Finally got round to reading the Joe Bageant article that Mac started things out with, and this paragraph resonated with me pretty strongly:
No ordinary person could ever have withstood such a colonization of human consciousness as the American people have seen. Consciousness being simply awareness, there was no surviving the onslaught. The tsunami of false possibilities and pseudo choices constituted entire constellations in the psyche, of goods, and images of goods large and small: hair dryers, iPods, anti-bacterial wipes, cable television, ammunition, plastic siding, gourmet foods, this HP notebook computer in my lap, the Prius and the Porsche, even words such as Google, Microsoft, China Mobile, Vodafone, Marlboro… They all have psychological and social meaning in our commoditized consciousness, that battlefield where each commodity vies for preeminence with every other commodity in the shifting exposition of stuff we are permitted to labor to pay for
Finding a way to break people out of this imprinted "commoditized consciousness" is vital to moving forward.
Also, I'm happy to lend my voice of support to the Jack Riddler plan for sane political evolution, with the possible exception of the need for even a purely ornamental Chief Executive. I think its time we moved past modeling our large-scale political systems on mammalian family/pack hierarchies. (Not to say they don't still have a valid place at the actual family or pack level, but they just don't seem to work out that well in the long run when you try to scale them up beyond the scope of people you actually deal with on a day-to-day basis).
Like many of you have expressed, it's become difficult for me to see much hope for substantial change to the system as it stands. Or, rather, to a conscious, controlled change that will result in an objectively less crappy enviro-socio-political landscape, as opposed to the crash-and-burn kind of change, which doesn't do anyone any damn good.
However, I've decided to make the conscious, concerted effort to maintain as optimistic an outlook as possible, regardless of the obstacles. I know enough about confirmation bias to realize that as bad as things seem, there's a good chance that I'm just choosing to focus on the negative in order to allow myself the ease of not having to act to change things, because "What's the point, anyway?". If we make the sincere effort to change, it may come to nothing, but if we don't try at all, it certainly will.
