“As the right-wing has clearly demonstrated (that is in their almost religious embrace of producer/consumer Capitalism (there is no reasoning with these people. And this is because their reasoning is subject to their baser impulses. Of course, Germany and every other western industrialized nation has seen the results of that kind of thing. So the main problem lies in America (a comparatively adolescent country (and the cut-throat Capitalism we have managed to shove down the throat of every other country.” –me
“Superficiality is the general characterization of US culture in Europe, especially Germany. This is, because Capitalism is more “pure” as money fetishism is more dominate there!! A bad environment for the deeper thinking required for philosophy!!” –Harald
This, once again, returns to Layotard’s (who, mind you, mainly worked north of America in Canada (concern in the appendix of The Postmodern Condition: the terroristic potential of the accessible and easily communicated. And American culture is saturated with it to an extent that… You see it from the outside and are “in it” to the extent that it is having some very disturbing effects on you via global Capitalism and our military might. But that is nothing like being right in it and actually interacting with the actors involved. I sometimes feel like I’m in the midst of some version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the sense of producer/consumer Capitalism being the lotos in Tennyson’s Land of the Lotos eaters. And the scary thing about this is that this observation could too easily be framed as paranoia and, therefore, irrational.
And it is these kinds of socially programmed responses to socially programmed cues that dominate American culture. For instance, I should assume that producer/consumer Capitalism is working as promised (as the only economic system compatible with democracy and freedom (since we have, along with FOX News, CNN and MSNBC as well as Bill Maher’s Real Time. The problem for me is that I can no more watch CNN and MSNBC than FOX since even they feel candy coated in the way they stay within the perimeters of producer/consumer Capitalism. Even liberalism has been assimilated as Zizek points out.
(And I will have to get to Bill Maher’s role in it in a later post.)
But it gets really scary, Harald (and I mean Brown shirt scary! (when you’re standing in front of a bar and looking at a gas guzzling and CO² pumping 4 by 4 truck with a sticker in the window with the silhouette of a soldier, crouched and gun aimed perfectly horizontal, with the quote:
“If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.”
Superficial? You haven’t seen shit my friend. And the scary thing about this is an experience I had at work. As I have pointed out before, I work and am surrounded by a lot of conservative guys (which would be expected in the maintenance field (as well as some who proudly claim to be right-wing. But they’re good people who I have found to be more than their ideologies. But one day I walk into my shop to find this essay pinned up called “Only in America”. And it consisted of a lot of conservative complaints about how America will do things like punishing the rich for working to be rich while rewarding the lazy for not working and a lot of other nonsense like that. Basically, they were whining when the conservative trend, at one time, was to accuse progressives of being whiners.
But even more disconcerting about this is that while, to them, to complain about the state of America is a constitutional right, when a progressive does it, it is a matter of being unpatriotic. Blend that with the phallic obsession of our military might and you get:
“If you can’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.”