Joe's Latest Dispatch

Because of these dissolute times in the land of the free, home of the brave, it is quite difficult to find a sensible and unbought social commentator. Not impossible, though. Mr. Joe Bageant has my vote as the last, best hope for awakening the sleepy American hobbits from their TV - induced stupor and rousing them to save themselves (and others) at the very last possible second. Go Joe! Click on over and be sure and read it all. The Devil and Mr. Obama

Oh, and, kill your TV, folks...It isn't entertainment, it's mind entrainment. To the benefit of the money monkey mafia, and no one else. Certainly not to our benefit.

Bageant: The Politicization of Class Wars, aka "Let Them Eat Twinkies"

Another sign of the times...
Joe says, regarding letters that rolled in about his "Shoot the fat guys" post

QUOTE Another email depicting the dollar's decline came in yesterday, from a world traveler named Arnie, who was shopping in Rome last September. Arnie has always carried American dollars as fallback currency. But in Rome he was informed by a pretty dark haired clerk that, "I'm sorry, but we do not accept the American dollar anymore."
"She told me," writes Arnie, "about the types of coin they would accept, including the Albanian lek. Now I now know that the axis of the world has shifted. Not having any leks in my wallet, I paid her in euros. I wonder how much sausage gravy you can buy with 20 leks?" UNQUOTE

Shoot the fat guys, hang the smokers

(This is a long letter, with an even longer reply, but this reader has several excellent points, including the politicization of smoking and over-eating. -- Joe Bageant.)

QUOTE I think many Americans voted for Obama because in their minds he represented the promise of a more compassionate America. They forgot, or chose to forget, that the promise was a political promise. Which is to say it was all either just smoke, or unfulfillable by even the best intended mortal in such a heavily armed high stakes whorehouse. Some of the best among us have thrown in the towel, lost all faith in the political process. Frankly, in my 63 years as an American I've never seen more hearts broken nor more bitter people created by a single event. And that includes the Vietnam War. UNQUOTE

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

Oh Freedom

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

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"The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. " - Hunter S. Thompson

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The real question is this: When are we going to rise up against our government and the criminal cartel that owns it? - Joe Bageant

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You can read the most recent Bageant rant here. Great stuff.

A Magical Mystery Tour Into The Recent Past

I have just finished reading Skinny Dipping in Reality (A coot's account of the great hippy LSD enlightenment search party) by Joe Bageant and wish to share it with the world. Those who know me know that I am and have been from my earliest youth devoted to the dear Lord Jesu Christos, but what most likely don't know is that the heart-opening peyote vision quest direct experiences of my teenage searchlight years (operating a searchlight in the dark for truth, for God, for enlightenment, for peace, for face-to-face encounters with the Creator) left me madly in love with the King of Kings, God and Man. And the sense of brotherhood which was opened up, with all humanity, which he describes at the end of the essay, I still bear witness to today. Enjoy.

Excerpt ~
QUOTE And often the soft presence of a gentle and loving Christ would fill the air with a sense of transcendent peace. Despite my many personal conflicts with the Police Court Jehova of Christian fundamentalism, it was becoming clear that Christ was a guy whose actions were worth deep consideration, even if you considered yourself an atheist. Police Court Jehova be damned. Other times would come zappy symbolic glimpses of quasi cosmic order: Aha! The upright bar of the cross represents the onrushing spirit and mind of man through eternity, and the horizontal crossbar stands for undifferentiated matter. And where they meet one another all we know is made manifest -- all pain, all ecstasy and everything in between. Pure existence. Years later I related this to one of the numerous Asian Buddhist masters who passed through Boulder. He crinkled up his face and laughed in recognition. This mysticism, if that's what it is, was clearly not new. UNQUOTE

Consumer Pseudo-Culture, TV as "Brain Conditioner"

I've been cynical about television for many years, although not nearly cynical enough I think, and probably am also not yet cynical enough about the Internet since I've let myself become addicted to it.

Television is just the modernist, updated version of the home altars , the people don't even have to leave the house to commune with the "spirits" these days. Too bad the "spirit" they are communing with is most likely that of a coven of demon-ridden corpulent bureaucrats who have less than the people's best interests at heart.

From Deer Hunting With Jesus, Joe Bageant's blog, his latest post, "Escape from the Zombie Food Court".

Mild cussing alert for those who care about such things.

QUOTE The bad news is that we nevertheless remain one of the most controlled peoples on the planet, especially regarding control of our consciousness, public and private. And the control is tightening. I know it doesn't feel like that to most Americans. But therein rests the proof. Everything feels normal; everybody else around us is doing the same things, so it must be OK. This is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of the soul, in which the prisoner identifies with the values of his or her captors, which in our case is of course, the American corporate state and its manufactured popular culture. . . .

North Americans live in a parallel universe in which they are conditioned to see everything in terms of consumer goods and "safety," as defined by police control. Conditioned to believe they have the best lives on the planet by every measure. . . .

...there is a shiny commercial skin that covers everything American, a thin layer of glossy throwaway technology, that leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. That slick commercial skin, the bright colored signs for Circuit City and The Gap (rest in peace), the clear plastic that covers every product from CDs to pre-cut vegetables, the friendly yellow and red wrapper on the burger inside its bright red paper box, the glossy branding of every item and experience. These things are the supposed tangible evidence that the slick conditioned illusion, the one I call The American Hologram, is indeed real. If it's bright and shiny and new, it must be better. Right? UNQUOTE

and

QUOTE You may or may not watch much television, but the average American spends almost one-third of his or her waking life doing so. The neurological implications of this are so profound that they cannot even be comprehended in words, much less described by them. Television constitutes our reality in the same fashion that water constitutes the environment in a goldfish bowl. It's everywhere and affects everything, even when we are not watching it. Television regulates our national perceptions and our interior ideations of who we Americans are. It schedules our cultural illusions of choice. It pre-selects candidates in our elections. By the way, as much as I like Obama, I fully understand he is there because he was selected by the illusion producing machinery of television, and citizens under its influence. It is hard to underestimate the strength of these illusions.

TV regulates holiday marketing opportunities and the national neurological seasons. It tells us, "It's Christmas! Time to shop!" Or "it's election season, time to vote." Or "it's football season, let us rally passions and buy beer and cheer." Or that America's major deity, "The Economy," is suffering badly. "Sacred temples on Wall Street make great sickness upon the land!" Or most ominous of all, "It's time to make war! Again."

It is fair to say that television and the American culture are the same thing. More than any other factor, it is the glue of society and the mediator of our experience. American culture is stone cold dead without it. If all the TVs in America went black, so would most of America's collective consciousness and knowledge. Because corporate media have replaced nearly all other previous forms of accumulated knowledge. UNQUOTE