Shoppers are torturers

Link: What torture? We went shopping | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press.

Seven years ago, when the nation was attacked and Americans wanted to pitch in, wanted to help, wanted to sacrifice, our leaders told us to go shopping. Prop the economy up, they said. Don't worry about the war. Let us handle it. Go shopping.

And we did. Nor, scared as we were, eager for the illusion of security as we were, did we look too closely or examine too intently the things that were being done in our names. We became, many of us, expert at ignoring the screams from behind the curtain, discounting the growing mountain of evidence that things were not as we had been told, brushing off nagging questions about what we have become and how that does not square with what we are supposed to be.

We shopped, and did not fret overmuch about the price of our moral laxity.

Maybe that's because the price is paid in tiny increments of our national honor, yet somehow, never by those who most deserve to foot the bill. So that, seven years later, George W. Bush is still president of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld is working on his memoirs, John Yoo is a law professor at U.C. Berkeley.

But Lynndie England is a single mother, on parole and looking for work, living in a trailer with her folks.

Comments

[parodijski centrum]

But Lynndie England is a single mother, on parole and looking for work, living in a trailer with her folks.

Well you know that's sometimes what happens to wimmin who work for imperial feminism, but you know all about that Dr Lt Fossey, having crossed all those galaxies in search of an end to capitalism...

[bob allen]

living with her folks

I am struck by the prevalence of dependency in the working class; the remark "wimmin who work for imperial feminism" is not even funny, a superficial petit bourgeois attempt at snark, but leaving that aside, it is amazing that those who carry out the dirty work of the ruling class garner so little payback, or at least it is so to those who don't relish a stake in the present order of things. With the dissembling of structures such as decent paying jobs, the dependency on family( and government aid, constricting in scope as that is) seems to be widening. Technical education seems a "paint by numbers" affair, the only real requirement is to get ahead however possible, what you are willing to do, or how inanely one can conform to banal corporate directives and attitudes seems to be as important as "education" in getting a coveted spot in the shrinking middle class, and having a hope of reducing dependency. Dependencies like this are a function of capitalist social divisions, one doesn't need to cross galaxies to recognize this.

[parodijski centrum]

Bob I was referring to the fact that Lieutenant Lynndie functioned as a feminist icon much like Sigourney Weaver in ALIENS, the message being ''American military women are on top'' (while all the while riding the cock of the male commanders who gave the orders). I have a big problem with Western feminism, namely, and I like to tease Dr. Fossey about it.

[Bob Allen]

well all right then (waving hands around head like comedian Louie Anderson) sorry I blew up. I'ts just all too real for me: I have a son on parole living in a trailer, and I joined the Army at 17 and suffered its degradations such that instead of analyzing a movie at a critical distance, I AM an alien living real life that feels like a movie, and aren't most of us on parole and living in trailers, riding cocks, virtually speaking? Excuse me, but there is a snake, (or is it the boss's cock?), about to burst out of my belly. This has gone way beyond gender...