The Ballad of WHO KILLED MLK
Sometime in the next 50 years, probably right before the National Archives are officially due to be opened, the marketing clowns at some blindly ambitious multinational conglomerate will realize they’ve exhausted their normal strategy of putting out a new pud-puller every time they make a minute change in the pud-puller of record they’re peddling as the most essential lifestyle tool since the last most essential pud-puller they were peddling six months earlier -to the almost-obsolete rubes still out there consuming their empty lives away.
Which is when the marketing clowns will come up with the bright idea of selling content.
Remember content?
If you don’t, you’re not alone, since we all know content, even though it does fill emptiness, begins to suck real fast in a world so fragmented Attention Deficit Disorder is the permanent condition people’s condition is in. So to make a short byte even shorter, the marketing mavens realize they can’t just sell any old content this time around. This time around the content has to be Special. And this Special content will be packaged for a gigantic special Holiday Special that they’ll hype for at least two, three, maybe even five-years before whoever the Speilberg-or-Cameron-of-the-day comes out with this stupendous full length special government sanctioned animated 3D musical called The Three Assassinations.
The Three Assassinations. Or “3A in 3D”, as the hipper pundits will call it, will be more like an opera than a Broadway musical, though it will open on Broadway at the same time it opens on the Big Screen and on Pay For View (for the lifestyle shut-ins). This special Special will depict the three major popular inspirational political leaders of the 1960s — JFK, MLK & RFK — as traitors to America who had to be eliminated in order to save the country. The assassins, of course, will be portrayed as the good guys; brave faceless FBI and CIA agents aided by wily mob warriors looking to redeem their heinous lifestyles in order to protect truth, beauty and the American way from something. . .Maybe the “Red menace”, if the ubiquitous they can get that lame McGuffin to come back from the dead and fly into the face of the two trillion pound unfettered capitalist snowball from the hell of “technological progress” rolling down the mountain over the out-of-control lives of gluttonous 21st century consumers. Maybe it’s even something we’ve never heard of before, because like the millions of aliens from different planets and galaxies some people believe are living amongst us on planet Earth, it, like them, couldn’t officially exist in the middle of the 21st century, except in the paranoia of the collective refried unconscious.
If and when the time actually comes to open the National Archives, the mood regulated people of the 21st Century probably won’t want to make a big thing about it. In fact, they’ll probably be satisfied as long as the authorities make an obligatory public show of not just giving the project outright to any one company, just to show they’re fair. As we all know, no matter how out of whack things get here, if the gestalt doesn’t reek of fair, no matter how it’s marketed, how it’s buggered, or what spin Satin’s schlockmeisters put on it, it won’t fly in the land of the mortgaged and the home of the fragged. So one way or another, the ruling mediocrecy of that time period will have to conduct open bidding on the Three Assassinations among the five, four? three? two? major media conglomerates left on the planet.
Obviously, it’s hard to picture. Even harder to buy the concept of open bids, because deep down, we all know, who better to tell the story, who better to spin the history of our darkest days than the folks who gave us Pinocchio and the Seven Dwarves? As any politician worth the salt of his hypocrisy covered peter might say when evoking the hot button of selling the cliché of saving our children’s future, it’s not only in our children’s National Interest that Mickey Mouse tell the story, at the rate things are going down here on Planet Mall, by the time the Archives are finally opened it may be in the best interest of business as usual to target market this conspiracy spectacle to the lowest common denominator of the old marketplace. After all, how many times do we have to hear the business of business is business, before we realize business is the engine of this great out-of-control society. And any company who can sell Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck, ought to be able to sell Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan-Sirhan as heroes, right? And if not, maybe the Warner Bros will move Mt. Rushmore down to Orlando and pop their heads up on the new competing Mt. Turner across the street, along with Bugs, Daffy, Tweety and Elmer Fudd shilling their wares down on us. . .
