Champagne 24/7 anyone? Television for the voyeuristic hoi polloi.

Reality television was never so blatant in its pursuit of superficiality.

PATRICE GREANVILLE

Superficiality sells. I know because the Bravo channel takes voyeurism of the rich and famous, and obsessive, frothing adulation of their decadent way of life (plus conformity in general), to ridiculous heights, and they seem to be thriving. It’s this channel’s sole raison d’etre. Bravo’s schedule is a paean to Sex & the City’s hedonistic theme, but this time writ large, in all its possible lurid implementations.  Banality addicts need not look no more: this is their natural home. For here we have  an entire channel devoted to superficialities—from constant competitions among chefs, hairdressers, fashion designers and wannabe models, to Hollywood stars and celebrities’ “personal stylists” (like the incomparably obnoxious and self-absorbed Rachel Zoe), to exotic services (matchmaking for millionaires), to the “travails” of rich pregnant matrons….in heels, of all things, and much much more, so as to constitute an ocean of narcissistic excess with absolutely no redeeming substance. 

But the breathless chronicles of the rich and worthless reach their natural apotheosis via this channel’s most profitable franchise, the “Real Housewives” , a whole slew of shows devoted entirely to following the scandalously wasted lives of various pods of rich and quasi-rich women (the shows haven’t managed to enlist the real blue blood haute bourgeois yet and probably never will so these specimens must content themselves with hyper-affluent upper middle class types) in L.A. (Beverly Hills), Orange County (Calif.), NYC, Miami, Washington, DC, Atlanta, and New Jersey.

Of the lot, only three pods are watchable: Atlanta, Beverly Hills, and New Jersey—mostly for their comic value. The OC franchise, comprised of chiefly brainless boring salopes yaking and yaking and yaking about their vapid lives is a waste even by Bravo’s standards. (This little fact, of course, doesn’t keep the show from having its loyal following). And although all these exhibitionistic matrons are supposed to represent something of a “socialite” standard in their respective venues, Bravo’s norms (without joining the ranks of professional snobs) are obviously mighty mighty generous.  In fact, the New Jersey contingent alone is a treasure trove for cultural anthropologists looking to study the miraculous transformation of clannish Italian paisan into manorial American nouveau riche, with all its bathetic implications.

Are any of these shows entertaining at least?  Yes, I must admit that some are, but at the end of the day, I doubt that even these contributions can make up for the lack of substance afflicting the other shows.

It’s obvious that the high-handed squandering of television as a precious social resource in a time of global crisis does not concern Bravo’s executives. Regrettably, in that regard they’re not that different from their brethren on other channels.

¡Bravo muchachos!

P. Greanville is the Greanville Post’s editor in chief.

PD/ The only redeeming value of this channel’s programming may be that, unwittingly, it provides abundant and eloquent documentation of why social change is urgent and necessary.

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Published on Monday, May 23, 2011 by TruthDig.com

by Chris Hedges

The liberal class, which attempted last week to discredit the words my friend Cornel West spoke about Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, prefers comfort and privilege to justice, truth and confrontation. Its guiding ideological stance is determined by what is most expedient to the careers of its members. It refuses to challenge, in a meaningful way, the decaying structures of democracy or the ascendancy of the corporate state. It glosses over the relentless assault on working men and women and the imperial wars that are bankrupting the nation. It proclaims its adherence to traditional liberal values while defending and promoting systems of power that mock these values. The pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, the church, culture, the university, labor and the Democratic Party—all honor an unwritten quid pro quo with corporations and the power elite, as well as our masters of war, on whom they depend for money, access and positions of influence. Those who expose this moral cowardice and collaboration with corporate power are always ruthlessly thrust aside.

The capitulation of the liberal class to corporate capitalism, as Irving Howe once noted, has “bleached out all political tendencies.” The liberal class has become, Howe wrote, “a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything.” The decision to subordinate ethics to political expediency has led liberals to steadily surrender their moral autonomy, voice and beliefs to the dictates of the corporate state. As Dwight Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man,” those who do not make human beings the center of their concern soon lose the capacity to make any ethical choices, for they willingly sacrifice others in the name of the politically expedient and practical.

By extolling the power of the state as an agent of change, as well as measuring human progress through the advances of science, technology and consumption, liberals abetted the cult of the self and the ascendancy of the corporate state. The liberal class placed its faith in the inevitability of human progress and abandoned the human values that should have remained at the core of its activism. The state, now the repository of the hopes and dreams of the liberal class, should always have been seen as the enemy. The destruction of the old radical and militant movements—the communists, socialists and anarchists—has left liberals without a source of new ideas. The link between an effective liberal class and a more radical left was always essential to the health of the former. The liberal class, by allowing radical movements to be dismembered through Red baiting and by banishing those within its ranks who had moral autonomy, gradually deformed basic liberal tenets to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization and permanent war. Liberalism, cut off from the radical roots of creative and bold thought, merged completely with the corporate power elite. The liberal class at once was betrayed and betrayed itself. And it now functions like a commercial brand, giving a different flavor, face or spin to the ruthless mechanisms of corporate power. This, indeed, is the primary function of Barack Obama.

