America is in Need of a Moral Bailout
America Is in Need of a Moral Bailouthttp://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/?ln
Posted Mar 23, 2009(A snippet of the article)
By Chris HedgesIn decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed
out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image
and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a
working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and
make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled.
Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion.
Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other
large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they
incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities,
turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and
chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the
discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of
meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains
us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have
withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral
questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice
to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the
pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a
cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer
society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and
honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality
television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant.
Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own
justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized.
And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic
collapse.
A
Andrea
(view)
America Is in Need of a Moral Bailouthttp://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090323_america_is_in_need_of_a_moral_bailout/?ln
Posted Mar 23, 2009(A snippet of the article)
By Chris HedgesIn decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed
out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image
and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a
working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and
make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled.
Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion.
Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other
large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they
incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities,
turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and
chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the
discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of
meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains
us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have
withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral
questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice
to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the
pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a
cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer
society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and
honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality
television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant.
Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own
justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized.
And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic
collapse.
