Schizophrenia, American-Style

I don’t know how you feel, but when I watch the mainstream media or read the Wall Street Journal for a couple of days running, I get to feeling like a crazy person.

It’s not the empty, sensational reports, or the vapid talking heads trying desperately to make news out of non-news, it’s the utter, unrelenting dissonance contained in the information itself.

For instance, on the one hand we have the sub-prime mortgage crunch, millions of folks defaulting on their home loans, and on the other we have the talking heads – and the endless droning commercials – exhorting Americans to run to the Mall, to Wal-Mart, to Target, to Macy’s, to Old Navy, and shop, shop, shop. Ignore the hard times that are surely coming, ignore your debts, and slap your plastic down, do your part to pump up the profits of corporate America.

Or take the stock market. One day, the Dow Jones plunges 237 points; the next it jumps by 215. One day, investors are scared witless about the credit crunch, the debilitated dollar, oil prices and sluggish housing starts; the next they are sanguine about the very same factors. How can this be?

Obviously, investors don’t have a fucking clue about what’s really going on with the economy. If you ignore Wall Street gambling and simply look at the fundamentals, the US economy looks like a train wreck. When the big bust comes, the super-wealthy will be able to dodge the fallout, while the rest of us will feel the lash and pay the piper.

No wonder Americans pop more anti-depressant medications than any other people on this planet. We’re whipsawed to and fro like palm trees in a Category 5 hurricane by our government and its lapdog, the corporate media.

We’ve passively accepted the bullshit corporate line that consumption is the road to happiness and the goal of life.

Now we’re even told that we can save the planet by buying “green.”

Jesus, no wonder Charles Bukowski holed up in a cheap Hollywood apartment with a fifth of Scotch and never answered the phone or the door.

No wonder Henry Miller retreated to remote Big Sur and stayed put for nearly two decades.

Schizophrenia. Like George W. Bush insisting that America has no plans to remain in Iraq indefinitely, and then, according to the venerable Wall Street Journal, signs a deal (they don’t say with whom) to do just that.

We’re passive, stupid, and easily fooled.

Nothing to do now but deadbolt the door and uncork the Scotch.