The Culture of Insignificance.

[KlatooBNikto]

The late Christopher Lasch called ours a Culture of Narcissism in which our constant need for acceptance by others dictates our needs to act in certain ways.I have given this some thought and believe that Lasch has missed an even more tragic part of our society's ills.The relentless bombardment of images of beautiful people living so called beautiful live that are beyond the reach of ordinary Americans has actually made many of us feel insignificant and no matter what we do within our small circles of family and friends, we are made to feel inadequate in comaprison with the Beautiful People.Sort of a keeping up with the Joneses on the emotional level.

The biggest culprit, of course, is TV which contributes to this sickness further by advertising products that exploit these ineadequacies both for men and women.Women, of course, have their plastic surgery, cosmetics and other paraphernalia; men have viagra and other socalled lifestyle drugs.

My interest really is how these feelings of inadequacy at an emotional level are affecting our political lives. I believe there is a significant part of our population that wants badly to overcome its own feelings of inadequacy through some sort of a political expression.Those who are overwhelmed by the changes in the outside world, whether in sexual mores, economic dislocations or the rise of previously denigrated social groups adopt various strategies to cope with these changes, some violent, some not.

Those groups totally hostile to all of the issues that I mentioned are the base of the Republican Party.They tend to be the least educated,use religion as a crutch to cope with overwhelming problems brought on by their marginalization bombarded into their homes by TV,
are unable to see any way out except to compete with newcomers on the scene and want to reassert their old privileges Bush promises to restore.Bush and more precisely Rove are catering to this segment of the population even though they are miles apart socially and economically and even spiritually from this population.

Our job, as I see it, is to bring this population into our fold by showing that we do not pose any threats either to their lifestyle or their economic well being.In fact, we should promote the idea that a better future awaits them if they make common cause with their economically disadvantaged brothers and sisters against the corporate plutocracy that is at the top of the pyramid of the Republican Party.
Only by removing this sense of isignificance of this population can we hope to break the stranglehold of the Republican Party .

[indigobusiness]

1. Tragically true

sad

[coalition_unwilling]

2. Well-put. I believe this is what Howard Dean was getting at

with his mis-reported comment about Southerners with Confederate flags on their pick-up trucks. That is, they have been voting against their own class interests for so long as to stagger belief. The Democratic party will win again when it succeeds in removing the blinders the ruling class has placed over the eyes of the Southern working class and the working clas in general.

Up until the 1960s, the ruling class (the "corporate plutocracy" you allude to) used race to divide whites and blacks. When that was no longer possible. Now that it can't use race to keep the working class divided, it uses other 'faux' issues to keep them divided (like gay\lesbian issue) and deluded as to their true class interests.

Instead of (or in addition to) the "Culture of Indifference" you posit, I might offer the "Culture of Alienation" (harkening back to theories of Herbert Marcuse and, before him, Theodore Adorno and Karl Marx).