‘That’s just the way it is…some things will never change’ – Bruce Hornsby
I didn’t mean to put you in mind of dire, bland, piano-led mid-eighties FM-rock, but the platitudinal chorus lyric sums up a certain late-capitalist mindset: deal with it, or die. The very feeling that we are trapped, there is no way to escape the cruel system designed by self-interested others for you to service for them, is palpable, and the interweb brings it closer to home every day.
Although you might not be being paid by one, and though you may not know it, you are working for a corporation, one which slaps it’s brand name on every piece of available space it can find until you feel nauseous by colour, and which needs you to keep smoking it’s cigarettes, drinking it’s beer or other sweet fizzy piss, eating it’s non-biodegradable meats or passively absorbing it’s mediated lies. If you stop, so do they; but how do they make sure that doesn’t happen? By working you so hard you have no energy to find ways to protest, and making the things we SHOULD buy too expensive or difficult to find.
The Bottom Line is now the final word, despite the financial meltdown of 2008. These insanely rewarded executives still reap unbelievable ‘bonuses’, and any means of getting there is still fine. These bankers stole the money of their investors, flushed it down the toilet of unrepayable loans and mortgages, and then got the taxpayer to bail them out – via the brand new government – when the banks collapsed due to having no more money left. The fact that there wasn’t bloodshed on the streets and an actual revolution borne of outrage is testament to the unbelievable, unshakeable belief in open free-market capitalism as some kind of undeniable human right that has become so embedded in the US psyche as ‘The American Way’.
The Neo-Cons did a very good job of undermining the US’s global cultural colonialism in the first decade of this century in terms of international and enlightened domestic thinking, but this decade is a quieter, groovier version with better teeth. Conventional notions of warfare are (mercifully, for the West) to all intents and purposes over, with unmanned Drone aircraft taking out ‘terrorists’ (not the ones based in Washington, London or Tel-Aviv of course) and often their surrounding friends and family – so no more difficult pictures of coffins flying home draped in American flags. Mainstream media has all but stopped unbiased reporting, with EVERYTHING checked to be in the party line of US-Euro colonialism, further and further alienating and infuriating Asia, Africa and the BRIC countries. The UK and Israel are simply Orwell’s Airstrip One and Airstrip Two, and clomping unstoppably down them are the boots alternating forever onto the human face.
From the music we are fed, to the brands we buy, to the wars we are led to believe are worthwhile, we are being manipulated more brutally than ever before – but Machiavelli is as present as ever, realpolitik is the name of the game, and it’s fully accepted as ‘the way it is’. They can and will do anything and everything to you, as long as you still have the impression you are free. Well you are not free. While you are not allowed the time or funds to think or educate yourself, afford a home no matter how hard you work, you are not free. There are plenty of resources in this technologically reduced world to go round, but 1% of men are controlling them, and naturally they need to keep it this way, to keep that ever important bottom line fat and sedated. The freedom of information provided by the internet, and models of state provided by some of the more resistant, bloody-minded South American countries appears to be a beacon in the murk; but as always, the price of freedom – the innate one, not the capitalised version – is eternal vigilance.
