'An
awakening is most
unlikely since all
forces that could break
that trance are devoted
to maintaining it.'
By Paul Edwards: Noam Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”, published in 1988, was a
ground-breaking, comprehensive analysis of the processes used by American
government to persuade citizens to approve whatever witches’ brew of deceit,
crime, and murder the ruling elite elected to perpetrate.
Today that idea has a quaint, nostalgic
charm since no serious person would now contend that our government requires
anything resembling consent from its people. It rules imperiously an
intellectually lobotomized public it has rendered torpid, quiescent,
inanimate. You are now told what it has done or is doing, if you are told
anything at all.
While the stupefied, comatose condition of
Americans that allows them to opt out of the moral universe and assuage their
guilt with petitions, donations, and memberships in faineant feel-good drum
circles is not necessarily permanent, an awakening is most unlikely since all
forces that could break that trance are devoted to maintaining it.
Government, which Plato, Burke and the
Federalist argue will always work to aggrandize itself against all
restraint, has triumphed over the people who theoretically empower it, but
Government is only a device, a giant toy, a Rube Goldberg machine, and the
wholly-owned subsidiary of Capitalism, and the dirty, tattered cover for its
absolute rule. With apologies to Clausewitz, American government is the
continuation of Capitalism by other means.
Capitalism, controling education, media and
culture, ran an intense PR blitz to create a society of shallow, childish,
insatiable consumers, paradoxically certain that they were at once utterly
worthless and undeniably Number 1. This infantilization of the people
produced a double payoff: a citizenry without the acuity to oppose the
criminality of the state, but with no limit to their ingrafted materialist
“needs”. As their regressive, debilitating self-absorption grew, so did
their indifference to their own psychic, spiritual, and social health, as well
as to the full-spectrum horror their country continually inflicts on nations
that won’t come to Jesus and kneel to submit to our ravenous Minotaur.
Capitalism, dubiously victorious, is not
what it used to be, evolving as its DNA coding required and Marx
described. It is now so sick with Financial Elephantiasis that it can’t
evade its own voracity and, enchained in unpayable debt, it blindly, greedily
devours itself. The insanity of world neurosis based on U.S. Capitalist
rapacity is now driven entirely by America’s own economic panic, not ideology.
There will be no redemption.
Capitalism will crash and come disastrously, catastrophically undone. As
Marx said, a mode of production’s power continues until advancing
history enforces its replacement. We are there, and ironically, as the
terminally haemorrhaging Capitalist ghoul lurches toward its demise, its death
throes will be most agonizingly painful to those zombified American souls who
lost consciousnes to the siren lullabies of their destroyers.
Paul Edwards is a writer and
film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
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