Marty's Blog

written by a friar in a Nebraska monastery:

British inventor Josh Silver, a former professor of physics at Oxford University, has come up with a game-changer of a product design with his water-lensed glasses.

Silver has devised a pair of glasses which rely on the principle that the fatter a lens the more powerful it becomes. Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles.The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed. The principle is so simple, the team has discovered, that with very little guidance people are perfectly capable of creating glasses to their own prescription.

You can mass-produce millions of these, rather than manufacturing myriad individual lenses each tuned to a user’s specific vision deficiencies. And while the one-size-fits-all mentality may not fly in developed nations, Silver’s goal is to help the hundreds of millions of people in developing countries who suffer from poor eyesight.

Silver calls his flash of insight a “tremendous glimpse of the obvious”–namely that opticians weren’t necessary to provide glasses. This is a crucial factor in the developing world where trained specialists are desperately in demand: in Britain there is one optometrist for every 4,500 people, in sub-Saharan Africa the ratio is 1:1,000,000.The implications of bringing glasses within the reach of poor communities are enormous, says the scientist. Literacy rates improve hugely, fishermen are able to mend their nets, women to weave clothing. During an early field trial, funded by the British government, in Ghana, Silver met a man called Henry Adjei-Mensah, whose sight had deteriorated with age, as all human sight does, and who had been forced to retire as a tailor because he could no longer see to thread the needle of his sewing machine. “So he retires. He was about 35. He could have worked for at least another 20 years. We put these specs on him, and he smiled, and threaded his needle, and sped up with this sewing machine. He can work now. He can see.”

So far 30,000 of Silver’s specs have been distributed, but more are on the way; his eventual target is 100 million pairs.

I just heard a wonderful way to frame the response of “no”.  Instead of believing you heard “no” as an answer to your question, think of it as another question.

As Zig Ziglar says; when a person tells you no, what they are saying is based on the information I have at this time, I am not ready to commit.  I need more information to make my decision. Please keep on providing me more information.

Or in other words, the reply of no is in fact an implied response asking for more information.

Posted on Aug 31, 2009  by Chris Hedges

Globalization and unfettered capitalism have been swept into the history books along with the open-market theory of the 1920s, the experiments of fascism, communism and the New Deal. It is time for a new economic and political paradigm. It is time for a new language to address our reality. The voices of change, those who speak in powerful and yet unfamiliar words, will cry out Sept. 25 and 26 in Pittsburgh when protesters from around the country gather to defy the heads of state, bankers and finance ministers from the world’s 22 largest economies who are convening for a meeting of the G-20. If we heed these dissident voices we have a future. If we do not we will commit collective suicide.

The international power elites will go to Pittsburgh to preach the mantra that globalization is inevitable and eternal. They will discuss a corpse as if it was living. They will urge us to remain in suspended animation and place our trust in the inept bankers and politicians who orchestrated the crisis. This is the usual tactic of bankrupt elites clinging to power. They denigrate and push to the margins the realists—none of whom will be inside their security perimeters—who give words to our disintegration and demand a new, unfamiliar course. The powerful discredit dissent and protest. But human history, as Erich Fromm wrote, always begins anew with disobedience. This disobedience is the first step toward freedom. It makes possible the recovery of reason.

The longer we speak in the language of global capitalism, the longer we utter platitudes about the free market—even as we funnel hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into the accounts of large corporations—the longer we live in a state of collective self-delusion. Our power elite, who profess to hate government and government involvement in the free market, who claim they are the defenders of competition and individualism, have been stealing hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to nationalize mismanaged corporations and save them from bankruptcy. We hear angry and confused citizens, their minds warped by hate talk radio and television, condemn socialized medicine although we have become, at least for corporations, the most socialized nation on Earth. The schizophrenia between what we profess and what we actually embrace has rendered us incapable of confronting reality. The longer we speak in the old language of markets, capitalism, free trade and globalization the longer the entities that created this collapse will cannibalize the nation.   

What are we now? What do we believe? What economic model explains the irrationality of looting the U.S. Treasury to permit speculators at Goldman Sachs to make obscene profits? How can Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, tout a “jobless recovery”? How much longer can we believe the fantasy that global markets will replace nation states and that economics will permit us to create a utopian world where we will all share the same happy goals? When will we denounce the lie that globalization fosters democracy, enlightenment, worldwide prosperity and stability? When we will we realize that unfettered global trade and corporate profit are the bitter enemies of freedom and the common good?

Corporations are pushing through legislation in the United States that will force us to buy defective, for-profit health insurance, a plan that will expand corporate monopolies and profits at our expense and leave tens of millions without adequate care. Corporations are blocking all attempts to move to renewable and sustainable energy to protect the staggering profits of the oil, natural gas and coal industries. Corporations are plunging us deeper and deeper as a nation into debt to feed the permanent war economy and swell the military budget, which consumes half of all discretionary spending. Corporations use lobbyists and campaign contributions to maintain arcane tax codes that offer them tax havens and tax evasions. Corporations are draining the treasury while the working class sheds jobs, sees homes foreclosed and struggles to survive in a new and terrifying global serfdom. This has been the awful price of complacency.

Protests will begin several days before the summit. Many of the activities are being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. There will be a march Sept. 25 for anyone who, as Jessica Benner of the center’s Antiwar Committee stated, “has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food. … ” There will be at least three tent cities, in addition to a Music Camp beginning Sept. 18 that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street. Unemployed workers will set up one tent city at the Monumental Baptist Church on Sept. 20 and five days later will march on the Convention Center. The encampment and the march are being organized by Bail Out the People Movement (BOTM). The Institute for Policy Studies, The Nation magazine, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), Pittsburgh United and other organizations will host events including a panel on corporate globalization featuring former World Bank President Joseph Stiglitz, along with a “People’s Tribunal.” There will be a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert organized by Students for a Democratic Society.

