Americans: a carefully watched commodity

It doesn’t end with a bang, it ends with a whimper ... and it will be brought to you by your most favoritest sponsors of your most favoritestproducts and services, whether you like it or not. Actually, you may as well like it, since not liking it just titillates those sponsors. They love challenges.

Maybe in the depths of your darkest paranoia you’ve imagined the government was out to get you. Maybe you haven’t been reduced to a quivering puddle of psychosis like a speed freak peeking through a strategically created cigarette burn hole in the curtains at 3 AM, but after being officially groped by TSA at the airport one (too many) times, or cavity searched on the side of the road for throwing a butt out the window, you’ve begun to wonder.

No worries, the threat of a creeping police state is just a distraction. That’s not to say there is no police state creeping inexorably up behind you as surely, steadily, unstoppably as can be arranged by the only truly sick paranoids there are among us – the architects and implementers of the police state themselves. It just means that by the time the police state program succeeds, few will care any more. In fact, most will welcome it, if only to end the anxiety of waiting for that millipede’s final shoe to drop.

The real threat is at heart much more mundane, compensates for it with far sexier outfits, and is wired directly into our greedy, gluttonous addiction centers. It’s the very people who supply us with everything we need and all the things we didn’t know we needed but wereorgasmically satisfied to discover. It’s brought to you by the media that watches you even more intently than you watch it.

Nearly three years ago Verizon filed a patent application for technology that monitors the area within range of common media access devices to see what products and services any people there might be most inclined to be coerced into purchasing. People cuddling in front of the TV might be shown ads for romantic vacations and condoms. Others arguing with their spouses in front of their computer might see ads for marriage counselors and divorce lawyers the next time they looked at the screen. Gamers with dogs nervously watching them blast their virtual enemies into red mist and grisly piles of hamburger might find themselves faced with pet product offers.

Governments only want docile, micromanaged populations. Private businesses want to use debt and consumer addiction to sell you into wage slavery so deep that your children’s children seven generations from now will still be paying for it. Those are the kinds of income streams the elite crave to support derivatives and asset bubbles beyond the lustiest dreams of avarice.

Still, you may have some resistance to your final consumerization, however alluring, narcotic, and irresistible it can be made to be. You might never be able to surrender all your flesh at once to the jaws of the machine. You may still require to be eaten in smaller bites with more savor.

During the Bush II regime, people railed against intrusive, ubiquitous government surveillance and elected Barack Obama in 2008 partly in response to his promise to end the worst of it and reconsider the Patriot Act. People should have known the omens were clearly evil when Obama voted for the very legislation he told everyone he opposed – while he was still campaigning for president. Oh, well, anything to overtly terminate a hated Republican dynasty, right?

Four years later it’s not just Obama demanding the Bush-era attacks on our privacy be renewed without any modifications whatsoever, it’s also one of our supposedly more progressive senators, California’s own Senator Dianne Feinstein, teaming up in broad daylight with GOP stalwarts to defeat Democratic Party opposition to the police state’s warrant-unimpeded surveillance policies. So much for the Fourth Amendment, and that much easier now for the next erosion of our freedom.

Much in the same moment, California’s other progressive darling, Senator Barbara Boxer, has been in front of Congress proposing legislation to place National Guard troops in full battle gear at all our public schools. That attempt to solve the problem of too many guns in our schools, precisely military grade ones, by putting more military grade guns in our schools and staffing them with soldiers like one might expect of a third world dictatorship, came right on the heels of the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre advocating mandatory arming of the teachers themselves, a relatively mild proposal by comparison. It seems great minds really do think alike.

Theoretically, we can vote to change the government. By the same sort of theory we can vote with our patronage to change private business, too, but business is not constrained by any philosophical need to remain vulnerable to such a crude attack.

Thus, we have industry lobbyists playing a leading role in having mandatory GPS tracking built into our cell phones just in case someone really “needs” to find us (or locate a business for us), and chronically abusive corporations like AT&T about to release a total remote home monitoring service that no one would surely – surely – ever try to hijack for the sake of repressing people, or selling them more junk they would never have dreamed they couldn’t feel secure without.

Similarly, we have effective monopolies like Facebook to whom we not only freely divulge so many of our secrets, but willingly, eagerly, sate their lust for information with which to subvert us even as their ability to censor and sculpt our conversations becomes obvious.

Facebook, not alone in its lack of inhibition for satisfying its calculating business sense and owner’s caprice, has been caught applying a political filter to the content its users provide, although as a recent episode with Michael Moore reveals, the gods of Facebook aren’t completely insensitive to public sentiment – yet. Today, they still do better with a public that doesn’t resist being mined for the benefit of itspaying customers.

During the contested and usurped presidential election of 2000, the UN and Russia both offered to send election monitors to Florida to help the US overcome its problems with democracy. Twelve years later, Russia, fed up with continually being called every evil name by the very US that better defines its own accusations with every passing year, has decided to bar US citizens from adopting Russian children, officially lest they become party to human rights abuses and required to live in a land of shadow that every day looks more like Mordor, complete with its gloomy, thickening cloud of vile emissions.

