more on the feel good foto of the barefoot vet

Here is more on the now not so feel good foto of the shoeless, not really  homeless war vet.  Am waiting for someone to get his side of the story.


By selectively focusing on such acts of purported compassion, a society mired in brutality and cruelty -- a culture which, as I have noted, offers as a central lesson to all of us, including children, that, "You will be rewarded for cruelty: the crueler you are, the greater the reward" -- seeks to convince itself that it is actually a model of kindness of caring. Even though it is an issue mentioned by virtually no one with regard to the Hillman story, I am compelled to remark that it is more than extraordinary for Americans to claim they embody compassion and kindness to any extent at all, when roughly 120 million Americans recently voted for two candidates who support a program devoted to the unrestricted murder of completely innocent human beings. Moreover, one of those candidates is the man who has ordered the murder of such innocents on multiple occasions and seeks to institutionalize his Murder Program as a foundational element of national policy going forward. Such a country can be described as murderous, vicious, and evil with full justification; kind, just, and compassionate are not words that occur to a sane, healthy person when confronted with brazen, publicly declared evil on this scale.






For the feel-good story to work, for it to be "perfect,"Hillman must be genuinely wretched: he must be homeless and barefoot, entirely alone, and with no resources whatsoever available to him. The stories strongly hint at what they want to say, but they won't state it in unmistakable terms. Nonetheless, we get the message: This man is a rotten fraud. He tricked us. That wonderful police officer helped someone who didn't even need his help!

As I discussed before, the feel-good version of the story was used in very significant part to make those who celebrated it feel good about themselves. It was a way many people could convince themselves that we're good, that we care, that we don't like to see bad things happen to people. When President Obama and his fellow criminals routinely order the murders of innocent human beings -- and when these same people refuse to understand what that means or even that it's happening -- the need to reassure themselves that they're basically decent is one they feel very keenly.





Although we are now provided with some additional details about Hillman's situation, there remains a great deal we don't know. We're told:

For the past year, Jeffrey Hillman has had an apartment in the Bronx paid for through a combination of federal Section 8 rent vouchers and Social Security disability and veterans benefits, officials said Monday.

The story puts its thumb heavily on the scales and later describes his apartment as "a warm home." But we don't know that it's "a warm home"; it might be an awful apartment, and to pay for heating bills might be beyond his means. Moreover, it is entirely possible that the benefits he receives don't provide enough for food and clothing, in addition to his rent (and electricity, if we assume he also pays for that). Perhaps he panhandles because he truly needs more money, and he knows no other way to get it.

The stories also try to make much of the fact that Hillmanrefuses help. He's not just a bum, he's an ungrateful bum. To appreciate an interesting connection as to how these dynamics work, recall how every loathsome politician made the same claim about those damned "ungrateful" Iraqis. Hillary Clinton is the loathsome politician in that example, but almost every other loathsome politician said the same. The United States bombs them, murders them in vast numbers, and utterly destroys their country -- and those rotten bastards won't even thank us for the great gifts we've given them. This is a theme of enduring popularity.


http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.it/2012/12/the-vicious-lie-is-indeed-vicious.html