Dear George,
I know things are looking a little grim right now and that everything seems to be working against you. There is Iraq, Libby, Abramoff, and unauthorized surveillances, all of them ticking bombs that could blow up in your face.
Well, George, I’m here to bring you some good news! Let them all blow at once, because not a shard of shrapnel will touch you. Protecting you like an invisible shield is the ultimate instrument of social control: over stimulation.
Do you know why there’s so little outrage over your misdeeds? Because the media pumps so much bullshit and trivia into the public brain that the important stuff is drowned in a sea of minutia.
Years of media acculturation have decayed our national attention span until it has become an endangered species. The net result is a dumbing down of the American psyche. The conditioning begins with childhood when well-meaning parents plop their toddlers in front of the tube to watch Sesame Street. They believe they’re enriching the tots when what they are really doing is eroding their attention spans. The show is a series of rapid-fire cuts from one scene to the next, each one lasting only seconds. This has given us a nation of adults who only read headlines since reading the body of a story takes too much time. So they develop a dependent relationship with the cable news networks who give them the world in twenty-two minutes.
There is a secondary benefit to this national attention deficit disorder. If you cripple a man’s attention span and increase the stimuli to which he is exposed, it is very easy to convince him that life is moving at a break-neck pace. And so it seems if the longest a person can pay attention is measured in seconds. In a world that seems to move at the speed of light, there is a crying need for “efficiency.” This “efficiency” demands that we curtail both our freedom and leisure because efficiency demands a strong central authority that can respond quickly to a situation that changes rapidly even thought its staying pretty much the same, but who pays attention to figure that out?
So, don’t worry, George. You can do anything you want because nobody is paying attention.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
9:51:28 PM 
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