When You Don't Know Who to Blame - You're an American

You can't hope to change much when control of the narrative is what really matters.   In the United States today, it's not actions but perceptions upon which elections are won.   Many Americans, enough to shift control of one or both houses of Congress, vote not upon what is but on the strength of what they've been made to feel.

This is not to say that actions don't count.   Of course they do, big time.  Actions matter a great deal to those whom they're intended to benefit.   For example, gutting the EPA and repealing its regulations.  Those are powerful actions and they're worth hundreds of millions, in some cases billions, of dollars in profits to their lavishly generous beneficiaries.   Preserving public subsidies for oil companies is an action that likewise is worth many millions to a select few companies whose lobbyists ensure fitting rewards for the decision-makers.  Creating the conditions to permit an utterly felonious transfer of wealth from the working, middle class to the richest of the rich is an action to overshadow all others. Actions do count and there are plenty of them - for some.

For most, however, they're left to get by on a diet of narrative, spiced up as necessary with heavy applications of fear or anger or, when possible, both.   Narrative is the vehicle for getting people to reject what is actually in their best interests.   Public healthcare is bad because - because - because it's socialism and that's the same as communism and that means totalitarianism and the loss of their democratic freedom and some undeserving swine or welfare criminal or a family of Mexicans will be moving into their house.  And Saddam Hussein orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and had a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that he was about to unleash on the shores of America itself, probably even in their own town.  And really, really rich people deserved enormous tax cuts because they were America's wealth generators and, without those big tax cuts, you and your wife might not keep all four of your jobs that you desperately need just to get by.  And all your problems will only get worse if the Elite had their way, the Elite being those know it alls, the people with fancy educations who keep studying stuff to keep living their middle class lives by pulling hoaxes on you.   And if we don't spend more than all the other nations combined on our military-industrial apparatus your daughter will be sold into marriage to some dirty Muslim and we'll all have to live under Sharia law.

It truly is "Mission Accomplished" once you have enough of the voting public engorged on narrative for the more they swallow the less room they have for things they don't need - like reason and doubt, logic and facts.   And without all those things they won't blame you for your actions but the other guy, who, their illusion-glutted instincts tell them, is the real source of all their problems.   And without all those things, chances are you're either North Korean or American.