Whatever Happens, It's Your Fault, You Stupid Fat-Ass Lazy Americans! Except That's Not Actually True.

I’ve been thinking and reading about thought control quite a bit lately. It’s a fascinating subject, and there’s a lot of good literature out there on the topic, if you’re interested.

Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” is unbelievably illuminating. Ben Bagdikian’s “The [New] Media Monopoly” is a classic, as is Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's “Manufacturing Consent.” 

These thinkers, and many others like them, expose some uncomfortable truths:

• The American media is controlled by a very, very small group of corporations and the individuals who sit on their boards. In 2004, eight corporations—AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Disney, News Corp (which owns Fox News), Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann AG, and General Electric—and now, seemingly, NBC/Comcast—control more than 90% of the world’s mass media. This includes newspapers, television, radio, movies, books, and magazines. With the NBC/Comcast merger a fait accompli, it looks like Internet content will soon go this way as well.
• The people who own these corporations are not your friends. They aren’t necessarily your enemies, but they sure as hell aren’t your friends. They act in their own interests. Not yours. Rarely, if ever, do their interests overlap with yours.
• The corporations which control the media largely control the government as well, through campaign contributions, PACS, and lobbyist groups. And this is only going to get worse. Since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision—in which all five Republican appointees voted out corporate limits on campaign spending, and all four Democratic appointees voted to keep them—corporations are only going to strengthen their control over government, media--and you.
• They work very hard to maintain their control over your mind, and have gotten very good at it. 
• Your options for limiting their control over your life are limited to precisely dick. 

Yes, I’m aware that it sounds pretty conspiracy theory-ish, but when you look at the evidence they lay out, it’s really kind of tough to disagree with.

One of the most pernicious elements of corporate thought control is what I call the “blame the public” strategy. We are constantly told, by our media, how much we suck. You don’t really notice it until you begin to look for it. But we, the American public, are subjected to a constant hammering away at our self-esteem. And once you learn to recognize it, you see it everywhere.

America is fat. America is unhealthy. America is dumb. Americans don’t vote. American kids are fat and unhealthy and being raised by television. American public education doesn’t work. Americans are a bunch of wastrel spendthrifts who run up their credit card debt buying junk they don’t need like boats and designer clothes, and then default on their mortgages, thus crashing the economy. 

Get the picture? Over and over and over, our news media hammer home the point that we’re a bunch of shmucks.

And just in case you missed the point when the news media made it, think about what we’re shown by “reality” TV. Think about the parade of horrific, subhuman imbeciles, whining jerkoffs, lowlifes, self-interested socialites, venal bitches, and certifiable lunatics who appear on “Jersey Shore,” “Hoarders,” “Wife Swap,” “The Real World,” “The Real Housewives of Atlanta/Orange County/Miami/New York,” "Intervention," "The Apprentice," or any of a billion other “reality” shows out there—or what are called reality shows in spite of the fact that they're about as far removed from actual reality as Never Never Land.

Reality TV is anything but. I don’t know anyone like the people on those shows. I’ll bet you don’t, either. But by calling it reality TV, our media tell us that what they’re showing us is the real America--and the real America is a shithole chock full of fat, self-indulgent, lazy, materialistic, and deluded asshats. It just hammers home the point that the news media already made.

The implication of this constant assault upon our collective self-esteem is, simply, this: the public is too stupid to govern itself. We need elites to do it for us. Because, you see, it’s all our fault. Whatever we suffer, it’s our fault. Whatever goes wrong, it’s our fault. Whatever ills America as a nation experiences, it’s our fault—the fault of the great unwashed bunch of stupid, fat, uneducated hillbillies that make up America. Not our friends, the corporations, who forced us into the messes we’re in now, oh God, no, not them. No, it’s our fault. Whatever happens, it’s the public who takes the blame for it.

Well, as my father rather pungently put it when I tried to make excuses for a lousy score on an algebra test, “Ah, fuck that noise.”

It’s about time to stop letting those cynical, mercenary, conscienceless pricks beat up on us. Let’s start turning over the rocks and looking at what REALLY lies beneath. Let’s look at what I’ve identified as the Big Four of Big Fucking Corporate Lies.

·                     BFCL #1:  The American public is a bunch of spendthrifts running up their credit card bills on shit they didn’t need and houses they couldn’t afford because they’re a bunch of materialistic asses, and in doing so brought on the Great Recession.

Oh, horseshit. That’s not the case at all. The single biggest cause of personal bankruptcies in this country isn’t because Dad bought a boat or because Mom bought an Ab Roller. The number one cause of personal bankruptcies in America is the cost of healthcare. Medical expenses. 

