AZspot

The blurring of the real world with manufactured imagery by media on behalf of the corpocracy has been going on a long time. And yes, the media does get paid to do the propaganda work. It’s called advertising and marketing money, which is of course the lifeblood of the media. Nobody had to conspire with the media to use the media as propaganda. In a capitalist system that is the only purpose of media, given that media must be for-profit to even exist, and that its value is judged by its stock price, not by the quality of its product. You can scream at the top of your lungs, but I’d suggest you save the strain on your larynx. Nobody can hear us, hermetically sealed in the vacuum of the nation’s living rooms media streaming the national consumer message straight to their cerebral cortexes. We have reached the point where only media can be heard regarding anything significant. It the corpo-political machine wants to hear from us, it will stage a Tea Party or a Town Hall Meeting featuring what it considers the most entertaining and useful fools among us to rage against decent healthcare, or to rant against the war in Iraq, thus demonstrating that the Great American Capitalist Democracy Machine, in all of its goodness, allows freedom of opinion and speech. Joe Bageant ☀

Corporatism’s rituals are as reverentially and unquestionably observed in daily behavior as those of ancient Egypt’s theocracy or the blood sacrifice of the Aztecs. The Aztecs thoroughly believed their world would end if the gods were not fed enough still-beating human hearts. We believe that the world turns on employment figures, stock prices, our jobs, productivity and consumption. Hourly, we receive reports from the media priesthood on the health of an aggregate god known as the economy. The masses pause to listen, then ask inside their heads, “Will my job, my only source of family sustenance, disappear? I must try harder.” And so, fearfully, we render tribute to Moloch in the form of increased toil, more sheaves of what they alone produced (for it is labor that produces all authentic wealth) in the form of bailouts and sons sacrificed on the altar of war. Joe Bageant ☀

Armchair sociologist that I am, I have a theory about this: Millions of American women are in poverty because they are paid poverty wages. I could be wrong, I often am, but there seems to be a connection between poverty and money. I started developing this theory last year when I was in a Melbourne, Australia hotel and learned from a single mother hotel housekeeper there that she made $19 an hour, had government assisted childcare and was going to college at night toward becoming a medical technician. Hmmm… Over here we tell single mothers, “Get a six dollar an hour job or get married bitch! Workfare, baby, workfare.” Then too, contrary to the American middle class belief system, out-of-wedlock babies are increasing at all levels of white American society. Even more contrary to popularly held notions, as many of these children turn out to be as well adjusted people as do children of the middle class. But for damned sure poorer in most cases. Joe Bageant ☀

In some respects the oligarchs have it better than they did before the Civil War when about half their wealth consisted of human bondage. Slaves were expensive as hell, a couple thousand dollars each, a hundred thousand in today’s money. They needed lots of slaves to work their large tracts, dozens in some cases, hundreds in others, and were directly responsible for the feeding, upkeep, health and productivity of their investment. By contrast, today’s white, Hispanic and black workers are a dime a dozen. You can dump them at will if they get sick or business is slow. And you can be sure plenty more will line up for work when and if you again need bodies to fulfill your newest state highway building contract or drive your fleet of trucks. Joe Bageant ☀

Indeed, the purpose of all our evolving neuro-circuitry is to make survival of the species easier. But apparently, even the actions of mother nature can have unintended consequences too. In this case, extinction of the species through overburdening the environment through the technology and resources required to sustain the matrix. It’s not just Americans who prefer the matrix. Even indigenous people seem willingly drawn to it, once exposed. Americans just happened to have arrived there first, evolutionarily speaking. Just as the mind is a hologram of the brain, the matrix is a hologram of the evolution of human consciousness. Joe Bageant ☀

We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a “theater state.” In our theater state, we know the world through media productions which are edited and shaped to instruct us on how to look and behave and view the outside world. As in all staged productions and illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what supposedly represents reality. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras, as the American empire’s cultural machinery weaves and spins out our cultural mythology. Cultural myth production is an enormous industry in America. It is very similar to the national projects of pyramid-building in Egypt, or cathedral-building in medieval Europe. And in our obsession with violence and punishment, two characteristics of a consensual police state reality, we are certainly similar to prison camp building in Stalinist Russia. Actually, we’re pretty good in that department too. Consider that one fourth of all the incarcerated people on earth are in U.S. prisons. U.S. citizens imprisoned by their own government. Joe Bageant ☀

