I’m worried that the pavlov’s-doggism — ‘beat the 9/11, “New-Pearl-Harbor” fear-drum’ and we’ll roll over for more narrowing of rights and stupid foreign wars and $14,000 a minute being spent on the fantasy Missile Nonsense — is wearing off in the citizenry. We aren’t drooling on cue and wagging our tails in time to the Star-Spangled Banner. The ied’s red glare and the rocket-propelled grenades bursting in air are smelling a tad too acrid for us to ignore even tho we aren’t allowed to view the star-spangled-banner-draped coffins forever silent of song.
The “New Pearl Harbor” vaccination of fear is wearing off; I dread they will think we require a booster-dose in the ides of July or of August. Before or after the Supreme Court confirmation fight? What’s your guesstimate?
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copyright pogblog 2005
“New Pearl Harbor” — see David Ray Griffin, about whom more anon.
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Mr. Pogblog,
Though I don't follow Pavlov's blog, just haven't gotten conditioned to it I guess, I think one of the things he found was that if you rang the bell too often or too much the dog would stop salivating because the association with meat got crossed with all the false alarms.
If you were to associate salivation with meat again, you would likely have to use something other than the ring of a bell. Might be more like “there are terrorist sympathizers living amongst us, maybe in Lodi.”
I remember, when I came to California 30 some years ago, seeing bumper stickers on pickups in Lodi saying something like “I'll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers” –clearly Lodiism is back in vogue.
(For those not from CA, it's Low-die, a red town in a blue state.)
Lending Creedence to Mr. Pogblog, there's an old song “Stuck in Lodi again”, but I was refering to the recent arrest of two men in Lodi as suspected terrorists.
I am worried at a psychic level about what this site is doing. Pogblog talks about the next terror booster shot on one day and then the next, the very sad, horrifying bombings in London. One part of me says, you know this is what Iraq has seen on a near daily basis for 2 solid years which raises two questions, are we safer now and if this is all true, how is it again that we're winning?
Mostly though, there are an awful lot of innocent people being killed all over the world in the name of who knows what when it all comes down to it. Actual civilization is a very delicate and precious thing. It's an agreement among millions of people to abide by certain expectations at least most of the time. It doesn't take that much for it to break down either from below or above as the Romans, Incas, Aztecs, various Chinese dynasties, etc. ultimately found out.