The liberal class, despite becoming an object of widespread public scorn, prefers the choreographed charade. It will decry the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or call for universal health care, but continue to defend and support a Democratic Party that has no intention of disrupting the corporate machine. As long as the charade is played, the liberal class can hold itself up as the conscience of the nation without having to act. It can maintain its privileged economic status. It can continue to live in an imaginary world where democratic reform and responsible government exist. It can pretend it has a voice and influence in the corridors of power. But the uselessness and irrelevancy of the liberal class are not lost on the tens of millions of Americans who suffer the indignities of the corporate state. And this is why liberals are rightly despised by the working class and the poor.

The liberal class is incapable of reforming itself. It does not hold within its ranks the rebels and iconoclasts who have the moral or physical courage to defy the corporate state and power elite. And when someone such as Cornel West speaks out, packs of careerist liberals—or perhaps one should call them neoliberals—descend on the apostate like hellhounds, never addressing the truths that are expressed but instead engaging in vicious character assassination. The same thing happened to Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich, Jeremiah Wright and others who defied the political orthodoxy of corporate capitalism. The corporate forces, which have taken control of the press and which break unions, run the universities, fund the arts and own the Democratic Party, demand the banishment of all who question the good intentions of the powerful. Liberals who comply are tolerated within the system. They are permitted to busy themselves with the boutique activism of political correctness, inclusiveness or multiculturalism. If they attempt to fight for the primacy of justice, they become pariahs.

Leo Tolstoy wrote that there were three characteristics of all forms of prophecy: “First, it is entirely opposed to the general ideas of the people in the midst of whom it is uttered; second, all who hear it feel its truth; and thirdly, above all, it urges men to realize what it foretells.”

Prophets put forward during their day ideas that the mass of people, including the elite, denounce as impractical and yet at the same time sense to be true. This is what invokes the rage against the prophet. He or she states the obvious in a society where the obvious is seditious. Prophecy is feared because of the consequences of the truth. To accept that Obama is, as West said, a mascot for Wall Street means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions can be instruments for genuine reform. It means having to step outside the mainstream. It means a new radicalism. It means recognizing that there is no hope for a correction or a reversal within the formal systems of power. It means defying traditional systems of power. And liberals, who have become courtiers to the corporate state, must attempt to silence all those who condemn the ruthlessness and mendacity of these systems of destruction. Their denunciation of all who rebel is a matter of self-preservation. For once the callous heart of the corporate state is exposed, so is the callous heart of the liberal class.

© 2011 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

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By Christine Shearer, Left Eye on Books

Posted on May 23, 2011

Humans have stolen their future. Now what?

Don’t be fooled by the title of Kari Marie Norgaard’s Living in Denial – this is not a book about people who reject the basic science of climate change (I’m looking at you, Koch brothers and Exxon). This is a book about many of us, and how we to varying degrees live in denial. Although focusing on a small rural community in Norway, Norgaard sheds light on how people systematically interact in ways that serve to downplay or ignore climate change, and avoid the unsettling emotions it raises.

In the Introduction, Norgaard says she is looking at climate change to build a model of socially organized denial, where denial is not just an individual, psychological process, but one that occurs through social interaction. By denial, she means Stanley Cohen’s three varieties of denial: literal, interpretive, and implicatory. Literal is outright dismissal of information (i.e. climate change deniers). Interpretive means reinterpretation of information (perhaps thinking climate change is natural, or will not be that bad).

Implicatory is Norgaard’s main focus, meaning the information is not rejected but the psychological, political, or moral implications are not followed. This is the heart of the book: why those who know about climate change fail to act on that knowledge. In that sense, Norgaard is not interested in climate change activists, but why so many who accept the science don’t act, and how this inaction becomes a cultural norm (similar to what political theorist Antonio Gramsci calls hegemony).

Norgaard explores the topic of social denial through interviews and ethnography in Bygdaby, Norway, from 2000-1. Bygdaby is a small rural community of about 14,000 people, with many farms and a strong sense of tradition, yet also firm roots to the modern world, including the fact that 34% of Norway’s national revenues came from petroleum in 2008.

Although gaining so much of its wealth from oil, Norgaard tells us that neither the country nor the town of Bygdaby has the well-financed climate denial operations that other countries have, most notably the U.S. That makes Bygdaby an interesting case study, since most of the residents, Norgaard tells us, accept the science of climate change, meaning much of the inaction here is apparently not due to simply literal denial.

