Hello Joe,
I've just read "Inside the Iron Theater" and I think I will translate it into German. It is a great way in which you deal with your inner screaming self. The iron theater is everywhere, although I tend to believe that in the US it is showing its most perfected face. But the people addicted to commodity are about everywhere. (I am a German living in Spain.) They are also in the third world and the most oppressed parts of this planet. They were and are in the concentration camps. In Auschwitz and Dachau they were called kalfactors. They traded privileges for being a tool for the system. Sometimes they even did good and helped others to survive. But evidently they chose the wrong side. Well, some of them didn't exactly choose, did they?
Sometimes I, like most of us, think I must go crazy. I get into a rage and don't know where to let it out. I don't want to turn to hate -- no, not even like those sinister crooks some call the US Government. Their faces tell you everything you don't want to know. I find it incredible how somebody with a visage like big Schlong Cheney or midwife from hell Condoleezza Rice could ever make it that far. Well Condi plays piano, that's a little help, but what are Cheney's merits, I wonder.
Sorry, don't want to steal your time, just tell you that I like to read your stuff and that you are not alone in impotence. And that it is a lot better to be rude at dinner parties and have rage attacks in traffic jams than to suffer a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome and start to trust one's government and believe its lies. That is when one loses one soul. Don't let the system get inside of your head.
Sad thing: in talks and discussions I hear a lot of people who have let the system creep inside their head. Don't let the system make you kill your brother, man! And I have heard a lot of people find the bombings of Afghanistan, Baghdad, Gaza and Lebanon quite okay and who even don't mind the prospect of bombing Iran -- and these are people who are otherwise not so bad. What a fucking pimper's paradise.
All the best fom Europe.
Hergen
Spain
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Dear Hergen:
You are so right about the commodity addiction being worldwide. I was watching it develop in a small Central American village a few months ago. Moreover, it travels like a virus through television, crystallizing what little money poor people have down there around unneeded goods, and the creation of a mythical adorned self.
The kids watched cartoons before school, the women at home watched the soaps, and in the evenings it was sports and crime. The black people broadcasting the news all had blonde Katie Couric haircuts and much practiced frozen smiles even as they read from the teleprompter news of a man who had both his hands and feet cut off in a village to the south. And as I watched their eyes and faces I could see how television was wall papering the insides of their craniums with the latest and most exciting designs of the empire.
It no longer works on me. It no longer works on millions. But none of us seem to gain immunity until it is too late.
sigh
Joe
