Three years ago this month (June 2021), Christina Wilkie and Rachel Maddow, as well as their corporate paymasters NBCUniversal, MSNBC, CNBC and their parent, Comcast, tried to drag me into a cesspool of filth which they not only inhabit, but thrive in.
They defamed me, they slandered me, and they smeared my professional reputation by insinuating I was a criminal and had “disappeared”, because I chose not to respond to their loaded questions, and take down my company’s old social media and website, when asked to do so by my (then) new employers.
Why take this interest in me, a relatively unknown and fairly “small time” architect, you may ask? Because like many architects based in NYC, over the course of my professional career, I had worked on some projects for Trump. That alone was enough to capture their feeble imaginations, and in their rabid eyes, smelling an opportunity, make me a “suspect” (or more appropriately, a “target”).
When they realized their “story” on me led to a dead-end before it even began, because despite their best efforts, there was no story, being the blood-sucking parasites they are, they immediately scurried to find a new host, undoubtedly hoping for better results, and proceeding to pretend that their story on me never happened.
BUT I DIDN’T.
What resulted from that experience for me was the creation of this album, which at times during the last three years has served as my place of solace, the reclamation of my identity (which they unsuccessfully tried to hijack), and my coping mechanism. It is dark and it is cynical in its world view, reflecting many of the conclusions I’ve drawn having gone through this farce and other experiences during my professional career as an architect. But most importantly, it has served as a catharsis (of sorts).
While I can’t stop cheap and profoundly ugly (and I do mean, UGLY), propagandists like Wilkie and Maddow as well as their paymasters (corporate and otherwise), from continuing to make a living slandering and defaming people like me with impunity (defamation laws in the United States, and frankly, human nature, need to change for that to happen), I CAN take that experience and try and learn from it, and create a work of Art in the process.
Making this album has given me time to think. One of the many things I’ve come to realize is that no one (including me) can come close to inflicting the type of damage on these two frauds, that they haven’t already inflicted on themselves.
I have no doubt that time will prove me correct. Trafficking in obscene lies and operating in the gutters of their “profession”, they are grotesque and deformed caricatures of what real journalists are. They’ve shown that they are reckless and intentionally dishonest – as equally motivated by the notoriety that comes with feigning ideological fervor, as they are by the accolades and monetary rewards that come in its wake. This seems to have become commonplace among many media figures of the dystopian technocracy we now all unfortunately inhabit.
Exhibiting no virtues whatsoever, except the ones they vainly try to “signal” while they reflexively check on their followers and their ratings (just look at their ridiculous twitter accounts), these gargoyles perfectly illustrate everything that is wrong with an irreparably corrupt, morally bankrupt, and politicized media. A cheaply bought media that slings one false narrative after another like spaghetti against a wall, hoping something will stick and get ratings, and which has completely lost the trust of that constantly shrinking segment of the public that actually still bothers paying attention to it.
Despite what Wilkie and Maddow tried to do to me, I wouldn’t trade places with these disgusting and pathetic harpies for all the money in the world.
I know WHO I am, and WHAT I am.
I also know what they are. They are GARBAGE.
They are inferior in every measurable sense. And as a result, I suspect that when they came to this inevitable realization, they were forced to skirt convention and stoop to chronic dishonesty bordering on criminality, as their modus operandi in order to survive and make their way in the world.
Sadly they found a line of work that not only affords them survival, but in fact rewards their type of masturbatory and reflexive self-aggrandizement by calling it “success”.
As I said, GARBAGE.
(And I’ll bet when they look in the mirror, and momentarily let their thick veil of self-delusion slip, they would agree. I never said they were stupid, after all).
