• “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.”
• “Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned out in a sea of irrelevance.” “A populace deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining a free society.”
  • Provide a current example that supports ONE of these statements.
  • Write a paragraph (125-150 words) analyzing this example based on what your learned in the first chapter: “The Illusion of Literacy”.
  • In order to receive full-credit, you will also reply to one of your classmate’s posts with your understanding of how his/her example supports one of the three statements above.

Please read the chapter 1.

Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
I – The Illusion of Literacy
II – The Illusion of Love
III – The Illusion of Wisdom
IV – The Illusion of Happiness
V – The Illusion of America
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright Page
2
For Eunice,
soles occidere et redire possvnt: nobis cvm semel occidit
brevis
lvx, nox est perpetva vna dormienda. da mi basia mille.
3
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own
destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of
innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a
monster.
—JAMES BALDWIN
4
I
The Illusion of Literacy
Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image
has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image.
We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting
presence. And that image has all the Godly powers. It kills at will. Kills
effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly.
The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not
to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a
clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images
cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to
idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of the electronic
image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.
—JOHN RALSTON SAUL, Voltaire’s Bastards1
We had fed the heart on fantasy,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, The Stare’s Nest By My Window
JOHN BRADSHAW LAYFIELD, tall, clean-cut, in a
collared shirt and white Stetson hat, stands in the center of
the ring holding a heavy black microphone. Layfield plays
wrestling tycoon JBL on the World Wrestling
Entertainment tour.2 The arena is filled with hooting and
jeering fans, including families with children. The crowd
yells and boos at JBL, who has had a long career as a
5
professional wrestler. Many chant, “You suck! You suck!
You suck!”
“Last week I made Shawn Michaels an offer, and I
have yet to hear back from the Heartbreak Kid,” drawls
Layfield. Michaels, another WWE wrestler, is a crowd
favorite. He is a self-professed born-again Christian with a
working-man persona. “So earlier today I made Shawn
Michaels an offer that was a lot easier to understand,”
Layfield continues. “I challenge Shawn Michaels to a
street fight tonight! So Shawn, I know you’re back there.
Now what’s your answer?”
“HBK, HBK, HBK!!!” the crowd intones. A pulsing
rock beat suddenly shakes the arena as action shots of the
Heartbreak Kid flash across the Titantron, the massive
screen suspended over the ring. The crowd cheers, leaping
up as Shawn Michaels, in jeans and an army-green shirt,
whirls onstage, his long, blond hair flying. Pyrotechnics
explode. The deafening sound system growls, “I know I’m
sexy . . . I got the looks . . . that drive the girls wild. . . .”
Michaels bursts into the ring, fists pumping, stalking
back and forth. The ref steps in to begin the match.
“HBK! HBK! HBK!” chants the crowd.
“Hold on, hold on, referee,” Layfield says, putting his
hand on the referee’s shoulder. People in the crowd begin
to heckle.
“Shawn,” he says, “you got a choice to make. You can
either fight me right now in this street fight, or you can do
6
the right thing for you, your family, and your extended
family, and take care of them in a financial crisis you
never dreamed would happen a year ago today.”
Michaels stands silently.
“You see, I know some things, Shawn,” continues
Layfield. “Rich people always do. Before this stock market
crashed, nobody saw it coming, except, of course, my
wife, but that didn’t help you, did it? See, I was hoarding
cash. I was putting money in gold. While most Americans
followed the leader—blindly, stupidly followed the leader
—I was making money. In fact, Shawn, I was prospering
while you were following the herd, losing almost
everything, right, Shawn?”
“Fight!! Fight!! Fight!! Fight!!” urges the crowd.
Michaels looks hesitantly back and forth between the
heaving crowd and Layfield.
“You lost your 401(k). You lost your retirement. You
lost your nest egg. You lost your children’s education
fund,” Layfield bellows into the mic, his face inches from
Michaels’s. “You got to support your extended family,
Shawn, and now you look around with all this
responsibility, and you look at your beautiful wife, she’s a
beautiful lady, you look at your two little wonderful kids,
and you wonder: ‘How in the world . . . am I going to send
them . . . to college?’ ”
Layfield pauses heavily. Michaels’ face is slack,
pained. Small, individual voices shout out from the crowd.
7
“Well, I’ve got an answer,” Layfield goes on. “I’m
offering you a job. I want you to come work—for me.”
“No! No! No!” yells the crowd. Michaels blinks
slowly, dazed, and lowers his eyes to the mat.
“See, there’s always alternatives, Shawn. There’s
alternatives to everything. You can always wrestle until
you’re fifty. You might even wrestle till you’re sixty. In
fact, you could be a lot like these has-beens who are
disgracing themselves in high school gyms all over the
country, bragging about their war stories of selling the
place out while they’re hawking their eight-by-tens and
selling Polaroids. Shawn, you could be that guy, or you
could take my offer, because I promise you this: All the
revenue that you’re goin’ to make off your DX T-shirts
will not compare to the offer that I . . . made . . . to you.”
He tells the Heartbreak Kid to look in the mirror,
adding, “The years haven’t been kind to you, have they,
Shawn?” He reminds him that one more bad fall, one more
injury, and “you’re done, you’re done.”
The crowd begins to rally their stunned hero, growing
louder and louder. “HBK! HBK! HBK!”
“What else can you really do besides this?” Layfield
asks. “You get a second chance in life.”
Layfield sweeps off his white Stetson. “Go ahead,” he
screams into Michaels’s face. “Ever since you walked out
here . . . people have been wantin’ you to kick me in the
face. So why don’t you do it? I’m gonna give you a free
8
shot, Shawn, right here.”
The crowd erupts, roaring for the Heartbreak Kid to
strike.
“HBK!! DO IT!! DO IT!! HBK!! HBK!!!”
“Listen to ’em. Everybody wants it. Shawn, it’s what
you want. You’re twitching. You’re begging to pull the
trigger, so I’m telling you right now, take a shot! Take it!”
The Heartbreak Kid takes one step back, his stubbled
face trembling, breathing rapidly like a rabbit. The crowd
is leaping out of their seats, thrusting their arms in the air,
holding up handmade banners.
“HBK!!! HBK!!! HBK!!!”
“Do it, Shawn,” Layfield hollers, “before it’s too late.
This is your second chance, but understand this,
understand this—”
“HBK!!! HBK!!! HBK!!!”
“—Listen to me and not them! If you take this shot . . .
then this offer is off the table . . . forever.”
The crowd stops chanting. Different cries are heard:
boos, shouts to attack, shouts to stop. There is no longer
unity in the auditorium.
Layfield holds his head outstretched until the
Heartbreak Kid slowly turns his back. Layfield leers.
Shawn Michaels climbs through the ropes out of the ring
9
and walks heavily back to the dressing room, his dull gaze
on the ground.
“Lookin’ forward to doin’ business with ya, Shawn,”
Layfield shouts after him.
The crowd screams.
Layfield, like most of the wrestlers, has a long,
complicated fictional backstory that includes a host of
highly publicized intrigues, fights, betrayals, infidelities,
abuse, and outrageous behavior—including goose-stepping
around the ring and giving the Nazi salute during a
wrestling bout in Germany. But tonight he has come in his
newest incarnation as the “self-made millionaire,” the
capitalist, the CEO who walked away with a pot of gold
while workers across the country lost their jobs, saw their
savings and retirement funds evaporate, and fought off
foreclosure.
As often happens in a celebrity culture, the line
between public and fictional personas blurs. Layfield
actually claims to have made a fortune as a stock market
investor and says he is married to the “richest woman on
Wall Street.” He is a regular panelist on Fox News
Channel’s The Cost of Freedom and previously appeared
on CNBC, not only as a celebrity wrestler but as a savvy
investor whose conservative political views are worth
airing. He also has written a best-selling book on financial
planning called Have More Money Now. He hosts a
weekend talk-radio program syndicated nationally by Talk
Radio Network, in which he discusses politics.
10
The interaction between the crowd and Layfield is
vintage professional wrestling. The twenty-minute bouts
employ the same tired gimmicks, the same choreographed
moves, the endless counts to two by the referee that never
seem to get to three without the pinned wrestler leaping up
from the mat to continue the fight. There is the desperate
struggle of a prostrate wrestler trying to reach the hand of
his or her partner to be relieved in the ring. This
pantomime, with his opponent on his back and his arm
outstretched, can go on for a couple of minutes. There are
a lot of dirty shots when the referee is distracted—which is
often.
The bouts are stylized rituals. They are public
expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The
lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the
wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a
frenzy. These ritualized battles give those packed in the
arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives.
The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for
a high-energy pantomime. And the most potent story
tonight, the most potent story across North America, is one
of financial ruin, desperation, and enslavement of a
frightened and abused working class to a heartless,
tyrannical, corporate employer. For most, it is only in the
illusion of the ring that they are able to rise above their
small stations in life and engage in a heroic battle to fight
back.
As the wrestlers appear and strut down the aisle, the
crowd, mostly young, working-class males, knows by
heart the long list of vendettas and betrayals being carried
into the ring. The matches are always acts of retribution for
11
a host of elaborate and fictional wrongs. The narratives of
emotional wreckage reflected in the wrestlers’ stage
biographies mirror the emotional wreckage of the fans.
This is the deep appeal of professional wrestling. It is the
appeal of much of popular culture, from Jerry Springer to
“reality” television to Oprah Winfrey. The narratives
expose the anxiety that we will die and never be
recognized or acclaimed, that we will never be wealthy,
that we are not among the chosen but remain part of the
vast, anonymous masses. The ringside sagas are designed
to reassure us. They hold out the hope that we, humble and
unsung as these celebrities once were, will eventually be
blessed with grace and fortune.
The success of professional wrestling, like most of the
entertainment that envelops our culture, lies not in fooling
us that these stories are real. Rather, it succeeds because
we ask to be fooled. We happily pay for the chance to
suspend reality. The wrestlers, like all celebrities, become
our vicarious selves. They do what we cannot. They rise
up from humble origins into a supernatural world of
tyrants, divas, and fierce opponents who are huge and
rippling with muscles—mythic in their size and power.
They face momentous battles and epic struggles. They win
great victories. They garner fame and vanquish their
anonymity. And they return to befriend and confer some of
their supernatural power on us. It is the stuff of classical
myths, including the narrative of Jesus Christ. It is the
yearning that life conform to a recognizable pattern and
provide ultimate fulfillment before death.
“For the truth is,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset, “that life
on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost.
12
The individual suspects as much but is terrified to
encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so
attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over
it, behind which he can make believe that everything is
clear.”3
Clashes in the professional wrestling ring from the
1950s to the 1980s hinged on a different narrative. The
battle against the evil of communism and crude, racial
stereotypes stoked the crowd. The bouts, which my
grandfather religiously watched on Saturday afternoons,
were raw, unvarnished expressions of the prejudices of the
white working class from which he came. They appealed
to nationalism and a dislike and distrust of all who were
racially, ethnically, or religiously different. During these
matches, some of which I watched as a boy, there was
usually some huge hulk of a man, known invariably as
“The Russian Bear,” who would say things like “Ve vill
bury you.” Nikolai Volkoff, who wrestled during these
years under the name Boris Breznikoff, used to sing the
Soviet National Anthem and wave the Soviet flag before
matches to bait the crowd. He eventually teamed up with
an Iranian-born wrestler, Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri,
known as The Iron Sheik. In the midst of the Iranian
hostage crisis, the Iron Sheik bragged in the ring about his
devotion and friendship with Ayatollah Khomeini. The
Iron Sheik was regularly pitted against a wrestler known as
Sergeant Slaughter, All-American G. I. During the first
Gulf War; the Iron Sheik reinvented himself, as often
happens with wrestlers who shed one persona and name
for another, as Colonel Mustafa, an Iraqi who was a close
confidant of Saddam Hussein. In wrestling, villains were
13
nearly always foreigners. They were people who wanted to
destroy “our way of life.” They hated America. They
spoke in strange accents and had swarthy skin.
But that hatred, once directed outward, has turned
inward. Wrestling fans, whose numbers have been swelled
by new immigrants and are no longer limited to the white
working class, began to come in too many colors. The
steady loss of manufacturing jobs and decline in social
services meant that blue-collar workers—people like my
grandparents—could no longer find jobs that provided a
living wage, jobs with benefits, jobs that could support a
family. The hulks of empty manufacturing centers began to
dot the landscape, including the abandoned mills in Maine,
where my family lived. The disparity between the elite, the
rich, and the rest of the country grew obscenely. The
growing class division and hopelessness triggered a
mounting rage toward the elite, as well as a sense of
powerlessness. Communities began to crumble. Downtown
stores went out of business and were boarded up. Domestic
abuse and drug and alcohol addiction began to plague
working-class neighborhoods and towns.
The story line in professional wrestling evolved to fit
the new era. It began to focus on the petty, cruel,
psychological dramas and family dysfunction that come
with social breakdown. The enemy became figures like
Layfield, those who had everything and lorded it over
those who did not. The anger unleashed by the crowd
became the anger of people who, like the Heartbreak Kid,
felt used, shamed, and trapped. It became the anger of
class warfare. Figures such as Layfield—who arrives at
professional matches in a giant white limousine with
14
Texan “hook ’em” horns on the hood—are created by
wrestling promoters to shove these social disparities in the
faces of the audience, just as the Iron Sheik mocked the
crowd with his hatred of America.
Wrestlers work in “stables,” or groups. These groups,
all of which have managers, are at war with the other
groups. This motif, too, is new. It represents a society that
has less and less national cohesion, a society that has
broken down into warlike and antagonistic tribes. The
stables cheat, lie, steal one another’s women, and ignore
all rules in the desperate scramble to win. Winning is all
that matters. Morality is irrelevant. These wrestling clans
have their own logos, uniforms, slogans, theme songs,
cheerleaders, and other badges of communal identity. They
do not, however, stay consistent in their “good guy” or
“bad guy” status. A clan, like an individual wrestler, can
be good one week and evil the next. All that matters is
their own advancement. Week after week, they act out
scenarios that are psychological windows into what has
happened to our culture.
Ray Traylor was a prison guard in Georgia before
debuting as a professional wrestler in 1985. Known on the
wrestling circuit as Big Boss Man, he was portrayed as a
brutal, sadistic wrestler devoid of human compassion.
Traylor showed up at the ring with a nightstick, a flak
jacket, handcuffs, and a ball and chain. During a match in
1992 a digitized voice came over the loudspeaker. It
warned the Boss Man that someone from his past was
coming to exact revenge. Sure enough, the Boss Man was
ambushed in the ring by Nailz, a wrestler who claimed to
be a former inmate brutalized by the Boss Man during his
15
time as a correctional officer. Nailz, a six-foot, eight-inch
brute with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, appeared
in the arena wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. The two
began a bitter, long feud. It was a feud many in the crowd
knew too well. It was the feud between prisoners and
guards. It was the feud between those who had once been
incarcerated and who wanted to do to their keepers what
had been done to them. Traylor later adopted a new
persona in the ring, also known as the Boss Man, but now
a hated security guard, dressed in a SWAT-like outfit, for
Vince McMahon’s Corporation, which owns the wrestling
franchise. McMahon, in tune with the passions of his
audience, is always trying to exploit, threaten, and cheat
the wrestlers who work for him.
The Boss Man’s most infamous stunt was publicly
taunting a wrestler named Big Show when it was
announced that Big Show’s father had cancer. The Boss
Man, at least in the scripted melodrama, hired a police
impersonator to go into Big Show’s locker room moments
before a match and tell him his father had died. Big Show,
shown weeping, withdrew from the match, and the Boss
Man won by forfeit. A grainy black-and-white video,
purportedly lifted from a surveillance camera in the Boss
Man’s locker room, showed Traylor asking the
impersonator for a detailed report on how Big Show
reacted.
“What he do, what he do?” the Boss Man asked,
eagerly shifting from side to side.
The police impersonator pinched the bridge of his nose
and bowed his head. “My daddy! My daddy!”
16
“My daddy! My daddy!” the Boss Man squealed.
“Waaaa! My daddy gone!”
In the ring he imitated Big Show and wailed to the
crowd, “My daddy! My daddy! Waaaa! Waaa!” Stalking
the ring in mirrored sunglasses, he read a ditty to the
booing, enraged crowd:
With the deepest regrets and tears that are soaked
I’m sorry to hear your dad finally croaked.
He lived a full life on his own terms,
Soon he’ll be buried and eaten by worms.
But if I could have a son as stupid as you
I’d wish for cancer so I could die too.
Boss Man then supposedly smashed Big Show’s family
heirloom, his grandfather’s gold pocket watch, with a
hammer and anvil. A video of the Boss Man was played to
the crowd, showing him at the graveside service of Big
Show’s father, in a Blues Brothers-inspired police car with
a huge loudspeaker on the roof. The Boss Man blared
through the speaker as he drove up the cemetery path,
“He’s dead as a doornail, and no matter how much you cry
and cry, nobody but nobody gonna bring him back. . . .
You’re nothin’ but a momma, and speakin’ of yo’ momma,
hey, Ms. Wight [Big Show’s mother], now that you’re a
single woman, how’d you like to go out with a man like
me?”
He then drove the car into Big Show, who weighed
close to 500 pounds. As the mourners huddled around the
17
fallen Big Show, the Boss Man hooked the coffin up to the
police car with a chain and dragged it away. Big Show got
up and ran after the casket, clinging to it until he fell off.
Boss Man then “secretly” taped a meeting with Big
Show’s weeping mother in her kitchen. He held up a
manila envelope and shook it in her face.
“If you don’t tell him what’s in this envelope, I will,”
he threatened.
“Let me tell him, it should come from me,” she sobbed.
She confessed that she had had an affair during her
marriage and that Big Show was the illegitimate result. Big
Show’s father was not his biological father.
“So what you’re saying is, your son is a bastard?” the
Boss Man asked the bawling widow.
“Yee-ess,” she whimpered between sobs.
“Hey, Paul Wight,” the Boss Man turned and yelled
into the hidden camera, using Big Show’s real name.
“You’re a nasty bastard and yo’ mama said so!”
“You know, I thought it was real funny when Big
Freak Show’s fake daddy died and went to hell,” the Boss
Man told the crowd afterward from the ring. “But you
know what’s ten times funnier than his fake daddy’s
dying? That’s Big Show walking around, ‘Waaa, waaa,
where’s my daddy? Who’s my daddy?’ Well, that’s the
million-dollar question. Your daddy could be any one of
these stinkin’ morons sittin’ in this arena tonight. But the
18
fact remains: After I get through kicking your ass, I will be
the World Wrestling Federation champion, and I guess that
makes me your daddy.”
City after city, night after night, packed arena after
packed arena, the wrestlers play out a new, broken social
narrative. No one has a fixed identify, not the way a
Russian communist or an evil Iranian or an American
patriot once had an intractable identity. Identities and
morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores,
rules, and authenticity mean nothing. Good and evil mean
nothing. The idea of permanent personalities and
permanent values, as in the culture at large, has
evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal
pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while
inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood.
The wrestler known as the Undertaker frequently
battles a wrestler known as Kane. Kane is the supposed
result of an affair between the Undertaker’s mother and the
Undertaker’s manager, whose stage name is, appropriately,
Paul Bearer. Paul Bearer, fans were told, was at the time of
the affair an employee at the funeral home in Death Valley
owned by the Undertaker’s parents. Kane, in the story line,
“accidentally” burned down the funeral home as a child.
The parents died in the fire. Kane was hideously scarred.
The Undertaker and Kane each thought the other had been
lost in the conflagration.
Paul Bearer had, it turned out, hidden young Kane in a
mental asylum. It was when Paul Bearer had a falling out
with the Undertaker that he had Kane released and signed
Kane on as his agent of revenge. Kane and Paul Bearer,
19
during one event in Long Island, ostensibly exhumed the
parents’ bodies for the crowd. They carried the purported
remains into the arena. The younger brother had a series of
bouts against the older. Paul Bearer was finally kidnapped
and trapped in a concrete crypt. The Undertaker refused to
rescue his manager. He buried him alive. As Paul A.
Cantor notes in his essay on professional wrestling, “All
the elements are there: sibling rivalry, disputed parentage,
child neglect and abuse, domestic violence, family
revenge.”4
Those who were once born with the virus of inherent
evil, the Russian communist or the Iranian, now become
evil for a reason. It is not their fault. They are victims.
Self-pity is the driving motive in life. They were abused as
children or in prison or by friends or lovers or spouses or
employers. The new mantra says we all have a right to
seek emotional gratification if we have been abused, even
if it harms others. I am bad, the narratives say, because I
was neglected and poorly treated. I was forced to be bad. It
is not my fault. Pity me. If you do not pity me, screw you.
I pity myself. It is the undiluted narcissism of a society in
precipitous decline.
The referee, the only authority figure in the bouts, is
easily distracted and unable to administer justice. As soon
as the referee turns his back, which happens in nearly
every match, the second member of the opposing tag team,
who is not supposed to be in the ring at the same time as
his or her partner, leaps through the ropes. The two
wrestlers pummel an opponent lying helpless on the mat
behind the referee’s back. They often kick, or pretend to
20
kick, the downed wrestler in the gut. The referee,
preoccupied, never notices. The failure to enforce the
rules, which usually hurts the wrestler who needs the rules
the most, is vital to the story line. It reflects, in the eyes of
the fans, the greed, manipulation, and abuse wreaked by
the powerful and the rich. The world, as professional
wrestling knows, is always stacked against the little guy.
Cheating becomes a way to even the score. The system of
justice in the world of wrestling is always rigged. It
reflects, for many who watch, the tainted justice system
outside the ring. It promotes the morality of cheat or die.
I watch Irish-born wrestler Dave Finley, with a
shamrock on his costume and brandishing his signature
shillelagh, enter the ring in Madison Square Garden with a
four-foot, five-inch midget known as Hornswoggle, who is
dressed as a leprechaun. The two are battling a massive
African American wrestler known as Mark Henry. Henry
is bearded and grimacing and weighs 380 pounds. He
shouts insults at the crowd. When Hornswoggle enters the
ring in the middle of the match to assist a beleaguered
Finley, the referee tries to get Hornswoggle out. Finley,
now unobserved by the referee, grabs his shillelagh and
hits Mark Henry on the head. The referee, preoccupied
with Hornswoggle, sees nothing. Mark Henry holds his
head, spins around the ring, and collapses. Finley leaps on
Mark Henry’s bulk. He attracts the attention of the referee,
and with the count of three wins the match. The crowd
cheers in delight.
Wrestling operates from the popular (and often
inarguable) assumption that those in authority are sleazy.
Finley is a favorite with the crowd, although tonight he
21
cheats to win. If the world is rigged against you, if those in
power stifle your voice, outsource your job, and foreclose
your house, then cheat back. Corruption is part of life. The
most popular wrestlers always defy and taunt their
employers and promoters.
Women, although they enter the ring to fight other
women wrestlers, are almost always cast as temptresses.
They steal each other’s boyfriends. They are often prizes
to be won by competing wrestlers. These vixens,
supposedly in relationships with one wrestler, are often
caught on surveillance videos flirting with rival wrestlers.
This provokes matches between the jealous boyfriend and
the new love interest.
The plotlines around the women, or “divas,” are lurid,
bordering on soft porn. Torrie Wilson is a female wrestler
engaged in a long and popular feud with another female
wrestler named Dawn Marie. Dawn Marie, who was
originally called Dawn Marie Bytch, announced, on one
occasion, that she wanted to marry Torrie Wilson’s father,
Al Wilson. Torrie was appalled. Dawn, however, also
supposedly found Torrie attractive. Dawn told Torrie she
would cancel the wedding with Al if Torrie would spend
the night with her in a hotel. In a taped segment, the two
women met in a hotel room. They kissed and fondled in
their underwear. As they began to undress, screens in the
arena went black, leaving the rest to the imagination of the
fans. Dawn, despite the tryst, married Al anyway. The two
held their ceremony in the ring in their underwear. Al, fans
were told afterward, collapsed and died of a heart attack
after marathon sex sessions on their honeymoon. Torrie
Wilson then had numerous grudge matches with Dawn,
22
whom she blamed for killing her father. Sordid domestic
scenarios, which resonate in a world of broken and
troubled homes, are also staples of television talk and
reality shows.
The divas in the ring are there to fuel sexual fantasy.
They have no intrinsic worth beyond being objects of
sexual desire. It is all about their bodies. They engage in
sexually provocative “strap matches,” in which two
women are tied together with a long strap. During the bout,
combatants use the strap to whip each other, including
smacking exposed buttocks. They grab a short length of
the strap between their two hands and wrap it around the
neck of the opponent to simulate choking. In “evening
gown matches,” women wrestle in long evening gowns
ripped to expose lacy bras and thongs. Evening gown
matches, involving two and sometimes three women, have
also been filmed in swimming pools. Such matches
frequently result in “accidental” exposure of breasts, which
sets crowds roaring in lewd gratification.
Female wrestlers often try to sabotage matches or
seduce male wrestlers who oppose allies or members of
their clan. In one episode broadcast on the big screens in
the arena, a female wrestler named Melina enters the
locker room of a wrestler named Batista. The scene has the
brevity and stilted dialogue of a porn film. Melina, in a
sequined red tank top and micro-miniskirt, stands
awkwardly behind the brawny and tattooed Batista, who is
seated on the bench, dressed in a tiny bikini brief. Melina
self-consciously rubs her palms up and down his expansive
pecs. “My boys, Mercury and Nitro, have a match against
the Mexicools, and they could really use this time to
23
prepare. So if you could . . . withdraw yourself from the
match tonight?”
“Naw, I don’t think so,” rumbles Batista.
“I could really make it worth your while,” whines
Melina, straddling one of Batista’s massive thighs.
“How you gonna do that?” Batista mutters.
“Let me show you,” Melina pouts. She kisses him,
wriggling her shoulders in a caricature of passion. Batista
finally figures it out and yanks her down as they kiss,
spreading her legs open over his lap. The crowd is heard
whooping.
The video cuts to a close-up of Melina’s black bra
strap. She turns around, pulling her tank top down over her
bra.
“So we have a deal, right?” she simpers, blowing her
hair out of her face.
“A deal? No, no deal,” Batista chuckles. “Thanks for
the warm-up, though. I feel great.” He flexes his chest
muscles, making them jump. “I’m going to kill those
guys.” He cuffs her on the shoulder. “See you out there.”
“Oh, my God,” sniggers the announcer. “Did he say,
‘Thanks for the warm-up’? What a backfire!”
The camera zooms in on Melina’s humiliation. “No,
no, nooooo!” she shrieks, clapping her hands to her face,
24
squinting malevolently after Batista.
Fans chant, “Slut! Slut! Slut!” when Melina appears in
the arena. Melina, although the temptress in the story, later
announces she has filed a lawsuit for sexual harassment
against Batista.
In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained
for the duration of their lives in an underground cave,
knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to
the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are
thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality.
If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought
into the sunlight, he will suffer great pain. Blinded by the
glare, he is unable to see anything and longs for the
familiar darkness. But eventually his eyes adjust to the
light. The illusion of the tiny shadows is obliterated. He
confronts the immensity, chaos, and confusion of reality.
The world is no longer drawn in simple silhouettes. But he
is despised when he returns to the cave. He is unable to see
in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave
ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they
be blinded as well.
Plato feared the power of entertainment, the power of
the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to
obliterate reason. No admirer of popular democracy, Plato
said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate
those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a
position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who
tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could
25
somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would
do so.”
We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity
culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies
of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them
completely fictional, that have become the staple of news,
celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop
psychology. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America, Daniel Boorstin writes that in contemporary
culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical
have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the
spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into
stagecraft. Americans, he writes, increasingly live in a
“world where fantasy is more real than reality.” He warns:
We risk being the first people in history to have
been able to make their illusions so vivid, so
persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them.
We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we
dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions
are the very house in which we live; they are our
news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our
very experience.5
Boorstin goes on to caution that
an image is something we have a claim on. It must
serve our purposes. Images are means. If a
corporation’s image of itself or a man’s image of
26
himself is not useful, it is discarded. Another may fit
better. The image is made to order, tailored to us. An
ideal, on the other hand, has a claim on us. It does not
serve us; we serve it. If we have trouble striving
towards it, we assume the matter is with us, and not
with the ideal.6
Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our
lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments,
promoters, script writers, television and movie producers,
advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards,
wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public
announcers, and television news personalities who create
the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters. No
one achieves celebrity status, no cultural illusion is
swallowed as reality, without these armies of cultural
enablers and intermediaries. The sole object is to hold
attention and satisfy an audience. These techniques of
theater, as Boorstin notes, have leeched into politics,
religion, education, literature, news, commerce, warfare,
and crime. The squalid dramas played out for fans in the
wrestling ring mesh with the ongoing dramas on television,
in movies, and in the news, where “real-life” stories,
especially those involving celebrities, allow news reports
to become mini-dramas complete with a star, a villain, a
supporting cast, a good-looking host, and a neat, if often
unexpected, conclusion.
The nation can sit rapt at one of these real-life stories,
as happened when O. J. Simpson went on trial for the
murder of his estranged wife and her purported lover. A
carefully manipulated image of real life, which can be
27
based either on utter fiction or, as in Simpson’s case, real
tragedy, can serve as a myth on which millions can hang
their fears and hopes. The problems of existence are
domesticated and controlled. We measure our lives by
those we admire on the screen or in the ring. We seek to be
like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape
the chaos of real life through fantasy. We see ourselves as
stars of our own movies. And we are, as Neal Gabler
writes in Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered
Reality, “all becoming performance artists in and
audiences for a grand, ongoing show.”7
We try to see ourselves moving through our life as a
camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves,
how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play
inside our heads. We imagine ourselves the main
characters. We imagine how an audience would react to
each event in the movie of our life. This, writes Gabler, is
the power and invasiveness of celebrity culture. Celebrity
culture has taught us to generate, almost unconsciously,
interior personal screenplays in the mold of Hollywood,
television, and even commercials. We have learned ways
of speaking and thinking that disfigure the way we relate
to the world. Gabler argues that celebrity culture is not a
convergence of consumer culture and religion, but rather a
hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture.
Commodities and celebrity culture define what it means to
belong, how we recognize our place in society, and how
we conduct our lives.
I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los
Angeles. It is advertised as “the final resting place to more
28
of Hollywood’s founders and stars than anywhere else on
earth.” The sixty-acre cemetery holds the remains of 135
Hollywood luminaries, including Rudolph Valentino,
Tyrone Power, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks,
Nelson Eddy, Bugsy Siegel, Peter Lorre, Mel Blanc, and
John Huston, as well as many wealthy non-celebrities.
Celebrity culture is, at its core, the denial of death. It is the
illusion of immortality. The portal to Valhalla is through
the perfect, eternally beautiful celebrity. “There’s nothing
tragic about being fifty,” Joe Gillis says in the 1950 film
Sunset Boulevard , speaking of the faded movie star
Norma Desmond, who dreams of making a triumphant
return to the screen. “Not unless you’re trying to be
twenty-five.”
We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a
question of which ones. And in American society our gods
are celebrities. Religious belief and practice are commonly
transferred to the adoration of celebrities. Our culture
builds temples to celebrities the way Romans did for
divine emperors, ancestors, and household gods. We are a
de facto polytheistic society. We engage in the same kind
of primitive beliefs as older polytheistic cultures. In
celebrity culture, the object is to get as close as possible to
the celebrity. Relics of celebrities are coveted as magical
talismans. Those who can touch the celebrity or own a
relic of the celebrity hope for a transference of celebrity
power. They hope for magic. The personal possessions of
celebrities, from John F. Kennedy’s gold golf clubs to
dresses worn by Princess Diana, to forty-dollar Swatch
watches once owned by Andy Warhol, are cherished like
relics of the dead among ancestor cults in Africa, Asia, or
29
the medieval Catholic Church. They hold, somehow, faint
traces of the celebrities themselves. And they are auctioned
off for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pilgrims travel to
celebrity shrines. Graceland receives 750,000 visitors a
year. Hard Rock Cafe has built its business around the
yearning for intimacy with the famous. It ships relics of
stars from one restaurant to another the way the medieval
Church used to ship the bones and remains of saints to its
various cathedrals.
Charlie Chaplin’s corpse, like that of Eva Perón, was
stolen and held for ransom. John Wayne’s family, fearing
grave robbers, did not mark his burial spot until twenty
years after his death. The headstones of James Dean,
Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Buddy Holly, and Jim
Morrison have all been uprooted and carted away. Those
who become obsessed with celebrities often profess a
personal relationship with them, not unlike the relationship
a born-again Christian professes to have with Jesus. The
hysteria thousands of mourners in London displayed for
Princess Diana in 1997 was real, even if the public persona
they were mourning was largely a creation of publicists
and the mass media.
Hollywood Forever is next to Paramount Studios. The
massive white HOLLYWOOD letters tower on the hillside
above the tombs and faux Italian Renaissance marble
buildings that contain rows of crypts. Maps with the
locations of stars’ graves, along with a glossy booklet of
brief star biographies, are handed out at the gate. Tourists
are promised “visits” with dead stars, who are referred to
as “residents.” The cemetery, which has huge marble
monuments to the wealthy and the powerful, many of them
30
non-celebrities, is divided into sections with names like
Garden of Eternal Love and Garden of Legends. It has two
massive marble mausoleums, including the Cathedral
Mausoleum, with six thousand crypts—the largest
mausoleum in the world when it was built in the 1930s.
Most of the celebrities, however, have plain bronze
plaques that seem to indicate a yearning for the simplicity
and anonymity denied to them in life.
The cemetery, established in 1899 and originally called
Hollywood Memorial Park, fell into disrepair and neglect
some eight or nine decades after it was opened. By the
1990s, families, including relatives of the makeup artist
Max Factor, paid to have their loved ones removed from
the grounds. By April 1996, the property was bankrupt.
The cemetery was only months away from being
condemned. It was bought by Tyler Cassidy and his
brother Brent, who renamed the cemetery Hollywood
Forever Cemetery and began a marketing campaign around
its celebrity residents. The brothers established the Forever
Network, where the non-celebrity departed could, at least
in death, be the stars of their own customized video
tributes. The cemetery Web site archives the tributes.
“Families, young and old, are starting their LifeStories
now, and adding to them as the years pass,” the cemetery’s
brochure states. “What this means—having our images,
voices, and videos available for future generations—has
deep importance, both sociologically and for fully
celebrating life.” At funerals, these carefully produced
movies, which often include highlights from home videos,
are shown on a screen next to the caskets of the deceased.
The cemetery’s business is booming.
31
It costs a lot to be buried near a celebrity. Hugh Hefner
reportedly paid $85,000 to reserve the crypt next to
Marilyn Monroe at Westwood Cemetery in Los Angeles.
The “prestige service” offered by Hollywood Forever runs
$5,400. Jay Boileau, the executive vice president of the
cemetery, conceded that a plot near Valentino would cost
even more, although he did not have the price list with
him. “We have sold most of them,” he said of those
spaces. “Visits to his crypt are unique. Every year we hold
a memorial service for him on the day he passed away. He
was the first true sex symbol. Ten thousand people came to
his funeral. He was the first Brad Pitt. He was the first true
superstar in film and the greatest screen lover.”
The most moving memorial in the cemetery is a small
glass case containing the cremated remains of the actor
David White and his son Jonathan White. White played
Larry Tate, the Machiavellian advertising executive, on the
television show Bewitched, and he had a long stage career.
He was married to the actress Mary Welch, who died
during a second childbirth in 1958. David was left to raise
Jonathan, his only child. Next to the urns are pictures of
the father and boy. There is one of Jonathan as a tall young
man in a graduation gown, the father’s eyes directed up
toward his son’s face. Jonathan died at the age of thirtythree,
a victim of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103
over Locker bie, Scotland. His father was devastated. He
entered into a long period of mourning and seclusion. He
died of a heart attack shortly before the two-year
anniversary of his son’s death. The modest memorial is a
simple and poignant veneration of the powerful bond
between a father and a son. It defies the celebrity culture
32
around it. It speaks to other values, to loss, to grief, to
mortality, and to the awful fragility of life. It is a reminder,
in a sea of kitsch, of the beauty of love.
Buses wind their way through the Hollywood hills so
tourists can gawk at the walls that barricade the homes of
the famous. The celebrity interview or profile, pioneered
on television by Barbara Walters and now a ubiquitous
part of the news and entertainment industry, gives us the
illusion that we have intimate relations with celebrities as
well as the characters they portray. Real life, our own life,
is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and
inauthentic. Celebrities are portrayed as idealized forms of
ourselves. It is we, in perverse irony, who are never fully
actualized, never fully real in a celebrity culture.
Soldiers and marines speak of first entering combat as
if they are entering a movie, although if they try to engage
in Hollywood-inspired heroics they often are killed. The
chasm between movie exploits and the reality of war,
which takes less than a minute in a firefight to grasp, is
immense. The shock of reality brings with it the terrible
realization that we are not who we thought we were. Fear
controls us. We do not control it. The movie-inspired
images played out in our heads, the fantasies of racing
under a hail of bullets toward the enemy or of rescuing a
wounded comrade, vanish. Life, the movie, comes to an
abrupt halt. The houselights go on. The harsh glare of our
limitations, fear and frailty blinds and disorients us.
Wounded marines booed and hissed John Wayne when
he visited them in a hospital ward in Hawaii during the
Second World War. Wayne, who never served in the
33
military and for the visit wore a fancy cowboy outfit that
included spurs and pistols, would later star in the 1949
gung-ho war movie The Sands of Iwo Jima. The marines,
some of whom had fought at Iwo Jima, grasped the
manipulation and deceit of celebrity culture. They
understood that mass culture contributes to self-delusion
and social control and elicits behavior that is often selfdestructive.
Illusion, especially as presented in movies, can replace
reality. When Wayne made The Sands of Iwo Jima,
director Allan Dwan recreated the iconic image taken by
photographer Joe Rosenthal of five marines and a navy
corpsman raising the American flag on top of Mount
Suribachi during the battle at the end of the film. Dwan
coaxed Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, and John Bradley, the
three surviving soldiers from the flag-raising, to appear
briefly in the film to reenact the scene with Wayne, who
handed them the original flag, loaned to the moviemakers
by the Marine Corps.
The photo, later used by Felix de Weldon to sculpt the
massive United States Marine Corps War Memorial near
Arlington National Cemetery, had already made the three
veterans celebrities. It was widely reprinted. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt used the photo as the logo for the
Seventh War Loan Drive in 1945. The Pentagon brought
the three men back to the United States, where they toured
as part of the fund-raising effort. The veterans helped
raised $26.3 billion, twice the original goal. But the
publicity, along with the transformation from traumatized
veterans to poster children for the war, left the three
soldiers alienated, bitter, and depressed. They were
34
prisoners to the image and the patriotic myth built around
it. Hayes and Gagnon became alcoholics and died early—
Hayes at thirty-two and Gagnon at fifty-four. Bradley
rarely took part in ceremonies celebrating the flag-raising
and by the 1960s had stopped attending them. He was
plagued by nightmares. He discussed the war with his wife
Betty only once during his forty-seven-year marriage, and
that was on their first date. He gave one interview, in 1985,
at the urging of his wife, who told him to do it for the sake
of their grandchildren. He was haunted by the death of his
friend Iggy—Ralph Ignatowski, who had been captured,
tortured, and killed by Japanese soldiers. When he found
Iggy’s body a few days after he had disappeared, he saw
that the Japanese had ripped out Iggy’s toe-nails and
fingernails, fractured his arms, and bayonetted him
repeatedly. The back of his friend’s head had been
smashed in, and his penis had been cut off and stuffed in
his mouth.
“And then I visited his parents after the war and just
lied to them,” John Bradley told his son James, in one of
the very rare comments he made to his children about the
war. “‘He didn’t suffer at all,’ I told them. ‘He didn’t feel a
thing, didn’t know what hit him,’ I said. I just lied to
them.”8
Bradley’s family went to Suribachi in 1997 after his
death and placed a plaque on the spot where the flagraising
took place. James Bradley investigated this buried
part of his father’s past and interviewed the families of all
the flag raisers. He published his account of the men’s
lives in his book Flags of Our Fathers.
35
The veterans saw their wartime experience transformed
into an illusion. It became part of the mythic narrative of
heroism and patriotic glory sold to the public by the
Pentagon’s public relations machine and Hollywood. The
reality of war could not compete against the power of the
illusion. The truth did not feed the fantasy of war as a
ticket to glory, honor, and manhood. The truth did not
promote collective self-exaltation. The illusion of war
peddled in The Sands of Iwo Jima, like hundreds of other
Hollywood war films, worked because it was what the
public wanted to believe about themselves. It was what the
government and the military wanted to promote. It worked
because it had the power to simulate experience for most
viewers who were never at Iwo Jima or in a war. But as
Hayes and the others knew, this illusion was a lie. Hayes,
arrested dozens of times for drunkenness, was discovered
dead, face-down in his own vomit and blood, near an
abandoned hut close to his home on the Gila River Indian
Reservation. The coroner ruled that Hayes died of
exposure and alcohol. It was left to the songwriter Peter
LaFarge and Johnny Cash to memorialize the tragic saga
of Hayes’ brief life. “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” told a tale
about war the producers of The Sands of Iwo Jima, who
made the movie not to tell a truth but to feed the public’s
appetite and make a profit, studiously ignored.9
Celebrity worship banishes reality. And this adulation
is pervasive. It is dressed up in the language of the
Christian Right, which builds around its leaders, people
like Pat Robertson or Joel Osteen, the aura of stardom,
fame, and celebrity power. These Christian celebrities
36
travel in private jets and limousines. They are surrounded
by retinues of bodyguards, have television programs where
they cultivate the same false intimacy with the audience,
and, like all successful celebrities, amass personal
fortunes. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the
devotion of millions of women to Oprah Winfrey, is all
part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship.
We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If
Jesus and The Purpose Driven Life won’t make us a
celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or
reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk
onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and
celebrated.
“What does the contemporary self want?” asked critic
William Deresiewicz:
The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the
computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the
two technologies converge—broadband tipping the
Web from text to image; social-networking sites
spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—
the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity
and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.
