Charlie,
The problem is that of course, people like you who tend to be thoughtful and
introspective, will not permit what Hedges describes, to happen to you.
Unfortunately, I think that you are in the minority. People are receiving
their information and entertainment mainly from TV or other corporate
sources. Their ideas and values are molded by what corporate America
communicates to them. Even the political discussions tend to be theater
because they are based on false premises. People may have ideas about
Russia, ISIS, Israel/Palestine, our financial situation, et cetera, but
because even in the New York Times, often vital facts are omitted, they
don't really understand what's happening. And the discontent of which you
speak can be expressed in various ways. One way was the killing of nine
people in a church in South Carolina. Another is the rise in the number of
hate groups that influence people like the young man who did the shooting.
Another is the rise of the Tea Party.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Charles Crawford
Sent: Monday, June 29, 2015 11:07 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Lonely American
Hi Miriam and all,
As I read this, I began to think of the many people I know who might
well fit the description of the average person provided within this article.
More concerning to me than the plight of these people is the fact that many
of them actually believe themselves to be happy, when the sum of their
experience is primarily what is described in the article. Yet, if the
article speaks a reality greater than the sum of the parts of which it
speaks, then is there a basis for hope?
I believe the answer is yes. Beneath all the electronic distractions we
confront every day, and even deeper than the emotional and physical
satisfactions available to us, I believe there is a space that creates a
kind of discontent and a feeling of something being very much missing. Some
define that space as intellectual curiosity, metaphysical longing, spiritual
disconnection, or any number of other similar states of being. I believe it
is the place where we find the meaning of life and for me, a spiritual
fulfillment that rests with God. Irrespective of what we call that space,
the fact is that it is there and properly filling it with meaningful and
lasting substance is important to accomplish.
Lastly, I also agree with the reality of the loss of our classic social
outlets ranging from altruistic organizations such as Lions clubs, to
smaller circles of friends interested in books of films, where the
discussions increase social interactions. The dangers of less and less
engagement in these activities lay in the increased social isolation and
alienation from the fabric of our community. If left to continue down this
current path of increasing social disintegration, it may soon become a
completely objectified world in which we become almost totally desensitized
to the sufferings of others and lose our ability to compassionately respond
to the needs of our fellow human beings.
As I said before, I do believe however that there is hope and it is really
up to us all to acknowledge the problem of needing to appreciate community
and to nurture it even as we engage in our technologies. What do you folks
think?
Charlie Crawford.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: 29 June 2015 09:58
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Lonely American
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 Yorks
Times Square in January. (Seth Wenig / AP) Michael P. Printup, president of
Watkins Glen International, one of the countrys 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 hallucinationswith 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 Americas 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
NASCARwhich has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and
at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachersis ominous. It is the
symbol of a captive society.
We dont 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 its hard. Look around. Whos the youngest person
here? Thats 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.
Printups 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 Ferrariracingsports car we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay
for that. It is not cheap. Thats how you have got to get these kids. But
its 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
Stalins Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were
required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictators
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 propagandacontent, respectful of authority, just, economically secure
and freeis 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 Yorks
Times Square in January. (Seth Wenig / AP)
Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the
countrys 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 hallucinationswith 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 Americas 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
NASCARwhich has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and
at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachersis ominous. It is the
symbol of a captive society.
We dont 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 its hard. Look around. Whos the youngest person
here? Thats 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.
Printups 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 Ferrariracingsports car we are one of the top 10 lists. We pay
for that. It is not cheap. Thats how you have got to get these kids. But
its 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
Stalins Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were
required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictators
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 propagandacontent, respectful of authority, just, economically secure
and freeis 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.
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