Basically in this post, Joe sums up exactly why I dislike, no despise, our society so very much. The parts about Obama and the "sanitized for our protection" inauguration are just priceless. And he goes on to say a lot more after that. Read the whole thing before you get upset. He is spot on as to how the roundup of Americans began years ago, without even a single concentration camp needing to be built. We are sanitized, corporatized, numbed to death by digital distractions of all kinds. We are gluttons and capitalism IS a confidence game.
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/08/a-yard-sale-in-chernoybl.html#more"It's only a system," she said, as we floated through the sprawling supermarket's gleaming commodity lined indoor streets. "THE HELL IT IS! It's a goddamned air conditioned zombie hell of waste and gluttony," I thought to myself, before the usual vertigo completely enveloped me. Just back from Central America's simple, comprehensible mercados, bodegas and street cart vendors, the effect of this most common American shopping venue was, as always, one of vertigo. Head splitting light beats down on pyramids of plastic eggs, as if to incubate their hatching of the ladies stockings within, dozens of kinds of toothpaste, well scrubbed dead chickens, lurid baskets of too-perfect flowers, plastic wraps, tissue for faces, asses and wrapping gifts, row upon row of polished vegetables and fruits standing like soldiers waiting for the annihilation of salads or the ovens of casseroledom.
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President Obama understands the featureless not-so-new American aesthetic. So well that he had the world's most politically correct, authority sanctioned, but absolutely worst poet, Elizabeth Alexander, read at his inauguration. ("We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider") Like the soothing, ambiguous language of the Super Corporate State, it sounds as if it means something. Which is close enough for government work. More importantly, she has been vetted by proper authorities and is credentialed and licensed by Yale University to practice poetry. The marketing theme of the event was Obama's s alleged blackness. Alexander is a sorta black too, but not black enough to scare away business. Welcome to the domination of the business aesthetic. Literate people all over the world found Alexander's reading to be like one of those eye watering farts you just wait through until it blows away. Still, millions of Americans listened and cried, in accordance with the marketing theme almost on command, "happy to be born in America, where a black man can be elected president." Personally, I was sorry as hell I'd sworn off bourbon for the month.
If you ask, you will find that most of our citizenry are indeed "happy to be born in America" -- Fat City, the beacon of bacon. The great 24/7 all-you-can-eat buffet republic, where you can walk in without a cent in your pocket and buy a car, or, until the credit meltdown, even a house. People immigrate here for just that: to possess more commodities and goods than previously available (as in none, zilch); or to accumulate money to ensure such goods in the future. Or to escape political machinery that deprives them of goods, and sometimes kills them if they object. "Your basic lack of democracy," as we're constantly reminded. I've met a few genuinely starving people in my day, and to be truthful, democracy was the last thing on their minds.
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