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

Friendly Americans No More

Oh for heaven's sake, this is absolutely ridiculous. These nominally American border guards who pepper-sprayed a Canadian who asked them to "say please" before complying with their request to turn his car off during a search should have murmured "Please" and gone about their business. The eagerness of the U.S. "Homeland Security" border guards, TSA and police to emulate jackbooted brownshirts of the world's most unfortunate recent history is revolting to see.

It puzzles me as to why the borderistas would seem to prefer being like stalwarts of the Soviet gulag or Nazi Germany than friendly Americans. It stymies me, boggles the mind and is otherwise utterly inexplicable. What on earth, one wonders, is wrong with being a friendly American?

It oftens appears that the divide is not so much between right and left, East and West or Arab and American, but rather between the mannered and the unmannered, the civil and the churlish, the chivalrous and the impudent bully.

How very sad that the American character would stoop to this.

QUOTE He said he was questioned by a border officer who demanded he turn off his car and, when asked to make the request more politely, threatened to spray him with his pepper gun if he did not comply.
"I just felt I should stand my ground about it. I should not be treated like that. No matter what kind of position you are in, if you want respect you have to show respect," he said yesterday. "I asked him three times and when I didn't turn the car off, because he didn't say please, he pepper sprayed me.... It was terrible. For half an hour or so I couldn't see anything." UNQUOTE
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