AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Saturday 22 August 2009

My friends abroad tell me it is pitiful to watch such unquestioning bovine Americans. I tell them it isn’t much fun to watch from the inside either. Swamped in the manufactured spectacle, fear and distractions we call American culture, few among us notice what our nation has become — a slickly packaged totalistic and authoritarian state of type new to history. That there has been any loss of self agency among the people is incomprehensible. Two subsequent generations to mine have never knew what life once was in America. While not perfect, it was not so thoroughly policed and minutely administrated. For most now, present conditions are like the atmosphere or the weather. Just there. Just the way it is. The condition among adolescents makes me want to cry. Passing through school metal detectors are a part of life. Being subjected to a piss test to join the chess club, or sniffed by a German shepherd police dog while being lined up against the lockers along with the rest of the student body? Paramilitary terrorist drills in high schools and middle schools? A kid being led out of study hall in handcuffs? Don’t even think twice about it. It’s just the way it is. Joe Bageant

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