Plug in and Be Lit up by the American Hologram
May 18th, 2010Via: Joe Bageant:
Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world’s a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state’s 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.
This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.
The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.
For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.
However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape.
Wrong, Joe !
and pray G*d that it is so !!!
form communities of those who are awake, identify the agents provocateurs amongst you and take steps to remove their influence, then teach, teach, teach:
“There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting…”
-T.H. White, The Once and Future King
I have tried to live by that my whole life .. it ain’t easy … but it is one of the very few things that makes life worthwhile.
cybele
I buy the first half of this essay, but not the conclusion.
On the whole, I think he’s spot-on in his description of the sort of consensual hallucination in which people in the US (and by extension, most of the western world) are enmeshed. Travelling outside of the US, especially in ‘3rd-world’ countries, helps make this abundantly clear. Leaving behind regular access to television and the internet was a kind of shock to the system, but without all of that shoved into my face every day, the world took on a different shape.
Now I’m back in the US and so many people around me seem just lifeless, thoughtless, hulks. The recent pop-culture fad for zombie-related crap makes me uneasy because it is all too close to a mirror for modern life. We’re all just munching feed, oblivious to the dangers of our situation, willfully ignorant of the fact that we have almost no control over the mechanisms that feed, clothe, and take care of us. We push the buttons we are assigned, watch as many of the suggested mind-numbing entertainments as we can, eat food into whose production we have virtually no insight, express our dissatisfaction in ineffectual ways, and eventually die, but hopefully not before any last bits of savings are extracted by the state and affiliated industries.
On a side note, I’m currently reading: ‘Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America’, and so many of the individual stories echo similar themes of alienation, boredom, and mismatched life values in the US.
His suggestion, however, while perhaps well-meaning, just rings to me of the same self-placating bullshit that the typical organized protest and ‘doing-it-mindfully-is-enough’ crowd espouses. To be sure – thinking about what you do and why you do it is positive. Trying to accomplish your ends without harming the earth is a laudable goal. Believing that by doing things mindfully I will connect spiritually to all the greater good in the universe is a convenient pacifier. It’s a feel-good sucker, there to be nursed at whenever someone feels helpless. Group hugs don’t stop the bank from repossessing your house. If being mindful in your daily life leads you to actions which seriously improve your situation, then great. But you don’t feel and think your way into a garden. And you don’t feel and think your way out of debt. And Cosmic Oneness isn’t going to help you out when the government decides you are the enemy.
Pick up a stick. Pack up your bags. Figure out what shackles are binding you to the machine which kills, then plan and execute your moves to break them, or at least lift yourself to a position where you can manage how much influence they have over your life.