Monkeywrench The Machine With La Vida Loca

Another winner from the irrepressible Joe Bageant. And another reminder from me to tune in(to the green subculture and tribal resurgence), turn on (to the spiritual and your Higher Power) and drop out (of the rat race). I also plead with you to stop using the word consumer to refer to people. Use citizen, person or worker instead. The word consumer has a lot of negative baggage, and it is the result of a concerted ad campaign of dark intent and dubious integrity. It is demeaning. (BBC's The Century of the Self argues -- quite successfully -- that we have all been brainwashed to see ourselves as consumers first. It documents how capitalists and politicians in the US and in Great Brittan used psychological warfare to turn the masses in the US and UK from seeing themselves as workers to seeing themselves as buying machines. Freud, his daughter Anna and his diabolical nephew Edward Bernays -- who according to the documentary founded the profession of public relations -- are the villains in this evolving story.)

"But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness."

Our Produce-or-Die Culture Is Killing Us -- And We're Idiotically Grinning and Bearing It by Joe Bageant