"Can’t we engage in at least a nonviolent revolt against this servitude?"

wow... wow... wow... and wow... susang offers this book review over at daily kos...

Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power
The Rise and Risk of the New Conservative Hate Culture
By Gerry Spence
St. Martin’s Press
New York, 2006
256 Pages

Generalized hate often has a narrow base. It’s easy to hate gays if one can’t find a job that pays more than the minimum starvation wage. It’s easy to jump on the patriotic band wagon to blow the hell out of half the innocent people in Iraq if one has, in effect, been blown to some sort of economic hell and is equally innocent. When people feel hurt they hurt back.
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I am talking in a general way about what our corporate-industrial state does to people, without them realizing that the culture itself creates stress, disappointment, and a pesky anxiety that keeps the pharmaceutical stocks popping.
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A vague sense of overall worthlessness prevails, and it makes us angry. We get used to it, like one gets used to a pervasive bad smell.
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The problem is simple. We no longer own our own minds. They already belong to the corporate-government oligarchy. We have been thoroughly propagandized. We do not know our frontal lobes have been so tinctured with propaganda that we – all of us – will vehemently deny to our last breath that we have lost our ability of independent thought.
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We have been taught to hate the forgotten and abandoned members of our society, our mentally ill, whom we’ve thrown out onto the streets. There are laws against throwing empty bottles on the streets, but none to keep us from throwing the lost and helpless there.

and, if that doesn't grab you, try this...

There’s no end to my wants because my worth is expressed in the things I have. If I have nothing or little, or at least not as much as Joe Average Hard-Working American, I do not amount to much. We live in a society of things, and I want everything. Everything! .... I call it Thingism. Relentlessly we’re subjected to a propaganda of things called, euphemistically, “advertising.” Out there lies that awful malaise, people who feel numb and dead. To many, life has become a sort of walking death.
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Can’t we put an end to this endless madness? Can’t we engage in at least a nonviolent revolt against this servitude? But if one is consumed in consumption, in paying off debt, in devoting one’s life to the acquisition and payment of things, then there is no time or energy left to rebel, to consider, to think; to contemplate intelligently about one’s condition, much less the condition of the community, the country, or the world. Thingism leads us to apathy.

every once in a while, someone comes along who gives clear voice to my own thoughts... i can't wait to read it...

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