Joe!
As a Brit living in Sweden, I am following your observations with interest, and with despair starting to see the same phenomena in Europe coming slowly.
However, that is not at the top of my mind just now; it's Die Hard 4 with Bruce Willis. We rented the DVD last night and I sat down to watch it at the request of the youngest member of our family.
At one point, the baddy looks up the personal details about the hero John McClane (played by Willis) on government computers. This New York cop of Irish origin, had no retirement plan, his personal economy was ruined, and he was divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughter.
But he had saved thousands of lives earlier, in Die Hard 1, 2 and 3. Earlier in the film, he says how heroes are not welcome and he talks about how people want don't to know about them. It obviously does not pay well, but our hero appears to accept it.
I thought about Die Hard when I read your blog! This film is pure indoctrination into just what you are talking about. You are white and of Scots-Irish origin, have to lay your life on the line, because you just happen to be there, and be the one that does something about the situation because you are the only one who can. You find a computer hacker with the same sentiment. You are tough and reckless and do a jig when the bad guy gets killed.
The upper echelons of the middle class, the lackies of the ruling class, are either real bad-ass people who are using the education they got subsidized by the taxpayer to screw virtually everybody and topple the economy, or incompetent jobsworth who put daily life at risk by creating infrastructure and systems that blatantly do not work or are intrinsically unsound.
Talk about art imitating life!
Keep up the good work and saying it like it is!
Steve
Stockholm, Sweden
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Steve,
It never ceases to amaze me on how many variations on the theme can be created. In the end the American working class will always come to see their defeat and consequent suffering as heroic.
I heard a version of this yesterday on the radio as I drove back home from the airport, after having been to the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis. The radio program had a series of ordinary Americans -- people who had triumphed over their lack of health insurance or health care, through their own stubbornness, toil, ingenuity, individualism and sheer grit. Now implicit in this of course was acceptance of the complete lack of health protection whatsoever, and then overcoming that lack.
What really got me were the people who said the bureaucracy and frustration of dealing with Medicare and Medicaid were just not worth it. Nowhere was it mentioned that they had paid all their lives for those health programs, or that employees of those programs are public servants whose salaries are paid by the working masses. (Or if you do not like such Marxist terms as "working masses," then we can use the more technical private jargon of capitalism, in which they are known as victims, suckers, marks or money on the hoof.) In any case, the end message, the "takeaway," of the radio show was that:
1 -- It is possible to go it on your own without insurance or nationalized health support in a nation where an illness can cost you $100,000 in the blink of an eye. The radio host called it "opting out" of what shred of government health care we have in this country, thereby lending an air of proud independence and defiance to such a stupid option (we have absolutely no concept of "the common good" in this country, thanks to the "every man for himself" ethos that has been cultivated by our overlords in an effort to keep us disunited.
2 -- That the very agencies set up to help you are now your adversaries, and you should accept that as natural, as a given, because, as we all know, "handouts" are bad and "government handouts" are especially bad because they are an evil sign of encroaching socialism -- to wit, the "coddling of niggers, and now the goddamned Mexicans," and the "forced redistribution of wealth." (Huh? What wealth for chrissake? It's already been redistributed to the elite top 5%.) The radio show of course had a certain tone of anger over being denied by these agencies, but it was a brief necessary moment -- necessary because it is totally fucking illogical, even in the media hologram's production of the state message that there would not be at least some natural anger at such a situation. But even natural anger, deeply latent as it is here, is harnessed to the end objectives of the corporate and political elites, woven into the weft and warp of the national delusion we call "the fabric of our society" to such a degree that I personally believe it can never again be separated.
3 -- That such agency callousness is the natural result of "big government." You know, the kind of government that wants to "manage your life" by guaranteeing proper nutrition for children, adequate education and -- horror of horrors! -- a warm place to shit and die for the sick and elderly.
and 4 -- The tens of thousands of dollars you have paid into that system are just part of a heroic but futile lifelong effort you suffer merely as the cost of being a citizen of this noble nation that has defended democracy and justice throughout history and around the world, and is currently dispensing said democracy in Iraq and justice to the 2.2 million in American prisons and jails and another 2 million walking around under strict post-incarceration supervision and monitoring.
In the overview, the bullshit theme of the radio show was the product of some middle class broadcast asshole's idea of a "new angle" on the vital issue of health care in this country. Obviously the producer has internalized the state's rationale so thoroughly he probably doesn't even know how ludicrous this show was. But listeners across this Mid-Atlantic seaboard region had it beamed into their consciousness anyway. And by a "liberal" radio outlet to boot. Doubtlessly that poor asshole was well enough insured through his job in broadcasting, thereby assuring his numbness to the truth, and allowing him to come up with this inspiring little delusional piece of offal. The show was a masterpiece of propaganda, so much so that, honest to god, I am beginning to sound to myself like one of the convoluted conspiracy freaks that I avoid (not that I don't think there are many conspiracies afoot here). The show was just too perfect in its underlying propaganda effect, and one wonders just how it was being influenced or supported -- but that's another matter.
In any case, I am sure we will be hearing and watching more of. And there will be endless variations on the theme of "suck it in and suffer, because the American people are heroic individuals."
Goddamned gerbils are what we have become. Mindless fucking gerbils in a heavily managed cage.
I gotta go now because the nice man with my gerbil pellets just opened the feeding door.
In art and labor,
Joe