In exploring the topic, Norgaard makes use of many different bodies of research in the social sciences and psychology. The work is nicely blended with her ethnographic research to illustrate the subtle ways in which individuals engage in social norms of selective attention to avoid uncomfortable feelings, crystallizing as cultural nonmobilization on climate change.

Much of these processes are not necessarily conscious nor deliberate, so in focusing attention on them, Norgaard helps make them conscious. In doing so, the book offers insights into underlying social and psychological barriers to action that – to my knowledge – have not been widely considered or discussed, yet arguably represent some of the biggest challenges to addressing climate change.

Norgaard notes many different ways that the social organization of denial works – she later calls it a kaleidoscope. Among them is the sheer enormity of the problem of climate change, one that can leave people feeling powerlessness, as individual actions appear insufficient and political actions seem so untenable. Thus bringing up climate change can feel like it accomplishes little more than bringing down the social mood of a group, kind of like Debbie Downer from Saturday Night Live: “Sure, it’s a beautiful, sunny day, because the planet is cooking us alive.” Wah-waaah!

Acknowledging climate change also immediately invites questions over how you live. Unless you have a zero waste home run by solar power with an organic garden and a bike, then you probably use fossil fuels, which invites criticism about hypocrisy – criticism that is somehow null and void if you just do not bring up climate change at all.

The result is that climate change is often only discussed during socially sanctioned times and settings, like classrooms. Yet it is in the fabric of everyday life that the problem is woven and changes need to be made.

Though focused on denial, Norgaard’s work indirectly raises the question of how and why people become active and push for social change. Norgaard says that most people in Bygdaby probably understand at least the basics of climate change science: increasing greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the planet. But does level of awareness – both cognitively and emotionally – make a difference in individual response? What if more people connected increasing greenhouse gases with daily weather events? (How to change the minds of people who deny the science outright is an entirely different matter, as science writer Chris Mooney recently laid out.)

For example, a recent Yale study found significant differences in how groupings of people respond to climate change, suggesting more variation between individuals than Living in Denial explores. This could be a function of place (the Yale study looked at the U.S.) and also time, as the science on climate change grows more alarming, and its everyday effects become more apparent.

But Norgaard’s main point is showing how a group of well-meaning people can be both aware of climate change and not addressing the problem – how they interact in ways that push climate change out of the range of full attention and action. In that way, it speaks to many of us. As we become more aware of the subtle ways in which we collectively avoid the unsettling reality of climate change, will we change our actions to align with the knowledge? Or will we continue living in denial?

Christine Shearer is a researcher for CoalSwarm, part of SourceWatch, and a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UC Santa Barbara. She is managing editor of Conducive, and author of the forthcoming book, “Kivalina: A Climate Change Story” (Haymarket Books, 2011).

© 2011 Left Eye on Books All rights reserved.

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Op-Ed

Chile’s buried secrets
By exhuming the body of Salvador Allende, an official inquiry aims to lay the past to rest.

By Peter Kornbluh and Marc Cooper

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

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May 8, 2011

The old bogeyman is dead. Long live constant terror!

Like Bush, Jr., before him, Obama is proving that a puffed-up and “powerful” president is a dangerous president. It was only a matter of time before Obama used his newfound popularity and warrior credentials to wreak military havoc elsewhere. It took just three days for Obama to go from bin Laden to Yemen, where he bombed — via an aerial drone — two innocent civilians in his attempt to assassinate an American citizen who makes pro-Jihad Youtube videos.

Americans have been focused on bank bailouts, high unemployment, Medicare and Social Security, the state budget deficits and the subsequent attack on labor unions that spawned the events in Wisconsin.

If the social movements in either Libya or Yemen are stamped out by U.S. military aggression, the warning will be obvious to other working people contemplating a revolutionary movement against a dictatorial government.

Inside the post-bin Laden United States, Americans are being told not to relax, but to prepare for a counterattack. Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press reports:

Local law enforcement has been encouraged to use closed-circuit televisions to monitor sensitive areas, establish neighborhood watch programs, conduct security sweeps for explosives and do background checks on employees. These are not new suggestions, but counterterrorism officials want to remind the country to be on extra alert in order to stave off potential retaliatory attacks by bin Laden supporters.

The wars must continue or expand because they make some of people very rich. Therefore, most people inside the U.S. must suffer cuts to virtually every social program, since all the tax money must be funneled into more war. It is this fact that currently unites the Republicans and Democrats over their militarized foreign policy abroad and their domestic policy of starving individual states to force cuts while demanding massive cuts on a federal level.

The best way to stop U.S. military aggression is to focus on the internal problems of the U.S., by demanding that the hundreds of billions of military and war spending be used instead to create millions of jobs. Additional hundreds of billions can be raised by dramatically increasing taxes on the rich and corporations to spend on jobs, education, Medicare and Social Security, and other social programs.

About the Author: Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action. He can be reached at portland@workerscompass.org

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