THE AGE OF SNAKE OIL SALESMEN & ARTFUL DODGERS

And How To Learn And Profit From It - A MultiMedia Exravaganza For Those Who Are Boomers and For Those Who Love To Hate The BabyBoomers.

On Being Oneself - The Art & Science of WYSIWYG - A Vaudvillian Exercise

They say brevity is the soul of wit. They are correct but I, like Polonius, have little of either.

What I describe here is being written for those who have more of both. I call on those who are well versed and talented in the use of irony to hear this plea. Like anyone else I cannot be anyone but just who I am. What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) is entirely in play here.

Never Knew There Was An Art & Science Of Whizzeewhig?

Although I had suspected as much, I never really knew such art and science until I resurrected the thought for this essay. We just never know what these tricky minds of ours might invent next. Never know what we may conjure into being in this cold-hearted world.

The idea of using adversity to excel as a human being is nothing new. Many of us have made an art and science of this. We take adversity as a challenge, learn from it, heal ourselves with the help of others we learn to trust and move on.

Just because those packaged and marketed New Age philosophies never worked is no reason to reject this notion out of hand. Once a bliss ninny - always a bliss ninny. I think it is hilarious when recalling how our families - and even our own kids - called my husband and I “solar energy midwives.” How very true it was they never knew. We remain unapologetic bliss ninny, solar energy midwives” to this day. Some things are simply true.

That our most precious personal growth tactics have been turned into a thing to be sold back to us for a price by New Age proselytizers is no reason to reject them. Just don’t allow anyone to sucker you into paying for something you will need to accomplish on your own anyway. There are no shortcuts to personal growth.

“Backstage Are Parasites” Whiskey Meyers

Our Post World War II generation has had the most parasitic relationship with popular culture ever. Those who packaged New Age philosophies continue to serve as parasites surviving off our good graces. But once you see them as bloated parasites capitalizing on our sympathies they cannot be seen as other than parasites.

These parasites will be referred to forthwith as snake oil salesmen.

THE AGE OF SNAKE OIL SALESMEN

Like most real valuable advice it is not for sale and cannot be bought. Those who are suckered into buying it will get nowhere. We of a certain age have lived in the Age of Snake Oil Salesmen. Many of us are pretty good at knowing when we are being suckered.

These were everywhere in the so called counter culture and buried deep in the consciousness of those who became the counter culture. There were so many - both those who unintentionally became tools and those who intentionally became tools - a list would reach into extragalactic space. It seems extragalactic space is beyond the reach of this essay.

It was snake oil salesmen who sold us the the lies. Lies from early childhood. Lies from Tarzan, Leave It to Beaver, Roy Rogers, and All In The Family. In fact we have all been so effectively lied to over so many years it is a wonder any of us is still alive or retains some sanity. My husband and I remark daily - wondering how we managed to survive Spaghetti-O’s, television for kids, perpetual wars for perpetual peace, Chicago, New Age San Francisco, nuclear fallout, and raising our fiercely independant and hard-headed kids. And perhaps better unmentioned - our time as backwoods, off grid, hippies in the California Sierras.

We have survived being made fun of by so-called elites for all of our lives. Our parents, their parents and so on and so forth ad infinitum. But our generation had one grand goal. And that was to escape the no pain, no gain lifestyles of our parents. Well we got the pain and sometimes we even gained. And we were even able to generate some sympathy for our poor parents, serially manipulated as they were by those manufacturing their valuable consent.

That the kleptocrats we have suffered all of our lives appropriate our language, our customs, and even our own ignorance to use for their own gain is a fact we understand well. Even WYSIWYG has been appropriated for financial gain.

We simply have grown accustomed to knowing if we invoke Spaghetti-O’s - lo and behold an ad for these magically appears in our inbox and is emblazoned across our screens. We take it for granted that our children and grandchildren would become highly paid internet architects and internet advertising specialists. Anything else my dear sharp shooters?

A Deeper View As To How Things Got This Way - Not Deep Enough But Then

Necessity is the mother of invention and so it stands to reason there must be a Townes Van Zandt and that he had to write Flying Shoes. What else is needed in a world gone mad?

Capes, Flying Shoes, And Those Leaps Of Faith - We Will Be Needing Them All Kids

We have been so plagued by snake oil salesmen that of course we could not be told any accurate histories. The American history we were sold is composed of fictions about saintly Pilgrims, Colonists seeking religious freedom and those pesky primitive and evil Indians. That we ended up in this current totalitarian and fascistic mess is a logical outcome.

Brainwashing via literature - Holden Caulfield and Lord Of The Flies - was something we became accustomed to early on.

From the fairy tales we were told as kids to the stories we grew up on you would not expect humans raised on such stuff would turn out to be anything other than toxic narcissists and madmen.