But expect difficulties. The Secret Service has so far denied protesters permits while it determines the size of the “security perimeter” it will impose around the world leaders. Pittsburgh has contracted to bring in an extra 4,000 police officers at an estimated cost of $ 9.5 million. Activist groups have reported incidents of surveillance and harassment. The struggle to thwart the voices of citizens will be as fierce as the struggle to amplify the voices of the criminal class that is trashing the world’s economy. These elites will appear from behind closed doors with their communiqués and resolutions to address us in their specialized jargon of power and expertise. They will attempt to convince us they have not lost control. They will make recommitments to free-trade agreements from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, which have all thrust a knife into the backs of the working class. They will insist that the world can be managed and understood exclusively through their distorted lens of economics. But their day is over. They are the apostles of a dead system. They maintain power through fraud and force. Do not expect them to go without a struggle. But they have nothing left to say to us. 

“Those who profess to favour freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground,” Frederick Douglass wrote. “They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

If you can, go to Pittsburgh. This is an opportunity to defy the titans of the corporate state and speak in words that describe our reality. The power elite fear these words. If these words seep into the population, if they become part of our common vernacular, the elite and the systems they defend will be unmasked. Our collective self-delusion will be shattered. These words of defiance expose the lies and crimes the elite use to barrel us toward neofeudalism. And these words, when they become real, propel men and women to resist. 

“The end of something often resembles the beginning,” the philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote in “Voltaire’s Bastards.” “More often than not our nose-to-the-glass view makes us believe that the end we are living is in fact a new beginning. This confusion is typical of an old civilization’s self-confidence—limited by circumstances and by an absence of memory—and in many ways resembling the sort often produced by senility. Our rational need to control understanding and therefore memory has simply accentuated the confusion. … Nothing seems more permanent than a long-established government about to lose power, nothing more invincible than a grand army on the morning of its annihilation.”

The same skewed thinking that supports a Saddam-9/11 link explains the power of health-care myths.

Aug 25, 2009 by Sharon Begley

Not being a complete idiot (contrary to the assertion of many readers I’ve been hearing from), I was not exactly surprised at the e-mails I got in response to my story analyzing why the myths about health-care reform—even the totally loony ones, like death panels—have gained such traction. One retired military officer called me “nothing more than an ‘Obama Zombie’ that has lost touch with reality,” while a housewife sweetly suggested that I sign up for “socialistic medicine” and die, the sooner the better. (My kids get upset when people wish me dead, but hey, they’ll survive.) But now I think I understand people who believe the health-care lies—and the Obama-was-born-in-Kenya lie—even better than when I wrote that piece.

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama’s citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. “Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief,” he says, “people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.” And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). “For the most part,” says Hoffman, “people completely ignore contrary information” and are able to “develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information.”

His conclusions arise from a study he and six colleagues conducted. They were looking at the well-known phenomenon of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Some people, mostly liberals, have blamed that on false information and innuendo spread by the Bush administration and its GOP allies (by former members of the Bush White House, too, as recently as this past March). (As Dick Cheney said in June, suspicion of a link “turned out not to be true.”) But the researchers think another force is at work. In a paper to be published in the September issue of the journal Sociological Inquiry(you have to subscribe to the journal to read the full paper, but the authors kindly posted it on their Web site here), they argue that some Americans believe the Saddam-9/11 link because it “made sense of the administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq . . . [T]he fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11,” they write.

For their study, the scientists whittled down surveys filled out by 246 voters, of whom 73 percent believed in a Saddam-9/11 link, to 49 believers who were willing to be interviewed at length in October 2004. Even after the 49 were shown newspaper articles reporting that the 9/11 Commission had not found any evidence linking Saddam and 9/11, and quoting President Bush himself denying it, 48 stuck to their guns: yup, Saddam Hussein, directly or indirectly, brought down the Twin Towers.

When the scientists asked the participants why they believed in the link, they offered many justifications. Five argued that Saddam supported terrorism generally, or that evidence of a link to 9/11 might yet emerge. These counterarguments are not entirely illogical. But almost everyone else offered some version of “I don’t know; I don’t know anything”—that is, outright confusion over the conflict between what they believed and what the facts showed—or switched subjects to the invasion of Iraq. As one put it, when asked about his Saddam-9/11 belief, “There is no doubt in my mind that if we did not deal with Saddam Hussein when we did, it was just a matter of time when we would have to deal with him.” In other words, holding fast to the Saddam-9/11 belief helped people make sense of the decision to go to war against Iraq.

“We refer to this as ‘inferred justification,'” says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). “For these voters,” says Hoffman, “the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.”

For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.

Which brings us back to health-care reform—in particular, the apoplexy at town-hall meetings and the effectiveness of the lies being spread about health-care reform proposals. First of all, let’s remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he’s leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama’s health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors’ bank accounts?

Obama’s opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on “confirmation” that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumber—finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the “socialist” label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion label—anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

There are legitimate, fact-based reasons to oppose health-care reform. But some of the loudest opposition is the result of confirmatory bias, cognitive dissonance, and other examples of mental processes that have gone off the rails.

The overview of the book by Chris Hedges is so well articulated I have to share it.

By Tirdad Derakhshani

Inquirer Staff Writer

Real power in America doesn’t reside in citizens, or the government, but in corporations. So argues Chris Hedges in his new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books).

Hardly a revelation.

Anticorporate jeremiads have become a dime a dozen in this, the year of our economic discontent.

Hedges is no garden-variety prophet. The Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times foreign correspondent, who will read at 7:30 tonight at the Free Library of Philadelphia, has written a trenchantly argued critique of the near-destruction of the American dream by unfettered capitalism.

Hedges, whose previous books include American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, not only shows how corporations wield power, he also examines how they manipulate and reshape the individual’s sense of self.

Speaking by phone from his home in Princeton, Hedges says consumerist ideology has blinded Americans to reality.

“Our manufacturing base has been destroyed. Tens of millions of Americans live in real or near poverty. Our infrastructure is collapsing,” he says. “We have massive deficits that we can never repay. . . . And we have a permanent war economy” that eats up “half our discretionary spending.”

