Why Americans Are So Easily Conned

[Pharaoh]

Editor’s Note: It is one of the marvels of U.S. politics, why so many working people – especially white men in the South – align their votes with a rich corporate elite waging class war on those same people. Or why so many otherwise smart individuals from all walks of life keep buying the promise that “progress” will somehow save the day?

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/041111a.html

The technologies that inflicted upon the world the ongoing tragedies in both the Gulf of Mexico and Japan serve a dangerous addiction, an addiction to blind optimism, a habituation of mind that allows us to dwell within provisional comfort zones but renders vast spaces of the world into death realms.
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After each catastrophe, there ensues a scramble to contain the damage leveled, as, concurrently, the apologists of the present system explain the anomalous nature of the event.

Yet, this much should be obvious: Attempting to clean up the mess, after it occurs, as oppose to altering the way of life that incurs the damage, is analogous to an addict believing a few days in detox will serve as a solution to his addiction.

In the same way drug dealers are reliant on an addict's unwillingness to reflect on the carnage created in his life, as well as the havoc reaped in the lives of those near him, engendered by his addiction, the small group of hyper-wealthy elites who benefit from the current system rely on collective cognitive dissidence (or, as it has been termed, the fear of fear itself) to dissuade the public at large from peering deeply into the pernicious situation.

[AndyTiedye]

1. Because the Tee Vee Told Them To Vote for the Repiglickins

MUST… OBEY…

[al_liberal]

2. 150th anniversary of being conned.

Why did so many dirt poor Southerners side with the South during the Civil War? They were conned by the rich land/slave owners into thinking that they were fighting for state's rights. I split my primary education between IL and TN. The differences in how they treated the Civil War were just as one would expect, slavery versus states rights.

[Webster Green]

3. K&R!

This is a great essay. Thanks for posting it! :thumbsup:

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Growing up in the Deep South, being raised, as we say there -- not brought up, but raised -- like corn, hogs (or Lazarus or zombies from the grave) and socialized there, shame is a subject with which I'm well acquainted; it has taken me a lifetime (and it remains an ongoing process) to sort through and shake out the shame-based sensibility acquired there.
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A large number of the blustering, willfully ignorant, Southern men that I grew up around, whether they are khaki clad, country-club smoothies or leather jacket-donning punk rock belligerents, were twisted inside out, kicked and stomped insensate by shaming authority figures before they shed their baby teeth. If one listens closely, one can detect the voice of shame-bearing demons hissing in their every utterance.

Yet the knowledge of the origin and source of their suffering remains buried deep within these men. To acknowledge shame (even to oneself) is considered a tacit admission of having something to be ashamed of i.e., "If you ain't got nothing to be ashamed of, you miserable peckerwood, then you wouldn't have no need to feel it."
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