Billmon takes a diamond shot to the forehead

The Whiskey Bar reopened not that long ago, but Billmon himself has not been writing much. Instead, he's been posting the quotes and writing of others to draw parallels, illuminate paradoxes, and basically lead his readers to water but let them drink it for themselves.

He explains why he stopped writing and why he's been performing the blog equivalent of a street mime. His "thinking out loud" is quite interesting.

And that’s when it hit me – as if, to quote Col. Kurtz, I’d been shot in the forehead with a diamond – that Kerry was almost certainly going to lose the election, that the American people really were going to ratify torture and murder as instruments of state policy, and that all the facts and all the rational arguments and all the moral outrage in the world weren’t going to persuade them otherwise.

What I finally had to confront was the fact that truth alone is impotent in the face of modern propaganda techniques – as developed, field tested, refined and deployed by Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, the think tanks, the marketing departments of major corporations, the communications departments of major research universities, etc. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the peculiar vulnerability of historical truth (which means political truth) is that it isn’t inherently more plausible than outright lies, since the facts could always have been otherwise. And in a world where the airwaves are overloaded 24/7 with the mindless babbling of complete idiots, it isn’t very hard to make inconvenient facts disappear, or create new pseudofacts that reinforce whatever bias or cultural affinity you want to cultivate – particularly if the audience is already disposed to prefer your reassuring lies to discomforting truths told by strangers.

But he found himself to be addicted to blogging, and decided that futility was not a good enough reason to close the liquor cabinet and shut down the Whiskey Bar. And, anyway, he concludes with a sentiment to which I couldn't agree more: If we're all going to hell in a handbasket, we may as well enjoy the ride.