Saturday 20th of April 2024
Home » Blogs » Gus Leonisky's blog

chauvinistic nationalism, plutocratic policies and spectatorial cynicism are running amok...

cornel

We live in one of the darkest moments in American history – a bleak time of spiritual blackout and imperial meltdown. Exactly 25 years ago, in my book Race Matters, I tried to lay bare the realities and challenges to American democracy in light of the doings and sufferings of black people. Back then, I reached heartbreaking yet hopeful conclusions. Now, the heartbreak cuts much deeper and the hope has nearly run out. 

The nihilism in black America has become a massive spiritual blackout in America. The undeniable collapse of integrity, honesty and decency in our public and private life has fueled even more racial hatred and contempt. 

The rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity has so poisoned our hearts, minds and souls that a dominant self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars and bombs thrives with little opposition. 

The escalating military overreach abroad, the corruption of political and financial elites at home, and the market-driven culture of mass distractions on the internet, TV, and radio push toward an inescapable imperial meltdown, in which chauvinistic nationalism, plutocratic policies and spectatorial cynicism run amok. 

Our last and only hope is prophetic fightback – a moral and spiritual awakening that puts a premium on courageous truth telling and exemplary action by individuals and communities.

The distinctive features of our spiritual blackout are threefold. 

First, we normalize mendacity and naturalize criminality. We make our lies look like the normal order of things. And we make our crimes look like the natural order of things. We too often say Wall Street is a good servant – rather than a bad master – of the common good. Then we look away from the criminal behavior of big banks because they are too indispensable to prosecute. 

We deny that drone strikes are killing innocent people abroad. Then we overlook killing lists on Terror Tuesday at the White House, when a president and his staff can decide to kill people without any legal procedure, including, sometimes, US citizens.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/14/america-is-spiritu...

of shithole countries...

Let's note here that many people, from John McCain (Russia is a petrol pump) to Josh Barro (Russia is a Dystopian shit land) who have decried Trump allegedly mentioning "shithole" countries, have used similar language to describe, say, Russia...:
For example Tim Wise (an anti-racist "promoter") apparently said: "Every day that passes, I understand better why my family left this shitty country that is imperial Russia. 100 years after the last revolution, let's hope there is another one. "
Meanwhile:

A Republican senator who attended the White House immigration meeting shot down reports that President Trump used the term “shithole countries” to refer to Africa, Haiti and El Salvador, calling them a “gross misrepresentation.”

“I’m telling you he did not use that word, George. And I’m telling you it’s a gross misrepresentation,” Sen. David Perdue told host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, suddenly recalling Trump’s comments after having said Friday he could not remember whether the commander in chief used the vulgar reference.

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2018/01/14/gop-senator-denies-trump-made-shithole-com...

 

And please dont blame Trump for the USA being a shithole country... It started a long time ago (read from top):

We could be a much better country. Trump makes it impossible.

we love the crap, we hate the unsophisticated hubris...

"Fire and Fury" is the title of the new exposé of Donald Trump's first year in the White House. The tome has only been out for a few days, and yet it has already established itself as one of the books of the year. Even we journalists find ourselves describing the book's contents as "indescribable" and "unfathomable." Can the world's most powerful man really be dumb, senile and addicted to television as the book claims? He spends his early evenings watching three televisions in his bedroom? Eating a cheeseburger and tweeting all the while? An entire White House teetering between hysteria and chaos? And yet, it's still the journalist's job to describe the indescribable and fathom the unfathomable.

Read more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-age-of-fire-and-fury-lates...

 

Of course Trump is to be blamed for WWI, WWII, the Napoleonic Wars, the Wars of Religions and the Crusades... He is the last one (possibly not) in the line of idiots who have shaped the world we try to live in. Before him, sophisticated lies and patriotic hubris made us swallow the crap. We love the crap as long as it's covered in hypocrisy and stylish sophistication.

And of course, Trump, the elegance-lacking boor, having won the US Presidency, highlights the hypocrisy and the hubris in the crap we have have been swallowing for milleniums...

I can bet a dollar that we would have got similar crap or worse from Hillary, except we would have swallowed it because the excuses, promoted as "Real News" in our stupid media would have sugar coated it with sophistication.

 

Be quiet!  You are silly and very young.

You really cannot catch me out.

You see, we are playing not for money

But only to pass eternity away!

                  Pushkin

rise the gallery of lowest common denominator-giddy cretins...

I remember my first impression of the Reality Television program American Idol. I cringed at the thought, what if, a young Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, or the members of The Clash had been forced to have their talents appraised by the sort of shallow celebrities, supercilious moderators, and gallery of lowest common denominator-giddy cretins attendant to the hype-driven fare.

Yet now, there is serious talk among abjectly unserious people that the next presidential election might pit a billionaire, Reality Television grifter versus a billionaire, Reality Television grifter. All hail, The President of the United States Of Reality Television.

Oprah Winfrey is and has been since her entrance into the US mass media hologram one of the capitalist elite’s most effective propagandists. By intention, her New Age snake oil-peddling patter never connects capitalist exploitation as the dominant source of individual suffering. Of course not. Oprah is a US American huckster in the model of Norman Vincent Peale.

She retails in the con job that a paucity of positive thinking — in essence, personal failings — is the source of individual angst, alienation, anomie, and suffering in general under the neoliberal order. Yet there is hope, she confides. A positive change in attitude will shift the course of one’s destiny. Thereby, she steers her rapt adherents away from the shedding of internalised, capitalist engendered false consciousness, and, on a cultural basis, the paradigmatic shift required to steer humankind away from ecological catastrophe.

It should go without saying that me-first-er Oprah, the obscenely wealthy virgin queen of the neoliberal order, would become a prominent promulgator of me-too myopia and its bourgeoisie feminist refusal to connect capitalist exploitation of any and all aspects of human life imposed by her fellow members of capitalism’s criminal class. Wealth inequity and wage and debt slavery are forms of predation. Yet notice this dominant and guiding feature of the mindset, a given since the rise of the Weltanschauung in the Western, Christian imagination: Oprah’s breed of Calvinist crusader animus, as a rule, will be incurred when the human genitals can be blamed as a key source of human misery.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/01/28/thus-spake-oprah-as-the-new-york-tim...

 

Read from top...