This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to
be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be
visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah,
then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is
the quality that validates us, this is how we become
real to ourselves—by being seen by others. The great
contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling
was right, if the property that grounded the self in
Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was
37
authenticity, then in postmod ernism it is visibility.10
We pay a variety of lifestyle advisers—Gabler calls
them “essentially drama coaches”—to help us look and
feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the
movie of our own life. Martha Stewart built her financial
empire, when she wasn’t insider trading, telling women
how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect
home. The realities within the home, the actual family
relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make
everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet
doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and
fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us
happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we
are assured, with how we look and how we present
ourselves to others. Glossy magazines like Town &
Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to
be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive
designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set-pieces
that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in
how skillfully we show ourselves to the world. We not
only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured
vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism
and happiness.
The Swan was a Fox reality makeover show. The title
of the series referred to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy
tale “The Ugly Duckling,” in which a bird thought to be
homely grew up and became a swan. “Unattractive”
women were chosen to undergo three months of extensive
plastic surgery, physical training, and therapy for a
38
“complete life transformation.” Each episode featured two
“ugly ducklings” who compete with each other to go on to
the beauty pageant. “I am going to be a new person,” said
one contestant in the opening credits.
In one episode, Cristina, twenty-seven, an Ecuadorborn
office administrator from Rancho Cordova,
California, was chosen to be on the program.
“It’s not just the outside I want to change, but it’s the
inside, too,” Cristina told the camera mournfully. She had
long, black hair and light brown skin. She wore baggy,
gray sweatshirts and no makeup. Her hair was pulled back.
We discovered that she was devastatingly insecure about
being intimate with her husband because of her postpregnancy
stretch marks. The couple considered divorce.
“I just want to be, not a completely different person,
but I want to be a better Cristina,” she said.
As a “dream team” of plastic surgeons discussed the
necessary corrections, viewers saw a still image of
Cristina, in a gray cotton bra and underwear, superimposed
on a glowing blue grid. Her small, drooping breasts,
wrinkled stomach, and fleshy thighs were apparent. A
schematic figure of an idealized female form revolved at
the left of the screen. Crosshairs targeted and zoomed in on
each flawed area of Cristina’s face and body. The surgical
procedures she would undergo were typed out beside each
body part. Brow lift, eye lift, nose job, liposuction of chin
and cheeks, dermatologist visits, collagen injections,
LASIK eye surgery, tummy tuck, breast augmentation,
liposuction of thighs, dental bleaching, full dental veneers,
39
gum tissue recontouring, a 1,200-calorie daily diet, 120
hours in the gym, weekly therapy, and coaching. The
effect was suggestive of a military operation. The image of
a blueprint and crosshairs was used repeatedly through the
program.
Cristina was shown writing in her diary: “I want a
divorce because I think that my husband can do better
without me. And it would be best for us to go in different
directions. I am not happy with myself at all, so I think,
why make this guy unhappy for the rest of his life?”
At the end of the three months, Cristina and her
opponent, Kristy, were finally allowed to look in a mirror
for “the final reveal.” They were brought separately to
what looked like a marble hotel foyer. Curving twin
staircases with ornate iron banisters framed the action. A
crystal chandelier glittered at the top of the stairs. Sconces
and oil paintings in gold frames hung on the cream-colored
walls.
The “dream team” was assembled in the marble lobby.
Massive peach curtains obscured one wall.
“I think Cristina has really grown into herself as a
woman, and she’s ready to go back home and start her
marriage all over again,” said the team therapist.
Two men in tuxedos opened a set of tall double doors.
Cristina entered in a tight, black evening gown and long
black gloves. She was meticulously made up, and her hair
had been carefully styled with extensions. The “dream
team” burst into applause and whoops.
40
“I’ve been waiting twenty-seven years for this day,”
Cristina tearfully told host Amanda Byram. “I came for a
dream, the American dream, like all the Latinas do, and I
got it!”
“You got it!” cheered Byram. “Yes, you did!”
Reverberating drumbeats were heard. “Behind that
curtain,” says Byram, “is a mirror. We will draw back the
curtain, the mirror will be revealed, and you will see
yourself for the first time in three months. Cristina, step up
to the curtain.”
Short, suspenseful cello strokes were heard. There was
a tumbling drumroll.
“I’m ready,” quavered Cristina.
The curtain parted slowly in the middle. An elaborate
full-length mirror reflected Cristina. The cello strokes
billowed into the Swan theme song.
“Oh, my God!” she gasped, covering her face. She
doubled over. Her knees buckled. She almost hit the floor.
“I am so beautiful!!!” she sobbed. “Thank you, oh, thank
you so much!! Thank you, God!! Thank you, thank you,
thank you so much for this!! Look at my arms, my figure .
. . I love the dress! Thank you, oh!! I’m in love with
myself!”
The “dream team” burst into applause again. “Well,
you owe this to yourself,” said Byram. “But you also owe
41
it to these fantastic experts. Guys, come on in.”
The crowd of smiling experts closed in on their
creation, clapping as they approached.
At the end of each episode, the two contestants were
called before Byram to hear who would advance to the
pageant. The winner often wept and was hugged by the
loser. Byram then pulled the loser aside for “one final
surprise.” The double doors opened once more, and her
family was invited onto the set for a joyful reunion. In
celebrity culture, family is the consolation prize for not
making it to the pageant.
The Swan’s transparent message is that once these
women have been surgically “corrected” to resemble
mainstream celebrity beauty as closely as possible, their
problems will be solved. “This is a positive show where
we want to see how these women can make their dreams
come true once they have what they want,” said Cecile
Frot-Coutaz, CEO of FremantleMedia North America,
producers of The Swan. Troubled marriages, abusive
relationships, unemployment, crushing self-esteem
problems—all will vanish along with the excess fat off
their thighs. They will be new. They will be flawless. They
will be celebrities.
In the Middle Ages, writes Alain de Botton in his book
Status Anxiety , stained glass windows and vivid paintings
of religious torment and salvation controlled and
influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of
gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from
television, cinema, and computer screens. People knelt
42
before God and the church in the Middle Ages. We flock
hungrily to the glamorous crumbs that fall to us from
glossy magazines, talk and entertainment shows, and
reality television. We fashion our lives as closely to these
lives of gratuitous consumption as we can. Only a life with
status, physical attributes, and affluence is worth pursuing.
Hedonism and wealth are openly worshipped on shows
such as The Hills, Gossip Girl, Sex and the City, My Super
Sweet 16, and The Real Housewives of. . . . The American
oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the
bottom 90 percent combined, are the characters we envy
and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion
dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts. They
marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch
limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion shows
to movie premieres, flaunting their surgically enhanced,
perfect bodies in haute couture. Their teenagers throw
$200,000 parties and have $1 million dollar weddings.
This life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are
told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying.
The working classes, comprising tens of millions of
struggling Americans, are shut out of television’s gated
community. They have become largely invisible. They are
mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess
they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost
none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power.
Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we
believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have
everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these
impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of
inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others
43
have succeeded.
We consume countless lies daily, false promises that if
we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that
product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected,
envied, powerful, loved, and protected. The flamboyant
lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on
television, movies, professional wrestling, and sensational
talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the
emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages
everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as
possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. It is, as
Christopher Lasch diagnosed, a culture of narcissism. Faith
in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important
than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as
an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New
Age mysticism and pop psychology of television
personalities, evangelical pastors, along with the array of
self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers,
psychiatrists, and business tycoons, all peddle a fantasy.
Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as
the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity, or as
inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who
question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those
who are able to confront reality and who grasp the
hollowness of celebrity culture are shunned and
condemned for their pessimism. The illusionists who shape
our culture and who profit from our incredulity hold up the
gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief,
personal empowerment, corporatism, political
participation, and self-definition argue that all of us are
special, entitled, and unique. All of us, by tapping into our
44
inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by
visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to
achieve, happiness, fame, and success. This relentless
message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has
seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to
everything.
American Idol, a talent-search reality show that airs on
Fox, is one of the most popular shows on American
television. The show travels to different American cities in
a “countrywide search” for the contestants who will
continue to the final competition in Hollywood. The
producers of the show introduced a new focus in the 2008-
2009 season on the personal stories of the contestants.
During the Utah auditions, we met Megan Corkrey,
twenty-three, the single mother of a toddler. She has long
dirty-blonde hair, and a wholesome, pretty face. A tattoo
sleeve covers her right arm from the shoulder to below the
elbow. She wears a black, grey, and white dress
reminiscent of the 1950s, and ballet flats. She is a font
designer.
In an interview, Corkrey says, “I am a mother. He will
be two in December.” We see Corkrey with a little blond
boy, reading a book together on a beanbag chair. Breezy
guitar music plays. “His name is Ryder.” We see Corkrey
kissing Ryder and putting him to bed. “I recently decided
to get a divorce, which is new.” The guitar music turns
pensive. “The life I had planned for us, the life I’d
pictured, wasn’t going to happen. I cried a lot for a while. I
don’t think I stopped crying. And Ryder, of course, you
can be crying, and then he walks by, and does something
45
ridiculous, and you can’t help but smile and laugh.” We
see Corkrey laughing with her son on the floor. “And a
little piece kind of heals up a little bit.”
The montage of Corkrey’s life fills the screen as the
rock ballad swells. “I can laugh at myself, while the tears
roll down . . . ,” sings the band. We see Corkrey and her
son looking out a window. She holds her son up to a
basketball hoop as he clutches a blue ball.
“It was kind of crazy, I found out Idol was coming to
Salt Lake, and I’d just decided on the divorce, and for the
first time in my life it was a crossroads where anything can
happen!! So why not go for what I love to do?”
Corkrey enters the audition room. The judges—Simon
Cowell, Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, and Kara DioGuardi
—are seated behind a long table in front of a window.
They each have large, red tumblers with “Coca-Cola”
printed on them. They seem charmed by her exuberant
presence. She sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from
Show Boat. Her performance is charismatic and quirky.
She improvises freely and assuredly with the rhythms and
notes of the song, beaming the whole time.
“I really like you,” says Abdul. “I’m bordering on
loving you. I think I’m loving you. Yeah, I do. Simon?”
“One of my favorite auditions,” says Cowell in a
monotone.
“Yess!!” grins Corkrey.
46
“Because you’re different,” continues Cowell sternly.
“You are one of the few I’m going to remember. I like
you, I like your voice, I mean seriously good voice. I loved
it.”
“You’re an interesting girl. You have a glow about
you, you have an incredible face,” says DioGuardi.
The judges vote.
“Absolutely yes,” says Cowell.
“Love you,” says Abdul.
“Yes!” says DioGuardi.
“One hundred percent maybe,” smiles Jackson.
“You’re goin’ to Hollywood!” cheers DioGuardi as the
inspirational rock music swells.
“YESS!!! Thank you, guys!” Corkrey screams with
delight. She runs out of the audition room into a crowd of
her cheering friends. The music plays as she dances down
the street, waving her large yellow ticket, the symbol of
her success.
Celebrities, who often come from humble
backgrounds, are held up as proof that anyone, even we,
can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints,
are living proof that the impossible is always possible. Our
fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success, and of
fulfillment, are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies
47
are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture
of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The
juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by
celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual
achievements, however, eventually leads to frustration,
anger, insecurity, and invalidation. It results, ironically, in
a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated,
alienated individual with even greater desperation and
hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises
of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear.
We beg for more. We ingest these lies until our money
runs out. And when we fall into despair, we medicate
ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the
hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told
it is.
Human beings become a commodity in a celebrity
culture. They are objects, like consumer products. They
have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live
on fabulous sets. Those who fail to meet the ideal are
belittled and mocked. Friends and allies are to be used and
betrayed during the climb to fame, power, and wealth. And
when they are no longer useful, they are to be discarded. In
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future
dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant
television screens that show endless scenes of police
chases and criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury
understood, once it was packaged and filmed, became the
most compelling form of entertainment.
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on
reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark
voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness,
48
and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty,
transparency, and sharing are qualities that will see you, in
a gross perversion of democracy and morality, voted off a
reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a
chance for fleeting fame elect to “disappear” the unwanted.
In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top
Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode
vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast
aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons.
Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of
unadulterated competition. Life is about the personal
humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are
the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased.
Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity with
others are forms of weakness. And those who do not
achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money
or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve to lose.
Those who are denigrated and ridiculed on reality
television, often as they sob in front of the camera, are
branded as failures. They are responsible for their
rejection. They are deficient.
In an episode from the second season of the CBS
reality game show Survivor, cast members talk about
exceptional friendships they have made within their
“tribe,” or team. Maralyn, also known as Mad Dog, is a
fifty-two-year-old retired police officer with a silver crew
cut and a tall, mannish build. She is sunning herself in a
shallow stream, singing “On the Street Where You Live.”
Tina, a personal nurse and mother, walks up the stream
toward her.
“Sing it, girl! I just followed your voice.”
49
“Is it that loud?”
“Maralyn, she’s kind of like our little songbird, and our
little cheerleader in our camp,” Tina says in an interview.
“Maralyn and I have bonded, more so than I have with any
of the other people. It might be our ages, it might just be
that we kind of took up for one another.”
We see Tina and Maralyn swimming and laughing
together in the river.
“Tina is a fabulous woman,” says Maralyn in an
interview. “She is a star. I trust Tina the most.”
Maralyn and Tina’s tribe, Ogakor, loses an obstacle
course challenge, in which all the tribe members are
tethered together. If one person falls, the entire team is
slowed. Mad Dog Maralyn falls several times and is
hauled back to her feet by Colby, the “cowboy” from
Texas.
Because they lost, the members of Ogakor must vote
off one of their tribe members. The camera shows small
groups of twos and threes in huddled, intense discussion.
“The mood in the camp is a very sad mood, but it’s
also a very strategic mood,” says Tina. “Everyone’s
thinking, ‘Who’s thinking what?’ ”
The vote is taken at dusk, in the “tribal council” area. It
resembles a set from Disney World’s Adventureland. A
ring of tall stone monoliths is stenciled with petroglyphs. It
50
is lit by torches. A campfire blazes in the center of the
ring. Primitive drums and flutes are heard.
The Ogakor team arrives at dusk, each holding a torch.
They sit before Survivor’s host, Jeff Probst.
“So I just want to talk about a couple of big topics,”
says Probst, who wears a safari outfit. “Trust. Colby, is
there anyone here that you don’t trust, wouldn’t trust?”
“Sure,” says Colby.
“Tell me about that.”
“Well, I think that’s part of the game,” says Colby.
“It’s way too early to tell exactly who you can trust, I
think.”
“What about you, Mitchell? Would you trust everyone
here for forty-two days?” asks Probst. “I think the motto is,
‘Trust no one,’” answers Mitchell. “I have a lot of faith in
a good number of these people, but I couldn’t give 100
percent of my trust.”
“What about you, Mad Dog?” asks Probst. “These all
your buddies?”
Maralyn looks around at her team members. “Yes,” she
says unequivocally. “Yes. And, Jeff, I trust with my heart.”
“I think friendship does enter into it at some point,”
says Jerri. “But I think it’s very important to keep that
separate from the game. It’s two totally different things.
51
And that’s where it gets tricky.” Jerri will say later, as she
casts her vote, “This is probably one of the most difficult
things for me to do right now. It’s purely strategic, it’s
nothing personal. I am going to miss you dearly.”
“Jeff,” Maralyn breaks in. “I’m conjoined with Tina.
She is a constellation. And, the cowboy [Colby]! The poor
cowboy has dragged me around so many times [during the
obstacle course challenge]. I appreciate it.”
“I’d do it again,” laughs Colby broadly.
“Hey, you hear that? He’d do it again!” says Maralyn.
It is time to vote. Each team member walks up a
narrow bridge lit by flaring torches, again looking like
something out of Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, made of
twisted logs lashed with vines, to a stone table. They write
the name of the person they want to eliminate and put it in
a cask with aboriginal carvings. Most of the votes are kept
anonymous, the camera panning away as each person
writes. But as Tina, Mad Dog Maralyn’s best friend and
“constellation,” casts her vote, she shows us her ballot:
Mad Dog. “Mad Dog, I love you,” she says to the camera,
“I value your friendship more than anything. This vote has
everything to do with a promise I made, it has nothing to
do with you. I hope you’ll understand.” She folds her vote
and puts it in the cask.
“Once the vote is tallied, the decision is final, and the
person will be asked to leave the tribal council area
immediately,” says Probst.
52
Five people of the seven voted to eliminate Maralyn.
“You need to bring me a torch, Mad Dog,” says Probst.
She does so, first taking off her green baseball cap and
putting it affectionately on Amber, who sits next to her and
gives her a hug. The camera shows Tina looking
impassive.
“Mad Dog,” says Probst, holding the flaming torch
Maralyn has brought him, “the tribe has spoken.” He takes
a large stone snuffer and extinguishes the torch. The
camera shows Marilynn’s rueful face behind the smoking,
blackened torch. “It’s time for you to go,” says Probst. She
leaves without speaking or looking at anyone, although
there are a few weak “bye” ’s from the tribe.
Before the final credits, we are shown who, besides her
friend Tina, voted to eliminate Maralyn. They are Amber,
who gave Maralyn a farewell hug, along with Mitchell,
Jerri, and Colby, Maralyn’s “cowboy.”
Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. No one
has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or
ability to “succeed.” The highest achievements in a
celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It
does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as
Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow.
They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life
of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us that existence is
to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather
than the common good. The ability to lie and manipulate
others, the very ethic of capitalism, is held up as the
highest good. “I simply agreed to go along with [Jerri and
53
Amber] because I thought it would get me down the road a
little better,” says young, good-looking Colby in another
episode of Survivor. “I wanna win. And I don’t want to
talk to anybody else about loyalties—don’t give me that
crap. I haven’t trusted anyone since day one, and anyone
playing smart should have been the same way.”
The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This
cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths:
superficial charm, grandios ity, and self-importance; a
need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying,
deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel
remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by
corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is
the misguided belief that personal style and personal
advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as
democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the
commodities we buy or consume, has become a
compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have
a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire.
We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around
us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and
to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved,
they become their own justification, their own morality.
How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those
questions are no longer asked.
It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street
bankers and investment houses that willfully trashed the
nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of
small shareholders who had bought stock in these
corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these
corporations, like the winners on a reality television
54
program who lied and manipulated others to succeed,
walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in
bonuses and compensation. In his masterful essay “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Walter Benjamin wrote: “The cult of the movie star,
fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not
the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the
personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.”11
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the
crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a
fetish of competition,” wrote C. Wright Mills:
In America, this system is carried to the point
where a man who can knock a small, white ball into a
series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and
skill than anyone else thereby gains access to the
President of the United States. It is carried to the point
where a chattering radio and television entertainer
becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial
executives, cabinet members, and the higher military.
It does not seem to matter what the man is the very
best at; so long as he has won out in competition over
all others, he is celebrated. Then, a second feature of
the star system begins to work: all the stars of any
other sphere of endeavor or position are drawn toward
the new star and he toward them. The success, the
champion, accordingly, is one who mingles freely
with other champions to populate the world of the
celebrity.12
Degradation as entertainment is the squalid underside
55
to the glamour of celebrity culture. “If only that were me,”
we sigh as we gaze at the wealthy, glimmering stars on the
red carpet. But we are as transfixed by the inverse of
celebrity culture, by the spectacle of humiliation and
debasement that comprise tabloid television shows such as
The Jerry Springer Show and The Howard Stern Show. We
secretly exult: “At least that’s not me.” It is the glee of
cruelty with impunity, the same impulse that drove crowds
to the Roman Colosseum, to the pillory and the stocks, to
public hangings, and to traveling freak shows.
In one segment from Jerry Springer: Wild &
Outrageous, Volume 1, a man and his wife sit on the
Springer stage. They are obese, soft, and pale, with
mounds of fluffy, brown hair. Their bodies look like
uncooked dough. The man wears a blue polo shirt and
brown pants. The woman wears a dark pink shirt with long
sleeves and a long black skirt.
“I have a sex fantasy,” the man tells his wife solemnly.
His voice is quiet and nasal. She recoils with raised
eyebrows. “Do you remember that bachelor party I went to
three weeks ago? There was a stripper there. She was
dressed up as a cheerleader, and she just turned me on. I
mean, I got—I have this thing—I don’t know if it’s her or
the outfit, I think it’s the outfit. But, I’d really love for you
to dress up as a cheerleader. For me. And do a cheer that’s
especially for me, and. . . . You could be my cheerleader . .
. of my heart.”
The woman, still sitting in her chair, has her hands on
her hips and looks affronted. There are close-ups of the
Springer audience bursting into raucous laughter, hoots,
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and applause.
“I brought her here to show you—” continues the man.
He is cut off by the whoops of the audience.
“Let’s bring her out!” says Jerry. The audience cheers.
Shaking yellow pom-poms, a skinny blonde girl in a
purple-and-yellow cheerleader outfit runs out onstage. Her
body is like a stick. She turns a cartwheel and moons the
audience, smacking her own bottom several times. Behind
her, the obese man is shown grinning. The obese woman is
waving in disgust at the cheerleader.
“Is everybody ready to do a cheer just for Jerry?!”
squeaks the cheerleader.
“YEAAAHHH!!!” hollers the audience.
“I can’t hear yoooouuuuuu . . .” pipes the cheerleader,
lifting her skirt up to her waist.
The audience goes crazy. She leads a cheer, spelling
out Jerry’s name.
“Now that you’ve seen these pom-poms, how’d you
like to see these pom-poms?” she squeaks, shaking her flat
chest. A rapid electronic beat fills the studio, and the lights
dim. She takes off her top, her bra, and, gyrating her hips,
slides off her skirt and underwear. Her bottom is about
three feet from the whooping men in the front row. The
obese man’s arms and legs are waving around in
excitement, as his grimacing wife shakes her head
57
repeatedly. The naked cheerleader leans back on the floor
and does the splits in the air. She then jumps into the fat
man’s lap and smothers his face in her tiny chest. She runs
into the audience and does the same to another man and a
gray-haired woman in a cardigan who looks like a
grandmother. The cameramen follow the cheerleader
closely, zooming in on her breasts and ass.
While the naked, ponytailed girl runs around leaping
into the laps of members of the audience, the crowd begins
chanting, under the deafening electronic music, “JER-RY!
JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!”
The girl finally runs back onstage. The music stops.
She collects her pom-poms and sits down naked, dressed
only in a pair of white tennis shoes and bobby socks.
“JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!” chants the crowd.
In a later portion of the episode, Jerry says to the man,
“So this is really what you want your wife to be doing?”
The naked cheerleader is seated beside him, and his wife is
no longer onstage.
“Oh, yes!” he exclaims. The audience laughs at his
fervor. “It really excites me, Jerry. It really does.”
“All right,” says Jerry. “Well, are we ready to bring her
out?”
“YEESSSSS!!!” bellows the audience.
“Here she is!” announces Jerry. “Cheerleading
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Kristen!”
The wife runs out onto the stage. She is in an identical
purple-and-yellow cheerleading outfit, with yellow pompoms.
Her fluffy brown hair is tied into two bunches on
the sides of her head. She resembles a poodle. Her exposed
midriff is a thick, white roll of fat that hangs over her
short, purple skirt and shakes with every step.
She turns a clumsy somersault. She prances heavily
back and forth on the stage. She does cancan kicks. She
yells “WHOOOOOO!!!” Her husband is seen behind her,
yelling with the rest of the audience. She leads a cheer of
Jerry’s name, but forgets the Y. The audience laughs. She
finishes the cheer. There is a shot of Jerry watching quietly
at the back of the studio, leaning against the soundman’s
booth, his hand covering his mouth.
The wife continues to high-step back and forth. The
clapping and cheers subside. The audience has fallen
silent. “WHOOO!!” she yells again. She does, in complete
silence, a few more lumbering kicks. A few individuals
snicker in the crowd. Jerry is shown at the soundman’s
booth, doubled over in soundless laughter. The woman is
confused. She looks to the side of the stage, as though she
is being prompted. “Oh—OK,” she says.
She takes center stage again. “All right,” she says.
“You’ve seen these pom-poms.” Individual giggles are
heard from the audience. “Now what about THESE?” Her
husband watches eagerly. The naked stripper, sitting
behind her, laughs.
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The stripping music comes on. The lights dim. The
wife does more cancan kicks. She trots back and forth. She
takes off all her clothes except her underpants. The
audience is clapping to the beat, whooping, and laughing.
Some of them are covering their eyes. Others are covering
their mouths. She continues prancing onstage, doing the
occasional kick, until the music stops.
“JER-RY!! JER-RY!! JER-RY!!” chants the crowd.
Her husband wraps his arms around her naked torso and
kisses her.
“You made my wildest dreams come true,” he tells her.
Individuals laugh in the audience.
“Aww,” says Jerry, shaking his head. “That is true
love.” The woman collects her scattered clothes. “That is
—that is—that is—true love.”
Celebrities are skillfully used by their handlers and the
media to compensate for the increasingly degraded and
regimented existences that most of us endure in a
commodity culture. Celebrities tell us we can have our
revenge. We can triumph. We can, one day, get back at the
world that has belittled and abused us. It happens in the
ring. It happens on television. It happens in the movies. It
happens in the narrative of the Christian Right. It happens
in pornography. It happens in the self-help manuals and on
reality television. But it almost never happens in reality.
Celebrity is the vehicle used by a corporate society to
sell us these branded commodities, most of which we do
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not need. Celebrities humanize commercial commodities.
They present the familiar and comforting face of the
corporate state. Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, on an
episode of America’s Next Top Model, gushes to a group
of aspiring young models, “Our job as models is to sell.”
But they peddle a fake intimacy and a fantasy. The
commercial “personalizing” of the world involves
oversimplification, distraction, and gross distortion. “We
sink further into a dream of an unconsciously intimate
world in which not only may a cat look at a king but a king
is really a cat underneath, and all the great power-figures
Honest Joes at heart,”13 Richard Hoggart warned in The
Uses of Literacy. We do not learn more about Barack
Obama by knowing what dog he has brought home for his
daughters or if he still smokes. Such personalized trivia,
passed off as news, divert us from reality.
In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojek calls celebrity
culture “the cult of distraction that valorizes the
superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity
culture.” He goes further:
Capitalism originally sought to police play and
pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the
central life interest threatened the economic survival
of the system. The family, the state, and religion
engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation
to control desire and ensure compliance with the
system of production. However, as capitalism
developed, consumer culture and leisure time
expanded. The principles that operated to repress the
individual in the workplace and the home were
extended to the shopping mall and recreational
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activity. The entertainment industry and consumer
culture produced what Herbert Marcuse called
“repressive desublima tion.” Through this process
individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded
version of humanity.14
This cult of distraction, as Rojek points out, masks the
real disintegration of culture. It conceals the
meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It
seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects
the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice,
growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic
collapse, and political corruption. The wild pursuit of
status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our
economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed
with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers
recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik
shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a
sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides
television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami,
shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for
spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American
workers are ground down by corporations that have
disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded
them.
Celebrities have fame free of responsibility. The fame
of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess
true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical
thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but
also of totalitarian culture. And as we sink into an
62
economic and political morass, we are still controlled,
manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the
dark wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture
is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep
us from fighting back.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban
books,” Neil Postman wrote:
What Huxley feared was that there would be no
reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would
deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who
would give us so much that we would be reduced to
passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth
would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell
feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley
feared we would become a trivial culture,
preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the
orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. As
Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the
civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the
alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account
man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In
1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by
inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are
controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell
feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared
that what we love will ruin us.15
Mark Andrejevic, a professor of communication
63
studies at the University of Iowa at Iowa City, writes that
reality shows like Big Brother and Survivor glamorize the
intrusiveness of the surveillance state, presenting it as “one
of the hip attributes of the contemporary world,” “an
entrée into the world of wealth and celebrity,” and even a
moral good. In his book Reality TV: The Work of Being
Watched, he quotes veterans of The Real World, Road
Rules, and Temptation Island who speak about their on-air
personal growth and the therapeutic value of being
constantly watched. As Josh on Big Brother explains,
“Everyone should have an audience.” Big Brother, in
which ten cohabiting strangers willingly submit to roundthe-
clock video monitoring, is a celebration of the
surveillance state. More than twice as many young people
apply to MTV’s Real World show than to Harvard, for a
chance to live under constant surveillance. But the use of
hidden cameras—part of professional wrestling’s attraction
as well as a staple on reality television—reinforces
celebrity culture’s frightening assumption that it is normal,
indeed enviable, to be constantly watched. For
corporations and a government that seeks to make
surveillance routine, whether to study our buying habits or
read our e-mails or make sure we do not organize social
protest, these shows normalize what was once considered a
flagrant violation of our Constitutional right to privacy.16
There is a rapacious appetite for new, “real-life” drama
and a desperate thirst for validation by the celebrity
culture. This yearning to be anointed worthy of celebrity
was captured in Dave Eggers’s book A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius. He writes a satirical transcript
of an interview/audition tape he purportedly made for The
64
Real World.
Eggers eagerly discloses to the interviewer the most
sensational episodes of his life, including his daily habit of
masturbating in the shower. His parents both died of
cancer thirty-two days apart, leaving him at twenty-two to
raise his eight-year-old brother Toph. Mr. T from the ATeam
moved into the town he grew up in. His childhood
friend’s father doused himself in gasoline and set himself
on fire. He drew a picture of his mother on her deathbed.
His father was a devious alcoholic who drank vodka out of
tall soda glasses.
Eggers muses on the hunger for celebrity:
Because, see, I think what my town, and your
show, reflect so wonderfully is that the main byproduct
of the comfort and prosperity that I’m
describing is a sort of pure, insinuating solipsism . . .
we’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to
the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our
safe and comfortable homes, given the time to think
about how we would fit into this or that band or TV
show or movie, and how we would look doing it.
These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is
existentially irrational, indefensible.17
“Why do you want to be on The Real World?” asks the
interviewer. “Because I want everyone to witness my
youth,” answers Eggers:
I just mean, that it’s in bloom. That’s what you’re
all about, right? The showing of raw fruit, correct?
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Whether that’s in videos or on Spring Break,
whatever, the amplifying of youth, the editing and
volume magnifying what it means to be right there, at
the point when all is allowed and your body wants
everything for it, is hungry and taut, churning, an
energy vortex, sucking all toward it.18
Okay, you want to hear a sad story? Last night I
was home, listening to an album. A favorite song
came on, and I was singing aloud . . . and as I was
singing and doing the slo-mo hands-in-hair maneuver,
I messed up the words to the song I was singing, and
though it was two fifty-one in the morning, I became
quickly, deeply embarrassed about my singing gaffe,
convinced that there was a very good chance that
someone could see me—through the window, across
the dark, across the street. I was sure, saw vividly that
someone—or more likely a someone and his friends
—over there was having a hearty laugh at my
expense.19
At the end of the interview, Eggers says to the
interviewer, “Reward me for my suffering,”
“Have I given you enough? Reward me. Put me
on television. Let me share this with millions . . . I
know how this works. I give you these things, and
you give me a platform. So give me a platform. I am
owed . . . I can do it any way you want, too—I can do
it funny, or maudlin, or just straight, uninflected—
anything. You tell me. I can do it sad, or inspirational,
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or angry. . . . All this did not happen to us for naught,
I can assure you—there is no logic to that, there is
logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason.
Just give us our due. . . . I need community, I need
feedback, I need love, connection, give-and-take—
will bleed if they will love. . . . I will open a vein, an
artery. . . . Oh please let me show this to millions. . . .
Let me be the conduit. . . . Oh, I want to be the heart
pumping blood to everyone! . . . I want—”
“And that will heal you?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”20
We live in an age, Philip Roth wrote, in which the
imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what will
appear in the morning newspaper: “The actuality is
continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up
figures daily that are the envy of any novelist.” Roth
observed that the reality of celebrity culture “stupefies, it
sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of
embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.”21
Philip Roth’s grasp of the unreality of reality is
exemplified in the British reality star Jade Goody.22 A
twenty-year-old dental technician who was the only child
of two drug addicts, Goody was in 2002 given a role as a
contestant in Big Brother 3. She got drunk on the first
night of the program. She waltzed around the set topless.
She asked what asparagus was and said, “Rio de Janeiro,
ain’t that a person?” She referred to East Anglia as “East
67
Angular,” thought Portugal was in Spain, and complained
that she was being made an “escape goat.” She thought
“pistachio” was a famous painter. She finished fourth in
the competition, but this did not, as it would for most
others, end her career as a celebrity. She released several
successful fitness DVDs and opened a beauty salon in
Hertford. She published an autobiography and marketed
her own fragrance in the weeks before Christmas 2006,
which generated huge sales. She appeared on other reality
shows including Celebrity Wife Swap, Celebrity Driving
School, Celebrity Weakest Link, and Celebrity Stars in
Their Eyes. She also hosted her own reality TV shows,
including What Jade Did Next, Jade’s Salon, and Jade’s
P.A.
Goody had the essential skill required of all who agree
to expose their lives and selves to constant surveillance:
She appeared to lack any degree of self-consciousness. She
came naturally to exhibitionism, even when she was
clearly a figure of ridicule. She opened her life to millions
of viewers, even when it involved seamy and messy
relationships and personal disasters, with a beguiling
innocence. This is a bizarre skill highly prized in celebrity
culture. Goody clearly craved the attention and sought to
perpetuate it, but she seemed slightly bored or at least
indifferent while doing it.
Her appearance, along with her mother Jackiey Budden
and model boyfriend Jack Tweed, in the Big Brother house
in January 2007, however, backfired. She bullied and
taunted Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, and used crude,
racist remarks to describe Shetty, calling her “Shilpa
Poppadom.” The show received some 45,000 complaints
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about her behavior and racist language. Her perfume was
yanked from shelves, and publishers dropped plans to
publish the paperback version of her autobiography. She
apologized abjectly to Indian viewers and appeared on the
Indian version of the show, called Bigg Boss. She might
have faded from view, like most reality show contestants,
but in 2007 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer,
learning of the disease while being filmed for the Indian
program. The new twist to the drama of her life propelled
her back into the spotlight and allowed her a final chance
to play a starring role in her life movie. The Living
Channel commissioned a three-part series that documented
her battle with cancer. The program drew an audience of
more than 900,000 viewers in Britain when it aired. She
milked her final days for money and celebrity, including
making about $1 million by selling exclusive rights to
cover her wedding. She died at the age of twenty-seven in
March 2009.
Goody told the News of the World when she learned
her cancer was probably terminal: “I’ve lived my whole
adult life talking about my life. The only difference is that
I’m talking about my death now. It’s OK.
“I’ve lived in front of the cameras,” she went on. “And
maybe I’ll die in front of them. And I know some people
don’t like what I’m doing, but at this point I really don’t
care what other people think. Now, it’s about what I want.”
Nothing is off-limits, including death. As long as it can
be packaged and turned into drama, it works. The
emptiness of those like Goody who crave this validation is
tragic. They turn into clowns. This endless, mindless
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diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes
entertainment above substance. Intellectual or
philosophical ideas require too much effort and work to
absorb. Classical theater, newspapers, and books are
pushed to the margins of cultural life, remnants of a
bygone literate age. They are dismissed as inaccessible and
elitist unless they provide, as Goody did, effortless
entertainment. The popularization of culture often ends in
its total degradation. The philosopher Hannah Arendt
wrote:
The result of this is not disintegration but decay,
and those who promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley
composers but a special kind of intellectual, often
well read and well informed, whose sole function is to
organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in
order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as
entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as
educational as well. There are many great authors of
the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and
neglect, but it is still an open question whether they
will be able to survive an entertaining version of what
they have to say.23
We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively
given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with
complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have
traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public
rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old
child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of
70
us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this
level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica
of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with
the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all,
however, turned into donkeys—a symbol, in Italian
culture, of ignorance and stupidity.
Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic.
There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27
million are unable to read well enough to complete a job
application, and 30 million can’t read a simple sentence .24
There are some 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifthgrade
level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is
illiterate or barely literate—a figure that is growing by
more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school
graduates never read another book for the rest of their
lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In
2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did
not buy or read a book.25 And it is not much better beyond
our borders. Canada has an illiterate and semiliterate
population estimated at 42 percent of the whole, a
proportion that mirrors that of the United States.26
Television, a medium built around the skillful
manipulation of images, ones that can overpower reality, is
our primary form of mass communication. A television is
turned on for six hours and forty-seven minutes a day in
the average household. The average American daily
watches more than four hours of television. That amounts
to twenty-eight hours a week, or two months of
uninterrupted television-watching a year. That same person
will have spent nine years in front of a television by the
71
time he or she is sixty-five. Television speaks in a
language of familiar, comforting clichés and exciting
images. Its format, from reality shows to sit-coms, is
predictable. It provides a mass, virtual experience that
colors the way many people speak and interact with one
another. It creates a false sense of intimacy with our elite
—celebrity actors, newspeople, politicians, business
tycoons, and sports stars. And everything and everyone
that television transmits is validated and enhanced by the
medium. If a person is not seen on television, on some
level he or she is not important. Television confers
authority and power. It is the final arbitrator for what
matters in life.
Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we are
bombarded with the cant and spectacle pumped out over
the airwaves or over computer screens by highly-paid
pundits, corporate advertisers, talk-show hosts, and gossipfueled
entertainment networks. And a culture dominated
by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally
literate but who make the choice not to read. There have
been other historical periods with high rates of illiteracy
and vast propaganda campaigns. But not since the Soviet
and fascist dictatorships, and perhaps the brutal
authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in the Middle
Ages, has the content of information been as skillfully and
ruthlessly controlled and manipulated. Propaganda has
become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is
confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial
brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And
in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among
those who cannot read and those who have given up
72
reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being
seeded.
The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the
intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from
truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children.
It impoverishes language. The Princeton Review analyzed
the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, the
Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon
debate of 1960, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.
It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary
test that indicates the minimum educational standard
needed for a reader to grasp the text. In the Lincoln-
Douglas debates, Lincoln spoke at the educational level of
an eleventh grader (11.2), and Douglas addressed the
crowd using a vocabulary suitable (12.0) for a high-school
graduate. In the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the candidates
spoke in language accessible to tenth graders. In the 1992
debates, Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while
Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did Perot (6.3).
During the 2000 debates, Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level
(6.7) and Gore at a high seventh-grade level (7.6) .27 This
obvious decline was, perhaps, raised slightly by Barack
Obama in 2008, but the trends above are clear.
Those captive to images cast ballots based on how
candidates make them feel. They vote for a slogan, a smile,
perceived sincerity, and attractiveness, along with the
carefully crafted personal narrative of the candidate. It is
style and story, not content and fact, that inform mass
politics. Politicians have learned that to get votes they
must replicate the faux intimacy established between
73
celebrities and the public. There has to be a sense, created
through artful theatrical staging and scripting by political
spin machines, that the politician is “one of us.” The
politician, like the celebrity, has to give voters the
impression that he or she, as Bill Clinton used to say, feels
their pain. We have to be able to see ourselves in them. If
this connection, invariably a product of extremely
sophisticated artifice, is not established, no politician can
get any traction in a celebrity culture.
The rhetoric in campaigns eschews reality for the
illusive promise of the future and the intrinsic greatness of
the nation. Campaigns have a deadening sameness, the
same tired clichés, the concerned expressions of the
sensitive candidates who are like you and me, and the
gushing words of gratitude to the crowds of supporters.
The metaphors are not empty. They say something about
us and our culture. Changes in metaphors are, as the critic
Northrop Frye understood, fundamental changes.
“Are we going to look forward,” asked candidate
Obama at an “American Jobs Tour” rally in Columbus,
Ohio, on October 10, 2008, “or are we going to look
backwards?”
AUDIENCE: Forward!
OBAMA: Are we going to look forward with
hope, or are we going to look backwards with fear?
AUDIENCE: Hope! Forward!
OBAMA: Ohio, if you are willing to organize
74
with me, if you are willing to go vote right now—
we’ve got—you could go to the early voting right
across the street, right on—right there. [Cheers and
applause.] If every one of you are willing to grab your
friends and your neighbors and make the phone calls
and do what’s required, I guarantee you we will not
just win Ohio, we will win this general election. And
you and I together, we will change this country and
we will change the world. [Cheers and applause.] God
bless you. God bless the United States of America.
[Cheers and applause.]
Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin
DeMott calls “junk politics.” Junk politics does not
demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes
and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. “It’s
impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about
America’s optimism and moral character, and heavily
dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture,”
DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing
changes—“meaning zero interruption in the processes and
practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of
socioeconomic advantage.” It redefines traditional values,
tilting “courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward
mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect,
identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of
brains.” Junk politics “miniaturizes large, complex
problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad.
It’s also given to abrupt, unexplained reversals of its own
public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems
previously miniaturized.” And finally, it “seeks at every
turn to obliterate voters’ consciousness of socioeconomic
75
and other differences in their midst.”28 Politics has become
a product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in
celebrities who are, as Boorstin wrote, “receptacles into
which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing
but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror.”29
Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not
examine voting records or compare verbal claims with
written and published facts and reports. The reality of their
world is whatever the latest cable news show, political
leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The
illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though
they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They
live in an eternal present. They do not understand the
predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and
bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on the
credit card agreements that plunge them into
unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating
clichés and slogans. They are hostage to the constant jingle
and manipulation of a consumer culture. They seek refuge
in familiar brands and labels. They eat at fast-food
restaurants not only because it is cheap, but also because
they can order from pictures rather than from a menu. And
those who serve them, also often semiliterate or illiterate,
punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are usually
marked with pictures. Life is a state of permanent amnesia,
a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick,
sensual gratification.
Celebrity images are reflections of our idealized selves
sold back to us. Yet they actually constrain rather than
expand our horizons and experiences. “One of the deepest
76
and least remarked features of the Age of Contrivance is
what I would call the mirror effect,” Boorstin wrote.
Nearly everything we do to enlarge our world, to
make life more interesting, more varied, more
exciting, more vivid, more “fabulous,” more
promising, in the long run has an opposite effect. In
the extravagance of our expectations and in our ever
increasing power, we transform elusive dreams into
graspable images within with each of us can fit. By
doing so we mark the boundaries of our world with a
wall of mirrors. Our strenuous and elaborate efforts to
enlarge experience have the unintended result of
narrowing it. In frenetic quest for the unexpected, we
end by finding only the unexpectedness we have
planned for ourselves. We meet ourselves coming
back.30
The most essential skill in political theater and a
consumer culture is artifice. Political leaders, who use the
tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux
intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent,
sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these
qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal
narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be
completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and
emotional appeal of the story are paramount. Those who
are best at deception succeed. Those who have not
mastered the art of entertainment, who fail to create a
narrative or do not have one fashioned for them by their
handlers, are ignored. They become “unreal.”
