Re: Why America is So Screwed Up


Do you think people are ready for that much truth ?



On Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:36:19 -0700, bron <bron@xxxxxxx> wrote:


An Essay In Cultural Psychiatry

Fred Reed

Letters pour in from desperate readers (or would if they did) saying,
"Fred, explain America today. Say something tendentious and irritating
about what is going on in this curious country. Why do we do what we
do? Sock it to us."

All right.

The United States is an uneasy, frightened country, yet aggressive,
truculent, and looking for trouble--which it finds. Fear: Terrorists
are everywhere, like cockroaches and governmental cameras. Citizens
should watch each other on the subway and rat out suspicious behavior,
such as speaking a language other than English. People need to go
through metal detectors in county courthouses, because the government
is scared of them, and get spied on by the government to protect them
against the ever-present danger of...of, well, the unspeakable and
unspoken angst of existence. And so, in the customary manner of large
scared bullies, the country lashes out, at Iraq, Iran, Syria, North
Korea, Afghanistan, Venezuela, wherever.

A friend says, "Fred, gringos want to be controlled. They love this
police-state stuff. It gives them meaning. They lead miserable lives
in boring suburbs. The husband is a mouth-breathing oaf with his
retinas sewed to the football machine. His wife is a pucker-faced
shrew with cellulite like the dark side of the Moon and his kids are
whining dopers who gawp at the box and gurgle over stupid video games.
The guy has no control over anything in his life. He's scared of the
boss and the pissed-off middle-aged man-hating divorcee with thick
ankles in Human Resources who would love to outsource his job to
Mumbai. He knows he'll get raped if he splits from the wife. So he
wants to kill something. He doesn't care what, and anyway finding out
might require reading a book, which god knows he isn't going to do."

This may be harsh. It also may be true of more people than one would
like. The United States does not look real happy just now. It is a
lower-middle-class country with an upper-middle-class income, except
the credit cards are maxed out and people are in debt up to their
gills. They don't read much. The cultural center of gravity is the
black ghetto with its irremediable anger. Americans tend to equate
social class with income, but Archie Bunker in a call-me-Arnold SUV is
still Archie Bunker. And his job, no matter how air-conditioned the
office, is probably as rewarding as screwing lug-nuts on cars passing
on the assembly line.

It is a purely consumer society. There is not much to life out there
except buying things. Granted, a medieval serf would have regarded
this as a problem much to be desired, but it leads to a certain
bleakness today. You don't buy a house because you love it, because of
the lush vegetation thereabout and ancient trees and an enchanting air
of calm and antiquity. No. You buy a "starter house" with the
intention of unloading it when you make partner. Then you buy a shoddy
McMansion, exactly like three hundred others surrounding it. Then it's
home theater and granite counter-tops and more-complex iPods and, just
maybe, one day, a Hummer, that most thunderous of motorized codpieces.
A suspicion dawns that something somehow isn't right. Yep.

Other uneases brood over the landscape. Women dominate domestic
politics and so we have the Fear State. With them security...security
security trumps liberty or taking chances of any sort, and so we must
ban pocket knives. They are afraid of guns, want kids to wear helmets
on bikes, and think tag is a violent and dangerous game. Yes, there
are exceptions, but fewer day by day. We must fill in the deep ends of
swimming pools and fear second-hand smoke and things that go bump in
the night. I suspect a lot of this vague anxiety stems from the lack
of a settled and satisfying place in society.

Men run foreign policy, and do it with the ardor and brainless
territoriality of retarded pit bulls. We must confront The Threat--
this threat, that threat, any threat in a storm. After the Soviets
punked out on us, we adopted Terr, Terrace, and Tersm as interim
threats until China comes online. We must Fight, we must Show Them, we
must Draw the Line. All across America men with grade-school minds and
beachball paunches growl that we gotta gettem before they get us, if
we don't stoppem there, they'll land on the beaches of Peoria.

Women are limited creatures. They couldn't be this stupid if you wired
the entire sex in series.

Anyhow, this division of irresponsibility leads to contradictions. In
school, low-IQ teachers try to make little boys into girls and expel
them if they play soldier and say Bang. Then the Pentagon recruits
these transvestite artifacts and sends them off to shoot people
they've barely heard of. What a plan. What clarity of vision. What
consistency.

A thing about society now is that nobody knows the rules any longer,
if there are rules. In the past, from about the lower middle class and
up, women behaved as ladies and men as gentlemen, concepts now
identified with oppression. Even the lower classes were usually
courteous after their fashion. The arrangement had its uses. When
general agreement enforces consideration of others, life is better.
You can go for days without wanting to strangle anybody.

Today, many people are civil, but many aren't. You don't know what to
expect. Do you respond to abuse by being abusive in return? Or get
walked over? That is the question. We now have Road Rage. In the
streets you find people pushing onto the subway like piglets looking
to suckle, and throwing the finger. Women are worse, apparently
confusing ill-bred pugnacity with virility. (Men are careful how they
treat each other, as there are consequences. Women do not suffer
consequences. It must be nice.)

Further, the ghetto rules everywhere, seeps in, or threatens.
Americans are not social climbers, but social descenders, rappelling
deliberately into the grubby depths. On the radio one hears regularly
such lyrical confections as "Muthahfucka, muthafucka, she a ho, ***."
Ah, but the chief rule of discourse today is that one must never
offend the offensive. You must never suggest that they straighten up
and mind their manners, mouth, grammar, and work ethic.

The pervasive overregulation adds to the national edginess. The
government decides what and whether your children will learn in
school, and makes it nearly impossible to flee. Getting on an airplane
requires a strip-search by federal dimwits. You can't hire people
without proving that you have enough of this race and that sex and
don't discriminate against left-handed Pomeranian sadomasochists with
Hispanic grandmothers. Rules, laws, regulations, paperwork. A sense
arises of being trapped. Many hate it.

Add it up. A frightened people over-controlled, having no communal
roots, blocked by government from raising their children as they see
fit, parlously indebted, sexually confused, and lacking a sense of
permanence or of a connection with the natural world, both of which
have since time immemorial mitigated a certain emptiness in human
affairs. Like a dog tormented by evil children, the country is ready
to bite. And it does.

I hope that was adequately irritating. I can do no worse.

.

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