If I was a more compassionate man, I might pity them. But they don’t deserve my pity, or yours for that matter. What they deserve is not only scorn, but to be stripped of the platforms they have been entrusted with, and which they have serially abused and exploited for their own personal gain. The fact they still have jobs, draw salaries and continue to go unpunished, tells you everything you need to know about the state of the media today. More importantly, the fact that they have hundreds of thousands of faithful followers online and millions on TV, who hang on their every word, and whose minds are so soft and pliable as to take every lie they utter at face value, and as the sacrosanct “truth” (and who also took to attacking and defaming me on social media before they even learned how to spell my name correctly), reveals far more about the intellect of your fellow citizens, who also happen to be your fellow voters, than it does about this pair of 3rd rate propagandists. If I still cared, and still voted, I would find this distressing. Luckily, I do neither. Frankly, I’ve come to consider the whole enterprise of “politics”, especially the 21st century version of “American Representative Democracy” a sham neither worthy of my time or energy. All the more reason I was stunned, but not surprised, when Wilkie and Maddow tried to drag me into their filthy world.
Nevertheless, as Socrates famously inferred in The Republic, one of the inherent problems with “democracy” is that it treats people as equals, whether they are equal or not. Maddow and Wilkie no doubt owe their “success” and “careers” to this very idea which has proven itself true again and again.
This album is dedicated to ALL of them and their failed defamation project on ME.
This album is also a FREE download. Contrary to what they’d have you believe, MY creative endeavors have NEVER been about making money (my bank account can attest to that). Rather, they’ve been about a process of examination, discovery, intellectual fulfillment, and an endless quest for improvement.
As my hero Socrates also said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. And in speaking In his own defense, he famously said this of his prosecutors, in “The Apology”:
“Meletus and Anytus can kill me, but they cannot hurt me”.
Wilkie and Maddow, despite their most sinister efforts, haven’t even scratched me. But unfortunately for them, they’ve momentarily piqued my interest and attracted my attention. This is the result.
I hope this album will be a reminder to anyone listening, to never forget that it is YOU who writes the narrative of YOUR life. Not others. Despite what they would have you believe.
One final word on this directly to Wilkie and Maddow – many people blindly listen to your smug proclamations and lies, and not knowing any better, and unable to think for themselves, entrust and believe in you to bring them objective and reliable information. In other words, they’re suckers. They are the great stupid and unwashed masses. The gullible lemmings who you lie to every day, and have nothing but utter loathing and contempt for, but who you also need to pay for your summer homes, your domestic help, your personal trainers, your children’s diapers, and your orthodontist bills, all with their ignorant advertising dollars. You owe your pathetic “petite bourgeois” existences to all of them. And in feigning a mantle of noble selflessness – pretending to be “warriors” in pursuit of the “truth” and “voices of the common people”, as far as your naive followers go, you add insult to injury. But like everything else you project, it’s all an act. Just another sham. No surprise there. You are both a pathetic and ugly joke.
Nevertheless, you’ve never fooled me. I saw past your lies, and right through your self-righteous act and nauseating self-importance and sanctimony on DAY ONE. I saw you for the cheap and corrupt charlatans you are. And as long as I’m around, I’ll eagerly remind anyone willing to listen, in painstaking detail, of the same. Incidentally, many of your “peers” who I’ve spoken with, seem torn between laughing behind your backs, being profoundly embarrassed by you, and hating you for destroying their profession. Can you blame them?
So as you start yet another day of your rather small and unimportant lives preparing the “propaganda du jour” for your feeble minded audiences to rabidly consume like rats in some dysfunctional social experiment gone horribly wrong, listen to “The Disappearing Architect” to get in the mood.
In fact put it on “repeat play”, and drill it into your pathetic, plastic, overly made-up, overly blow dried, ugly heads. Let it be a reminder that while you may have made a little money and fooled a few people along the way, you will NEVER come close to approaching the levels of my talent, my creativity, and my intellect, but most importantly, my integrity. You lost that competition a long time ago.
And as hard as you may try to ride on the lives of people clearly superior to you, the way you tried (and failed) to ride on mine – in a vain attempt to escape, you will forever remain mired and chained in the depths of that cesspool of dishonesty, filth, but worst of all, mediocrity. A cesspool that you not only inhabit, but where you clearly belong.
PS – I’ve written at length on the absurd saga I mention above. If you’d like to learn more about it, take a look at my blog posts at:
www.fotiadis.net/fotiadis-blog/
THE DISAPPEARING ARCHITECT IS AVAILABLE HERE:
https://emptycitysquares.bandcamp.com/album/the-disappearing-architect
