The Government We Deserve

[mudplanet]

Over at Stinque they're speaking truth to power - although on DU we can wail about the perversion of America that's been perpetrated for the last three decades plus, the plain fact is that the overwhelming majority of Americans are getting exactly what they want:

...we’re having a hard time, almost thirty years on, getting worked up by Thursday’s Supreme Court decision granting corporations unlimited free-speech rights. We having a hard time taking seriously the cries that the ruling will undermine the sanctity of our government. We’re having a hard time accepting the notion that unrestrained corporate political spending makes a difference.

Nothing prevents Americans — or a decisive majority of Americans — from seeing things as they are. All the advertising in the world couldn’t sell New Coke. Nothing forces Americans to watch Fox News. Or listen to Rush. Or read Palin. Or swallow their lies.

We as a nation, as a people, are willingly, happily, aggressively ignorant.

By choice.

But go ahead, fight the good fight. Just don’t expect Americans to thank you for saving their sorry asses. They don’t want to know about it.

Read the rest at: http://www.stinque.com/2010/01/22/the-government-we-deserve/#more-18442

[Demeter]

1. Their Kids Will Want to Know

The "grown-ups" didn't want to hear about Vietnam, either. Or Watergate.

Or Iraq/Contra. But the kids, enlisting in default of any other way to eat, will want to know.

[Ozymanithrax]

2. The last national strike was in 1952.

That is no coincidence.

After 1952, Consumerism, the real economy of the U.S.A. took over our lives, coercing almost all of us with its seductive power of fake afluence.

Television has become both brad and circus. Every television show sells the same idea of what we are. Product placements within these shows make them a 24/7 advertisement for stuff. The shows, themselves, sell the American ideal.

You want people to wake up, turn off the television for a generation or collapse the economy.