Our lives have been reduced to a mere marketing demographic... 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... It is fair to say that television and the American culture are the same thing.
—Joe Bageant
This is a follow-up to my post Thinking Outside The Box. That first effort featured Joe Bageant, and so does this one. A reader recently sent his Escape From The Zombie Food Court, which we'll look at below. After a 4-month bout with cancer, Bageant died on March 26, 2011 at the age of 64. Requiescat in pace.
Today we will start with a film clip instead of ending with one. Yes it's true, this classic scene from The Matrix has become trite, a cliché, it has become co-opted within Joe Bageant's self-referential, all-pervasive media hologram, as I will explain below. But first, you must decide whether you will take the Blue Pill, or the Red Pill. This is a serious question.
Let's face it: this country, as currently constituted, has no future. You can assume a dismissive attitude toward this now degraded movie scene from The Matrix, which, like everything else, has been commoditized and thus trivialized by a culture which seeks to control your consciousness and behavior. Despite the fact that there were three terrible sequels to this movie because, after all, there is money to be made, you must really decide which pill to take because the real-life Matrix we've lived in for so long—our corporate-run "consumer" culture—is falling apart. Bageant defines this culture as a self-referential media hologram, the theater state.
Last week when I got back to the States I took a shower in an American friend's new $30,000 gleaming remodeled bathroom. It felt like a surgical operating room experience, compared to wading into the Caribbean surf in the tropical dusk with a bar of soap. Like a parallel universe straight out of The Matrix.
So how is it that we Americans came to live in such a parallel universe? How is it that we prefer such things as Facebook (don't get me wrong, I'm on Facebook too), and riding around the suburbs with an iPod plugged into our brain looking for fried chicken in a Styrofoam box? Why prefer these expensive earth destroying things over love and laughter with real people, and making real human music together with other human beings — lifting our voices together, dancing and enjoying the world that was given to us? Absolutely for free.
And the answer is this: We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, we now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a "theater state."
You might say "I've heard all this before." Haven't there been people telling me for years now to kill my TV? Isn't it easier to live within the hologram, to go with the flow?
Capitalist society however, can only survive by defying the laws of thermodynamics, through endlessly expanding growth, buying and using more of everything, every year and forever. Thus the cult of radical consumerism. It has been the deadliest cult of all because, so far, it has always triumphed, and has now spread around the earth and its nations.
Why has it been so viral, so attractive to so many for so long? How did it come to grip the consciousness of so much of mankind, from Beijing to Bangladesh? Thuggish enforcement accounts for part of it, of course. But it has succeeded too because it requires no effort. No critical thinking. Not even literacy. Just passive consumption. The easy addiction to consumption is probably hard wired into us. Every one of us will go right out this door tonight and continue to play out our lives as contributors to ecocide and global warming, mainly because it's easier.
And besides, we are not offered any other real options, and we don't know any other way. Nor can we ever know any other way without making a great effort.
Passive consumption is no longer easier for the vast majority of Americans. What changed was that an ultimately unsustainable system of debt-based consumption finally blew-up. I could cite the usual statistics—1 in 6 Americans on food stamps, 77% of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck—but just take my word for it today, our "consumer" culture is gone for good, despite the messages you receive daily on TV. There has always been a large disconnect between the media hologram and real life. But in 2011, the yawning chasm between staged scenes with actors playing imbeciles in TV commercials or sitcoms and our experience of everyday life has grown too large to ignore.
And although you have not been offered "any other real options," it's time to make the great effort to figure out what they might be. It's time to take the Red Pill. It's simply not an option to take the Blue Pill, to resume your comfortable pre-2008 lives, because those lives no longer exist. However, there is a deeper, more insidious way for Americans to maintain their complacency in the face of outrageous social and economic injustice.
The easiest way to resist the Red Pill is to read Paul Krugman, who merely happens to be the most popular of the many commentators telling you the corporate-run hologram just needs to be tweaked a little bit to get America's consumption machine running smoothly again. This message is seductive, and we can immediately see why: it requires no real effort on your part, no change in behavior. All we need do is find the right candidate with the right policies with the political will to follow-through. Never mind that so many Americans were duped into believing that Barack Obama was that man just 3 years ago.
And how were Americans seduced into thinking The Change was coming? By what they saw on television! The entire seemingly endless 2007-2008 presidential campaign existed within Bageant's hologram, within a parallel universe, within the corporate-created simulacrum presented by the media. The Audacity of Hope. Change We Can Believe In—you know, complete bullshit. We find ourselves at exactly the same juncture in 2011 as we did in 2007. Would-be saviors are announcing their candidacies—Newt Gingrich is in, Donald Trump is out. A new, sorry spectacle is kicking into gear. And because things are much worse in 2011 than they were in 2007, you can be sure that this campaign's connection with reality will be more tenuous than ever before.
Many Americans became more conscious about what is happening in this country after the financial meltdown in 2008. But that awareness is fading now. I can see the door closing. Although our living circumstances are worse now than they were even a few years ago, and our quality of life continues to deteriorate, America is getting back to its peculiar form of business-as-usual. There has never been a better time to take the Red Pill. There has never been a better time to start thinking outside the box.
Sitting here in an Old West mining town, looking out over a valley with bright sunshine and a good breeze moving through the fir trees, I think I'll turn off the computer and go for a walk with my beagle. Thanks DOTE.
Posted by: Gene | 05/17/2011 at 11:03 AM