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An image-based culture communicates through
narratives, pictures, and pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs,
hurricanes, untimely deaths, train wrecks—these events
play well on computer screens and television. International
diplomacy, labor union negotiations, and convoluted
bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives
or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call
girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who
proposes serious regulatory reform or advocates curbing
wasteful spending is boring. Kings, queens, and emperors
once used their court conspiracies to divert their subjects.
Today cinematic, political, and journalistic celebrities
distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They
create our public mythology. Acting, politics, and sports
have become, as they were in Nero’s reign,
interchangeable. In an age of images and entertainment, in
an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek
nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality
is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its
confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by
clichés, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us
we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the
greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with
superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future
will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of
our own attributes or our national character or because we
are blessed by God. In this world, all that matters is the
consistency of our belief systems. The ability to amplify
lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in
endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical
narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become
trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We
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are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or
change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex
thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.
“Entertainment was an expression of democracy,
throwing off the chains of alleged cultural repression,”
Gabler wrote. “So too was consumption, throwing off the
chains of the old production-oriented culture and allowing
anyone to buy his way into his fantasy. And, in the end,
both entertainment and consumption often provided the
same intoxication: the sheer, endless pleasure of
emancipation from reason, from responsibility, from
tradition, from class, and from all the other bonds that
restrained the self.”31
When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it
retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or
discarded according to the dictates of a preordained
cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant. Our
national discourse is dominated by manufactured events,
from celebrity gossip to staged showcasings of politicians
to elaborate entertainment and athletic spectacles. All are
sold to us through the detailed personal narratives of those
we watch. “The pseudo-events which flood our
consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar
senses,” Boorstin wrote. “The very same advances which
have made them possible have also made the images—
however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid,
more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive
than reality itself.”32
In his book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann
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distinguished between “the world outside and the pictures
in our heads.” He defined a “stereotype” as an
oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the
world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude “stereotypes
we carry about in our heads” of whole groups of people
such as “Germans,” “South Europeans,” “Negroes,”
“Harvard men,” “agitators,” and others. These stereotypes,
Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to
the chaos of existence. They offer easily grasped
explanations of reality and are closer, as Boorstin noted, to
propaganda because they simplify rather than
complicate.33
Pseudo-events, dramatic productions orchestrated by
publicists, political machines, television, Hollywood, or
advertisers, however, are very different. They have the
capacity to appear real, even though we know they are
staged. They are capable because they can evoke a
powerful emotional response of overwhelming reality and
replacing it with a fictional narrative that often becomes
accepted as truth. The power of pseudo-events to overtake
reality was what plunged the marines who returned from
Iwo Jima into such despair. The unmasking of a stereotype
damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudoevents
are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the
elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds
to its fascination and its power. This is the basis of the
convoluted television reporting on how effectively
political campaigns and candidates have been stagemanaged.
Reporters, especially those on television, no
longer ask whether the message is true but rather whether
the pseudo-event worked or did not work as political
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theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we
have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that
appear real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to
create a believable illusion are deemed failures. Truth is
irrelevant. Those who succeed in politics, as in most of the
culture, are those who create the most convincing
fantasies.
A public that can no longer distinguish between truth
and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion.
Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used
either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or
discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse
reality becomes—the more, for example, foreclosures and
unemployment sky-rocket—the more people seek refuge
and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be
distinguished from facts, when there is no universal
standard to determine truth in law, in science, in
scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the
most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world
becomes a place where lies become true, where people can
believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger
of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more
pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as
stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events
redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators.
These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions,
have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures
they control.
The old production-oriented culture demanded what
the historian Warren Susman termed character. The new
consumption-oriented culture demands what he called
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personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed
morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural
values of thrift and moderation honored hard work,
integrity, and courage. The consumption-oriented culture
honors charm, fascination, and likeability. “The social role
demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that
of a performer,” Susman wrote. “Every American was to
become a performing self.”34
Totalitarian systems begin as propagandistic
movements that ostensibly teach people to “believe what
they want,” but that is a ruse. The Christian Right, for
example, argues that it wants Intelligent Design, or
creationism, to be offered as an alternative to evolution in
public-school biology classes. But once you allow
creationism, which no reputable biologist or paleontologist
accepts as legitimate science, to be considered as an
alternative to real science, you begin the deadly assault
against dispassionate, honest, intellectual inquiry. Step into
the hermetic world of many Christian schools or colleges
and there are no alternatives to creationism offered to
students. Once these systems have control, the Christian
advocates’ purported love of alternative viewpoints and
debates is replaced by an iron and irrational conformity to
illusion.
Pseudo-events, which create their own semblance of
reality, serve in the wider culture the same role creationism
serves for the Christian Right. Pseudo-events destabilize
truth. They are convincing enough and appear real enough
to manufacture their own facts. We carry within us
feelings and perceptions about politicians, celebrities, our
82
nation, and our culture that are mirages generated by
pseudo-events. The use of pseudo-events to persuade
rather than overtly brainwash renders millions of us unable
to see or question the structures and systems that are
impoverishing us and in some cases destroying our lives.
The flight into illusion sweeps away the core values of the
open society. It corrodes the ability to think for oneself, to
draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when
judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong,
to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to grasp historical
facts, to advocate for change, and to acknowledge that
there are other views, different ways, and structures of
being that are morally and socially acceptable. A populace
deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has
become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put
forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining
a free society.
Those who slip into this illusion ignore the signs of
impending disaster. The physical degradation of the planet,
the cruelty of global capitalism, the looming oil crisis, the
collapse of financial markets, and the danger of
overpopulation rarely impinge to prick the illusions that
warp our consciousness,. The words, images, stories, and
phrases used to describe the world in pseudo-events have
no relation to what is happening around us. The advances
of technology and science, rather than obliterating the
world of myth, have enhanced its power to deceive. We
live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations
that profit from our deception. Products and experiences—
indeed, experience as a product—offered up for sale,
sanctified by celebrities, are mirages. They promise us a
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new personality. They promise us success and fame. They
promise to mend our brokenness.
“People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of
power, competence, and responsibility, and whose
characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make
excellent spenders,” wrote Wendell Berry in The
Unsettling of America. “They are the ideal consumers. By
inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness,
sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to
buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is ‘attractively
packaged.’”35 And there are no shortages of experiences
and products that, for a price, promise to stimulate us,
make us powerful, sexy, invincible, admired, beautiful,
and unique.
Blind faith in illusions is our culture’s secular version
of being born again. These illusions assure us that
happiness and success is our birthright. They tell us that
our catastrophic collapse is not permanent. They promise
that pain and suffering can always be overcome by tapping
into our hidden, inner strengths. They encourage us to bow
down before the cult of the self. To confront these
illusions, to puncture their mendacity by exposing the
callousness and cruelty of the corporate state, signals a loss
of faith. It is to become an apostate. The culture of illusion,
one of happy thoughts, manipulated emotions, and trust in
the beneficence of power, means we sing along with the
chorus or are instantly disappeared from view like the
losers on a reality show.
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II
The Illusion of Love
Capitalism is not wicked or cruel when the commodity is the
whore; profit is not wicked or cruel when the alienated worker is a
female piece of meat; corporate bloodsucking is not wicked or cruel
when the corporations in question, organized crime syndicates, sell
cunt; racism is not wicked or cruel when the black cunt or yellow cunt
or red cunt or Hispanic cunt or Jewish cunt has her legs splayed for any
man’s pleasure; poverty is not wicked or cruel when it is the poverty of
dispossessed women who have only themselves to sell; violence by the
powerful against the powerless is not wicked or cruel when it is called
sex; slavery is not wicked or cruel when it is sexual slavery; torture is
not wicked or cruel when the tormented are women, whores, cunts. The
new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast
graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its
whores and its politics too.
—ANDREA DWORKIN, Pornography: Men Possessing Women
THE PINK CROSS BOOTH has a table of anti-porn
tracts and is set up in the far corner of the Sands Expo
convention center in Las Vegas. It is an unlikely
participant at the annual Adult Video News (AVN) expo.
Pink Cross is a Christian outreach program for women in
the porn industry, run by ex-porn star Shelley Lubben.
In a convention exalting the pornography industry,
Lubben’s table is not overrun with visitors, most of whom
are male and middle-aged with cameras around their
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necks. The few men who make it to the far corner of the
convention center look curiously at its pink banner and
walk past. The expo is filled with more alluring fare. There
are numerous booths for porn producers and distributors,
many with women in tiny skirts and bras who, often
clinging to stripper poles, gyrate and bend over and spread
their legs for groups of men. They simulate masturbation
and flash their breasts for crowds of onlookers. Huge
banners hang from the ceiling promoting new releases
such as Anal Buffet, Fetish Fuck Dolls, Gangbang My
Face 3, Fuck Slaves 3, Milk Nymphos 2, and Slutty and
Sluttier 6.
A local escort service, VegasGirls, has a booth about a
hundred feet from Pink Cross. There is a homemade
wooden wheel with a flipper that looks like a middleschool
shop project on its table. Those who spin the wheel
can get various discounts or even a free visit by a
“stripper” to their hotel room. Small, glossy cards are
fanned out on the table, showing women in evocative
poses and not much clothing, all with a first name, the
agency’s phone number, and the phrase actual photo
emblazoned on the side of the card.
“You want to take a picture of my boobs, then you
have to take my card,” a woman in front of the booth tells
a camera-wielding, middle-aged man.
“If I call this number, is it you who will come?” he
asks.
“Here, baby,” she says, giving him the card. “I will
come.”
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Many of the booths at the Sands Expo feature wellknown
porn stars. There are long lines of men waiting for
a signed photo and the chance to have a picture with stars
from the Wicked Pictures studio, including Kaylani Lei,
Kirsten Price, and Jessica Drake. The men usually wrap
their arms around the women for the photo, always taken
by a friend or someone in line. As they hug the women’s
waists, the women sometimes playfully grab the man’s
crotch or lick their lips. Huge plasma screens placed in the
booths run nonstop porn, often featuring the stars having
anal sex with multiple partners or giving blow jobs. The
sheer volume of porn blasted throughout the convention
floor by the sea of giant screens becomes, very quickly,
numbing.
The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and
digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting
because none of the women are permitted to have what
amounts to a personality. The one emotion they are
allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy
men, especially if that desire involves the women’s
physical and emotional degradation. The lighting in the
films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give
the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn,
which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached
pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human
endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and
groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting,
oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the
sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask
blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines,
no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow
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spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the
dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste,
breath—or tenderness. Those in the films are puppets,
packaged female commodities. They have no honest
emotions, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and
resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one
defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It
promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary autoarousal
that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is
about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.
“I was addicted to porn for two years,” says Scott
Smith, twenty-nine, from Cleveland, Tennessee, who is at
the Pink Cross booth. He first watched Internet porn as a
college student.
“I started out once a day, usually at night, when my
roommate wasn’t there,” Smith says. “You try and hide it.
Then I started watching it several times a day. I would
only watch it long enough to masturbate. I never got why
they make these long features since I would always turn it
off when I was done.”
Smith says the images crippled his ability to be
intimate. He could not distinguish between the fantasy of
porn and the reality of relationships. “Porn messes with the
way you think of women,” he says. “You want the women
you are with to be like the women in porn. I was scared to
get involved in a relationship. I did not know how
extensive the damage was. I did not want to hurt anyone. I
kept away from women.”
There are some 13,000 porn films made every year in
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the United States, most in the San Fernando Valley in
California. According to the Internet Filter Review,
worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at
hotels, sex clubs, and the ever-expanding e-sex world,
topped $97 billion in 2006. That is more than the revenues
of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple,
Netflix, and EarthLink combined. Annual sales in the
United States are estimated at $10 billion or higher. There
is no precise monitoring of the porn industry. And porn is
very lucrative to some of the nation’s largest corporations.
General Motors owns DIRECTV, which distributes more
than 40 million streams of porn into American homes
every month. AT&T Broadband and Comcast Cable are
currently the biggest American companies accommodating
porn users with the Hot Network, Adult Pay Per View, and
similarly themed services. AT&T and GM rake in
approximately 80 percent of all porn dollars spent by
consumers.
The largest users of Internet porn are between the ages
of twelve and seventeen. And porn producers increasingly
target adolescents. “The age demographic has moved
downwards, especially in the UK and Europe,” explained
Steve Honest, the European director of production for
Bluebird Films. “Porn is the new rock and roll. Young
people and women are embracing porn and making
purchases. Porn targets the mid-teens to the mid-twenties
and up.”
Patrice Roldan, twenty-six, with black hair and a loosefitting
purple and black potato sack dress, is standing next
to the Pink Cross table. Roldan, whose screen name was
Nadia Styles, made her last porn film in November 2008.
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She starred in nearly two hundred films, including Lord of
Asses, Anal Girls Next Door, Monster Cock Fuckfest 9,
Deep Throat Anal, Trophy Whores, and Young Dumb &
Covered in Cum. She is five feet, five inches, 110 pounds,
and wears a black scarf around her neck, black knitted
stockings with knee-high black socks, and flat, black
shoes. Her outfit seems calculated to be exactly what a
porn star should never wear in public. She looks like a
schoolteacher.
Roldan, like many of the women who drift into the
porn and prostitution industry, had a difficult and troubled
childhood, including a physically abusive mother. Her
mother threw her out of her home when she was seventeen,
and she spent time in homeless shelters. She answered an
ad in LA Weekly that offered women $1,000 as models.
This is a common doorway into the porn industry. She
started appearing in Internet porn. She had a boyfriend
when she began filming and tells me she “felt guilty”
about hiding her porn sessions from him, but the money
was good. Her boyfriend eventually found out, and their
relationship descended into one increasingly characterized
by verbal and physical abuse. She drifted from the Internet
into films. She was nineteen when she made her first film.
“Doing a movie shoot was a different experience,” she
says as we sit in two folding chairs across from the Pink
Cross booth. “I made my first film with New Sensations

[adult video studio]

. I got makeup. There was a set and
cameramen all around. I thought it was glamorous to have
my makeup done, to have pictures taken of me. That was a
regular boy-girl shoot. At that point, I was just trying to
survive.”
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She had been promised $1,000 for her first film. She
was handed $600 when the scene was done. She also
contracted gonorrhea. Porn stars are tested for HIV and
sexually transmitted diseases once a month, but “people do
so many scenes between tests that a month is a long time.”
She began, once she had treated her gonorrhea, to do films
three or four times a month. She would have several more
bouts with gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted
diseases during her career. She got pregnant and had an
abortion. The demands on her began to escalate. She was
filmed with multiple partners. Her scenes became
“extremely rough. They would pull my hair, slap me
around like a rag doll.”
“The next day my whole body would ache,” she
recalls. “It happened a lot, the aching. It used to be that
only a few stars, people like Linda Lovelace, would once
do things like anal. Now it is expected.”
She became a staple in “gonzo” porn films. Gonzo
movies are usually filmed in a house or hotel room. They
are porn verité. The performers often acknowledge the
camera and speak to it. Gonzo films push the boundaries of
porn and often include a lot of violence, physical abuse,
and a huge number of partners in succession. According to
the magazine Adult Video News, “Gonzo, non-feature fare
is the overwhelmingly dominant porn genre since it’s less
expensive to produce than plot-oriented features, but just
as importantly, is the fare of choice for the solo stroking
consumer who merely wants to cut to the chase, get off on
the good stuff, then, if they really wanna catch some
acting, plot, and dialog, pop in the latest Netflix disc.”1
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Roldan would endure numerous anal penetrations by
various men in a shoot, most of them “super-rough.” She
would have one man in her anus and one in her vagina
while she gave a blow job to a third man. The men would
ejaculate on her face. She was repeatedly “face-fucked,”
with men forcing their cocks violently in and out of her
mouth. She did what in industry shorthand is called
“ATM,” ass-to-mouth, where a man pulls his penis from
her anus and puts it directly in her mouth.
As she talks of her career in porn, her eyes take on a
dead, faraway look. Her breathing becomes more rapid.
She slips into a flat, numbing monotone. The symptoms
are ones I know well from interviewing victims of
atrocities in war who battle post-traumatic stress disorder.
“What you are describing is trauma,” I say.
“Yes,” she answers quietly.
Shelley Lubben, who also worked as a porn actress,
agrees.
“You have to do what they want on the sets,” she says.
“There’s too much competition. They can always find
other girls. Girls bring in their friends and get kickbacks.
They feel like stars. They get attention. It’s all about the
spotlight. It’s all about me. They have notoriety. They
don’t realize the degradation. Besides, this is a whole
generation raised on porn. They’re jaded and don’t even
ask if it is wrong. They fall into it. They get into drugs to
numb themselves. They get their asses ripped. Their uterus
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hemorrhages. They get HPV and herpes, and they turn
themselves off emotionally and die. They check out
mentally. They get PTSD like Vietnam vets. They don’t
know who they are. They live a life of shopping and drugs.
They don’t buy real estate. They party, and in the end they
have nothing to show for it except, like me, genital herpes
and fake boobs.”
“Porn is like any other addiction,” Lubben says. “First,
you are curious. Then you need harder and harder drugs to
get off. You need gang bangs and bestiality and child porn.
Porn gets grosser and grosser. We never did ass-to-mouth
when I was in the industry. Now you get an award for it.
And meanwhile the addicts make their wives feel like they
can’t live up to the illusion of the porn star. The addict
asks, ‘Why can’t she give blow jobs like a porn star?’ He
wants what isn’t real. Porn destroys intimacy. I can always
tell if a man is a porn addict. They’re shut down. They
can’t look me in the eyes. They can’t be intimate.”
“When legal and social mores first changed and porn
went mainstream in the 1970s, there was a standard sexual
script, which included oral and vaginal sex, with anal sex
relatively rare, ending with the ‘money’ or ‘come’ shot,
where the man ejaculated onto the body of the woman,”
Robert Jensen, the author of Getting Off: Pornography and
the End of Masculinity, tells me over breakfast one
Saturday morning at my home in Princeton. “But once
there were thousands of porn films on the market, the porn
industry had to expand that script to expand profits. It had
to find new emotional thrills. It could have explored
intimacy, love, the connection between two people, but
this was not what appealed to the largely male audience.
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Instead, the industry focused on greater male control and
cruelty. This started in the 1980s, with anal sex as a way
for men to dominate women. It has descended to multiple
penetrations, double anals, gagging, and other forms of
physical and psychological degradation.
“What does it say about our culture that cruelty is so
easy to market?” Jensen asks. “What is the difference
between glorifying violence in war and glorifying the
violence of sexual domination? I think that the reason porn
is so difficult for so many people to discuss is not that it is
about sex—our culture is saturated in sex. The reason it is
difficult is that porn exposes something very
uncomfortable about us. We accept a culture flooded with
images of women who are sexual commodities.
Increasingly, women in pornography are not people having
sex but bodies upon which sexual activities of increasing
cruelty are played out. And many men—maybe a majority
of men—like it.”
The cruelty takes a toll on the bodies, as well as the
emotions, of porn actresses. Many suffer severe repeated
vaginal and anal tears that require surgery. And there are
some women porn stars, such as Jenna Jameson, who, once
they are established, refuse to do scenes with men and are
filmed only with other women. But few actresses in the
industry are able to achieve this kind of control. Roldan,
like most of the women, did not eat on nights before she
was filmed. She flushed out her system with enemas and
laxatives. “I would starve myself,” she says, “so I wouldn’t
have to suck on my shit. The worst was when it came out
of another girl and it was not clean and you had to do it.”
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“I could not go to the bathroom,” she says. “I became a
vegetarian and still couldn’t go. I took enemas and
laxatives. I got colonics where they would fill me up with
water and flush everything out. Sometimes my butt would
stay wide open for days. It was scary.”
The male stars are encouraged to be rough and hostile.
Some, she says, “hated women. They would spit in my
face. I was devastated the first time that happened, but I
thought it was good they were rough because of my
abusive relationships. I thought roughness in porn was OK.
I would say, ‘Treat me like a little slut,’ or ‘I’m your
bitch,’ or ‘Fuck me like a whore.’ I would say the most
degrading things I could say about myself because I
thought this was what it meant to be sexy and what people
wanted to hear, or at least the people who buy the films.
You are just a slut to those who watch. You are nothing.
They want to see that we know that.”
She would shoot scenes with men who disgusted her,
whose sweat and smell “made me cringe.” And when the
lights went off and the cameras stopped, she would
stumble off the set in pain, her face often covered with
semen. “Sometimes they would hand you a paper towel to
wipe your face off,” she says, “and sometimes they would
say, ‘Don’t touch us. You’re gross.’ I remember the first
time I had come all over my face. I was so pissed off, but I
took it. I pretended to like everything they did. I took pride
in being a good gonzo girl. My fame came from this.”
By the second year of shooting, with an income of
$100,000, she had turned to drugs, including painkillers
and muscle relaxants.
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“The lifestyle of a porn star is to spend your money as
soon as you make it on weed, alcohol, coke, ecstasy, and
Vicodin,” Roldan says. “I wanted to be the good gonzo girl
they wanted me to be. I took this so I would not feel
anything. By the next year, instead of only Vicodin I began
to drink vodka, a whole bottle. Every girl I knew used
alcohol. We were drinking so we did not feel the pain,
physically and emotionally. I remember driving home
thinking, ‘I could be stopped for DWI.’”
Roldan usually socialized with other porn stars, whom
she and everyone in the industry call “girls.” They often
spent their days drinking. “Most are very lonely,” she says.
She longed for a relationship, “but it felt weird to have a
boyfriend.”
Adult video companies such as JM Productions and
Extreme Associates, which includes graphic rape scenes in
its array of physical abuse of women, make no attempt to
hide the pain and acute discomfort endured by the women.
The pain and discomfort are the major draws of the
productions. JM Productions pioneered “aggressive throatfucking”
videos such as the Gag Factor series, in which
women have penises pushed all the way down their throats
until they gag or vomit. On the Gag Factor Web site, the
producers promise “The best throat-fucking ever lensed.”
It offers still shots of women being “face-fucked.” One
typical description of a film begins with the standard brief
summary, as if the women were criminals with a rap sheet:
“Degraded On: 10/8/08. Name: Ashley Blue . . . Age:
twenty-five. Status: Happy? Home Town: Thousand Oaks,
CA.” It shows a picture of a woman with black hair lying
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on her back with her eyes closed. Her face is covered with
semen and a penis is buried in her throat.
“Here’s Your Retirement Party,” the description of the
film reads. “As many of you will remember, for quite a
long time superwhore Ashley Blue was the official JM
contract whore. But like the sole of an old shoe, porn
whores eventually wear out and have to be thrown away.
So, our way of throwing a retirement party for Ashley was
to have her head get pistonfucked one last time. Enjoy!”2
Las Vegas, a city built on illusions, lends itself to
the celebration of porn. It is the corrupt, wilfully
degenerate heart of America. It is, in Marc Cooper’s
memorable phrase, The Last Honest Place in America. Las
Vegas strips away the thin moral pretension and hypocrisy
of consumer society to reveal its essence. The
commodification of human beings, the heart of the
consumer society, is garishly celebrated in Las Vegas.
Here there is no past, no history, no sense of continuity,
and no real community. The mammoth resorts and casinos
glittering in the desert are monuments to greed and vice,
even as the rest of the country crumbles under the
onslaught of physical decay, shuttered stores and factories,
a disintegrating infrastructure, and mounting poverty.
Las Vegas is the city of spectacle. The Treasure Island
Casino has an hourly pirate battle with two clipper ships,
smoke-filled cannons, and scantily clad female pirates in a
fake lagoon. Tourists can visit the New York-New York
Hotel & Casino and take in a replica of the city’s skyline.
They can go to the Venetian, board gondolas, and be poled
down indoor copies of the Venice canals by aspiring opera
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singers. They can watch the pathetic eruption of the
belching man-made volcano and the rubberized trees in the
“rain forest” of the lobby of the Mirage. They can eat in a
replica of a French bistro called Mon Ami Gabi, under the
shadow of a half-size copy of the Eiffel Tower.
Mon Ami Gabi, where I went one day for lunch in the
forlorn hope of escaping the ugliness and noise of the
Strip, has waiters in black vests, white shirts, black bow
ties, and long, white aprons. But, like the rest of Las
Vegas, the exotic is only a veneer. The menu offers
hamburgers, sandwiches, waffles, and, in what I suppose is
a concession to France, French toast. Diners at the bistro
look out on Caesars Palace, where Roman statues speak,
although not in Latin, in Caesar’s Forum. It is a short walk
to diminished copies of the Giza pyramids at the Luxor.
Las Vegas sells a cartoon version of other cultures and
other lands. It is a monument to pseudo-events. It is a place
where stereotypes can be experienced as reality. The guts
and sinews of every theme-park hotel and casino, however,
hold the same, mind-numbing slot machines, roulette
wheels, and blackjack tables. A trip to Las Vegas is a visit
to a sanitized, cutout version of foreign countries without
the intrusion of foreign people, the hassle of unintelligible
languages, strange habits, different ideas and traditions, or
bizarre food. Here everyone speaks English. Here you are
surrounded by Americans. Here, once you get past the
façade, it is all the same. There is always beer on tap and
hamburgers. The chaos of the real world, of other cultures
and ways of being, is purged and made tidy, easy, and
accessible. But it is all a game. New York-New York will
part you from your money as efficiently as the Luxor. And
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that is the point. It is all about taking your money, and
when the money runs out, you might as well not exist. Las
Vegas, unlike the rest of the culture, is brutally honest
about its exploitation.
Las Vegas speaks in the comforting epistemology of
television. Many of the slot machines have movie and
television themes with audio voices of characters from the
Austin Powers movies, I Love Lucy, or The Price is Right
cheering on the slack-jawed, glazed-eyed customers who
repeatedly pull the lever, or, increasingly, push a button, to
set off the whirl of icons. In Las Vegas the illusion of the
exotic overlies the banal comfort of the safe and familiar.
In a nation where less than 10 percent of the population
has a passport, how many Americans can tell the
difference between the illusion of France and the reality of
France? How many can differentiate between Egypt and
the illusion of Egypt? How many care?
Las Vegas should, as Neil Postman observed in his
1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, be considered the
“symbolic capital” of America. “At different times in our
history,” Postman wrote, “different cities have been the
focal point of a radiating American spirit. In the late
eighteenth century, for example, Boston was the center of
a political radicalism that ignited a shot heard round the
world—a shot that could not have been fired any other
place but the suburbs of Boston.” In the mid-nineteenth
century, “New York became the symbol of a melting pot
America.” In the early twentieth century, Chicago, “the
city of big shoulders and heavy winds, came to symbolize
the industrial energy and dynamism of America. If there is
a statue of a hog butcher somewhere in Chicago, then it
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stands as a reminder of the time when America was
railroads, cattle, steel mills, and entrepreneurial
adventures.”
“Today,” Postman concluded,
we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as
a metaphor of our national character and aspiration,
its symbol a thirty-foot high cardboard picture of a
slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city
entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as
such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all
public discourse increasingly takes the form of
entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news,
athletics, education, and commerce have been
transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business,
largely without protest or even much popular notice.3
The Las Vegas Strip is a monument to our nation’s cult
of eternal childishness. It plays off of our fear of growing
up. In Marc Cooper’s portrait of Las Vegas, The Last
Honest Place in America, he wrote:
In a television-marinated society in which the
boundaries between childhood and adulthood have
been blurred if not erased, increasingly and
dismayingly, children and adults dress the same, eat
the same, and often talk the same, where they
certainly endlessly watch the same TV shows, where
simulation is often valued over authenticity (look no
further than the acrobatic contrivances of so-called
“reality TV” or the reclassification of steel and
concrete hotels into “scenery”), it should come as
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little surprise that the phony lava eruption and the
staged pirate-show next door should bring equal glee
to the ten-year-olds and their parents. Add to that a
certain solace Americans find in the worship of
technology, even technology at this infantile level,
and the Strip begins to make perfect sense.4
Porn films frequently build their themes around reality
shows or popular sitcoms. I stand at the AVN expo in front
of a display where the newest release is called I’m
Dreaming of Genie. The company has also filmed Paris
and Nicole Go to Jail and Getting It Up with the
Kardassians. Jessica Lynn, twenty-three, plays the role of
the porn Genie and for the convention is dressed in a
replica of the television character’s costume.
“I usually do whatever I want and think later,” she
says. “I won’t do anal yet. I basically do boy-girl, girlgirl.”
She does do ATM, although she says, “I don’t like
to. There are a lot of infections.” She says she can climax
on the set, something most ex-porn actresses, including
Lubben, insist never happens. “I can come if there is a
vibrator.” She says her parents recently discovered what
she is doing and have asked her to get out of the industry.
She has a boyfriend, whom she later calls her husband,
who “is cool with it,” and she says she sometimes “brings
girls home for him.” “I love watching my husband fuck
other girls, watching him make her feel good.” She has
been in scenes, she said, that “got too violent and rough
and one where one of the men began to eat his own come.”
She said she is saving money for college and has stayed
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away from drugs. “A lot of girls have breakdowns,” she
says. “They call me. I have had numerous calls. They are
freaking out about their life and they are usually on drugs.”
Jeff Thrill, who uses the pen name of Roger Krypton,
writes porn scripts for the Hustler Video Group. He wrote
Not the Bradys XXX, This Ain’t the Munsters XXX, Very
Happy Days, This Ain’t Gilligan’s Island XXX, and This
Ain’t the Partridge Family XXX. The logo on the poster for
This Ain’t the Partridges XXX has a line of little birds
shaped as penises with wings.
“There have been parodies in porn forever,” he says.
“In the past, it might have been Forrest Hump. But they
were not true to the original show. In my films we make
sure the actors look like the characters and, God willing,
deliver dialogue like the characters.”
Thrill’s big hit this year was Who’s Nailin’ Paylin:
Adventures of a Hockey MILF, shot with a porn actress
who resembled Sarah Palin. The actress, Lisa Anne, played
a character called Serra Paylin. Nina Hartley plays Hillary
Clinton and Jada Fire plays Condoleezza Rice. The women
have a three-way sex scene. In the movie, Serra Paylin
participates in sexual encounters with visiting Russian
soldiers. There is a flashback to college days, in which her
creationist science professor teaches her lessons on the
“theory of the Big Bang.” There are also shouts of “Drill,
baby, drill” during sex scenes and many “you betcha”s.
During a Serra Paylin press conference, there is an ode to
the podium scene in the 1984 comedy Police Academy.
The film was featured on Fox News and the Colbert
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Report, as well as on The O’Reilly Factor. It sold well,
four times Hustler’s other releases, Thrill says. DVD,
video, and magazine sales of porn have dropped by 25 to
45 percent because of free Internet porn. Thrill said he had
just completed Everybody Loves Lucy. In this latest film,
Lucy and Ethel sneak into Rickey’s club and find that it is
a sex club. “People like these familiar characters that they
already know,” Thrill says. “You would not think anybody
would want to see Herman Munster have sex, but they
actually did.”
Thrill spends about six or eight hours on scripts, most
of which have five scenes. A script runs about a dozen
pages. “Once you get into the actual sex, we like them to
stay in character,” he says, “but these are no Academy
Award-winning performances.”
The sex those in the porn industry claim to promote is
as fake, absurd, and unattainable as the façade of the Luxor
casino and hotel. Porn is not about love or eroticism. It is
about power and money. It is a transaction. It is based on
the conversion of women into objects. They are assigned a
monetary value and sexually exploited for profit. Most
porn stars are also prostitutes. They charge a range of fees,
usually in the thousands of dollars, to fans on porn escort
Web sites.
When I ask ex-porn actress Jan Meza, thirty, who once
did a scene in which twenty-five men had sex with her,
how she would describe the producers and directors of the
porn industry, she answers curtly: “Pimps.” The porn stars
make anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 an hour as
prostitutes. Roldan would, along with other porn actresses,
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be flown into a city, including New York, and stay at a
hotel for a week. They would meet clients in their hotel
room.
Lubben says the AVN convention and awards
ceremony brings together high-priced porn stars and
clients.
“Ninety percent work as prostitutes,” she says. “They
meet a lot of their big clients in Vegas during this
convention. There is really big money being made by some
of these women at night, as much as $2,000 an hour.”
The most famous porn actresses can make as much as
$30,000 a week as hotel-bound prostitutes. Clients “would
see you in the film and they wanted you to be exactly the
same way,” Roldan says. “It was uncomfortable to meet
some married stranger. I would walk around these cities
and feel sad and empty. No one cared about me. My agent
didn’t care. All I had was money and nothing else.”
The most successful porn films keep pushing the
physical and emotional boundaries of the women onscreen
and incorporate an expanding array of physically and
verbally abusive acts.
Ariana Jollee, twenty-one, is sitting in a motel room
beside a particle-board desk and a bare white wall, giving a
pre-film interview for 65 Guy Cream Pie, produced in
2005 by Devil’s Film. She has sex with sixty-five men
beside the indoor pool of a Prague resort during the film.
She is smiling at the camera. Jollee has sleek, dark hair
with bangs, a tribal tattoo encircling one bicep, and wears
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jeans and a loose black tank top. She has rounded arms,
full cheeks, and a slightly heavy chin. Jollee started doing
porn in 2003, when she was twenty, debuting in a film
called Nasty Girls 30. She has done hundreds of films and
was one of the industry’s premier gonzo girls, purportedly
enjoying extreme abuse. Jollee tells the camera that she
performed in a twenty-one-man gang bang on her twentyfirst
birthday. She says she is looking forward to doing the
same now with fifty men, although this number climbs to
sixty-five on the set. “Cream pie” refers to men ejaculating
in a woman’s anus or vagina, rather than ejaculating on her
body.
“I’ll be banging fifty guys—fifty, fifty, fifty!,” says
Jollee. Maybe even more. That’d be cool. . . . So I’m like
really excited.”
She laughs and plays with her hair. “And it just so
happens that all these guys are going to be coming in me.”
She looks coyly at the camera. “In the ass and pussy,” she
grins, wrinkling her nose. “See I like it in the ass the best. I
wanna find the biggest pervert and get him to suck all fifty
loads out and spit it in my mouth.” She reaches up and
fiddles with her bangs. “That’d be so good. That’d be
fucking hot. It’d be disgusting.” She giggles. “I get off on
that.” She runs her fingers through her hair, fanning it out
behind her.
“It’s a big, big fantasy, always been a big fantasy of
mine to be with more than one guy at a time. Many women
have that fantasy. . . .” Her voice drops to a whisper. She
wrinkles her nose and narrows her eyes. “You have all
these men, and they all wanna fuck you, and they’re all
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there, and it’s just like, cock, holy shit. It’s so good. So
good. Now I’m getting wet,” she says, giggling. Her feet
are up on the seat of her chair, and the camera pans down
briefly to the exposed crotch of her jeans. She demurely
pops her thumb in her mouth, still smiling, gazing at the
camera.
“If you’re watching this before the scene, you’re in for
a fucking treat. . . . Each one of those motherfuckers is
gonna, you know, it’s gonna be the ride of their lives.” She
nods thoughtfully. “But, who knows?” She throws her
hands in the air. “Maybe they’ll fuck me up. Maybe they’ll
really, like, teach me a lesson.” She tosses a small smile at
the camera. She scratches her knee absently. “We’ll just
have to wait and see. Maybe I’m not as insatiable as I think
I am. We’ll see. I’m excited.”
She concedes that when it is over, she will “look like
shit” but will be “well fucked.” The interviewer asks what
condition her vagina and anus will be in after having sex
with that many men. She speaks of her genitals in the
disembodied third person: “They can take it. They want it.
They like it. They go back to size after. Pussy’s tight. She
always goes back to size.”
Jollee talks briefly about her private life. She says that
before she did gang bangs in films she once had sex with
twelve men on a fire truck. “I won’t say how old I was,”
she giggles. “It was so good. I will thank the man who
took me there every day for the rest of my life. I still talk
to him. He’s a really good friend of mine. He’s a pervert,
but I love perverts. I like free people.”
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Her enthusiasm, as she relates this story about the fire
truck, appears to momentarily fade. A brief tremor crosses
her face. The fleeting impression when she falls out of
character is that the experience of being taken to a
firehouse by a friend who is “a pervert” and having sex
with twelve men on a truck was not sexy or exciting, that
for a young girl the experience was perhaps not the result
of being free or the product of sexual desire. She quickly
snaps back into the façade. She says, “I hope everyone gets
off. I plan on coming.”
Her smile broadens. “If you’ve just watched it, well,
here’s me beforehand.” She chortles. “It should be cool.”
The camera zooms in and pans down her body as she
fiddles with her hair. She reaches down and grabs her
crotch. “Everything’s intact at the moment, it’s all intact.”
She grins and wrinkles her nose as she rubs her breasts
happily. She sits up and hisses at the camera, “I’m ready,
I’m fucking horny, dude. It’s bad.” Then, in her
enthusiastic college-girl voice: “I’m so excited, can you
tell? Like I can’t sit still!” She rocks back and forth in her
chair, raising her knees to her chest and putting her thumb
in her mouth again. She giggles and swipes her bangs with
her other hand.
65 Guy Cream Pie takes six hours to film. Jollee has
oral sex, vaginal sex, double penetration, and double anal
with sixty-five men. They ejaculate into and onto her body.
When the shoot is finished, the last man heaves himself off
Jollee. In a behind-the-scenes DVD bonus, she clambers
up and stands on the curlicued iron bed. She is naked. Her
body is covered in semen. Her hair is tied back. She jumps
off the stained, pink mattress onto the tiled pool deck. She
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bounces up and down in front of a large potted palm,
laughing gleefully.
“Grab your IDs really quick,” says the director.
“Can I just wipe off?” she asks, holding out a sticky
hand. “My stupid IDs. I’m not going anywhere. Let me
just wipe off really quick. Really quick.”
Jollee walks gingerly on her toes into the hallway. She
holds her arms stiffly out to her side, fingers splayed. She
glances down at herself.
“No hug?” a production assistant teases.
“I would hug you, but . . . I would give everyone big
fucking kisses,” she throws back.
She walks naked past a group of fully dressed men in a
post-production huddle. She is the only woman visible.
The men ignore her. She rummages through a duffel bag.
She pulls a white towel out of the bag and holds it in her
hand, away from her body, as she walks naked to the
bathroom. She laughs and banters with the camera crew.
“No, no, no, don’t touch me. Trust me. You don’t want
to.” A camera flash goes off as she opens the bathroom
door. The counter in the white marble bathroom is littered
with crumpled paper towels. Jollee roams back and forth
distractedly. She continues to hold her arms out stiffly.
“Good show,” remarks the man holding the camera.
“Yeah, huh?” Jollee puts down the towel. She tears off
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a piece of paper towel. She wipes her belly with the paper
towel. She bends over to wipe cautiously between her legs.
“Oh, my God. Wow,” she says, examining the paper towel.
Her laugh, as she straightens up, sounds like panting.
“What’d ya think?”
“I think—I think you wore those guys out,” answers
the cameraman.
Jollee laughs again raggedly. “They wore me out, I
won’t fucking deny that,” she says as she takes out a baby
wipe from a packet on the counter. “Look at me. I’m about
to pass out.”
She pauses, unfolding the wipe. Then she looks at the
camera. Her smeared eyeliner gives her the appearance of
two black eyes. The corners of her mouth are pulled down.
Her chin is tilted up. Her expression is hard to read. “Good
gang bang?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it was intense. Great job.”
Jollee nods for a moment.
“Thank you,” she says quietly. “I tried.”
She looks down and wipes her belly with the baby
wipe. She blows her breath out as she holds the wipe to her
vagina, bending her knees. “Oh my God, I gotta douche. I
gotta douche real bad.” She inspects the wipe and sighs.
“Fuck.” Suddenly she looks up with a wide grin and
laughs. “D’you have fun with the camera? It’s fun, right?
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It’s like power. It’s like, whoo! It’s so much fun. It’s so
much fun. . . . It’s like you’re allowed to be a pervert, now
you have the camera in your hands.”
She catches sight of herself in the mirror and bursts out
laughing. “Oh, God. I give up.” She throws the used wipe
on the counter and heads back out, naked, into the lobby,
among the milling production crew.
Jollee was also featured in the 2005 JM Productions
release Swirlies, in which the male performer dunks the
woman’s head into a toilet after sex and flushes. The
company promo for the film promises that “every whore
gets the swirlies treatment. Fuck her, then flush her.”
In Swirlies, Jollee comes to the door of a house and
meets a man named Jenner. She tells Jenner that his little
brother has given her little brother a swirlie at school.
There is less than a minute of the usual stilted dialogue
before the sex scene begins. There is oral, vaginal, and
anal penetration in a variety of positions, with many closeup
shots of the performers’ genitals. The oral penetration
includes deep thrusting that causes Jollee to gag. Jenner
finally ejaculates on Jollee’s face. He then takes her to the
bathroom for a swirlie. During the sex scenes Jollee says to
Jenner:
• “Shove it up my fucking ass . . . fuck that
fucking tight little motherfucking asshole. Ah, that’s
so fucking good.”
• “Fuck that motherfucking filthy asshole,
motherfucker. Fucking amazing. So fucking amazing.
Fucking fuck me, motherfucker.”
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• “Fucking cock in that little asshole. That
fucking dick in my fucking tight little filthy
motherfucking asshole.”
• “Fucking love it. Fucking love it.”
• “Fuck, motherfucker is fucking me. Ride that
fucking cock, huh.”
• “Fucking nice, hard cock in fucking tight, little
ass. Fuck me like a fucking little puppy, huh. Little
puppy dog, huh. Fuck me with that fucking, hard cock
so hard. So fucking hard, shoot your fucking hot
come all over my pretty, little motherfucking face like
a dirty, little, filthy, motherfucking whore.”
• “Fucking dirty. I’m a filthy, little, fucking
whore.”5
As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades
ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs
and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an
open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme
violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with
an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always
primarily involved the eroticization of unlimited male
power, but today it also involves the expression of male
power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women.
Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a
society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter
unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds
of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents
in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a
culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street,
warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies
health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun
ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious
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and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate
capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn
are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for
empathy.
