the notion that obama would appoint a 'messaging expert' as ebola coordinator shows that they don't understand their own problem, which is that they have been unable to distinguish 'messaging' from responding to reality. this is why no one really believes what they're saying, and really, it's why no one has believed any american politician or bureaucrat for some decades now about anything. i think it's a kind of banalized post-modernism, narrative-theory thing. so sometime around 1970, someone pointed out again that there was no external world, only 'narratives' and so on. pretty soon, nike was running ads: 'we are the stories we tell'. it may be that people like obama and bush and clinton really can't tell the difference between the world and a story they are telling. that the story is incredibly self-serving is very hopeful: i can make the world adore and obey me if i can just utter the right phrase. their adoration of me will be their salvation, and then we'll all live in my hopey reality forever. let's focus-group some phraseology and work on 'the narrative', 'the message'. we've got to control the narrative, be more effective in our messaging. then, i think the growth of 'communications' programs and theories and 'strategic communications' exacerbates the effect, and some of the killer clowns who teach in those programs have a straight-up theory on which all communication is an attempt by me to get you to do what i want, and then the only question is, what noises can i make that best accomplish that? all communication is advertising.
in their human-centered, narcissistic, obviously false structure of non-thought, there can be no difference between medicine and messaging.
reality, see, is social, consensual, or 'what your contemporaries let you get away with saying'. then the only question is, what reality can you get people to consent to? unfortunately, the ebola virus is indifferent or impervious to whatever they consent to, as is everything else, even themselves.
for an actual creature in an actual world where something like natural selection operates to lose contact with reality, or to begin to live in its own fantasies and hallucinations, is to flow toward extinction. also, in this particular form, it is to deserve extinction.
