Britney Spears and the downfall of America

I have often mentioned that Joe Bageant and his blog are among my favorite sources for depressing insights into the discouraging state of this once great nation as it plunges headlong into catastrophic collapse. Here lately he has filled in the spaces between his own thoughtful but rather long essays by printing letters from his correspondents and his replies to them, which often amount to mini-essays. And in a recent letter from “Robert (from) New Mexico” (which is the only identity he vouches to his correspondents), one line jumped out at me as a sort of crystalline summary of what I’ve been thinking for years: “Any system that encourages the participation of stupid people, is doomed to fail.” I think that encapsulates my attitude in a pithy (or pissy) apothegm.

I’m not sure why I’ve picked on Britney Spears as a symbol of this, except that Bageant himself has occasionally mentioned our national obsession with the pitiful shenanigans in the personal life of this half-witted loser; and just this morning, during the five minutes of mainstream-media newsertainment in which I sometimes indulge while eating breakfast (although I don’t know why it doesn’t take my appetite), sure enough, another item about America’s Favorite Vagina managed to crop up in that short time span. And one can hardly avoid the conviction that a nation which sits spellbound at the latest trivia about the life of some witless Barbie doll whose single claim to fame is her exposure of her snatch to cameras, is indeed stupid enough to be doomed to fail. (I’m not sure what conclusion can be drawn from this, but I’m convinced that if someone like Kevin Federline, a similarly hollow cultural nonentity, had exposed his cock to cameras, it would never have been shown the first time, far less become a national obsession viewed thousands of times. He’d simply have been arrested for indecent exposure and the case closed. There’s some sort of sex-discrimination at work here.)

However, one of the themes of Bageant’s criticism is that the nation is not really as stupid as the mainstream media treat it, a vaguely optimistic belief which he bases on the intelligence of his own readers. On the other hand, the number of people waking up and smelling the vomit, while probably growing, is still such an infinitesimally small proportion of the total populace that their increasing awareness can hardly be called a groundswell just yet. But if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the people are not really as stupid as the media treat them, then why do the media treat them that way? They claim that if it improves their viewer ratings, that must confirm their assumptions. But there is a darker possible explanation: they treat their viewers like imbeciles in order to make them imbeciles. The system doesn’t just encourage the participation of stupid people, it encourages them to be stupid; it creates stupid people! (It’s plain as a pikestaff that the system actively discourages the participation of the growing minority who are figuring things out.) And why would they do that? Because they don’t know that this dooms the system to failure? Or because they want the system to fail?

Which system are we talking about here? I think there are two, or at least two levels to the one system. The level I think “Robert” is talking about above, the one doomed to fail, is that on which the system of democratic government is supposed to represent and serve the needs of the people, regardless of how smart or stupid they may be assumed to be. The level which seems to be deliberately encouraging that level to fail is the level of corporate power barons who control every facet of society, and whose control is ensured by a populace who either don’t know what the power barons are doing (because they’ve been fed pictures of celebrity snatches rather than real news), or know and don’t care. Their abuse of control thrives at the expense of the people who have to be kept anesthetized to the fact that their lives are being sacrificed to the power structure. And as long as these deliberately created morons are participating in the system to the extent of legitimizing it—by such banal exercises in pointless futility as voting for which branch of the corporatist party will be propped up as a façade for the power barons for the next four years, and by feeding it with their lifeblood by consuming the tons of useless shit which become a major part of the anesthesia—then the system which should succeed is indeed doomed to fail, and the system which has doomed it will survive and continue to rape the people and the planet.

And we’ll all settle back and listen to another story about poor Britney’s poor kids. (And I’ll take some lessons in rhetoric and syntax—when pigs fly.)