For a sense of the cumulative numbing-dumbing effect of official party propaganda, check out these words, which are both observational and additive, from Florida State Rep. Dennis Baxley:
There’s absolutely an undercurrent of rage in Florida.... I don’t think people are nearly as worried about government shutting down as they are about spending us into oblivion. The first time they heard it - that was a shock factor. Now it’s like, 'Great, why don’t they shut down the government for a couple of months?'
"Great."
I can think of many a description for vital services and desperately needed entitlement and transfer payments being abruptly terminated, but "great" isn't one of them. Nonetheless that's the "different emotional response" by many to a government shutdown now, says Baxley, than a mere few weeks ago: a paradoxical combination of desensitization and overstimulation, a kind of programmed mass hysteria, one also reminiscent of many a darker age.
Traditionalists, we might call them, see a steady march of progress on humanity's historical path. Postmodernists, on the other hand, say we're the same barbarians we always were -- "progress" is an illusion.
This year, score one for the postmodernists.
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