After a long weekend Joe Bageant is like a tonic to clear the cob webs away. Here Joe is ruminating on what a disaster the U.S. has become. And how the sheeple have been propagandized into submission. Joe has a point. Peacenik is sometimes ridiculed when Peacenik offers a negative perspective on the end of the recession or the world. Negativity is somehow socially unacceptable. Enough said. Read Joe.
C hernobyl
by Joe Bageant
"It's only a system," she said, as we floated through the sprawling supermarket's gleaming commodity lined indoor streets. "THE HELL IT IS! It's a goddamned air conditioned zombie hell of waste and gluttony," I thought to myself, before the usual vertigo completely enveloped me. Just back from Central America's simple, comprehensible mercados, bodegas and street cart vendors, the effect of this most common American shopping venue was, as always, one of vertigo. Head splitting light beats down on pyramids of plastic eggs, as if to incubate their hatching of the ladies stockings within, dozens of kinds of toothpaste, well scrubbed dead chickens, lurid baskets of too-perfect flowers, plastic wraps, tissue for faces, asses and wrapping gifts, row upon row of polished vegetables and fruits standing like soldiers waiting for the annihilation of salads or the ovens of casseroledom.
And all those hushed and not so hushed shopper cell phone conversations, this one consoling someone at the home base pod:
"Oh I am so sorry, baby, but I think they've quit making the Ranch flavored Pringles. Yes I know you don't like the jalapeno Pringles. I am so sorry. Really I am." Both parties seemed genuinely distraught.
Read on...
C hernobyl
by Joe Bageant
"It's only a system," she said, as we floated through the sprawling supermarket's gleaming commodity lined indoor streets. "THE HELL IT IS! It's a goddamned air conditioned zombie hell of waste and gluttony," I thought to myself, before the usual vertigo completely enveloped me. Just back from Central America's simple, comprehensible mercados, bodegas and street cart vendors, the effect of this most common American shopping venue was, as always, one of vertigo. Head splitting light beats down on pyramids of plastic eggs, as if to incubate their hatching of the ladies stockings within, dozens of kinds of toothpaste, well scrubbed dead chickens, lurid baskets of too-perfect flowers, plastic wraps, tissue for faces, asses and wrapping gifts, row upon row of polished vegetables and fruits standing like soldiers waiting for the annihilation of salads or the ovens of casseroledom.
And all those hushed and not so hushed shopper cell phone conversations, this one consoling someone at the home base pod:
"Oh I am so sorry, baby, but I think they've quit making the Ranch flavored Pringles. Yes I know you don't like the jalapeno Pringles. I am so sorry. Really I am." Both parties seemed genuinely distraught.
Read on...
