Should American culture go extinct — in arguably deserved retribution for societally approved viciousness?

© 2019 Peter Free

 

04 June 2019

 

 

Nasty-minded stupidity — whose fault (really) is it?

 

Film-maker Paul Edwards appears to be mulling whether US warmongering and pillaging can be attributed to more than just a handful of predatorily bad people:

 

 

[A] few men own half our wealth and a majority have nothing . . . U.S. economic hegemony is based on killing people and the biosphere by weapons and debt . . . our political system, the toy of financial criminals, is inaccessible to citizens.

 

This butcher’s list of engineered malignity should have crashed a polity so viciously corrupted but, since it hasn’t, the explanation must be in the nature of its victims.

 

[T]hese burlesques of policy show the moral torpidity and pathetic inanimacy of a public that has been relentlessly lied to, cozened, infantilized, made stupid, and shorn of pride in itself by a Capitalist System that savages them with the same contempt it does all life.

 

They’ve internalized it [the contempt] and now act as their own abusers.

 

History is a tale of failed societies that lacked the will to save themselves . . . our impotence is not unique.

 

Perhaps . . . given the vast catalogue of our self-inflicted disasters, the question is not how we can be saved but whether we should be.

 

© 2019 Paul Edwards, Idiocracy, CounterPunch (04 June 2019)

 

 

When does brainwashing become voluntarily imbibed?

 

As Paul Edwards implies, American culture is quiescently ruminant-like. It happily swallows whatever soul-defeating nonsense appears on its plate. And we are, characteristically, easily distracted from considering anything that actually matters to our personal wellbeing and freedoms.

 

In apparent psychic compensation for this obvious lack of common practical and moral sense, we have an addictive taste for mindless entertainment and argument.

 

While:

 

 

Yellow Vests are raising a justified ruckus in France

 

and

 

significant minorities all over the world are resisting oppression and invasion —

 

Americans are sitting on their (generally overfed) butts not doing much of anything

 

while our liberties and moral rectitude vanish on the tides that Edwards describes.

 

 

Most of us, it seems, are fulfilled (pro or con) just watching President Trump act crassly in public.

 

 

The moral? — Is conceitedly lazy nitwitism enough to justify societal survival?

 

Or should Pest Control come by with Evolution's bug spray?