How does this end? What happens when so many Americans come to realize how they've been manipulated and conditioned to fear and reject so much of what is actually in their best interests even as they rabidly defend so much that is not.
When I look at America's rabid Right, it's easy to see them as round-eyed North Koreans. Both do blatantly irrational things. Both have a thirst for the blood of their enemies, even if only metaphorically. Both embrace what is unquestionably extremist and magical thinking.
America's "killing kulture" also resembles North Korea's. And, like North Korea's, it is embedded from the bottom straight to the top.
US environmentalists complain of receiving death threats. When the former Democratic governor of West Virginia marries the gun culture with anti-environmentalism in his successful bid for the US Senate, is that any wonder?
So long as it is carefully and skilfully controlled, modern US-style conditioning has a genuine utility but surely the Tea Party movement illustrates what happens when control is lost. What is the Tea Party but the culmination of the anti-tax fetish introduced by the leadership of the hard Right? The CBC's Neil Macdonald has this fascinating look at what happens when America's tax phobia runs amok.
America's ruinous spiral isn't the result of structural or institutional failures but of mental collapse. FOX News only sounds plausible to troubled minds. People who can be brought to believe that the solution to government debt is to just keep slashing tax revenues are in a state of a genuine psychosis. It's like half the population has crowded into a prayer tent to place their country's salvation in the hands of a crackpot faith healer.
This simply cannot go on and it almost certainly won't. A recent report on 60 Minutes showed that 2011 is the year in which a great many American states will confront their insolvency, the direct legacy of three decades of Ronald Reagan's Age of Ruin. It's crunch time and it's going to be ugly and possibly bloody to boot. Lord knows America is primed for bloodshed, by the bucketful.
Showing posts with label American culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American culture. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Monday, June 21, 2010
Living With the Crazies
Bill Maher put it best when, describing the Ron Paul/Rand Paul dynasty, he noted, "the shit never falls far from the bat." The same could be fairly said of America's ascendant radical right exemplified in the Tea Party ("TP") movement's infiltration of congressional and state Republican politics.
For the record, these people are crazy, batshit crazy. If you doubt that, take a look at Arizona, a state that has plunged headlong into insolvency in pursuit of TP policies. If you thought California was in dire straits (and it surely is), Arizona is far, far worse off thanks to a mentality that holds when government becomes broke, the answer is to cut taxes again and again and again. In the July edition of Harper's magazine, Ken Silverstein has an eyeopener entitled, "Tea Party in The Sonora, For the future of GOP Governance, Look to Arizona."
"The general unsightliness of the [state] capitol makes it a fitting home for today's Arizona legislature, which is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists and cranks. Collectively they have bankrupted the state through a combination of ideological fanaticism on the Republican right and acquiescence and timidity on the part of GOP moderates and Democrats. ...A horrific budget deficit has been papered over with massive borrowing and accounting gimmickry, and the state may yet have to issue IOUs to employees and vendors."
Silverstein points out that the Arizona legislature gutted its revenue department budget, saving $25-million but at the cost of firing hundreds of state auditors and tax collectors that will cost the state an estimated $174-million a year in lost revenues. That's a 7-1 exercise in madness. It's what crazy people might do but only those wildly divorced from reality.
Arizonans approved a one cent on the dollar sales tax increase but the legislature first went ahead with further tax cuts that will quickly lose far more than the take from Arizona cash registers.
"...to raise cash the legislature pursued a series of wild sell-offs and budget cuts. It privatized the capitol building and leased it back from its new owner, an arrangement that brought in substantial revenue but over time will cost Arizona far more. The legislature ...has put up future lottery revenues as collateral on a $450-million loan. Meanwhile, Arizona removed more than 300,000 adults from state health coverage and terminated one healthcare program for 47,000 poor children. Funding was slashed at the agency that deals with reports of child abuse and neglect, and also at Children's Rehabilitative Services, so that parents of children with cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, and a number of other conditions are now required to pay 100 per cent of treatment costs."
"...the deficit for 2011 is already projected to be at least $1-billion and possibly double that, on a total budget of only $9-billion. The situation will only worsen from there, as federal stimulus money dries up and the state runs out of short-term sources of cash.
Silverstein writes that Arizona legislators have little appetite for dealing with their state's insolvency, preferring instead, "...to focus on matters that have little to do with the crisis. Lawmakers have turned racial profiling into official policy, through a new law that requires police to stop suspected illegal immigrants ...anyone not carrying acceptable proof of citizenship can be arrested for trespassing and thrown in jail for up to six months. ...Another new law bans the funding of any ethnic-studies programs in the public schools, while a third prohibits 'intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.'
"In January, Senator Jack Harper, an immaculately combed zealot who speaks in the patter of an infomercial voiceover, submitted a bill that would allow faculty members to carry guns on university campuses, saying it was 'one very small step in trying to eliminate gun-free zones, where there's absolutely no one would could defend themselves if a terrorist incident happened.' The house passed a measure that would force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to state officials if he runs for re-election, as well as a bill that bars Arizona from entering into any program to regulate greenhouse gases without approval from the legislature. 'There are only two ways to vote on this,' said Representative Ray Barnes of the latter initiative. 'Yes, or face the east in the morning and worship the EPA because they own you.'"
These are but a few examples of the madness running large in Arizona. Despite tax revenues running at about two-thirds of the state budget, 38 of 90 legislators joined the governor in signing the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" of Grover Norquist's group Americans for Tax Reform, a pledge that they will never vote for a tax increase."
