Why Your Parents Warned You Against Taking Too Many Drugs

I had the chance, or misfortune, to stumble upon yesterday's Khari Baat Lucman Ke Saath on its repeat today and I am still reeling at the heights of lunacy achieved in that programme. And no, I am not referring to the fact that, as an intro to the show, Mubasher Lucman kept pretending to present declassified and Wikileaked US government documents, which are freely available on the web and which have been written and talked about for the past one year, as documents that he had somehow mysteriously and surreptitiously got his hands on ("I have got Anne Patterson's entire email," he once proclaimed). I'm not even referring to how he claimed that one of his guests, Asfandyar Kasuri (who he claimed needed no introduction but who at least I have no idea about aside from the fact that he apparently likes to be known as 'Fundy' on Facebook) had a show shut down on Aaj TV because he had, horror of horrors, interviewed Noam Chomsky. (Yes, I'm sure the fact that the show, called Washington Report, looked like VoA's bland Khabron Se Aagay and was in English with Urdu subtitles played no part in its being axed.)

No, the task of raising the psychosis quotient immeasurably was laid at the feet of that well known expert on globalization and Pakistan-US relations, Ali Azmat. In his opening lines, Azmat pointed out that he was smiling to himself at some of the initial discussion of US foreign policy hypocrisy between Lucman and Kasuri, because, hey, "We'd been saying it all along for five years and we were dubbed conspiracy theorists by people." After the obligatory-for-a-Lucman-show segue into an attack on Najam Sethi as a slave of American capitalists,  Azmat got really warmed up. (Mr Azmat did sort of confuse the name of the think tank Sethi is a fellow at, calling it the Project for the New American Century rather than the New America Foundation, but that was only the smallest confusion in the mind of the former 'bad boy of rock'.)

Here's the first part of Ali Azmat expounding his dialectical vision (the relevant bit begins around 05:45):




In the space of next few minutes, Azmat told us the following (and I swear I am not making this up):

1. The music of Michael Jackson and The Beatles was developed by the Tavistock Institute in England to wean people away from their indigenous culture and impose cultural imperialism on the world. 

2. The Rockefeller Foundation forced musicians ("by hook or by crook") to tune their instruments' A-note at 440 Hz after 1945 since that is the frequency that causes human beings' "cellular structure" to be unsettled the most, in order to propagate "mass hypnotism and mass crowd control." 

3. This mass brain-washing was dubbed "counter-culture" and was led by a consortium of record companies, television channels and General Electric. 

4. Hollywood's end-of-the-world type disaster films, zombie movies and vampire flicks are all part of the same "orchestrated and planned" conspiracy to confuse people whether "Balochis are killing us or Punjabis are killing Balochis." 

5. The Occupy Wall Street Movement in a thousand cities across the globe is being funded by the same capitalists it is ostensibly fighting against. 

6. The "North Command" of the US Army which is ostensibly responsible for domestic security is preparing for the Third World War within the US employing mercenary Poles and Ghanaians. 

7. Corporations put fluoride in the water (anyone else remember Dr Strangelove?), poison in toothpastes and "monoxide sodium glutamate" {sic} in chips and juices to spread cancer.

Here's the clear-headed Mr Azmat in all his glory:



As a sum-up Asfandyar Kasuri (who is either really the most tolerant person on the planet or the yin to Mr Azmat's yang) first helpfully points out the meaning of the phrase "military industrial complex" and that the American media is controlled by big commercial interests, with nary a sense of irony about the fact that he is sitting on a channel and a show that runs on corporate advertising. When he mentions the power of wealthy advertisers such as Exxon, Lucman boastfully tells him to go ahead since "Exxon does not give us any advertising." Unfortunately for him and Dunya, Ali Azmat then goes on to mention a local bank's name which is dutifully bleeped out by the channel and leads to Lucman grumbling that Azmat would get him into trouble. These televangelical radicals are almost funny.




Oh, and the solution to these problems (because, you know, Lucman loves solutions)? According to Azmat, we should stop dealing with banks completely since they take commissions on every transaction thereby destroying Pakistan's and the world's economy. And lest you ask, as Lucman does, whether we should then keep our money in socks: we should not keep money in any case and instead buy gold and silver. I really am not making this up.

We should also stop buying corporate products. Ostensibly this includes some of the telecom and fast-food products Mr Azmat himself sold until recently and the products that funded this show.