Election Time - 2010
!!!
Election time again. What a fun time. Just look at the rhetoric circulating in the corporate mass media ... So exciting!
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39933286/ns/politics-the_new_york_times - today)
But has anyone noticed that campaign adds, whether local or national, are a tad stale? The rhetoric and antagonism bears a striking resemblance to that of the pre-adolescent schoolyard, and is reminiscent of the standing ovations (every 30 seconds or so) during a State of the Union Address. What a wonderful system. So sincere. Why do we play along then! Are we awash is spare time or something?!
We've been trained and conditioned our entire lives to accept imaginary, alternate realities in lieu of the truth. We live vicariously through Hollywood - why not get our principles in a similiar fashion, prefabbed for us - like twinkies? Pseudo-principles and plastic food, but it sure is easy! Vicarious living at its best. So-called "politics" today seems a subset of popular culture, best described as a soap-operatic charade which gives us a false sense of civic duty and simultaneously diverts our attention from the real goings on. So-called "politics" today is the proverbial rubber room, a safe place where adults can go to watch cartoons ... to keep themselves out of trouble. The overclass would like us to think there is some cataclysmic, epic struggle going on. It's the old (and irresistible) good vs evil line. It's Harry Potter ... Chronicles of Narnia ... Lord of the Rings ... only for grown ups. This epic struggle portrayed by popular culture and the mass media overshadows the epic collaboration of the elite behind closed doors, which is far more significant and telling, far more. Similarly, the media loves to spotlight capitalism vs socialism, as if we are have anything even remotely resembling either, or ever have, or ever will. We are coached to defend one or the other, like religions, aimed at controlling some particular ideologic contingency. We have become too conditioned and accustomed to receiving dictation (and preoccupied being consumers) to bother ourselves with any real thinking. So we buy into prefab scripts which are ready made for our convenience, like big macs. Thus the discourse between dems and pubs has come to resemble pro wrestling, and it serves a similar purpose - filling an empty void.
Modern day "politics" is the golden pendulum, swinging back and forth, making people think something magical is happening, like birds by the fowlers glass. We like to think checks and balances are occurring and that the system is working. And it feels so good to sling political mud and pretend we are making a difference ... that we are performing our civic duty. Institutional beings are given to vicarious fulfillment, but this goes beyond just consumer goods. We eat out of their hands - right down to our very values. Popular culture has gone to all that trouble coming up with these ideological concoctions, so how could we refuse? How nice of them. Now we can live vicariously through "Whale Wars", "American Idol", a "Move On" petition, tea party clamor, and a million other things pop cultture serves up on a silver platter. We anesthetize ourselves not only with consumerism but also with so-called "politics".
Today's "progressivism" deserves special attention since we have (presumably) a "progressive" administration. Today's "progressivism" is just another religion that is supportive of the status quo. The "opiate of the masses" - on the left, making a good showing for the system, masqueradeing as socially responsible, concerned with the environment, with the poor, representing a countervailing force against corporate abuses, providing band aid solutions, partially covering up the underlying hemorrhage and helping to cover it up, but doing nothing to stop it. In short, stick us in front of the tv and put a lolipop in our hands.
Of course, the right is no better or worse. Antagonism between political parties, like racial antagonism, perpetuates a system which beggars both. Talk about placating ourselves with a false sense of civic duty when we could be moving forward in any number of ways. Real change does not involve political solutions ushered in on rigged tables. Real change occurs in individuals, families and communities, when folks begin to realize that they are not - after all - each other's enemy, and begin forming alliances together instead of inviting division. There are are million different ways we could be moving forward, creating transformative change in our lives. But institutional creatures lose their work ethic, and readily accept anything that is prefabbed and ready made for them.
The electric car is finally making a comeback, after its debut in the 1830s. I'm sure there are a thousand or so culture serving ways to explain the hiatus without using the word "oligarchy". And I'm sure many of these are perpetuated so that the myth of freedom and democracy can endure. But "oligarchy" is a lot shorter, more to the point, and more true.
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"[People] did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies・\the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man・s almost infinite appetite for distractions・c.
But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema."
Aldous Huxley (from Brave New World Revisited - 1958)
"All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."
Historian Lord
Acton (Letter to
Mandell Creighton, April, 1887)