http://www.alternet.org/politics/143684/our_produce-or-die_culture_is_killing_us_--_and_we%27re_idiotically_grinning_and_bearing_it?page=1But you won't hear anyone complaining. America doesn't like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheeriness.
Appearing cheerful is vital in a society where all of life is monitored by an employer, a credit rating bureau or the media's projection of the world, and mediated by the financialization of life's every aspect. Every action and movement is a transaction, some as large as the mortgage, others as small as the purchase of a bus token, or the cost of a cell phone call, gasoline, vehicle maintenance and parking costs for movement within the sprawling asphalt grids we call communities. Even respite from work with its vacation "leisure destinations" put on the credit card, and even the greatest commons of all, nature, has a cost of access, whether it be admission to national parks or the cost of camping and other "recreational equipment."
In the background a tabulator relentlessly calculates our bill for the thoroughly transactional and mediated life. Quit paying the bills and you are disappeared. Erased from the screens of a society of watchers watching each other -- or watching celebrities, those godlike creatures dwelling on the Olympus of the most watched ... and dreaming of perhaps being watched on Oprah by even more watchers than already watch us for some fleeting few seconds.
There is a flickering screen or monitor in front of and between every citizen of the mediated society of watchers. Whether we watch television or other media matters not, we dwell among the watchers in a surveillance society of our peers. We dress appropriately, speak middle class English, not urban street slang or redneck, and look as prosperous as possible, or as hip as possible, or as learned or pious or whatever within our peer groups, and for outsider groups. No jokers, smokers or midnight tokers allowed in Mainstream American society and culture, which consists of working, consuming and "appearing to be," but never purely being.
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edit: I accidentally linked to copied/pasted from the second page of the article. new link is to the first page
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