Chris Hedges: Addicted To Nonsense

http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/addicted_to_nonsense_20091129/ http://www.alternet.org/story/144255/what_do_levi_johnston%2C_evangelicals_and_oprah_have_in_common_they_all_blind_us_to_what_really_matters

Addicted To Nonsense

What Do Levi Johnston, Evangelicals and Oprah Have in Common? They All Blind Us to What Really Matters
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted November 30, 2009.

Our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd, while the course of human history is changing. Those who choose reality over fantasy are derided as pessimists.

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives -- the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and “The Purpose Driven Life” won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts.

- snip -

The American oligarchy -- 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined -- are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions. They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts. They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.

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I think the real nugget of this article is the last paragraph:



No one in this administration is speaking to these people. The wealth of the nation has been funneled into the pockets of the upper 1%, still, this last year, just like the last eight years (and to a lesser extent but still ongoing in the eight years previous and before that going back at least to Reagan) and no one is talking to or about blasted Detroit, or all the young Black men walking the streets of my town with no jobs, no hope, no future but jail or prison. On another thread there is an excerpt from a speech by AFT President on teachers inititatives, with an anecdote about children in a school district where 95% of the students live below the poverty level. As if teachers could really "cure" such a condition.

Unless Obama starts speaking of and to this world, the world that most of us outside a privleged slice of the populace live in, we will continue on the same downward spiral.

Speak to and advocate for those of us flailing around in the growing ranks of America's serfdom.

I suppose there's still hope he will. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting, though.

...were not enough they aren't even being covert about their machinations any more. The entire financial meltdown (which the oligarchy engineered) and the subsequent government bail out was the most blatant theft of public funds in history.
All that has happened to the majority of the crowd of crooks was to suffer the slings and arrows of a few sternly worded editorials and congressional kabuki theater with scowling and bluster (followed by cocktails).
The news that Goldman Saks executives are buying up firearms might be prudent on their part.