MarkLimacher.com

If the history books used in American classrooms were grounded in any sort of reality, I often wonder what will be said about the age I am currently living in. Knowing that the fight to teach accuracy in schools is probably a losing battle, I wonder what lies the authors may come up with in the future to explain away the current right-wing psychopaths that have seemingly endless potential for media coverage. The incoherent verbal assaults taking place at the health care reform town hall meetings are bound to bring laughter to any reality-based person, myself included. Nothing elicits a grander guffaw than watching these encephalitic psychopaths completely mischaracterize socialism, the ‘founding fathers’, or the very Medicare they themselves receive. Our laughter must be carefully monitored, however, for it masks the precipitous horrors these people will bring to fruition. Having said that, I do recognize the necessity to express my stupefaction at the overwhelming ignorance displayed by these people.

Yes, you read correctly, I referred to the offending individuals as a collective ‘these people’, and there is a hard intention behind that. They are the genesis of a mass movement, a movement that has been gradually shaped and molded over the decades, a movement that has emerged from its adolescence with a hunger for violence.

The brains behind this movement lie in many hands, be they the practitioners of free market extremism, promulgators of the many systemic-industrial complexes, or proselytists of religious fundamentalism, but they all require the aid of the malleable. This is where the birthers, the deathers, and the tea-baggers come into the picture. The necessity of an angry mob, a collection of cognitively deficient pawns with which to direct as per your bidding, has always been necessary for those wishing to overthrow a regime of some kind. The one thing that needs to come about, however, is both a consolidation of message and the establishment of some kind of leadership, no matter how anti-establishment these people claim to be. Thus far we seem to be seeing a loose association of individuals with disparate objections, ranging anywhere from the anti-federal government, anti-tax lunatics to the viciously racist militiamen. Indeed, what seems clear at the moment is that no such consolidation seems to have happened, and frankly, it is often impossible to discern a decisive message with a great many of town-hall disruptions. Even a casual dip into Wikipedia reveals that the Sturmabteilung didn’t exactly coalesce into the kind of organization we associate with the term until 1922, by which point both the German Workers Party and the structureless pugilists had reconfigured into the NSDAP. Any further reading on Hitler’s rise to power, or any totalitarian regime for that matters, suggests the same, that consolidation of interests enables the success of a rise to power¹.

If it weren’t for disturbing trends that suggest such a cohesion is just around the corner, I might consider relaxing. Finding myself at teapartypatriots.org brought a little phrase back into my vocabulary, lost in the din of the town hall psychopaths: The 9-12 Project. Looking at the extensive list of ‘Tea Party Patriot Groups’, a.k.a. angry white idiot douchebags, the term ‘9-12’ appears more times than I am comfortable with. In case you’re still unconcerned, the The 9-12 Project is one of Glenn Beck’s masturbatory experiments in delusion that first came to my attention in March. In case you’re still vacillating on the connectivity here, I think it’s safe to say that the 9-12 project is precisely the coalescent meme necessary to bring about the dreaded consolidation. Given that Glenn Beck’s latest book, Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine (shazail!) has been on the New York Times non-fiction best sellers list for weeks², and knowing that the book ends with instructions on how to organize a 9-12 ‘club’ of your very own, my unwillingness to calm down is not a result of my own superfluous anxieties, but an objection to the unfolding of ensuing darkness.
Take a quick peek at the 9 Principles, and tell me you aren’t disturbed given specific trends in American Society (as written about here by friend of the site, Samantha Fingerhut).

1. America Is Good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.
God “The propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained.” from George Washington’s first Inaugural address.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.
Honesty “I hope that I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider to be the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.” George Washington

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.
Marriage/Family “It is in the love of one’s family only that heartfelt happiness is known. By a law of our nature, we cannot be happy without the endearing connections of a family.” Thomas Jefferson

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.
Justice “I deem one of the essential principles of our government… equal and exact justice to all men of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political.” Thomas Jefferson

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.
Life, Liberty, & The Pursuit of Happiness “Everyone has a natural right to choose that vocation in life which he thinks most likely to give him comfortable subsistence.” Thomas Jefferson

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.
Charity “It is not everyone who asketh that deserveth charity; all however, are worth of the inquiry or the deserving may suffer.” George Washington

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.
On your right to disagree “In a free and republican government, you cannot restrain the voice of the multitude; every man will speak as he thinks, or more properly without thinking.” George Washington

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
Who works for whom? “I consider the people who constitute a society or a nation as the source of all authority in that nation.” Thomas Jefferson³

The sun is truly setting. Brace yourselves.

