The other day I was talking to one of my grandson's and, well, I was
talking toward my grandson while he was facing me, texting to one
friend or another. "Isolated?" he said, "I'm not isolated. I got
Face Book and I'm Liked by dozens of friends."
"But don't you miss going to the game, or hitting the surf, or joining
the boys for a hand ball game after work?"
"Well, I actually work out of my apartment these days, and my legs
don't hold me up on the surf board anymore. Gosh Gramps, I am turning
35 this July, you know."
My grandson does not feel isolated. He has a world of close friends.
As close as his iPad.
Now I'm not going to suggest that the development of all these
electronic gadgets was some well planned Corporate Capitalistic plot,
but if their goal was to isolate our youth, and then give them the
sense of being connected electronically, and then taking control of
that media and controlling them with Corporate Empire propaganda, they
couldn't have done a better job.
Chris Hedges hits another home run with this article. Isolate and
dominate. But always leave them believing that they are connected.
And they are. They are connected to the big Teat of the Empire.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/29/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Lonely American
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_lonely_american_20150628/
Posted on Jun 28, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Sandy Johal uses a selfie stick to take a picture of herself in New
York’s
Times Square in January. (Seth Wenig / AP)
Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the
country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans
at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee.
A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers,
pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower
room.
A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to
the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all
middle-aged
or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of
cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging
demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the
sport.
“Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would
come,” suggested one gray-haired man.
But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor
unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the
Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of
Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical
societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater
attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and
professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a
dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take
the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole
of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and
pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah
Arendt, “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and
entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry,
the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.
The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun
with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and
perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it
impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic
engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into
commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is
NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks
and
at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the
symbol of a captive society.
“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the
younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year
to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person
here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling
with
the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult.
They only want to look at their computers.”
Printup’s parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has
invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for
it.
“We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,”
he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this
past
weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. “The
digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them.
We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet
interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid
Googles ‘Ferrari—racing—sports car’ we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay
for that. It is not cheap. That’s how you have got to get these kids. But
it’s not working the way it should.”
Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement,
or
what he called our “social capital,” in his book “Bowling Alone: The
Collapse and Revival of American Community.” He noted that our severance
from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness
and
alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.
Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a
steady
stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to
destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided
millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves
with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in
Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were
required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the
dictator’s
speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that
were not under the iron control of the party.
The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian
systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading
civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The
seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based
world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy
required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads,
why
censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his
voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events
or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms
and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.
The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within
the
parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and
isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out
dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and
clichés,
are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of
the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the
public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a
totalitarian
society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety,
fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create
these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her
personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of
state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically
secure
and free—is mistaken for reality.
Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called
“atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in
anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust
their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by
anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This
propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable,
unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and
identification.”
Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded
to
new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the
meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public,
to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden
made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting
that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public “and translate it into
intelligible utterance and convincing action.”
“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study,
the
masses,” Heiden wrote. “The speaker is in constant communication with the
masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration.” Heiden, forced
to
flee Nazi Germany, went on: “When a resonance issues from the depths of the
substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he
must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind,
propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine
to
make wind but a sail to catch the wind.”
Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate
propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves
from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and
intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian
anarchist Peter Kropotkin called “voluntary associations for study and
teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation,
resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and
self-denial.”
“We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest,
merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination,” Kropotkin
wrote.
“It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities,
guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by
confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was
by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement
between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the
fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they
succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects,
who had no direct union more among themselves.”
Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted.
We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must
connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It
is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And
it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate
change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Lonely American
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_lonely_american_20150628/
Posted on Jun 28, 2015
By Chris Hedges
Sandy Johal uses a selfie stick to take a picture of herself in New York’s
Times Square in January. (Seth Wenig / AP)
Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the
country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans
at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee.
A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers,
pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower
room.
A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to
the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all
middle-aged
or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of
cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging
demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the
sport.
“Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would
come,” suggested one gray-haired man.
But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor
unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the
Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of
Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical
societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater
attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and
professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a
dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take
the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole
of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and
pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah
Arendt, “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and
entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry,
the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.
The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun
with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and
perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it
impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic
engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into
commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is
NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks
and
at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the
symbol of a captive society.
“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the
younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year
to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person
here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling
with
the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult.
They only want to look at their computers.”
Printup’s parent company, the International Speedway Corp. (ISC), has
invested significant sums to reach this demographic with little to show for
it.
“We have a digital firm that represents nearly all our tracks in the ISC,”
he went on, noting that Watkins Glen, which drew about 16,000 fans this
past
weekend, is one of the few exceptions to the decline in numbers. “The
digital platform is about the only way you can get to them. We target them.
