Goodbye Rousseau and Locke, hello Oprah

Joe,

This week I finally lost my last thread of hope in my country and democracy. Last year I had the privilege of voting out one of the most disastrous (and conservative) governments ever to govern my country and putting in its place the nominally social-democratic Australian Labor Party. However, the euphoria of that happy day has been lost. Rather than the strong progressive government hoped for by millions of Australians, we have had months of petty legislation in the pursuit of a bourgeois liberal nanny state.

The most recent example being a recent government pronouncement having four drinks in a night classifies a person as a dangerous binge drinker. While the government fusses over minor details, greater wrongs remain untouched. The aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory remain under occupation by the Army. The law still permits employers to block unions from their premises leading to greater exploitation of workers, and many rural communities still do not receive adequate telephone service.

Thus the greater malaise at the heart of our democracy is exposed: we are too weak to deal with any real issues so we hide by debating small and irrelevant details. This week while petrol prices sky-rocketed, more focus has been paid to the governments stand on alcohol consumption and the drunken antics of one minister. And this is a trend prevalent throughout the western world. Obama is castigated for not wearing a flag pin rather than his isolationist economic policies. McCain gets more criticism for his poor speaking skill rather than his blatant ignorance of world politics and militancy.

The preponderance of the popular mass media means all potential leaders are little better than whores, selling themselves to the highest bidder. Thus we have the great victory of the conservative monster. The conservative mindset is so ingrained in society that the institutions that may save us are regarded as anathema. Unions are a dirty word, even amongst the people they stand to help. Socialism is even dirtier still; it's dangerous even to be regarded as progressive. The power of conservative self interest has transformed the working and middle classes. There is no chance of a revolution, 1968 will never occur again -- the new battle cry is 'for the love of god and country BUY SHIT!'

Society is atomised and as individuals cut from the tree we must wither and die. Alone and afraid of our own shadows there is no strength, no vitality and no leadership.

I can't help but feel terrified as I look to the future. Religious extremism (from all religions), climate change and the increasing rate at which our limited resources are being consumed. There may be another Kennedy, Huey Long or Jack Curtin out there, but there is no chance he will be allowed to do what is necessary for human survival. While the country's present political climate prevails there can be no real change.

Michael in Australia

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Michael,

For starters, if four drinks make an Aussie a binge drinker, then half of your nation already qualifies for admission to the Betty Ford Treatment Center. Beyond that, I'd never trust a man who cannot hold four drinks anyway.

Be that as it may, I am sickened at heart to hear that Australia is losing more ground in the battle against global elites and corporatism. And that's what it is -- a battle for the soul and best interests of the working man and citizen. Complicit in this are the media, those hopeless little self-absorbed middle class shits more worried about their hair, careers and public status than the fate of democracy. But then, hell, the corporate elites own the media, and therefore their asses, so what could we have expected?

The global takeover of media and politics -- those inseparable Gemini twins of the new world order of things -- is one of the most profound phenomenons in human history. And by corporate take over I do not mean in the strictest corporate consolidation sense, though that is happing too. I mean it in the sense that capitalist corporatist values have been internalized by all participants in both politics and media to the extent that they can only operate toward its ends. It constitutes their very unconscious in that it is the operating instructions for their daily lives, world view and behavior. As it does for so many ordinary Australians and Americans and just about anybody else on the planet with an extra buck in their pockets that can be extracted.

I recently attended the National Conference on Media Reform in America. There I met hundreds of sincere Americans putting out great energies in an effort to reverse the consolidation of media and create a place for alternative views exist in the public eye. All of them were "working within the system" for change. At the end of it all I felt sad. Sad because working within the system means working within a system owned, governed and operated by our adversaries. That's like trying to win in a game of five card stud in which the dealer gets to choose which cards you get. It's guaranteed to make you lose. And I felt even sadder that no one noticed that there was no room at that conference for genuine alternative views to be represented. For example, intensely political as it was, there were no socialist solutions whatsoever. Just people trying to get legislative theft changed to give things such as the airwaves back to the people.

Did they think that once our corporate elites own something legally -- under legislation they bought and paid for -- that they are going to then pay our congress to reverse the situation? Did it ever occur to those middle class "alternative" attendees that their revered keynote speaker, Bill Moyers, was nevertheless a very well-off former presidential press secretary advocating working within a system that has been very generous to him? Let me say here that Moyers is one of the most courageous journalists and thinkers in America. Yet, despite his accomplishments, he is also the permissible “leftish voice” in our media. His is a fine and informed mind, something middle class American liberals cherish the idea of at least. And so they settle for the allowable televised symbol of intelligence and integrity and small doses of the truth, small enough doses in the form of yet more facts about our leadership's criminality or corporate takeover of media. And they delighted in the spite fight between neo-con Bill O'Reilly's producer, Porter Barry, cheering Moyers' elegant smackdown of Barry in the attempted public ambush. God bless Bill Moyers, he's the best we have available in this country. But nevertheless, it all amounts to theatrics, albeit genuinely passionate theatrics, in the managed consciousness of a theater state.

