American Psychosis

[Robin Landseadel]

Chris Hedges gets all "Howard Beale" on our asses:

	The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that  
grips dying
	empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional  
and
	intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated  
by the hollow
	stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity  
culture giddily
	licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain,  
weakness and
	betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is  
Michael
	Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country …  
despite bank
	collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial  
class.

	The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from  
honesty to
	self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night  
on television
	as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted  
off reality
	shows. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting  
fame,
	cheered on by millions of viewers, 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,  
nonpersons.
	Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or bad,  
vanish. Life,
	these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated  
competition
	and a constant quest for notoriety and attention.

	Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American  
character,
	permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after  
all, that
	because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war.  
Those
	who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed  
ugly,
	ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are  
used and
	discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of
	superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the  
prisons 	
	and the soup kitchens . . .

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/hedges-american-psychosis.html