We buy lists. We hire an agency that tracks their Web and Internet
interactions. If they bring up racing, we want to be there. When a kid
Googles ‘Ferrari—racing—sports car’ we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay
for that. It is not cheap. That’s how you have got to get these kids. But
it’s not working the way it should.”
Robert D. Putnam pointed out the decline of independent civic engagement,
or
what he called our “social capital,” in his book “Bowling Alone: The
Collapse and Revival of American Community.” He noted that our severance
from local communal and civic groups brought with it not only loneliness
and
alienation, but also a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.
Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a
steady
stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to
destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided
millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves
with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in
Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were
required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the
dictator’s
speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that
were not under the iron control of the party.
The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian
systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading
civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The
seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based
world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy
required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads,
why
censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his
voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events
or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms
and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.
The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within
the
parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and
isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out
dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and
clichés,
are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of
the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the
public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a
totalitarian
society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety,
fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create
these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her
personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of
state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically
secure
and free—is mistaken for reality.
Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called
“atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in
anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust
their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by
anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This
propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable,
unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and
identification.”
Corporate propaganda saturates the public, especially a generation wedded
to
new technology, with these lies. Its power, however, comes from the
meticulous study of the moods, prejudices, whims and desires of the public,
to manipulate the masses in their own language and emotions. Konrad Heiden
made this point when he examined fascist propaganda in Nazi Germany, noting
that propaganda must detect the murmur of the public “and translate it into
intelligible utterance and convincing action.”
“The true aim of political propaganda is not to influence, but to study,
the
masses,” Heiden wrote. “The speaker is in constant communication with the
masses; he hears an echo, and senses the inner vibration.” Heiden, forced
to
flee Nazi Germany, went on: “When a resonance issues from the depths of the
substance, the masses have given him the pitch; he knows in what terms he
must finally address them. Rather than a means of directing the mass mind,
propaganda is a technique for riding with the masses. It is not a machine
to
make wind but a sail to catch the wind.”
Dissent will only be possible when we break the dark spell of corporate
propaganda and the isolation that accompanies it. We must free ourselves
from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and
intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian
anarchist Peter Kropotkin called “voluntary associations for study and
teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation,
resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and
self-denial.”
“We know well the means by which this association of the lord, priest,
merchant, judge, soldier, and king founded its domination,” Kropotkin
wrote.
“It was by the annihilation of all free unions: of village communities,
guilds, trades unions, fraternities, and medieval cities. It was by
confiscating the land of the communes and the riches of the guilds; it was
by the absolute and ferocious prohibition of all kinds of free agreement
between men; it was by massacre, the wheel, the gibbet, the sword, and the
fire that Church and State established their domination, and that they
succeeded henceforth to reign over an incoherent agglomeration of subjects,
who had no direct union more among themselves.”
Corporate propaganda has become so potent that many Americans are addicted.
We must leave our isolated rooms. We must shut out these images. We must
connect with those around us. It is only the communal that will save us. It
is only the communal that will allow us to build a movement to resist. And
it is only the communal that will sustain us through mutual aid as climate
change and economic collapse increasingly dominate our future.
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/will_the_machines_ever_rise_up_201
50629/
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/will_the_machines_ever_rise_up_201
50629/
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/will_the_machines_ever_rise_up_201
50629/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/greek_banks_close_indefinitely_a
fter_weekend_that_shook_the_euro_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/greek_banks_close_indefinitely_a
fter_weekend_that_shook_the_euro_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/greek_banks_close_indefinitely_a
fter_weekend_that_shook_the_euro_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_got_war_poverty_drugs_the_middl
e_east_and_terror_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_got_war_poverty_drugs_the_middl
e_east_and_terror_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_got_war_poverty_drugs_the_middl
e_east_and_terror_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stress_on_water_resources_threatens_live
s_and_livelihoods_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stress_on_water_resources_threatens_live
s_and_livelihoods_20150629/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/stress_on_water_resources_threatens_live
s_and_livelihoods_20150629/ http://www.truthdig.com/
http://www.truthdig.com/
http://www.truthdig.com/about/http://www.truthdig.com/contact/http://www.tru
thdig.com/user_agreement/http://www.truthdig.com/privacy_policy/http://www.t
ruthdig.com/about/comment_policy/
© 2015 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.hopstudios.com/
http://support.truthdig.com/signup_page/subscribe
http://support.truthdig.com/signup_page/subscribe
http://www.facebook.com/truthdighttp://twitter.com/intent/follow?source=foll
owbutton&variant=1.0&screen_name=truthdighttps://plus.google.com/+truthdight
tp://www.linkedin.com/company/truthdighttp://truthdig.tumblr.com/http://www.
truthdig.com/connect
