Live from Planet Norte (Joe Bageant)

Totalitarian democracy and the politics of plunder

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

June 27, 2010 -- WINCHESTER, Va. -- Starting with the Homeland Security probe at Washington's Reagan Airport, arrival back in the United States resembles an alien abduction to a planet of bright lights, strange beings and incomprehensible behavior. The featureless mysophobic landscape of DC's Virginia suburbs seems to indicate that homogeneity and sterility are the native religions. Especially after spending eight months in Mexico's pungent atmosphere of funky, sensual open air markets, rotting vegetation, smoking street food grills, sweat, agave nectar and ghost orchids.

The uniformity on Planet Norte is striking. Each person is a unit, installed in life support boxes in the suburbs and cities; all are fed, clothed by the same closed-loop corporate industrial system. Everywhere you look, inhabitants are plugged in at the brainstem to screens downloading their state approved daily consciousness updates. iPods, Blackberries, notebook computers, monitors in cubicles, and the ubiquitous TV screens in lobbies, bars, waiting rooms, even in taxicabs, mentally knead the public brain and condition its reactions to non-Americaness. Which may be defined as anything that does not come from of Washington, D.C., Microsoft or Wal-Mart.

For such a big country, the "American experience" is extremely narrow and provincial, leaving its people with approximately the same comprehension of the outside world as an oyster bed. Yet there is that relentless busyness of Nortenians. That sort of constant movement that indicates all parties are busy-busy-busy, but offers no clue as to just what they are busy at.

We can be sure however, that it has to do with consuming. Everything in America has to do with consuming. So much so that we find not the slightest embarrassment in calling ourselves "The Consumer Society." Which is probably just as well, since calling ourselves something such as "The Just Society" might have been aiming a bit too high? Especially for a nation that never did find enough popular support to pass any of the 200 anti-lynching bills brought before its Congress (even Franklin Roosevelt refused to back them).

On the other hand, there is no disputing that we do reduce all things to consumption. Or acquiring money for consumption. Or paying on the debt for past consumption. It keeps things simple, and stamps them as authentically American.

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I love Joe. No bullshit, great writing.

I empathize and sympathize with him greatly. These are things almost better left unknown and unthought of, since we can't seem to change any of it.

And the bottom line is that human beings have not advanced much, if at all, in the last 10,000 years. Just our energy budget and technology. God help us if we lose any portion and start going backward on that.

Because the ugly mediveal feudalism is now very close to our surface, and the medieval crazy, stupid mean that the RW Lie Machine has stirred up. Gotta give 'em credit. Those crazies are relentless and shamelss as Nazis. And they make it work. Hell, they're already up to the part where they start to blame their victims of what they are doing themselves - being Nazi-like. Listen to Beck and consider at what stage of the game THAT comes along.

It's only masked by the fact that the economic times, while hard, are not nearly as bad as they were in 1930s America or 1920s Germany.

God help us all if we ever get anywhere near those kind of bad times.

We are greedy, selfish children.

But we only have an illusion of control. The masters let us vote, to show some semblance of freedom but are really just servants to the corporate game.

" If voting changed anything,
they'd make it illegal."