The New Opiates

from Special Correspondent T.S. DeHaviland

When Marx described religion as the opiate of the people, he never could have predicted the psychological whollop that is mass marketing. Nor could he have predicted how that has been used to command and control the plebiscite by the capitalist interests. But mass marketing is only one of the new opiates used against us to dull our senses and make us blindly accept the status quo.

Fear Factor and Survivor and Doom and the Fantastic 4 and iPods full of trashy pop are fun, and they take a lot of our time. When entertainment is cheap and plentiful, the people will be entertained. And, unlike in the 1840s when a man who worked all day in a factory had little to come home to other than the penny press (if he could read) and the pain of his own muscles and the misery of his own hovel and he could spend a lot of time thinking about how bad he had it, we now have the pleasure of hour upon hour of home theater, music videos, 24-hour golf channels, and jiggly titties on the pay-per-view. It’s sort of hard to get organized when you’re orgaistically entertained during most of the time you used to call “free.” And, while you’re basking in the afterglow of the plasma-screen you’ve charged on your Discover card, you kind of forget whatever it was about the CEO of your company that made you crazy to begin with. You’re not alone.

The Time Crunch

I’m not sure if the idea that we have less and less time to do what we want to do is an invention of the mass marketing machine or the god’s-honest truth. It’s probably a little of both. The 40-hour workweek Big Labor worked so hard for is still the norm, and the proletariat Marx wrote about worked at least 50% more than that in any given week. Our need for stuff, and our slipping buying power if we’re in the middle or lower classes, push us to spend more time working just to stay put materially. And the “need” to consider ourselves materially comfortable means we spend more time in our cars on the way to Wal-Mart, more time picking out the proper shower curtains and DVDs and Hot Pockets and Viagra and Bud.

We also worry that our children will fall even further than we did from the ideal set by the postwar generation as they rode the wave of 1950s prosperity. So little Hunter and Kylie and Connor have to have their soccer practice and ballet and gymnastics and anything else to get their spoiled little butts into a better chance at Prestigious U., and, hopefully, from there, find a job better than that of mom or dad.

But that very downsizing and rightsizing and outsourcing that America’s workers ought to be upset about necessitate that those of us who still do have jobs work longer and longer hours and be more productive for less and less dough. The more we work, the less time we have to organize and the more likely we are to keep in “our place” at the bottom of the corporate heap. The 40-hour workweek is still the norm, but not for long.

The Right Wing Message machine

Thomas Frank, among others, has written extensively about this, so I shan’t repeat his work. But suffice it to say that 20 years of right-wing propaganda has taken its toll. From the moment Ronald Reagan declared government “the problem,” the private sector has taken up the position of “the solution” in the minds of most Americans. And a lie repeated often enough gets to be believed, even though the private sector has “solved” our problems by laying us off, freezing our wages, polluting our rivers and streams, destroying our family farms, enriching those at the top at the expense of everyone else, eating out the substance of small and independent businesses, and squandering our natural resources. In other words, our investment of time, effort, trust, and our retirement funds in big business has resulted in more powerful industry-funded “think tanks” and FoxNews that spit back to us the baldfaced lie that we have it so much better now that the fetters are off the corporate world.

Cheap Chinese Goods

Just as those manufacturing jobs disappear, the local Wal-Mart has turned dealer for a particularly potent form of consumer crack: cheap Chinese goods. As long as the Chinese keep making things cheaper than we can, and as long as we can afford their goods, we’ll continue to think we’re middle class. It’s not that we’ve benefitted so much from China’s cheap stuff, but it has happened to come at a time that our actual buying power has for the most part declined. We don’t notice because the things that used to cost a fair amount of money now cost next to nothing. Think about it: it used to be cost-effective to have your shoes repaired rather than replaced. Cheap crap from China makes us think we’ve “made it” materially even while the corporate oligarchs rob our retirement funds to pay for their multi-million dollar bonuses. We feel we have little to complain about because we can still buy most of the things we think we “need” – and with easy credit we can get our hands on a few luxuries as well. The cost is not just our manufacturing jobs, but our sense of moral outrage as well.

Charismatic Fundamentalist Christianity

Marx gets echoed here, but unlike in 19th Century Europe in which the church was still attached to the political power structure, in 21st Century America, independent “mainstream” churches could be seen to be something of a political and economic threat. The civil rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s saw a massive realignment of Christianity and Judaism against maintaining the status-quo and with the forces of progressive change. Figures like Martin Luther King Jr. yanked the scales from the eyes of church leaders and reawakened believers to the spiritual component of social justice. The Fundamentalists had never been on board with that liberal, forgiving, loving Jesus anyway, and so became the natural ally of the capitalist robber-barons of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Combined with massive numbers of disaffected, guilt-ridden Baby-Boomers, desperate for a spiritual life, the potential for destructive demographic change was afoot. The Fundamentalists had only to tap into their powerful charismaticism for the coup to be complete. Fundamentalist charismatics offer the sort of easy, prepackaged, marketable spiritual message that would resonate with a population raised on the “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” ad campaign and pop-politics on a bumper sticker. How could we resist? Fundamentalism is the theological equivalent of cheap Chinese goods – and it comes at a steep price for our souls. But it’s accessible, and it doesn’t require that we think a whole lot about its ramifications or where it comes from. It makes us feel good about who we already are, dismisses the poor (who we don’t want to think about anyway), and is unswervingly loyal to those who would wage war in our names and those same forces of the free-market that lead us to seek meaning in the first place. Fundamentalism also saps our strength and desire to change our social and economic condition – God will take care of us, right? – further doping us with a shallow, facile, happy-clappy excuse for genuine religious experience.

These are the reasons I don’t see a revolution happening in American politics anytime soon. I hope I’m wrong. But it seems we’re too dazzled, tired, dittoed, and Christ-stricken to want to resist. And as our resources grow thin and our wealth rapidly recedes offshore, we’ll again be on the frontier: this time, we’ll be the New Pioneers of Imperial Collapse.

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