Our Daily Hate

The post yesterday asked you to sit down and spend an hour with Chris Hedges. This is asking a lot, an hour is not cheap in this world and Hedges can make one sad.

But I hope you did it. Anyway, aside from the fact that one comes away feeling betrayed by this country's leaders, pretty much all of them, I think there were two very important lessons for me.

1. Propaganda is our daily discourse. This may not be "news" to anyone but the sheer Truth of this must often be disregarded to live the lives we're offered. All that we do seems party to this mode of discourse. It would benefit all of us to try to learn more about it AS discourse so that we can stand outside of it. Primarily it is language or perhaps "messaging" crafted to elicit emotional responses. That is easy to understand, right? But see how easily we are persuaded in all walks of life by our emotions? Even our vaunted sense of Irony seems to offer no protection.

2. All beings should be allowed to strive for life without conscious murderous interference.

Unfortunately, too often the first works very hard to insert itself into the second.

So, propaganda is our daily bread. Why must we eat?

You, yes, you--you are first. Understand that the ridiculous media war about who called who a Nazi first and who has the "right" to use those crimes and that evil as comparison points is simply more propaganda.

Here's all we really need to know. People in power do not care for "subjects". There is no benevolent sovereign but only a tyrannous despot regardless of political affiliation or country.

Power and Greed are always our bedrock motivation when seeking to "lead" others. We MUST see this and ask questions constantly about motivations.

Also, before we blame Goebbels for the "big lie" and so call out propagandists as Nazi's "like Goebbels" let's be sure we understand from whom Goebbels learned his craft. Homegrown, Edward Bernays.

Why are we killing people? Why do we allow our government to kill people? Why don't we care? There is no justification: there are reasons but these are not justifications.

Hedges--Apocalyptic Rage

**Update--An Affirming Flame

Chris Hedges speaking at the University of Toronto--The Death of the Liberal Class.

This is not about our "divisive" politics and about Left and Right...it's about our current despair--we are judged only on our monetary value (we are all commodities). "A mafia economic system." Exploiting both human beings and the natural world until exhaustion and collapse...

"I don't see any way out."

Here is a bit of the sunshine transcribed poorly by me. This is has to do with how we respond to our very physical realities--this from about the 34 minute mark to 36 minute mark:

"legitimate rage is now being expressed through emotionally consistent but absurdest polices...None of it makes any sense but you can't penetrate large sectors of the populace who have been driven into the arms of these movements through despair...and despair is always the engine of totalitarianism; and what's happened...is that when the real world no longer works when your community physically breaks down and brings with it all the attendant problems of sexual abuse, domestic violence, struggle with substance addictions then you seek a world of miracles and magic. And the rage or anger that is engendered when you try to push these people back into the real world, ie, through rational discussion or an attempt to present them with facts, is the anger of people who feel that they are being forced into a world that almost destroyed them. When you go to places like Detroit for instance the end of the world is no longer an abstraction.

And that of course brings with it this love of apocalyptic violence which is fundamental to the ideology of the Christian Right.

The only way...the only avenue that was open to us to save what was left of our anemic democracy was to incorporate these people back into the economic system; to give the disenfranchised working class hope...this chance was lost when we funneled hundreds of billions of dollars back into these speculative concerns."

No ray of sunshine...but the question I think needs to be how to NOT engender Christian Apocalyptics in these communities but rather create new communities that are small and self-sustaining and ones that disdain the current Corporate colonization of our very towns, cities and states; disdaining work for "money" that goes nowhere but to fund this very "external sovereign exception" that we've allowed to dominate our very souls.

(fun stat--almost EIGHT THOUSAND people per DAY have been forced out of their homes over the last two years)

Hedges at U Toronto

**Update

Hedges closes with a story from his war correspondent days in Serbia that is heart-rending and yet reveals "an ocean of hope"--please stick with it till the end. He finishes by quoting the end of Auden's poem September 1, 1939--

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages;
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.