How do we react to all this? We shop, watch TV, shop some more, watch a bit more TV.

And, for the most part, we love it.

We are the 30 million deliriously upbeat Americans glued to the set each week for American Idol. (And we dream that someday, we, too, will be international stars.) We are the millions who devour magazines and TV specials that make us think we have intimate relationships with Cameron Diaz, or Robert Pattinson, or (heaven forbid!) Amy Winehouse.

We think we are happy, Hedges argues, because we think consumer culture – and the corporate power that underlies it – empowers us. In reality, it robs us of our moral autonomy.

Hedges says that our consumer conditioning has reduced “the values of thrift, a sense of community and self-sacrifice” to “a need for self-gratification.” Democracy is reduced to the same level as “consumer choice or voting on American Idol.”

The discrepancy between perception and reality, Hedges argues, has generated a culture of illusions that allow citizens to hide from reality. Infantilized by advertising, the media, and celebrity culture, we have become incapable of recognizing – much less fixing – the degradation of our social, political, and economic system.

“We are the most illusioned society on the face of the earth,” Hedges said. “Oprah, the Christian right, self-help gurus, Hollywood tell us that we can have everything we want. And it’s an illusion.”

In reality, Hedges writes in his book, we have become “virtually disempowered” by corporate America. As employees, we are little more than disposable commodities, and as consumers we are addicted to goods we don’t need.

Hedges argues that consumerism and celebrity culture have a powerful political function. “The whole fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain,” Hedges says, but to make us politically passive.

Hedges says the move from “managed capitalism” to “unfettered capitalism” over the last four to six decades – accomplished with the help of government deregulation – has refashioned America as a “corporate state run by and on behalf of corporations rather than citizens.” When corporate needs trump those of citizens, Hedges said, the poor and the weak don’t stand a chance.

The net result of corporate power, Hedges writes in Empire, is that human beings are remade in the corporate image. In a brilliant analysis, Hedges shows how the reality show Survivor celebrates character traits we usually associate with the mentally ill.

Hedges quotes contestants who claim they have formed lifelong friendships during the show. Within minutes, the same best friends viciously turn on each other.

“The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape [and] . . . has the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulations, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation; and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.”

As Hedges tells the reader, these are the character traits valued in corporate leaders.

These leaders are “willing to consume human beings and destroy the ecosystem for the higher good of corporate profit,” Hedges said.

He asserts that one of our greatest illusions is that reform is possible without questioning the system itself.

“The structure we have inherited of unfettered capitalism and globalization is accepted as natural law . . . as inevitable,” he says. Question its moral or social effects, and the typical response is: “What are you going to do? This is the way things are.” But must they be that way? Hedges asks. Economic systems were made by humans and can be remade.

Hedges says there is a great irony – and hypocrisy – at the heart of the current efforts to bail out failed companies.

“What is so mendacious and pernicious about this is that until these institutions collapsed, all they talked about is the market and unfettered capitalism. And when, because of their own folly, greed, and mismanagement, it collapsed, they are raiding the Treasury.

“We’ve become a socialist nation – but socialism for corporations.”

Read this brilliant and humorous chapter from Chris Hedges’ new book and marvel as the Pulitzer-prize-winning war correspondent makes sense of reality television.

Adapted from “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” available from Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.  Copyright © 2009.

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges talks about his new book, “Empire of Illusion,” with the Philadelphia Inquirer. The book connects cultural decline with the transformation of America into a “corporate state run by and on behalf of corporations rather than citizens.”

Celebrity worship banishes reality.  And this adulation is pervasive.  It is dressed up in the language of the Christian Right, which builds around its leaders, people like Pat Robertson or Joel Olsteen, the aura of stardom, fame and celebrity power.  These Christian celebrities travel in private jets and limousines.  They are surrounded by retinues of bodyguards, have television programs where they cultivate the same false intimacy with the audience, and, like all successful celebrities, amass personal fortunes. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of women to Oprah Winfrey, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship.  We seek to be like them.  We seek to make them like us.  If Jesus and The Purpose Driven Life won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will.  We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated.

“What does the contemporary self want?” asked critic William Deresiewicz:

The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge —broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.9

We pay a variety of lifestyle advisers – Neal Gabler calls them “essentially drama coaches” – to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life.  Martha Stewart built her financial empire, when she wasn’t insider trading, telling women how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect home.  The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed.  Appearances make everything whole.  Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities.  And happiness comes, we are assured, with we look and how we present ourselves to others.  There are glossy magazines like Town & Country which cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities.  They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set-pieces that are their homes.  The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we show ourselves to the world.  We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness.

The Swan was a Fox reality makeover show.  The title of the series referred to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling,” in which a bird thought to be homely grew up and became a swan. “Unattractive” women were chosen to undergo three months of extensive plastic surgery, physical training, and therapy for a “complete life transformation.”  Each episode featured two “ugly ducklings” who compete with each other to go on to the Swan beauty pageant.  “I am going to be a new person,” said one contestant in the opening credits.

In one episode, Cristina, twenty-seven, an Ecuador-born office administrator from Rancho Cordova, California, was chosen to be on the program.

“It’s not just the outside I want to change, but it’s the inside, too,” Cristina told the camera mournfully.  She had long black hair and light brown skin.  She wore baggy gray sweatshirts and no makeup.  Her hair was pulled back.  We discovered that she was devastatingly insecure about being intimate with her husband because of her post-pregnancy stretch marks.  The couple considered divorce.

“I just want to be, not a completely different person, but I want to be a better Cristina,” she said.

