A Yard Sale in Chernobyl (Joe Bageant)

Joe Bageant at Innie's Cafe in Belize

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

Aug. 3, 2009 -- "It's only a system," she said, as we floated through the sprawling supermarket's gleaming commodity lined indoor streets. "THE HELL IT IS! It's a goddamned air conditioned zombie hell of waste and gluttony," I thought to myself, before the usual vertigo completely enveloped me. Just back from Central America's simple, comprehensible mercados, bodegas and street cart vendors, the effect of this most common American shopping venue was, as always, one of vertigo. Head splitting light beats down on pyramids of plastic eggs, as if to incubate their hatching of the ladies stockings within, dozens of kinds of toothpaste, well scrubbed dead chickens, lurid baskets of too-perfect flowers, plastic wraps, tissue for faces, asses and wrapping gifts, row upon row of polished vegetables and fruits standing like soldiers waiting for the annihilation of salads or the ovens of casseroledom.

And all those hushed and not so hushed shopper cell phone conversations, this one consoling someone at the home base pod:

"Oh I am so sorry, baby, but I think they've quit making the Ranch flavored Pringles. Yes I know you don't like the jalapeno Pringles. I am so sorry. Really I am." Both parties seemed genuinely distraught.

And I imagine Allen Ginsberg in this supermarket, as he once imagined Walt Whitman in a supermarket in California and wonder, as Allen wondered, "What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate their brains and imaginations?"

The meat department workers in blood stained white smocks recite their corporate programmed litany: "Welcome to Food Lion. How can I best serve you today?" I cannot help but politicize such moments, so I say, "Humiliating, isn't it, to say that a thousand times a day to people who just want to be left alone to shop." Once in a while I get a knowing glance back, but usually they do not respond, because cameras cover every inch of the place.

Only the Mongoloid bag-faced boy seems happy to be here. His smile is a deep mysterious void. What it must be like to be so unfazed, to be in another country of the mind? What sphinx rules his Republic of One? Does it have the same unknowable corporate face as governs our obedience to this one?

It was to the spectral triumph of corporatism Allen Ginsberg referred in the epic poem, "Howl": Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/component/content/article/90/3547-a-yard-sale-in-chernobyl-joe-bageant

"Speaking of motives, there are those who worry about an American authoritarian police state one day rounding folks up, shuffling them off to geographically remote camps, such as the Department of Homeland Security's scattered FEMA Camps. But physical geography isn't the only geography. There is geography of the mind too, where another kind of hellish internment may be conducted. One without razor wire or sirens but surely as confining and in its own way, as soul chilling as any concentration camp. One with plenty to eat and filled with distractions and diversions enough to drown out the alarms and sirens that go off inside free men at the scent of tyranny. If a round up of Americans is real, then it began years ago. And as far as I can tell, everyone went peacefully, each one alone, like children, whose greatest concern on that day when the gates were closed, was the absence of Ranch flavored Pringles."

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The alarms and sirens have been wailing for a long time, yet most people have ignored them. Good article.

They've done a bang up job of it.

A week w/o running water or electricity twuz WONDERFUL!!! Fresh fish daily. Cabana three feet from the water and 15 yards from the reef edge, easy snorkling distance. Lotza local fauna: nurse shark patrolling the pool at waters edge where we bathed, very curious iguanas everywhere and we were visited every day by an osprey with itz catch at dinner time. Met several members of the Discovery Channel Shark Week film crew and working archeologists vacationing in-country before their trip home. Highly recommended for the adventurous traveler. Far, far from the things of man!!

http://www.glovers.com.bz/