Chris Hedges: The Politics of Cultural Despair

As our empire implodes, and with it social cohesion, we must face what is happening — not only around us— but within us.

[consortiumnews.com]

{Freud, like Primo Levi, got it. The moral life is a matter of circumstances. Moral consideration, as I saw in the wars I covered, largely disappears in moments of extremity. It is the luxury of the privileged. “Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction,” Susan Sontag said.}

Propaganda through perception management today is attempting to move the blissful 80% towards voting for a man of the likes of Biden which offers them nothing better. His 50 year history is one of operating within the same parameters of Trump. They both serve the same agendas and ruling class structure at the cost and destruction of the 80%.

{To survive, it was necessary, Levi wrote of life in the death camps, “to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times. “It was, he wrote, “a Hobbesian life,” “a continuous war of everyone against everyone.”}

We're at this crossroads today. Just look towards our cities in despair today with protest. We have various groups in which almost each are at odds with each other. We have systemically been put at odds with each other while the most sadistic groups are using this time to create even a deeper sense of chaos. Which is where you find the night violences and destruction in efforts to gear up for a civil war they're attempting to engage in. We're at a whole new level of protesting today.

The Vice TV programing has recently began a series (Fringe Nation) covering the various groups within todays protest and their agendas. There has been 4 episodes I've found quite interesting. So far there are 2 at this link if you don't get them with your provider. Watch for updates. [vicetv.com]
The latest which we watched last night was about The Base. [adl.org] [en.wikipedia.org]

{But the fact that circumstances can reduce us to savagery does not negate the moral life. As our empire implodes, and with it social cohesion, as the earth increasingly punishes us for our refusal to honor and protect the systems that give us life, triggering a scramble for diminishing natural resources and huge climate migrations, we must face this darkness, not only around us, but within us.

The dance macabre is already underway. Hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year from opioid overdoes, alcoholism and suicide, what sociologists calls deaths of despair. This despair fuels high rates of morbid obesity, some 40 percent of the public, gambling addictions, the pornification of the society with the ubiquitous of images of sexual sadism along with the proliferation of armed right-wing militias and nihilistic mass shootings. As despair mounts, so will these acts of self-immolation.

Those overwhelmed by despair seek magical salvations, whether in crisis cults, such as the Christian Right, or demagogues such as Trump, or rage-filled militias that see violence as a cleansing agent. As long as these dark pathologies are allowed to fester and grow — and the Democratic Party has made it clear it will not enact the kinds of radical social reforms that will curb these pathologies — the United States will continue its march towards disintegration and social upheaval. Removing Trump will neither halt nor slow the descent.}

{Our privatized health care system, which is making record profits during the pandemic, is not designed to cope with a public health emergency. It is designed to maximize profit for its owners. There are fewer than 1 million hospital beds nationally, a result of the decades-long trend of hospital mergers and closures that have reduced access to care in communities across the nation.

Cities such as Milwaukee have been forced to erect field hospitals. In states such as Mississippi there are no longer any ICU beds available. The for-profit health service did not stockpile the ventilators, masks, tests or drugs to deal with Covid-19. Why should it? That is not a route to increased revenue. And there is no substantial difference between Trump and Joe Biden’s response to the health crisis, where 1,000 people a day are dying.}

Biden admitted himself during the debate he too would have left society wide open towards the same results we're looking at now for the benefit of economy. Without proper PPE and constructed distancing measures in the workplace to properly prepare forced working conditions would have been even more drastically harming to the population. He made this statement even after it has been well known the present administration knew the dangers and kept silent while he blames Trump for the numbers and conditions as it is today. While they each wag their fingers at China who got it right he spouts out an even more horrific scenario he would have used serving the ruling class. This is what we're looking forward to!?!

{Only one thing matters to the corporate state. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate crisis. It is the primacy of corporate power — which has extinguished our democracy, taken from us our most basic civil liberties and left most of the working class in misery — and the increase and consolidation of its wealth and power.

Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump inepter and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.

Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country’s largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design.

