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by scalio
3271 days ago
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House of Cards made me realize something very self-evident: the baddies in "realistic" entertainment media do not reflect the baddies in real life (ditto for the good guys, for that matter). I saw one day that I was conflating real world and HoC politics. Not the actual events, but rather how the different actors got or lost their way. Since I don't know what's going on behind the curtains, I started filling that gap in real-world knowledge with constructions based on the personal politics portrayed in HoC. Now, I try to be as suspicious as sanely possible of anything even remotely tied to politics, and yet it took me a month to notice my error. What happens in minds that don't? I suspect they imagine the real world functions like the dream worlds created in studios. I think that's the insidiousness of propaganda you're describing. |
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I don't see it as being that close to reality in every way, but the central message of this season is something I've been trying to communicate to people for a long time. In my interpretation, that message was of the government being captured by the war industry and of those captured factions using and even manufacturing terrorism to goad the public into war. Frank Underwood's rise to power is plausible in a political climate like in the US, and the scenario of a corrupted president retaining power by forging a deal with the war industry is also plausible IMO.
I don't pretend to know exactly how it happened, but there is no doubt that something similar is going on in the US. If anyone can offer me a coherent narrative for G.W. Bush's Iraq war with consideration to the 9/11 "28 pages" and related evidence, Obama and Trump's sale of hundreds of billions in weapons to Saudi Arabia, a never-ending state of war without need for congressional approval, the extreme erosion of civil liberties in the Patriot Act, 2012 NDAA, etc., then I am keen to hear it.