As a “dream team” of plastic surgeons discussed the necessary corrections, viewers saw a still image of Cristina, in a gray cotton bra and underwear, superimposed on a glowing blue grid.  Her small, drooping breasts, wrinkled stomach, and fleshy thighs were apparent.  A schematic figure of an idealized female form revolved at the left of the screen.  Crosshairs targeted and zoomed in on each flawed area of Cristina’s face and body. The surgical procedures she would undergo were typed out beside each body part. Brow lift, eye lift, nose job, liposuction of chin and cheeks, dermatologist visits, collagen injections, LASIK eye surgery, tummy tuck, breast augmentation, liposuction of thighs, dental bleaching, full dental veneers, gum tissue recontouring, a 1,200-calorie daily diet, 120 hours in the gym, weekly therapy, and coaching.  The effect was suggestive of a military operation.  The image of a blueprint and crosshairs was used repeatedly through the program.

Cristina was shown writing in her diary: “I want a divorce because I think that my husband can do better without me.  And it would be best for us to go in different directions.  I am not happy with myself at all, so I think, why make this guy unhappy for the rest of his life?”

At the end of the three months, Cristina and her opponent, Kristy, were finally allowed to look in a mirror for “the final reveal.”  They were brought separately to what looked like a marble hotel foyer.  Curving twin staircases with ornate iron banisters framed the action.  A crystal chandelier glittered at the top of the stairs.  Sconces and oil paintings in gold frames hung on the cream-colored walls.

The “dream team” was assembled in the marble lobby.  Massive peach curtains obscured one wall.

“I think Cristina has really grown into herself as a woman, and she’s ready to go back home and start her marriage all over again,” said the team therapist.

Two men in tuxedos opened a set of tall double doors.  Cristina entered in a tight black evening gown and long black gloves.  She was meticulously made up, and her hair had been carefully styled with extensions.  The “dream team” burst into applause and whoops.

“I’ve been waiting twenty-seven years for this day,” Cristina told host Amanda Byram tearfully.  “I came for a dream, the American dream, like all the Latinas do, and I got it!”

“You got it!” cheered Byram.  “Yes, you did!”

Reverberating drumbeats were heard.  “Behind that curtain,” says Byram, “is a mirror.  We will draw back the curtain, the mirror will be revealed, and you will see yourself for the first time in three months.  Cristina, step up to the curtain.”

Short, suspenseful cello strokes were heard.  There was a tumbling drumroll.

“I’m ready,” quavered Cristina.

The curtain parted slowly in the middle.  An elaborate full-length mirror reflected Cristina.  The cello strokes billowed into the Swan theme song.

“Oh, my God!” she gasped, covering her face.  She doubled over.  Her knees buckled.  She almost hit the floor.  “I am so beautiful!!!”  she sobbed.  “Thank you, oh, thank you so much!!  Thank you, God!!  Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for this!!  Look at my arms, my figure … I love the dress!  Thank you, oh!!  I’m in love with myself!”

he “dream team” burst into applause again.  “Well, you owe this to yourself,” said Byram.  “But you also owe it to these fantastic experts.  Guys, come on in.”

The crowd of smiling experts closed in on their creation, clapping as they approached.

At the end of each episode the two contestants were called before Byram to hear who would advance to the pageant.  The winner often wept and was hugged by the loser.  Byram then pulled the loser aside for “one final surprise.”  The double doors opened once more, and her family was invited onto the set for a joyful reunion.  In celebrity culture, family is the consolation prize for not making it to the pageant.

The Swan’s transparent message is that once these women have been surgically “corrected” to resemble mainstream celebrity beauty as closely as possible, their problems will be solved.  “This is a positive show where we want to see how these women can make their dreams come true once they have what they want,” said Cecile Frot-Coutaz, CEO of FremantleMedia North America, producers of The Swan.  Troubled marriages, abusive relationships, unemployment, crushing self-esteem problems – all will vanish along with the excess fat off their thighs.  They will be new.  They will be flawless.  They will be celebrities.

In the Middle Ages, writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, stained glass windows and vivid paintings of religious torment and salvation controlled and influenced social behavior.  Today we are ruled by icons of gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from television, cinema, and computer screens.  People knelt before God and the church in the Middle Ages.  We flock hungrily to the glamorous crumbs that fall to us from glossy magazines, talk and entertainment shows, and reality television.  We fashion our lives as closely to these lives of gratuitous consumption as we can.  Only a life with status, physical attributes and affluence is worth pursuing.

Hedonism and wealth are openly worshipped on shows such as The Hills, Gossip Girl, Sex and the City, My Super Sweet 16, and The Real Housewives of …  The American oligarchy, one percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom ninety percent combined, are the characters we envy and watch on television.  They live and play in multimillion-dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts.  They marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres, flaunting their surgically enhanced, perfect bodies in haute couture. Their teenagers throw $200,000 parties and have $ 1 million dollar weddings.  This life is held before us like a beacon.  This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying.

The working classes, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are shut out of television’s gated community.  They have become largely invisible.  They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms.  Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power.  Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything.  We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.  We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume countless lies daily, 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.  It is, as Christopher Lasch diagnosed, a culture of narcissism. 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, evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help bestsellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists, and business tycoons, all peddle a 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 and who grasp the hollowness of celebrity culture, are shunned and condemned for their pessimism.  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 very aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything.

American Idol, a talent-search reality show that airs on Fox, is one of the most popular shows on American television.  The show travels to different American cities in a “countrywide search” for the contestants who will continue to the final competition in Hollywood.  The producers of the show introduced a new focus in the 2008-2009 season on the personal stories of the contestants.

During the Utah auditions we meet Megan Corkrey, 23, the single mother of a toddler.  She has long dirty-blond hair, and a wholesome, pretty face.  A tattoo sleeve covers her right arm from the shoulder to below the elbow.  She wears a black, grey, and white dress reminiscent of the 1950s, and ballet flats.  She is a font designer.

In an interview Corkrey says, “I am a mother.  He will be two in December.”  We see Corkrey with a little blond boy, reading a book together on a beanbag chair.  Breezy guitar music plays.  “His name is Ryder.”  We see Corkrey kissing Ryder and putting him to bed. “I recently decided to get a divorce, which is new.” The guitar music turns pensive.  “The life I had planned for us, the life I’d pictured, wasn’t going to happen.  I cried a lot for a while.  I don’t think I stopped crying.  And Ryder, of course, you can be crying, and then he walks by, and does something ridiculous, and you can’t help but smile and laugh.”  We see Corkrey laughing with her son on the floor.  “And a little piece kind of heals up a little bit.”

