Bageant: We've Let Corporations and Media Rob Our Souls -- It's Time to Do Something Meaningful

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted April 6, 2009.

Most Belizeans own their homes outright, and all citizens are entitled to a free piece of land upon which to build one. Employment is scarce, and that has a down side: Many folks waste a lot of valuable time having sex , perhaps because they have too much time on their hands. The Jehovah's Witnesses missionaries are working hard to fix that problem.

Anyway, American and Canadian tourists drive by in their rented SUVs, and you can see by their expressions they are scared as hell of those barefooted black folks in the sand around them.

Central America sure as hell ain't heaven. But lives there are not what we Americans are told about the Third World either. It's not a flyblown, dangerous place run by murdering drug lords and full of miserable people. It's just a whole lot of very poor people trying to get by and make a decent society.

I mention these things because it's a good example of how North Americans live in a parallel universe in which they are conditioned to see everything in terms of consumer goods and "safety," as defined by police control, conditioned to believe they have the best lives on the planet by every measure.

So when they see our village and its veneer of "tropical grunge," they experience fear. Anything outside of the parameters of the cultural hallucination they call "the First World" represents fear and psychological free fall.

Yet, even if we think in that sort of outdated terminology, First, Second and Third World, and most Americans do, then America is a Second World nation. We have no universal free health care (don't kid yourself about the plan under way), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status -- if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a "career" -- high infant-mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy. Even by our own definition we are a Second World nation.

Learning to love shiny objects

But there is a shiny commercial skin that covers everything American, a thin layer of glossy, throwaway technology that leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. That slick commercial skin, the bright-colored signs for Circuit City (rest in peace) and the Gap, the clear plastic that covers every product from CDs to pre-cut vegetables, the friendly yellow-and-red wrapper on the burger inside its bright-red paper box, the glossy branding of every item and experience.

These things are the supposed tangible evidence that the slick, conditioned illusion, the one I call the American Hologram, is indeed real. If it's bright and shiny and new, it must be better, right? It's the complete opposite of tropical grunge.

Last week, when I got back to the States, I took a shower in an American friend's new, $30,000, gleaming, remodeled bathroom. It felt like a surgical operating-room experience, compared to wading into the Caribbean surf in the tropical dusk with a bar of soap. Like a parallel universe straight out of The Matrix.

Meat space versus the parallel universe

So how is it that we Americans came to live in such a parallel universe? How is it that we prefer such things as Facebook (don't get me wrong, I'm on Facebook, too), and riding around the suburbs with an iPod plugged into our brain looking for fried chicken in a Styrofoam box?

Why prefer these expensive, earth-destroying things over love and laughter with real people and making real human music together with other human beings -- lifting our voices together, dancing and enjoying the world that was given to us? Absolutely for free.

And the answer is this: We suffer under a mass national hallucination.

Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a "theater state."

In our theater state, we know the world through media productions, which are edited and shaped to instruct us on how to look and behave and view the outside world.

As in all staged productions and illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what supposedly represents reality. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras as the American empire's cultural machinery weaves and spins out our cultural mythology.

Cultural myth production is an enormous industry in America. It is very similar to the national projects of pyramid building in Egypt or cathedral-building in medieval Europe.

And in our obsession with violence and punishment, two characteristics of a consensual police state reality, we are certainly similar to prison-camp building in Stalinist Russia. Actually, we're pretty good in that department, too. Consider that one-fourth of all the incarcerated people on earth are in U.S. prisons -- U.S. citizens imprisoned by their own government.

Good guys and bad guys at the chariot races

In any case, the media culture's production of martyrs, good guys and bad guys, fallen heroes and concept outlaws, is not just big corporate business. It is the armature of our cultural behavior.

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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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