with Chris Hedges
Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Dennis Trainor, Jr on Oct 26, 2013
While watching Russell Brand’s BBC interview, it is not hard to imagine two families in Middle America, neighbors, watching separately in the comfort of their own homes as Russell Brand does his bit and each nod in lonely agreement. “Yes!”, they are likely to say- “this Russell Brand fellow is right.”
But family A has to work hard at a job they are made to feel they are lucky to have buying something, selling something, or processing something when, like their inner Lloyd Dobbler, they don’t want to buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, they don’t want to do that. And Family B is doing the same thing. Both are trying to keep up with the Joneses, as they the expression goes. Family B is competing to send their kids to better schools and than Family A; and Family A is competing just as hard to beat out family B. They are each others Jones.
But there is NO Jones.
“Jones” is a construct, a shackle. And don’t you know, Jones is like the show put on by the Wizard of OZ to scare you into submission. Time for us all to find our inner Dorothy’s, click our heels together and build a new world called home. A new world called home. Stop the machine and build a new world called home.
Also covered in this week’s Resistance Report:
The Chris Hedges Interview: Let’s Get This Class War Started
Joel Northam reports on the Nonprofit Industrial Complex
Occupy Sandy Mutual Aid, Still Going A Year After The Storm
Fukushima: A Global Solution to A Global Crisis
***
Russell Brand vs. Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight 2013
BBC Newsnight on Oct 23, 2013
Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman talks to Russell Brand about voting, revolution and beards, as he launches his guest edit for the New Statesman.
see
Chris Hedges: NDAA, Al Qaeda and the American Police State
Chris Hedges: Beware the Tea Party Dominionists
Radioactive Water Spilling Over Containment Barriers At Fukushima
We Live Under a Total Surveillance State in America by Fred Branfman (#NDAA, #NSA)
Rivera Sun’s The Dandelion Insurrection reviewed by Guadamour
Lee Camp: What You Don’t Know About The #NSA Spying Scandal (with Chris Hedges) #NDAA
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We’ve heard propaganda about “people power” since the year dot. The core issue are leadership, initiative and responsibility. There is no practical solution to apathy. Deferring to the alleged authority of some mythical mass is futile.
A desperate crowd has no will, it only has an inertial mind and a hunger for change. We have witnessed this in the “Arab Spring” ~ some Spring. It’s been a catastrophe. From within, a crowd may feel secure & righteous, from the outside it will be perceived as a threat. The potential madness of crowds is legendary, as Mackay declaimed in 1841. We’ve witnessed how barricades fall, and new tyrannies arise far too often.
There are no shortcuts, human society needs institutional integrity, complex checks and balances, and intellectually accountable “organons.” There can be no trust without pragmatic consequences that address moral deviance. In my opinion, the US took an irrevocable and disastrous wrong turn in the “eighties.” We are now living out the dramatic and inexorable consequences ~ & by “we” I mean the whole world.
Who was shouting back then? the (mesmerized) stupid mob was cheering for Reagan.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for freedom of choice in an open society; political self-determination; maximum opportunity and the unmitigated right to self-expression. I’m just extremely skeptical, because opportunists will always seek to profit by peddling popular delusions. No matter who we are or what we say, there will always be someone trying to figure out how to exploit our best intentions.
Beware! ideological conviction is a great comfort but a profound error. Whoever is at the helm, must not only seize the levers of economic power, but grasp the doomsday keys of annihilation. We need truly massive reforms to curb the abuses of banking, ruthless markets, chemical agriculture, universal ecological mis-management and the proliferation of lethal ordnance ~ and that is only the beginning. The world is a criminal syndicate, the cure is not to be complicit.
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