If those pilgrims were so innocent why did they need to burn witches? If Holden Caulfield was a literary hero how come he was insane? If our parents generation was in fact so righteous in World War II why drop those nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

And throughout the rest of our lives - where is the sanity in perpetual war for perpetual peace? The short answer is the best - there isn’t, hasn’t and will not ever be any sanity in it.

For we as a generation were never sold or taught sanity. Our parents and overlords eagerly sold us insanity while pretending to sell us good advice. Their panic over things like Elvis Presley was real. What it revealed was their own puritanical insanity - the logical outcome of the brand of lies they were told.

Those who are successfully brainwashed live in fear. It doesn’t take much to threaten their fragile egos.

So even though we may imagine we are living in unique and interesting times they aren’t much different than the old times. We were always - all of us - ensnared in the clutches of frightened powerful absolutists utterly dependent on manufacturing our consent. Se we hold onto the thought that these seekers of absolute power suffer themselves from fatal weaknesses.

THE PREEMINENT ROLE OF THE ARTFUL DODGER

The kind of power-seeking absolutist of which we speak seeks this power to fill the big sucking black holes they possess instead of hearts and brains. They are damaged individuals who have been raised by the damned for generation after generation.

They cannot be reasoned with as they possess no reason. All they know how to do is perpetuate the lies and snake oil salesmanship which successfully manufacture our consent. They will sell us anything which they envision as propping up their own power.

So we get sold our New York Times, our Rolling Stones, our Volodymyr Zelensky, our Amazon-promoted Chinese sweatshop goods, our lousy Microsoft software, our credit cards and insurance schemes, our medical care, Bono’s, our Rihannah’s.

My list of the things we are sold could obviously take up the whole of this essay and extend into the stratosphere. It is easy to perceive that we are surrounded - that we live completely surrounded by the snake oil the snake oil salesmen promote.It is everywhere - in our churches, our public buildings, our doctors and dentists offices, on our billboards, emblazoned across our screens, celebrated on our radios, and in our music and art. It is echoed by all of the merchants, corporate and government entities -and throughout our cities.

No wonder these insecure kleptocrats believe they have won. In many ways they have. We live in environments where our consent has been successfully manufactured for so long it seems sometimes we have - like willing slaves - built our own prison walls.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ARTFUL DODGERS

But there is a weak chink in that armor. These elite halfwits take themselves so seriously they cannot understand the irony of real wit. Like Bill Gates being questioned about Jeffrey Epstein. He wiggles uncomfortably, evades answering, gives the wrong answer, backtracks - but overall reveals the fear of a trapped liar.

Instead of using real wit and irony he uses evasion and deception. He is our Artful Dodger - nothing but a pickpocket with attitude.

Famous lines like “I didn’t have sex with that woman” or “I shouldn’t have had dinner with him” or “I shouldn’t have stayed in his house” or “ridden on his plane” or “gone to his island”. These are the lies of little boys who have been caught. The actual mental age of these “elites” may be well fall short of that of my twin seven year old grandsons.

We keep rehashing proof these elites are psychologically damaged & infantile power mongers. Now what?

First we sharpen our own skills using wit and irony to effectively pierce their armor. Their real weak points lie in their vanity. They cannot suffer an effective assault to their vanity without injury. Unrelenting attacks on their vanity will eventually weaken them into the emotional puddles they in fact are.

Joe Biden is right, as he has reminded us twice - that AR-15’s will be inadequate to fight the government - that we would need atomic weapons and gunships to do so. So maybe this is a different sort of war. It is likely a shooting war is they want us to have. A shooting war is where they can handily defeat us. A shooting war of the right magnitude will ensure the suicidal dreams of these maniacs and remove us as humans from the planet as well.

There is another way and that is teaching the intelligent application of irony and wit. We stop buying the snake oil sold by these snake oil salesmen. We stop falling into their hands. We identify the snake oil on every level. We make it a mark of foolishness to buy their junk.

We have already made much headway into proving that the vaccines are the mark of the beast - highly toxic and dangerous. Through the war in the Ukraine, the “election” of Joe Biden and the escalation of mentally deranged individuals into public awareness we already understand.

They have done us a tremendous favor in furnishing with all these artful dodgers. Figures like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, the Biden family, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Olav Sholtz, Bill Clinton, Members of the British Royal family, US government officials, Barack Obama, Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari are villains worthy of vaudeville.

The ironic and wit-driven skewering of these figures in the public square will serve like placing each of these in public stocks. Having to build public stocks is much to resource expensive. We need the fastest route to common sense, sanity and back to the unalienable rights of the individual.

Sharpen you wits and tie on those capes and flying shoes. We have a job to do.