The montage of Corkrey’s life fills the screen as the rock ballad swells.  “I can laugh at myself, while the tears roll down …,”  sings the band.  We see Corkrey and her son looking out a window.  She holds her son up to a basketball hoop as he clutches a blue ball.

“It was kind of crazy, I found out Idol was coming to Salt Lake, and I’d just decided on the divorce, and for the first time in my life it was a crossroads where ANYTHING can happen!!  So why not go for what I love to do?”

 

Corkrey enters the audition room.  The judges – Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, and Kara DioGuardi – are seated behind a long table in front of a window.  They each have large red tumblers with “Coca-Cola” printed on them.  They seem charmed by her exuberant presence.  She sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from Show Boat.  Her performance is charismatic and quirky.  She improvises freely and assuredly with the rhythms and notes of the song, beaming the whole time.

“I really like you,” says Abdul.  “I’m bordering on loving you.  I think I’m loving you.  Yeah, I do.  Simon?”

“One of my favorite auditions,” says Cowell in a monotone.

“Yess!!” grins Corkrey.

“Because you’re different,” continues Cowell sternly.  “You are one of the few I’m going to remember.  I like you, I like your voice, I mean seriously good voice.  I loved it.”

“You’re an interesting girl.  You have a glow about you, you have an incredible face,” says DioGuardi.

The judges vote.

“Absolutely yes,” says Cowell.

“Love you,” says Abdul.

“Yes!” says DioGuardi.

“One hundred percent maybe,” smiles Jackson.

“You’re goin’ to Hollywood!” cheers DioGuardi as the inspirational rock music swells.

“YESS!!! Thank you, guys!”  Corkrey screams with delight.  She runs out of the audition room into a crowd of her cheering friends.  The music plays as she dances down the street waving her large yellow ticket, the symbol of her success.

Celebrities, who often come from humble backgrounds, are held up as proof that anyone, even we, can be adored by the world.  These celebrities, like saints, are living proof 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, eventually leads to frustration, anger, insecurity, and invalidation.  It results, ironically, in 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.  We beg for more.  We ingest these lies until our money runs 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.

Human beings become a commodity in a celebrity culture.  They are objects, like consumer products.  They have no intrinsic value.  They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets.  Those who fail to meet the ideal are belittled and mocked.  Friends and allies are to be used and betrayed during the climb to fame, power and wealth.  And when they are no longer useful they are to be discarded.  In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant television screens that show endless scenes of police chases and criminal apprehensions.  Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment.

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty, transparency, and sharing are qualities that will see you, in a gross perversion of democracy and morality, voted off a reality show.  Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame elect to “disappear” the unwanted.  In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen.  Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, non-persons.  Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition. Life is about the personal humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are the best.  Those who lose deserve to be erased.  Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity with others are forms of weakness.  And those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve to lose.  Those who are denigrated and ridiculed on reality television, often as they sob in front of the camera, are branded as failures.  They are responsible for their rejection.  They are deficient.

In an episode from the second season of the CBS reality game show Survivor, cast members talk about exceptional friendships they have made within their “tribe,” or team.  Maralyn, also known as Mad Dog, is a fifty-two-year-old retired police officer with a silver crew cut and a tall, mannish build.  She is sunning herself in a shallow stream, singing “On the Street Where You Live.”  Tina, a personal nurse and mother, walks up the stream toward her.

“Sing it, girl!  I just followed your voice.”

“Is it that loud?”

“Maralyn, she’s kind of like our little songbird, and our little cheerleader in our camp,” Tina says in an interview.  “Maralyn and I have bonded, more so than I have with any of the other people.  It might be our ages, it might just be that we kind of took up for one another.”

We see Tina and Maralyn swimming and laughing together in the river.

“Tina is a fabulous woman,” says Maralyn in an interview.  “She is a star.  I trust Tina the most.”

Maralyn and Tina’s tribe, Ogakor, loses an obstacle course challenge, in which all the tribe members are tethered together.  If one person falls, the entire team is slowed.  Mad Dog Maralyn falls several times, and is hauled back to her feet by Colby, the “cowboy” from Texas.

Because they lost, the members of Ogakor must vote off one of their tribe members.  The camera shows small groups of twos and threes in huddled, intense discussion.

“The mood in the camp is a very sad mood, but it’s also a very strategic mood,” says Tina.  “Everyone’s thinking, ‘Who’s thinking what?’ ”

The vote is taken at dusk, in the “tribal council” area.  It resembles a set from Disney World’s Adventureland.  A ring of tall stone monoliths is stenciled with petroglyphs.  It is lit by torches.  A campfire blazes in the center of the ring.  Primitive drums and flutes are heard.

The Ogakor team arrives at dusk, each holding a torch. They sit before Survivor’s host, Jeff Probst.

“So I just want to talk about a couple of big topics,” says Probst, who wears a safari outfit.  “Trust.  Colby, is there anyone here that you don’t trust, wouldn’t trust?”

“Sure,” says Colby.

“Tell me about that.”

“Well, I think that’s part of the game,” says Colby.  “It’s way too early to tell exactly who you can trust, I think.”

“What about you, Mitchell?  Would you trust everyone here for forty-two days?”  asks Probst.  “I think the motto is, ‘Trust no one,’ ” answers Mitchell.  “I have a lot of faith in a good number of these people, but I couldn’t give 100 percent of my trust.”

“What about you, Mad Dog?” asks Probst.  “These all your buddies?”

Maralyn looks around at her team members.  “Yes,” she says unequivocally.  “Yes.  And, Jeff, I trust with my heart.”

