Chris Hedges does not mince words. We need more "Town Criers" like
him. We will never succeed in winning the struggle for our human
existence, until we face the hard reality of our situation.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/2/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
Reign of Idiots
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/reign_of_idiots_20170430/
Posted on Apr 30, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot
generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot
economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social service
programs for the poor, and project economic growth on the basis of myth.
Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil and the air, slash jobs and
depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created financial bubbles and
impose crippling debt peonage on the citizens. Idiot journalists and public
intellectuals pretend despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives
orchestrate the overthrow of foreign governments to create lawless enclaves
that give rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts” and
“specialists” busy themselves with unintelligible jargon and arcane theory
that buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot entertainers and
producers
create lurid spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy.
There is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are ticking off every item
on it.
The idiots know only one word—“more.” They are unencumbered by common
sense.
They hoard wealth and resources until workers cannot make a living and the
infrastructure collapses. They live in privileged compounds where they eat
chocolate cake and order missile strikes. They see the state as a
projection
of their vanity. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov,
Wilhelmine (https://www.revolvy.com/topic/Wilhelminism&item_type=topic ;) ,
Pahlavi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_dynasty ;) and Soviet
dynasties crumbled because the whims and obsessions of ruling idiots were
law.
Donald Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind
the mask of our professed civility and rationality—a sputtering,
narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac. He wields armies and fleets
against
the wretched of the earth, blithely ignores the catastrophic human misery
caused by global warming, pillages on behalf of global oligarchs and at
night sits slack-jawed in front of a television set before opening his
“beautiful” Twitter account. He is our version of the Roman emperor Nero,
who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers, the Chinese
emperor Qin Shi Huang
(http://launchistory.blogspot.com/2013/03/qin-shi-huangs-quest-for-immortali
ty.html ) , who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of
immortals to bring back the potion that would give him eternal life, and a
decayed Russian royalty that sat around reading tarot cards and attending
séances as their nation was decimated by war and revolution brewed in the
streets.
This moment in history marks the end of a long, sad tale of greed and
murder
by the white races. It is inevitable that for the final show we vomited a
grotesque figure like Trump. Europeans and Americans have spent five
centuries conquering, plundering, exploiting and polluting the earth in the
name of human progress. They used their technological superiority to create
the most efficient killing machines on the planet, directed against anyone
and anything, especially indigenous cultures, that stood in their way. They
stole and hoarded the planet’s wealth and resources. They believed that
this
orgy of blood and gold would never end, and they still believe it. They do
not understand that the dark ethic of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist
expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as the exploited. But even as
we
stand on the cusp of extinction we lack the intelligence and imagination to
break free from our evolutionary past.
The more the warning signs are palpable—rising temperatures, global
financial meltdowns, mass human migrations, endless wars, poisoned
ecosystems, rampant corruption among the ruling class—the more we turn to
those who chant, either through idiocy or cynicism, the mantra that what
worked in the past will work in the future, that progress is inevitable.
Factual evidence, since it is an impediment to what we desire, is banished.
The taxes of corporations and the rich, who have deindustrialized
(http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/deindustrialization.html)
the
country and turned many of our cities into wastelands, are cut, and
regulations are slashed to bring back the supposed golden era of the 1950s
for white American workers. Public lands are opened up to the oil and gas
industry as rising carbon emissions doom our species. Declining crop yields
stemming from heat waves and droughts are ignored. War is the principal
business of the kleptocratic state.
Walter Benjamin (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/benjamin/ ;) wrote in
1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus
(https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia
/commons/4/4b/Klee%252C_paul%252C_angelus_novus%252C_1920.jpg&imgrefurl=http
s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus_Novus&h=400&w=321&tbnid=pXecmQFJAgk7rM:&tb
nh=186&tbnw=149&usg=__iStlP1DhuCboWQ6kxj6DtGLBFOE=&vet=10ahUKEwjNgK67kc3TAhU
N_WMKHVJ-CK0Q_B0IggEwCg..i&docid=P4w54is3_SbRfM&itg=1&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNgK67
kc3TAhUN_WMKHVJ-CK0Q_B0IggEwCg&ei=u1gGWY03jfqPA9L8oegK#h=400&imgdii=Trjr1WMK
Z5ug_M:&tbnh=186&tbnw=149&vet=10ahUKEwjNgK67kc3TAhUN_WMKHVJ-CK0Q_B0IggEwCg..
i&w=321 ) shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from
something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is
open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.
His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he
sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and
hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from
Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel
can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the
future
to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Magical thinking is not limited to the beliefs and practices of pre-modern
cultures. It defines the ideology of capitalism. Quotas and projected sales
can always be met. Profits can always be raised. Growth is inevitable. The
impossible is always possible. Human societies, if they bow before the
dictates of the marketplace, will be ushered into capitalist paradise. It
is
only a question of having the right attitude and the right technique. When
capitalism thrives, we are assured, we thrive. The merging of the self with
the capitalist collective has robbed us of our agency, creativity, capacity
for self-reflection and moral autonomy. We define our worth not by our
independence or our character but by the material standards set by
capitalism—personal wealth, brands, status and career advancement. We are
molded into a compliant and repressed collective. This mass conformity is
characteristic of totalitarian and authoritarian states. It is the
Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and
positive
attitudes. And when magical thinking does not work, we are told, and often
accept, that we are the problem. We must have more faith. We must envision
what we want. We must try harder. The system is never to blame. We failed
it. It did not fail us.
All of our systems of information, from self-help gurus and Hollywood to
political monstrosities such as Trump, sell us this snake oil. We blind
ourselves to impending collapse. Our retreat into self-delusion is a career
opportunity for charlatans who tell us what we want to hear. The magical
thinking they espouse is a form of infantilism. It discredits facts and
realities that defy the glowing cant of slogans such as “Make America great
again.” Reality is banished for relentless and baseless optimism.
Half the country may live in poverty, our civil liberties may be taken from
us, militarized police may murder unarmed citizens in the streets and we
may
run the world’s largest prison system and murderous war machine, but all
these truths are studiously ignored. Trump embodies the essence of this
decayed, intellectually bankrupt and immoral world. He is its natural
expression. He is the king of the idiots. We are his victims.
Chris Hedges and Enrique Martinez Celaya: The Calling of the Artist Is to
Bring Forth the Future
America’s Other Drug Problem
Our Political Reality Is the Stuff of Nightmares
How ‘Russiagate’ Got So Much Momentum
Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
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