This group has been designated for adults age 18 or older. Please sign in and confirm your date of birth in your profile so we can verify your eligibility. You may opt to make your date of birth private.
Quote
Joe Bageant from an article entitled "The Great American Media Mind Warp." This is just the introduction; the rest of the essay's as good or better.
All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind's interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.
The American media hologram forms our subconscious opinions immediately and without our rational participation. Particularly when it comes to generating terrorist outlaws. For example, despite what we were told and most of us believe, Timothy McVeigh was a patriot and was a more literate and intelligent person than most Americans; in truth, he more resembled Tom Paine than a terrorist. Chew on that one for a while … or read Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Again, nothing significant is as presented by the American media. Watch television in countries with supposedly primitive media, and after a while you will be shocked at the technologically mediated and shape-shifted image of the world presented to Americans — how the hologram makes incongruous parts suddenly fit together and make sense in its own parallel universe.
The only television show my wife and I are watching right now is Mad Men. So when I think of television that's what I think of. But this American hologram that Bageant writes about, that's what it seems like is at stake. Which is why I keep watching it, even though I'd happily cut the throat of every single character.