Yet it all seems so normal. Certainly the psychologists who have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins, saw what they did as necessary. And the doctors who enable the profitable blackmail practiced by the medical industries see it all as part of the most technologically advanced medical system in the world. And the teacher, who sees no problem with 20% of her fourth graders being on Ritalin, in the name of “appropriate behavior,” is happy to have control of her classroom. None of these feel like dupes or pawns of a corporate state. It seems like just the way things are. Just modern American reality. Which is a corporate generated reality. Joe Bageant ☀

We all understand that there is a political class which dominates in America, and that Sarah Palin for damned sure is not one of them. And the more she is attacked by liberal Democratic elements (translation: elite highly-educated big city people) the more America’s working mooks will come to her defence. Her daughter had a baby out of wedlock? Big deal. What family has not? She is a Christian fundamentalist who believes God spat on his beefy paws and made the world in seven days? So do at least 150 million other Americas. She snowmobiles and fishes and she is a looker to boot. She’s a redneck. Joe Bageant ☀

…the elimination of misery is the highest of human endeavors. The rest is mere diversion, and now that our capability for said diversion has reached such astronomical earth destroying cost, mostly folly. This entire nation of Belize could easily be fed, clothed and housed for more than a year on what it costs to make a single crapola American Adam Sandler movie. Compared to most folks in this village, the citizens of Rome USA up there above Mexico are sitting in bath tubs of wine, stuffing brie up their noses and beating off all day. And they are absolutely convinced this is their god granted entitlement, their reward for reaching new levels of obesity, personal arrogance and ignorance about the world. Apparently their particular god agrees. Joe Bageant ☀

Faking sincerity is easy in a nation where virtually everything is reduced to electronic images — how you should live, what opinions you should hold, what you should wear and eat, what sincerity looks like. The short answer, in my humble opinion:
Television turned out to be deadlier stuff than anyone could have ever imagined. Joe Bageant ☀

Fundamentalists such as my family have no idea how thoroughly they have been orchestrated by agenda-driven Christian media and other innovations of the past few decades. They probably would not care now, even if they knew. Like most of their tribe (dare we say class, in a nation that so vehemently denies it has a class system?) they want to embrace some simple foundational truth that will rationalize all the conflict and confusion of a postmodern world. Some handbook that will neatly explain everything, make all their difficult decisions for them. And among these classic American citizens, prone toward religious zealotry since the Great Awakening of the 18th Century, what rock could appear more dependable upon which to cling than the infallible Holy Bible? From there it was a short step for Christian Dominionist leaders to conclude that such magnificent infallibility should be enforced upon all other people, in the same spirit as the Catholic Spanish Conquistadors or the Arab Muslim Moors before them. It’s an old, old story, a brutal one mankind cannot seem to shake. Joe Bageant ☀

But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today’s system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things — the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process. Joe Bageant ☀

In the world’s big picture, however — the unedited version we are never allowed to see in American media — most American fundamentalists are being screwed blue by the same global economic pillage as, say, the Quiche Indians of Guatemala. Working class American fundamentalists suffer extractive capitalism’s vampirism the same as the Third World, but by a more incremental yet nonetheless relentless process. A scam is a scam and while you may blame the victims for ignorance, you cannot blame them for trust and good will toward men. Now hold onto your drawers and get this. Some working class fundamentalists are beginning to get a sense of what even the most educated of Americans seem congenitally blind to — the inevitable brutality of capitalism’s march through history — mainly because it is marching in their direction this time, creating bankruptcy, lost homes, credit meltdowns, and job insecurity for the hardest working, most obedient and faithful people in America — the traditional working class. Just like their brothers in the Third World, the economic “cures” they are subjected to always turn out to be worse than the sickness. Some now notice that when unemployment rises, so does the stock market, and when real wages drop the “economy” soars, according to the news reports. All sorts of folks are beginning to disabuse themselves of the notion that the American economy and the American people are the same thing. Joe Bageant ☀