What’s Your Rallying Cry? Is It Just A Myth?
There have been many taglines over the years, Nike’s, “Just do it” Apple’s, “Think Different” and Capital One’s marketing campaign, “What’s in your wallet.” Or how about, “People Call Me Crazy.” Rallying cries are meant to spawn people into action, inspire them to make their best possible choices in the performance of their best possible selves, or inform them in some way. Well, they are supposed to be used as marketing tools. However, some are rooted in nothing more than clandestine deception of lies and myth-making.
However, rallying cries appeal to one’s sense of purpose and mastery and motivated people will make sure their desires are accomplished in some twisted and clandestine ways to promote their goals.
In the summer of 2008, a group experimenting with social media and online communications methods decided to trigger a flash mob in the House of Representatives in Washington. Eric Odom from the Sam Adams Alliance group and Rob Bluey, a self-promoted “card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy” created false Tweets to generate action. Utilizing the social media platform Twitter to form something called the “DontGo” movement. Sending out false Twitter messages demanding the Democratic leadership in the House scheduled a vote on legalizing offshore oil and gas drilling, or else the Republicans would refuse to go home for the summer recess. It’s almost laughable that it was actually believed. I mean, a threat to your boss to refuse to go on vacation? What they proved was it was possible to flood Twitter feeds with false messages to promote controversy. This begins to make me wonder even further about the Twitter storms that surrounded Donald Trump's phenomenal presidency. Phantasmagorical Twitter storms will never be forgotten for sure by those who lived through it over the social media platform.
So how did the “DontGo” false Twitter campaign work? In August of 2008, conservative congressmen, oil lobbyists, and other supporters of offshore drilling poured into the House creating a wild and seemingly spontaneous protest. They chanted, “Don’t go!” and “Drill here!” “Drill now!” They didn’t succeed at lifting the restriction on offshore drilling but the protest was said to be “the 2008 version of the Boston Tea Party.”
Less than a year and a half following the Boston Tea Party, at the Virginia Convention on March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry spoke his famous words in a speech that became a defining moment in his career as a statesman and for the Commonwealth of Virginia and what would soon become the United States of America. Patrick Henry delivered his famous “Give me liberty, or give me death!” speech less than a month before the American Revolution began. The American Revolution would begin on April 19, 1775.
Henry’s most well-known line from the “give me liberty or give me death” speech came into play at the very end of his presentation. His last words to the audience were:
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” (ushistory.org)
In the true libertarian sense and in the similar vein of the brother Kochs, Eric Odom and Rob Bluey tried, as they may, to accomplish unregulated chaos and anarchy which began America in Pattrick Henry’s rallying cry “give me liberty or give me death.” And we can infer from the free libertarian wishes of the Kochs that this, albeit maybe unconscious wish, is implied in acts of electronic targeted violence and psychotronic torture.
When dealing with treacherous behavior, no other writer is more complete. I am talking about the villainous treachery found in the writings of William Shakespeare. The criminally deceptive behaviors penned no better than by the infamous William Shakespeare and which seem to be prolifically found at the core of big business and politics. Is it no coincidence that the most villainous treachery surrounds Shakespearean characters who were in possession of political and economic power?
When Iago whispers mythical lies into the ear of Othello, the Moore of Venice, he lies about Othello’s beloved Desdemona we can come to see its potential as a rallying cry. It has been said in literary analysis that if you want to uncover the lies one tells, you must first uncover what the villains say about their motives. Iago states his motives in his soliloquy. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago's lust for Desdemona only proves useful in his plot of revenge. As Iago continues to manipulate Othello further through his trickfullness, Othello begins to lose control over his own thinking at Iago’s persistent insinuations that Desmodona has been unfaithful to Othello.
Or how could we forget Tamora’s villainy in Titus Andronicus when it reaches a shocking peak, she orders her two surviving sons to rape and mutilate Titus’s daughter, Lavinia, in an act that avenged her son’s murder by Titus. Cruelly ignoring the innocent girl’s pleas for mercy and mocking her distress, she defiantly sentences the girl to death.