“I think friendship does enter into it at some point,” says Jerri.  “But I think it’s very important to keep that separate from the game.  It’s two totally different things.  And that’s where it gets tricky.”  Jerri will say later, as she casts her vote, “This is probably one of the most difficult things for me to do right now.  It’s purely strategic, it’s nothing personal.  I am going to miss you dearly.”

“Jeff,” Maralyn breaks in.  “I’m conjoined with Tina.  She is a constellation.  And, the cowboy [Colby]!  The poor cowboy has dragged me around so many times [during the obstacle course challenge].  I appreciate it.”

“I’d do it again,” laughs Colby broadly.

“Hey, you hear that? He’d do it again!” says Maralyn.

It is time to vote.  Each team member walks up a narrow bridge lit by flaring torches, again looking like something out of Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, made of twisted logs lashed with vines, to a stone table.  They write the name of the person they want to eliminate and put it in a cask with aboriginal carvings.  Most of the votes are kept anonymous, the camera panning away as each person writes.  But as Tina, Mad Dog Maralyn’s best friend and “constellation,” casts her vote, she shows us her ballot: Mad Dog.  “Mad Dog, I love you,” she says to the camera, “I value your friendship more than anything.  This vote has everything to do with a promise I made, it has nothing to do with you.  I hope you’ll understand.”  She folds her vote and puts it in the cask.

“Once the vote is tallied, the decision is final, and the person will be asked to leave the tribal council area immediately,” says Probst.

Five people of the seven voted to eliminate Maralyn.

“You need to bring me a torch, Mad Dog,” says Probst.  She does so, first taking off her green baseball cap and putting it affectionately on Amber, who sits next to her and gives her a hug.  The camera shows Tina looking impassive.

“Mad Dog,” says Probst, holding the flaming torch Maralyn has brought him, “the tribe has spoken.”  He takes a large stone snuffer and extinguishes the torch.  The camera shows Marilynn’s rueful face behind the smoking, blackened torch.  “It’s time for you to go,” says Probst.  She leaves without speaking or looking at anyone, although there are a few weak “bye” ’s from the tribe.

Before the final credits, we are shown who, besides her friend Tina, voted to eliminate Maralyn. They are Amber, who gave Maralyn a farewell hug along with Mitchell, Jerri and Colby, Maralyn’s “cowboy.”

Celebrity culture plunges us into this moral void.  No one has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or ability to “succeed.”  The highest achievements in a celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame.  It does not matter how these are obtained.  These values, as Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory.  They are hollow. They leave us chasing vapors.  They urge us toward a life of narcissistic self-absorption.  They tell us that existence is to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather than the common good. The ability to lie and manipulate others, the very ethic of capitalism, is held up as the highest good.  “I simply agreed to go along with [Jerri and Amber] because I thought it would get me down the road a little better,” says young, good-looking Colby in another episode of Survivor.  “I wanna win.  And I don’t want to talk to anybody else about loyalties – don’t give me that crap.  I haven’t trusted anyone since day one, and anyone playing smart should have been the same way.”

The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape.  This cult shares within it the classic traits of psychopaths; superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.  This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality.  We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous.  Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality.  How one gets there is irrelevant.  Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.

It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street bankers and investment houses that willfully trashed the nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these corporations for retirement or college.  The heads of these corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation.  In his masterful essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote: “The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.”10

“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition,” wrote C. Wright Mills:

In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and skill than anyone else thereby gains access to the President of the United States.  It is carried to the point where a chattering radio and television entertainer becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial executives, cabinet members, and the higher military.  It does not seem to matter what the man is the very best at; so long as he has won out in competition over all others, he is celebrated.  Then, a second feature of the star system begins to work: all the stars of any other sphere of endeavor or position are drawn toward the new star and he toward them.  The success, the champion, accordingly, is one who mingles freely with other champions to populate the world of the celebrity.11

Degradation as entertainment is the squalid underside to the glamour of celebrity culture.  “If only that were me,” we sigh as we gaze at the wealthy, glimmering stars on the red carpet.  But we are as transfixed by the inverse of celebrity culture, by the spectacle of humiliation and debasement that comprise tabloid television shows such as The Jerry Springer Show and The Howard Stern Show.  We secretly exult: “At least that’s not me.”  It is the glee of cruelty with impunity, the same impulse that drove crowds to the Roman Colosseum, to the pillory and the stocks, to public hangings and to traveling freak shows.

In one segment from Jerry Springer: Wild & Outrageous, Volume 1, a man and his wife sit on the Springer stage.  They are obese, soft, and pale, with mounds of fluffy brown hair.  Their bodies look like uncooked dough.  The man wears a blue polo shirt and brown pants.  The woman wears a dark pink shirt with long sleeves and a long black skirt.

“I have a sex fantasy,” the man tells his wife solemnly.  His voice is quiet and nasal.  She recoils with raised eyebrows.  “Do you remember that bachelor party I went to three weeks ago?  There was a stripper there.  She was dressed up as a cheerleader, and she just turned me on.  I mean, I got – I have this thing – I don’t know if it’s her or the outfit, I think it’s the outfit.  But, I’d really love for you to dress up as a cheerleader.  For me.  And do a cheer that’s especially for me, and. … You could be my cheerleader … of my heart.”

The woman, still sitting in her chair, has her hands on her hips and looks affronted.  There are close-ups of the Springer audience bursting into raucous laughter, hoots, and applause.

“I brought her here to show you—” continues the man.  He is cut off by the whoops of the audience.

“Let’s bring her out!” says Jerry.  The audience cheers.

Shaking yellow pom-poms, a skinny blond girl in a purple and yellow cheerleader outfit runs out onstage.  Her body is like a stick.  She turns a cartwheel and moons the audience, smacking her own bottom several times.  Behind her, the obese man is shown grinning.  The obese woman is waving in disgust at the cheerleader.

“Is everybody ready to do a cheer just for Jerry?!” squeaks the cheerleader.

“YEAAAHHH!!!” hollers the audience.

“I can’t hear yoooouuuuuu…” pipes the cheerleader, lifting her skirt up to her waist.

