Joe Bageant: Americans Are "Hope Fiends" Because Honestly Looking at the Present Situation Would Des

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.alternet.org/news/145840/joe_bageant%3A_americans_are_%22hope_fiends%22_because_honestly_looking_at_the_present_situation_would_destroy_just_about_everything_we_hold_as_reality


Joe Bageant: Americans Are "Hope Fiends" Because Honestly Looking at the Present Situation Would Destroy Just About Everything We Hold As Reality

An awareness of class makes clear who is screwing whom. That's why American capitalism's official line is that we are a "classless society."


Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. While my good Mexican neighbors along Zaragoza Street sleep.

Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.

I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America's perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation -- I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.


More at the link above --

[whyverne]

1. We are Americans. We are delusional.

We trumpet freedom, while continually trying to limit it. Well what would you expect from a country that was stolen from some of the freest people the world has ever seen, the American Indian.

We trumpet our founding fathers and the great system of government they gave us.Yet if you put it to a popular vote, Congress would probably be disbanded.

We trumpet capitalism while constantly bitching about money.

We're crazy as loons, dude.

[blindpig]

2. big ol' k&r

Who in the hell would unrec Joe, the sanest man among us? Hmmm....

There were the exploited working masses then, just as there are now. And there was always the petty bourgeoisie, more than happy to do the dirty work of the most elite owning class, in hopes of currying its favor. Always happy to sanction the "wet jobs" on the Italian, Polish, Chinese and Irish immigrant laborer. You could then, and you can now, depend on the true middle class, that 15% or so, capitalism's commissars, to crush the working class. They will do anything to remain in a more privileged zone of consumption, the boundaries of which are maintained by agreement of state authorities. From their petty perches, they have deemed themselves "the middle class." In reality they are the mitigating class, the petty anointed whose job it is to obscure class awareness in America.

[lunatica]

3. Sadly true

Just thinking of overcoming the status quo one can feel one's soul being sucked dry.

"The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage."

[Dr.Phool]

4. Revolution will be impossible.

There will be no words left in the language to describe it.

George Orwell, 1984
Not an exact quote, since I haven't had a copy laying around for years.

[ipaint]

5. I read this yesterday.

The look on the bright side crowd won't be able to stomach it but what he writes is the truth.

"We always see hope somewhere down every road, chiefly because honestly looking at the present situation would destroy just about everything we hold as reality. Personally, as I often state and catch readership hell for, I do not like hope. When Obama ran it up the flagpole for us to salute, and so many saluted, my blood chilled. Made me feel that we were all in deeper shit than I had supposed (Nevertheless, I reluctantly voted for Obama. At the time it seemed It was either Obama, or continuing war, debt, and diminishing civil liberties. Ha!) Hope is magic thinking, believing that somehow, some larger unknown force is in motion to set things right.

The world is what it is, and its injustices are set right by peoples and nations morally intact enough to challenge its malevolent forces.

Hope is political pabulum for an infantilized nation."

[MattSh]

6. How true that is... n/t