The Great American Media Mind Warp
By Joe Bageant

Needless to say, the Middle Eastern doctors accused of terrorism in Scotland may be guilty as hell. Mohammed Asha may be another one of your standard terror wogs who, as we all know by now, relish the idea of prison or perhaps blowing up his wife and baby up for Allah. But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today's system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things -- the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process. All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind's interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.

[more]

Let's Dump Prepackaged Class Identities
By Joe Bageant

It never ceases to amaze how American capitalism can sell even our own identities back to us in such tantalizing fashion as to make a profit. Nobody is exempt. As in "Liberal ladies, buy your wardrobe at Target and you too will be a slim sexy humanitarian like Susan Sarandon." My eyeballs are in my lap every time that woman twists her stuff against that orange backdrop. My wife glowers from her armchair: "Buy me a quarter million dollar eye job, chin and butt tuck, and I'll shake all the damned booty you want, Buster." I'm seriously tempted by her offer. Or we can gas up the car, drive to the suburban Cineplex and pay ten bucks to see Al Gore tell us to save energy by hanging your clothes outside on lines in An Inconvenient Truth, thereby striking a blow as an environmentalist. Never mind ole Al's 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom Nashville mansion and its $20,000 annual energy bill. Or his 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Virginia, or that rolls rural estate in Carthage, Tennessee. Al and Tipper remind us that, because it was the despicable (which it is) Hoover Institute which plastered that inconvenient truth across the pages of USA Today, the houses do not count. They may not count, but their images seem to have been yanked off the Internet. Meanwhile the Dub and Laura have gone green too, and are unashamedly shopping for a gasoline powered windmill for the Crawford Ranch. "We're doin' our part," the president waves from his custom Silverado HD 3500 long box truck with the matching green 6,700 pound hauling capacity and the matching air conditioned gooseneck trailer. It's a "green" ranch, green being the official color of the Crawford spread. They say even the pistol shooting range in the basement has green carpet (no shit!) But country music has got to be the supreme example. People work like dogs, have few or no educational opportunities, live surly lives of struggle just trying to get by, get their cods shot off for the amusement of Cheney and Condi, yet, the country music industry sells even that identity back to the very people who are being screwed and should be pissed as hell about it but aren't because of the cultural ghetto we poor whites are raised in. As the old Johnny Russell song says, "There's no place I'd rather be than right here, with my red neck and white socks and blue ribbon beer." And so the nine-buck-an-hour skidder operator with the double hernia and no health insurance listens to the song and says to himself: "Hey! That's my life! And he's a star and he's singing a hit about it, so other people must be satisfied with it. I reckon there's no place I rather be than right here! That was true in 1973 when Johnny Russell won a Grammy for the song and it's still true. It's a damned good song. I'm still playing it.

[more]

Joe Bageant also has an inverview in ColdType (Scroll down to Issue 17), and don't forget to read his book Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War

Crunch Time
by Jim Kunstler

I think we are in trouble with all these things. But I doubt we can give up our current behavior without going through a convulsion. The psychology of previous investment is, for us, a force too great to overcome. We will sell the birthrights of the next three generations in order to avoid changing our behavior. We will blame other people who behave differently for the consequences of our own behavior. We will not understand the messages that reality is sending us, and we will drive ourselves crazy in the attempt to avoid hearing it.

[more]

Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph and the Hard Way Ahead

Tomorrow is here. The game is over. The crisis has passed -- and the patient is dead. Whatever dream you had about what America is, it isn't that anymore. It's gone. And not just in some abstract sense, some metaphorical or mythological sense, but down in the nitty-gritty, in the concrete realities of institutional structures and legal frameworks, of policy and process, even down to the physical nature of the landscape and the way that people live.

[more]

  thanks to Yolanda Flanagan