American Psychosis: What Happens To A Society That Cannot Distinguish Between Reality And Illusion?…

[Michaelangelica]

American Psychosis: What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion?…

 

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.

 

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

 

 

 

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For Jarrin, the campaign is personal. She lost her job in 2008. She lost her unemployment benefits in March. And now she is homeless and sleeping on her friend's couch.

 

"We just need jobs," said Jarrin. "And we need help until we get jobs."

 

Jarrin says she's applied for 3,000 jobs. The former client relations director is one of 1.5 million Americans who are expected to max out on their unemployment benefits this year.

 

Sanders has vowed to delay passage of the proposed tax cut deal between the White House and Congressional Republicans. While the proposal would extend benefits for 13 months for those currently receiving unemployment insurance, it does nothing for those who have already run out of benefits.

 

As Jarrin prepared to deliver the letters to Sanders' office in rural Vermont Friday, the senator in Washington spoke for more than eight hours on the floor of the Senate to stall passage of the bill.

 

"This recession was caused by the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street," said Sanders. "How can I get by on one house? I need five houses, 10 houses. I need three jet planes to take me all over the world."

 

Meanwhile, Jarrin read portions of the letters to CNN, "I look around me and see how many have been affected by this. I see it in my own family. Sisters and brother have lost homes."

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/12/vermont.unemployed/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_politics