AZspot

You never hear them say it, but neo-conservatives understand that they have a mean streak down inside. They also know if they want to share in the national plunder, they must win hearts and minds. They must look pious and sound right while lying through their teeth and picking our pockets. In other words, they have an astute grasp of American politics and business — which are the same thing, of course. Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation’s saviors — morally and intellectually right in all things. As proof, they read more and, allegedly, are more open minded than most conservatives, except when it comes to their daughter dating a redneck named Ernest who lives in a trailer court behind the strip mall. They are certainly among the educated class in a country known for its lousy schools and a dull, sated and unquestioning public. Education and access to education are now our fundamental class delineators. Higher education is now for the privileged. And that privilege, almost regardless of profession or career, is a future that depends on government. Liberal or conservative, it matters little. In fact, this privileged class votes Democratic more predictably than the working class, Hispanics or Blacks. Joe Bageant ☀

What banks and governments have been doing for the past eighteen months is a dumbshow meant to distract the public from the fact that the world financial system has been effectively destroyed. There isn’t enough money left in the known reaches of the universe to pay off the outstanding claims. In fact, not even close. Everything that proceeds from this fiasco will be in service of impoverishing most of the population and, incidentally, probably bringing down governments and, with them, convenient social usufructs such as due process of law and civil order. What remains - what you’re watching right now on CNN or Fox - is just a representation of the former structures of civilized life, what Joe Bageant refers to as “the hologram,” a kind of 3-D picture you can see around, that looks like reality, but is actually immaterial, a collective hallucination. It’s comfortable living in a hologram - until you discover that you’re in one. James Howard Kunstler ☀

For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find. However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape. Go live in a shack in the woods. Call that escape. But everything in the outside world continues to run in accordance with the humming energy of the hologram. There is no cutting our umbilical link to the womb of this illusion, this mass hallucination. There is only getting a longer umbilical cord, closing your eyes, and pretending that what the rest of the nation does has no effect on you. We were all born and raised in that womb. We can no more divorce the neurochemistry and consciousness it shaped in us, than we can deny that we had an earthly mother and are of her tissue. Our consciousness is born of the hologram’s connective neural and electrical tissue. Joe Bageant ☀

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it. The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions. Joe Bageant ☀

Liberal or conservative, money is what we care about — period. From birth, the empire has made one thing very clear to us: If you do not produce or acquire enough of the green stuff, meet the quota, you will be ground beneath the heel of the machine we call a society. No universal health insurance or higher education, no guaranteed minimum income, no worker rights, nothing for you suckers but the tab. So keep humping. Joe Bageant ☀

Yet, believe me, just being in a place where life is more fundamental and simple, if hard, goes a long way toward peace of mind and discovering human normalcy. It’s the learning ground. And usually one learns that people who escape at least some of the ravages of our slow collapse, always seem to do it in cooperation with a community of some sort. Either an already existing one, or an intentional one they create between themselves. There’s nothing new in this, of course. Latin America and the world have countless communities hundreds of year old. Governments come and go, rivers dry up, but the people always have tortillas, one way or another. Americans and Europeans usually see these people as poor, thanks to our heavy social conditioning, industrialization and commoditized consciousness — not to mention the denial of the effects of colonialism by Euro-American culture. We see no connection between our iPods, high speed wireless, and, say, the present condition of the Haitian or Dominican people. Joe Bageant ☀

There is no way the world’s working people can win in the long run, which is getting pretty damned short, or even survive, except by joining the worker struggles, of China, Asia and Africa and India. The idea that American workers are the same as the Asian and Latin American and African working people goes down hard in American gullets. (I’m no expert, but it looks to me like the Euros and the Aussies and the Canadians are snotty that way too. In fact, now that I am meeting dozens upon dozens of Canadians from all walks of life, they are looking worse than Americans.) But for Americans, it does not go down at all. As a people, they’ll never ever accept that fact, because they’ll never know it for at least two reasons. (1) They are too over worked and undereducated to find out for themselves, and (2) American corporate media machinery will never let them hear of it. Americans are screwed, blued and tattooed. And for that I blame Anderson Cooper. That’s right, CNN’s boyishly good looking, sincere faced, Emmy Award winning Anderson Cooper. Joe Bageant ☀

I am coming to understand that as Americans, we were born into a powerfully induced mass illusion. An infantile consciousness of “I-want-I want,” which drives the machinery of war, waste and profits, and which colonizes our minds and souls from birth like a progressive disease. I say “coming to understand,” because, as an American I can never truly understand. My consciousness and neurosystem are far too mutated to ever understand. But I find great relief in the effort. And also pain. Joe Bageant ☀

American politicians have traditionally been happy with the American underclass’ allergy to the voting booth. Yet some pretense of democracy must be maintained, some false flag of popular consensus held aloft, if the engines of profit are to be kept fueled and running. Which means marketing some pretty unsavory stuff as being part of what is brave, good and right about America? In hyper capitalist American culture, everything, be it cars, cancer or war, every activity, legal or illegal, must turn a corporate profit. That includes even the nastiest activities, such as drug distribution and addiction. So the far-flung network of profitable state sanctioned industries, from prisons and police battalions, to rehabilitation, are marketed as necessary fixtures of the “drug war.” The term Drug War is an empty term to anyone who has even for a moment rationally examined it, two words — like Islamo-fascism — married incongruously in a shotgun wedding of political theater. However, for most Americans, those two words work well enough. Our attention spans are briefer than a rabbit fuck. Anything in depth is anathema. Only slogans and brands survive. We do not understand much of anything in depth except the football rating system. Joe Bageant ☀