With so many so very obvious things so very obviously wrong one would assume that an allegedly intelligent, empowered population likeAmerica’s would quickly get fed up and do something about the problems. After all, much of it has easy solutions.

Americans don’t have to force their co-opted, subverted, privately owned government to nationalize their apparently vital social media providers and have them run by non-partisan public employees, they can flock to or create other providers with principles more to their liking.

Americans could stop quivering with fear long enough to see through the diaphanous veil of false security and realize that guns, practically useless against the true tyranny of malignant government, but divisively Tarantinoesque amongst their comrades, are a dead end to be protested and boycotted instead of hoarded.

Americans could refuse to buy anything, ever, on credit – especially junk they didn’t know they needed until some vacuous celebrity smiley face shoved it at them from their favorite media source. Americans could consume less, reuse & recycle more, and save their bountiful energy for producing things of real, lasting value.

Americans could boycott the airlines and refuse to fly rather than put up with horrendously invasive security – intended primarily as just moreintimidation & humiliation – that their ancestors would have been willing to die fighting against.

Instead, what we hear is just the whimper of an overweight, deliberately oblivious America reaching for another beer, another bag of chips, and spinning the dial looking for more stuff to buy lest they be bored in the fewer and fewer minutes between ad volleys, or the fewer and fewer years before they succumb to overconsumption forging thick chains of debt – and die.

----

Links directory (Get the info straight from the sources! The article text that the links link from is in parentheses at the end of each line. This article has a whole other life once you read the material that supports it. And yes, the music is commentary. The lyrics for all the tracks have their own links so you don’t miss any of that not always very subtle messaging.)

Data Links:

1. Examiner (billy rainbow, 2010 Nov 20) – Erin Chase discovers the true meaning of “TSA”: Total Sexual Assault (groped by TSA)
2. Information Clearing House (David Edwards, 2012 Dec 18) – US cop caught on tape giving two women body cavity search during routine traffic stop (cavity searched)
3. FierceCable (Steve Donohue, 2012 Nov 30) – Verizon patents targeted advertising method that determines if viewers are laughing, cuddling, sleeping or singing (Verizon filed a patent application)
4. Iinformation Clearing House / Guardian (Glenn Greenwald, 2012 Dec 28) – GOP and Feinstein join to fulfill Obama's demand for renewed warrantless eavesdropping (Senator Dianne Feinstein teaming up)
5. Business Insider / Agence France Presse (2012 Dec 29) – Senate Renews Controversial Law Which Allows Warrantless Wiretapping Of US Citizens (warrant-unimpeded surveillance policies)
6. AlterNet (Steven Rosenfeld, 2012 Dec 26) – Barbara Boxer Triggers Outrage Over Proposal to Deploy National Guard in Public Schools (proposing legislation to place National Guard troops)
7. Washington’s Blog (2012 Dec 14) – Biggest Social Media Sites Censor Alternative News (not alone)
8. Reuters (Sinead Carew, 2013 Jan 07) – AT&T to launch home monitoring service in March (total remote home monitoring)
9. Naked Capitalism (“George Washington,” 2012 Nov 27) – Washington’s Blog: Facebook Censors Prominent Political Critics (censor and sculpt our conversations)
10. Michael Moore – Michael Moore’s Facebook page (recent episode with Michael Moore) Look down the page for his, “I don’t support the troops, America, and neither do you” post for Thursday, 2013 Jan 03 and his follow ups on Saturday, 2013 Jan 05. Then “Like” the page. You know you do. And follow it, too. You know you want to.
11. Guardian (Laurie Penny, 2012 Dec 28) – Russia's ban on US adoption isn't about children's rights (adopting Russian children)

Multimedia Links:

1. Skrillex – Reptile (YouTube, 3:57 min – Sonny Moore) (end with a bang) Lyrics It must be admitted that this one is here mostly just to get the beat started for the article. Set a mood. The lyrics you can easily make out, that got printed on the website, are pretty minimal, and the nearly subliminal ones that didn’t get printed aren’t worth an awful lot of concentration. So just sink into it – while you put a Postie over the camera on your monitor. You’ve been warned.
2. The Kinks – The Destroyer (YouTube, 4:03 min – XavieRinato) (paranoia) Lyrics
3. Radiohead – Paranoid Android (YouTube, 6:39 min – emimusic) (truly sick paranoids) Lyrics
4. Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me (YouTube, 3:37 min – RockwellVEVO) (media that watches you) Lyrics
5. will.i.am ft. Britney Spears – Scream & Shout (YouTube, 4:52 min – williamVEVO) (get fed up) Lyrics Look both ways before crossing.
6. Cop Conducts Shocking Cavity Search On Two Women 2012 (YouTube, 5:07 min – ADGUKNEWS) (intimidation & humiliation)
7. Porcupine Tree – Anesthetize (YouTube, 12:28 min – NoiseBerserker) (deliberately oblivious America) Lyrics The spoiler for this number is all in its name. It’s good work done by talented, inspired musicians, with lyrics that get a little, heavy, drifting, clumsy, strained … like the iconic American couch potato.