underXposed

Although the metaphor “The Matrix” is growing a little stale and timeworn, the Wachowski brothers’ were, if nothing else, prophetic for those still living in The Matrix.

This morning I scribbled notes on an interview with Chris Hedges , a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, who talked about his new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. The only bit I added was the quote from Margaret Thatcher. The rest is from the interview and not from me. Note that since I scribbled the notes in long-hand and may have not copied everything exactly, then edited my notes for continuity and clarity, I could hardly place what Hedges said in quotes, but this is the jist of what I heard him say.

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Michael Jackson was the poster boy of the dissolution of self when you become a commodity. He illustrates the disease of commercial culture that is managed by corporate forces and advertising. These forces deliberately replaced values like thrift, integrity, and self-sufficiency, which once directed Americans, with branding and consumption. This manipulation had the effect of destroying American culture and replacing it with consumer culture.

But this consumer culture is now collapsing. Now that the middle class finds mass-produced goods of consumer culture less and less affordable, what we now experience is an existential crisis which goes far beyond economic or political management.

Seymour Melman has written about the permanent war economy that sustains empire. This war economy has expanded beyond its capacity to sustain itself. As it diverted resources to itself, it has eroded and destroyed America, hollowed it from the inside out by hollowing out social services, state economies, infrastructure, public education, healthcare, and jobs. This is how empire destroys itself–by neglecting its domestic economy.

Why do we keep funding the war machine? Because people have become irrelevant. [Recall during the Reagan era Margaret Thatcher's infamous saying, "there is no such thing as 'society'" - my comment, not Hedges's]. Corporate interests have a stranglehold on the legislative branch. The result is that what once was illegal is now legal, such as spying on citizens and creeping fascism. There is no popular support anywhere for this corporate ramrodding.

For example, because health care lobbyists pay the most to political campaigns, America spends three times more than any other nation on health care, yet it has the worst health care of any developed nation on earth. It’s all about profit, not people. This is why politicians, including President Obama, are unresponsive to the needs and rights of citizens, and refuse to create a public program.

There is a direct correlation between war and blight on working class neighborhoods, i.e., a Weimar effect . Under Clinton, for example, the draconian NAFTA and welfare reform were the two single greatest betrayals of the working class. Once a welfare recipient could live on $500 a month; nowadays that same person is expected to survive on a little more than $100 a month.

Consumerism, image, spectacle, entertainment, cheap mass goods are all part of the illusion. But with the decline of the American dollar, cheap mass-produced goods are becoming more and more expensive. This amounts to a coup d’etat in slow motion. Sheldon Wolin in his Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy & the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism writes that the corporate forces have retained a facade of democracy while perverting it so it no longer functions. As the situation disintegrates and the middle and working classes are pushed to extremes, they have begun to wake up and see beyond the illusion that we are the best country in the world. Increasingly they can no longer be pushed to buy mass-produced goods (the hollow spectacle of illusion–advertising, television, Hollywood, fashion, anti-depressants, cosmetic surgery, etc.), and they feel more and more hollowed out because as criminal wars of aggression and massive penal institutions continue to detain and torture. The illusion that America is a champion of democracy has kept them in a state of perpetual childhood.

The hollow spectacle of illusion, pedaled by corporatism, can never define America and instead has rendered citizens ineffectual in a time of momentous change. This hollow spectacle of illusion was carefully designed to keep citizens from growing up. It seduced citizens into investing in the illusion that poisons them against doing anything to change anything. Investing emotional lives in the spectacle of illusion has kept Americans from seeing the coming economic, environmental and political crises.

Is there a way out of all of this? No. We’re a dying nation. And we see that President Obama is utterly ineffectual in determining the direction of the nation. We’ve been manipulated (as opposed to governed) by an utterly self-centered and corrupt oligarchy for decades. Under corporate management there has been a virtual inverse of the New Deal, an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth without the resources to respond to the collapse. The nation is sustaining a criminal structure that’s bringing untold misery in its wake. These criminals, i.e., the CEOs that enjoyed immense bonuses at the expense of taxpayers, should be in jail, but they likely won’t see a day behind bars. The only reason America is still afloat is because China is still buying its debt, but China has begun to back out by unloading dollars for physical assets. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the reserve currency, it will become junk.

Restive right wing elements in America are growing violent. Although their analysis of the situation may be correct, violence is what fascists want to happen so that they can deepen social repression. The corporate/fascist state is responsible for destroying the two-party system.

The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi outlines the 1999 repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act which kept commercial and investment banks from getting in bed with each other. Now, years after the repeal combined with deregulation, this sociopathic oligarchy (bought by corporate interest and comprised entirely of both Republicans and Democrats) lacks the capacity to understand that people and things have intrinsic value besides as means for profit, intrinsic value beyond commodification.

Under these toxic conditions, self-destruction of America and the eco-system (ecological and economic) that sustained it was and is inevitable.

How do we as individuals act to break this machine with its stranglehold around our necks? First, get out of debt and second, don’t buy anything else except absolute necessities, locally.

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Unrelated to the above notes or any reference to “The Matrix,” how about On the Coming Crisis written on November 9, 2000? Talk about prophetic.