The consequences, even in creating unneeded services and products for the sheer sake of growth, even pointless are enormously profitable. For example, water, is bottled at a cost of a few cents and sold for a buck. Much of it is just bottled water from a municipal source. The consumer has already paid for such water twice, once in taxes and again as a utility bill, but nevertheless buys bottled at a little over 10,000 times the municipal cost. Of course not all of that difference is profit. Some of it goes into petroleum based polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, boosting the oil industry and contributing one third of our national waste stream. Bottle production and bottle recycling both pollute our water supply, helping push us to that day we will all eventually be forced to buy bottled water. Until then, our commodity fetishism will suffice; we can buy “Boulder Water,” bottled tap water from Boulder, Colorado, at 11,000 times the cost of the tap water, because, well, it’s from Boulder. The glories of commodity capitalist productivity! Joe Bageant ☀

Read Tocqueville’s description of earlier Americans’ relentless buying and selling fever. Everything and everyone was always up for sale from the start. Read about the greed and stinginess of the “refugees from religious persecution,” such as slave owning Quakers, Presbyterians and Methodists. Read about how the founding fathers ripped off the Revolutionary War veterans for the IOU script they so patiently held for many years in payment for fighting, buying it up for pennies on the dollar, then passing legislation to pay up on the script. Or how not only the business class, but also the supposedly bucolic and wise heartland American farmers cheered as the government troops shot down hungry striking miners, burned out their families, lest they disturb the order of the Republic of commerce. Joe Bageant ☀

Examples of socialism working well? Various types and degrees of socialism are working well all over the planet, ranging from the communal sharing of certain indigenous peoples, to the adaptations one sees in Scandinavian countries and elsewhere in Europe. Toss the political rhetoric and just look. The common citizens are secure, at least until the innumerable world corporatists plotting to blow them out of the water succeed. And they will. They can’t lose. Capitalist corporations have a grip on the world’s monetary system, and most importantly, the means of production to supply the world’s human needs. Especially in the so-called “advanced countries.” People everywhere salute advancement. And world’s corporate cartels get to define advancement. To them advancement is the degree of cheap unnecessary crap you can ram down the people’s throats, and how much you can blackmail human beings for such things as health care. Not to mention convince them that the rest of the world is not safe, that it is not made up of ordinary folks who just wanna raise families, screw and sleep well at nights, but rather is full of murderous heathens out to enslave the local Cub Scout Troop and blow up the neighborhood 7-Eleven. Joe Bageant ☀

It doesn’t work. Not for liberals. Tea partiers armed with baseball bats and megaphones get results. But liberal activism is sort of like sending a rabbit to sell wolves on the benefits of veganism. Liberal activism requires convincing the pissed off and scared citizenry that your guy is different, better, more kind and possessive of the higher moral ground than his opponent, and will govern accordingly. This is hard stuff to peddle in a nation that has, for quite understandable reasons, grown meaner, more distrustful and more ideological over the past 30 years, not to mention demonstrably more stupid, and more ideological (which comes along with becoming more stupid) over the past thirty years. Joe Bageant ☀

I know a slew of these people all over the nation and I can tell you this: they honestly do not give a tinker’s damn about abortion. They really don’t. Not one in a hundred. You will never hear any of them mention the word abortion, except when their preachers and self-designated spokespersons or news reporters urge them to. Or when they are expected to offer some kind of political opinion, or show verbal credentials they are one of their crowd. The term abortion is tucked away somewhere in their heads in a file holding the vague lexicon of “stuff I understand that I should believe in.” There it remains, a stale unexamined little brain fart until the appropriate hot button word is pressed, until summonsed up by those who instruct them directly or indirectly as to what they should believe. 
And then right on cue, like serially wired blasting caps they are detonated at the Town Hall meetings or Tea Party protests, setting off a chain blasts of “citizen anger. Joe Bageant ☀

Will Americans ever rise up in defense of their own common well being through such things as education, health and a productive peace caring society? Nope. Because it has been seen to that socialism — the administration of the nation solely for the common good and benefit of all the people without preference or privilege — doesn’t stand a chance in America. For over a century those who have attempted to further socialism have been shot, hanged, burned alive in their beds on Christmas Eve, imprisoned, falsely accused of crimes and falsely convicted, and demonized by the capitalist elites of the corporate state. The cause of socialism has effectively been wiped out in the US. Few Americans can even define the word. Most think it is a political system when it is a social philosophy. Hell, half the socialists these days think it is entirely a political system. But even if Americans understood socialism, they are too terrified to ever admit to its virtues, much less publicly support the cause. And without free and open public participation in some democratic form of socialism, regardless of the name or label given it, there can be no recognition of the people’s common welfare and good. And so the most egalitarian social philosophy ever conceived dies within a nation, with very little chance of being reborn because such an ideal, by its definition, cannot exist within the narrow mindset of bankers and oligarchs. Bush smirks, Obama breakdances in and around the minefield of his false promises, and Wall Street CEO bonuses are higher than ever. Like I said, the Devil does take care of his own. Joe Bageant ☀