I know I have digressed here into the subject of media. But media is the subject on which I have the best odds of bullshitting the readers into believing I halfway know what I'm talking about. After all, I was a hack reporter for years – they weren't.

Nevertheless, my main point is valid. So long as the people allow the corporate theater state to sap their energies and awareness through pseudo events, celebrity worship and spectacle – no matter how righteous and gratifying the spectacle -- those energies will not be available to initiate change. Willing and pliant spectators, by definition can never be players on the field of their nation's destiny.

But for we spectators, there is succor. We still have Oprah Winfrey, who is certain she can fix the world, bankroll the whole job by herself. Just watch! To that effect she got herself nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Winfrey reminds us that "Freedom is not free!" With a net worth of over 1.7 billion dollars, she is certainly among the freest women on the planet. Unfortunately my Visa limit is $13,000.

In any case, like you, I no longer look for any significant uprising. Oh sure, we will see so-called "populist rebellions," in this country and probably in yours too. But they will be mere negative reactions to such things as the price of gasoline or food or the pick-pocketing and fleecing of the public of our financial industries. The pious cold blooded banditry of the medical professions. The gleeful toxicity and hormonal chicken jamming of Tysons or Archel Daniels Midland or ConAgra. ("Lordee bee, mah little Charlene has got a set of D-cup bazookas and she's only six years old. Talk about child dee-velopment!")

A negative reaction to paying for your doctor's brat to spend the summer in Paris getting laid while you are stuck in a traffic jam burning up $4 petrol is not rebellion. And getting pissed off at the gall of basketball referees these days is not exactly the stuff of revolution. Yes, there will be much noise amid the frothing drek, but no true rebellion. I conclude this from over six decades of observation of people across numerous cultures. Human beings are not especially strong creatures to begin with, and certainly are not so much liberty loving as they are comfort and security loving. No price is too great for those very human and understandable desires. Even when we do collectively rise up, it is because of discomfort, or to grab a snack, not out of love for liberty.

And when we do rise up (sit up on our couches and bitch out loud) our energies are easily misguided in the wrong direction by the national explainers, the information caste at the service of a system so large we cannot comprehend it without great and purposeful effort. So when this rising of the lard does occur upon the couches of this supersizing superstate, any howling, or god forbid actual effort toward change is neutralized by the extension of some newer comfort, perhaps cybernetic holographic television, or the addition of more channels. Which works well enough for most of us. Hell, 24-hour porn, telephonic off-track betting on the ponies and television remote ordering of pizza and beer would have me fighting the dog for a spot on the couch.

Funny thing is, that here in the USA we have hundreds of commercial channels in this country, life channels for tear-soaked menopausal women, channels for Navahos and channels to babysit white trash latchkey kids, booty channels for ghetto minorities, business channels, weather channels, and of course dedicated bandwidth for direct shopping and consumption -- and alleged educational channels to feed us vital information about deadly great white sharks, and potential asteroids striking the earth.

God only knows it is an endless electronic landscape of political information pumps, ranging from propaganda penis pumps such as Fox News, to the eye glazing stuporific real-time, watching-paint-dry pump that is CNN. All of this, yet there seems not to be room for a socialist channel.

But whatever media sewer we choose to bathe in, one thing is consistent. And all of them tell us to buy, buy, buy. The one qualified exception is PBS, which tells us to acknowledge the kindness and generosity of sponsors such as ExxonMobil. But even PBS hawks its sponsorships on such assurances as "59% of viewers are more inclined to buy products from PBS sponsors."

Like it or not, hoss, citizenship in the old Greco-Roman, Thomas Paine, Jack Curtin, Frank Church, Ephialtean and Periclesian sense rests in a grave alongside Rousseau and Locke. From that vantage point they are privileged to look up and see the CEOs of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Citicorp wipe their asses on the remaining scraps of Rousseau's social contract.

Anyway, media is now the true environment for the average person, much more so than nature itself, which has taken up residence on The Nature Channel. Goodbye French Revolution, goodbye rough hewn America liberty. Goodbye jolly swagman camped by the billabong -- all the real men, the blood and guts patriots who would have never stood for this kind of shit, they have gone a'waltzing Matilda. What's left are the dregs. Otherwise known as consumers. And that includes you and me.

So go out and buy something.

Preferably beer.

In art and labor,

Joe