The space-time continuum called The News
by Jon Rappoport
February 10, 2015
“The news isn’t a just a thing, a person, a message. It’s a hallucination pretending to be real, as if a dreamer has suddenly risen and broken through the surface of the ocean, and now he can see the shore and the glittering buildings…and when he reaches the beach, he can walk into the city and actually watch very important people doing very important things all around him…and that’s supposed to be the up-to-the-minute news. But actually, it’s the reverse. The news is the dream, not the awakening.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Images sent over thousands of miles; well-lit anchors who seem alert to everything of importance taking place in our world; field reporters in far-flung places who pop up and respond instantly to the anchors…
—And, over and over, the same important faces of government leaders who, day after day, are “struggling to improve our destiny against great odds, against intransigent enemies of progress.”
All this is delivered in the space of a few minutes, each night, like clockwork.
The anchor can twist the truth, burn it, hide it, step on it, reverse it; it doesn’t matter. He performs those actions before he sits in his chair and the cameras roll.
If the US government hires, supports, and arms terrorists, the news can claim the government is doing everything possible to fight against terrorism—including installing a massive Surveillance State.
In 1927, Carl Jung wrote: “…the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”
But in the case of the news, the dream must come from an external place. It must come from a personage (the anchor) stamped with an official imprimatur.
There must be The Voice and it must narrate (invent, fabricate) the dream.
When this happens on a daily basis, most viewers sink so far into it they fully accept its parameters and remain enclosed.
The space and time of the news form their own continuum.
In this continuum, viewers are content to “take their dream-knowledge” from the anchor. This is considered safe. This is considered proper. This is considered reasonable. Knowledge comes to be thought of as always and forever coming from a place that is definitely not-self.
And that’s how individual power is replaced and hidden.
When I was a small boy, the stooge for official reality was one of the most respected men in America, Edward R Murrow. He seemed to be talking out of a dark vault. His somber tone, his serious intent, his moonscape rhythms offered doom, but always with a hint of light, because “he knew Justice and, therefore, it might still prevail.” He was the pope of hope.
I can still remember thinking, this is a show, it’s a good show, but it’s theater. I knew that, because in those days my friends and I played on fields of our own choosing, we were free, we made up our own rules and our own games, and we loved having that power.
And then at night, I found my imagination by reading novels about sea voyages and trips to other planets—and soon enough I realized the news was a story about power being everywhere I wasn’t.
It was a losing proposition, from one end to the other.
Fortunately, my other early education was conducted in a local pool room. People who were a lot smarter than I was taught me how to recognize a hustler.
Official reality is a cosmic hustler.
In Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film, Network, the unhinged news anchor Howard Beale tells his audience: “We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you….You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion…”
As the Brian Williams front is crumbling, it’s important to understand what is really happening. Williams is the host and master of ceremonies of the space-time continuum called the News. That’s his job. And his viewers, at some level, understand it.
They enter that continuum every night, and the deal they make with Williams is: “You pretend to be honest and we’ll pretend to believe you.” That’s the ticket, the agreement, the price of admission. Once the deal is consummated, the audience willingly enters dream-fantasyland, in order to receive their dose of hypnotic trance. It’s the dose they want.
But Williams’ pretense of honesty, his side of the bargain, has been exposed, has been made public. The trance has been interrupted.
THE TRANCE HAS BEEN INTERRUPTED.
How does the audience enter a trance-space when there is now a large hole in it?
It’s like a devotee of a diet guru discovering the guru actually had his stomach stapled. The devotee still wants to genuflect at the feet of the guru, but it’s much harder now.
“I want to pretend the space-time universe of the news is more real than real, but now the host is wearing a clown mask and big fake feet, and he’s pumping up brightly colored balloons with helium…”
People who want a trance tend to become quite angry when their fervent wish is derailed.
So let’s not think the Brian William affair is a matter of truth versus lying. It’s about sticking a pin in the space-time enclosure called the News. It’s about the popping sound and the deflation of that universe.
“I just don’t know whether I can believe Brian Williams anymore.” No, no, no, no. That’s not it. It’s “I don’t know whether I can keep living in that world every night. I really want to. I do. But it’s harder to induce my trance…”
Of course, this isn’t a Brain Williams problem. It’s about consensus reality itself. If the interior little swinging pendulum and the soothing inner objective voice narrating “the collective stories of our time” shut down, what then?
What then? The return of the individual.
The individual, who beyond the layers of programming, was there all along.
Front and center stage.
His rational mind awake, his imagination and creative-force powering up.
This is exactly what the news is meant to bury in electronic narcosis. This is what the news is supposed to supplant, by constructing a parallel universe. This is the same perverse art that has launched religious and metaphysical cosmologies as old as time, cosmologies that place the individual inside a labyrinth whose exits disappear.
In 1978, in a speech titled, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, Philip K Dick offered this: “Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups…So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
The news is a strong pseudo-reality because it purports to describe what is actually happening in the moment. But no, it is a fabricated continuum, in which billions of people can be told the equivalent of: ducks are flying space ships to the moon, the price of condos on Jupiter is dropping, and Presidents keep saving our bacon.
Billions of people want to bathe their psyches in that invented place and rest and sleep there. This is modern space travel.
This is mind transportation from one world to another.
The staff and crew who assemble the nightly news understand this well. Enabling smooth transitions from one story to another, backing up the anchor whose voice-rhythms intone surety, switching from anchor in-studio to field reporters and back, they do everything they can to eliminate technical mistakes and, above all, guard against their nemesis:
Dead air.
Seconds of nothing.
This is also what a hypnotist avoids; anything that would cut the trance.
An anchor who can pull this off, while at the same time describing events that are disturbing, wins the big prize, the big check, and the big fame. He’s the modern version of the underworld ferryman Charon, carrying a billion souls across the River Styx every night.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.