The audience goes crazy.  She leads a cheer, spelling out Jerry’s name.

“Now that you’ve seen these pom-poms, how’d you like to see these pom-poms?” she squeaks, shaking her flat chest.  A rapid electronic beat fills the studio, and the lights dim.  She takes off her top, her bra, and, gyrating her hips, slides off her skirt and underwear.  Her bottom is about three feet from the whooping men in the front row.  The obese man’s arms and legs are waving around in excitement, as his grimacing wife shakes her head repeatedly.  The naked cheerleader leans back on the floor and does the splits in the air.  She then jumps into the fat man’s lap and smothers his face in her tiny chest.  She runs into the audience and does the same to another man and a gray-haired woman in a cardigan who looks like a grandmother.  The cameramen follow the cheerleader closely, zooming in on her breasts and ass.

While the naked, ponytailed girl runs around leaping into the laps of members of the audience, the crowd begins chanting, under the deafening electronic music, “JER-RY!  JER-RY!  JER-RY!  JER-RY!”

The girl finally runs back onstage.  The music stops.  She collects her pom-poms and sits down naked, dressed only in a pair of white tennis shoes and bobby socks.

“JER-RY!  JER-RY!  JER-RY!” chants the crowd.

In a later portion of the episode, Jerry says to the man, “So this is really what you want your wife to be doing?”  The naked cheerleader is seated beside him, and his wife is no longer onstage.

“Oh, yes!” he exclaims.  The audience laughs at his fervor.  “It really excites me, Jerry.  It really does.”

“All right,” says Jerry.  “Well, are we ready to bring her out?”

“YEESSSSS!!!” bellows the audience.

“Here she is!” announces Jerry.  “Cheerleading Kristen!”

The wife runs out onto the stage.  She is in an identical purple and yellow cheerleading outfit, with yellow pom-poms.  Her fluffy brown hair is tied into two bunches on the sides of her head.  She resembles a poodle.  Her exposed midriff is a thick, white roll of fat that hangs over her short purple skirt and shakes with every step.

She turns a clumsy somersault.  She prances heavily back and forth on the stage.  She does cancan kicks.  She yells “WHOOOOOO!!!”  Her husband is seen behind her, yelling with the rest of the audience.  She leads a cheer of Jerry’s name, but forgets the Y.  The audience laughs.  She finishes the cheer.  There is a shot of Jerry watching quietly at the back of the studio, leaning against the soundman’s booth, his hand covering his mouth.

The wife continues to high-step back and forth.  The clapping and cheers subside.  The audience has fallen silent.  “WHOOO!!” she yells again.  She does, in complete silence, a few more lumbering kicks.  A few individuals snicker in the crowd.  Jerry is shown at the soundman’s booth, doubled over in soundless laughter.  The woman is confused.  She looks to the side of the stage, as though she is being prompted.  “Oh – OK,” she says.

She takes center stage again.  “All right,” she says.  “You’ve seen these pom-poms.”  Individual giggles are heard from the audience.  “Now what about THESE?”  Her husband watches eagerly.  The naked stripper, sitting behind her, laughs.

The stripping music comes on.  The lights dim.  The wife does more cancan kicks.  She trots back and forth.  She takes off all her clothes except her underpants.  The audience is clapping to the beat, whooping, and laughing.  Some of them are covering their eyes.  Others are covering their mouths.  She continues prancing onstage, doing the occasional kick, until the music stops.

“JER-RY!!  JER-RY!!  JER-RY!!” chants the crowd.  Her husband wraps his arms around her naked torso and kisses her.

“You made my wildest dreams come true,” he tells her.

Individuals laugh in the audience.

“Aww,” says Jerry, shaking his head.  “That is true love.”  The woman collects her scattered clothes.  “That is—that is—that is—true love.”

Celebrities are skillfully used by their handlers and the media to compensate for the increasingly degraded and regimented existences that most of us endure in a commodity culture.  Celebrities tell us we can have our revenge.  We can triumph.  We can, one day, get back at the world that has belittled and abused us.  It happens in the ring.  It happens on television.  It happens in the movies.  It happens in the narrative of the Christian Right.  It happens in pornography.  It happens in the self-help manuals and on reality television.  But it almost never happens in reality.

Celebrity is the vehicle used by a corporate society to sell us these branded commodities, most of which we do not need.  Celebrities humanize commercial commodities.  They present the familiar and comforting face of the corporate state.  Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, on an episode of America’s Next Top Model, gushes to a group of aspiring young models, “Our job as models is to sell.” But they peddle a fake intimacy and a fantasy.  The commercial “personalizing” of the world involves oversimplification, distraction, and gross distortion.  “We sink further into a dream of an unconsciously intimate world in which not only may a cat look at a king but a king is really a cat underneath, and all the great power-figures Honest Joes at heart,” Richard Hoggart warned in The Uses of Literacy.  We do not learn more about Barack Obama by knowing what dog he has bought for his daughters or if he still smokes.  This personalized trivia, passed off as news, diverts us from reality.

In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojeck calls celebrity culture “the cult of distraction that valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity culture.”  He goes further:

Capitalism originally sought to police play and pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the central life interest threatened the economic survival of the system.  The family, the state and religion engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation to control desire and ensure compliance with the system of production.  However, as capitalism developed, consumer culture and leisure time expanded.  The principles that operated to repress the individual in the workplace and the home were extended to the shopping mall and recreational activity.  The entertainment industry and consumer culture produced what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation.’ Through this process individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded version of humanity.13

This cult of distraction, as Rojeck points out, masks the real disintegration of culture.  It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives.  It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption.  It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, and economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy.  Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay.  Consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit.  Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami, shopping.  Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations who have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them.

Celebrities have fame free of responsibility.  The fame of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but of totalitarian culture.  And as we sink into an economic and political morass, we are still controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the dark wall of Plato’s cave.  The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain.  It is designed to keep us from fighting back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am grateful for Dr. Wayne Dyer.  He has been inspiring me for almost 30 years.  In his latest book EXCUSES BEGONE he tells the following story about the value of compassion.

