1. 15 July 2007

    Deer Hunting with Jesus

    Joe Bageant

    508 days ago

    Wonderful bit of writing on the ignored population of America – poor whites. Living in small towns, working paycheck to paycheck, being born again and again into christianity, voting defacto republican, etc. They’re where Bush can draw enough of the electorate to have ever managed to b e our president, despite his utter incompetence. People for which it comes to pills or heating oil. I’ve met precious few of these.

    Bageant can take a look at these people with better perspective than most, having grown up in the small town spotlighted in the book, where he lives for a second time. But between he’s been places, moving west, getting college educated, moving through hippy circles, living on the Coeur d’Alene indian reservation, and in big librul towns. He can love and understand these people, while wanting to smack them for the idiocy they’ve been raised into.

    Bageant himself describes the book: “one part cultural anthropology and part splash of cold water into the face of those liberals wondering why their working-class brothers and sisters seem to have turned against them.”

    Backed by the faithful support of hardworking American Christians who seldom fully comprehend their leadership’s agenda, zealous evangelical leaders will have no less than the “inevitable victory God has promised his new chosen people,” according to the founding masters of the covert kingdom. Screw the Jews, they blew their chance. The 2008 elections, regardless of the outcome, will not change the fact that millions of americans are under the spell of an extraordinarily dangerous mass psychosis. Maybe the philosopher Nietzche was right “one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity — one must first be sick enough for it.” 190

    Over the past twenty-five years a boatload of America’s for-profit hospitals migrated to nonprofit status because it is more profitable. 231

    Liberal or Conservative, the average American spends about one-third of his or her waking life watching television. THe neurological effects are profound. For example, researcher Herbert Krugman famously demonstrated that television viewing makes the right brain hemisphere twice as active as the left, releasing a surge in the body’s natural opiates—endorphins, including beta-endorphins and enkephalin, all of which act on the same brain receptors as opiates. Other research shows suspension of critical-thinking skills. Meanwhile, we watch television pleasurably, believing we understand what we have watched, believing we are always in control of the experience and are not unduly influenced by it. 256

    Our culture is based on two things: television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie [an actual person from Winchester] or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So it is small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we revive the conditioning required to sustain out acceptance of the state brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, war as a corporate profit center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects og the corporate sponsored hologram. 262

  2. 18 April 2007

    School, springtime

    596 days ago

    It’s been beautiful outside the past few days and I’ve been lapping it up. 65 degree days with blue skies and light breezes make school plenty hard to put up with though. I sat down in my third two hour class yesterday only to get up and leave and sit outside the rest of the afternoon. I made it to all three of my classes today, but the third was rough. Here’s me falling asleep:

    (I told the iMac to capture an iSight image every 15 minutes along with a screenshot. So far only one kid dialing up internet porn.) Here’s all that I could do to keep awake:

    The puzzle widget is another great one to tile across the 1900×1200 screen, but you have to go through and click each one to make them move, and it chews up an unfair amount of processor to have so many little windows constantly drawing themselves in the background.

    To make things worse, I have a french paper due consecutively last friday, this morning, and tomorrow at 1pm for which I haven’t yet been able to get a paragraph out. I’ve read patches of four different books (not to mention at least as much on the web) for inspiration. Although I have a topic that pulls me in (at least in theory), I still can’t bring any words out. We’ll see how this goes.

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