TAKE THE EMOTIONAL HIGH GROUND

For some time now I’ve suffered from this unfocused fear that, here in the new 21st century depression, it all looked too fucking normal. No oakies. No railroad bums. No starving kids with flies buzzing around their eyes. While friends and acquaintances lose jobs, run out of money, and look quietly but increasing more desperate, the superficial world goes on with an appearance that everything – and by that I mean corporate capitalism – goes on as if there was no cause for concern. Although worrying, the feeling was sufficiently nebulous that I hadn’t managed to actually write anything about it. And now Munz has sent me this on-the-money piece by Chris Hedges from Common Dreams I guess I don’t need to because Hedges – give or take a point – voices many of the these uneasy thoughts.

“The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton's draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.
Our economic crisis-despite the corporate media circus around the death of Michael Jackson or Gov. Mark Sanford's marital infidelity or the outfits of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest incarnation, Brüno-barrels forward. And this crisis will lead to a period of profound political turmoil and change. Those who care about the plight of the working class and the poor must begin to mobilize quickly or we will lose our last opportunity to save our embattled democracy. The most important struggle will be to wrest the organs of communication from corporations that use mass media to demonize movements of social change and empower proto-fascist movements such as the Christian right.” Click here to read the rest.

The secret word is Deception