Only in America Could Misery Be Turned Into a Commodity

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted February 11, 2009.

By comparison, my doctor in Jalisco, Mexico, Jim Jaramillo, who practiced in Albuquerque for 30 years, invites me to ride into the surrounding ranch country and have a dawn drink with the Mexican cowboys, simply because he regards all his patients as friends. And "Nurse Judy," who runs the main clinic here in Hopkins, whoops it up with the rest of her patients on Friday oldies night down by the beach. The village's Dr. Anya, a Mayan-mestizo lady trained in Castro's famous Cuban institution, dropped by my cabana to examine the local kids on my front porch. For free. Then we played guitar together.

I asked her if she could teach me any local folk songs. "No," she said, "I'm into Iris Dementh." Go figure. Anyway, none of these doctors require appointments.

But we started out talking about the psychic pathology of Americanness, didn't we? So without going too far over ground well enough covered by better and more authoritative writers than I, the pathology of Americanness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state.

The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized, by authority since it was first openly broached in the '60s. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things, too, in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope.

Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind-expanding drugs. And ever since then, corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind-numbing antidepressants and the like have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become.

Not that I'm entirely opposed. As I've said before, if this officially sanctioned dope were a bit more ecstatic and colorful, I'd be right there in line for my share. Hell, I'm an American -- instant gratification works for me, too. But an anesthetic to workhouse burnout just ain't enough incentive. Beyond that, the street drugs are crap these days. So to our King Kong pharmaceutical industry, I say: "Work with me here guys!"

Seriously though, back in the '60s, along with LSD, nature and Buddhism, I looked to psychology for answers. Sure, psychology was very much a bourgeois affectation and fad at the time. But it looked damned promising to many of us, including a redneck hippie with tons of cultural and family baggage to unload and an allergy to mindless toil -- especially those aspects of psychology that dealt with social realization.

But who'd have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored "mental heath system?" And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members.

Now, collective societal responsibility is common sense for, say, a Dane or a Frenchman. Most of them anyway. For Americans though, it's an explosive issue.

Because if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Some gestures are now being made in that direction, thanks to President Barack Obama, but it's still America's longest-standing hot tater that I doubt even he will hold very long.

Every successful, well-off American, or even so called middle-class Americans -- we seem to be unable to truly define them; even uninsured households earning under $25,000 most often define themselves as middle class, thanks to our national denial of our class system -- succeeds at the expense of some other American. Or more accurately at the expense of an entire, unacknowledged underclass of them.

Consequently, we get the "self-determination" and "individual initiative" stuff as an excuse and cover-up. An attractive one, too, given that it implies some sort of superiority of effort or talent. And there's no denying that life requires some of both from everyone. But that does not reconcile our larger-than-ever class discrepancies, much less the alienation one feels when he or she cannot trust that his or her society is operating on his or her behalf.

Whatever else can be said of capitalism, it is miraculous stuff, pure alchemy. It can privatize and corporatize any damned thing under the sun, turn a profit on it, and then make it a bulwark of corporate state control to boot. Even human misery and oppression of soul and mind.

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Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his Web site.

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