The Abu Ghraib images that were released, and the
hundreds more disturbing images that remain classified,
could be stills from porn films. There is a shot of a naked
man kneeling in front of another man as if performing oral
sex. There is a naked man on a leash held by a female
American soldier. There are naked men in chains. There
are naked men stacked one on top of the other in a human
pile on the floor, as if in a prison gang bang. And there are
hundreds more classified photos, many privately viewed
by members of Congress, that show forced masturbation
by Iraqi prisoners. Prisoners are made to pose for the
camera in simulated sexual acts. And there are reportedly
pictures of sexual intercourse among the guards. The
photographs reflect the raging undercurrent of sexual
callousness and perversion that runs through contemporary
culture. These images speak in the language of porn,
professional wrestling, reality television, music videos, and
the corporate culture. It is the language of absolute control,
total domination, racial hatred, fetishistic images of
slavery, and humiliating submission. It is a world without
pity. It is about reducing other human beings to
commodities, to objects. It is a reflection of the sickness of
gonzo porn.
Torture and pornography inevitably converge. They
each turn human beings into submissive objects. In porn
the woman is stripped of her human attributes and made to
beg for abuse. She has no identity as a distinct human
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being. Her only worth is as a toy, a pleasure doll. She
exists to gratify any whim that a male decides is
pleasurable. She has no other purpose. Her real name
vanishes. She adopts a cheap and usually vulgar stage
name. She becomes a slave. She is filmed being degraded
and physically abused. This film is sold to consumers,
who, in turn, are aroused by the illusion that they too can
dominate and abuse women. They, too, can be torturers.
Three of the alleged torturers in Abu Ghraib were
women. They appeared to be willing participants. Porn has
become so embedded and accepted in the culture,
especially among the young, that sexual humiliation,
abuse, rape, and physical violence have merged into a
socially acceptable expression, once fear of retribution is
removed. Absolute power over others almost always
expresses itself through sexual sadism.
“My whole reason for being in the industry is to satisfy
the desire of the men in the world who basically don’t
much care for women and want to see the men in my
industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have
when they were growing up,” Bill Margold, a performer
and producer of porn, has said. “I strongly believe this, and
the industry hates me for saying it. . . . So we come on a
woman’s face or somewhat brutalize her sexually: We’re
getting even for their lost dreams. I believe this. I’ve heard
audiences cheer me when I do something foul onscreen.
When I’ve strangled a person or sodomized a person or
brutalized a person, the audience is cheering my action,
and then when I’ve fulfilled my warped desire, the
audience applauds.”6
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A performer known as Max Hardcore, currently in
prison in Florida on obscenity charges, pioneered many of
the forms of physical abuse now widely embraced by the
industry. He was the first to perform anal fisting and “facefucking.”
He placed lighted medical specu lums in the
vagina and anus. He urinated on women, often directly into
their mouths. He slapped women around, tied them up,
thrust their heads into toilets and flushed, pulled their hair,
threw them onto the floor, and called them bitch, whore,
cunt, and slut.
The women in porn plead to be abused. They call
themselves whores and sluts. They are beaten and
penetrated by groups of men. Their faces are covered with
semen from dozens of masturbating men, their anuses
penetrated repeatedly by lines of partners, and they are
raped. The women portrayed in the films exist to fulfill the
desires of men in the most degrading and painful way
possible. Nearly all porn dialogue includes lines from
women such as I am a cunt. I am a bitch. I am a whore. I
am a slut. Fuck me hard with your big cock.
I find a man named Barry who refuses to give his last
name sitting at a table selling bulk packages of 100 DVDs
filmed by his company, Pain and Orgasm. He does
business using the names Torture Portal, Masters of Pain,
and Bacchus Studios. He admits his torture porn is
outlawed in many states, and I find out later that he has
been charged by a federal grand jury in Billings, Montana,
with distributing obscene DVDs through the mail. The
specific films named in the indictment are Torture of Porn
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Star Girl, Pregnant and Willing, and Defiant Crista
Submits. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of five
years in prison and a fine of $250,000 on each of the three
counts charged in the indictment.
Barry is fifty-eight and is wearing a gold Star of David
around his neck. He has graying hair pulled back in a
ponytail. He has been making movies since 1998. Not
surprisingly, he feels the government is too intrusive in the
business. He has a Web site where subscribers can see his
bondage and torture films for $24.95 a month, along, he
said, with “one live show.”
“There are more restrictions, more government
involvement where there shouldn’t be,” he says. “People
should be able to watch whatever they want to watch as
long as it is between consenting adults and there are no
kids or animals. Stay out of our bedrooms.”
He has little time for traditional porn and tells me, “I
couldn’t tell you anything about porn. I don’t shoot porn. I
don’t watch it. It’s boring. I shoot bondage. Tie ’em up and
fuck ’em and maybe I will watch.
“I am not really involved in the industry,” he goes on.
“All I know is that large segments around the world like to
watch young girls being tortured.”
Barrett Blade, whose real name is Russell Alex Heil, is
a porn actor who directs and is often filmed in porn movies
with his wife, Kirsten Price. He started acting in porn films
a decade ago when, he says, a girlfriend who shot porn
brought him to the set.
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“When I came into the business, gonzo was very
small,” he tells me. “There were more features, more films
with story lines. As a performer, I don’t do a lot of the
gonzo. I’m a lover. I film it as a director, but I don’t do it. I
can’t do a scene with some girl who before we start is
crying and sitting scared in a corner. I can’t do a scene if
the girls are not enjoying themselves.”
Most porn films have dispensed with the thin fantasy
plots of older porn. The raw sex scenes begin almost
immediately. And porn is overtly racist. Black men in porn
films are primitive animals, brawny and illiterate studs
with vast sexual prowess. Black women are filled with
raw, animalistic lust. Latina women are hot and racy.
Asian women are sexually submissive geishas. In this
year’s AVN Awards, nominated movies bore titles such as
Get That Black Pussy You Big Dick White Bastard Muttha
Fucka, My Daughter Went Black and Never Came Back,
and Oh No! There’s a Negro in My Mom! Porn, as Gail
Dines writes, is a “new minstrel show.” Porn allows white
males, safely removed from the black culture and the inner
city, to be voyeurs into a depraved and frightening world
of racial and sexual stereotypes. Porn, as Dines writes,
functions as
a peep show for whites into what they see as the
authentic black life, not on the plantation, but in the
“hood” where all the conventions of white civilized
society cease to exist. The “hood” in the white racist
imagination is a place of pimps, ho’s and generally
uncontrolled black bodies, and the white viewer is
invited, for a fee, to slum in this world of debauchery.
In the “hood,” the white man can dispense with his
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whiteness by identifying with the black man, and thus
can become as sexually skilled and as sexually out-ofcontrol
as the black man. Here he does not have to
worry about being big enough to satisfy the white
woman (or man) nor does he have to concern himself
with fears about poor performance or “weak wads” or
cages like poor hubby in Blacks on Blondes [an
interracial film in which the husband is literally in a
cage while watching black men have sex with his
wife]. Indeed, the “hood” represents liberation from
the cage, and the pay-off is a satiated white woman
(or man) who has been completely and utterly
feminized by being well and truly turned into a
“fuckee.”7
Dines writes that the black body that is celebrated as
uncontrolled in interracial pornography is the same body
that must be controlled and shackled in the world of white
supremacy:
Just as white suburban teenagers love to listen to
hip-hop and white adult males gaze longingly at the
athletic prowess of black men, the white pornography
consumer enjoys his identification with (and from)
black males through a safe peephole, in his own
home, and in mediated form. The real, breathing,
living black man, however, is to be kept as far away
as possible from these living rooms, and every major
institution in society marshals its forces in the defense
of white society. The ideologies that white men take
to the pornography text to enhance their sexual
pleasure are the very ideologies that they use to
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legitimize the control of black men: While it may
heighten arousal for the white porn users, it makes
life intolerable for the real body that is
(mis)represented in all forms of white controlled
media.8
Male porn stars make about a third of the money paid
to the women. They possess the singular talent of keeping
an erection for long periods of time while a small audience
of actors, directors, and production crew watch. Barrett
Blade tells me that many male stars take Viagra or inject
Caverject into an open vein in the penis. “Some guy will
be waiting to go on and reading a book and their cock up
like this,” he says, indicating an erection with his fingers.
“These guys who inject keep an open wound at the base of
their penis. They bleed on the women. Pretty soon they
can’t get it up without it. They need to get a vial from the
fridge every time they want to have sex, even when they
are home with their girlfriends.”
Jim Powers stands in his booth with a large, glossy
poster behind him that reads, “Wanna Fuck a Porn Star?”
The poster invites the reader to visit Fuckafan.com and
“see Super Stars of XXX Cinema with Real Guys.”
Powers, who has directed films such as Detention Whores,
Mexicunts, and Squeel Like a Pig, films “real” fans
screwing porn stars and puts it up for view on the Internet
for paid subscribers. The booth next to his is a cosmetic
surgery company that offers “breast augmentation,
liposuction, Tummy Tuck, Buttock Implants, Nose
Refinement, Botox, and Facial Fillers and more.”
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“I find real guys and they get to fuck a porn star like
Kenci,” he says, turning to a young woman beside him in
cutoff shorts, a bra, and a baseball hat.
Powers says he tried to film a scene the night before
with a fan that “went really bad.” “It was hours of
heartache, but he got a free sandwich out of it,” he says. “It
is tough once the camera comes on.” He is perturbed
because three fans who had previously agreed to be filmed
with Kenci this afternoon had not appeared. He says he
“makes stupid content for stupid people,” that porn is a
prime example of the “stupidifi cation of America.” “This
is a YouTube world,” he continues. “It is a Jackass world.
Everyone has short attention spans. You need a catchy
trailer. You catch their attention, they buy the film and jerk
off.
“There was a day when porn stars were veiled
actresses,” he says. “They took the job seriously. They
were twenty-four or twenty-five years old. Now they are
nineteen. They are hookers. They don’t care. They are a
throwaway commodity in a throwaway world.” He turns
and looks with disdain at Kenci and says to me, “She
doesn’t know what a book is, I bet.” He asks me if I want
to be filmed having sex with Kenci. I decline with a quick
“No, thank you.” He explains he doesn’t have anyone else.
He has a house nearby to film, a camera crew, a porn
actress, and no fan. At no point is Kenci consulted.
Sharon Mitchell, an ex-porn star, is the founder of the
Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation. She tests
and treats actors in the porn industry. She runs her clinic
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out of Los Angeles.
“The type of performances that they are doing,
basically they walk on the set and it is wall-to-wall sex,
and the type of sexual encounters they are having are
extremely high-risk, much, much higher-risk than when I
was involved,” Mitchell said in a 2007 interview with
National Public Radio. “When I was involved, I had the
choice to use a condom, the choice to do whatever sex acts
I preferred. Today, anyone pretty much with a handful of
Viagra and a High-8 camera: ‘Hey, I want to be a porn
director and producer.’ And they can literally go about this
and sell these things on the Internet. So they recruit very
young people, and my concern is, ‘Are you ready to do
this?’
“When I founded the Adult [Industry] Medical
Healthcare Foundation in 1998, there was actually an actor
who was knowingly and willfully infecting women with
HIV,” Mitchell said, “and finally I caught up with him and
realized that he was going to county health clinics and
getting anonymous testing. And he would put someone
else’s name on this test. And not everyone was testing, and
the tests were not centrally located back then. Denial is the
backbone of pornography when it comes to health care.”
“I am a clinician that serves a world that I know very,
very well because I come from it,” Mitchell told NPR’s
Scott Simon. “And I know the pressures that these talent
members go through not to use the condoms. They are
offered more money. They are told, ‘Look, these films will
not sell if there are condoms on it.’”
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“Not to get graphic, but you would think that in these
days of computer enhancements and special effects, it
would be no more necessary to endanger a performer that
way than it would be to require Tom Cruise to jump off a
twelve-story building,” Simon said.
“Absolutely,” Mitchell answered, “but they are not
looked at as performers. They are looked at as
commodities. They are looked at as body parts that are
going to be edited into a product that’s going to make
money. And this industry, albeit mainstream as it’s
become, they are not going to say, ‘OK, let’s go ahead and
spend half a million dollars, let’s just digitally edit out the
condom,’ which can be done, obviously. They just don’t
want to spend any money.”
“In helping porn performers are you just enabling them
do something that is destructive?” Simon asked.
“You know, some days I feel like I am sweeping back
the ocean with a broom,” she said. “I wake up and I think,
‘This is amazing.’ I mean, we do catch a tremendous
amount of HIV that would have ended up in the industry.
And I can literally say I have saved lives. We have put a
lot of people into rehab. We help a lot of people leave porn
and get an education. We have a scholarship program. And
with all this, some days, you know, when I see a young girl
walk in, and I just know she is just going to get run over by
all these producers and agents and types of things that she
probably hasn’t experienced or even thought of
experiencing, I think, ‘Am I just fattening them up for the
kill? What am I doing?’”9
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The Internet is the curse and salvation of the industry.
It has vastly expanded the reach of the porn industry, but it
has also made free porn easily accessible. DVDs and
glossy magazines are going the way of newspapers.
Playboy’s stock is down 81 percent, and in October 2008 it
announced it was selling off its DVD division. There are
an estimated 4.2 million porn Web sites—12 percent of the
total number of sites— providing access to 72 million
worldwide visitors monthly. One-quarter of total daily
search-engine requests, or 68 million, are for pornographic
material. There are 40 million Americans who are regular
visitors to porn sites. Sites like Youporn.com and
xtube.com allow amateurs with camcorders to show
explicit porn. Illegal downloads and free video-sharing
sites have cut into profits, say those in the industry, by as
much as 20 percent.
The most successful Internet porn sites and films are
those that discover new ways to humiliate and inflict
cruelty on women. In the Web site Slut Bus, women are
lured into a van, offered money for sex, filmed having sex,
and then dumped on the side of the road. Money is held
out toward the woman as the van pulls away. She is always
left without payment. The message is clear. Women are
compliant sex machines. They are good only for sex. And
they are not worth paying for their services.
“The Mission?” the slutbus.com Web site asks. “Pick
up the hottest girls we find. And get them to let us fuck
them & cum in their pretty little faces all while
videotaping the whole thing.”
“The Fun?” the site goes on. “Treating these slutty
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bitches like they deserve to be treated . . . with a slam bam
thank ya ma’am & a swift kick in the ass! What? You
thought we would actually pay these sluts? Haha hahaha.
Think Again!”
The theme of luring women to have sex and then
discarding them is common.
“Tired of stuck up bitches that want gifts, dinners,
money all of your fuckin’ time and attention?” reads an ad
on a Web site called Creampie Thais, which charges
subscribers $29.95 a month.”
Did you ever want to just want to find a little
SUBMISSIVE fuck toy and fill her full of your man
seed? At Creampie Thais, I do just that. I pick up hot
Thai whores off the streets of Thailand. In clubs,
supermarkets, the beach and off the streets, I wreck
their young slick pussies and fill them full of my
spunk. After I have these whores suck my cock and
dump my sperm into their receptive cunts, I throw
them back to the world to fend for themselves. These
girls are willing to do anything to receive my spunk
inside their hot tight asian twats. Maybe they think
it’s a ticket to the promise land, or maybe they just
want to breed. Are they on the pill? Who gives a fuck.
Protection. Fuck no. Do I have illegitimate children in
Thailand? Probably. This is the REAL FUCKIN’
DEAL.
Jan Meza worked as a porn actress in a genre known as
“Big Beautiful Women” films. She made about forty
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movies and was filmed on some twenty Web sites. She left
the industry addicted to painkillers, drinking heavily, and
on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She is currently
married and is finishing her doctorate in psychology at the
University of Texas at Austin.
“The more society loses touch with reality, especially
in relationships, the more people do not know how it is
supposed to be, how to react with other people, the more
they turn to porn,” she says. “People look at this fantasy
and believe it should be their reality. They retreat further
and further into their illusion because porn can never be
real. It does not work in real life. Porn is a sickness.”
Jersey Jaxin, as she was known in the industry, walked
away from porn. “Guys punching you in the face. You
have semen. . . . Twenty or thirty guys all over your face,
in your eyes,” she remembers. “You get ripped. Your
insides can come out of you. It’s never-ending. You are
viewed as an object, not as a human with a spirit. People
don’t care. People do drugs because they can’t deal with
the way they’re being treated.” She estimates that the
number of women who use drugs before they film are “75
percent and rising. Have to numb themselves. . . . There
are specific doctors in this industry, if you go in for a
common cold, they’ll give you Vicodin, Viagra, anything
you want, because all they care about is money. You are a
number. You’re bruised. You have black eyes. You’re
ripped. You’re torn. You have your insides coming out of
you. It’s not pretty and foofoo on set. You get hurt.
“The main thing going around now is crystal meth,
cocaine, and heroin,” Meza says. “You have to numb
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yourself to go on set. The more you work, the more you
have to numb yourself. The more you become addicted,
the more your personal life is nothing but drugs. . . . Your
whole life becomes nothing but porn. I was a drinker. I
drank a lot. Vodka was my drug. Vodka was my numbing
toy. Before sets, after sets, and if it was a set where people
didn’t care, they’d have it there waiting.”
“You may see a forty-five-minute set that took us
thirteen hours. . . . We’re ripped, we’re tired, we’re sore,
we’re bleeding, we’re cut up, we have dried semen all over
our faces from numerous guys, and we can’t wash it off
because they want to take pictures. You have this stuff all
over you, and they’re telling you, ‘Hold it!’” Meza says.
“You can say anything you want [e.g., ‘Stop’], and
they don’t listen,” she says. “There’s the ultimate thing
where you squeeze their leg to ease up, and most of them
don’t care. They have another scene to go to. It’s all about
the money. They’ve forgotten who they are, and they don’t
care who they’re hurting.
“You have no soul in the porn industry,” she adds.10
Porn is about reducing women to corpses. It is about
necrophilia. Mingled with the booths set up by distribution
and production companies, Las Vegas escort services, and
a vast array of sex toy displays. There are booths that sell
life-size, anatomically correct silicone dolls.
At the Lovable Dolls display booth, three large picture
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windows are set in walls of faux brick. There is a replica of
an iron streetlamp outside the windows. The first window
has two life-size silicone dolls. One wears knee-high,
black latex boots with stiletto heels. She is reclining on a
small frame covered in red velvet. Her fingers gently touch
the hand of another doll in a black, curly wig and wearing
a bandeau top. In the other two windows are more dolls,
one with pointed pixie ears and what Bronwen Keller, a
sales respresentative, calls “a deliberate fantasy face.”
“They have removable heads,” she tells me. “There’s a
whole array of heads. The head cap pops off. You can
reach in and disconnect the head and put a new one on.
You can move the eyes. You do that from the inside so you
don’t damage the eyelashes.”
We stand and peer through the glass at the pixie doll,
surrounded by huge plastic flowers, as if she is emerging
from a tropical garden. She has a pierced naval.
“We ship them in lingerie, like a chemise,” she tells
me. “They are fully made up. They have their nails done,
and they have a wig. They have shoes. We ship with the
heads on. It creates the effect of ‘Oh, wow, here’s my girl,
ready to go.’”
The dolls, which cost $7,500 each, are custom-built
and come with various breast sizes, tongues, mouths, and
vaginas, seven different skin colors, and eleven eye colors.
Clients can create their own dolls. The dolls are the
silicone replicas of the living porn stars signing autographs
and permitting their fans to grab their asses and pose for a
photo. The display next door, Reel Dolls, is even more
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disturbing. It has four silicone women’s heads, lined up in
glass cases, with their lips parted to receive an incoming
cock. On top of the display case rests a headless, legless,
armless female torso, complete with an anatomically
correct vagina and a tuft of pubic hair. Men passing by the
booth push their fingers into her red silicone slit.
Dr. Z—not his real name—has come to the convention
to preach the joys of silicone doll ownership. He is a trim,
bearded, fifty-two-year-old man who teaches anatomy. He
is wearing khaki pants, an orange collared shirt, and a pair
of boots. He owns eight silicone dolls, with names that
include Lindsey, Danielle, Sunni, Trixie, Candy, and
Shawna.
“You walk into a room and they are sitting or standing
around you, and they seem real,” he says. “It’s like having
a family. They all have personalities.”
Dr. Z hides his hobby from most of his friends. He
keeps the dolls locked in his bedroom closet. He positions
them around the house, including in his bed, when he is
alone. He shops for their clothing. He poses them for photo
shoots. He carefully applies their makeup. And he talks to
them. He began using blow-up dolls when he was married.
He took blow-up dolls with him when he traveled. He kept
his habit secret from his wife. He is now divorced. “Hey,”
he says, “I wasn’t cheating.”
“No one I dated was ever privy to it,” he says. “It was
always a private side of me. It did improve my
relationships because it gave me the ability to experiment.
It also takes the stress out of a relationship. My last wife
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used sex as a control mechanism.”
“You have to be creative,” he explains. “You have to
make them feel like they are interacting. I have been in
relationships where women just lie there like dead fish.
The same thing can happen with this, but it is more fun
with some dolls than with some women. You can make
them do things with their hands. You can wrap their arms
around your neck. You can use bungee cords to put them
in positions. Their eyes are adjustable.”
He uses the thick iron hook on the back of the dolls’
necks to prop them up. He puts them in his sex swing. He
photographs them using sex toys. He says it is a “really
nice thing because you are in full control.” He tells me the
dolls “take the stress out of wining and dining women.” He
says he uses lubricants in the silicone mouth, vagina, and
anus for sex. And he tells me that of the top three or four
blow jobs he has had in his life, he would have to include
those delivered by his dolls.
“You lie on top of one and it feels like you are on top
of a person,” he says. He fixes their eyes when he has sex
with them so “there is direct eye contact.” He explains, “I
talk to them like pets,” and then smiles, saying, “but they
don’t shed.” He tells me that he has, over the years,
“learned what works.”
“You can’t beat them all you want,” he says. “They
can get damaged, but spanking is OK. They jiggle like
real.”
His dolls are body types that he says are not available
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to him with the women he meets socially.
“From my experience, women who look like these
dolls are not mentally or emotionally in line,” he says. “It
is hard to find someone who is smart, intelligent,
attractive, and who wants to be with you. And then there
are the breast sizes. I have one with ridiculous breasts. She
is extremely hard to dress. I have become very
appreciative of women’s clothes.”
“Everyone has a desire about controlling the look, the
environment, what women represent and how they come
across,” he says.
We are looking at the dolls in the display. He points
out the simulated veins in the feet, which he tells me are
the dorsal venous arch. “To me,” he says, “That’s really,
really cool.”
“I have one doll, Sunni, who is blonde, hooker-style,”
he says. “She’s really good at blow jobs. She’s like a
California beach bunny. She has dark skin and is always
tanning herself. She’s happiest in a black bikini and a
blonde wig. She looks great in her bikini. I keep most of
them dressed in underwear and sports bras. They hang out
together, like a sorority. Personally, I have never
ejaculated inside my dolls. I use the rhythm method. The
cleanup is easier. I have a hanging apparatus in my tub and
use the shower massage. They can absorb body oil. Look,
you have old people who need to be taken care of, you can
think about these dolls as being in a coma. Your job is to
keep them comfortable. I am always a gentleman around
them. I never have sex without asking permission. I sleep
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with them. I cover them with an electric blanket, and the
silicone absorbs the heat.”
The dolls, like the porn stars, are a compliant mouth,
vagina, and rectum. They exist solely to allow a man to
penetrate, usually with a penis, sometimes hands,
sometimes objects, into their orifices at will. You can spit
on their faces, slap them around, verbally abuse them, as is
done with women in porn films, but with the dolls there is
no chance of rebellion or complaint. The silicone mouths
will always have the thick, slightly spread lips, offering
themselves silently to their owner’s penis.
The culmination of the AVN Expo is the awards
ceremony, often referred to as the Oscars of porn. Porn
actors and actresses walk down a red carpet into the
cavernous Mandalay Bay Convention Center. The stars,
producers, and directors sit at tables on the main floor, and
fans are seated in the U-shaped bleachers around the main
stage. Awards include Best Anal-Themed Release, Best
All-Girl 3-Way Sex Scene, Best Double Penetration Sex
Scene, and Best Big-Butt Series.
When an actress named Stoya wins the statuette for
Best New Starlet, she thanks “each and every person who
jerks off to my smut.”
The Best Anal Sex Scene award goes to Sunny Lane
and her role in the film Big Wet Asses 13. She tells the
crowd, “I can’t help it, I just love that cock.” Introducing
her co-star, Manuel Ferrara, she says: “This is the man. I
had to choose Manuel to be my first anal because he is so
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passionate, so loving, and he definitely knows how to work
that soda-can cock. I prepared for this scene by sitting with
a butt plug in while I was doing my makeup time so I was
ready to go, all for you.”
“I did exactly the same for you while I was getting my
makeup done,” Ferrara quips.
“Oh, really, very nice,” she says. “I would like to thank
Elegant Angel for all of this, for the opportunity to let my
ass show in all the right ways.”
I sit through nearly three hours of this vapid banter, an
irony-free reflection of the banality of mainstream awards
ceremonies. The rap-per Flo Rida provides entertainment
along with local dancers from the Spearmint Rhino
gentlemen’s club. Evil Angel owner John “Buttman”
Stagliano leads a dance sequence that incorporates images
of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Abu Ghraib,
Halliburton, the Iraq war, and freedom of speech, which
the porn industry champions as protecting its
Constitutional right to disseminate porn. The five-minute
dance sequence is Stagliano’s artistic objection to the
federal government’s use of the Patriot Act to persecute
adult entertainment companies and customers.
“Did we really believe them when they said they would
only use these laws to prosecute terrorists?” he asks in the
sequence.
Stagliano, once a Chippendale dancer and also a porn
actor, has tested positive for HIV. He was charged by the
United States government for adult-to-adult obscenity. He
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is married to ex-porn star Tricia Devereaux, whose stage
name was Karen Stagliano and who is also HIV-positive,
as are many former members of the industry.
Porn has evolved from the airbrushed misogyny of
glossy spreads in Playboy and smutty films sold in seedy
shops. It is corporate and easily available. Its products
today focus less on sex between a man and a woman and
increasingly on groups of men beating off on a woman’s
face or tearing her anus open with their penises. Porn has
evolved to its logical conclusion. It first turned women into
sexual commodities and then killed women as human
beings. And it has won the culture war. Pornography and
the commercial mainstream have fused. The publicity
photo for the porn production company Wicked could be
lifted from a Victoria’s Secret catalog. The lacy brassieres
and thongs, candelabras, stilettos, windswept hair, strings
of pearls, and arched backs are staples of mass culture. The
wars fought by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan
Faludi, Susan Brownmiller, and Gloria Steinem to free
women from sexual tyranny have been defeated by a
cultural embrace—by both men and women—of bondage
and objectification. Stripping, promiscuity, S&M,
exhibitionism, and porn are mainstream chic.
“Why do deep down within we’d all like to be porn
stars at one point in our life or another?” asks Faye
Wattleton in complete earnestness on the HBO special
Thinking XXX. She is the president of the Center for the
Advancement of Women.
Sexual callousness and emancipation have become
synonymous. Fashion takes its cue from porn. Music
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videos feature porn stars and pantomime porn scenes.
Commercials and advertisements milk porn for shock
value. The grainy sex tapes of vacuous celebrities from
Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton enhance their allure as
porn icons. Madonna has built her public persona, and her
dance routines and videos, around the sexual boundaries
obliterated by porn. Rap stars like Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent,
and Yella produce porn. Howard Stern interviews porn
stars. Fitness clubs offer pole-dancing and strip classes.
Porn star Jenna Jameson’s memoir was published by
HarperCollins and was a New York Times best-seller for
six weeks. The E! True Hollywood Story episode of her
life remains the highest-rated single episode of that show.
Reality television shows like The Girls Next Door and
Rock of Love feature a male celebrity who has multiple
female partners competing for his affections. The Girls
Next Door, which stars the octogenarian Hugh Hefner and
girlfriends young enough to be his granddaughters, is
spiced up with undertones of incest and pedophilia. HBO
celebrates and glamorizes porn, prostitution, and strippers
with specials and shows like Thinking XXX, Katie
Morgan’s Sex Tips, Cathouse, and G-String Divas. The
language, abuse, and moral bankruptcy of porn shape and
mold popular culture. And there is a direct line from the
heartlessness and usury of the culture of porn to the
hookup parties on college campuses, in which young men
and women get hammered, have sex, and do not speak to
each other again.
Women, porn asserts, whether they know it or not, are
objects. They are whores. These whores deserve to be
dominated and abused. And once men have had their way
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with them, these whores are to be discarded. Porn glorifies
the cruelty and domination of sexual exploitation in the
same way popular culture, as Jensen points out, glorifies
the domination and cruelty of war. It is the same disease. It
is the belief that “because I have the ability to use force
and control to make others do as I please, I have a right to
use this force and control.” It is the disease of corporate
and imperial power. It extinguishes the sacred and the
human to worship power, control, force, and pain. It
replaces empathy, eros, and compassion with the illusion
that we are gods. Porn is the glittering façade, like the
casinos and resorts in Las Vegas, like the rest of the
fantasy that is America, of a culture seduced by death.
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III
The Illusion of Wisdom
Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that
fresh generations should be trained to its service.
—SINCLAIR LEWIS
THE MULTIPLE FAILURES that beset the country,
from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of
Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to
our imperial deba cles in the Middle East, can be laid at the
door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated
elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford,
Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and the Paris
Institute of Political Studies, along with most elite schools,
do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question
and think. They focus instead, through the filter of
standardized tests, enrichment activities, AP classes, highpriced
tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams, and
blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of
competent systems managers. Responsibility for the
collapse of the global economy runs in a direct line from
the manicured quadrangles and academic halls in
Cambridge, New Haven, Toronto, and Paris to the
financial and political centers of power.
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The elite universities disdain honest intellectual
inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority,
fiercely independent, and often subversive. They organize
learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow
answers, and rigid structures designed to produce such
answers. The established corporate hierarchies these
institutions service—economic, political, and social—
come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an
unfettered free market, and also with a highly specialized
vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and,
of course, the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It
keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It
destroys the search for the common good. It dices
disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny,
specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to
retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the
most pressing moral, political, and cultural questions.
Those who critique the system itself—people such as
Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph
Nader—are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream
debate. These elite universities have banished selfcriticism.
They refuse to question a self-justifying system.
Organization, technology, self-advancement, and
information systems are the only things that matter.
In 1967, Theodor Adorno wrote an essay titled
“Education After Auschwitz.” He argued that the moral
corruption that made the Holocaust possible remained
“largely unchanged” and that “the mechanisms that render
people capable of such deeds” must be uncovered,
examined, and critiqued through education. Schools had to
teach more than skills. They had to teach values. If they
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did not, another Auschwitz was always possible.
“All political instruction finally should be centered
upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again,”
he wrote:
This would be possible only when it devotes itself
openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to
this most important of problems. To do this,
education must transform itself into sociology, that is,
it must teach about the societal play of forces that
operates beneath the surface of political forms.1
If we do not grasp the “societal play of forces that
operates beneath the surface of political forms,” we will be
cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one
that does away with artifice and the seduction of a
consumer society, and wields power through naked
repression.
I had lunch in Toronto with Henry Giroux, professor of
English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in
Canada. Giroux was for many years the Waterbury Chair
Professor at Penn State. He has long been one of the most
prescient and vocal critics of the corporate state and the
systematic destruction of American education. He was
driven, because of his work, to the margins of academia in
the United States. He asked the uncomfortable questions
Adorno knew should be asked by university professors.
Giroux, who wrote The University in Chains: Confronting
the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex, left in 2004 for
Canada.
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“The emergence of what Eisenhower had called the
military-industrial-academic complex had secured a grip
on higher education that may have exceeded even what he
had anticipated and most feared,” Giroux tells me.
“Universities, in general, especially following the events of
9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists,
reactionary neoconservatives, and market fundamentalists
for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on
terrorism. Right-wing students were encouraged to spy on
the classes of progressive professors, the corporate grip on
the university was tightening, as was made clear not only
in the emergence of business models of governance, but
also in the money being pumped into research and
programs that blatantly favored corporate interests. And at
Penn State, where I was located at the time, the university
had joined itself at the hip with corporate and military
power. Put differently, corporate and Pentagon money was
now funding research projects, and increasingly
knowledge was being militarized in the service of
developing weapons of destruction, surveillance, and
death. Couple this assault with the fact that faculty were
becoming irrelevant as an oppositional force. Many
disappeared into discourses that threatened no one, some
simply were too scared to raise critical issues in their
classrooms for fear of being fired, and many simply no
longer had the conviction to uphold the university as a
democratic public sphere.”
The moral nihilism embraced by elite universities
would have terrified Adorno. He knew that radical evil
was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed,
and confused population, a system of propaganda and mass
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media that offered little more than spectacle and
entertainment, and an educational system that did not
transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for
individual conscience. He feared a culture that banished
the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and
embraced a childish hypermasculinity.
“This educational ideal of hardness, in which many
may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong,”
Adorno wrote. “The idea that virility consists in the
maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screenimage
for masochism that, as psychology has
demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism.”2
Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric
current through reality television and trash-talk programs,
is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant,
corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the
capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to
force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective.
This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu
Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of
compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill,
the unemployed, and the sick.
“The political and economic forces fueling such crimes
against humanity—whether they are unlawful wars,
systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic
starvation, and disease or genocidal acts—are always
mediated by educational forces,” Giroux says. “Resistance
to such acts cannot take place without a degree of
knowledge and self-reflection. We have to name these acts
and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to
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prevent such human violations from taking place in the
first place.”
But we do not name them. We accept the system
handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it.
We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us
and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the
corporate state.
“Political silence. That’s my summary. There are only
flickers of resistance to most here-and-now issues,” says
Chris Hebdon, an undergraduate at the University of
California at Berkeley. Hebdon went on to describe how
various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the historic
center of student activity at Berkeley. Groups set up tables
to recruit and inform other students, a practice known as
“tabling.”
“Students table for Darfur, but seldom, if ever, do I see
a table on Iraq, Afghanistan, or militarization. Tables on
Sproul Plaza are ethnically fragmented and explicitly preprofessional,
the [ethnicity-of-your-choice] -American Pre-
Law, Pre-Med, Engineering, or Business Association).
There are strict restrictions and permitting processes for
tabling. You see few, if any, tables on globalization,
corporatization, or, heaven forbid, the commercialization
of Berkeley. Too many students and professors are
distracted, specialized, atomized, and timid. They follow
trends, prestige, and money, and so rarely act outside the
box. You know, U.C. adores the slogan ‘Excellence
Through Diversity,’ but it doesn’t mention
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multiculturalism’s silent partner—the fragmentation of
student society into little markets, segmenting the powerful
sea of students into diverse but disarmed droplets.
Exemplifying this disorientation is Sproul Plaza—the same
place Mario Savio once gave his rallying cry for the Free
Speech Movement from atop a police car—now composed
of tens of tables for sports, entertainment, ethnic
associations, résumé-building clubs for corporate
careerists, and small causes. Disconnection prevails. In the
absence of cohesion, one really wonders how such smart
kids could be struck so, in the muting sense of the term,
dumb.”
The corporate hierarchy that has corrupted higher
education is on public display at Berkeley. The wealthiest
of the elite schools, such as Yale and Stanford, assign
dormitories by lottery. They treat their students with a
careful egalitarianism, expecting all to enter the elite.
Berkeley and many other public universities, however,
assign rooms depending on how much a student can pay.
They fall into a capitalist logic of “choice.”3 The poorer
Berkeley students end up in residences known as “the
units” (Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3), while the wealthier students
and recruited athletes, sustained by family money or
athletic scholarships, receive rooms at Foothill or Clark
Kerr, a fancy Stanford-style dorm that was once a private
school for deaf and blind children. The food is better at the
more expensive dorms. Corporations have cut deals with
universities to be sole providers of goods and services and
to shut out competitors. Coca-Cola, for example, has
monopoly rights at Berkeley, including control of what
drinks and food are sold at football games. Corporations
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such as Cingular and Allstate blanket California Memorial
Stadium with their logos and signs.
Berkeley negotiated a deal with British Petroleum for
$500 million. BP gets access to the university’s researchers
and technological capacity, built by decades of public
investment, to investigate biofuels at a new Energy
Biosciences Institute. BP can shut down another research
center and move into a publicly subsidized one. BP will
receive intellectual property rights, which it can use for
profit, on scientific breakthroughs expected to come out of
the joint project.
“When it comes to football, I go to Tightwad Hill, a
no-cost site perched above the stadium where people can
bring beers and laugh, rather than just hoot and scream,”
says Hebdon. “The crowd on Tightwad represents a Bay
Area variety—students, grandparents, alcoholics, sportsfamilies,
children—and there is a culture of uncoordinated
neighborly fun. The relative freedom at Tightwad contrasts
to the neo-Pavlovian crowd training that goes on in the
stadium below. In the stadium you are inundated. It begins
right at the door. Tickets cost upwards of $25, you must
enter with no food, and you must buy high-priced Coke or
its underlings, Dasani water or Minute Maid juice.”
The football coach is Berkeley’s highest-paid
employee. He makes about $3 million. Tuition has been
steadily rising for decades. U.C. undergraduate students
pay 100 percent of their educational costs because the state
subsidy has effectively disappeared.4 By the U.C. charter,
tuition at the University of California is supposed to be
free. Berkeley is a microcosm of the intrusion of
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corporations into education. Education, at least an
education that challenges assumptions and teaches students
to be self-critical, has been sacrificed in a Faustian bargain.
Charles Schwartz, an emeritus professor of physics, drew
up a chart that showed that in the last fourteen years, from
1993 to 2007, management staffs increased 259 percent.
The total of employees increased 24 percent. Fulltime
faculty increased by 1 percent.
When the U.C. Regents, who oversee the university
system, announced they wouldn’t accept thousands of
qualified freshmen because of a budget shortfall, Schwartz
drew up a plan. In the spirit of public service rather than
personal enrichment, he proposed that the university take 1
percent from the salary of each employee making more
than $100,000. This is not unprecedented. Weeks earlier,
Barack Obama had capped his staffs’ salaries at $100,000.
“That would net you $29 million,” Schwartz told the
Regents. “That is more than enough to cover the full costs
for those 2,300 new students that you were planning to
turn away next year.” The Regents ignored him.5
“Berkeley is trying to brand itself through its athletics,
especially football,” Hebdon tells me. “The program is a
tremendous investment. Our chancellor, in an act of great
misdirection, just announced he plans to raise $1 billion
for the athletic endowment by selling off 3,000 front-row
seats for thirty to fifty years to private bidders for
$225,000 a pop.6 Piece by piece, Berkeley is becoming a
trade school. Students, for instance, mostly agree with the
idea of a sports university.”
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In December 2006, the university announced plans to
cut down more than forty huge oak trees on a 1.5-acre site
on campus to build a training facility for athletes. A group
of protesters built crude tree houses in the branches and
took shifts manning them to thwart the plan. Berkeley
municipal law prohibits removing any Coast Live Oak
with a trunk larger than six inches within city boundaries,
but city boundaries do not include the university. The
protest lasted for twenty-one months until September
2008, when the last protesters were coaxed down and the
grove was demolished.
“During the well-publicized, two-year tree sits, most
students supported the university’s plans to build the
sporting complex and railed against ‘the hippies,’” Hebdon
says. “One student, a war veteran, was treated as an
imminent threat for tree-sitting with a sign that read
‘Democratize the U.C. Regents.’ Few students knew that
the Regents, who oversee the whole university system, are
appointed rather than elected and representative, even
though this is required by law. Few really dug in and
thought. My strongest memory is of a person selling rocks
to throw at tree sitters. He had noticeable crowd support.
When I see things like this, I think of how Berkeley, once
known for conscientious objection, is training an
inhumane, deeply frustrated, indifferent, game-driven
people. The military has a strong presence on campus and
is one of the few ways for students to pay their way
without accruing large debt.
“We have bought hook, line, and sinker into the idea
that education is about training and ‘success,’ defined
monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to
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challenge,” Hebdon goes on. “The competitive efficiency
culture—electronic immersion, high-paced everything,
career networking as a way of life, prestige, money—it
disconnects the so-called best and the brightest from
commonsense obligations to society, ecology, and
democratic ideals. Somewhere along the way into the free
market, Berkeley forgot that learning isn’t about
handshaking, résumé fondling, and market rewards.”
“What makes Berkeley a terribly contradictory public
institution is its version of the wrought-iron gates that
enclose Harvard or Yale: our high-security national
laboratories. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
up the hill from campus, is a mystery to most. It is
connected to U.C. Berkeley’s historical involvement with
nuclear technology, something inherently centralizing,
undemocratic, and dangerous to civil rights. The labs have
special buses students cannot ride. Buildings are restrictedaccess,
and secrecy abounds. Researcher scientists do not
fancy whistle-blowing, as they have no legal right to
tenure. Students learn these labs are prestigious. After all,
labs pull in copious amounts of taxpayer-funded federal
science dollars.”
I sat with a classmate from Harvard Divinity School
who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what
she was teaching, she unleashed a torrent of arcane
academic jargon. I had no idea, even with three years of
seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this
retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in
every academic department and discipline across the
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country. The more these universities churn out these
stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a
peculiar breed of specialist who uses obscure code words
as a way to avoid communication. This specialist blindly
services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she
has never been taught to question. Specialists look down
on the rest of us, who do not understand what they are
talking and writing about, with thinly veiled contempt.
By any standard comprehensible within the tradition of
Western civilization, as John Ralston Saul points out, these
people are illiterate. They cannot recognize the vital
relationship between power and morality. They have
forgotten, or never knew, that moral traditions are the
product of civilization. They have little or no knowledge of
their own civilization and do not know, therefore, how to
maintain it. “One of the signs of a dying civilization,” Saul
writes, “is that its language breaks down into exclusive
dialects which prevent communication. A growing, healthy
civilization uses language as a daily tool to keep the
machinery of society moving. The role of responsible,
literate elites is to aid and abet that communication.”7
Our elites use a private dialect that is a barrier to
communication as well as common sense. The corporate
con artists and economists who have rigged our financial
system continue to speak to us in the obscure and
incomprehensible language coined by specialists on Wall
Street and at elite business schools. They use terms such as
securitization, deleveraging, structured investment
vehicles, and credit default swaps to shut us out of the
debate. This retreat by elites into specialized ghettos spans
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the range of academic disciplines. English professors, who
see novels as divorced from society, speak in the obscure
vocabulary of deconstructionism, disempowering and
emasculating the very works they study. Writers from
Euripides to Russell Banks have used literature as both a
mirror and a lens, to reflect back to us, and focus us on,
our hypocrisy, moral corruption, and injustice. Literature is
a tool to enlighten societies about its ills. It was Charles
Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers
to the slums and workhouses of London. It was Honoré de
Balzac who, through the volumes of his Human Comedy,
ripped open the callous heart of France. It was Sinclair
Lewis who took us into the stockyards and shantytowns of
Chicago in The Jungle.
