Wish I Had Said This

Cruising the 'net this afternoon, I ran across this video on the Time Magazine blog that's interesting, if only as an example of technology.  It is a Taiwanese re-enactment of the Tiger Woods incident.  I'm already tired of hearing and reading about it, but watched the video anyway.

After watching, I read the comments.  Comment number 6 struck me.  It echoes much of my own fears for the future.  So, I followed it to the source, another blog.  This time it is Chris Hedges.  I read his entire post, and knew immediately that I'd be writing about it.  The following are large excerpts from the beginning and end of his article:

Chris Hedges:

Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

....

We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected. The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism.

The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture.

Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible. Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation. It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear. The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working class into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise these dispossessed workers, insert them back into the economy, unless we give them hope, these demagogues will rise up to take power. Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age. 

I find it interesting in that it's one possible scenario for the near future, one I believe possible.  Perhaps not likely, but certainly not so far out as to be completely discounted and labeled insane.  I hope it is wrong, but "hope is not a plan" as I have heard so often.  It's thought provoking.

Comments

[Felix Grant]

> ...it's one possible scenario ...
> Perhaps not likely, but...

At any point in time, the likelihood of such futures depends directly on actions in the present. We face a range of them, from the social at one end (of which Hedges speaks) to the geophysical at the other (of which climate change is the most visible), the question is not which is "true", but which of them will hit us first and render the others irrelevant.

The real question, I think, is how likely we are to do anything about it. And my personal assessment of that (for what a personal assessment is worth!) is that we are not likely to do anything effective at all. We never do. Faced with a threat which will wipe us out in a year, we would rise to the challenge; faced with one which will wipe us out in ten, we bicker instead.

A couple of years ago I quoted a fragmentary exchange between Quatermass and the anthopologist Roney from the film /Quatermass and the pit/. It's regrettably relevant. Quatermass is musing on what we, the human race, would we do "if our planet was dying, our atmosphere degrading, our whole environment becoming hostile to our existence?" ... "Nothing." replies Roney, "We'd just go on squabbling and fighting amongst ourselves, the same as usual."

[Felix Grant]

Following on from that comment above (I've been musing on it as I washed up the breakfast dishes!), we have a small laboratory crucible in which to examine how we respond to Hedges' call.

In the "reasons to be cheerful" corner (to switch metaphors from lab to boxing ring), we have the public upswell of feeling which led to the election of Obama and the possibility (as you mentioned recently in «Coming out of the fog») of passing the health care bill.

In the "we're all going to die" corner, the tremendous difficulty he has encountered in getting to even an “imperfect ... beginning place” as you described it.

How that bill and the drive behind it play out will tell us much about how willing (and likely) we are to shape our range of potential futures.