{"id":413,"date":"2016-06-25T20:32:53","date_gmt":"2016-06-26T03:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.wehle.org\/?p=413"},"modified":"2016-06-25T20:32:53","modified_gmt":"2016-06-26T03:32:53","slug":"empire-of-illusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/?p=413","title":{"rendered":"Empire of Illusion"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming\u00a0image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak\u00a0at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio&#8217;s Pleasure Island,\u00a0where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun.\u00a0They were all, however, turned into donkeys\u2014a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\">\u2014Chris Hedges, <em>Empire of Illusion<\/em>, (New York: Nation Books, 2009), 44.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming\u00a0image. Public rhetoric is designed &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/?p=413\">Weiterlesen <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}