In the hands of academics, however, who rarely
understand or concern themselves with the reality of the
world, works of literature are eviscerated and destroyed.
They are mined for obscure trivia and irrelevant data. This
disconnect between literature and philosophy on one hand
and the real on the other is replicated in most academic
disciplines. Economists build elaborate theoretical models
yet know little of John Law, have never closely examined
the tulip crisis, and do not study the railroad bubbles or the
deregulation that led to the Great Depression. The
foundation of Athenian democracy rose out of the
egalitarian social and political reforms of Solon, including
his decision to wipe out all of the debts that were
bankrupting Athenian citizens. But the study of the
classics, because it is not deemed practical or useful in a
digitalized world, leaves such vital lessons unexamined.
Tacitus’ account of the economic meltdown during the
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reign of Tiberius—a meltdown that also saw widespread
bankruptcies, a collapse of the real estate market, and
financial ruin—is a reminder that we are not unique to
history or human behavior. The meltdown during Tiberius’
reign was finally halted by massive government spending
and intervention that included interest-free loans to
citizens. Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the
belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to
learn from the past, remain children. They live in an
illusion.
The specialized dialect and narrow education of
doctors, academics, economists, social scientists, military
officers, investment bankers, and government bureaucrats
keeps each sector locked in its narrow role. The
overarching structure of the corporate state and the idea of
the common good are irrelevant to specialists. They exist
to make the system work, not to examine it. Our elites
replicate, in modern dress, the elaborate mannerisms and
archaic forms of speech employed by calcified, corrupt,
and dying aristocracies. They cannot grasp that truth is
often relative. They base their decisions on established
beliefs, such as the primacy of an unregulated market or
globalization, which are accepted as unquestioned
absolutes. “In a corporatist society there is no serious need
for traditional censorship or burning,” Saul writes,
“although there are regular cases. It is as if our language
itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act
upon reality.”8
I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the
age of ten. By the time I had finished eight years in New
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England prep schools and another eight at Colgate
University and Harvard University, I had a pretty good
understanding of the game. I have also taught at Columbia
University, New York University, and Princeton
University. These institutions feed students, no matter how
mediocre, the comforting reassurance that they are there
because they are not only the best but they are entitled to
the best. You saw this attitude on display in every word
uttered by George W. Bush. Here was a man with severely
limited intellectual capacity and no moral core. Bush,
along with Scooter Libby, who attended my pre-prep
school, exemplifies the legions of self-centered, spoiled,
intellectually limited and wealthy elitists churned out by
places like Andover, Yale, and Harvard. Bush was, like the
rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his
connections. The real purpose of these richly endowed
schools is to perpetuate their own. They do this even as
they pretend to embrace the ideology of the common man,
trumpet diversity on campus, and pose as a meritocracy.
The public commitment to egalitarianism alongside the
private nurturing of elitism creates a bizarre schizophrenia.
“There’s a certain kind of student at these schools who
falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own
education,” said Elyse Graham, whom I taught at
Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale.
“This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a
scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia:
‘How many famous professors can I collect?’ and so on.
And he comes away not only with all these props for his
sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that
seems to indicate wide learning. College socializes you, so
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you learn to present even trite ideas well.”
These institutions cater to their students like high-end
resorts. My prep school—remember, this is a high school
—built a $26 million gym. Not that they didn’t have a
gym. They had a fine one, with an Olympic pool. But they
needed to upgrade their facilities to compete for the elite
boys and girls being wooed by other expensive prep
schools. Princeton is so overcrowded with glittering new
buildings. There is almost always a building project under
way. It has devoured its once-rolling expanses of green
and become cramped and claustrophobic. While public
schools crumble, while public universities are slashed and
diminished, while for-profit universities rise as our newest
vocational schools, elite institutions become unaffordable
even for the middle class. The privileged retreat further
and further behind the walls of their opulent, gated
communities. Harvard, like most institutions, has lost
money. Its endowment fell $8 billion over four months in
2008, and by 2009 had officially declined by some 30
percent. Harvard’s investments, once they have been
disentagled, may have shrunk to half their former value.
But Harvard remains very well endowed. It still has at least
$20 or $25 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford, and
Princeton are not far behind.
At the elite institution, those on the inside are told they
are there because they are better than others. Most believe
it. They see their money and their access to power as a
natural extension of their talents and abilities, rather than
the result of a system that favors the privileged. They are
carefully socialized in chapel, on groomed playing fields,
in dormitories, and within the natural, exclusive gatherings
150
they have with the powerful and the rich. They are
members of the same clubs and fraternities. George W.
Bush and John Kerry, who ran for the presidency in 2004,
had each attended Yale and had been inducted as
undergraduates into the university’s secret and exclusive
Skull and Bones society.
John D. Rockefeller III, an alumnus, was our
graduation speaker the year I finished prep school at
Loomis-Chaffee. The wealthy and powerful families in
Boston, New York, or Los Angeles are molded by these
institutions into a tribe. School, family, and entitlement
effectively combine. The elites vacation together, ski at the
same Swiss resorts, and know the names of the same
restaurants in New York and Paris. They lunch at the same
clubs and golf on the same greens. And by the time they
finish an elite college, they have been conditioned to
become part of the inner circle. They speak an intimidating
language of privilege, complete with references to
minutiae and traditions only the elite understand. They
have obtained a confidence those on the outside often
struggle to duplicate. And the elite, while they may not say
so in public, disdain those who lack their polish and
connections. Once they finish their schooling they have the
means to barricade themselves in exclusive communities,
places like Short Hills, New Jersey, or Greenwich,
Connecticut. They know few outside their elite circles.
They may have contact with a mechanic in their garage or
their doorman or a nanny or gardener or contractor, but
these are stilted, insincere relationships between the
powerful and the relatively powerless. The elite rarely
confront genuine differences of opinion. They are not
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asked to examine the roles they play in society and the
inequities of the structure that sustains them. They are
cultural philistines. The sole basis for authority is wealth.
And within these self-satisfied cocoons they think of
themselves as caring, good people, which they often are,
but only to other members of the elite or, at times, the few
service workers who support their lifestyles. The gross
social injustices that condemn most African Americans to
urban poverty and the working class to a subsistence level
of existence, the imperial bullying that led to the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan, do not touch them. They engage in
small, largely meaningless forays of charity, organized by
their clubs or social groups, to give their lives a thin patina
of goodness. They can live their entire lives in state of total
self-delusion and perpetual childhood. “It is for people in
such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a
pseudo-world beyond, and a pseudo-world within
themselves as well,” wrote C. Wright Mills.9
The people I loved most, my working-class family in
Maine, did not go to college. They were plumbers, postoffice
clerks, and mill workers. Most of the men were
veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were
indulgent of my incessant reading and incompetence with
tools, even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a
steady reminder that although I had been blessed with an
opportunity that had been denied to them, I was not better
or more intelligent. If you are poor, you have to work after
high school or, in the case of my grandfather, before you
finish high school. You serve in the military because it is
one of the few jobs in which you can get health insurance
and a decent salary. College is not an option. No one takes
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care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the
most important difference between members of the
working classes and elites. If you are poor or a member of
the working class, you are on your own.
The elite schools speak often of the diversity among
their students. But they base diversity on race and ethnicity
rather than on class. The admissions process, along with
the staggering tuition costs, precludes most of the poor and
working classes. The system is stacked against those who
do not have parents with incomes and educations to play
the game. When my son got his SAT scores back as a
senior in high school, we were surprised to find that his
critical reading score was lower than his math score. He
dislikes math but is an avid and perceptive reader. And so
we did what many educated, middle-class families do. We
hired an expensive tutor from the Princeton Review—its
deluxe SAT preparation package costs $7,000—who
taught him the tricks and techniques of standardized
testing. The undergraduate test-prep business takes in
revenues of $726 million a year, up 25 percent from four
years ago. The tutor told my son things like “stop thinking
about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test
time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell
you.” His reading score went up 130 points, pushing his
test scores into the highest percentile in the country. Had
he somehow become smarter thanks to the tutoring? Was
he suddenly a better reader because he could quickly
regurgitate a passage rather than think about it or critique
it? Had he become more intelligent? Is it really a smart,
effective measurement of intelligence to gauge how
students read and answer narrowly selected multiple-
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choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over
them? What about families that do not have a few
thousand dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do their
children have?
Elite universities, because of their incessant reliance on
standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill
their classrooms with large numbers of drones and a
disproportionate percentage of the rich and well connected.
Joseph A. Soares, in The Power of Privilege: Yale and
America’s Elite Colleges, used Yale’s internal data to
show that 14 percent of the students attending in 2000
were “legacies,” children of alumni. And at Harvard the
most generous donors, those who give more than $1
million, are grouped together in the Committee on
University Resources. The 340 committee members who
have children at or past college age have 336 children who
are, or were previously, enrolled or have studied at
Harvard—even though the university admits fewer than
one in ten candidates overall, Inside Higher Education
reported. According to Daniel Golden, who wrote The
Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its
Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the
Gates, Harvard has something called the “Z list” (on which
the university refuses to comment) of about twenty-five to
fifty well-connected but academically borderline
applicants. These wealthy applicants are told they can
enroll if they defer for a year.10 The list is a major tool for
lining up big prospective donors. Soares and Golden
illustrate that you can, if you are rich enough, almost
always buy your way into an Ivy League school.
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I have taught gifted and engaged students who used
these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked
the big questions, and who cherished what these schools
had to offer. But they were often a marginalized minority.
The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to
Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, with
opening salaries starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious
amounts of work, and faithfully regurgitated information.
They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring
classes and stimulating ones. They may have known the
plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness, but they were unable to tell you why the story
was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded
“political” and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy
donors and administrative overlords who rule these
institutions, did not dare draw the obvious parallels
between events in the Conrad novel and the failures and
discontents of the Iraq occupation and American empire.
They did not use Conrad’s story, as it was meant to be
used, to examine our own imperial darkness. Even in the
anemic and marginalized world of the humanities, what is
taught exists in a moral void.
The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems
can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities.
The neglect of the humanities has allowed elites to
organize education and society around predetermined
answers to predetermined questions. Students are taught
structures designed to produce these answers even as these
structures have collapsed. But those in charge, because
they are educated only in specializations designed to
maintain these economic and political structures, have run
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out of ideas. They have been trained only to find solutions
that will maintain the system. This is what the Harvard
Business School case method is about, a didactic system in
which the logic employed to solve a specific problem
always, in the end, sustains market capitalism. These elites
are not capable of asking the broad, universal questions,
the staples of an education in the humanities, which
challenge the deepest assumptions of a culture and
examine the harsh realities of political and economic
power. They have forgotten, because they have not been
taught, that human nature is a mixture of good and evil.
They do not have the capacity for critical reflection. They
do not understand that for every answer there arises
another question—the very basis behind the Socratic
academy’s search for wisdom.
For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge. To
train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is
to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate
stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of
grappling with reality is to educate them in values and
morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay
between morality and power, which mistakes management
techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the
measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or
ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is
the product of a civilization, but the elites know little of
these traditions. They are products of a moral void. They
lack clarity about themselves and their culture. They can
fathom only their own personal troubles. They do not see
their own biases or the causes of their own frustrations.
They are blind to the gaping inadequacies in our economic,
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social, and political structures and do not grasp that these
structures, which they have been taught to serve, must be
radically modified or even abolished to stave off disaster.
They have been rendered mute and ineffectual. “What we
cannot speak about,” Ludwig Wittgenstein warned, “we
must pass over in silence.”11
“The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has
become a commonplace, but however much elite
universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a
few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one
form of intelligence: the analytic,” wrote William
Deresiewicz in The American Scholar. Deresiewicz, who
taught English at Yale, writes that
while this is broadly true of all universities, elite
schools, precisely because their students (and faculty,
and administrators) possess this one form of
intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to
ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what
one most possesses and what most makes for one’s
advantages. But social intelligence and emotional
intelligence and creative ability, to name just three
other forms, are not distributed preferentially among
the educational elite.12
Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous
than athletic prowess. It can be used to further the
exploitation of the working class by corporations and the
mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to
fight these forces. But if you determine worth by wealth,
as these institutions do, then examining and reforming
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social and political systems is inherently devalued. The
unstated ethic of these elite institutions is to make as much
money as you can to sustain the elitist system. College
presidents, many of whom earn salaries that rival those of
corporate executives, must often devote their energies to
fund-raising rather than to education. They shower
honorary degrees and trusteeships on hedge-fund managers
and Wall Street titans whose lives are often examples of
moral squalor and unchecked greed.
The slavish honoring of the rich by elite schools,
despite the lofty rhetoric about public service, is clear to
the students. The object is to make money. These
institutions have an insatiable appetite for donations and
constant fund-raising campaigns to boost multibilliondollar
endowments. This constant need can be met only by
producing rich alumni. But grabbing what you can, as John
Ruskin said, isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with
the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
Most of these students are so conditioned to success
that they become afraid to take risks. They have been
taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and
institutional authorities what constitutes failure and
success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over
grades and seek to please professors, even if what their
professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and
getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging
authority is never a career advancer. The student becomes
adept, as Richard Hoggart wrote, at
a technique of apparent learning, of acquiring
facts. He learns how to receive a purely literate
education, one using only a small part of his
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personality and challenging only a limited area of his
being. He begins to see life as a ladder, as a
permanent examination with some praise and some
further exhortation at each stage. He becomes an
expert imbiber and doler-out; his competence will
vary, but will rarely be accompanied by genuine
enthusiasm. He rarely feels the reality of knowledge,
of other men’s thoughts and imaginings, on his own
pulses; he rarely discovered an author for himself and
on his own. In this half of his life he can respond only
if there is a direct connection with the system of
training. He has something of the blinkered pony
about him; sometimes he is trained by those who have
been through the same regimen, who are hardly
unblinkered themselves, and who praise him in the
degree to which he takes comfortably to their
blinders. Though there is a powerful, unidealistic,
unwarmed realism about his attitude at bottom, that is
his chief form of initiative; of other forms—the
freely-ranged mind, the bold flying of mental kites,
the courage to reject some ‘lines’ even though they
are officially as important as all the rest-of these he
probably has little, and his training does not often
encourage them.13
The products of these institutions, as Hoggart noted,
have “difficulty in choosing a direction in a world where
there is no longer a master to please, a toffee-apple at the
end of each stage, a certificate, a place in the upper half of
the assessable world.”14
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The very qualities and intellectual inquiries that sustain
an open society are often crushed by elite institutions. The
elite school, as Saul writes,
actively seeks students who suffer from the
appropriate imbalance and then sets out to exaggerate
it. Imagination, creativity, moral balance, knowledge,
common sense, a social view—all these things wither.
Competitiveness, having an ever-ready answer, a
talent for manipulating situations—all these things are
encouraged to grow. As a result amorality also grows;
as does extreme aggressivity when they are
questioned by outsiders; as does a confusion between
the nature of good versus having a ready answer to all
questions. Above all, what is encouraged is the
growth of an undisciplined form of self-interest, in
which winning is what counts.15
One winter night I was returning books to Firestone
Library at Princeton University. I glanced at the book the
student behind the main desk was reading. It was How to
Win at College by Cal Newport. The flap cover promised
that it was “the only guide to getting ahead once you’ve
gotten in—proven strategies for making the most of your
college years, based on winning secrets from the country’s
most successful students.”
“What does it take to be a standout student?” the flap
read.
How can you make the most of your college years
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—graduate with honors, choose exciting activities,
build a head-turning résumé, and gain access to the
best post-college opportunities? Based on interviews
with star students at universities nationwide, from
Harvard to the University of Arizona, How to Win at
College presents seventy-five simple rules that will
rocket you to the top of the class. These college-tested
—and often surprising—strategies include:
• Don’t do all your reading
• Drop classes every term
• Become a club president
• Care about your grades, ignore your GPA
• Never pull an all-nighter
• Take three days to write a paper
• Always be working on a “grand project”
• Do one thing better than anyone else you
know
“Proving that success has little to do with being a
genius workaholic, and everything to do with playing the
game,” it went on. “How to Win at College is the musthave
guide for making the most of these four important
years—and getting an edge on life after graduation.”16
First-year students arrive on elite campuses and begin
to network their way into the exclusive eating clubs,
fraternities, sororities, or secret societies, test into the elite
academic programs and lobby for competitive summer
internships. They put in punishing hours, come to office
hours to make sure they grasp what their professors want,
and challenge all grades under 4.0 in an effort to maintain
a high average. They learn to placate and please authority,
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never to challenge it. By the time they graduate, they are
superbly conditioned for the drudgery of moving large
sums of money around electronically or negotiating huge
corporate contracts.
“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the
prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most
important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a
number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the
true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
“Only a small minority have seen their education as
part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the
work of the mind with a pilgrim soul,” he went on. “These
few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they
get so little support from the university itself. Places like
Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to
searchers. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help
students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was
a golden age of intellectualism in the American university,
but in the 19th century students might at least have had a
chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the
literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on
campus.”17
This soul-crushing experience of education is not new
within elite academic institutions, as William Hazlitt noted
at the beginning of the nineteenth century:
Men do not become what by nature they are
meant to be, but what society makes them. The
generous feelings, and high propensities of the soul
are, as it were, shrunk up, seared, violently wrenched,
and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse with the
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world, something in the manner that beggars maim
and mutilate their children, to make them fit for their
future situation in life.18
The educational landscape, however, has deteriorated
since Hazlitt. There has been a concerted assault on all
forms of learning that are not brutally utilitarian. The
Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job
listings in English, literature, and foreign languages
dropped 21 percent for 2008-2009 from the previous year,
the biggest decline in thirty-four years. The humanities’
share of college degrees is less than half of what it was
during the mid- to late ’60s, according to the Humanities
Indicators Prototype, a new database recently released by
the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Only 8
percent of college graduates, or about 110,000 students,
now receive degrees in the humanities. Between 1970 and
2001, bachelor’s degrees in English have declined from
7.6 percent to 4 percent of the whole, as have degrees in
foreign languages (2.4 percent to 1 percent), mathematics
(3 percent to 1 percent), and social science and history
(18.4 percent to 10 percent). Bachelor’s degrees in
business, which promise to teach students how to
accumulate wealth, have skyrocketed. Business majors
since 1970-1971 have risen from 13.6 percent of the
graduating population to 21.7 percent. Business has now
replaced education, which has fallen from 21 percent to 8.2
percent, as the most popular major.19
Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors:
The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,
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writes that liberal arts education has been systemically
dismantled for decades. Any form of learning not strictly
vocational has at best been marginalized and in many
schools abolished. Students are steered away from asking
the broad, disturbing questions that challenge the
assumptions of the power elite. They do not know how to
interrogate or examine an economic system that serves the
corporate state. This has led many bright graduates directly
into the arms of corporate entities.
Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, written in
1869, was once considered a canonical work on the lofty
goals of education. Arnold argued that a broad knowledge
of culture, “the best that has been thought and said,” would
provide standards to resist the errors and corruptions of
contemporary life. This belief held sway, at least in the
outward manifestations of higher education, for perhaps a
century. But Arnold’s eloquent defense of knowledge for
its own sake, as a way to ask the broad moral and social
questions, has been shredded and destroyed. Most
universities have become high-priced occupational training
centers. Students seek tangible vocational credentials. At
the few institutions where the liberal arts survive, as
Donoghue writes, prestige is the paramount commodity.
U.S. News & World Report has, since its annual America’s
Best Colleges issue debuted in 1983, ranked schools that,
through their selectiveness, also offer a route into the
world of the elite. These schools may still teach the liberal
arts, but those arts are marketed as another way to propel
students into the vocational specialties offered by graduate
schools or into lucrative jobs.
The assault on education began more than a century
164
ago by industrialists and capitalists such as Andrew
Carnegie. In 1891, Carnegie congratulated the graduates of
the Pierce College of Business for being “fully occupied in
obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewrit ing”
rather than wasting time “upon dead languages.” The
industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed
in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the “life of the
mind.” No one who has “a taste for literature has the right
to be happy” because “the only men entitled to happiness .
. . are those who are useful.”20 The arrival of industrialists
on university boards of trustees began as early as the 1870s
and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of
Business offered the first academic credential in business
administration in 1881. The capitalists, from the start,
complained that universities were unprofitable. These early
twentieth-century capitalists, like heads of investment
houses and hedge-fund managers, were, as Donoghue
writes, “motivated by an ethically based antiintellectualism
that transcended interest in the financial
bottom line. Their distrust of the ideal of intellectual
inquiry for its own sake, led them to insist that if
universities were to be preserved at all, they must operate
on a different set of principles from those governing the
liberal arts.”21
And as small, liberal arts schools have folded—at least
200 since 1990—they have been replaced with corporate,
for-profit universities. There are now some forty-five
colleges and universities listed on the NYSE or the
NASDAQ. The University of Phoenix, the largest forprofit
school with some 300,000 students, proudly calls
itself on its Web site: “Your corporate university.” Ronald
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Taylor, the chief operator and co-founder of DeVry, the
second-largest for-profit, higher-education provider,
bluntly stated his organization’s goals: “The colos sally
simple notion that drives DeVry’s business is that if you
ask employers what they want and then provide what they
want, the people you supply to them will be hired.”22 The
only mission undertaken by for-profit universities, and
increasingly non-profit universities, is job training. And as
universities become glorified vocational schools for the
corporations, they adopt values and operating techniques
of the corporations they serve. It may be more costeffective
to replace tenured faculty with adjuncts and
whittle down or shutter departments like French or history
that do not feed vocational aspirations, but it decimates the
possibility of a broad education that permits students to
question the assumptions of a decaying culture, reach out
beyond our borders, and chart new alternatives and
directions.
It is not just the humanities that are in danger, but the
professors themselves. Most universities no longer hire the
best and most experienced teachers but the cheapest.
Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35
percent of the pedagogical work force and the number is
steadily falling.23 Professors are becoming itinerant
workers, often having to work at two or three schools,
denied office space, and unable to make a living wage. The
myopic and narrow vision of life as an accumulation of
money and power, promoted at the turn-of-the-century by
rapacious capitalists such as Carnegie or Crane, has
become education’s dominant ideology. We have, as
Steven Brint points out, displaced the “social-trustee
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professional” by the “expert professional.”
The old social-trustee professional came out of the
humanities. He or she valued collegial organization,
learning, and the volunteerism of public service. The new
classes of expert professionals have been trained to focus
on narrow, specialized knowledge independent of social
ideas or conceptions of the common good. A doctor,
lawyer, or engineer may become wealthy, but the real
meaning of their work is that they sustain health, justice,
good government, or safety. The flight from the
humanities has become a flight from conscience. It has
created an elite class of experts who seldom look beyond
their tasks and disciplines to put what they do in a wider,
social context. And by absenting themselves from the
moral and social questions raised by the humanities, they
have opted to serve a corporate structure that has destroyed
the culture around them.
Our elites—the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall
Street, and the ones being produced at prestigious
universities and business schools—do not have the
capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make
it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations
they have received, of how to replace a failed system with
a new one. They are petty, timid, and uncreative
bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems
management. They see only piecemeal solutions that will
satisfy the corporate structure. Their entire focus is
numbers, profits, and personal advancement. They lack a
moral and intellectual core. They are as able to deny
gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company
profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly
167
weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The
human consequences never figure into their balance sheets.
The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary
product of the free market—which they slavishly serve.
Andrew Lahde, a Santa Monica, California, hedgefund
manager who made an 866 percent gain by betting on
the subprime mortgage collapse, abruptly shut down his
fund in 2008, citing the risk of trading with faltering
banks. In his farewell letter to his investors, he excoriated
the elites who run our investment houses, banks, and
government.
“The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid
for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was
there for the taking,” he said of our oligarchic class:
These people who were (often) truly not worthy
of the education they received (or supposedly
received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG,
Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers and all levels of
our government. All of this behavior supporting the
Aristocracy ended up only making it easier for me to
find people stupid enough to take the other side of my
trades. God bless America. . . .
“On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to
make a modest proposal,” he went on:
First, I point out the obvious flaws, whereby
legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress
over the past eight years, which would have [reined]
in the predatory lending practices of now mostly
168
defunct institutions. These institutions regularly filled
the coffers of both parties in return for voting down
all of this legislation designed to protect the common
citizen. This is an outrage, yet no one seems to know
or care about it. Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam
Smith [sic] passed, I would argue that there has been
a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at
least ones focused on improving government.24
The single most important quality needed to resist evil
is moral autonomy. As Immanuel Kant wrote, moral
autonomy is possible only through reflection, selfdetermination,
and the courage not to cooperate. Moral
autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its coded
attacks on liberal institutions and “leftist” professors, have
really set out to destroy. The corporate state holds up as
our ideal what Adorno called “the manipulative character.”
The manipulative character has superb organizational
skills yet is unable to have authentic human experiences.
He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an
overvalued realism. The manipulative character is a
systems manager. He or she is exclusively trained to
sustain the corporate structure, which is why our elites
wasted mind-blowing amounts of our money on
corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG.
“He makes a cult of action, activity, of so-called
efficiency as such which reappears in the advertising
image of the active person,” Adorno wrote of this
personality type. These manipulative characters, people
like Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin,
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Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, AIG’s Edward Liddy,
and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with
most of our ruling class, have used corporate money and
power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in
our classrooms, on the airwaves, and in the halls of
Congress—while looting the country. Many of these men
appear to be so morally and intellectually stunted that they
are incapable of acknowledging their responsibility for our
decline.
“It is especially difficult to fight against it,” warned
Adorno, “because those manipulative people, who actually
are incapable of true experience, for that very reason
manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with
certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely
schizoids.”25
Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his
degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard,
Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and
classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in
powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions.
They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy
language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement. The
education they have obtained has served to rigidify and
perpetuate social stratification. These elite schools prevent,
to use Arnold’s words, the “best selves” in the various
strata in our culture from communicating across class
lines. Our power elite has a blind belief in a decaying
political and financial system that has nurtured, enriched,
and empowered it. But the elite cannot solve our problems.
It has been trained only to find solutions, such as paying
170
out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out banks
and financial firms, to sustain a dead system. The elite, and
those who work for them, were never taught how to
question the assumptions of their age. The socially
important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in
history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at
their core subversive and threatening to authority, have
been banished from public discourse.
Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of
thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist.
They have trained people to maintain a structure that
cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped
with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how
to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be
helpless. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know
how. They do not even know how to ask the questions.
And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system
with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our
imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power
elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as selfdeluded,
as the rest of us.
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IV
The Illusion of Happiness
“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of
happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning
aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”1
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
“Feeling blue? Doctors now say you can lie yourself into
happiness. By creating self-deceptions, no matter how negative [your
problem], it can be turned into a positive and you’ll have greater

[happiness]

.”2
—RADIO ADVERTISEMENT
DAVID COOPERRIDER, a professor from Case
Western Reserve University, is a plump, balding man in a
shapeless black suit and checkered tie. He stands in the
center of the stage in the high-ceilinged lecture hall of
Claremont Graduate University before some six hundred
people. The spotlight illuminates his head.
“What would it mean to create an entire change theory
around strengths?” he asks. Such a theory, he asserts,
exists. It is called “Transformational Positivity.” And to
understand it, people need to shift their thinking, much like
172
Einstein, whom he quotes as saying, “No problem can be
solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
We must learn to see the world anew.”
Positive thinking, which is delivered to the culture in a
variety of forms, has its academic equivalent in positive
psychology. Cooperrider touts what he calls
Transformational Positivity. Transformational Positivity,
he says, is the future of organizational change. Optimism
can and must become a permanent state of mind. He has
designed a corporate workshop that promises to bring
about this change. It is called “Appreciative Inquiry.”
Appreciative Inquiry, he assures the audience, will spread
happiness around the world.
Appreciative Inquiry promises to transform
organizations into “Positive Institutions.” “It’s almost like
fusion energy,” Cooperrider explains. “Fusion is where
two positive atoms come together, and there is an
incredible energy that is released.” His clients include the
U.S. Navy, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, United Way,
Boeing, the American Red Cross, the Carter Center, and
the United Nations.3 Celebrities such as Goldie Hawn also
promote positive psychology, designing workshops and
curriculums for children and corporate workers. And
Appreciative Inquiry, which is supposed to make workers
into a happy, harmonious whole, is advertised as a way to
increase profits.
Cooperrider, excited and at times sputtering, stands
before a Power-Point demonstration. He slips into obscure
and often incomprehensible jargon: “Positive Institutions
are organizations, including groups, families, and
173
communities, designed and managed for the elevation and
the engagement of signature strengths, the connected and
combined magnification of strengths, and ultimately, the
coherent cross-level refraction of our highest human
strengths outward into society and our world” [emphases
are Cooperrider’s]. He compares Appreciative Inquiry to a
solar concentrator.
Happiness, Cooperrider explains, is achieved through
“a progressive concentration and release of positivity—a
‘concrescence’ or growing together—whereby persons are
‘enlarged,’ and organizational or mutual strengths,
resources, and positive-potentials are connected and
magnified, where both (person and organization) become
agents of the greater good beyond them.
“In other words,” he continues, “institutions can be a
vehicle for bringing more courage into the world, for
amplifying love in the world, for amplifying temperance
and justice, and so on.”
He ends by saying that this generation—presumably
his—is the most privileged generation in human history. It
is a generation that will channel positive emotions through
corporations and spread them throughout the culture. The
moral and ethical issues of corporatism, from the toxic
assets they may have amassed, to predatory lending, to
legislation they may author to destroy regulation and
oversight, even to the actual products they may produce,
from weapons systems to crushing credit-card debt, appear
to be irrelevant. There presumably could have been a
“positive” Dutch East Indies Company just as there can be
a “positive” Halliburton, J. P. Morgan Chase, Xe (formerly
174
Blackwater), or Raytheon.
Corporate harmony means all quotas can be met. All
things are possible. Profits can always increase. All we
need is the right attitude. The highest form of personal
happiness comes, people like Cooperrider insist, when the
corporation thrives. Corporate retreats are built around this
idea of merging the self with the corporate collective. They
often have the feel, as this conference does, of a religious
revival. They are designed to whip up emotions. In their
inspirational talks, sports stars, retired military
commanders, billionaires, and self-help specialists such as
Tony Robbins or Cooperrider claim that the impossible is
possible. By thinking about things, by visualizing them, by
wanting them, we can make them happen. It is a trick
worthy of the con artist “Professor” Harold Hill in The
Music Man who insists he can teach children to play
instruments by getting them to think about the melody.
The purpose and goals of the corporation are never
questioned. To question them, to engage in criticism of the
goals of the collective, is to be obstructive and negative.
The corporations are the powers that determine identity.
The corporations tell us who we are and what we can
become. And the corporations offer the only route to
personal fulfillment and salvation. If we are not happy
there is something wrong with us. Debate and criticism,
especially about the goals and structure of the corporation,
are condemned as negative and “counterproductive.”
Positive psychology is to the corporate state what
eugenics was to the Nazis. Positive psychology—at least,
as applied so broadly and unquestioningly to corporate
175
relations—is a quack science. It throws a smokescreen
over corporate domination, abuse, and greed. Those who
preach it serve the corporate leviathan. They are awash in
corporate grants. They are invited to corporate retreats to
assure corporate employees that they can find happiness by
sublimating their selves into corporate culture. They hold
academic conferences. They publish a Journal of
Happiness Studies and a World Database of Happiness.
And the movement has sought and found academic
legitimacy. There are more than a hundred courses on
positive psychology available on college campuses. The
University of Pennsylvania offers a Masters of Applied
Positive Psychology established under the leadership of
Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness: Using
the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for
Lasting Fulfillment and a former president of the American
Psychological Association. The School of Behavioral and
Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University
offers Ph.D. and M.A. concentrations on what it calls “the
Science of Positive Psychology.” Degree programs are
also available at the University of East London, the
University of Milan, and the National Autonomous
University of Mexico in Mexico City.
Dr. Tal D. Ben-Shahar, who wrote Happier: Learn the
Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment, taught hugely
popular courses at Harvard University on “Positive
Psychology” and “The Psychology of Leadership.” He
called himself, when he taught at Harvard, the “Harvard
Happiness Professor.”
“There is mounting evidence in the psychological
literature showing that focusing on cultivating strengths,
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optimism, gratitude, and a positive perspective can lead to
growth during difficult times,” Ben-Shahar has stated.
Positive Psychology has its own therapy techniques to
achieve happiness. It instructs patients to write a letter of
gratitude to someone who had been kind to them. Patients
are instructed to pen “You at your best” essays in which
they are asked “to write about a time when they were at
their best and then to reflect on personal strengths
displayed in the story.” They are instructed to “review the
story once every day for a week and to reflect on the
strengths they had identified.” And the professionals argue
that their research shows that many of their patients have
“last ingly increased happiness and decreased depressive
symptoms.”
Ben-Shahar pumps out the catchy slogans and clichés
that color all cheap self-improvement schemes. “Learn to
fail or fail to learn,” he says, and “not ‘It happened for the
best,’ but ‘How can I make the best of what happened?’”
He argues that if a traumatic episode can result in posttraumatic
stress disorder, it may be possible to create the
opposite phenomenon with a single glorious, ecstatic
experience. This could, he says, dramatically change a
person’s life for the better.
Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter
the external reality, are in some ways ill. Their attitudes,
like those of recalcitrant Chinese during the Cultural
Revolution, need correction. Once we adopt a positive
mind, positive things will always happen. This belief, like
all the other illusions peddled in the culture, encourages
177
people to flee from reality when reality is frightening or
depressing. These academic specialists in “happiness”
have formulated the “Law of Attraction.” It argues that we
attract the good things in life, whether it is money,
relationships, or employment, when we focus on what we
desire. The gimmick of visualizing what we want and
believing we can achieve it is no different from praying to
a god or Jesus who we are told wants to make us wealthy
and successful. For those who run into the hard walls of
reality, the ideology has the pernicious effect of forcing the
victim to blame him or herself for his or her pain or
suffering. Abused and battered wives or children, the
unemployed, the depressed, the mentally ill, the illiterate,
the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those
crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with
addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in
menial and poorly paid jobs, those facing foreclosure or
bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills,
need only overcome their negativity. “I think positive
emotions are available to everybody,” says Barbara
Frederickson, the Kenan Distinguished Professor of
Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and director of that university’s Positive Emotions and
Psychophysiology Lab, in the May 2009 issue of The Sun.
She also speaks at the Claremont conference. “There’s
been research done with people in slums across the globe
and with prostitutes, looking at their well-being and
satisfaction with life. The data suggest that positive
emotions have less to do with material resources than we
might think; it’s really about your attitude and approach to
your circumstances.” This flight into self-delusion is no
more helpful in solving real problems than alchemy. But it
178
is very effective in keeping people from questioning the
structures around them that are responsible for their
misery. Positive Psychology gives an academic patina to
fantasy.
The conference is filled with people in business attire.
At the break, many stand in clusters, holding a coffee in
one hand and a pastry in the other.
The university is quiet for a Saturday afternoon. The
weather outside is overcast and cold. The browning lawns
of Claremont’s Pomona College, dotted with palm trees
and oaks, reflect the harshness of the statewide drought.
There is a half-moon wall visible from the conference
center. “CLOSE THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS” is
written in large red letters on the wall. “Dan Eats Chicken
Skin” and “Dog Boner To The Rescue!” read other graffiti.
“SUCK IT, LIFE” is spray-painted in black. Sections of
the wall resemble works by Picasso or Diego Rivera. The
largest message is “Vote Obama ’08.” The university
buildings, with imitation adobe walls and red clay tile
roofs, cluster around the college’s clock tower. The
campus has the appearance of a California Spanish
mission.
In the auditorium, the round face of Martin Seligman
appears in a video on a twenty-foot screen. His gaze is
serious. Behind him are disordered bookshelves.
“Welcome to this auspicious occasion,” he says to the
attentive, mostly white crowd. A young woman, a student
of psychology at California State University at Long
Beach, scribbles notes. She underlines auspicious
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occasion.
Seligman speaks of four endeavors for the movement.
“The first endeavor I call ‘positive physical health,’”
Seligman says. “If you think about positive psychology as
having argued that positive mental health is something
over and above the absence of mental illness. That is,” he
clarifies, hammering his desk with every “presence,” “the
presence of positive emotion, the presence of flow, the
presence of engagement, the presence of meaning, the
presence of positive relationships.” Seligman pauses. “Can
the same thing be said for physical health?” He believes
researchers will find a correlation between these positive
mental states and the “real” body.4
Seligman announces that twenty $200,000 grants–a
dream sum for any researcher—will be given out for
“groundbreaking research” in the burgeoning field of
positive neuroscience. The goal is to locate where positive
emotions originate in the brain.
“Education usually consists of taking young people and
teaching them workplace skills. . . . But there is an
epidemic of depression,” he says sadly. His optimistic tone
returns: “Would it be possible to have positive education? .
. . That is, without sacrificing any of the usual skills such
as discipline, reading, literacy, numeracy. . . . Can we build
engagement, meaning, positive emotion, good relations in
schools?”
Seligman announces that schools in the United States,
such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools
180
in Riverside, California, as well as schools in the United
Kingdom and in Australia, are putting his theory into
practice. The Geelong Grammar School in Australia is
implementing a positive psychology curriculum. Hundreds
of teachers there are being taught, in missionary fashion, to
“spread the notion of positive education.”
In Authentic Happiness, written in 2002, Seligman
argues that authentic happiness can be conditioned and
thus taught.
A similar-sounding life of “enjoyment,” “engagement,”
and “affiliation” is the engineered temperament of the
pliant characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
There, the protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration
to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to
have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy
nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy
nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at
five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in
some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for
example; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.5
“A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom,” writes
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Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who is “the brains behind
positive psychology,” according to Seligman. He credits
Csíkszentmihályi with adding the concept of “flow” to the
movement’s ideas.6 “Flow experiences provide the flashes
of instense living against this dull background.” “Flow” is
described by Csíkszentmihályi as a state of “being
completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The
ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and
thought follows naturally from the previous one, like
playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re
using your skills to the utmost.”7 With enough adjustment,
he implies, we could all be making beautiful jazz of our
lives.
“People who learn to control inner experience will be
able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as
close as any of us can come to being happy,”
Csíkszentmihályi writes in Flow: The Psychology of
Optimal Experience (1990). “There are two main strategies
we can adopt to improve the quality of life,” he continues.
“The first is to try making external conditions match our
goals. The second is to change how we experience external
conditions to make them fit our goals better. . . . We
cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try
to improve on them.”
Csíkszentmihályi specializes in “optimizing” human
experience. The optimal organization man is fitter,
happier, more productive, and less expensive. The optimal
worker complains less. He or she obeys more. The optimal
worker costs the employer less in health-care expenditures.
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Csíkszentmihályi developed the idea of “psychological
capital,” or what he terms “paratelics.” When Ed Diener, a
professor of psychology at the University of Illinois,
measured the world according to Csíkszentmihályi’s
paratelic factors, he discovered something so “shocking,”
he says, it must be true. These paratelic factors—“I can
count on others,” “I feel autonomous,” “I learned
something new today,” and “I did what I do best”—are,
more than money, corruption, starvation, or abuse, “the
best predictors of the positive emotions of nations.”
Diener believes he can measure happiness. He
conducted a study that found a correlation between the
incomes of undergraduates nineteen years after graduation
with their level of cheerfulness.8 His research also showed
that happy people have higher supervisor ratings, higher
organizational citizenship, and higher incomes.
The movement embraces self-delusion as
psychologically and socially beneficial. It also makes
handsome profits peddling it. Seligman, Diener, Shelley
Taylor, and a slew of positive psychologists write popular
books for, essentially, those who can afford the therapy. It
is a trade. Dacher Keltner, a positive psychologist at
Berkeley, hosts for-pay motivational workshops that cost
$139 for standard registration. Csíkszentmihályi
participates in the Annual Positive Psychology Forum,
which in 2009 was in Sedona, Arizona, supposedly one of
the energy hot spots of the world, for a registration fee of
$716.74 per person.
“The effective individual in the face of threat seems to
be one who permits the development of illusions, nurtures
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those illusions, and is ultimately restored by those
illusions,” writes Taylor, a psychologist at the University
of California at Los Angeles.9 In 1991 Taylor published a
book titled Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and
the Healthy Mind, in which she argued that “positive
illusions” protect mental and physical health.”10
Taylor’s article “Illusion and Well-Being” is a
commonly cited resource in positive psychology. She
insists that positive illusions have a measurable affect on
survival rates among patients with cancer, HIV, and
cardiovascular disease or surgery.
Positive illusions, described as “pervasive, enduring,
and systematic,” come, Taylor writes, in three types: (1)
unrealistically positive views of the self; (2) exaggerated
perceptions of personal control; and (3) unrealistic
optimism. All of these illusions can, managed the right
way, supposedly improve our lives. Illusions are good for
people, she says, and therefore, by extension, unadorned
reality is negative.
But while Taylor sees positive illusions as tools to
ward off dysfunction, stress, and bad health, not everyone
agrees. Philosopher David Jopling calls such illusions
“life-lies.” He argues that so-called positive illusions may
work for a while but collapse when reality becomes too
harsh and intrudes on the dream world.
“The deeper and more pervasive an individual’s
positive illusions,” writes Jopling, “the greater their effect
of diminishing his range of awareness of himself, other
people, and the situation confronting him.” Jopling argues
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that self-deception strategies are reality filters that organize
what people understand into self-relevant and self-serving
packages. “With the diminishing of the range of awareness
comes a corresponding diminishing of the range of
responsiveness and openness” to what is real. One’s ability
to interact intelligently with all of the world’s real
consequences diminishes.
