But even more fortunate people among them believe the hype. My Central American friend Rodrigo, who is in no danger of starving because he owns a couple of tamale and panade street carts, says, "A new car, that's what I want to go to America for. A car and an apartment with one of those things that go up and down inside the buildings."
"An elevator?"
"Si! An elevator. A glass one!"
"It's only a system," I told myself during the 24/7 blanket coverage of Michael Jackson's corpse, deeply suspicious that that so many millions of Americans were really distraught over the loss of this weirdly mutated media flesh puppet. Morbidly curious maybe, but not distraught. There were the high ceremonial triubutory rituals, the carefully written and rehearsed incantations as to how Jackson pushed the global cause of racial eq uality to new heights. Even Nelson Mandela said so. Why am I not sharing in this great and tragic stirring of the masses? This news event apparently of massive import?
A politician dips his pecker in the wrong honeypot, and it plays for days, dies down, then returns months later when the honeypot sues him for support, his wife sues him for divorce. A congressman offers a black dude a blowjob in a public restroom because, "I was afraid of him and wanted to accommodate the situation." Cheap spectacle and the distractive buffoonery of folly, along with the latest reasons we should be afraid, these are primary grist for the media entertainment divisions called "news."
But seldom to never do we get news and information as to the global scale of the genuine emergency facing humankind. Bad news is bad for business, therefore said to be bad for you and me. We all accept that consumer confidence is the foundation of the whole shebang, the confidence game that is capitalism. Thus confidence and cheery optimism is mandatory among the citizen consumer-producer marks. Willingly we self-police our behavior, shunning, criticizing or mocking what we perceive as "negative people." We drive past the empty parking lots, abandoned housing developments, through networks of cameras and cops with radar guns, stun guns and real guns every few blocks, numb to it all, listening to government commercial propaganda officialized by Katie Couric and Ben Bernanke. Just like us, they have internalized the system as a matter=2 0of education and "professionalism." But unlike us, they've done it to such an effective degree as to warrant seven figure remuneration.
Somewhere waaay down the ladder of the propaganda machinery, we find the anonymous guy or gal who writes the crap that keeps the front page of our web browsers so slow. The top story on my browser yesterday was: "Is Facebook hurting American productivity?" (begging the question as to whether there is any production to hurt). On one level you gotta wonder who the hell put that story there and for what reason. On the other hand, the story carried a link to Facebook. Was that a small act of personal rebellion at AOL? A corporate state message? Or a Facebook plant to direct traffic in its direction? In all likelihood though, it was just another piece of meaningless sh*t, generated by some kid news editor at AOL, a guy who has one of those rare things in America these days, a job, because he's already internalized the system far too well. In any case, my attention was momentarily diverted, sucked into AOL World, snared away from what other world I do not know, but certainly one fraught with paranoia, or at least hyper suspicion, if a browser screen can arouse so much speculation as to its motives.
Speaking of motives, there are those who worry about an American authoritarian police state one day rounding folks up, shuffling them off to geographically remote camps, such as the Department of Homeland Security's scattered FEMA Camps. But physical geograp hy isn't the only geography. There is geography of the mind too, where another kind of hellish internment may be conducted. One without razor wire or sirens but surely as confining and in its own way, as soul chilling as any concentration camp. One with plenty to eat and filled with distractions and diversions enough to drown out the alarms and sirens that go off inside free men at the scent of tyranny. If a round up of Americans is real, then it began years ago. And as far as I can tell, everyone went peacefully, each one alone, like children, whose greatest concern on that day when the gates were closed, was the absence of Ranch flavored Pringles.
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