Shake, Shake, Shake

Madame M:

Ron Paul, whether one agrees with him or not, was attempting to give a sophisticated answer to why we were attacked, an answer with complex truth in it, not the simplistic drivel put out by simpletons like Santorum or cynical manipulators like most of the rest of the candidates. If the audience is a measure of America, or at least a good portion of it, then it only illustrates in appalling fashion—and in spades—Hedges’ points.

The group of citizens rescuing the cyclist: humans, and Americans especially, react to emergency and short-term things. It requires only momentary focus, and also lifts them, momentarily, out of the purposelessness of many of their lives. Communal effort is a nice by product, but it is short-lived, because the underlying culture gives little to nothing to sustain it.

On the political stage that we still look to for answers, there are few to none to be found: “Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls ‘junk politics.’ Junk politics does not demand justice or reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. ‘It is impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America’s optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture,’ DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes –“meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage.’ It redefines traditional values, tilting ‘courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains.’ Junk politics ‘miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It’s also given to abrupt, unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized.’ And finally, it ‘seeks at every turn to obliterate voters’ consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst.’ Politics has become a product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in celebrities who are, as Boorstin wrote, ‘receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.’” (47)

Is that not what we have seen many times, perhaps most recently with the debt ceiling made an immediate crisis by the very people who were only too glad to pass it over 13 times when they were fully in charge? And then the very same people who hand every advantage to themselves and their fellow rich then take a hammer to the foundations of middle class survivability (let alone prosperity). Further, they divert attention (and often merely ignore it, because they are so powerful they can) and twist what attention remains so that they are never held accountable, but are, incredibly, put forward as “one of us!” by their rabid constituents whom they have effectively economically and socially disenfranchised. I am surprised that those who see the Devil’s hands in everything don’t see it in that one (unless the professed Master of Deception has that one covered too).

“Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though as they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on the credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They are hostage to the constant jingle and manipulation of a consumer culture. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. They eat at fast-food restaurants not only because it is cheap, but also because they can order from pictures rather than from a menu. And those who serve them, also often semiliterate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are usually marked with pictures. Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism, and quick, sensual gratification.” (48)

Historians have been trying to tell people the dangers of cutting themselves off from the past, and especially the learning of the past, and the dangers of ridiculing the very idea of learning it. Mathematicians and business teachers have been shouting that dammit, it’s NOT okay to say “I’m not good at math,” or to be helpless for even basic stuff without a calculator or some shortcut. And the acquiescing numbing and anesthetizing of large segments of the population: once again, who does that serve? Who would benefit from the manufacture of the people's consent, or at least the appearance? Those who could use it as a means of social coercion and control! Political “leadership” that is mostly just about manipulation and exploitation is really nothing except “charlatans trying to build their own credibility by decrying other charlatans.” All that is a product of a culture that is far too okay with illusion, or even embraces it. It is difficult to listen to the truth, and even more difficult to live within it, but if you care anything for your free will, you will. Or you can effectively give that up to embrace some perverted predestination.

It might seem that we are giving the reader large chunks of Hedges’ masterful work. Not enough! The snippets the Housewife and I are giving you should merely prompt to want to absorb and infuse the complete work into one’s consciousness. We are leaving out much that is valuable. We earnestly want this work to be something other than a forgotten treatise by a latter-day Cassandra. As one commentator put it, we need to wake up from our state of induced childishness. We need to first recognize and then reject the different forms of propaganda, often disguised or dressed up as some form of entertainment. Recognize the diversion! Be distracted no longer! The foundations of the country are eaten out or dynamited when your attention is diverted.

Hedges titled his first chapter “The Illusion of Literacy.” If it is true that reading is becoming staid and boring by a majority of Americans, it is further alarming when we look at the type and quality of books that are read by the still large (but apparently declining) minority that do read. An examination of the top 20 or even 100 books in numbers sold seems to confirm Hedges’ intimation that we are abandoning the tools of analytical thought. Sure, some of this is overworked value workers who want to escape the analytical things they do at work, but much, too much perhaps, is willing embrace of the cult of distraction and the superficial, the
illusions and the celebrity culture Hedges so rightly condemns. A wise man once said that you become what you feed yourself, whether physical, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual. If we feed ourselves a steady diet of junk food for the mind, body, spirit, and emotions that allows or causes us to evade the central troubles of our times, are we not to blame by our actions and inactions? We have given ourselves a pass on too much. How are we, without being properly grounded, going to both expose and follow through on accountability the utterly treasonous greed of the predatory wealthy class and their corporate associates who have abandoned the rest of us? Will we not, in one person’s words, become an “increasingly docile, illiterate peasantry nursed by corporate feudalism and systematically degraded to one essentially ‘colonized’ by financial, technical, professional, managerial, and academic elites devoid of any real sense of the common good”? (from a forum discussion of the book, the location of which has become lost to me)

And if people choose to retreat back into delusion and denial, or if they can’t stay focused long enough, they advance the day when it will no longer matter—the Matrix will have come.

We the awake need to work earnestly to shake awake those whose cultural narcolepsy and sedation is tugging on them. For only when the “average” person no longer desires to be part of the sick, illusory culture can a transformation take place.