Silverstein warns that the nihilistic state of government in Arizona provides a glimpse of what could well come to Washington if the Republicans recover control of Congress. Imagine the most powerful nation on the planet governed by a gang of lunatics who simply ignore facts to operate in an alternative, delusional "reality" of their own making?
Will 2011 be the year that Canadians grasp that we really are living with the crazies?
For the record, these people are crazy, batshit crazy. If you doubt that, take a look at Arizona, a state that has plunged headlong into insolvency in pursuit of TP policies. If you thought California was in dire straits (and it surely is), Arizona is far, far worse off thanks to a mentality that holds when government becomes broke, the answer is to cut taxes again and again and again. In the July edition of Harper's magazine, Ken Silverstein has an eyeopener entitled, "Tea Party in The Sonora, For the future of GOP Governance, Look to Arizona."
"The general unsightliness of the [state] capitol makes it a fitting home for today's Arizona legislature, which is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists and cranks. Collectively they have bankrupted the state through a combination of ideological fanaticism on the Republican right and acquiescence and timidity on the part of GOP moderates and Democrats. ...A horrific budget deficit has been papered over with massive borrowing and accounting gimmickry, and the state may yet have to issue IOUs to employees and vendors."
Silverstein points out that the Arizona legislature gutted its revenue department budget, saving $25-million but at the cost of firing hundreds of state auditors and tax collectors that will cost the state an estimated $174-million a year in lost revenues. That's a 7-1 exercise in madness. It's what crazy people might do but only those wildly divorced from reality.
Arizonans approved a one cent on the dollar sales tax increase but the legislature first went ahead with further tax cuts that will quickly lose far more than the take from Arizona cash registers.
"...to raise cash the legislature pursued a series of wild sell-offs and budget cuts. It privatized the capitol building and leased it back from its new owner, an arrangement that brought in substantial revenue but over time will cost Arizona far more. The legislature ...has put up future lottery revenues as collateral on a $450-million loan. Meanwhile, Arizona removed more than 300,000 adults from state health coverage and terminated one healthcare program for 47,000 poor children. Funding was slashed at the agency that deals with reports of child abuse and neglect, and also at Children's Rehabilitative Services, so that parents of children with cystic fibrosis, cerebral palsy, and a number of other conditions are now required to pay 100 per cent of treatment costs."
"...the deficit for 2011 is already projected to be at least $1-billion and possibly double that, on a total budget of only $9-billion. The situation will only worsen from there, as federal stimulus money dries up and the state runs out of short-term sources of cash.
Silverstein writes that Arizona legislators have little appetite for dealing with their state's insolvency, preferring instead, "...to focus on matters that have little to do with the crisis. Lawmakers have turned racial profiling into official policy, through a new law that requires police to stop suspected illegal immigrants ...anyone not carrying acceptable proof of citizenship can be arrested for trespassing and thrown in jail for up to six months. ...Another new law bans the funding of any ethnic-studies programs in the public schools, while a third prohibits 'intentionally or knowingly creating a human-animal hybrid.'
"In January, Senator Jack Harper, an immaculately combed zealot who speaks in the patter of an infomercial voiceover, submitted a bill that would allow faculty members to carry guns on university campuses, saying it was 'one very small step in trying to eliminate gun-free zones, where there's absolutely no one would could defend themselves if a terrorist incident happened.' The house passed a measure that would force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to state officials if he runs for re-election, as well as a bill that bars Arizona from entering into any program to regulate greenhouse gases without approval from the legislature. 'There are only two ways to vote on this,' said Representative Ray Barnes of the latter initiative. 'Yes, or face the east in the morning and worship the EPA because they own you.'"
These are but a few examples of the madness running large in Arizona. Despite tax revenues running at about two-thirds of the state budget, 38 of 90 legislators joined the governor in signing the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge" of Grover Norquist's group Americans for Tax Reform, a pledge that they will never vote for a tax increase."
Silverstein warns that the nihilistic state of government in Arizona provides a glimpse of what could well come to Washington if the Republicans recover control of Congress. Imagine the most powerful nation on the planet governed by a gang of lunatics who simply ignore facts to operate in an alternative, delusional "reality" of their own making?
Will 2011 be the year that Canadians grasp that we really are living with the crazies?
Friday, June 18, 2010
America - Rich, Powerful and Deeply Mentally Ill
The American people are seriously mentally ill. They're suffering a collective disease of the mind. That's the conclusion of Chris Hedges set out in his article American Psychosis in this month's Adbusters magazine. Here are a few excerpts:
The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions.
...The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows.
...Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.
It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. ...It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. it is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth.
...We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. ...It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs...that wilfully trashed the global economy and stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. ...The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.
...When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children. We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge, moral renewal and new glory. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher America into a new dark age. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Wiemar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
The decline of American empire began ...when we shifted from an "empire of production" to an "empire of consumption." ...We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. ...We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America's most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.
...even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood, or by Christian preachers, is magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. it turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers offshore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. And it keeps us from fighting back.
...The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. The goal will become the ability to endure."
The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions.
...The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows.
...Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.
It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. ...It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. it is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth.
...We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become famous. ...It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs...that wilfully trashed the global economy and stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college. ...The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.
...When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children. We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge, moral renewal and new glory. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher America into a new dark age. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Wiemar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
The decline of American empire began ...when we shifted from an "empire of production" to an "empire of consumption." ...We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. ...We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America's most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.
...even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood, or by Christian preachers, is magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. it turns a nation that wages illegal wars and administers offshore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. And it keeps us from fighting back.
...The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. The goal will become the ability to endure."
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