Democracy rots from the inside out as a nation of telemarketers and war criminals parties on amid the stench
By Joe Bageant -- World News Trust
A spring Sunday morning and I am at the politically incorrect 7-Eleven buying my cholesterol-loaded Half and Half for my peasant slave labor-grown coffee. In the parking lot car speakers blare out Bob Marley from a grungy 1987 Olds Cutlass (the last year GM made’em), while the owner, a Haitian guy, sits on the curb eating his Smokey Big Bite hot dog, sunshine pouring over the whole world sweet as that quart of chocolate milk he is going to wash it all down with. Bob Marley is singing One Love and that Smokey smells so damned good I order one for myself and settle in next to that Haitian dude. And I think, “Is this a great fucking country or what? Yessiree, the world’s best hope.”
And it is. Or was. Or something. Ask any poor suffering bastard in the garbage dumps of Mumbai or Caracas to name the best place in the world to live and most will answer, “The United States.” Maybe it’s for all the wrong reasons. And surely the image is driven by the global hype and bullshit of an America that cannot get over itself… cannot pause from its huckstering long enough to see that the America of both John Wayne and FDR quit circling the drain thirty years ago. It has since been pulled asunder by spectacular greed and the learned helplessness of the consumer state. And denial. The kind that allows us to sanctify the young men starring in that horrific snuff flick over In Iraq, “Heroes.” But we were talking about the third world weren’t we? Where if you are eating spoiled cat meat and getting raped nightly in a Bangkok slum, things like a Cutlass gunboat with busted springs and a Smokey Big Bite on a Sunday morning look good. Damned good. There is not that cannot be explained by population geography and proximity to basic goods and services. This is not wasted upon the predatory few among us concerned with capturing, holding and blackmailing others for access to them under our free market system. It’s a brutal process, one we can only coexist with through ironclad denial. Did free people make your clothes? Mine neither. My Dutch friend Bram, is mystified at our denial, which he says “is spooky.” How can anyone sustain such a thing?” Well, it’s when you are born numb. Most of us born under American extremist capitalism are inured to its sheer brutality. To Americans, it’s just the way things are. The world is a tough place. We agree that god has blessed us; we deserve what we have and let it go at that. Citizens born under the Third Reich felt the same way about their consensual reality. Not many of us can grasp the national hubris involved, thanks to the heady patrio-religious mythology of American exceptionalism in which we were spawned and educated in preparation for adulthood as citizens of the consumer state. Collectively, we feel exempt from human folly because our particular god, the Christian God, the Jewish God, The Mormon God, the Seventh Day Adventist God, Muslim God or whatever one’s cult deems divine, has chosen us. Whatever we think we are as liberals, your nation and mine, the government we are responsible for has always acted on these beliefs, destroying whole nations, peoples and the planet under that exceptionalist banner. At some point, liberals and neocons and the apolitical alike, are going to have to own all of America’s history, not just the parts we prefer. For instance, it was FDR who packed off all those decent Japanese families off to interment camps. Abraham Lincoln loved his nigger jokes. Bram remains mystified.
Mercifully enough, the same predatory American capitalism that generates so much of the world’s misery renders its own citizens irrelevant save for their purchasing power, to the entire process and therefore guiltless -- in their own minds at least -- of the empire’s crimes. Such is the unburdened material happiness granted us. It is not hard for Americans to conclude that we are outside of, and therefore irrelevant to, global events or changes. We are waaaaay over here on this vast continent with only a vast media generated holograph to tell us who we are as a people and as individuals. And it tells us we foremost are citizens of a state that suffers no diversion from profitability. The vast majority of Americans don't even know there is a global reality, except in the sense that the price of gasoline is affected by some swarthy peoples living in a sandy place full of terrorists somewhere else on the globe. We know the price of gas and we know what we are are going to rent at the video store on Friday. We know what we will eat at the restaurant on Saturday and when the game is televised on Sunday. Personally, I also know that four blocks from where I sit writing this an old man named Virgil pulled one of his own teeth last week because he cannot afford a dentist. Rather than kick out a little dough Virgil’s way, I poured a shot of Woodford Reserve and was grateful I have dental insurance. Being “grateful for what we have” is the time honored American mantra used to mask denial.
Thus we express gratitude for what the corpocracy bestows us, convinced that we are flourishing in those big box store isles of Kansas or in the soft leather booths of the martini bar off Central Park, depending upon one’s class. It only took a couple of generations to accept and then enjoy the reduced humanity but increased flood of material stuff as a bona fide life experience. Beat off to internet porn and NFL football while the wife sleeps alone. The state generated hologram IS reality. Reality IS the image, not the flesh. It’s true of all of us. I have done it and still do it. I know. And you more than likely do too. Let’s not kid ourselves here. Just this once.
more
http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=3719
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