Jopling warns of grave moral consequences for a
delusional society. “This means that the range of social,
emotional, and personal relations that connect us to others,
to the social world, and to our own humanity, are
progressively weakened as self-deceptive strategies
become progressively entrenched in behavior and
thought.”11
Psychology has a long history of lending its services to
the military and government as well as propaganda
industries such as advertising, public relations, and human
management. The National Institute of Mental Health,
from which many positive psychologists have generous
grants, though a public institution, has numerous
government, military, and commercial relationships .12
Keltner is the author of Born to be Good: The Science
of the Meaningful Life. He is also executive editor of The
Greater Good, a magazine, and director of The Greater
Good Science Center on the Berkeley campus. He teaches
a course on happiness at the university and hosts
motivational workshops on “building compassion, creating
well-being.” He has had his ears rubbed by the Dalai
Lama.13
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Keltner sits in his office in Berkeley’s Tolman Hall.
Students wait in the hallway for an appointment. He is
dressed in shorts, a polo shirt, and sweatshirt with
Berkeley’s blue background with gold stripes.
When asked whether positive psychology could be
used for mass coercion, Keltner replies: “As scientists our
task is to describe human nature as well as we can. So the
motivations of positive psychology are well founded.
There are branches of our nervous system that we study in
our lab that are really mysteries scientifically. The vagus
nerve, oxytocin, parts of the brain that are involved in
compassion. That’s our first task, and that’s the scientific
motivation of positive psychology. And then cultures and
societies and communities take science and push it in a lot
of different directions. [Charles] Darwin had a theory
about human nature that was very sanguine. He said we are
a sympathetic species, we take care of others, we are
inherently cooperative, and then [Herbert] Spencer, and
social Darwinists, and libertarians pushed it in all sorts of
directions, in the service of their versions of public
policies. . . . So you always have to separate science from
practice. And you can’t critique the science based on the
practices that follow. Nazism was an application of a lot of
scientific ideas that have nothing to do with the science.”
The theme of the most recent issue of The Greater
Good is “The Psychology of Power.” It exposes in
scenario after scenario the true purpose of positive
psychology—how to manipulate people to do what you
want.
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The magazine has an article called “Peaceful
Parenting,” in which two practitioners explain “how to turn
parent-child conflict into cooperation.” The article begins:
“It’s nine o’clock on a school night and twelve-year-old
Jessie is absorbed in his favorite video game—until his
mother comes into his bedroom and announces it’s
bedtime.”
“I don’t want to go to bed!” says Jessie.
“But it’s already past your bedtime,” says Mom, “and
you know you have to get your rest.”
“But I’m not tired!”
“Well, you will be in the morning if you don’t go to
sleep soon.”
“Shut up!” Jessie yells. “Anyway, you can’t make me
go to sleep.”
“Sound familiar?” the article asks. “It does to us. . . .
The conversation might go on in this way until Mom,
exhausted and angry, shouts something like ‘I quit! Suit
yourself!’”
What parents need to do, says the article, is shift from
“using power over kids to using power with them.”
“Peaceful parenting” should go like this:
“You’re having a lot of fun playing now, huh?” asks
Mom.
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“Yeah,” says Jessie. “And I’m not even tired.”
“So you just want to keep playing until you’re tired?”
“Yeah.”
“It must be frustrating to be asked to stop doing
something that’s so much fun when you don’t feel tired.”
“I don’t have time for what I want to do. I just have to
come home and do homework.”
“Hmm. It sounds like this time between homework and
bedtime is really important to you, and you wish it were
longer?”
“Yeah, Mom, I do.”
“Thanks for helping me understand that. You know,
I’d like you to have as much time as you want for the
things that interest you. At the same time, I’ve also noticed
that when you stay up after nine on school nights, you’re
tired the next morning. Do you hear what my concern is?”
“Yeah, you want me to get a good night’s sleep.”
“Yes, thanks for hearing that.”
“I just need five more minutes to finish this game.
Okay?”
“Okay. I’ll get out your pajamas.”14
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The pages of The Greater Good are awash in such
insincere and coercive techniques. The goal, replicated in
the corporate workshops where managers are taught how
to speak to employees, is not to communicate but to
control.
Richard S. Lazarus, who was a professor of
psychology at Berkeley, was disturbed by “the vagueness,
the religious tone, and the arrogance with which [the
claims of positive psychology] are made.”15 He saw
positive psychology as “populist and intellectually much
too easy rather than a set of thoughtful ideas or principles
to be respected.” “In my opinion, [positive psychologists]
are promoting a kind of religion,” wrote Lazarus, “a vision
from on high, which is falsely clothed in a claim to science
that never materializes.”
Barbara Frederickson, from the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, shows the crowd in the Claremont
auditorium a cartoon diagram of a sailboat. She says she
has found an exact, “totally scientific,” optimal
“positivity” ratio for positive to negative emotions: 3 to 1.
The keel of the sailboat, she says, represents the
“necessary negative emotions” that are heavy and
burdensome and “keep the boat on course and
manageable,” while the sail, “having ample and sufficient
positivity, is what really allows us to take off. What
matters most, I have found, is the ratio of your heartfelt
positivity relative to your heart-wrenching negativity,” said
Frederickson.
“Why do we need positive emotions to really take
off?” she asks. “Because positivity opens us.” On the
189
screen overhead, the image of a blue flower appears. “Now
imagine you are this flower, and your petals are drawn
tightly around your face. If you could see out at all, it’s
just a little speck,” she says mournfully. “You can’t
appreciate much of what goes on around you. . . . But once
you feel the warmth of the sun, things begin to change,
your leaves begin to soften, your petals loosen and begin to
stretch outward, exposing your face”—Frederickson splays
her hands open around her face like petals—“and
removing your delicate blinders, you see more and more,
and your world quite literally expands.
“Now some flowers bloom just once. But others, like
these day lilies,” she says, pointing to the slides of the blue
and now red flowers, “they close up every evening and
they bloom again when they see the sun. . . . Our minds are
like these day lilies. Yet their openness honors momentary
shifts in our positivity.” Frederickson pauses. “Positivity is
to our minds what the sunlight is to day lilies.”
Christopher Peterson and Nansook Park claim to have
found the statistically most important “character strengths”
in every society around the world. Peterson and Park stand
on opposite sides of the stage. The large screen between
them shows a bar graph titled “Adult Character Strengths.”
“We have our adult questionnaire online,” says
Peterson. “I think to date it’s been completed by about 1.3
million people. Pretty soon it will be the whole world! But
about 100,000 people into this, we simply calculated the
more common versus less common character strengths,
and we have arranged them here.”
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Peterson gestures at the graph.
“What’s interesting is that on the left side are certain
strengths that are more common, like kindness, fairness,
honesty, gratitude. And, we wonder, and other people have
said this, if these might not be the sorts of strengths that
are necessary for a viable society? It’s kind of hard to
imagine a viable society in which these things are not
present.
“Now what I left out is, ‘Who do these data refer to?’
Well, this particular graph is 50,000 Americans. But we
subdivided it into all fifty states, and you get the same
distribution across the fifty states.”
Peterson chuckles.
“Oh yeah, we also looked at fifty-four other nations,
and you get the same distribution across the nations . . . I
remember we sent it to a journal,” Peterson says
confidently, “and the first journal editor rejected it, and he
said, ‘You didn’t find anything different, any
differences.’”
Peterson comically slaps himself on the head, mugging
in mock disbelief.
“I said, ‘We found human nature!’” Peterson throws
his arms out. “Isn’t that good enough!?”
Peterson goes on to talk about the less important
indicators. “Oh, look what’s on the bottom: Self-regulation
—that’s like staying on a diet. That’s why I am hiding
191
behind the podium!” The crowd chuckles.
“Modesty,” he says. “Like, ‘God, we are good
researchers!’” The crowd laughs louder. “You get the
idea!”
Kim Cameron is dressed in a black suit with a red tie.
He is Professor of Management and Organizations at the
University of Michigan, where he is co-founder of the
Center for Positive Organizational Culture. Cameron has
come to talk about how corporations can use positive or
“virtuous” practices to improve profits.
“All organizations exist to eliminate deviance,” says
Cameron. “The reason we organize is to minimize
unexpected, chaotic, unpredictable behavior. Right?
Organization exists to eliminate negative deviance. The
problem is, it also eliminates positive deviance. We
organize, and thereby, by definition, we eliminate
positively deviant or extraordinary or spectacular or
virtuous behavior.”
Cameron says he shows business executives how
happiness, compassion, and goodness can increase profits.
Cameron’s clients include Fortune 100 companies, but
also small organizations, nonprofits, and county
governments. Clients range from the YMCA to the
trucking industry. Cameron reminds the audience he is not
in it for the money, but for the fulfillment he gets from his
work. What matters is feeling good. He sells harmony
ideology to corporations.
Most positive psychologists belong to the 148,000-
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member American Psychological Association (APA),
which has lent its services for decades to the military and
intelligence communities to research and perfect
techniques for interrogation and control. Psychologists
working for government agencies in the 1950s and ’60s
conducted human experiments and discovered that
psychological torture, including sensory and sleep
deprivation, was far more disorientating and destructive to
the human psyche than crude beatings and physical abuse.
They refined psychological techniques to ensure complete
emotional breakdowns. Psychologists are the only group of
major health-care providers who openly participate in
interrogations at military and CIA facilities. The American
Psychiatric Association and the American Medical
Association have forbidden members to participate in
military interrogations. But the APA, despite complaints
and resignations by a few of its members, has refused to
ban its psychologists from interrogations, including at
notorious torture sites such as Guantánamo Bay.
A May 2007 Pentagon report by the inspector general’s
office acknowledged that psychologists oversaw the
adaptation of the military’s Survive, Evade, Resist, and
Escape (SERE) program for use against prisoners. SERE
was first designed to replicate torture techniques and help
U.S. troops resist Chinese and Soviets interrogators. But,
in the hands of army and intelligence psychologists, SERE
has been reverse-engineered to break prisoners held in
American interrogation centers. The sleep deprivation,
lengthy stress positions, complete sensory deprivation,
isolation, sexual humiliation, and forced nudity are
systematically employed to reduce prisoners to a state of
193
utter helplessness. Many become catatonic. The
psychologists monitor the steady deterioration of the
prisoner and advise interrogators how to employ
techniques to complete the psychological disintegration.
Psychologists, in and out of the government, have
learned how to manipulate social behavior. The promotion
of collective harmony, under the guise of achieving
happiness, is simply another carefully designed mechanism
for conformity. Positive psychology is about banishing
criticism and molding a group into a weak and malleable
unit that will take orders. Personal values, those nurtured
by an independent conscience, are gently condemned as
antagonistic to harmony and happiness. Those who refuse
under group pressure to become harmonious are deemed a
drag on the corporate body and, if they cannot be
reformed, expunged. Those who are willing to surrender
their individuality are granted small rewards doled out by
the corporate structure. They can feel, at least until they
lose their jobs, that they belong to an important and
powerful collective. They can adopt a corporate identity.
They feel protected. The greatest fear becomes the fear of
disrupting the system, of becoming an impediment to the
harmony of the corporate collective. The quest for
harmony, which these psychologists understand, lures
people into a state of psychological somnambulism.
Berkeley anthropologist Laura Nader argues that most
oppressive systems of power, including classical Western
colonialism and proponents of globalization, all use the
idea of social harmony as a control mechanism. There is a
vast difference, Nader points out, between social harmony
and harmony ideology, between positivity and being
194
genuinely positive. Nader sees harmony ideology as a
concerted assault on democracy. The drive for harmony,
Nader argues, always lends itself to covert censorship and
self-censorship. The tyranny of harmony, when pushed to
the extreme, leads to a life of fantasy that shuts out reality.
Nader sees the ideology of harmony as one that has slowly
dominated and corrupted the wider culture.
Positive psychology is only the latest incarnation of
this assault on community and individualism. A related
ideology was lauded by Business Week in the early 1980s
as the “New Industrial Relations.”16 It was touted as a new
form of human management. It was also said to be “nicer”
than the earlier “scientific management” and social
engineering innovations of Henry Ford or Frederick
Taylor.17
Roberto González, an anthropologist at San Jose State
University, spent nine months in 1989 and 1990 as a
student engineer at General Motors. He later wrote “Brave
New Workplace: Cooperation, Control, and the New
Industrial Relations,” a study on corporate work teams and
“quality circles.” The goal of such programs, González
found, “was to end the adversarial relationship between
management and labor through ‘self-managed’ work
teams, and in so doing improve the efficiency and
psychological ‘health’ of those involved.” He notes that
these workplace reform programs have gone by several
names, including “the team approach,” “employee
participation,” “workplace democracy,” “human
capitalism,” and “quality of work life” programs.18
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During the 1980s American automobile corporations
used this tactic of labor-management cooperation to
compete with what was seen as the Japanese economic
juggernaut. “ . . . [T]his can be seen, for example,”
González recounts, “in the charts at the Chevrolet Gear
and Axle plant in Detroit, which lists the sales figures of
various American and Japanese cars. Next to these lists is a
sign that reads, ‘You are entering the war zone, Quality
and productivity are our weapons.’”19
Workers at GM were arranged into “self-managed”
“quality circles,” or teams of workers who form an
identity. These teams competed with other teams to
increase their productivity. “We and they” mentality is
reduced and collapses into a collective “we.” Quality
circles at GM gave themselves names such as “Joe’s
Trouble Shooters,” “Positive Approach,” and “Loose
Wires and Stripped Nuts.”20
“Any status symbol that ferments class consciousness
is removed from the workplace,” noted Robert Ozaki in his
book Human Capitalism in an observation of a GMToyota
plant in California. “There are no parking spaces or
toilets reserved for executives. Managers and workers dine
in the common cafeteria. . . . Production workers are called
‘associates’ or ‘technicians’ rather than ‘workers’ or
employees.’”21
Prestige systems, like those in the military, were
employed at the Toyota plant at which Satoshi Kamata
worked in the 1970s. He recalled how hats of different
colors and stripes were used to distinguish rank: “ . . . two
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green stripes stand for Seasonal Worker; one green stripe,
Probationer; one white stripe, Trainee; one red stripe,
Minor; a cap without any stripe, Regular Worker; two
yellow stripes, Team Chief. . . .”22 “At the same assembly
plant,” González continued, citing Kamata’s book Japan in
the Passing Lane: An Insider’s Account of Life in a
Japanese Auto Factory, “Good idea suggestions” were
elicited from workers, and the number submitted by each
worker was posted in the locker room.23 Similarly, one of
Kamata’s closest friends boasted about the number of
pieces he could produce in a work day. Production became
a source of identity and prestige .24 Any incident or act that
disrupted production was condemned. When a worker in
Kamata’s quality circle was injured on the job, all
members were forced to wear a “Safety First arm band.”
This saw them stigmatized by others in the plant.25 Low
prestige was attached to the arm band. Peer pressure–from
a worker’s own team– formed a strong disincentive for
anyone to report a job-related injury to avoid having to
wear the arm band.
González in Brave New Workplace described a long
and double-edged history of attempts to reconcile workers’
interests with those of corporations. It dated back to the
“scientific management” methods of Frederick Taylor,
who, in the name of efficiency, “‘streamlined’ assembly
plants by conducting time-motion studies of each worker,
breaking down each movement into a number of discrete
steps, and then reorganizing them in a more efficient
sequence by eliminating all unnecessary movements.”26
This dehumanization led Taylor’s disciples to take another
approach. While some conservative followers focused
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solely on “productivity and efficiency,” liberal “business
leaders, bankers, politicians, trade-union leaders, and
academic social scientists” during the 1920s “tried to forge
a viable corporate order.”27 They sought to establish a
stable corporate state by implementing worker “uplift”
programs, such as collective bargaining, profit-sharing,
company magazines, insurance, pension plans, safety
reform, workmen’s compensation, restricted work hours
and the “living wage.” The idea that “better living and
working conditions would render him [the worker] more
cooperative, loyal, content, and, thus, more efficient and
‘level-headed’ . . . also carried over into such aspects of
the industrial-betterment movement as gardens,
restaurants, clubs, recreational facilities, bands, and
medical departments.”28
“Since at least a century ago, a number of engineers,
businessmen, and scientists realized that technology was
no longer the limiting factor of production; now, it was
man that could be engineered, and made still more
efficient, given the right motivation,” González wrote,
quoting from historian David Noble’s book America by
Design.29 “However there are two aspects of today’s
industrial relations that are genuinely new: first, the
specific psychological techniques used to motivate
workers; and, second, the increased number of companies
willing to experiment with these techniques.”30
Toyota pioneered the new approach. “Toyota City”
was built by the corporation to completely encapsulate and
control the lives of its employees. “Total control over the
social environment is an important component of thought
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reform programs,” González wrote.31 “At Toyota City,
thousands of young men were housed in military-style
dormitories, surrounded by a fence and a guardhouse.” He
also describes how, “during the time Kamata wrote his
account, visitors—including family members—were not
allowed to enter the dorms to visit temporary workers.
Roommate assignments often grouped men from the same
town together,” because, “according to Kamata, ‘it helps
them adjust to the new environment and stay put during
the employment period.’”32
These techniques were adopted by “U.S. bureaucracies
and corporations, such as supermarkets, schools, banks,
and government offices, including the Pentagon.”33 During
the 1990s, American and Japanese automakers began
pursuing what they called the Southern Strategy. They set
up factories modeled on Toyota City in Tennessee, Ohio,
Kentucky, and Indiana, where, they believed, a lack of
unions and rural insularity made for a fertile environment
.34
González quotes Kamata’s personal account of Toyota
City in the 1970s as an example of how emotional stress
and sheer fatigue can create bewildering confusion and
despair reminiscent of the experiences of those who are
inducted into a cult. “When I come back from work,”
Kamata recounts, “I do nothing but sleep. I try not to think
about the job; even the thought of it is enough to make me
feel sick. Mostly, I feel too tired to think about anything.”
Several weeks later, Kamata slips into trancelike states on
the assembly line:
[S]ometimes I think of something totally illogical:
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landscapes with towns I once visited suddenly appear
one by one. It’s impossible to concentrate on any one
scene. . . . I’m not myself while I’m on the line. . . . It
often surprises me to look up and suddenly find some
strange scene in front of my eyes. In that split second
I always wonder where I am. Merely seeing the light
come in through a door on the opposite side of the
building can bowl me over. . . . Again, for a few
seconds, I’m totally disoriented.35
This peer group approach replicates the techniques
used in coercive influence and control programs in
Communist China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea. In
these programs, the target subject “would become
emotionally attached to the peer group members, who
‘came to know the target’s personality and history
exceedingly well.’”36
“ . . . [A] prisoner in Communist China would develop
a circle of friends among his jailers,” explains González,
“who could reward or sanction him according to whether
or not his behavior fit their standards. Eventually, his
behavior could be conditioned through peer pressure.”37
Similar processes occur in the cooperative work
groups. Kamata explains: “If Fukuyama, the worker on my
right, falls behind, he’ll pull me behind, since I barely keep
up with the work myself. Even if Fukuyama finishes his
job in time, should I take longer on my job, then the next
worker, Takeda, will be pulled out of his position. It takes
enormous energy to catch up with the line, and if things go
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wrong, the line stops.”38
Anthropologist Alejandro Lugo, who worked at a
maquiladora plant in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, describes a
similar experience. He dropped behind many times in his
first few days of work, and writes that “the pressure would
be almost unbearable” as members of his work group
would shout at him for not keeping up.39
When a temporary worker at Toyota City was injured
and forced to quit, he told Kamata: “I’d have quit a long
time ago. But I came here with Miura, so I can’t let him
down.”40 Reflecting on these statements, Kamata argues
that the “work here is so difficult that people try to support
and encourage one another, especially the ones who come
here together. We feel it’s not fair to drop out and go home
alone.”
“Circle leaders often learn a great deal about team
members’ personalities and histories, sometimes for the
purpose of manipulation,” González writes.
For example, at an assembly plant jointly owned by
General Motors and Toyota in Fremont, California, a
management handout, entitled “Facts a Group Leader Must
Know,” implored team leaders to learn the birthday,
marital status, anniversary, number of children, and
hobbies of each circle member. Furthermore, “team
members are encouraged to help each other deal with
personal problems.” At a Toyota plant in Japan, team
chiefs even used team members’ birthdays to calculate
biorhythm charts, so that an individual’s “bad days” could
be anticipated by the quality circle.
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At a General Motors plant, 22,000 employees partook
in weeklong “family awareness training” aimed at
“establishing a family atmosphere within the division,”
where managers and workers did interpersonal activities.41
“One of the exercises worked at developing trust,”
González summarized:
Employees were paired up and then one of them
was blindfolded and guided by the other. In another
exercise, “Johari Window,” the object was to reveal
as much about one’s “joys, fears, and needs” as
possible—and in so doing, open the “window.”
Another exercise, “Hot Seat,” took place on the last
day of the training session: “One by one each person
sits on the ‘hot seat’ and listens to group members say
positive things about him or her. It is hard to say
which is the more moving experience—sitting on the
‘hot seat’ or seeing those in the seat moved to
tears.”42
“A recent scandal in the federal government illustrates
the dangers posed by coercion masked as harmony,”
González concludes.
In May 1995, a Congressional subcommittee was
stunned by the bizarre testimony of many witnesses who
told of being “psychologically abused” and subjected to
sessions resembling “cult programming” during
management and diversity training sessions sponsored by
the Federal Aviation Administration. According to
witnesses, men were fondling women, blacks and whites
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were urged to exchange epithets, and co-workers were tied
together or disrobed for hours at a time during the
weeklong training courses, which the FAA subcontracted
to various management consultants. One consultant,
Gregory May, received $1.67 million in government
contracts. According to some witnesses, May is influenced
by a West Coast “guru” who occasionally contacts a
35,000-year-old spirit named Ramtha.43
In Britain, coercive persuasion techniques were among
the blunt instruments used to undermine the strong shopstewards
organizations in well-organized plants such as
Unilever and at Rover in Cowley (in the greater Oxford
area), with the promise of “jobs for life.” Many trade union
officials were initially seduced by this illusion of corporate
and worker harmony. General Motors’ Saturn car was built
in plants that adopted the Japanese industrial relations
model. This experiment, which soon became very
unpopular with workers, lasted until 2004, when the union
at the Spring Hill plant in Tennessee challenged the GM
management and voted to restore the traditional United
Auto Workers’ contract.
Corporatism, aided by positive psychology, relies on
several effective coercive persuasion techniques, similar to
those often employed by cults, to meld workers into a
“happy” collective. It sanctions interpersonal and
psychological attacks and lavish praise to destabilize an
individual’s sense of self and promote compliance. It uses
the coercive pressure of organized peer groups. It applies
interpersonal pressure, including attacks on individuality
and criticism as a form of negativity, to ensure conformity.
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It manipulates and controls the totality of the person’s
social environment to stabilize modified behavior.
Anthony Vasquez is a student at Berkeley. Sitting on
the steps of Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall on a sunny evening,
he describes his experience with positive psychology at
FedEx Kinko’s, a photocopy and printing store. He has
hazel eyes and messy black hair, and he is wearing
corduroys and a brown mountaineer jacket. He worked at
FedEx Kinko’s for about two years and was “always called
negative, a com plainer, and not a team player.”
Vasquez recalls that his store’s slogan was “Yes We
Can.” “It meant that if a customer asked us to do a job for
them, no matter what it was, we were to say, ‘Yes We
Can!’” Posters of the slogan were posted near telephones
and around the back room. Corporate auditors would
phone the store to make sure employees said, “Yes we
can!” to every request. Employees would be punished as a
group for failures, and individuals could be fired. Other
slogans included, “Winning by engaging the hearts and
minds of every team member” and “I promise to make
every FedEx experience outstanding.”
Vasquez tells about the scandal that ensued when his
trainee, Sam, was fired. The store managers did not
announce the dismissal but kept Sam on the schedule to
make it appear that Sam was skipping work. The managers
then used this as grounds for Sam’s removal. After two
weeks and several conversations with Sam, Vasquez wrote
“Fired” in pencil under Sam’s name on the schedule. The
store managers were outraged. They called Vasquez into
the office and reprimanded him with a “Positive Discipline
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Documentation Form.” He was charged with defacing
company property and slandering Sam.
“The document explained how I had made ‘false or
malicious statements’ against Sam,” says Vasquez. “I told

[the managers]

they were being duplicitous and that
nothing I wrote had been false or malicious. I told them
that if they wanted to make ‘our organization a success, ’
they could start by paying me a fair wage. I went on and
on until they both threw their hands in the air and told me
to stop being difficult. I told them that I wasn’t the one
being difficult. They stared hard at me and said reluctantly,
‘We know.’” Vasquez signed the document and left the
office.
“It must have been in 2006, the company was holding
another mandatory meeting for ‘team members,’ which is
what they call us,” he says. “I went with a couple of coworkers
to Fresno, where we met a lot of other employees
from various stores in northern California. . . . [T]he
meeting took place in this rented room, and the woman
from corporate had all these toys, markers, and candy in
the middle of each table. The first thing she had us do was
organize ourselves according to duration of employment at
the company. While in this line, we had to introduce
ourselves and say how long we had been working. The girl
on the far end had been hired two months prior; the man
on the other had been with the company for almost twenty
years.”
Some of his co-workers didn’t like having to reveal
that they had spent a lifetime working at FedEx Kinko’s.
But the corporate manager tried to muster up corporate
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pride. “She spun it so hard I felt dizzy,” says Vasquez.
“‘Isn’t this wonderful?! We have such a wide range of
great team members. This really shows what a great place
this is to work, and how you can make a career here!’ she
said.”
One man stared at the floor in anger and
embarrassment. “[I]f he had said anything, she would have
e-mailed his center manager and he would have been
written up and probably denied a raise. By the way, raises
are twenty-five cents a year.
“The purpose of the meeting was, her euphemisms
aside, to push merchandise and services onto customers
that they didn’t want. I believe it’s called up-selling. She
wanted us to talk about our positive customer service
experiences. Most of us struggled with this, as nearly all of
our experiences with customers and the company had been
extremely negative and stressful. But she was all smiles,
no matter what we said, and I noticed she was able to make
almost everyone there smile and laugh and have a good
time. She used the toys, the candy, the markers, and
activities like skits and competitions to get people active
and involved with each other. She used the happiness and
was able to switch its source from human interaction to the
company. You aren’t happy because you are being social,
you are happy because you work for the company.
“From my two years at the company, ‘positive
psychology’ is a euphemism for ‘spin,’” he adds. “They try
to spin their employees so much they can’t tell right from
left, and in the process they forget they do the work of
three people, have no health insurance, and three-quarters
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of their paycheck goes to rent.”
Positive psychology, like celebrity culture, the
relentless drive to consume, and the diversionary appeals
of mass entertainment, feeds off the unhappiness that
comes from isolation and the loss of community. The
corporate teaching that we can find happiness through
conformity to corporate culture is a cruel trick, for it is
corporate culture that stokes and feeds the great malaise
and disconnect of the culture of illusion.
In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies,
political scientist Robert Lane writes:
Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their
material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and
depression haunting advanced market democracies
throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that
markets maximize well-being and the eighteenthcentury
promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness
under benign governments of people’s own choosing.
The haunting spirit is manifold: a postwar decline in
the United States in people who report themselves as
happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of
clinical depression and dysphoria (especially among
the young), increasing distrust of each other and of
political and other institutions, declining belief that
the lot of the average man is getting better . . . a tragic
erosion of family solidarity and community
integration together with an apparent decline in warm,
intimate relations among friends.44
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There is a dark, insidious quality to the ideology
promoted by the positive psychologists. They condemn all
social critics and iconoclasts, the dissidents and
individualists, for failing to surrender and seek fulfillment
in the collective lowing of the corporate herd. They
strangle creativity and moral autonomy. They seek to mold
and shape individual human beings into a compliant
collective. The primary teaching of this movement, which
reflects the ideology of the corporate state, is that
fulfillment is to be found in complete and total social
conformity, a conformity that all totalitarian and
authoritarian structures seek to impose on those they
dominate. Its false promise of harmony and happiness only
increases internal anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. The
nagging undercurrents of alienation and the constant
pressure to exhibit a false enthusiasm and buoyancy
destroy real relationships. The loneliness of a work life
where self-presentation is valued over authenticity and one
must always be upbeat and positive, no matter what one’s
actual mood or situation, is disorienting and stressful. The
awful feeling that being positive may not, in fact, work if
one is laid off or becomes sick must be buried and
suppressed. Here, in the land of happy thoughts, there are
no gross injustices, no abuses of authority, no economic
and political systems to challenge, and no reason to
complain. Here, we are all happy.
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V
The Illusion of America
We would rather be ruined than changed;
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
—W. H. AUDEN, The Age of Anxiety
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
—PROVERBS 29
I USED TO LIVE in a country called America. It was
not a perfect country, especially if you were African
American or Native American or of Japanese descent in
the Second World War. It could be cruel and unjust if you
were poor, gay, a woman, or an immigrant, but there was
hope it could be better. It was a country I loved and
honored. It paid its workers wages envied around the
world. It made sure these workers, thanks to labor unions
and champions of the working class in the Democratic
Party and the press, had health benefits and pensions. It
offered good, public education. It honored basic
democratic values and held in regard the rule of law,
including international law, and respect for human rights.
209
It had social programs, from Head Start to welfare to
Social Security, to take care of the weakest among us, the
mentally ill, the elderly, and the destitute. It had a system
of government that, however flawed, worked to protect the
interests of most of its citizens. It offered the possibility of
democratic change. It had a press that was diverse and
independent and gave a voice to all segments of society,
including those beyond our borders, to impart to us
unpleasant truths, to challenge the powerful, to reveal
ourselves to ourselves.
I am not blind to the imperfections of this old America,
or the failures to meet these ideals consistently at home
and abroad. I spent more than two years living in Roxbury,
the inner city in Boston, across the street from a public
housing project where I ran a small church as a seminarian
at Harvard Divinity School. I saw institutional racism at
work. I saw how banks, courts, dysfunctional schools,
probation officers, broken homes, drug abuse, crime, and
employers all conspired to make sure the poor remained
poor. I spent two decades as a foreign correspondent in
Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. I
saw there the crimes and injustices committed in our name
and often with our support, whether during the contra war
in Nicaragua or the brutalization of the Palestinians by
Israeli occupation forces. We had much to atone for, but
still there was also much that was good, decent, and
honorable in our country.
The country I live in today uses the same civic,
patriotic, and historical language to describe itself, the
same symbols and iconography, the same national myths,
but only the shell remains. The America we celebrate is an
210
illusion. America, the country of my birth, the country that
formed and shaped me, the country of my father, my
father’s father, and his father’s father, stretching back to
the generations of my family that were here for the
country’s founding, is so diminished as to be
unrecognizable. I do not know if this America will return,
even as I pray and work and strive for its return.
The words consent of the governed have become an
empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and
economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by
oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and
economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs,
and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite,
in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of
all the values that were once part of the American system
and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically
destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury,
corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system.
During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized
by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to
success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the
corner.
The government, stripped of any real sovereignty,
provides little more than technical expertise for elites and
corporations that lack moral restraints and a concept of the
common good. America has become a façade. It has
become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions. It
represents a power and a democratic ethic it does not
possess. It seeks to perpetuate prosperity by borrowing
trillions of dollars it can never repay. The absurd folly of
trying to borrow our way out of the worst economic
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collapse since the 1930s is the cruelest of all the recent
tricks played on American citizens. We continue to place
our faith in a phantom economy, one characterized by
fraud and lies, which sustains the wealthiest 10 percent,
Wall Street, and insolvent banks. Debt lever-aging is not
wealth creation. We are vainly trying to return to a bubble
economy, of the sort that once handed us the illusion of
wealth, rather than confront the stark reality that lies
ahead. We are told massive borrowing will create jobs and
re-inflate real estate values and the stock market. We
remain tempted by mirages, by the illusion that we can,
still, all become rich.
The corporate power that holds the government
hostage has appropriated for itself the potent symbols,
language, and patriotic traditions of the state. It purports to
defend freedom, which it defines as the free market, and
liberty, which it defines as the liberty to exploit. It sold us
on the illusion that the free market was the natural
outgrowth of democracy and a force of nature, at least until
the house of cards collapsed and these corporations needed
to fleece the taxpayers to survive. Making that process
even more insidious, the real sources of power remain
hidden. Those who run our largest corporations are largely
anonymous to the mass of the citizens. The anonymity of
corporate forces—an earthly Deus absconditus—makes
them unaccountable. They have the means to hide and to
divert us from examining the decaying structures they have
created. As Karl Marx understood, capitalism when it is
unleashed from government and regulatory control is a
revolutionary force.
Cultures that cannot distinguish between illusion and
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reality die. The dying gasps of all empires, from the Aztecs
to the ancient Romans to the French monarchy and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, have been characterized by a
disconnect between the elites and reality. The elites were
blinded by absurd fantasies of omnipotence and power that
doomed their civilizations. We have been steadily
impoverished by our own power elites—legally,
economically, spiritually, and politically. And unless we
radically reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away
from corporate hands, we will be dragged down by the
dark and turbulent undertow of globalization. In this world
there are only masters and serfs. We are entering an era in
which workers may become serfs, no longer able to earn a
living wage to sustain themselves or their families,
whether in sweatshops in China or the industrial wasteland
of Ohio.
The country’s moral decay is manifested in its physical
decay. It is no coincidence that our infrastructure—roads,
bridges, sewers, airports, trains, mass transit—is
overburdened, outdated, and in dismal repair. It is not so
elsewhere. China opens a new subway system every year.
Europeans travel from London to Paris on high-speed
trains. Meanwhile, America’s antiquated and inefficient
rail system cannot maintain its lumbering cars and aging
tracks. Cities are plagued by broken pipes and sinkholes.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that
collapsing and overwhelmed sewage systems release more
than 40,000 discharges of raw sewage into our drinking
water, streams, and homes each year. The Education
Department found that one-third of our schools are in such
a severe state of disrepair that it “interferes with the
213
delivery of instruction.” A report in the journal Health
Affairs estimates that if the for-profit health-care system is
left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by
Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Half of all
bankruptcies in America occur because families are unable
to pay their medical bills. And staggering unemployment,
bankruptcies, declining real estate prices, and the
shuttering of stores and factories, are sweeping across the
nation.
War and rampant militarism—we now have 761
military bases we maintain around the globe—drains the
lifeblood out of the body politic. The U.S. military spends
more than all other militaries on earth combined. The
official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623
billion, and by 2010 the Pentagon is slated to receive more
than $700 billion, once funding for items such as nuclear
weapons is included in the budget. The next closest
national military budget is China’s at $65 billion,
according to the Central Intelligence Agency. We embrace
the dangerous delusion that we are on a providential
mission to save the rest of the world from itself, to impose
our virtues—which we see as superior to all other virtues
—on others, and that we have a right to do this by force.
This belief has corrupted both Republicans and Democrats.
The wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan are
doomed to futility. We cannot afford them. The rash of
home foreclosures, the mounting job losses, the collapse of
banks and the financial services industry, the poverty
ripping apart the working classes, our crumbling
infrastructure, and the killing of Afghan and Iraqi civilians
by our iron fragmentation bombs converge. The costly
214
forms of death we dispense on one side of the globe are
hollowing us out from the inside at home.
The daily bleeding of thousands of jobs will soon turn
our economic crisis into a political crisis. The street
protests, strikes, and riots that have rattled France, Turkey,
Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and
Iceland will descend on us. It is only a matter of time. And
not much time. When things start to go sour, when the
Obama administration is exposed as a group of mortals
waving a sword at a tidal wave, the United States could
plunge into a long period of precarious social and political
instability.
At no period in American history has our democracy
been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as
real. Our way of life is over. Our profligate consumption is
finished. Our children will never have the standard of
living we had. This is the bleak future. This is reality.
There is little President Obama can do to stop it. It has
been decades in the making. It cannot be undone with $1
trillion or $2 trillion in bailout money. Nor will it be
solved by clinging to the illusions of the past.
How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to
the absurd dreams of a superpower and the fantasies of a
glorious tomorrow, or will we responsibly face our stark,
new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and
rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility,
or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise
up in moments of crisis and panic to offer fantastic visions
of escape? Will we radically transform our system to one
that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common
215
good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the
brutality and technology of our internal security and
surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent?
There were some who saw it coming. The political
philosophers Sheldon S. Wolin, John Ralston Saul, and
Andrew Bacevich, writers such as Noam Chomsky,
Chalmers Johnson, David Korten, and Naomi Klein, and
activists such as Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, and Ralph
Nader warned us about our march of folly. In the
immediate years after the Second World War, a previous
generation of social critics recognized the destructive
potential of the rising corporate state. Books such as David
Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, C. Wright Mills’s The
Power Elite, William H. White’s The Organization Man,
Seymour Mellman’s The Permanent War Economy:
American Capitalism in Decline, Daniel Boorstin’s The
Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, and
Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History have
proved to be prophetic. This generation of writers
remembered what had been lost. They saw the intrinsic
values that were being dismantled. The culture they sought
to protect has largely been obliterated. During the descent,
our media and universities, extensions of corporate and
mass culture, proved intellectually and morally useless.
They did not thwart the decay. We failed to heed the
wisdom of these critics, embracing instead the idea that all
change was a form of progress.
In his book Democracy Incorporated, Wolin, who
taught political philosophy at Berkeley and at Princeton,
uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our
system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical
216
totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or
charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of
the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy,
patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating
internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic
institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular
votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering
amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden
to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state
capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to
pass it. Corporate media control nearly everything we read,
watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It
diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical
totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet
communism, economics was subordinate to politics.
“Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin
writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that
domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.”
“In order to cope with the imperial contingencies of
foreign war and occupation,” according to Wolin,
democracy will alter its character, not only by
assuming new behaviors abroad (e.g., ruthlessness,
indifference to suffering, disregard of local norms, the
inequalities in ruling a subject population) but also by
operating on revised, power-expansive assumptions at
home. It will, more often than not, try to manipulate
the public rather than engage its members in
deliberation. It will demand greater powers and
broader discretion in their use (“state secrets”), a
tighter control over society’s resources, more
summary methods of justice, and less patience for
217
legalities, opposition, and clamor for socioeconomic
reforms.
Imperialism and democracy are incompatible. The
massive resources and allocations devoted to imperialism
mean that democracy inevitably withers and dies.
Democratic states and republics, including ancient Athens
and Rome, that refuse to curb imperial expansion
eviscerate their political systems. Wolin writes:
Imperial politics represents the conquest of
domestic politics and the latter’s conversion into a
crucial element of inverted totalitarianism. It makes
no sense to ask how the democratic citizen could
“participate” substantively in imperial politics; hence
it is not surprising that the subject of empire is taboo
in electoral debates. No major politician or party has
so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an
American empire.
I reached Wolin by phone at his home about twentyfive
miles north of San Francisco. He was a bombardier in
the South Pacific during the Second World War and went
to Harvard after the war for his doctorate. Wolin has
written political science classics such as Politics and
Vision and Tocqueville Between Two Worlds. He is the
author of a series of essays on Augustine of Hippo,
Richard Hooker, David Hume, Martin Luther, John Calvin,
Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and John
Dewey. His voice, however, has faded from public
218
awareness because, as he told me, “it is harder and harder
for people like me to get a public hearing.” He said that
publications such as the New York Review of Books, which
often printed his essays a couple of decades ago, shied
away from his blistering critiques of American empire and
capitalism, his warnings about the subversion and
undermining of democratic institutions and the emergence
of a corporate state. To question the ideology of the free
market became, even among the liberal elite, a form of
heresy.
“The basic systems are going to stay in place; they are
too powerful to be challenged,” Wolin told me when I
asked him about the Obama administration. “This is shown
by the financial bailout. It does not bother with the
structure at all. I don’t think Obama can take on the kind of
military establishment we have developed. This is not to
say that I do not admire him. He is probably the most
intelligent president we have had in decades. I think he is
well-meaning, but he inherits a system of constraints that
make it very difficult to take on these major power
configurations. I do not think he has the appetite for it in
any ideological sense. The corporate structure is not going
to be challenged. There has not been a word from him that
would suggest an attempt to rethink the American
imperium.”
Wolin argues that a failure to dismantle our
overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic
collapse, is likely to result in a full-blown inverted
totalitarianism. He said that without “radical and drastic
remedies” the response to mounting discontent and social
unrest will probably lead to greater state control and
219
repression. There will be, he warned, a huge “expansion of
government power.”
“Our political culture has remained unhelpful in
fostering a democratic consciousness,” he said. “The
political system and its operatives will not be constrained
by popular discontent or uprisings.”
Wolin writes that in inverted totalitarianism, consumer
goods, and a comfortable standard of living, along with a
vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and
appealing diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive.
I asked if the economic collapse and the steady decline in
our standard of living might not, in fact, trigger classical
totalitarianism. Could widespread frustration and poverty
lead the working and middle classes to place their faith in
demagogues, especially those from the Christian Right?
“I think that’s perfectly possible,” he answered. “That
was the experience of the 1930s. There wasn’t just FDR.
There was Huey Long and Father Coughlin. There were
even more extreme movements, including the Klan. The
extent to which those forces can be fed by the downturn
and bleakness is a very real danger. It could become
classical totalitarianism.”
He said the political passivity bred by a culture of
illusion is exploited by demagogues who present
themselves to a submissive population as saviors. They
offer dreams of glory. He warned that “apoliti calness,
even anti-politicalness, will be very powerful elements in
taking us towards a radically dictatorial direction. It
testifies to how thin the commitment to democracy is in
220
the present circumstances. Democracy is not ascendant. It
is not dominant. It is beleaguered. The extent to which
young people have been drawn away from public concerns
and given this extraordinary range of diversions makes it
very likely they could then rally to a demagogue.”
Wolin lamented that the corporate state has
successfully blocked public debate about alternative forms
of power. Corporations determine who gets heard and who
does not, he said. And those, such as Wolin, who critique
corporate power are excluded from the national dialogue.
Pundits on television news programs discuss politics as a
horse race or compare the effectiveness of pseudo-events
staged by candidates. They do not discuss ideas, issues, or
meaningful reform.
“In the 1930s there were all kinds of alternative
understandings, from socialism to more extensive
governmental involvement,” he said. “There was a range
of different approaches. But what I am struck by now is
the narrow range within which palliatives are being
modeled. We are supposed to work with the financial
system. So the people who helped create this system are
put in charge of the solution. There has to be some major
effort to think outside the box.”
