America: Y Ur Peeps B So Dum? (Joe Bageant)

[Tace]

--Ignorance And Courage In The Age Of Lady Gaga

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

Dec. 7, 2010 -- AJIJIC, Jalisco, Mexico -- If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.

One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep-fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44-ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?

But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don't even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.

As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us -- those elites who run the institutions -- very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.

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[dixiegrrrrl]

1. I will kick and rec and holler..Bageant is GREAT!!!!!

[Tace]

6. Fresh Bageant -- Always A Treat

It's always a treat to read-out his essays.

[Enthusiast]

2. Love the Mammoth-Smilodon diorama. nt

[Mira]

3. Recommended (number five and thumbs up) n/t

[Newest Reality]

4. Joe's in good form!

If anything, he inspires people to think and pull back the simulated blinders they unconsciously wear.

After growing-up in a culture of advertising that feeds nothing more valuable than profits and spending years immersed in a system that creates divisive dichotomous designed to occlude and diminish the actuality of available choices, how can vast numbers of people actually wake-up rather than merely mouthing those words and thinking, "It is so!"?

Waking-up is about seeing/hearing/feeling what you actually have and are and how that determines your flexibility to respond to any given situation. It is like thinking outside the box enough to realize there was no frikken' box in the first place. It is like finding out that the changes needed to influence the system are not necessarily about huge, dangerous tasks that you have to engage in to change things. They are changes that you can and do and will make every moment of each day when you are alert and aware of the real choices and resources already there.

When you move or act or respond, that has some impact that may be initially unnoticeable. Eventually, those little junctures and decisions add-up, not only in their impact but by way of the feedback you get that provides self-reinforcing evidence of your place in the loop.

Now that the perceived, (and believed) social contracts and your investment in them provide less of a mirage that keeps you in your conceptual "space" of limitations, that's the time when an explosion of new ideas and behaviors emerge suddenly and irrevocably. This process can be easy and fast, actually, especially when the catalyst is the increasingly obvious breakdown of fulfillment for the social contracts we once agreed upon and those who now enforce them.

Go Joe!

[OwnedByFerrets]

5. Hell, we aren't even thrashing....we are barely whimpering.

[Stuckinthebush]

7. My favorite paragraph:

Meanwhile, here we are, American riders on the short bus, barreling into the Grand Canyon. With typical American gunpoint optimism, we've convinced ourselves we're in an airplane. A few smarter kids in the back whisper about hijacking and turning the bus around. But the security cop riding shotgun just strokes his taser and smiles. Not that yours truly has the ass to take on the security surveillance state. Hell no. I jumped out the window when the bus shot past Mexico.

[dixiegrrrrl]

8. Isn't that a great use of imagery???

It is clear that this long piece is made from some of his shorter essays, but it works well.

I do love this man. His writing is par excellence.