JAMAICA — It's interesting to me that the Tea Party types who are so agitated over governmental interference in their lives and constrictions of their freedom by unnecessary laws (and I heartily agree with that libertarian stand) show so little awareness of the much greater constriction of our freedoms under the iron-fisted domination of the mega-corporations.
These mega-corporations rule that very government that the Tea Partiers conceive to be the problem. Right in front of our faces and without any sleight of hand, the government took our money and gave it to the mega-corporations, without asking a thing in return.
So who ruled that transaction?
The mega-corporations, enormous institutions of banking and finance, with an accumulation of wealth greater than most nation-states, rule by using national governments as their hand puppets; by thrusting marketing in your face wherever you turn, filling every nook and cranny of our lives with demeaning slogans and jingles and robo phone calls designed to fire our imagination; by offering bad loans and seductive credit designed to build insurmountable personal debt, while withholding sensible loans that would assist small businesses to survive and grow; by outsourcing jobs and industry, while paying low wages, often without health benefits, to those dwindling employees (increasingly women who are compensated less than men) remaining stateside.
They rule. They win.
Yet the Tea Party faithful go on believing that “big government,” or the so-called “liberals” (a vague term defined by Fox News as a pantywaist elite who seek to sell out our hard-won freedoms by giving away the national treasury to insignificant foreign nations, useless science groups, NPR, and lazy welfare moms), or the Socialists (an even more hazy political entity that rules our Congress), or the United Nations (a sinister organization that seeks to establish a New World Order) - or all combined - are responsible for the diminishing quality of life (home, family, job), while the true perpetrators, the ruling class of the mega-corporations, skillfully direct our attention away from them by tossing us a hypnotic bouquet of cyber-goodies.
Yet, as Wendell Berry correctly observed, we can never make life better by technological means.
True, the techno-nonsense and nifty gadgets like cell phones that take pictures and play music and go bang in the night serve to foster in us a false impression that something is improving.
The only thing improving is the sale of Prozac and Wellbutrin.
When computer games and Facebook are substituted for lost jobs, we tend to “chill” even while those jobs disappear and the two-earner family is downsized to a one-earner family while our bills grow larger.
We pooh-pooh advertising, yet we are inundated by it.
We oppose war, yet we continue to pay war taxes and would jump for joy if only we could find a lucrative job in a war industry.
We ridiculed the nonsense of “weapons of mass destruction” and “axis of evil” and “mission accomplished,” yet we engaged with barely a protest in two huge, immoral wars of incalculable cost on the far side of the planet.
We make jokes about how everything is made in China, yet we buy everything that is made in China.
Hollywood directors and writers laugh at the crap they make, yet they continue to produce the same senseless, worthless shoot-'em-ups.
We called George Bush a buffoon even as he and his managers staged his re-election and proceeded to slash the taxes of the rich and the benefits of the poor and commence upon two loathsome wars while we guffawed at Saturday Night Live comic imitations of Bush malapropisms.
“Mammon” is a term from the New Testament, used to describe the brutal, mindless accumulation of material wealth, and the lusting after it, personified as a god or an idol. This false god, Mammon, piles up Everests of loot for the rulers of the mega-corporations and the parasitic so-called hedge funds that bet on their profits, leveraging we the people for a load of debt that we can never repay.
Hello, Tea Partiers. Would you like to wake up and fight the real power? Or shall we continue along in drugged enchantment with our cyber-toys while awaiting someone else to make the revolution that will not be televised, but globally announced on Twitter?