Our corporate media would have you believe that we’re a bunch of profligate Jones-keeper-uppers blowing everything on luxury items we don’t need. Don’t you believe it. We’re not buying boats. We're trying to keep up with the increased cost of living, the rising costs of healthcare and education, and all the skeevy stuff they put in the fine print of our mortgage agreements. And we're trying to do this on our pathetically puny salaries, because real wages have remained stagnant since the 1980’s, so we’re using our credit cards to do it. At 20-30% interest rates.

The sheer blatancy of the lie is infuriating. We’re not buying stuff we don't need. Most of us are lucky to be able to afford FOOD. Which brings me to...

·                     BFCL #2: Americans are fat and unhealthy because we’re lazy and sit around on the couch.

Again, horseshit. We’re the hardest-working people in the world. Americans put in more time at work than anyone else in the industrialized world, according to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization. And we’re not doing it because we’re workaholics. We’re doing it because we need to, just to afford the staples. We’re working harder than anyone else on the planet, and most of us are just scraping by. You tell me how much time or energy that leaves us for exercising.

Our eating habits do suck, I will give you that. But have you shopped for healthy, organic food lately? Been to Whole Foods in a while? Do you have any idea what it costs to buy food that isn’t genetically modified, packed with growth hormones, stuffed with carcinogenic preservatives, loaded with sodium, dripping with high-fructose corn syrup (or, as it used to be called, sugar), artificially flavored and colored, dyed, waxed, and otherwise stripped of any nutritional content except empty calories? 

The economy of scale of food production makes Twinkies and hot dogs cheaper than organic milk. Basically, the food producers save money by marketing garbage in vast quantities, with horrific effects, like child obesity and juvenile diabetes.

Kids in poverty are more likely to be obese than affluent kids. This is because food that’s bad for you is cheaper than food that’s good for you. Poor parents—who are likely working three jobs just to make ends meet, and who thus have no time to play with their kids, so they leave them at home in front of the television—spend their meager paychecks stocking up on cheap, calorie-filled food that will stave off hunger.

·                     BFCL #3: Greedy, mobster-infested unions ran good honest capitalist businesses into the ground, sending what used to be American jobs overseas.

Again, horseshit. American jobs went overseas because the capitalist sons of bitches who run them took them there in order to “remain competitive”, which is business-ese for "save a few zillion bucks for themselves." And again, this is an example of “blame the public." Because time was when a majority of American workers were union members—so the implication, pretty clearly, is, “It’s your fault, Americans. Your union membership resulted in your job loss.”

Unions didn't destroy American manufacturing. They built the American middle class. The right to collective bargaining is what gave us the eight hour workday, benefits, and enough money in our pockets that we COULD buy luxury goods, thus pouring a ton of money into the economy. You think it’s coincidence that the decline in Americans’ real wages and the decline in union membership began at the same time?

No one is saying that there weren’t abuses. No one is saying that occasionally unsavory characters didn’t find themselves in positions of union governance, and no one is saying that unions couldn't have used more effective and honest internal policing. But the facts are on my side—unions were good for the American people.

And finally...

·                     BFCL #4: Americans don’t vote, so we deserve what we get.

Well, okay, this one is actually true. American voter turnout is the lowest in the industrialized world—even in the presidential election of 2008 (which had the highest percentage of voter turnout ever), only 56% of registered voters actually did so.

But that begs the question, unasked in the mainstream media, of WHY Americans don’t vote.

Policy almost never reflects the wishes of the American public. Gay marriage is a good example. 67% of Americans favor it, but it's illegal in most states, and the federal government doesn’t recognize it. Marijuana legalization is another good example. Over 78% of Americans favor allowing doctors to legally prescribe dope, but federal laws still prohibit it. And healthcare reform? In poll after poll, Americans overwhelmingly supported universal coverage and single-payer healthcare insurance... but look at what we ended up with.

Americans don’t vote because we know it doesn’t make one goddam bit of difference. First, we don't have political options. We can choose the slightly more moderate pro-business party, or we can choose the crazy-assed right-wing pro-business party. And secondly, whichever party we choose, we know policy will not reflect our national wishes. Policy will reflect the agenda of the corporations who control our elected officials and our media.

Tragically, without armed revolution, there’s probably no way to overturn the unholy threeway circle-jerk collusion between the paid hacks and shills in our media, the whores in our government, and the corporations who control them both. But at least we don’t have to keep believing the lies they tell us about ourselves.