In a rut with consumerism and capitalism

Dear Joe,

I read the letter "Democrats have lost mainstream America" from Lisa, the Jewish, Spanish speaking Republican. I was entertained that she opened up with a missive describing her background. Just so you know she's not working class. I mean Jewish, OK. A woman? Acceptable. Working class? Ewwww! But that's OK. She has the education to talk with them, even though she makes it abundantly clear she's not one of them.

She wants to remove people from eligibility for welfare so she can get a greater sum of money for her own problems. She's also seemingly OK with her 73-year-old mother working to support her insurance. She was getting no care in an emergency room (probably at a state hospital because that's where they take violent crime victims) and had to go home to die, and blamed it on the illegals and "uninsured" who were "cutting in line" rather then seeing how the system itself is broken. She may agree with Republican talking heads she seeing on TV, and she seems entirely motivated by greed and kowtowing to authoritarian ideals. She's complaining about the symptoms and not seeing the sickness.

It is people like her that make me convinced that this country is doomed. If she is being truthful about her (left of Che, Trotskyite?) Commie mother and conservative father, she obviously didn't listen to what either one of them had to say. People who claim to be educated repeat crap they see on TV without once seeing the hologram.

With the perfect storm of peak oil, global climate change, and our industrial military pharmaceutical media overlords doing everything they can to turn us all into serfs, I don't see any direction for the good ol' USA other than economic ruination and fascism. With the media keeping the people turning on one scapegoat after another, (like Al Gore, or the obese, or terrorists) to keep us from focusing on our corporate overlords, they are also making sure we are too distracted to do anything about anything. In this age of information, there are so many people that I know that remain willfully ignorant, or only listen to people that agree with them, I have difficulty comprehending it. I mean people are calling Hillary Clinton a Marxist, and Barrack Obama a Muslim! It makes me want to tear out my eyes.

The American psyche is so in a rut with consumerism and capitalism that I don't see it possible for any sort of truly left organization to spread across this vast country. There are no catch phrases quick enough to compete with The Right's fear and hate mantra. There's no one communicating the message of class in a way that reaches people. I don't see any party cracking the two-party system. I'm too poor to get a solar powered house in the middle of nowhere to hide from the forthcoming food and race riots. I'm losing all sense of hope.

Thank you for your voice in the wilderness. Keep on writing! Maybe it will stick somewhere and be the pebble that starts an avalanche.

Justin

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Justin,

Well, her letter seems to be about who gets what and how much, doesn't it? There is much truth in the Marxian term "false consciousness" and how materialism, especially such staggering materialism as America's, hides the true forces at play between the classes, replacing human societal relationships with transactions and goods. Society is reduced to who gets what and how much, and everyone is pitted against everyone else in a struggle for everything from, health care and housing to beanie babies. Yet the foundations of any relatively free and functional society are awareness of, and consideration for, all other members and classes -- the understanding that each member needs all of the others in a profoundly fundamental and human way.

Personally, I am coming to understand that even the most elite in society suffer the same hallucination as the rest of us -- the delusion that society consists mainly of the economy and that people's primary engagement with one another is through material transaction. Like the masses, they see the present social orders and economy as inevitable. And why the hell not? It's all any living American has ever known. Unfortunately the elites and semi-elites are in a better position to exploit the national hallucination, even though trapped within it, due to privileges such as education (knowing the mechanics of transactional globalism) and control and ownership of everything that has any real value whatsoever, congress, the banks, most of the stock market, real estate, and the mainstream media which generates and perpetuates the false consciousness.    

The result is more than a national hallucination. Every nation lives under some national delusion or other. But we have reached the point of national psychosis -- psychosis being the denial of reality to the point of becoming self-destructive. In our society the defense of the indefensible is indeed pathological, especially considering its escalating violence. We see that violence at play in Iraq and around the world and at home. But like any victim of mental illness, we cannot see that the core driver of our pathology is our alienated tooth and claw competitive struggle with our fellow men for survival within our own nation.

Such divisiveness and polarization and plain old meanness is driven by the purposefully induced illusion of scarcity. Yes, yes, we are running out of oil, but the cost of savage military quest for oil and irrational dependence on it in every aspect of our lives in this unsustainable hydrocarbon based civilization defies rationality. It denies just about everything we know about physics, the natural world and the common sense. 

Meanwhile, our corporate state, itself a product of our specific national delusion (the one that says we do not need the nurture of each other as human beings) sends more actors into the mental ward to perpetuate the national hallucination and entertain the inmates of the asylum. In a purely theatrical struggle, symbolically representing some sort of resolution to the inmates anxieties and cognitive dissonance, Obama grapples with Hillary for a while. Then presumably he will do combat with McCain on the TV screen in the center of the ward, as the inmates draw back into two respective opposing crowds to cheer, sneer and place their bets.

Yet, whether actors or audience, all participants from top to bottom are patsies: the ward's doctors, the orderlies, the media calling the fight, the guy who mops the floor and the guy who banks the profits. All have internalized the corporate/state process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures of the larger machine they have created. Everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global social order of information and commodities -- the well-coiffed talking head on the TV screen, the grotesque delusional audience, and the candidates themselves. All play out their parts as good guys or bad guys or attractive meat puppets in a holographic projection of the hallucination itself called the news, which is presented as a description of reality, thereby reinforcing the hallucination itself.

Given the eerie and unearthly dynamics of the American national psyche, perhaps neither you, nor I, nor Lisa should be too hard on one another. Lobbing jibes from our respective ends of the ward doesn't do much to elevate our consciousness above the foaming drek. It only entertains the hell out of the guy behind the one-way glass whose job it is to monitor us, and dispense commodities, diversion and meds accordingly.

In art and labor,

Joe