In America we are only permitted to vote against what we hate. Partisan media outlets set one group against another, a consumer version of what George Orwell in his novel 1984 called the “Two minutes of Hate.” Our opinions and prejudices are skillfully catered to and reinforced, with the aid of a detailed digital analysis of our proclivities and habits, and then sold back to us.}

They have most of the population trapped in a delusional reality believing there's no way out. Step "Out Of The Illusion " Group

{Political coverage is modeled, as Taibbi points out, on sports coverage. The sets look like the sets on Sunday NFL Countdown. The anchor is on one side. There are four commentators, two from each team. Graphics keep us updated on the score. Political identities are reduced to easily digestible stereotypes. Tactics, strategy, image, the monthly tallies of campaign contributions and polling are endlessly examined, while real political issues are ignored. It is the language and imagery of war.}

This is a systemic propaganda tactic that has been waged on the public since about the Reagan era. Robert Parry correctly exposed the Reagan administrations agenda of erasing the public views of Vietnam to engage in perpetual warring in Latin America under a perception management campaign. Our news sources were infiltrated by X military and intelligence agents which came armed with propaganda from public relations firms, NGO groups, and various think tanks towards conditioning an illusion. Bill Clinton helped the ruling class wrap this all up into the hands of 6 billionaire maga news sources in which we get over 90% of this deceitful infotainment they profit from.

{By voting for Biden and the Democratic Party you vote for something.

You vote to endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus.

You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, de-industrialization, a real decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in Mexico, China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on teachers and public education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools.

You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of color with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for the fracking industry.

You vote for limiting a woman’s right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of those debt obligations even if file for bankruptcy.

You vote for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care. You vote for defense budgets that consume more than half of all discretionary spending.

You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the Senate abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son Hunter.

Biden was one of the principle architects of the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7 trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people. He is responsible for far more suffering and death at home and abroad than Trump.

If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, corporate plundering of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic debacle.}

{They have transformed what the Roman philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a “public thing” or the “property of a people,” into an instrument of pillage and repression on behalf of a global corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by the obscenely rich, omnipotent masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to engage in tax boycotts, financial fraud and theft.}

{In the midst of the pandemic crisis what did our ruling kleptocratic rulers do?

They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private jets, yachts, penthouses and palatial estates to the suffering and despised masses.}

{I watched competing ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia retreat into antagonistic tribes. They seized rival mass media outlets and used them to spew lies, mythological narratives exalting themselves, along with vitriol and hate against the ethnicities they demonized. This poisoned solidarity, which we are replicating, pumped out month after month in Yugoslavia, destroyed the capacity for empathy, perhaps the best definition of evil, and led to a savage fratricide.}

Taking the 2 parts above I put in bold, I will and have argued in this group with a certain person on at least 2 occasions on the use of percentages on this virus in the media are a means to create a tribal divide. While they are tossing all these percentages around which offer no realistic measure of help, they ignore the percentages that could. How the reactions between China and our government compare. While we continue to march towards half a million deaths with a population of some 350 million compared to some 10,000 deaths in a population of 1.4 trillion.

{Tens of millions of Americans live hermetically sealed inside the vast media and educational edifice erected by the Christian Right. In this world, miracles are real; Satan, allied with liberal secular humanists and the deep state, along with Muslims, immigrants, feminists, intellectuals, artists and a host of other internal enemies, is seeking to destroy America.

Trump is God’s anointed vessel to build the Christian nation and cement into place a government that instills “biblical values.” These “biblical values” include banning abortion, protecting the traditional family, turning the Ten Commandments into secular law, crushing “infidels,” especially Muslims, indoctrinating children in schools with “biblical” teachings and thwarting sexual license, which includes any sexual relationship other than marriage between a man and a woman.

Trump is routinely compared by evangelical leaders to the biblical king Cyrus, who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem and restored the Jews to the city.}

{More importantly, Trump has handed the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices, and with Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination most likely three, out of nine.

This is nineteen percent of the federal trial judges currently in service. Nearly all of the extremists who make up the judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.}

You can thank Obama and Biden for this. I believe the total numbers are closer to 240 some seats that have been filled. I believe Obama left something like 360 seats empty as he left DC. McConell and Trump have been working full speed ahead to fill as many as they can. With virtually no restrictive attempts by the democrats. Same as we got as Trump constructed his crime ridden administration after winning his election. He was permitted to take Bush Jr.s means of elevating people with no experience and or conflicts of interest to a new level put on steroids.

{Christian fascism is an emotional life raft for tens of millions of Americans. It is impervious to science and verifiable fact. The Christian fascists, by choice, have severed themselves from rational thought and the secular society that almost destroyed them and their families and thrust them into deep despair. We will not placate or disarm this movement, bent on our destruction, by attempting to claim that we, too, have Christian “values.”}

We will not disarm this movement as long as so many continue their belief in MSCM either. Those that also have severed themselves from rational thought within our given Biden history and facts will lead us into another 4 years of this simmering melt down of our society. Seemingly we can only hope they will recognize the messages we've attempted to bring forth as his 4 years pass with virtually no accomplishments.