Mongoose, 11/8

In a week filled with ideology, propaganda and conspiracy theories, the topic which stood out to me the most was Jameson’s concept of millenarianism. Millenarianism is the idea of an end of time and our progression to this end. To me this ties right in with these other topics discussed this week: ideology, propaganda and conspiracy; depending on one’s own personal beliefs, many of the things which have been tied to the possible end of time could very well be conspiracies or such. Some of the ideas which we connected to the end of time were: the Christian belief of the rapture, the millennial change of Y2K, the idea of a ground zero and various health scares which have lead to world wide panic. Now depending on what you believe, these different ideas and events have been connected to ideological scares around the world and conspiracies stirred up by others in order to achieve an agenda. This got me to thinking about the recent infestation of the swine flu and the world wide scare which has taken place regarding this illness. The reason that this caught my attention on this topic was because of a conspiracy theory that I heard: someone wrote about the possibility of the Obama administration making more of this infection than there really was to it in order to promote their agenda of a new healthcare plan. While I believe that this is pretty far fetched, it has to at least be given some thought based on what we have studied this week and last. We have seen many instances of ISAs and RSAs with this case the RSA being the gov’t and making a big deal out of the flu while the media is the ISA by repeatedly covering both the flu and the promotion of a new health care plan. Now again, I am not sayin that I believe such a far fetched conspiracy, but you can see the frame works of the conspiracy based on our study of these theorists.