It seems that a woman who lived a Tao-centered life came upon a precious stone while sitting by the banks of a running stream in the mountains, and she placed this highly valued item in her bag.

The next day, a hungry traveler approached the woman and asked for something to eat. As she reached into her bag for a crust of bread, the traveler saw the precious stone and imagined how it would provide him with financial security for the remainder of his life. He asked the woman to give the treasure to him, and she did, along with some food. He left, ecstatic over his good fortune and the knowledge that he was now secure.

A few days later the traveler returned and handed back the stone to the wise woman. “I’ve been thinking,” he told her. “Although I know how valuable this is, I’m returning it to you in the hopes that you could give me something even more precious.”

“What would that be?” the woman inquired.

“Please give me what you have within yourself that enabled you to give me that stone.”

By Bill Maher

Posted: July 23, 2009 11:56 PM

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn’t do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn’t used to define us. But now it’s becoming all that we are. Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a “war profiteer” was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves ­– like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.

Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason –­ who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you’re going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that’s where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That’s why America has the world;s largest prison population ­– because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.

Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite’s day. I thought, “Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.”

But maybe they aren’t. Because unlike in Cronkite’s day, today’s news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That’s why it wasn’t surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter’s time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.

And finally, there’s health care. It wasn’t that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.

But like everything else that’s good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they’re run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They’re not hospitals anymore; they’re Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America’s largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it’s not a right, it’s a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they’re always pushing the Jell-O.

Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like “recision,” where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you’ve been paying into your plan for years.

When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what’s in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

If conservatives get to call universal health care “socialized medicine,” I get to call private health care “soulless vampires making money off human pain.” The problem with President Obama’s health care plan isn’t socialism, it’s capitalism.

And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what’s wrong with firemen? Why don’t they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!

Posted on Jul 16, 2009

By William Pfaff

ATHENS—The peculiar charm of the anthropomorphic gods of classical Greece is that they were so like us, exemplifying our weaknesses and follies, inspiring the mortal occupants of Attic Greece to the invention of philosophy—the application of natural reason to the causes and meaning of existence—and to tragedy, which deals with the irony and confrontation with justice that destroys a human of noble but flawed intentions.

If one tries to draw an urgently contemporary lesson from Greek myth, the story of Midas is irresistible. It provides a commentary on our global economic and financial crisis, in which the pursuit of wealth has ruined us.

Seventy years ago, capitalism was widely thought to have failed because of the Crash and Great Depression. Following the Second World War, however, the United States was reassured by the wartime accomplishment of American industry, while in Western Europe there was less confidence. The magical promises of revolutionary change offered by fascism and communism between the wars were discredited.

Fascism in Italy famously made the trains run on time, drained the Pontine Marshes and launched an improbable new Roman imperialism.

Nazi Germany’s people were put to work by public investment, building the first limited-access national public highway system, and by rearmament. The raison d’etre of both fascism and Nazism proved ultimately to be war.

The Soviet system attracted parts of the Western working class and intelligentsia because of its romantic millenarianism, promising to make everyone happy in a new and better world, while crushing those who stood in the way.

The Cold War effectively stranded those in Western Europe and the U.S. who had been part of the pro-communist left before the war, leaving Western governments with their prewar capitalist and social democratic economic systems to rebuild.

This proved a great success; the industrial and social systems were rebuilt in Europe, with Marshall aid, and the American economy soared to meet postwar consumer demand and to create the military-industrial system Dwight Eisenhower warned against but which the Cold War seemed to demand. Whatever the fantasy that went into the latter—and there was much—all this Western economic activity was connected to utility. In all of the democracies there was an acknowledged obligation to share the wealth.

The social transformation of the United States during the 1950s and 1960s was phenomenal, due to the education of the population, thanks to the GI Bill of Rights, and to new popular housing and innovative enterprise. In continental Europe, the early postwar decades are still commonly referred to as the “glorious years.”

What brought the Western economies from that to the present world crisis was, in my view, a revolutionary theory. The American business model was changed. At some point a consensus emerged in the academic community on a new business model. This demanded abandonment of the social concerns previously expected from business, and demanded from corporations the highest possible profits.

It advocated minimal taxation and political regulation, so as to produce the highest stockholder earnings possible. It said that a rationally perfected industrial economy must be based on maximized pursuit of self-interest, and would then automatically bring the greatest possible efficiency and return.

Maximum self-interest by management would impose maximum productivity at lowest possible wage cost from labor. Free trade and globalization would produce raw materials at lowest possible cost, and maximum sales income.

Ethical responsibility (beyond minimal legality) and civic obligation would be stripped from business as obstacles to maximized profit, which the theory claimed would in the long run automatically produce the best possible outcome for society as a whole. That is the world in which we have been living.

Now, to Midas.

In the June 19 issue of the (London) Times Literary Supplement, the Exeter University classicist Richard Seaford elaborates on an argument he first made in 2004 in a book called “Money and the Early Greek Mind.” This proposed that “the pivotal position of the Greeks” in the world culture of the period they dominated came largely from their invention of money.

Until money, an individual’s possible possessions had to be tangible, useful and necessarily limited enough to enjoy and control. One can directly possess only so much property, herds and ships, or enjoy only so much food, sex, honors, reputation and so on, before being satisfied (or sated). But you cannot possess too much money, because money is fungible, transferable, portable and theoretically unlimited in quantity.

Money thus isolates the individual because it removes him from the real world of relationships, property and useful things, to the world of potentially unlimited possession of something whose essential characteristic is that in itself it is useless. It destroys limits in society and in human relations because it places the individual, or a society, in a position, as Seaford says, of “predatory isolation.”

This was the plight of Midas. He could not drink, eat, touch or love, because anything and everything he touched turned to gold. He bore the worst of curses—which he had himself invited. He begged for mercy from the god Dionysus, who lifted the curse. Who will lift the curse from us?