Corporate industry and its products are not
culture, despite all the new definitions of culture, bourgeois academia and the
marketplace come up with on behalf of the corporations that fund both of
them.
Your iPod shall set you free
Freedom and personal identity exist as freedom to choose identity from among the commodities, and particularly the entertainments offered. The Mac person as opposed to the Windows person. The Mariah Carey or Rihanna Fenty fan as opposed to the Eric Clapton fan. Each is convinced he or she is different because of their chosen commodity. Yet at the root of this, they all purchased a computer or a CD from a faceless corporation grounded in the toxic wastelands and sweatshops of Asia and elsewhere.
Those who, in a fit of defiance, choose Indy music choose a product originating in and listened to through digital equipment produced in the bowels of monolithic corporate commodities generators.We may gaze at the hologram and dream of living larger, or conversely, living the uncorrupted "simple life" on that little organic farm in Vermont. In the end though, most of us, all those people out there in anonymous Terra Condominia, out there in the sprawling suburban netherland, must be content with a flat screen television.
Watching the commercials for the
Super Bowl, commercials delivered to us breathlessly as "news" -- The News is
the liturgy of the commodity economy -- whose scope and omniscience no man can
grasp, but only consume as manna. We are feasters at the table of goods and
services, most of which are not only unnecessary, distractive and mind killing,
but earth destroying in both their manufacture and their use. This matters not a
bit in an illusionary world of appearances. The commodity economy in its bounty,
also offers us a chance to "buy
green."
It ain't fascism, it's practicality
If our national and individual minds have been colonized -- occupied -- then we necessarily live in an occupied nation. We have arrived at the destination where the trajectory of material consumer capitalism was always headed, toward an occupied (and preoccupied) totalitarian society.
Rational, practical, productive and autonomous. Clichà © as the word is, you would have to call it overshoot. In judging the arc and trajectory of that technical rationality Western society so prides itself upon, we reduced the Enlightenment, the original launching pad of ration, to the merely practical, material and economic. The practical is scripture now. Without it material production and profit, the only concerns of capitalism, do not exist. All power rests in the practical.
Your iPod shall set you free
Freedom and personal identity exist as freedom to choose identity from among the commodities, and particularly the entertainments offered. The Mac person as opposed to the Windows person. The Mariah Carey or Rihanna Fenty fan as opposed to the Eric Clapton fan. Each is convinced he or she is different because of their chosen commodity. Yet at the root of this, they all purchased a computer or a CD from a faceless corporation grounded in the toxic wastelands and sweatshops of Asia and elsewhere.
Those who, in a fit of defiance, choose Indy music choose a product originating in and listened to through digital equipment produced in the bowels of monolithic corporate commodities generators.We may gaze at the hologram and dream of living larger, or conversely, living the uncorrupted "simple life" on that little organic farm in Vermont. In the end though, most of us, all those people out there in anonymous Terra Condominia, out there in the sprawling suburban netherland, must be content with a flat screen television.
It ain't fascism, it's practicality
If our national and individual minds have been colonized -- occupied -- then we necessarily live in an occupied nation. We have arrived at the destination where the trajectory of material consumer capitalism was always headed, toward an occupied (and preoccupied) totalitarian society.
Rational, practical, productive and autonomous. Clichà © as the word is, you would have to call it overshoot. In judging the arc and trajectory of that technical rationality Western society so prides itself upon, we reduced the Enlightenment, the original launching pad of ration, to the merely practical, material and economic. The practical is scripture now. Without it material production and profit, the only concerns of capitalism, do not exist. All power rests in the practical.
What is most practical is
hierarchy and specialization. Technical Specialization -- within engineering
specialization -- within scientific specialization. All contained within the
economic specializations of the state sanctioned economy and ideology governing
the conditions of our daily existence. By definition, this is
totalitarian.Totalitarianism calls ideology philosophy. It salutes itself in
every medium and every product, material, legal, political. And we salute it in
return through meaningless work and consumption.
In all likelihood, you the reader are younger than I. Possibly less cynical and surely less tired. You may believe yet that violent overthrow of such a monstrous system is still possible. A year or so ago, I still believed that. Events in the world and at home have since convinced me otherwise.
Maybe the system could have been changed from within40 years ago. If it could have been and was not, then that most certainly is the greatest failure of my generation. The Sixties were a critical point at which important choices were offered to us as a people. At the time, a minority realized revolution was still possible and warranted. Violent revolution, if necessary. But as a generation, we were no better at acting in unselfish concert than your generation.
In all likelihood, you the reader are younger than I. Possibly less cynical and surely less tired. You may believe yet that violent overthrow of such a monstrous system is still possible. A year or so ago, I still believed that. Events in the world and at home have since convinced me otherwise.
Maybe the system could have been changed from within40 years ago. If it could have been and was not, then that most certainly is the greatest failure of my generation. The Sixties were a critical point at which important choices were offered to us as a people. At the time, a minority realized revolution was still possible and warranted. Violent revolution, if necessary. But as a generation, we were no better at acting in unselfish concert than your generation.
As Chris Hedges recently
pointed out, violence today only assures the survival of the most violent,
criminals of one sort or another, petty or international. Beyond that, the state
now has the technological capability to inflict the most violence in every case,
and therefore win. Realistic thinkers say aloud that what is so far advanced can
no longer be stopped or turned around by revolution, violent or otherwise. Most
other thinkers on the subject secretly suspect the same.
Mr. Popularity and the marmot
The rest of the country is oblivious, lost in the anxious clamor for an
economic "recovery."The voice of the state defines recovery for them as a
return to former levels of the unsustainable superheated capitalism, and
increased indebtedness of the populace. "Oh, when, oh when, will the bankers
"loosen the credit markets' so we can again buy things?" As if their debt
slavery were a great gift!
The banksters simply do not issue more credit to people they know are dead broke -- because they broke 'em, They will continue to make more money by letting the people wail, and taking the people's money directly from the state as bailouts. Stretched out over the coming years, we will see more of them. It should give us chills.
The banksters simply do not issue more credit to people they know are dead broke -- because they broke 'em, They will continue to make more money by letting the people wail, and taking the people's money directly from the state as bailouts. Stretched out over the coming years, we will see more of them. It should give us chills.
President Obama at some point must have asked himself if bailouts for
those who caused the collapse will truly result in an end to the "current
crisis" (a term calculated to make our slow inevitable collapse look temporary).
Asked himself, "How does getting the masses to accept more debt add up to
anything but worse crisis later?" Obama is a smart fellow, smarter than George
Bush, which is what got him elected, right? (Of course a marmot could have run
on the "smarter than Bush" ticket and looked good). Obama must have asked
that.
But like any highly educated (indoctrinated) American politician who has
interiorized the capitalist system -- you do not become a presidential candidate
without interiorizing capitalism lock stock and barrel -- his first reflex was:
"The system must be saved at all costs!" Members of Congress, whose butts
arrived in the Washington through the same processes as Obama's, agreed. That
cost us all plenty.
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