“The puzzle to me is the lack of social unrest,” Wolin
said when I asked why we have not yet seen rioting or
protests. He said he worried that popular protests will be
dismissed and ignored by the corporate media. This, he
said, is what happened when tens of thousands protested
the war in Iraq. If protestors are characterized as cranks or
fringe groups, if their voices are never heard, the state will
221
have little trouble suppressing local protests, as happened
during the Democratic and Republican conventions. Antiwar
protests in the 1960s gained momentum, he said, from
their ability to spread their message across the country.
This may not happen now. “The ways

[corporate/governmental authorities]

can isolate protests
and prevent it from [becoming] a contagion are
formidable,” he said.
“My greatest fear is that the Obama administration will
achieve relatively little in terms of structural change,” he
added. “They may at best keep the system going. But there
is a growing pessimism. Every day we hear how much
longer the recession will continue. They are already talking
about beyond next year [into 2011]. The economic
difficulties are more profound than we had guessed and
because of globalization more difficult to deal with. I wish
the political establishment, the parties, and leadership,
would become more aware of the depths of the problem.
They can’t keep throwing money at this. They have to
begin structural changes that involve a very different
approach from a market economy. I don’t think this will
happen.
“I keep asking why and how and when this country
became so conservative,” he went on. “This country once
prided itself on its experimentation and flexibility. It has
become rigid. It is probably the most conservative of all
the advanced countries.”
The American left has crumbled and sold out to a
bankrupt Democratic Party. It has abandoned the working
class, which has no ability to organize and little political
222
clout, especially with labor unions a spent force. The
universities are mills for corporate employees. The media
churn out info-tainment and pollute the airwaves with
fatuous pundits. The Left, he said, no longer has the
capacity to be a counterweight to the corporate state, and if
an extreme right regains momentum there will probably be
very little organized or effective resistance.
“The Left is amorphous,” he said. “I despair over the
Left. Left parties may be small in number in Europe, but
they are a coherent organization that keeps going. Here,
except for Nader’s efforts, we don’t have that. We have a
few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it. It
goes nowhere.”
The decline of American empire began long before the
current economic meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq. It began before the first Gulf War or Ronald
Reagan. It began when we shifted, in the words of the
historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to
an “empire of consumption.” By the end of the Vietnam
War, when the costs of the war ate away at Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil production
began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country
transformed from one that primarily produced to one that
primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a
lifestyle we could no longer afford. We began to use force,
especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst
for cheap oil. The decline has been steady and
uninterrupted since the conclusion of the Second World
War. At the end of the war, we possessed nearly two-thirds
of the world’s gold reserves and more than half of its entire
manufacturing capacity. The United States accounted for
223
one-third of world exports, the foreign trade balance was
in the black, and exports more than doubled imports. Three
decades later, the nation had slipped into a negative trade
balance, imports began to exceed exports, manufacturing
jobs were on the decline, and we began, collectively, to
spend more than we earned. Total public debt is now more
than $11 trillion, or about $36,676 per capita.
The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous
enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the
perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and
globalization. They have dynamited the foundations of our
society.
“The Big Lies are not the pledge of tax cuts, universal
health care, family values restored, or a world rendered
peaceful through forceful demonstrations of American
leadership,” Bacevich wrote in The Limits of Power:
The Big Lies are the truths that remain unspoken:
that freedom has an underside; that nations, like
households, must ultimately live within their means;
that history’s purpose, the subject of so many
confident pronouncements, remains inscrutable.
Above all, there is this: Power is finite. Politicians
pass over matters such as these in silence. As a
consequence, the absence of self-awareness that
forms such an enduring element of the American
character persists.1
The problems we face are structural. The old America
is not coming back. Our financial system was taken
224
hostage and looted by bankers, brokers, and speculators
who told us that the old means of making capital by
producing and manufacturing were outdated. They assured
us money could be made out of money. They insisted that
financial markets could be self-regulating. Like all
financial markets throughout history that have thrown off
oversight and regulation, ours has collapsed. Speculators in
the seventeenth century were hanged. Today they receive
billions in taxpayer dollars and huge bonuses.
The corporate forces that control the state will never
permit real reform. It would mean their extinction. These
corporations, especially the oil and gas industry, will never
allow us to achieve energy independence. That would
devastate their profits. It would wipe out tens of billions of
dollars in weapons contracts. It would cripple the financial
health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to
Blackwater/Xe and render obsolete the existence of U.S.
Central Command. This is the harsh, unspoken reality of
corporate power. The unseen hands of Lockheed Martin,
Boeing, and Northrup Grumman, the nation’s top-three
defense contractors, divided up $69 million in Pentagon
contracts in 2007, the last year for which contracting data
are available. These industries, which have judiciously
spread their parts and supply business throughout the
country, defend the production of weapons systems as vital
for employment. But their leaders are clearly nervous. The
Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), which represents
more than one hundred defense and aerospace
corporations, has an ad campaign with the slogan:
“Aerospace and Defense: The Strength to Lift America.” It
claims its manufacturers contribute $97 billion in exports a
225
year and employ 2 million people, a figure disputed by the
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which puts the number at
472,000 wage and salary workers. But this has not
dampened the promise made by these corporate executives
to help lift the nation out of its economic morass. “Our
industry is ready and able to lead the way out of the
economic crisis,” Fred Downey, an associate vice
president, told the Associated Press. The ads are useful,
but so is the some $149 million a year the industry lavishes
on lobbying firms, according to the Center for
Representative Politics.
Seymour Mellman spent his academic career, which
spanned the Cold War, at Columbia University,
researching, writing, and speaking about the large military
portion of the federal budget. In Pentagon Capitalism he
described the redundancy and costliness of modern
weapons systems—such as the next wave of fighter planes,
missiles, submarines, and aircraft carriers. He said that
high-tech weapons yet to be designed always escalate
spending as new, costlier systems replace the old, which
are often junked.
The United States has become the largest single seller
of arms and munitions on the planet. The defense budget
for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War.
More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to
defense. And so we build Cold War relics such as the $14
billion Virginia-class submarines as well as the stealth
fighters we engineered to evade radar systems the Soviets
never built. We spend $8.9 billion on ICBM missile
defense systems that would be useless in stopping a
shipping container concealing a dirty bomb. The defense
226
industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and
research talent and squander the nation’s resources and
investment capital. These defense industries produce
nothing that is useful for society or the national trade
account. They offer little more than a psychological
security blanket for fearful Americans who want to feel
protected and safe.
The defense industry is a virus. It destroys healthy
economies. We produce sophisticated fighter jets while
Boeing is unable to finish its new commercial plane on
schedule and our automotive industry goes bankrupt. We
sink money into research and development of weapons
systems and starve renewable energy technologies to fight
global warming. Universities are flooded with defenserelated
cash and grants yet struggle to find money for
environmental studies. The massive military spending,
aided by this $3 trillion war, has a social cost. Our bridges
and levees collapse, our schools decay, our real
manufacturing is done overseas by foreign workers, and
our social safety net is taken away. And we are bombarded
with the militarized language of power and strength that
masks our brittle reality.
Mellman coined the term permanent war economy to
describe the American economy. Since the end of the
Second World War, the federal government has spent more
than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military
operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the
government. The military-industrial establishment is
especially lucrative to corporations because it offers a
lavish form of corporate welfare. Defense systems are
usually sold before they are produced, and military
227
industries are permitted to charge the federal government
for huge cost overruns. Huge profits are guaranteed.
Foreign aid is given to countries such as Egypt, which
receives some $3 billion in assistance but is required to
buy American weapons with $1.3 billion of it. The
taxpayers fund the research, development, and building of
weapons systems and then buy them on behalf of foreign
governments. It is a circular system that little resembles
the paradigm of a free-market economy.
There is rarely any accounting to the client (i.e., the
government and people of the United States) if work is
shoddy or produces flawed weapons systems. The U.S.
Coast Guard, in one of many examples, undertook a fiveyear,
$24 billion modernization program called
“Deepwater.” The Coast Guard spent $100 million to
lengthen by thirteen feet the 110-foot Island Class patrol
boats. They shipped the boats to the Bollinger Shipyard
outside of New Orleans. The eight boats, when they
returned, had such severe structural problems that they all
had to be retired from service.
The Pentagon, Mellman noted, is not restricted by the
economic rules of producing goods, selling them for a
profit, then using the profit for further investment and
production. It operates, rather, outside of competitive
markets. It has erased the line between the state and the
corporation, and it subverts the actual economy. It leeches
away the ability of the nation to manufacture useful
products and produce sustainable jobs. Mellman used the
example of the New York City Transit Authority and its
allocation in 2003 of $3 billion to $4 billion for new
subway cars. New York City asked for bids, and no
228
American companies responded. Mellman argued that the
industrial base in America was no longer centered on items
that maintain, improve, or are used to build the nation’s
infrastructure. New York City eventually contracted with
companies in Japan and Canada to build its subway cars.
Mellman estimated that such a contract could have
generated, directly and indirectly, about 32,000 jobs in the
United States. In another instance, of 100 products offered
in the 2003 L.L. Bean catalogue, Mellman found that
ninety-two were imported and only eight were made in the
United States.
The defense industries, like all corporations, rely on
deceptive ad campaigns and lobbyists to perpetuate their
lock on taxpayer money. The late Senator J. William
Fulbright described the reach of the military-industrial
establishment in his 1970 book The Pentagon Propaganda
Machine. Fulbright explained how the Pentagon influenced
public opinion through direct contacts with the public,
Defense Department films, close ties with Hollywood
producers, and use of the commercial media to gain
support for weapons systems. The majority of the military
analysts on television are former military officials, many
employed as consultants to defense industries, a fact they
rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired
four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News,
was, The New York Times reported, at the same time an
employee of Defense Solutions, Inc., a consulting firm. He
profited, the article noted, from the sale of the weapons
systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
he championed over the airwaves.2
229
The grip of corporations on government is not limited
to the defense industry. It has leeched into nearly every
aspect of the economy. The attempt to create a health-care
plan that also conciliates the corporations that profit from
the misery and illnesses of tens of millions of Americans is
naïve, at best, and probably disingenuous. This
conciliation insists that we can coax these corporations,
which are listed on the stock exchange and exist to
maximize profit, to transform themselves into socialservice
agencies that will provide adequate health care for
all Americans.
“Obama offers a false hope,” says Dr. John Geyman,
former chair of family medicine at the University of
Washington and author of Do Not Resuscitate: Why the
Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must
Replace It. “We cannot build on or tweak the present
system. Different states have tried this. The problem is the
private insurance industry itself. It is not as efficient as a
publicly financed system. It fragments risk pools,
skimming off the healthier part of the population and
leaving the rest uninsured or underinsured. Its
administrative and overhead costs are five to eight times
higher than public financing through Medicare. It cares
more about its shareholders than its enrollees or patients. A
family of four now pays about $12,000 a year just in
premiums, which have gone up by 87 percent from 2000 to

1. The insurance industry is pricing itself out of the
   market for an ever-larger part of the population. The
   industry resists regulation. It is unsustainable by present
   trends.”
   230
   Our health-care system is broken. There are some 46
   million Americans without coverage and tens of millions
   with inadequate policies that severely limit what kinds of
   procedures and treatments they can receive. Eighteen
   thousand people die, according to the Institute of
   Medicine, every year because they can’t afford health care.
   “There are at least 25 million Americans who are
   underinsured,” Geyman says. “Whatever coverage they
   have does not come close to covering the actual cost of a
   major illness or accident.”
   The corporations that run our for-profit health-care
   industry would be shut down if single-payer, not-for-profit
   health-care was provided for all Americans. The for-profit
   health-care industry, like the defense industry, has
   vigorously fought to protect itself through campaign
   contributions and lobbying. They have placed profit before
   the common good. A study by Harvard Medical School
   found that national health insurance would save the
   country $350 billion a year. But Medicare does not make
   campaign contributions. The private health-care industries
   do.
   “The private health insurance companies and the
   pharmaceutical industry completely and totally oppose
   national health insurance,” says Stephanie Woolhandler,
   one of the founders of Physicians for a National Health
   Program. “The private health insurance companies would
   go out of business. The pharmaceutical companies are
   afraid that a national health program will, as in Canada, be
   able to negotiate lower drug prices. Canadians pay 40
   231
   percent less for their drugs. We see this on a smaller scale
   in the United States, where the Department of Defense is
   able to negotiate pharmaceutical prices that are 40 percent
   lower.”
   We cannot improve the system by expanding
   government oversight or improve for-profit health care by
   requiring doctors and hospitals to prove they provide
   quality medical services. Proposals to require insurance
   companies to use more income from premiums for patient
   care or link payment with reported quality are unworkable.
   Nor will turning record-keeping from paper to electronic
   data blunt rising costs.
   “There isn’t an enforcement mechanism,” Geyman
   says bluntly. “Most states have been unable to control rates
   or set a cap on rates.”
   “The only way everyone will get insurance is with
   national health insurance,” says Woolhandler, who is a
   professor at Harvard Medical School. “People with
   catastrophic illnesses usually lose their jobs and lose their
   insurance. They often cannot afford the high premiums for
   the insurance they can get when they are unable to work.
   Most families that file for bankruptcy because of medical
   costs had insurance before they got sick. They either lost
   the insurance because they lost their jobs or faced gaps in
   coverage that meant they could not afford medical care.”
   Our health system costs nearly twice as much as
   national programs in countries such as Switzerland. The
   overhead for traditional Medicare is 3 percent, and the
   overhead for the investment-owned companies is 26.5
   232
   percent. A staggering 31 percent of our health-care
   expenditures is spent on administrative costs. Look what
   we get in return. And yet the reality of the health-care
   system is never discussed because corporations, which
   fund the main political parties, do not want it discussed.
   The Democratic Party has been as guilty as the
   Republicans in the abdication of real power to the
   corporate state. It was Bill Clinton who led the Democratic
   Party to the corporate watering trough. Clinton argued that
   the party had to ditch labor unions, no longer a source of
   votes or power, as a political ally. Workers, he insisted,
   would vote Democratic anyway. They had no choice. It
   was better, he argued, to take corporate money and do
   corporate bidding. By the 1990s, the Democratic Party,
   under Clinton’s leadership, had virtual fund-raising parity
   with the Republicans. Today the Democrats raise more.
   The legislation demanded by corporations sold out the
   American worker. This betrayal was accompanied with a
   slick advertising campaign that promoted the laws, used to
   destroy the working class, as the salvation of the American
   worker. The North American Free Trade Agreement was
   peddled by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to
   raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the
   United States, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA would also,
   we were told, stanch Mexican immigration into the United
   States.
   “There will be less illegal immigration because more
   Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying
   home,” President Clinton said in the spring of 1993 as he
   was lobbying for the bill.
   233
   But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the effect
   of reversing every one of Clinton’s rosy predictions. Once
   the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and
   beans grown by Mexican farmers, those farmers had to
   compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United
   States. Many Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At
   least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their
   land since 1994. And guess where many of them went?
   This desperate flight of poor Mexicans into the United
   States is now being exacerbated by large-scale factory
   closures along the border as manufacturers pack up and
   leave Mexico for the cut-rate embrace of China’s
   totalitarian capitalism. But we were assured that goods
   would be cheaper. Workers would be wealthier. Everyone
   would be happier. I am not sure how these contradictory
   things were supposed to happen, but in a sound-bite
   society, reality no longer matters. NAFTA was great if you
   were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.
   Clinton’s welfare reform bill, signed on August 22,
   1996, obliterated the nation’s social safety net. It threw 6
   million people, many of them single mothers, off the
   welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the
   streets without child care, rent subsidies, or continued
   Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis,
   struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an
   hour, or less than $15,000 a year. And these were the lucky
   ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the
   welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed
   Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut
   $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and
   overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor,
   234
   as well as our abandoned mentally ill. We have 2.3 million
   of our citizens behind bars, most of them for nonviolent
   drug offenses. More than one in one hundred adults in the
   United States is incarcerated. The United States, with less
   than 5 percent of the global population, has almost 25
   percent of the world’s prisoners. One in nine black men
   between twenty and thirty-four is behind bars. This has
   effectively decapitated the leadership in the inner cities,
   where African Americans have traditionally had to react
   more quickly to confront social injustices.
   The Clinton administration, led by Lawrence
   Summers, signed into law the Financial Services
   Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped down the
   firewalls that had been established by the 1933 Glass-
   Steagall Act. Designed to prevent the kind of meltdown we
   are now experiencing, Glass-Steagall established the
   Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It set in place
   banking reforms to stop speculators from hijacking the
   financial system. With Glass-Steagall demolished, and the
   passage of NAFTA, the Democrats, led by Clinton,
   tumbled gleefully into bed with corporations and Wall
   Street speculators. They used institutions like Fannie Mae
   and Freddie Mac as a welfare gravy train. And many of the
   architects of this deregulation, economists such as
   Summers, remain in charge of the nation’s economic
   policy.
   “When times are prosperous, we do not mind a modest
   increase in ‘welfare,’” wrote Robert N. Bellah:
   When times are not so prosperous, we think at
   least our successful career will save us and our
   families from failure and despair. We are attracted,
   235
   against our skepticism, to the idea that poverty will be
   alleviated by the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s
   table. . . . Some of us often feel, and most of us
   sometimes feel, that we are only someone if we have
   made it: can look down on those who have not. The
   American dream is often a very private dream of
   being a star, the uniquely successful and admirable
   one, the one who stands out from the crowd of
   ordinary folk, who don’t know how. And since we
   have believed in that dream for a long time and
   worked very hard to make it come true, it is hard for
   us to give it up, even though it contradicts another
   dream that we have—that of living in a society that
   would really be worth living in.”3
   The cost of our empire of illusion is not being paid by
   the corporate titans. It is being paid on the streets of our
   inner cities, in former manufacturing towns, and in
   depressed rural enclaves. This cost transcends declining
   numbers and statistics and speaks the language of human
   misery and pain. Human beings are not commodities. They
   are not goods. They grieve and suffer and feel despair.
   They raise children and struggle to maintain communities.
   The growing class divide is not understood, despite the
   glibness of many in the media, by complicated sets of
   statistics, lines on a graph that chart stocks, or the absurd,
   utopian faith in unregulated globalization and complicated
   trade deals. It is understood in the eyes of a man or woman
   who is no longer making enough money to live with
   dignity and hope.
   236
   Elba Figueroa, forty-seven, lives in Trenton, New
   Jersey. She worked as a nurse’s aide until she got
   Parkinson’s disease. She lost her job. She lost her health
   care. She receives $703 a month in government assistance.
   Her rent alone runs $750 a month. And so she borrows
   money from friends and neighbors to stay in her
   apartment. She laboriously negotiates her wheelchair up
   and down steps and along the sidewalks of Trenton to get
   to soup kitchens and food pantries to eat.
   “Food prices have gone up,” Figueroa says, waiting to
   get inside the food pantry run by the Crisis Ministry of
   Princeton and Trenton. “I don’t have any money. I run out
   of things to eat. I worked until I physically could not work
   anymore. Now I live like this.”
   The pantry occupies a dilapidated, three-story art deco
   building in Old Trenton, the poorest neighborhood in the
   city. The pantry is one of about two dozen charities in the
   city that provide shelter and food to the poor. Those who
   qualify for assistance are permitted to pick up food once a
   month. Clutching pieces of paper that show the number of
   points they have been allotted, they push shopping carts in
   a U-shaped course around the first floor. Every food item
   is assigned a number of points. Points are allotted
   according to the number of people in a household. The
   shelves of the pantry hold bags of rice, jars of peanut
   butter, macaroni and cheese, and cans of beets, corn, and
   peas. Two refrigerated cases have eggs, chickens, fresh
   carrots, and beef hot dogs. “All Fresh Produce 2 pounds =
   1 point,” a sign on the glass door of the refrigerated unit
   reads. Another reads: “1 Dozen EGGS equal 3 protein
   points. Limit of 1 dozen per household.”
   237
   The swelling numbers waiting outside homeless
   shelters and food pantries around the country, many of
   them elderly or single women with children, have grown
   by at least 30 percent over the last year. General welfare
   recipients struggle to survive on $140 a month in cash and
   another $140 in food stamps. This is all many in Trenton
   and other impoverished pockets now have to survive.
   Trenton, a former manufacturing center with a 20 percent
   unemployment rate and a median income of $33,000, is a
   window into our unraveling. And as the government
   squanders taxpayer money in fruitless schemes to prop up
   insolvent banks and investment houses, citizens are thrown
   into the streets without work, a place to live, or enough
   food.
   There are now 36.2 million Americans who cope daily
   with hunger, up by more than 3 million since 2000,
   according to the Food Research and Action Center in
   Washington. The number of people in the worst-off
   category—the hungriest—rose by 40 percent since 2000,
   to nearly 12 million people.
   “We are seeing people we have not seen for a long
   time,” says the Reverend Jarrett Kerbel, director of the
   Crisis Ministry’s food pantry, which supplies food to 1,400
   households in Trenton each month. “We are seeing people
   who haven’t crossed that threshold for five, six, or seven
   years coming back. We are seeing people whose
   unemployment has run out, and they are struggling in that
   gap while they reapply, and, of course, we are seeing the
   usual unemployed. This will be the first real test of [Bill]
   Clinton’s so-called welfare reform.”
   238
   The Crisis Ministry, like many hard-pressed charities,
   is over budget, and food stocks are precariously low.
   Donations are on the decline. There are days when soup
   kitchens in Trenton are shut down because they have no
   food.
   “We collected 170 bags of groceries from a church in
   Princeton, and it was gone in two days,” Kerbel says. “We
   collected 288 bags from a Jewish center in Princeton, and
   it was gone in three days. What you see on the shelves is
   pretty much what we have.”
   States, facing dramatic budget shortfalls, are slashing
   social assistance programs, including Medicaid, social
   services, and education. New Jersey’s shortfall has tripled
   to $1.2 billion and could soar to $5 billion. Tax revenue
   has fallen to $211 million less than projected. States are
   imposing hiring freezes, canceling raises, and cutting back
   on services big and small, from salting and plowing streets
   in winter to heating assistance programs. Unemployment
   insurance funds, especially with the proposed extension of
   benefits, are running out of money.
   Dolores Williams, fifty-seven, sits in the cramped
   waiting room at the Crisis Ministry clutching a numbered
   card, waiting for her number to be called. She has lived in
   a low-income apartment block known as The Kingsbury
   for a year. Two residents, she says, recently jumped to
   their deaths from the nineteenth floor. She had a job at
   Sam’s Club but lost it. No one, she says, is hiring. She is
   desperate.
   239
   She hands me a copy of the Trentonian, a local paper.
   The headline on the front page reads: “Gangster Slammed
   for Bicycle Drive-By.” It is the story of the conviction of a
   man for a fatal drive-by shooting from a bicycle. The paper
   is filled with stories like these, the result of social,
   economic, and moral collapse. Poverty breeds more than
   hunger. It destroys communities. In one Trentonian story,
   a fifty-six-year-old woman is robbed and pistol-whipped in
   the middle of the afternoon. Another article reports the
   plight of four children whose parents had been shot and
   seriously wounded. “Libraries OK Now, but Future Is
   Murky,” a headline reads. Another reads: “Still No Arrests
   in Hooker Slayings.”
   “It is like this every day,” Williams says.
   Corporations are ubiquitous parts of our lives, and
   those that own and run them want them to remain that
   way. We eat corporate food. We buy corporate clothes. We
   drive in corporate cars. We buy our fuel from corporations.
   We borrow from, invest our retirement savings with, and
   take out college loans with corporations and corporate
   banks. We are entertained, informed, and bombarded with
   advertisements by corporations. Many of us work for
   corporations. There are few aspects of life left that have
   not been taken over by corporations, from mail delivery to
   public utilities to our for-profit health-care system. These
   corporations have no loyalty to the country or workers.
   Our impoverishment feeds their profits. And profits, for
   corporations, are all that count.
   240
   The corporation is designed to make money without
   regard to human life, the social good, or the impact of the
   corporation’s activities on the environment. Corporation
   bylaws impose a legal duty on corporate executives to
   make the largest profits possible for shareholders. In the
   2003 documentary film The Corporation by Mark Achbar,
   Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan, management guru Peter
   Drucker tells Bakan: “If you find an executive who wants
   to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast.” And
   William Niskanen, chair of the libertarian Cato Institute,
   says that he would not invest in a company that promoted
   corporate responsibility.
   A corporation that attempts to engage in social
   responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with
   benefit, that protects workers’ rights, that invests its profits
   to limit pollution, that gives consumers better deals, can
   actually be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, an
   investment manager, says in the film: “The corporation is
   an externaliz ing machine, in the same way that a shark is a
   killing machine. There isn’t any question of malevolence
   or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has
   within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for
   which it was designed.”
   Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corporation, the
   world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the
   corporation a “present-day instrument of destruction”
   because of its compulsion to “externalize any cost that an
   unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.”
   “The notion that we can take and take and take and
   take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the
   241
   biosphere to destruction,” Anderson says.
   The film, based on Bakan’s book The Corporation:
   The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, asserts that
   the corporation exhibits many of the traits found in people
   clinically defined as psychopaths. Psychologist Robert
   Hare recites in the film a checklist of psychopathic traits
   and ties them to the behavior of corporations:
   • Callous unconcern for the feelings for others;
   • Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships;
   • Reckless disregard for the safety of others;
   • Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning of
   others for profit;
   • Incapacity to experience guilt:
   • Failure to conform to social norms with respect
   to lawful behavior.
   And yet, under the American legal system,
   corporations have the same legal rights as individuals.
   They make contributions to candidates. They fund 35,000
   lobbyists in Washington and thousands more in state
   capitals to write corporate-friendly legislation and defang
   regulatory agencies. They saturate the airwaves, the
   Internet, newspapers, and magazines with advertisements
   promoting their brands as the friendly face of the
   corporation. They have huge legal teams, tens of thousands
   of employees, and scores of elected officials who ward off
   public intrusions into their affairs or lawsuits. They hold a
   near monopoly on all electronic and printed sources of
   information. A few media giants, such as AOL Time
   Warner, General Electric, Viacom, Disney, and Rupert
   Murdoch’s NewsGroup, control nearly everything we read,
   see, and hear.
   242
   “Private capital tends to become concentrated in [a]
   few hands, partly because of competition among the
   capitalists, and partly because technological development
   and the increasing division of labor encourage the
   formation of larger units of production at the expense of
   the smaller ones,” Albert Einstein wrote in 1949 in the
   Monthly Review in explaining why he was a socialist:
   The result of these developments is an oligarchy
   of private capital the enormous power of which
   cannot be effectively checked even by a
   democratically organized political society. This is true
   since the members of legislative bodies are selected
   by political parties, largely financed or otherwise
   influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical
   purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature.
   The consequence is that the representatives of the
   people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests
   of the underprivileged sections of the population.
   Moreover, under existing conditions, private
   capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly,
   the main sources of information (press, radio,
   education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed
   in most cases quite impossible, for the individual
   citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make
   intelligent use of his political rights.4
   The growing desperation across the United States is
   unleashing not simply a recession—we have been in a
   243
   recession for some time now—but rather a depression
   unlike anything we have seen since the 1930s. It has
   provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low
   wages without unions or benefits. This is excellent news if
   you are a corporation. It is very bad news if you are a
   worker. For the bottom 90 percent of Americans, annual
   income has been on a slow, steady decline for three
   decades. The majority of that sector’s workers had an
   average annual income that peaked at $33,000 in 1973. By
   2005, according to David Cay Johnston in his book Free
   Lunch, it had fallen to a bit more than $29,000 in adjusted
   dollars, despite three decades of economic expansion. And
   where did that money go? Ask Exxon Mobil, the biggest
   U.S. oil and gas company, which made a $10.9 billion
   profit in the first quarter of 2007. Or better yet, ask Exxon
   Mobil Corporation Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
   Rex Tillerson, whose compensation rose nearly 18 percent
   to $21.7 million in 2007, when the oil company pulled in
   the largest profit ever for a U.S. company. His take-home
   pay package included $1.75 million in salary, a $3.36
   million bonus, and $16.1 million in stock and option
   awards, according to a company filing with the U.S.
   Securities and Exchange Commission. He also received
   nearly $430,000 in other compensation, including
   $229,331 for personal security and $41,122 for use of the
   company aircraft. In addition to his pay package, Tillerson
   received more than $7.6 million from exercising options
   and stock awards during the year. Exxon Mobil earned
   $40.61 billion in 2007, up 3 percent from the previous
   year. But Tillerson’s 2007 pay was not even the highest
   mark for the U.S. oil and gas industry. Occidental
   Petroleum Corporation Chairman and CEO Ray Irani made
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   $33.6 million, and Anadarko Petroleum Corporation chief
   James Hackett took in $26.7 million over the same period.
   For each dollar earned in 2005, the top 10 percent
   received 48.5 cents. That was the top tenth’s greatest share
   of the income pie, Johnston writes, since 1929, just before
   the Roaring ’20s collapsed in the Great Depression. And
   within the top 10 percent, those who made more than
   $100,000, nearly all the gains went to the top tenth of 1
   percent, people like Tillerson, Irani, or Hackett, who made
   at least $1.7 million that year. And until we have real
   election reform, until we make it possible to run for
   national office without candidates kissing the rings of
   Tillersons, Iranis, and Hacketts to get hundreds of millions
   of dollars, this cannibalization of America will continue.
   Our elites manipulate statistics and data to foster
   illusions of growth and prosperity. They refuse to admit
   they have lost control since to lose control is to concede
   failure. They contribute, instead, to the collective denial of
   reality by insisting that another multibillion-dollar bailout
   or government loan will prop up the dying edifice. The
   well-paid television pundits and news celebrities, the
   economists and the banking and financial sector leaders,
   see the world from inside the comfort of the corporate box.
   They are loyal to the corporate state. They cling to the
   corporation and the corporate structure. It is known. It is
   safe. It is paternal. It is the system.
   Our government is being wrecked by corporations,
   which now get 40 percent of federal discretionary
   spending. More than 800,000 jobs once handled by
   government employees have been outsourced to
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   corporations, a move that has not only further empowered
   our shadow corporate government but also helped destroy
   federal workforce unions. Management of federal prisons,
   the management of regulatory and scientific reviews, the
   processing or denial of Freedom of Information requests,
   interrogating prisoners, and running the world’s largest
   mercenary army in Iraq—all this has become corporate.
   And these corporations, in a perverse arrangement, make
   their money directly off of the American citizen. This
   devil’s deal is an expansion of the corporate welfare
   enjoyed by the defense industry.
   Halliburton in 2003 was given a no-bid and noncompete
   $7 billion contract to repair Iraq’s oil fields, as
   well as the power to oversee and control Iraq’s entire oil
   production. This has now become $130 billion in contract
   awards to Halliburton. And flush with taxpayer dollars,
   what has Halliburton done? It has made sure only thirty-six
   of its 143 subsidiaries are incorporated in the United States
   and 107 subsidiaries (or 75 percent) are incorporated in
   thirty different countries. This arrangement allows
   Halliburton to lower its tax liability on foreign income by
   establishing a “controlled foreign corporation” and
   subsidiaries inside low-tax, or no-tax, countries used as tax
   havens. Thus the corporations take our money. They
   squander it. They cleverly evade taxation. And our
   corporate government not only funds them but protects
   them.
   The financial and political disparities between our
   oligarchy and the working class have created a new global
   serfdom. Credit Suisse analysts estimate that the number of
   subprime foreclosures in the United States by the end of
   246
   2012 will total 1,390,000. If that estimate is correct, 12.7
   percent of all residential borrowers in the United States
   will be forced out of their homes.
   The bailout for banks and financial firms, who feel no
   compunction to account for taxpayer funds, pulled the plug
   on the New Deal. The Great Society is now gasping for air,
   mortally wounded, coughing up blood. Power no longer
   lies with the citizens of the United States, who, with ratios
   of 100 to 1, pleaded with their representatives in
   Washington not to loot the national treasury to bail out
   Wall Street investment firms. Power lies with the
   corporations. These corporations, not we, pick who runs
   for president, Congress, judgeships, and most state
   legislatures. You cannot, in most instances, be a viable
   candidate without their blessing and money. These
   corporations, including the Commission on Presidential
   Debates (a private organization), determine who gets to
   speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge,
   from universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care to
   Wall Street bailouts to NAFTA. If you do not follow the
   corporate script, you become as marginal and invisible as
   Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, or Cynthia McKinney.
   This is why most Democrats opposed Pennsylvania
   Democratic House Representative John Murtha’s call for
   immediate withdrawal from Iraq—something that would
   dry up profits for companies like Halliburton—and
   supported continued funding for the war. It is why most
   voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act. It is why the party
   opposed an amendment that was part of a bankruptcy bill
   that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30
   percent. It is why corporatist politicians opposed a bill that
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   would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872,
   which allows mineral companies to plunder federal land
   for profit. It is why they did not back the single-payer
   health-care bill House Resolution 676, sponsored by
   Representatives Kucinich and John Conyers. It is why so
   many politicians advocate nuclear power. It is why many
   backed the class-action “reform” bill—the Class Action
   Fairness Act (CAFA)—that was part of a large lobbying
   effort by financial firms. CAFA would effectively shut
   down state courts as a venue to hear most class-action
   lawsuits. Workers, under CAFA, would no longer have
   redress in many of the courts where these cases have a
   chance of defying powerful corporations. CAFA moves
   these cases into corporate-friendly federal courts
   dominated by Republican judges.
   The assault on the American working class—an assault
   that has devastated members of my own family—is nearly
   complete. In the past three years, nearly one in five U.S.
   workers was laid off. Among workers laid off from fulltime
   work, roughly one-fourth were earning less than
   $40,000 annually. There are whole sections of the United
   States that now resemble the developing world. There has
   been a Weimarization of the American working class. And
   the assault on the middle class is now under way. Anything
   that can be put on software—from finance to architecture
   to engineering—can and is being outsourced to workers in
   countries such as India or China, who accept pay that is a
   fraction of their Western counterparts, and without
   benefits. And both the Republican and Democratic parties,
   beholden to corporations for money and power, have
   allowed this to happen.
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   Over the past few decades, we have watched the rise of
   a powerful web of interlocking corporate entities, a
   network of arrangements within subsectors, industries, or
   other partial jurisdictions to diminish and often abolish
   outside control and oversight. These corporations have
   neutralized national, state, and judicial authority. The
   corporate state, begun under Ronald Reagan and pushed
   forward by every president since, has destroyed the public
   and private institutions that protected workers and
   safeguarded citizens. Only 7.8 percent of workers in the
   private sector are unionized. This is about the same
   percentage as in the early 1900s. There are 50 million
   Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of
   Americans in a category called “near poverty.”
   We hear little about these stories of pain and
   dislocation. We are diverted by spectacle and pseudoevents.
   We are fed illusions. We are given comforting
   myths—the core of popular culture—that exalt our nation
   and ourselves, even though ours is a time of collapse, and
   moral and political squalor. We are bombarded with
   useless trivia and celebrity gossip despite the valiant
   efforts of a few remaining newspapers such as the New
   York Times and the Washington Post, along with
   Democracy Now, National Public Radio, Pacifica, and Jim
   Lehrer of the Public Broadcasting Service. These
   organizations still practice journalism as an ethical pursuit
   on behalf of the common good, but they are a beleaguered
   minority. The Federal Communications Commission, in an
   example of how far our standards have fallen, defines
   television shows such as Fox’s celebrity gossip program
   TMZ and the Christian Broadcast Network’s 700 Club as
   249
   “bona fide newscasts.” The economist Charlotte Twight
   calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and diversion,
   in which we get to vote on American Idol or be elevated to
   celebrity status through reality television programs,
   “participatory fascism.”
   Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled,
   entertained, and informed by courtiers—and the media has
   evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the
   Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts,
   at least those with prominent public platforms, are
   courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of
   political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is
   smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose
   behind it is deception.
   Television journalism is largely a farce. Celebrity
   reporters, mas querading as journalists, make millions a
   year and give a platform to the powerful and the famous so
   they can spin, equivocate, and lie. Sitting in a studio,
   putting on makeup, and chatting with Joe Biden, Hillary
   Clinton, or Lawrence Summers has little to do with
   journalism. If you are a true journalist, you should start to
   worry if you make $5 million a year. No journalist has a
   comfortable, cozy relationship with the powerful. No
   journalist believes that serving the powerful is a primary
   part of his or her calling. Those in power fear and dislike
   journalists—and they should. Ask Amy Goodman,
   Seymour Hersh, Walter Pincus, Robert Scheer, or David
   Cay Johnston.
   The comedian Jon Stewart, who hosts the popular
   Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central, has
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   become one of the most visible and influential media
   figures in America. In an interview with Jim Cramer, who
   hosts a show called Mad Money on CNBC, Stewart asked
   his guest why, during all the years he advised viewers
   about investments, he never questioned the mendacious
   claims from CEOs and banks that unleashed the financial
   meltdown—or warned viewers about the shady tactics of
   short-term selling and massive debt leverag ing used to
   make fortunes for CEOs out of the retirement and savings
   accounts of ordinary Americans.5
   STEWART: This thing was ten years in the
   making. . . . The idea that you could have on the guys
   from Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and guys that
   had leveraged 35 to 1 and then blame mortgage
   holders, that’s insane. . . .
   CRAMER: I always wish that people would
   come in and swear themselves in before they come on
   the show. I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show.
   It’s very painful. I don’t have subpoena power. . . .
   STEWART: You knew what the banks were
   doing and were touting it for months and months. The
   entire network was.
   CRAMER: But Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman
   Brothers, called me in—he called me in when the
   stock was at forty—because he was saying: “Look, I
   thought the stock was wrong, thought it was in the
   wrong place”—he brings me in and lies to me, lies to
   me, lies to me.
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   STEWART [feigning shock]: The CEO of a
   company lied to you? CRAMER: Shocking.
   STEWART: But isn’t that financial reporting?
   What do you think is the role of CNBC? . . .
   CRAMER: I didn’t think that Bear Stearns would
   evaporate overnight. I knew the people who ran it. I
   thought they were honest. That was my mistake. I
   really did. I thought they were honest. Did I get taken
   in because I knew them before? Maybe, to some
   degree. . . . It’s difficult to have a reporter say, “I just
   came from an interview with Hank Paulson, and he
   lied his darn-fool head off.” It’s difficult. I think it
   challenges the boundaries .
   STEWART: But what is the responsibility of the
   people who cover Wall Street? . . . I’m under the
   assumption, and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but
   I’m under the assumption that you don’t just take
   their word at face value. That you actually then go
   around and try to figure it out. [Applause.]
   Cramer, like most television and many print reporters,
   gives an uncritical forum to the powerful. At the same
   time, they pretend they have vetted and investigated the
   claims made by those in power. They play the role on
   television of journalists. It is a dirty quid pro quo. The
   media get access to the elite as long as the media faithfully
   report what the elite wants reported. The moment that quid
   pro quo breaks down, reporters—real reporters—are cast
   into the wilderness and denied access.
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   The behavior of a Jim Cramer, as Glenn Greenwald
   pointed out in an article on Salon.com, mirrors that of the
   reporters who covered the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Day
   after day, news organizations as diverse as the New York
   Times, CNN, and the three major television networks
   amplified lies fed to them by the elite as if they were facts.
   They served the power elite, as Cramer and most of those
   on television do, rather than the public.
   In Bill Moyer’s 2007 PBS documentary Buying the
   War, Moyers asked Meet the Press host Tim Russert why
   he had passed on these lies without vetting them—and
   even more damaging, he contrasted Russert’s work with
   that of Bob Simon of CBS, who had made a few phone
   calls and had quickly learned that the administration’s prowar
   leaks, so crucial in fanning public and political support
   for going to war, were bogus. Moyers focused on a story,
   given to the New York Times by Vice President Dick
   Cheney’s office, that appeared on the front page of the
   paper the Sunday morning the vice president was also a
   guest on Meet the Press.6 Moyers began by setting up a
   video clip of Cheney’s performance:
   BILL MOYERS: Quoting anonymous
   administration officials, the Times reported that
   Saddam Hussein had launched a worldwide hunt for
   materials to make an atomic bomb using specially
   designed aluminum tubes.
   Moyers then ran the clip of Cheney on Meet the Press
   the same morning the Times story appeared:
   253
   CHENEY: . . . Tubes. There’s a story in the New
   York Times this morning, this is—and I want to
   attribute this to the Times. I don’t want to talk about
   obviously specific intelligence sources, but—
   Jonathan Landay, a reporter who had written news
   stories at the time questioning Cheney’s prior assertions
   that Saddam Hussein had been seeking to acquire nuclear
   weapons, gave us the sneaky reason the White House had
   leaked the information—specifically so Cheney could
   discuss previously top-secret information on national TV.
   Even though there was no corroboration of that
   information (and never would be, since it was inaccurate),
   Cheney could now speak of it publically as if it were fact.
   “Now,” said Landay, “ordinarily, information like the
   aluminum tubes wouldn’t appear. It was top-secret
   intelligence, and the Vice President and the National
   Security Advisor would not be allowed to talk about this
   on the Sunday talk shows. But, it appeared that morning in
   the New York Times and, therefore, they were able to talk
   about it.”
   Moyers went back to the clip of the Cheney
   performance:
   CHENEY: It’s now public that, in fact, he has
   been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to
   intercept to prevent him from acquiring through this
   particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are
   necessary to build a centrifuge, and the centrifuge is
   required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it
   into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have
   254
   to have in order to build a bomb.
   Moyers, in the studio, asked Bob Simon of CBS what
   he thought of Cheney’s actions:
   MOYERS: Did you see that performance?
   BOB SIMON: I did.
   MOYERS: What did you think?
   SIMON: I thought it was remarkable.
   MOYERS: Why?
   SIMON: Remarkable. You leak a story, and then
   you quote the story. I mean, that’s a remarkable thing
   to do. . . .
   Moyers continued the video clip, with Meet the Press
   host Russert asking a question that appears to accept,
   credulously and uncritically, the very statement Cheney
   had just made.
   TIM RUSSERT [TO CHENEY]: What
   specifically has [Saddam] obtained that you believe
   will enhance his nuclear development program?
   Moyers, back in the studio, asked Russert, who was
   with him, why he had not been more incisive and skeptical
   255
   with his questions, especially with material that was so
   unprecedented and potentially explosive:
   MOYERS: Was it just a coincidence in your
   mind that Cheney came on your show and others went
   on the other Sunday shows, the very morning that that
   story appeared?