Or Angelo’s malevolent delight in dishing out severe justice, proclaiming one scene, “hoping you’ll find good cause to whip them all,” in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Angelo’s cracking down on the city’s sexual immorality, sentencing the young Claudio to death for making his lover pregnant. Angelo shows his full measure of hypocrisy when filled with lust, he propositions Claudio’s beautiful sister, Isabella, claiming he will reprieve Claudio if she agrees to sexual relations and, if not, her brother’s death will be guaranteed to be slow and tortuous.
Is there a more Machiavellian villain than King Richard III? He is portrayed as a malicious, deceptive, and bitter usurper who seizes England’s throne by nefarious means and a ruler who takes delight in his own villainy.**
Or what of Claudius in Hamlet? Shakespeare tells his audience “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” We quickly discover that this is a reference to Denmark’s usurper King Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle. Guilty of fratricide, Claudius makes a run for the kingdom by pouring poison into the ear of Hamlet’s father as he slept. What is the psychoanalytic connection between Macbeth, Richard III, and Hamlet? They were all plagued by the vengeful ghosts of their former victims. Claudius is described by the ghost of Hamlet’s Father as “that incestuous, that adulterate beast / with witchcraft of his wit, and traitorous gifts …” Does this sound like anybody we know? Unlike other villains like Iago and Richard III, Claudius takes no pleasure in his wrongdoing and seems to be endowed with a sense of conscience as he confesses, “O, my offense is rank, it smells to [HIGH] heaven.”
I was never a fan of Shakespearean tragedies. I always preferred his comedies until a kindly librarian once told me in order to fully understand the breadth of human existence (and human communication) one must study Shakespearean villainy, “among other things.”
We can certainly come to an understanding of how rally cries come to inspire and how some of them may be rooted in false narratives like the villainy in the “DontGo” movement and just how powerful an influence mainstream and social media can be in communicating falsehoods and influencing outcomes. We also can come to see that virtue and values (spirituality in the phenomenology of spirit) are important in personal conduct, both in business practices and political leadership.
Notes: *Spiritual mediums are believed to be schizophrenic by the psychiatric community. There is also a developed skill called clairsentience which some believe is a psychic phenomenon but is more adequately described as an evolutionary adaptation to living in a world full of predators. It is the heightened sense of developed empathic sensing. It occurs when one feels like they have “eyes watching them” but when they turn around, can see no one. It is the evolutionary adaptation of sensing another’s emotional presence even when their presence cannot be directly perceived with eyesight. Think about if you were walking in the woods and someone was hiding in a tree and you could feel their “presence,” like you knew someone was there, but could not perceive them with your eyesight. This is clairsentience and it has been deemed by some in the psychiatric community to be a “schizophrenic symptom.” There is a fine line between survival sensing (the fight or flight response) and paranoid hallucinations, the hearing of voices in one’s head. Still, does anyone possess the right to inflict harm through the use of clandestine electronic weapons or obscure the line between what appears as “treatment” and the act of harming another human being based on individual difference (mental illness)?
**Forensic anthropology would prove Shakespeare’s writing correct of Richard III's physical appearance. He had a physical deformity. He suffered idiopathic adolescent scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that developed after ten years of age and that may have brought back pain to the future king. Richard III died at age 32 at the Battle of Bosworth in the last war of the Roses on August 22, 1485. His bones were discovered sometime between 2012–2013 beneath a Leicester car parking lot believed to be where a church once connected to a friary. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882
The above writing is meant as a comparative analysis between the “experimenting with social media and online communications methods ” and the phenomenon of electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture being experienced by those that have been called “schizophrenic.”
Sources:
Jane Mayer. (2016). Dark Money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. New York. Doubleday.
Judith Butler. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, California. Stanford University Press.
William Shakespeare. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Stamford, Connecticut. Longmeadow Press.
Historic Documents. “Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death.” Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775. https://www.ushistory.org/documents/libertydeath.htm
Juno Jakob. (2014) “People Call Me Crazy: A Film by Juno Jakob.” Red Fox Pictures & Straw Lane Productions. A film about schizophrenia. YouTube.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJCtAzznzCw
