[quote=Allan from Fallbrook] Underneath all the screaming and hysterics right now, the system is actually functioning just the way its supposed to.[/quote]
I agree with this, but probably not in a much different way than you do.
The real division in America today is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between average citizens and the corporate and financial elite.
We have all become pawns and serfs in a game of pseudo democracy rigged by the corporate state.
No amount of massaging the propaganda line or finger pointing is going to be able to rectify the growing obvious discrepancy between what the bottom 80% experience every day and the media created fantasy world paraded across TV screens in dramas, sitcoms and mass media commercial culture. The future is coming into view and something has got to give.
[quote=eavesdropper]When I have a completely close-minded far-Right FoxNews true believer pull out the “elitist-intellectual-ivory tower academic” label, I tell them that I can’t help it if I’ve made a point of making education/the search for knowledge a lifelong pursuit, and I’m not about to apologize for it. [/quote]
What’s driving that narrative, Eaves? Go deeper.
All our political institutions are now being either overrun by, or co-opted by the dictates of the corporate and national security state. What are the liberals doing? Complaining about the “dumbing down” or lack of critical thinking of Americans. Well where did that come from, eh? They don’t wanna go there.
If you hang out much with thinking people, conversation eventually turns to the serious political and cultural questions of our times. Such as: How can the Americans remain so consistently brain-fucked? Much of the world, including plenty of Americans, asks that question as they watch U.S. culture go down like a thrashing mastodon giving itself up to some Pleistocene tar pit.
One explanation might be the effect of 40 years of deep fried industrial chicken pulp, and 44 ounce Big Gulp soft drinks. Another might be pop culture, which is not culture at all of course, but marketing. Or we could blame it on digital autism: Ever watch commuter monkeys on the subway poking at digital devices, stroking the touch screen for hours on end? That wrinkled Neolithic brows above the squinting red eyes?
But a more reasonable explanation is that, (A) we don’t even know we are doing it, and (B) we cling to institutions dedicated to making sure we never find out.
As William Edwards Deming famously demonstrated, no system can understand itself, and why it does what it does, including the American social system. Not knowing shit about why your society does what it makes for a pretty nasty case of existential unease. So we create institutions whose function is to pretend to know, which makes everyone feel better. Unfortunately, it also makes the savviest among us — those elites who run the institutions — very rich, or safe from the vicissitudes that buffet the rest of us.
Directly or indirectly, they understand that the real function of American social institutions is to justify, rationalize and hide the true purpose of cultural behavior from the lumpenproletariat, and to shape that behavior to the benefit of the institution’s members.
Interestingly, both author Joe Bagaent, self described redneck socialist and Chris Hedges, liberal Author, former NYT writer, devout Christian and graduate of Harvard Divinity School both have come to the same conclusion. Liberals stopped being liberals 40 years ago. Hedges adds the the only difference between a liberal and conservative in todays America is a conservative has values worth fighting for.
Carlin said something to the effect of what the American ruling class DO NOT want is a nation of well informed, critical thinkers.
