November 24, 2011, Happy Thanksgiving
Rationally, we should make today a day of national fasting and somber spiritual reflection... a recognition that our status, at least collectively (though less and less so as individuals) as the world's richest nation (and in resource depletion and waste, we are, to be sure, NUMBER ONE! AMERICA, FUCK YEAHHHHH!!!!)... has attached to it, some, you know, responsibility. As if.
And so, instead, the Thanksgiving Holiday now serves as an excuse for gluttony, in a country where something like the majority of our population is overweight, with huge numbers actually obese, and of course, today is the precursor-day to "Black Friday," an opportunity for a populace already drowning in cheap, low-quality consumer goods from China... to acquire some more (preferably using debt). And we have parades (usually sponsored by highly endangered enterprises known as "retailers"), football games (our national salute to the twin virtues of sport-featuring-military-style-body-armor-with-millitary-tactics-and-terminology and manliness in general... notwithstanding unfortunate allusions to the whole Penn State thing)... and of course, general self-satisfaction... even as the holiday itself takes its toll in killing us (not to mention destroying our spirits, of course).
But I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him... or something. Where was I? Oh yes... the Thanksgiving Holiday is just the perfect timing for an "out-of-nowhere" suggestion that the United States officially resume torturing our captive prisoners of war, sayeth young Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. Ayotte has suddenly been touted as a possible running mate for Mitt Romney; no pandering to early-primary-state New Hampshire there, of course.
But doesn't it figure? Newt Gingrich has picked up support among Republicans for advocating child labor. Police officers now think nothing of billy-clubbing, kicking, or pepper spraying White people (tasers make for much less dramatic video footage... just saying). Wealth and income disparity are at Marie Antoinette levels... "The 99%" has finally been mobilized and actually has taken to the streets...
And so the most compelling issue facing America is, of course, human carbon emissions at record levels, pretty much assuring crazy weather, devastated agriculture, droughts, ocean rises and other horrors ... the fact that some foreign prisoner somewhere hasn't been tortured enough.
There's a certain... immaturity in what passes for the national discourse. I say what passes, because the Gingrich thing above has convinced me that we are no longer in an era of mere "engineered consent"... but that the entire "process" of discourse has been captured. In other words, there is now almost a perfect feedback loop between what our betters who own the media outlets tell us that we think... and our seeing it duly repeated back to us (often in the form of "man in the street interviews") on those very same media outlets..., without any unfortunate "thinking" going on in between. In other words, the perfecting of the so-called "human microphone" of the OWS movement on its mass-media globalized scale. In my present example, this means that actual people (even most actual Republicans) think Newt "orphanages and child labor" Gingrich is what he is: articulate perhaps, but nonetheless a monster, and probably clinically insane at that. But there's no way to know it from the media accounts, because "the people" the media shows us, if they really exist in some unpaid form, which they do not, tell us otherwise. Lather, rinse, repeat... and the needle just keeps getting pushed further and further into "insane," until, of course, the real people in the street really do actually believe the crazy shit they are told to believe (enough times) by the powerful.
Just one more thing to be thankful about.