Democracy, that's a laugh. How could you buy this propaganda? Does anyone talk about ending imperialism? No, because 70% of discretionary spending is on the military. Corporate powers make big money on war, and are not about to stop. Voting means nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
ecerpt from a Morris Berman speech Nov 4 2011:
the French writer Denis Duclos, who is a
director of the CNRS, the research institute in Paris,
pegged the problem of the obsession with having an
enemy and the violence that results from that in his book
of 1994 Le Complexe du loup-garou, The Werewolf
Complex. In his epilogue to the 2005 edition, Duclos
writes that “America is always dependent on a werewolf
figure, a dark, savage beast that’s out to destroy it. The
beast,” he says, “changes in content, but the form is
always the same. At the center of this,” he says, “is a
terrible fear that Americans have of emptiness, which is an
anxiety of not existing, and they disguise this with a
hyperactive optimism.” -----Have a nice day. ----“A curious
society,” he writes, “a people who don’t know who they
really are. Like the Romans, they see themselves under
siege.” And, he says, “This could finally trigger a fascist
populism,” which, of course, we’re seeing with the Tea
Party. “The American fear of the monster,” he writes, “has
always marked its history, whether this exists on the inside
or the outside. This leads to isolating the country in a sort
of collective psychosis that can only contribute to
international instability.”
In fact, that’s how most of the world sees us. A few
years ago there was an international poll that asked the
question, “Which nation do you believe is the greatest
threat to world peace?” The United States and Israel said
Iran, and everybody else said the United States. Writing in
Der Spiegel last August, the German journalist Jakob
Augstein argues that the U.S. is basically a failed state; it’s
not part of the West anymore, and that Europe needs to
keep its distance from what is a very different and
apparently, his word, “insane” political culture. There is,
he concludes, no deliverance in sight for the U.S.
What does mental health mean in an individual case?
It’s at least this: That a person knows his or her personal
narrative and is able to see it from the outside and, as a
result of this transparency, at least try to do something
about it. Perhaps the same thing is true of a nation or a
civilization. I don’t know. But what I know is that there is
very little understanding in the U.S. as to what the
underlying narrative is, or even the fact that there is an
underlying narrative. This seems to escape most
Americans, almost all.