Each day I wake anew, and head furiously to the kitchen to make my coffee in anticipation of another day brimming with oppressive futility. My source of excitement lately has been a due diligence towards an alacritous autodidacticism. I drink some coffee, watch some Amy Goodman and then brace myself for some hardcore reading. I can’t find words to express how psychologically alive I’ve felt as of late, so much so that I’ve even stopped trying when others ask what I’ve “been up to”. There is, however, another more perilous reason for this inability to articulate my intellectual passion, and that is the very simple fact that so few people want to partake in it.

After reading Susan Jacboy’s The Age of American Unreason about a month ago, I was left sufficiently disturbed, enough to make several lifestyle changes, notably some serious distraction-mitigation from what she would call ‘video culture’. Her concept is not one easily summarized in brief because it refers both to technology (i.e. television, movies, computers, all screen interfaces) and behavior (i.e. constructs of importance surrounding said television shows, movies, games, etc). What was already very clear to me is that such media is now so ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into our every day life, that to escape the oppressive forces of video culture distraction is a one-way ticket to loneliness of mind. Without respite, I can hear from the next room one of my roommates watching 6 hours of The O.C. one day, followed by 5 or 6 hours of Six Feet Under the next, followed by- you get the picture. Suspending my disbelief for a moment, let us presume we are talking about artful content (or more broadly speaking, something of craft and substance) in television media. Would it then by excusable to carry on one’s day in such a fashion? I don’t need the Jacoby to aid me in recognizing the psychological turpitude of being passively ‘engaged’ (if in fact it can be likened to engagement at all) for lengthy periods of time.

Is such a scenario a fair representation of the majority of society? The answer is yes. Absolutely without doubt. Our capitalistically predacious society makes sure that unless we are one of the sick sons-a-bitches who is able to rise to the top of the corporate oligarchy, we’re simply not going to have all that much free time on your hands. We will be working, hard, and when we are not working, we will be so physically and mentally and emotionally exhausted, we will want to forget the humiliation and dehumanization of the free market’s invisible hand wrapped tightly around our throats. And what better way to forget than to watch the screen(s) designed precisely for that purpose, so that when we do have extended free time, we not only want to “do nothing,” we have no idea how to do anything else. The down comforter of video culture is gloriously inviting, but it will smother and suck all that remains of our intellectual livelihood from our être (painfully performed by Alan Greenspan’s proboscis), and we will remain ignorant of it all.

Having long ago recognized the validity of Chomsky’s media theories (Manufacturing Consent et al.), I think a new component needs to be incorporated. It is clear we have demonstrable evidence that corporate media distorts, frames, omits, and occasionally fabricates information, but what is not clear is why there continues this stunning apathy when information about, say, the Honduras coup or the Saro Wiwa suit against Royal Dutch Shell is leaked through the protective corporate filter. It would be foolish not to acknowledge that a myriad of factors are at play in such a situation, but I would say that the insidious metastasis of video culture in our day to day life has a christ-load to do with it- why else would seemingly nobody want to talk to me about Zinn, Dennett, deLanda, E.O. Wilson, etc?

So I read the following Chris Hedges piece from Truthdig the other day, and couldn’t help but grow concerned about my well being (yes- again). The jist of the article is about the meetings that took place earlier this week in Yekaterinberg, Russia by the BRIC & Shanghai Cooperation Organizationg, and the panic that should be starting to sink in about the future of the US dollar. A brief sample:

…It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

Yet another take, Prairie2 put it rather bluntly, but effectively:

…The turmoil that this could produce has no large scale precedent. With almost no Americans having any sense of ownership in our society the reaction will be a feeling of hopelessness and an every man for himself mentality. The crazies on the right have been priming themselves for this sort of apocalyptic collapse for forty years and will have no doubt who is to blame. Those that don’t know who to blame will get a fair and balanced list on Fox News. Watch your back.

I’m reminded, rather insistently, by the post I made a few months ago in which I linked to the Robert Freeman piece regarding the US facing a possible Weimar moment. I know I do a great deal of yammering about fearing for my life/future, but I’m finding it much more difficult to ignore the sheer volume of evidence that’s beginning to mount regarding the speed with which the American empire is dissolving. Unfortunately, I have been unable to find much information about the results of said meeting, with a New York Times article indicating that the group “concluded with only a cautious statement suggesting a move away from the dollar’s role in global commerce and a call for greater representation of developing countries in global financial institutions.” I will admit that I find the general ‘non-statement’ quality of that reporting to send chills up my spine, but what else can I expect from the Times financial section. This seems likely to be a developing topic over the next several months, which is good only in that it gives me time to go and purchase some canned goods before the right-wing psychopaths band together in an omega-man-esque sort of glory.

As a kind of appertif, a sort of deliciousness in video form, I thought I’d post some of the perplexing sadness that is the David Letterman outrage.