The American Reality
By Max Kantar
31 July,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Amidst the independence day
flag waving, summer sporting events, and even a few murmurs about
the prospect of 'change' in an upcoming national election, a much
darker reality exists in this country.
Blinded by the bright lights of flatscreen televisions and drowned out by the numbing buzz of propaganda and unimportant words, we have been hypnotized by the doctrinal system of mass media and baptized in materialistic excess.
By allowing a fraction of the spoils of international terrorism and exploitation to trickle into the hands of a substantial sector of the American working and middle class, the corporate elite have effectively purchased not only our blessing and consent, but our morals and souls.
They have lulled us into submission not simply through jingoist indoctrination, but by creating a necessary diversion from the undesirable images of the masses of emaciated children and mangled and deformed bodies suffering from disease and terror.
Our oil, our apparel, our electronics, jewelry, agriculture— so much of our ridiculous consumption, comes bearing a pretty face, benevolent message, or an admiral ideal. They are marketed and sold based on the principle that our values and human worth can be found in and measured by empty and soulless material possessions.
The faces of our hero celebrities don the false images of tyrannical corporations who have virtually enslaved hundreds of millions of men, women, and children, compelled to suffer criminal wages, physical and sexual assault, and countless other abuses, all driven simply by their need to eat and stay alive.
On top of endless commercial propaganda, the financial masters feed the masses daily the idiocy of pop culture. Images depicting animalistic fantasies of primal gratification consume the public mind in a roaring tsunami of sex, glorified violence, flesh chewing, intoxication, and militaristic spectator sporting events.
Not only are our consciousness and minds removed and averted by this swarm of barbarism, but our highest values are constructed out of it and cemented into our shallow and hollow being.
We contract, we kill, we subsidize, we profit. We impose starvation, disease, murder, and oppression. But yet because we, the public, do not see these conditions and people that we create and degrade, we are oblivious.
Virtually no human being, if given the opportunity, would steal food from a starving child. Likewise, none of us would dream of supporting or perpetrating terrorism on innocent victims in the interests of commercial investment and foreign capital. But yes, that is precisely what we are doing! Everyday!
This is the object of mass media, to properly indoctrinate the population with misconceptions about the nature of our nation regarding domestic and international affairs and to reinforce a value system that worships all things superficial, profitable, and meaningless.
We are all part of this unsustainable, exploitative, and violent structure, participating as consumers, workers, teachers, students, debtors, taxpayers and officials.
We built the Caterpillar bulldozers that have demolished tens of thousands of homes in Palestine, making tens of thousands of Palestinian families homeless. We are the ones paying for Palestine's ethnic cleansing and the starvation and imprisonment of Gaza. It is us whose hands are covered in Palestinian blood.
With our tax dollars, we have allowed for highly subsidized corporate agribusiness to destroy food independence of countless poorer nations, leading to the dispossession of their farmers, the destruction of their crops, and eventually, massive famine in the said nations. And while the masses of the ultra-exploited world struggle to eat and watch their children starve, we are using a subsistence crop, corn, to feed to automobiles rather than people amidst a global food crisis.
We are the ones drinking the coffee from Starbucks brought to us by the slavish, U.S. corporate plantations of Central America. To satisfy the artificial wants of our globalized consumer society, over 200 million children around the world forgo school and family life to work unfathomably long days under command and the threat of beatings and starvation, producing carpets, sporting goods, rugs, shoes, and many other objects of our collective desire. We might wonder how many hundreds of million adults suffer the same fate as well.
It is the oil from the Niger Delta that fills our vehicles, courtesy of Exxon Mobile and Shell, whose existence assures the continued desperation and hopelessness of the people of the region, the rightful owners of the natural resources of their homeland.
Using our overwhelming influence in international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, our representatives have effectively underdeveloped much of the world over the past 25 years, imposing neoliberal 'structural adjustments' on poor nations for the benefit of our own Wall Street criminals while several thousands of human beings unnecessarily starve to their graves daily.
To be sure, it is we who have been in gluttonous fashion usurping much of the global oil resources for our over-consumption. We are the United States of America. How many million human beings have been deprived, starved, killed, and oppressed to assure the profits of Middle Eastern oil find their ways into Western pockets? The bloody siege of Iraq and Afghanistan is only the most recent peak of repression and violence carried out for oil interests in the region. These policies are not new.
We, and nobody else, are paying for our 700 military bases around the globe, stationed to protect foreign western capital and poised to destroy popular struggle. We have supplied the weapons, planes, ammunition, training, soldiers, and cash to scores of belligerent nations with the pretext of assuring the preservation of foreign investment domination and the suppression of popular demand.
It is us who have subsidized, supported, and sacrificed to assure that no nation defies the global economic order and breaks the imperial laws of the West to pursue a social and economic agenda of the choosing of its population. Have we not learned that it is not communism that we despise, but independence that we so loathe?
Have we made the world safe for democracy yet?
We are so deeply indoctrinated and disillusioned by the carefully constructed reality that the elites are presenting us. Any thoughtfulness is drowned out by the pervasive rubbish being thrust upon our minds from all angles.
Our perceptions are so controlled by marketing, advertising, and selfishness that we cannot even begin to conceive that we are active participants in a global program of racism, capitalism, war, depravation, and destruction, that by the laws of economic gravitation, has already begun to create the conditions in which we too, shall reap what has been sown.
In this sick and deranged society we are programmed as well, to see our own countrymen as not our brothers and sisters, but as objects of competition. As an army of debtors, workers, and consumers, we march through the streets aimlessly towards our next meaningless purchase, destination, or crusade, instinctively kicking aside the faceless un-people sheltered in the cardboard barracks on the streets and sidewalks of multimillion dollar shopping centers and enterprises.
Like Orwell's sheep, we repeat and regurgitate robotic rationalizations justifying the fatal deprivation of the most fundamental human needs of our own brethren, of which these necessities could be so easily and readily provided, to deny other humans them is not less than malice.
And while we refuse to recognize and respect the rights of others, we seldom pass up an opportunity to relinquish ourselves of all responsibility for our own actions and inactions. We blame victims for their condition of victim-hood. Our relationships with each other are often void of sincerity and love, driven more by fear, habit, selfishness, expectations and other self-serving and superficial qualities.
If we wish to once and for all, remove ourselves from our despicable and pathological role that we are fulfilling at this very hour then we must break free from the indoctrination system to smash these ideological constraints and cease with our passive behavior that we have mastered over recent years.
Wake up! We have nothing of value to lose.
Max Kantar is a freelance writer and undergraduate. He can be reached at [email protected]
