Rant 64: Memory Holes

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Rant 64
Memory Holes

,ÄúWithout censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.,Äù
-General William Westmoreland

,ÄúForgetfulness does not exist unless it has been written down somewhere and filed away in the appropriate folder and then that folder is promptly forgotten.,Äù
-The Path of Chaos IV; ,Äòthe Path of Bureaucracy,Äô, verse 5

,Äú And we did read from the Bureaucracy. And Eris was pleased, though we in our drunkenness did not notice how pleased. When we woke up, Eris had departed and it was approximately three days later, though we weren,Äôt sure. Somehow, all of the tequila was there in its bottles, as if we never opened them. And all of the vacation forms that had sorely vexed our hearts had disappeared. Let her or him with a heart of understanding know that this is one of the marks of Visitation.,Äù
-from the Book of the Tequila M??stica Cabal

My fellow Discordians, there are memory holes all over the place, and I assure you that I had nothing to do with them. In fact, I,Äôll have you know, the memory holes probably made themselves (a damned LIE, I am sure, but an amusing conjecture, none-the-less) and are now breeding rampantly, filling the entire society in which we live with the pathetic dysfunction of not being able to remember things,Äîeven events we ourselves personally experience,Äîunless some officially sanctioned experts (on the right, left, or middle) not only tell us exactly what to remember, but how to remember them. This situation is, while amusing and the potential source of countless pranks, perilous. Just the other day, I almost fell into a memory hole. Thanks to my quick wits, or something possibly like a guardian angel or even Eris, I didn,Äôt fall in. I did drop a penny though and eventually got tired of waiting for the clink telling me it had hit bottom. There probably is no bottom. How did this happen? How could such things as memory holes exist? (You are probably wondering.)

What? Is that all you have to say? Silence? Well, Bobdamn it! Somebody should be pissed about this situation! We should have declarations and manifestos and all sorts of hoots and hollers! There should be an uproar! But perhaps those too have been lost in the memory holes. (I don,Äôt know. I forget these sorts of things all the time.) But then again, any declaration or yelling or what-have-you will probably be listened to for approximately twenty-three seconds before being either devoured by memory holes that have taken residence in the minds of the listeners, or get lost in the ceaseless meanders of we Discordians of the School of Long-Windedness. (As it has been written ,ÄúIt is said that many are the manifold manifestations of the manifesto. Sadly many are the ones who get entangled in the tango of their theoretical manifestations of mental masturbation.,Äù) Who can say? Maybe in our attempts to get to the theoretical or real bottom of the situation, we too will get sucked down into the memory holes. Perhaps you or someone you know has already been sucked down into one of the holes. Perhaps even some of your brain cells know other of your brain cells that have succumbed to this menace. Perhaps it,Äôs the reason why people are always obsessively documenting, photographing, and recording their experiences,Äîsuch as vacations, trips, weddings, etc. It could be fear of the memory holes out there that we all know (despite my conjecture above that such things possibly create themselves) have been placed around us, prefabricated and pretty in their nice shiny media packages, by those of THEM who have power (and thus think THEY can have control) over us, under us, or through us,Äîdepending on your political stance along the spectrum, if such a thing could be even said.

Hell, we,Äôd give rope to anyone who wants to explore the memory holes, but we ran out of it, seeing as we had a swarm of requests for rope by which others could hang themselves. So now we have no rope left to give. (Unless you want to wait a while for us to make more.) Perhaps we still have some shovels, though, and in that case you could always dig yourselves out of whatever hole you fall into,Ķprovided there is a bottom, at some point. Perhaps we could give you cigars or something to keep you company. Perhaps we should dig some of our own memory holes. The BUREAUCRACY would never be able to tell the difference unless THEY could find some experts to explain the difference. And we would never let that happen, now. Would we? (And why would we? Perhaps it could be more confusing for THEM, but we,Äôd have to wait and see about that.)

Perhaps the druids were right? Perhaps the Claw Shrimp attacks are really part of some nefarious plot by the supposed Illuminati and the memory holes are simply part of the grand design. Perhaps the paranoia has started to tip me over the edge,Äîthen I have a news flash for THEM. I jumped over the edge quite a long time ago. So pffft on that! Could the memory holes be the piles of feces left from the wandering of the great fnords? Or are they just the fnords in other less dubious disguises? Wouldn,Äôt I like to know that so  I could tell you,Ķbut Eris is silent on the matter,Äîmeaning, She is telling me to think for myself or whatever, just as long as I find some sort of solution. But I have no truck with such things as memory holes and I suspect that,Äôs because I can,Äôt quite remember how they all got here. All I know is that popularly and democratically elected leaders around the world are called tyrants and dictators while the tyrants and dictators are calling themselves democratically and popularly elected leaders. All the while most of the population is comfortable to agree with this, since the govercorporatemedia tells them that this is something they should agree with and how they should go about agreeing. Indulge me a little on a parenthetical discussion. (Two cases to illustrate this: 1)Bush, who claims to have won the popular vote of 2000, despite the evidence that thousands of African American votes in the South were tossed out of the process. The media chooses to ignore this little fact that some courageous and hearty explorers rescued from the memory hole it was shoved into. 2) A guy by the name of Chavez is elected via landslide votes in Venezuela, and yet is branded as a tyrant by both the US media and its rich lackeys who run Venezuela. All the protests that then take place in Venezuela to support their president against possible military coups are labeled as anti-Chavez protests up here in the USA. And the people here don,Äôt question it, because they never question what their media tells them, unless the media gives them the questions. Don,Äôt ask how I saved this fact personally from the memory hole,ÄîI had lots of help.) Are you scared yet? There are scores of more examples. You may have some of your own. (The largest being the fact of Eris,Äôs existence being ignored by the general masses, I may point out.)

Well? What the hell are you going to do about it? Yes, you!

I for one have my own solution to the problem of memory holes, which involves no abuse of toilets, though some of you ought to look into that option. I am going to seek out memory holes and dry out all the ones I find. Then I am going to, you guessed it, smoke them all in my pipe. This plan shouldn,Äôt take me too long as memory holes are known to burn up real quickly when dried out and smoked. Or I may get distracted by some other such things. I may just fall asleep, wake up the next day, and forget the whole problem even exists.

All Hail Discordia!

(Bureaucracy 19th, 3170)

[namu]

One of the biggest scam THEY pulled is to make people believe that seperated powers were any different from a centralised absolute authority that'd combine all those powers.

So you have the power of media, the power of justice, the power to execute, the power to legislate, and they're all heads of the same hydra king.