Sell fetish

Sell fetish

Humans are animals. A flight animal, to be more precise. As such, they have an alarm center in their brain that reacts reliably to panic. Headlines are the little brothers of panic. The media use them to spread their messages. In the age of speed, not to say of now, all media have started to ignite panic with their messages, the justification of which hardly anyone questions because of the high speeds. But we can do that at any time. Says Kai Blasberg.
At the end of last week, Saskia Esken was on Markus Lanz. One can only note this in amazement: she holds the office of August Bebel. Willy Brandt. Yes, even Hans Jochen Vogel springs to mind. Since she cannot fill this office, the good-humored bear from Lower Saxony, the 2-meter-tall man Lars Klingbeil, is helping her to fail. To put it briefly: Lanz took Esken apart. And it was unpleasant to have to watch. Under her leadership, the SPD managed to halve its poor election result from the last federal election. 13 point something. But Esken sees little need for action. Because she does not deal with the facts. Because she helplessly participates in discussing untruths. One of these untruths is the currently popular fetish of the shift to the right. The media functions like bouncers on the Reeperbahn. They condense trends to the point of lies in order to lure guests into the shabby establishment, where they have to witness terrible things and compare them with the consumption of overpriced goods. After the "Fridays for future" fetish, when the young generation, 90% of whom didn't give a damn about Greta Thunberg's concerns, was arrested as an alibi, the Green fetish was born as a popular party, then came a traffic light fetish, which died out just as quickly as the current conservative fetish will die out. In between there is the constitution fetish, Ukraine, military capability and the debt brake fetish, all with one thing in common: information in the form of facts is not conveyed.
Lanz addressed the new right-wing shift fetish, here using the example of "Fear of the future: young people are sliding to the right". Like all other target groups, 16% of young people voted for the idiots from the AfD. Now you have to know that there are about half as many 16-24 year olds as there are the reference group, 56-64 year olds, i.e. those 40 years older, the very many boomers who are not unimportant from a democratic perspective, are often ridiculed and finance the country. The human children born between 2000 and 2008 - you read that correctly, the latter were allowed to vote for political parties in the European elections under review - have an average year group value of 650,000 births. Multiplied by 9 years, this gives a figure of under 6 million. With a slightly lower voter turnout among young people of around 60%, that leaves 3.6 million who cast their votes. 16% of these are for the AfD, well under 600,000 voters in the 16-24 age group. There were a lot of boomers born. Sexual intercourse without contraception boomed. There was nothing else, not even the pill. During his late chancellorship, Konrad Adenauer went so far as to say: "Boys always grow". Nothing was as wrong as this sentence. But at the time it was true. Germans born between 1960 and 1968 have an average of 1.3 million births per year, which, if we look at the nine-year period, amounts to almost 12 million people. About two-thirds of them voted, so just under eight million boomers in this age group cast their votes. 16% voted for the Blues, or around 1.25 million. 1.25 million mostly financially strong boomers vs. less than 600,000 young, often poor adults. How does democracy work again? The majority decides?

None of this bothers our public relations workers, whether editorial staff or think tanks in the parties. One echoes the other's whining. What remains are the misinformed, who are then supposed to drink this nasty brew, i.e. pay for it. Topics are invented and are not supposed to be overloaded with truths, otherwise nobody will panic. And where there is no panic, no fetish can be sold. The issue of migration works exactly the same way. The poor Ukrainians are now supposed to get no more support. What have they done to us now? Someone in the third row stammers something about "no money" and it starts. The panel discussions condense the nothingness and then it's off to the European Championships. This is where experts meet. And Markus Söder. Because: there is something to fish for everywhere. But not to share. That's highway robbery. Now we'll soon have the "fear of the Germans" fetish again. If the possible success goes to our heads, then we'll be asked whether too much of too little is enough; with the weather, the euro and Chinese cars. I can't stand it anymore. But I can't change it either. But I can know that it's all a load of crap. Manipulation, lack of care and sometimes criminal stupidity, because nobody knows how it actually works anymore. The decline in the quality of the staff is just the topping. Small reminder: when the boomers were 16-24, there was a lot of fear of the future. It started in the 70s with the punk movement, which had "no future" as its motto. The film "When the wind blows", mind you an English cartoon with the German. The dubbing by Peter Schiff and Brigitte Mira and a fantastic soundtrack by David Bowie drove many young Germans to suicidal thoughts a few months after Chernobyl. Because in the mid-80s there was not only the best music of all time, no, we were all dying too. And all the time. Not just from nuclear war, which was very en vogue as a fetish. No, also from nuclear power plants themselves, see Chernobyl. If that wasn't enough, the fetish of forest dieback and its acid rain was just the ticket. And if you didn't die from nuclear power or nature, there was still Mother Sun. She was supposed to burn us. Because Mum used hairspray and that's why the hole in the ozone layer had grown to the size of Australia. And because all of this didn't smell like joie de vivre, the fetish industry, which was still functioning back then, took tough action: sex was ruined for us by a virus. Not Corona. HIV. And there was also a heat pump narrative: the catalytic converter was seen as the nail in the coffin of the German automobile industry, just as heating will be the downfall of the middle class today.

Do you notice something?

It all repeats itself. Nothing is as hot as it seems. Everything will sort itself out. Everything will be fine.

But the thing with the SPD and Saskia Esken: you can forget about that!

06/21/24
*Kai Blasberg worked in the private media in Germany for 40 years
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