Posted on 07/04/2010 7:42:14 AM PDT by LuigiBonnafini
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at adbusters.org ...
Check my post 19. We got the same thing out of his article. He’s calling for a war on the entertainment industry. As he writes for the NYTimes, my guess is that this is an officially approved position.
He actually speaks the truth, but with the following caveat: It applies to *his* people, the Leftards.
We're the ones who don't own TVs, who won't patronize crappy movies, and who don't go to urine-soaked "art" exhibits.
He recognizes the vacuousness of half of America, but mistakenly ascribes it to all of America.
We aren't all stupid, Chris. Just your half of us.
[the belief that] Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked...
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. ...
It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth.
But he loses me completely when he twists that into:
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.
WTF?! What a liberal leap! Lumping valuable, productive companies together with greedy, criminal enterprises is the way that collectivists throw the baby out with the bath water.
Hedges was actually booed off the speaking platform while he was giving a commencement address at Rockford College (Illinois) a few years ago. Nobody gets booed off the stage at a commencement address, but Hedges managed it.
Never heard that before. Care to clarify?
“What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion?”
They continue to become even more immoral.
bump
Sure. They thought the Jews were the cause of all their problems. They thought Hitler was a great man. They had no idea he was committing genocide. They thought they could win the war easily. They thought they were the master race and that everyone else was inferior. The list goes on and on.
No one can get to the right answer without first acknowledging that America was once a Christian nation.
The absence of government responsibility for what ails our country seems to elude the author. Talk about not being able to distinguish between reality and illusion!
The author's inability or refusal to recognize government policies as being responsible for our problems is a perfect example of inability to distinguish between reality and illsion. He's a Marxist idiot.
O.K. Thx, now I get it - some of them were illusion and some were reality.
Postmodernists want an American utopia to replace God as the unconditional object of desire.They want the struggle for social justice to be the country's animating principle, the nation's soul. They want to substitute social justice for individual freedom as our country's principal goal.
America wages war because it can... Goldman Sacks willfully "crashed the world economy..." What falsehoids and other points of the Commie propaganda were omitted here?
If that is what you believe in, please find another forum. Commie propaganda is unwelcome here.
Well, we wage wars just 'cause we can is not exactly from Marx --- he phrased such thoughts better --- but it is certainly marxist: capitalists wage wars for enrichment.
And you did not notice Goldman Sachs allegedly "willfully crashing the world economy?"
Dear TopQuark, I starting posting articles on FreeRepublic rather confident that Freepers would be able to differentiate between “Commie Propaganda” and reality. Perhaps it is just one of my foibles, but I find it interesting to see what the enemies of America, the American way of Life, and Freedom in general have to say. There are many poster on Free Republic that give us a great supply of articles that expound on Liberty and Freedom, and all the other things I hold dear to my heart and cherish. I take a lot of time and post articles that show up on Freep to some of the left wing new aggregators, and I thought it might be illustrative to us if we had a chance to see what they are ingesting on a daily basis. If you are only interested in someone preaching to the choir, I am sorry. My choice of Forum was influenced by a faith in the Freepers to appreciate a free flow of ideas, not a desire to pervert them to a collective way of life.
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