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.

It tells us who to fear (Middle Eastern terrorists, Mr. Chavez in Venezuela and foreign made pharmaceuticals), who to scorn (again, the same candidates, along with Britney Spears, for her lousy child-rearing skills). Our daily news is the modern version of Roman coliseum shows. Elections are personality combat, chariot races, not examinations of solutions being offered. None are offered.

What are being offered are monkey models. Man as a social animal necessarily mimics the behavior he sees around him, whether it be by real people or moving images of people. This eye-to-brain to mimicry connection does not care.

Consequently, we know how to act and what the things around us are because television and media tell us. Television is the software, the operating instructions for our society. Thus, social realism for us is a television commercial for the American lifestyle: what's new to wear, what to eat, who's cool ([President Barack] Obama), what and whom to fear (that perennial evil booger, [Fidel] Castro) or who to admire (Bill Gates, pure American genius at work).

This societal media software tells us what music our digitized corporate complex is selling, but you never see images of ordinary families sitting around in the evenings making music together or creating songs of their own based upon their own lives and from their own hearts.

Because that music cannot be bought and sold and is not profitable. I think about that when the children and their parents sing and dance on the sand in front of my shack in Central America. We Americans are not offered that choice.

Managing mythology

So instead of a daily life in the flesh, belly to belly and soul to soul, lived out in the streets and parks and public places, in love and the workplace, we get 40-inch televisions, YouTube, cineplexes and the myths spun out by Hollywood.

Now, for a national mythology to work it has to be accessible to everyone all the time, it has to be all in one bundle.

For example, in North Korea, it is wrapped up in a single man, Kim. In America, as we have said, it is the media, and Hollywood in particular. Hollywood accommodates imperial myths, melting-pot myths, hegemonic military masculinity myths and glamour myths.

It articulates our culture's social imaginary: "the prevailing images a society needs to project about itself in order to maintain certain features of its organization." And the features of our media mythology are terrifying when you think about them.

As a writer friend says, it is watching Man on Fire, with Denzel Washington's tragic pose and his truthful bullets and his willingness to saw the fingers off Mexicans to get the information on time to protect us from The Evil. It is the absorption of that electronic mythology that allowed us to cosign the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Incidentally, speaking of Abu Ghraib, I am a friend of Ray Hardy, lawyer to Lynndie England, the leash girl of Abu Ghraib. He has copies of thousands of other, far more grisly, Abu Ghraib photos. Believe me, they picked the gentlest ones to release.

Anyway, when the media and government people in power made that selection, they were managing your consciousness. What you know and don't know. Keeping you calmer by withholding the truth. Rather like not upsetting little children so they will continue to quietly behave the way you want.

But, like children, the American public got bored with the subject of torture long ago, so we quit seeing the victims. Plenty of new evidence has been coming out for years since Lynndie's famous pics from Abu Ghraib. But the short American attention span, created by our rapid-fire media, says, "Move on to the next hologram please. Whoa! Stop the remote. Nice butt shot of Sarah Palin there!"

The result is that Americans cannot achieve the cathexis we need. Cathexis is the ground zero psychic and emotional attachment to the world that cannot be argued. It is "beyond ideological challenge, because it is called into existence affectively." Americans are conditioned to reject any affective attachment that does not have a happy ending. And in that, we remain mostly a nation of children. We never get to grow up.

So, we tell ourselves the Little Golden Book fairy tales -- that we are a great and compassionate people and that we are personally innocent of any of our government's horrific crimes abroad. Guiltless as individuals. And we do remain innocent, in a sense, as long as we cannot see beyond the media hologram.

But it is a terrible kind of self-inflicted innocence that can come to no good. We are a nation of latchkey kids babysat by an electronic hallucination, the national hologram.

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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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