Paranoia – The Destroyer, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #380 | @MDWorld

October 7, 2014 Mike Gold 1 Comment

Silly boy ya, self-destroyer. / Paranoia, the destroyer / Self-destroyer, wreck your health / Destroy friends, destroy yourself / The time device of self-destruction / Light the fuse and start eruption – Destroyer, Ray Davies

They’ve got your number. They know exactly which buttons to push. And you’re not being paranoid if they’re really out to get you.

Is the government reading your email? Perhaps they’re monitoring your phone calls. What about all those spy cameras – at the tollbooths, in the parking lots, on the highway overpasses, in schools, stores and office lobbies, in your computer, in your smartphone? Is big business deliberately poisoning us? What will Facebook do with your medical history? Do you have H5N1? MSRA? SARS? Does the Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine cause autism? How’s your mad cow feeling?

Will you die from Ebola?

If you watch television “news” with any regularity, it would be completely understandable if you no longer wanted to get out of bed. According to these so-called journalists, “they” really are out to get you. Stay tuned, and please buy our boner pills.

It used to be “if it bleeds, it leads.” These days, we don’t even need to see blood: through their manufactured hysteria our well-coiffed talking heads will convince you we’re all going to get killed… but the real problem may be that these overpaid whores are going to scare us to death first.

Today’s big deal is Ebola, a nasty little disease that has a very high fatality rate. But the odds on you getting it, particularly if you live in a so-called civilized nation, are exceptionally remote. The usual precautions we take to prevent or limit such spread should suffice – but a lot of people who believe Ronald Reagan’s blatant lie about government being the problem are now demanding the government “do something about it.”

I don’t know what we can do, outside of continuing taking the steps we have been taking and, maybe, talk the hospital owners out of their death-by-neglect-for-profit business model. I suppose we could nuke West Africa, but that might pose some serious public relations problems. Ban all flights from African nations that have a high level of Ebola exposure? Some of our lawmakers and many of our media wags have proposed just that.

Our commercial media need ratings to justify the high price of commercial time that, by and large, are paid out by pharmaceutical companies. Paranoid trumps irony every time.

Yep, Steve Stills was right. Paranoia sure does strike deep. But it doesn’t creep into our lives; quick-buck artists who know all too well that fear sells are shoving it down our throats… and we thank them for it.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman and Martha Thomases as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color.