   TIM RUSSERT: I don’t know. The New York
   Times is a better judge of that than I am.
   MOYERS: No one tipped you that it was going
   to happen? RUSSERT: No, no. I mean—
   MOYERS: The Cheney office didn’t leak to you
   that “there’s gonna be a big story”?
   RUSSERT: No. No. I mean, I don’t have the—
   this is, you know—on Meet the Press, people come
   on and there are no ground rules. We can ask any
   question we want. I did not know about the aluminum
   tubes story until I read it in the New York Times.
   MOYERS: Critics point to September 8, 2002,
   and to your show in particular, as the classic case of
   how the press and the government became
   inseparable. Someone in the administration plants a
   dramatic story in the New York Times. And then the
   Vice President comes on your show and points to the
   New York Times. It’s a circular, self-confirming leak.
   RUSSERT: I don’t know how Judith Miller and
   Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources
   were. It was a front-page story of the New York
   256
   Times. When Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice and Vice
   President Cheney and others came up that Sunday
   morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly
   that. My concern was, is that there were concerns
   expressed by other government officials. And to this
   day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to
   them.
   Moyers then told the audience, “Bob Simon didn’t wait
   for the phone to ring,” and returned to his conversation
   with Simon of CBS.
   MOYERS [to Bob Simon}: You said a moment
   ago when we started talking to people who knew
   about aluminum tubes. What people—who were you
   talking to?
   SIMON: We were talking to people—to scientists
   —to scientists and to researchers, and to people who
   had been investigating Iraq from the start.
   MOYERS: Would these people have been
   available to any reporter who called, or were they
   exclusive sources for 60 Minutes?
   SIMON: No, I think that many of them would
   have been available to any reporter who called.
   MOYERS: And you just picked up the phone?
   SIMON: Just picked up the phone.
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   MOYERS: Talked to them?
   SIMON: Talked to them and then went down
   with the cameras. . . .
   Walter Pincus of the Washington Post suggested that
   Russert’s failure indicated a larger failure of many media
   figures: “More and more, in the media, become, I think,
   common carriers of administration statements, and critics
   of the administration. And we’ve sort of given up being
   independent on our own.”7
   Russert, like Cramer, when exposed as complicit in the
   dissemination of misinformation, attempted to portray
   himself as an innocent victim, as did New York Times
   reporter Judy Miller, who, along with her colleague
   Michael Gordon, worked largely as stenographers for the
   Bush White House during the propaganda campaign to
   invade Iraq. Once the administration claims justifying the
   war had been exposed as falsehoods, Miller quipped that
   she was “only as good as my sources.” This logic upends
   the traditional role of reporting, which should always begin
   with the assumption that those in power have an agenda
   and are rarely bound to the truth. All governments lie, as I.
   F. Stone pointed out, and it is the job of the journalist to do
   the hard, tedious reporting to expose these lies. It is the job
   of courtiers to feed off the scraps tossed to them by the
   powerful and serve the interests of the power elite.
   Cramer continues to serve his elite masters by lashing
   258
   out at government attempts to make the financial system
   accountable. He has repeatedly characterized President
   Obama and Democrats in Congress as Russian communists
   intent on “rampant wealth destruction.” He has referred to
   Obama as a “Bolshevik” who is “taking cues from Lenin.”
   He has also used terms such as “Marx,” “comrades,”
   “Soviet,” “Winter Palace,” and “Politburo” in reference to
   Democrats and asked whether House Speaker Nancy
   Pelosi is the “general secretary of the Communist Party.”
   On the March 3, 2009, edition of NBC’s Today, Cramer
   attacked Obama’s purported “radical agenda” and claimed
   that “this is the most, greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen
   by a president.” Statements like these from courtiers like
   Cramer will grow in intensity as the economic morass
   deepens and the government is forced to be increasingly
   interventionist, including the possible nationalization of
   many banks.
   The most egregious lie is the pretense that these people
   function as reporters, that they actually report on our
   behalf. It is not one or two reporters or television hosts
   who are corrupt. The media institutions are corrupt. Many
   media workers, especially those based in Washington,
   work shamelessly for our elites. In the weeks before the
   occupation of Iraq, media workers were too busy posturing
   as red-blooded American patriots to report. They rarely
   challenged the steady assault by the Bush White House
   against our civil liberties and the trashing of our
   Constitution. The role of courtiers is to parrot official
   propaganda. Courtiers do not defy the elite or question the
   structure of the corporate state. The corporations, in return,
   employ them and promote them as celebrities. The elite
   259
   allow the courtiers into their inner circle. As Saul points
   out, no class of courtiers, from the eunuchs behind the
   Manchus in the nineteenth century to the Baghdad caliphs
   of the Abbasid caliphate, has ever transformed itself into a
   responsible and socially productive class. Courtiers are
   hedonists of power.
   The rise of courtiers extends beyond the press. Elected
   officials govern under the pretense that they serve the
   public, while, with a few exceptions, actually working on
   behalf of corporations. In 2008, a Congress with a majority
   of Democrats passed the FISA bill, which provides
   immunity for the telecommunications companies that
   cooperated with the National Security Agency’s illegal
   surveillance over the previous six years. Such a bill
   endangers the work of journalists, human rights workers,
   crusading lawyers, and whistle-blowers who attempt to
   expose abuses the government seeks to hide. This bill
   means we will never know the extent of the Bush White
   House’s violation of our civil liberties. Worst of all, since
   the bill gives the U.S. government a license to eavesdrop
   on our phone calls and e-mails, it effectively demolishes
   our right to privacy. These private communications can be
   stored indefinitely and disseminated, not just to the U.S.
   government but to other governments as well. The bill will
   make it possible for those in power to identify and silence
   anyone who dares to make information public that defies
   the official narrative or exposes fraud or abuse of power.
   But the telecommunications corporations, which spent
   some $15 million in lobbying fees, wanted the bill passed,
   so it was passed.
   Being a courtier requires agility and eloquence. The
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   most talented of them should be credited as persuasive
   actors. They entertain us. They make us feel good. They
   persuade us; they are our friends. They are the smiley faces
   of a corporate state that has hijacked the government.
   When the corporations make their iron demands, these
   courtiers drop to their knees. They placate the
   telecommunications companies that want to be protected
   from lawsuits. They permit oil and gas companies to rake
   in obscene profits and keep in place the vast subsidies of
   corporate welfare doled out by the state. They allow our
   profit-driven health-care system to leave the uninsured and
   underinsured to suffer and die without proper care.
   We trust courtiers wearing face powder who deceive us
   in the name of journalism. We trust courtiers in our
   political parties who promise to fight for our interests and
   then pass bill after bill to further corporate fraud and
   abuse. We confuse how we are made to feel about
   courtiers with real information, facts, and knowledge. This
   is the danger of a culture awash in pseudo-events. The
   Democratic Party refused to impeach Bush and Cheney. It
   allows the government to spy on us without warrants or
   cause. It funnels billions in taxpayer dollars to investment
   firms that committed fraud. And it tells us it cares about
   the protection of our civil rights and democracy. It is a
   form of collective abuse. And, as so often happens in the
   weird pathology of victim and victimizer, we keep coming
   back for more.
   Our political and economic decline took place because
   of a corporate drive for massive deregulation, the repeal of
   antitrust laws, and the country’s radical transformation
   from a manufacturing economy to an economy of
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   consumption. Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized this
   danger. He sent a message to Congress on April 29, 1938,
   titled “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb
   Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power.”
   In it he wrote:
   the first truth is that the liberty of democracy is
   not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a
   point where it becomes stronger than the democratic
   state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—
   ownership of Government by an individual, by a
   group, or by any other controlling private power. The
   second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not
   safe if its business system does not provide
   employment and produce and distribute goods in such
   a way to sustain an acceptable standard of living.8
   The rise of the corporate state has grave political
   consequences, as we saw in Italy and Germany in the early
   part of the twentieth century. Antitrust laws not only
   regulate and control the marketplace. They also serve as
   bulwarks to protect democracy. And now that they are
   gone, now that we have a state run by and on behalf of
   corporations, we must expect inevitable and terrifying
   consequences.
   As the pressure mounts, as this despair and
   impoverishment reach into larger and larger segments of
   the populace, the mechanisms of corporate and
   government control are being bolstered to prevent civil
   unrest and instability. The emergence of the corporate state
   always means the emergence of the security state. This is
   262
   why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act
   (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the
   practice of “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of
   warrantless wiretapping on American citizens, and the
   refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable
   ballot-counting. It is all part of a package. It comes
   together. The motive behind these measures is not to fight
   terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and
   maintain internal control.
   Hints of our brave new world seeped out when the
   director of national intelligence, retired admiral Dennis
   Blair, testified in February and March 2009 before the
   Senate Intelligence Committee. He warned that the
   deepening economic crisis posed perhaps our gravest
   threat to stability and national security. It could trigger, he
   said, a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and
   ’30s. “The primary near-term security concern of the
   United States is the global economic crisis and its
   geopolitical implications,” Blair told the Senate:
   The crisis has been ongoing for over a year, and
   economists are divided over whether and when we
   could hit bottom. Some even fear that the recession
   could further deepen and reach the level of the Great
   Depression. Of course, all of us recall the dramatic
   political consequences wrought by the economic
   turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, the
   instability, and high levels of violent extremism.9
   The road ahead is grim. The United Nations’
   International Labor Organization estimates that some 50
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   million workers will lose their jobs worldwide in 2009.
   The collapse had already seen close to 4 million lost jobs
   in the United States by mid-2009. The International
   Monetary Fund’s prediction for global economic growth in
   2009 is 0.5 percent—the worst since the Second World
   War. There were 2.3 million properties in the United States
   that received a default notice or were repossessed in 2008.
   And this number is set to rise, especially as vacant
   commercial real estate begins to be foreclosed. About
   20,000 major global banks collapsed, were sold, or were
   nationalized in 2008. An estimated 62,000 U.S. companies
   are expected to shut down in 2009.
   We have few tools left to dig our way out. The
   manufacturing sector in the United States has been
   dismantled by globalization. Consumers, thanks to credit
   card companies and easy lines of credit, are $14 trillion in
   debt. The government has spent, lent, or guaranteed $12.8
   trillion toward the crisis, most of it borrowed or printed in
   the form of new money. It is borrowing to fund our wars in
   Afghanistan and Iraq. And no one states the obvious: We
   will never be able to pay these loans back. We are
   supposed to spend our way out of the crisis and maintain
   our part of the grand imperial project on credit. We are
   supposed to bring back the illusion of wealth created by
   the bubble economy. There is no coherent and realistic
   plan, one built around our severe limitations, to stanch the
   bleeding or ameliorate the mounting deprivations we will
   suffer as citizens. Contrast this with the national security
   state’s preparations to crush potential civil unrest, and you
   get a glimpse of the future.
   Senator Frank Church, as chairman of the Select
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   Committee on Intelligence in 1975, investigated the
   government’s massive and highly secretive National
   Security Agency. He was alarmed at the ability of the state
   to intrude into private lives. He wrote when he finished his
   investigation:
   That capability at any time could be turned around
   on the American people and no American would have
   any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor
   everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it
   doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If
   this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator
   ever took charge in this country, the technological
   capacity that the intelligence community has given
   the government could enable it to impose total
   tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back,
   because the most careful effort to combine together in
   resistance to the government, no matter how privately
   it was done, is within the reach of the government to
   know. Such is the capability of this technology. . . . I
   don’t want to see this country ever go across the
   bridge. I know the capability that is there to make
   tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that
   this agency and all agencies that possess this
   technology operate within the law and under proper
   supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss.
   That is the abyss from which there is no return. . . . 10
   At the time Senator Church made this statement, the
   NSA was not authorized to spy on American citizens.
   Today it is.
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   The military can be ordered by the president into any
   neighborhood, any town or suburb, capture a citizen and
   hold him or her in prison without charge. The executive
   branch can do this under the Authorization for Use of
   Military Force, passed by Congress after 9/11, that gives
   the president the power to “use all necessary and
   appropriate force” against anyone involved in planning,
   aiding, or carrying out terror attacks. And if the president
   can declare American citizens living inside the United
   States to be enemy combatants and order them stripped of
   constitutional rights, which he effectively can under this
   authorization, what does this mean for us? How long can
   we be held without charge? Without lawyers? Without
   access to the outside world?
   The specter of social unrest was raised at the Strategic
   Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in
   November 2008, in a monograph by Nathan Freier titled
   Known Unknowns: Unconventional “Strategic Shocks” in
   Defense Strategy Development. The military must be
   prepared, Freier warned, for a “violent, strategic
   dislocation inside the United States” that could be
   provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse,” “purposeful
   domestic resistance,” “pervasive public health
   emergencies,” or “loss of functioning political and legal
   order.” The resulting “widespread civil violence,” the
   document said, “would force the defense establishment to
   reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic
   order and human security.”11
   “An American government and defense establishment
   lulled into complacency by a long-secure domestic order
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   would be forced to rapidly divest some or most external
   security commitments in order to address rapidly
   expanding human insecurity at home,” it went on.
   “Under the most extreme circumstances, this might
   include use of military force against hostile groups inside
   the United States. Further, [the Department of Defense]
   would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the
   continuity of political authority in a multistate or
   nationwide civil conflict or disturbance,” the document
   read.
   In plain English, this translates into the imposition of
   martial law and a de facto government run and
   administered by the Department of Defense. They are
   considering it. So should we.
   Blair warned the Senate that “roughly a quarter of the
   countries in the world have already experienced low-level
   instability such as government changes because of the
   current slowdown.” He noted that the “bulk of anti-state
   demonstrations” internationally have been seen in Europe
   and the former Soviet Union, but this did not mean they
   could not spread to the United States. He told the senators
   that the collapse of the global financial system is “likely to
   produce a wave of economic crises in emerging market
   nations over the next year.” He added that “much of Latin
   America, former Soviet Union states, and sub-Saharan
   Africa lack sufficient cash reserves, access to international
   aid or credit, or other coping mechanism.”
   “When those growth rates go down, my gut tells me
   that there are going to be problems coming out of that, and
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   we’re looking for that,” he said. He referred to “statistical
   modeling” showing that “economic crises increase the risk
   of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a oneto
   two-year period.”
   Blair articulated the newest narrative of fear. As the
   economic unraveling accelerates, we will be told it is not
   the bearded Islamic extremists who threaten us most,
   although those in power will drag them out of the
   Halloween closet whenever they need to give us an exotic
   shock, but instead the domestic riffraff, environmentalists,
   anarchists, unions, right-wing militias, and enraged
   members of our dispossessed working class. Crime, as it
   always does in times of poverty and turmoil, will grow.
   Those who oppose the iron fist of the state security
   apparatus will be lumped together in slick, corporate news
   reports with the growing criminal underclass.
   The destruction the corporate state has wrought has
   been masked by lies. The consumer price index (CPI), for
   example, used by the government to measure inflation, is
   meaningless. To keep the official inflation figures low, the
   government has been substituting basic products they once
   tracked to check for inflation with ones that do not rise
   very much in price. This trick has kept the cost-of-living
   increases tied to the CPI artificially low. The disconnect
   between what we are told and what is actually true is
   worthy of the deceit practiced in the old East Germany.
   The New York Times’ consumer reporter, W. P. Dunleavy,
   wrote that her groceries now cost $587 a month, up from
   $400 one year earlier. This is a 40 percent increase.
   California economist John Williams, who runs an
   organization called Shadow Statistics, contends that if
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   Washington still used the CPI measurements applied back
   in the 1970s, inflation would be about 10 percent.
   The advantage of false statistics to the corporations is
   huge. An artificial inflation rate, one far lower than the real
   rate, keeps down equitable interest payments on bank
   accounts and certificates of deposit. It masks the
   deterioration of the American economy. The fabricated
   statistics allow corporations and the corporate state to walk
   away from obligations tied to real adjustments for
   inflation. These statistics mean that less is paid out in
   Social Security and pensions. These statistics reduce the
   interest on the multitrillion-dollar debt. Corporations never
   have to pay real cost-of-living increases to their
   employees.
   The lies employed to camouflage the economic decline
   have been in place for several decades. President Ronald
   Reagan included 1.5 million U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force,
   and Marine service personnel with the civilian work force
   to magically reduce the nation’s unemployment rate by 2
   percent. President Clinton decided that those who had
   given up looking for work, or those who wanted full-time
   jobs but could find only part-time employment, were no
   longer to be counted as unemployed. His trick disappeared
   some 5 million unemployed from the official
   unemployment rolls. If you work more than twenty-one
   hours a week—most low-wage workers at places like Wal-
   Mart average twenty-eight hours a week—you are counted
   as employed, although your real wages put you below the
   poverty line. Our actual unemployment rate, when you
   include those who have stopped looking for work and
   those who can find only poorly paid part-time jobs, is not
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   8.5 percent but 15 percent. A sixth of the country was
   effectively unemployed in May of 2009. And we were
   shedding jobs at a faster rate than in the months after the
   1929 crash.
   Individualism is touted as the core value of American
   culture, and yet most of us meekly submit, as we are
   supposed to, to the tyranny of the corporate state. We
   define ourselves as a democracy, and meanwhile voting
   rates in national elections are tepid, and voting on local
   issues is often in the single digits. Our elected officials
   base their decisions not on the public good but on the
   possibility of campaign contributions and lucrative
   employment on leaving office. Our corporate elite tell us
   government is part of the problem and the markets should
   regulate themselves—and then that same elite plunders the
   U.S. Treasury when they trash the economy. We insist we
   are a market economy, one based on the principles of
   capitalism and free trade, and yet the single largest sectors
   of international trade are armaments and weapons systems.
   There is a vast and growing disconnect between what we
   say we believe and what we do. We are blinded,
   enchanted, and finally enslaved by illusion.
   It was the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia that gave
   us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the collapse of the Weimar
   Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the
   breakdown in czarist Russia that opened the door for
   Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Financial collapses
   lead to political extremism. The rage bubbling up from our
   impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages
   a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. I spent two
   years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian
   270
   Right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and
   the War on America. I visited former manufacturing towns
   where for many the end of the world is no longer an
   abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability have
   plunged the working classes into profound personal and
   economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of
   the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian
   Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fiction
   of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we rapidly reenfranchise
   our dispossessed workers into the economy,
   unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.
   In his book Collapse, economist Jared Diamond lists
   five factors that can lead to social decay, including a
   failure to understand and to prevent causes of
   environmental damage; climate change; depredations by
   hostile neighbors; the inability of friendly neighbors to
   continue trade; and finally, how the society itself deals
   with the problems raised by the first four factors. A
   common failing involved in the last item is the dislocation
   between the short-term interests of elites and the longerterm
   interests of the societies the elites dominate and
   exploit.
   His last point is crucial. Corruption, mismanagement,
   and political inertia by an elite, which is beyond the reach
   of the law, almost always result in widespread cynicism,
   disengagement, apathy, and finally rage. Those who suffer
   the consequences of this mismanagement lose any loyalty
   to the nation and increasingly nurse fantasies of violent
   revenge. The concept of the common good, mocked by the
   behavior of the privileged classes, disappears. Nothing
   matters. It is only about “Me.”
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   As the public begins to grasp the depth of the betrayal
   and abuse by our ruling class; as the Democratic and
   Republican parties expose themselves as craven tools of
   our corporate state; as savings accounts, college funds, and
   retirement plans become worthless; as unemployment
   skyrockets and home values go up in smoke, we must
   prepare for the political resurgence of reinvigorated rightwing
   radicals including those within the Christian Right.
   The engine of the Christian Right— as is true for all
   radical movements—is personal and economic despair.
   And despair, in an age of increasing shortages, poverty and
   hopelessness, will be one of our few surplus commodities.
   But our collapse is more than an economic and
   political collapse. It is a crisis of faith. The capitalist
   ideology of unlimited growth has failed. It did not take into
   account the massive depletion of the world’s resources,
   from fossil fuels to clean water to fish stocks to soil
   erosion, as well as overpopulation, global warming, and
   climate change. It failed to understand that the huge,
   unregulated international flows of capital and assault on
   manufacturing would wreck the global financial system.
   An overvalued dollar (which could soon deflate); wild
   tech; stock and housing financial bubbles; unchecked
   greed; the decimation of our manufacturing sector; the
   empowerment of an oligarchic class; the corruption of our
   political elite; the impoverishment of workers; a bloated
   military and defense budget; and unrestrained credit binges
   are consequences of a failed ideology and conspire to bring
   us down. The financial crisis may soon become a currency
   crisis. This second shock will threaten our financial
   viability. We let the market rule. Now we are paying for it.
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   In his book The Great Transformation, written in 1944,
   Karl Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences—the
   depressions, wars, and totalitarianism—that grow out of a
   so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that
   “fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society
   that refused to function.” He warned that a financial
   system always devolved, without heavy government
   control, into a Mafia capitalism—and a Mafia political
   system—which is a good description of our power elite.
   Polanyi, who fled fascist Europe in 1933 and
   eventually taught at Columbia University, wrote that a
   self-regulating market turned human beings and the natural
   environment into commodities, a situation that ensures the
   destruction of both society and the natural environment.
   He decried the free market’s assumption that nature and
   human beings are objects whose worth is determined by
   the market. He reminded us that a society that no longer
   recognizes that nature and human life have a sacred
   dimension, an intrinsic worth beyond monetary value,
   ultimately commits collective suicide. Such societies
   cannibalize themselves until they die. Speculative excesses
   and growing inequality, he wrote, always destroy the
   foundation for a continued prosperity.
   We face an environmental meltdown as well as an
   economic meltdown. This would not have surprised
   Polanyi. Polar ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising.
   The planet is warming at an alarming rate. Droughts are
   destroying croplands. Russia’s northern coastline has
   begun producing huge quantities of toxic methane gas.
   Scientists with the International Siberian Shelf Study
   273
   describe what they saw along the coastline recently as
   “methane chimneys” reaching from the sea floor to the
   ocean’s surface. Methane, locked in the permafrost of
   Arctic land-masses, is being released at an alarming rate as
   average Arctic temperatures rise. Methane is a greenhouse
   gas twenty-five times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
   The release of millions of tons of it will only accelerate the
   rate of global warming.
   Those who run our corporate state have fought
   environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have
   fought financial regulation. They are responsible, as
   Polanyi predicted, for our personal impoverishment and
   the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain
   addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas, and automobile
   industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil
   fuels. Species are vanishing. The great human migration
   from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as
   temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will
   become uninhabitable. The continued release of large
   quantities of methane, some scientists have warned, could
   asphyxiate the human species. NASA climate scientist
   James Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of
   carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the
   atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the
   biosphere on the “planet on which civilization developed
   and to which life on earth is adapted.” To halt this selfimmolation,
   he has determined, the world must stop
   burning coal by 2030—and the industrialized world well
   before that—if we are to have any hope of ever getting the
   planet back down below that 350 number. And in the
   United States coal supplies half of our electricity.
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   Democracy is not an outgrowth of free markets.
   Democracy and capitalism are antagonistic entities.
   Democracy, like individualism, is based not on personal
   gain but on self-sacrifice. A functioning democracy must
   often defy the economic interests of elites on behalf of
   citizens, but this is not happening. The corporate managers
   and government officials trying to fix the economic
   meltdown are pouring money and resources into the
   financial sector because they are trained only to manage
   and sustain the established system, not change it.
   Saul writes that the first three aims of the corporatist
   movement in Germany, Italy, and France during the 1920s,
   those that went on to become part of the fascist experience,
   were “to shift power directly to economic and social
   interest groups, to push entrepreneurial initiative in areas
   normally reserved for public bodies,” and to “obliterate the
   boundaries between public and private interest—that is,
   challenge the idea of the public interest.” It sounds
   depressingly familiar.
   The working class, which has desperately borrowed
   money to stay afloat as real wages have dropped, now face
   years, maybe decades, of stagnant or declining incomes
   without access to new credit. The national treasury,
   meanwhile, is being drained on behalf of speculative
   commercial interests. The government—the only
   institution citizens have that is big enough and powerful
   enough to protect their rights—is becoming weaker, more
   anemic, and increasingly unable to help the mass of
   Americans who are embarking on a period of deprivation
   and suffering unseen in this country since the 1930s.
   275
   Creative destruction, Joseph Schumpeter understood, is the
   essential fact about unfettered capitalism.
   “You are going to see the biggest waste, fraud, and
   abuse in American history,” Ralph Nader told me when I
   asked about the bailouts. “Not only is it wrongly directed,
   not only does it deal with the perpetrators instead of the
   people who were victimized, but they don’t have a
   delivery system of any honesty and efficiency. The Justice
   Department is overwhelmed. It doesn’t have a tenth of the
   prosecutors, the investigators, the auditors, the attorneys
   needed to deal with the previous corporate crime wave
   before the bailout started last September. It is especially
   unable to deal with the rapacious ravaging of this new
   money by these corporate recipients. You can see it
   already. The corporations haven’t lent it. They have used
   some of it for acquisitions or to preserve their bonuses or
   their dividends. As long as they know they are not going to
   jail, and they don’t see many newspaper reports about their
   colleagues going to jail, they don’t care. It is total
   impunity. If they quit, they quit with a golden parachute.
   Even [General Motors CEO Rick] Wagoner is taking away
   $21 million.”
   There are a handful of former executives who have
   conceded that the bailouts are a waste. The former
   chairman of American International Group Inc. (AIG),
   Maurice R. Greenberg, told the House Oversight and
   Government Reform Committee that the effort to prop up
   the firm with $170 billion has “failed.” He said the
   company should be restructured. AIG, he said, would have
   been better off filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection
   instead of seeking government help.
   276
   “These are signs of hyper-decay,” Ralph Nader said
   from his office in Washington. “You spend this kind of
   money and do not know if it will work.”
   “Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to
   bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,” he
   added. “That is the end stage. If they no longer have
   socialism to save them, then we are into feudalism. We are
   into private police, gated communities, and serfs with a
   twenty-first-century nomenclature.”
   We will not be able to raise another $3 or $4 trillion,
   especially with our commitments now totaling more than
   $12 trillion, to fix the mess. It was not long ago that such
   profligate government spending was unthinkable. There
   was an $800 billion limit placed on the Federal Reserve.
   The economic stimulus and the bailouts will not bring back
   our casino capitalism. And as the meltdown shows no
   signs of abating, and the bailouts show no sign of working,
   the recklessness and desperation of our capitalist overlords
   have increased. The cost to the working and middle class is
   becoming unsustainable. The Fed reported that households
   lost $5.1 trillion, or 9 percent, of their wealth in the last
   three months of 2008, the most ever in a single quarter in
   the fifty-seven-year history of record-keeping by the
   central bank. For the full year, household wealth dropped
   $11.1 trillion, or about 18 percent. These figures did not
   record the decline of investments in the stock market,
   which has probably erased trillions more in the country’s
   collective net worth.
   The bullet to our head, inevitable if we do not radically
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   alter course, will be sudden. We have been borrowing at
   the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last ten
   years, and at some point it has to stop. The moment China,
   the oil-rich states, and other international investors stop
   buying U.S. Treasury Bonds, the dollar will become junk.
   Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar
   Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed
   and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and
   psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the
   Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of protofascist
   misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons
   like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk-show hosts, whom we
   naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with
   promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the
   ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and
   expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered
   enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft,
   abandoned outside the gates, and at the mercy of the
   security state.
   Lenin said that the best way to destroy the capitalist
   system was to debauch its currency. As our financial crisis
   unravels, and our currency becomes worthless, there will
   be a loss of confidence in the traditional mechanisms that
   regulate society. When money becomes worthless, so does
   government. All traditional standards and beliefs are
   shattered in a severe economic crisis. The moral order is
   turned upside down. The honest and industrious are wiped
   out while the gangsters, profiteers, and speculators walk
   away with millions. There are signs that this has begun.
   Look at Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld. Many of his
   investors lost everything and yet he pocketed $485 million.
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   An economic collapse does not mean only the degradation
   of trade and commerce, food shortages, bankruptcies, and
   unemployment. It also means the systematic dynamiting of
   the foundations of a society. I watched this happen in
   Yugoslavia. I watch it now in the United States.
   The free market and globalization, promised as routes
   to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as two parts
   of a con game. But this exposure does not mean our
   corporate masters will disappear. Totalitarianism, as
   George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith
   as an age of schizophrenia. “A society becomes totalitarian
   when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial,” Orwell
   wrote. “That is when its ruling class has lost its function
   but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”12
   They have engaged in massive fraud. Force is all they have
   left.
   There are powerful corporate entities, fearful of losing
   their influence and wealth, arrayed against us. They are
   waiting for a moment to strike, a national crisis that will
   allow them, in the name of national security and moral
   renewal, to take complete control. The tools are in place.
   These antidemocratic forces, which will seek to make an
   alliance with the radical Christian Right and other
   extremists, will use fear, chaos, the hatred for the ruling
   elites, and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to
   impose draconian controls to extinguish our democracy.
   And while they do it, they will be waving the American
   flag, chanting patriotic slogans, promising law and order,
   and clutching the Christian cross. By then, exhausted and
   broken, we may have lost the power to resist.
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   In Joseph Roth’s book The Emperor’s Tomb, which
   chronicles the decay of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he
   wrote that at the very end of the empire, even the
   streetlights longed for morning so that they could be
   extinguished. The undercurrent of a world like ours, where
   people are reduced to objects and where there are no
   higher values, where national myths collapse, triggers a
   similar longing for annihilation and a moral decline into
   hedonism and giddy, communal madness. The earth is
   strewn with the ruins of powerful civilizations that
   decayed—Egypt, Persia, the Mayan empires, Rome,
   Byzantium, and the Mughal, Ottoman, and Chinese
   kingdoms. Not all died for the same reasons. Rome, for
   example, never faced a depletion of natural resources or
   environmental catastrophe. But they all, at a certain point,
   were taken over by a bankrupt and corrupt elite. This elite,
   squandering resources and pillaging the state, was no
   longer able to muster internal allegiance and cohesiveness.
   These empires died morally. The leaders, in the final
   period of decay, increasingly had to rely on armed
   mercenaries, as we do in Iraq and Afghanistan, because
   citizens would no longer serve in the military. They
   descended into orgies of self-indulgence, surrendered their
   civic and emotional lives to the glitter, excitement, and
   spectacle of the arena, became politically apathetic, and
   collapsed.
   The more we sever ourselves from a literate, printbased
   world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of
   ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images,
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   fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence, the
   more we are destined to implode. As the collapse
   continues and our suffering mounts, we yearn, like World
   Wrestling Entertainment fans, or those who confuse
   pornography with love, for the comfort, reassurance, and
   beauty of illusion. The illusion makes us feel good. It is its
   own reality. And the lonely Cassandras who speak the
   truth about our misguided imperial wars, the economic
   meltdown, or the imminent danger of multiple pollutions
   and soaring overpopulation, are drowned out by arenas full
   of excited fans chanting, “Slut! Slut! Slut!” or television
   audiences chanting, “JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!”
   The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered
   population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts
   itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns,
   gossip, and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a
   dying civilization. The most ominous cultural divide lies
   between those who chase after these manufactured
   illusions, and those who are able to puncture the illusion
   and confront reality. More than the divides of race, class,
   or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or
   nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been
   carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and
   antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same
   language and cannot communicate. This is the divide
   between a literate, marginalized minority and those who
   have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture.
   Mass culture is a Peter Pan culture. It tells us that if we
   close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have
   faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in
   miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that
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   we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our
   lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural
   retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive
   psychologists, Hollywood, or Christian preachers, is a
   form of magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and
   debt into wealth. It turns the destruction of our
   manufacturing base into an opportunity for growth. It turns
   alienation and anxiety into a cheerful conformity. It turns a
   nation that wages illegal wars and administers off-shore
   penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the
   greatest democracy on earth.
   The world that awaits us will be painful and difficult.
   We will be dragged back to realism, to the understanding
   that we cannot mold and shape reality according to human
   desires, or we will slide into despotism. We will learn to
   adjust our lifestyles radically, to cope with diminished
   resources, environmental damage, and a contracting
   economy, as well as our decline as a military power, or we
   will die clinging to our illusions. These are the stark
   choices before us.
   But even if we fail to halt the decline, it will not be the
   end of hope. The forces we face may be powerful and
   ruthless. They may have the capacity to plunge us into a
   terrifying dystopia, one where we will see our freedoms
   curtailed and widespread economic deprivation. But no
   tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love.
   And this love—unorganized, irrational, often propelling us
   to carry out acts of compassion that jeopardize our
   existence—is deeply subversive to those in power. Love,
   which appears in small, blind acts of kindness, manifested
   itself even in the horror of the Nazi death camps, in the
   282
   killing fields of Cambodia, in the Soviet gulags, and in the
   genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda.
   The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote of the
   power of these acts in his masterpiece Life and Fate:
   I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in
   the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is
   impotent in the struggle against man. The
   powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is
   the secret of its immortality. It can never be
   conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the
   more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is
   impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers,
   reformers, social and political leaders are impotent
   before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.
   Human history is not the battle of good struggling
   to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil
   struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.
   But if what is human in human beings has not been
   destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.13
   What was a scrap of paper to a commander of the
   Khmer Rouge or Joseph Stalin? What was a scrap of paper
   to the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, extinguished in
   Stalin’s reign of terror, or the Hungarian poet Miklós
   Radnóti, on whose body, found in a mass grave, were
   poems that condemned his fascist killers and are today
   taught to schoolchildren in Hungary? “I’m a poet who’s fit
   for the stake’s fire,” Radnóti had scribbled, “because to the
   truth he’s testified. One, who knows that the snow is white,
   283
   the blood is red, as is the poppy, and the poppy’s furry
   stalk is green. One, whom they will kill in the end, because
   he himself has never killed.” What were the teachings of
   Jesus to the Roman consuls or the sayings of Buddha to the
   feudal warlords? Whose words, decades later, do we heed:
   the pompous and grandiose rants of the dictator and the
   politician, or the gentle reminders that call us back to the
   human?
   I am not naïve about violence, tyranny, and war. I have
   seen enough of human cruelty. But I have also seen in
   conflict after conflict that we underestimate the power of
   love, the power of a Salvadorian archbishop, even though
   he was assassinated, to defy the killing, the power of a
   mayor in a small Balkan village to halt the attacks on his
   Muslim neighbors. These champions of the sacred, even
   long after they are gone, become invisible witnesses to
   those who follow, condemning through their courage their
   own executioners. They may be few in number but their
   voices ripple outward over time. The mediocrities who
   mask their feelings of worthlessness and emptiness behind
   the façade of power and illusion, who seek to make us
   serve their perverse ideologies, fear most those who speak
   in the language of love. They seek, as others have sought
   throughout human history, to silence these lonely voices,
   and yet these voices always rise in magnificent defiance.
   All ages, all cultures, and all religions produce those who
   challenge the oppressor and fight for the oppressed. Ours
   is no exception. The ability to stand as “an ironic point of
   light” that “flashes out wherever the just exchange their
   messages,” is the ability to sustain a life of meaning. It is
   to understand, as Cyrano said at the end of his life, “I
   284
   know, you will leave me with nothing—neither the laurel
   nor the rose. Take it all then! There is one possession I
   take with me from this place. Tonight when I stand before
   God—and bow low to him, so that my forehead brushes
   his footstool, the firmament—I will stand again and
   proudly show Him that one pure possession—which I have
   never ceased to cherish or to share with all—”
   Our culture of illusion is, at its core, a culture of death.
   It will die and leave little of value behind. It was Sparta
   that celebrated raw militarism, discipline, obedience, and
   power, but it was Athenian art and philosophy that echoed
   down the ages to enlighten new worlds, including our own.
   Hope exists. It will always exist. It will not come through
   structures or institutions, nor will it come through nationstates,
   but it will prevail, even if we as distinct individuals
   and civilizations vanish. The power of love is greater than
   the power of death. It cannot be controlled. It is about
   sacrifice for the other—something nearly every parent
   understands—rather than exploitation. It is about honoring
   the sacred. And power elites have for millennia tried and
   failed to crush the force of love. Blind and dumb,
   indifferent to the siren calls of celebrity, unable to bow
   before illusions, defying the lust for power, love constantly
   rises up to remind a wayward society of what is real and
   what is illusion. Love will endure, even if it appears
   darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the
   wreckage that remains.
   285
   Notes
   CHAPTER 1: THE ILLUSION OF LITERACY
   1 John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards (New York:
   Vintage, 1992), 460.
   2 The World Wrestling Entertainment phenomenon is
   immense, both internationally and within the United
   States. WWE is consistently in the top ten daily searches
   globally on Yahoo’s Buzz Index and other search engines.
   The official site of World Wrestling Entertainment,
   http://www.wwe.com, receives within the United States
   alone a monthly average of 7.7 million unique visitors and
   a daily average of 517,000 unique visitors, according to a
   six-month survey done by Omniture SiteCatalyst from
   October 2006 to March 2007. Within the United States it
   had a monthly average of 214.4 million page views, a daily
   average of 7 million page views, a monthly average of
   16.2 million video streams, and an average of 524,000
   video streams per day. The WWE audience, according to a
   study conducted in May 2006 by Forrester Consulting, is
   86 percent male, with an average age of twenty-four.
   Thirty-six percent are ages twelve to seventeen, and 40
   percent are ages eighteen to thirty-four. Forty-one percent
   are students. Sixty-two percent of the males eighteen to
   thirty-four are employed full time. According to
   http://www.quantcast.com, 81 percent access wwe.com
   daily or several times a week. Fifty-seven percent have no
   college education. Twenty-six percent have an annual
   income of $30,000 or less, and another 30 percent make
   between $30,000 and $60,000. Fifty-one percent have
   286
   children aged six to seventeen. Sixty-four percent are
   Caucasian, 14 percent African American, and 16 percent
   Hispanic.
   3 Neal Gabler, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment
   Conquered Reality (New York Vintage, 2000), 238.
   4 Paul A. Cantor, “Pro Wrestling and the End of
   History,” The Weekly Standard 5:3 (4 Oct. 1999): 17-22.
   5 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-
   Events in America (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 240.
   6 Ibid., 198.
   7 Gabler, Life: The Movie, 4.
   8 James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers (New York:
   Bantam Books, 2000), 518-519.
   9 Antonino D’Ambrosio, A Heartbeat and a Guitar:
   Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (New York:
   Nation Books, 2009).
   10 William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” The
   Chronicle of Higher Education 55:21 (30 Jan. 2009): B6.
   11 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
   Mechanical Reproduction.”
   http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.12 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (Oxford: Oxford
   University Press, 1956), 74.
   287
   13 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy
   (Transactions Publishers, London, 1957), 151.
   14 Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books,
   2001), 33-34.
   15 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
   Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York:
   Penguin, 1985), 80.
   16 Emily Eakin, “Greeting Big Brother with Open
   Arms,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2004: B9.
   17 Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
   Genius (New York: Vintage, 2001), 200-202.
   18 Ibid., 209.
   19 Ibid., 214.
   20 Ibid., 235-237.
   21 Cited in Gordon Burn, “Have I Broken Your
   Heart?” The Guardian, March 7 2009.
   http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/gordonburn.
   22 My account of Jade Goody is informed by Burn,
   “Have I Broken Your Heart?”
   http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/gordonburn.
   23 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between
   Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
   288
   (New York: Penguin, 1993), 207.
   24 ABC News, Living in the Shadows: Illiteracy in
   America, Feb. 25, 2008.
   25 Statistics were obtained from the following sources:
   National Institute for Literacy, National Center for Adult
   Literacy, The Literacy Company, U.S. Census Bureau.
   26 “Canada’s Shame,” The National, Canadian
   Broadcasting Company, May 24, 2006.
   27 Cited in Frank Füredi, Where Have all the
   Intellectuals Gone? (New York: Continuum, 2004), 73.
   28 Benjamin DeMott, “Junk Politics: A Voter’s Guide
   to the Post-Literate Election,” Harper’s Magazine
   (November 2003): 36.
   29 Boorstin, The Image, 61.
   30 Ibid., 255.
   31 Gabler, Life: The Movie, 205.
   32 Boorstin, The Image, 36.
   33 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free
   Press, 1997), 59.
   34 Cited in Gabler, Life: The Movie, 197.
   35 Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture
   & Agriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1977), 24.
   289
   CHAPTER 2: THE ILLUSION OF LOVE
   1 “The Directors,” Adult Video News (2005), 54.
   2 Gag Factor.
   http://www.gagfactor.com/gagfactordotcom.html,
   accessed, April 5, 2009.
   3 Postman, Amusing Ourselves, 3-4.
   4 Marc Cooper, The Last Honest Place in America
   (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 42.
   5 Robert Jensen, Getting Off: Pornography and the
   End of Masculinity (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press,
   2007), 126.
   6 Bill Margold, quoted in Robert J. Stoller and I.S.
   Levin, Coming Attractions: The Making of an X-Rated
   Video (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993),
   31.
   7 Gail Dines, “The White Man’s Burden: Gonzo
   Pornography and the Construction of Black Masculinity,”
   Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 18 (2006), 296-297.
   8 Ibid., 297.
   9 Scott Simon, host. “Promoting Healthcare for the
   Porn Industry,” Weekend Edition. National Public Radio,
   Dec. 8, 2007.
   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?
   storyId=17044239.
   290
   10 Lubben, Shelley, and Jersey Jaxin. “Jersey Jaxin on
   Why She Quit Porn,” YouTube. Accessed Aug. 12, 2007.
   Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACLK5ccKfM
   and Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
   v=U1NObcJV8r0&feature=related.
   CHAPTER 3: THE ILLUSION OF LOVE
   1 Theodor Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz”
   (http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/auschwitz/AdornoEducation.10.
   2 Ibid., 6.
   3 Charles Ting, “The Dormitories at U.C. Berkeley.” in
   Nader, Laura, et al., Controlling Processes: Selected
   Essays, 1994-2005. The Kroeber Anthropological Society
   Papers 92/93 (2005): 197-229.
   4 Charles Schwartz, Home page.
   http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schwrtz/.
   5 Schwartz, “Good Morning, Regents.”
   UniversityProbe.org. http://universityprobe.
   org/2009/02/good-morning-regents/.
   6 Josh Keller, “For Berkeley’s Sports Endowment, a
   Goal of $1 Billion.” The Chronicle of Higher Education,
   Jan. 23, 2009.
   http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i20/20a01301.htm.
   7 Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 110.
   291
   8 Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (New York: The
   Free Press, 1995), 47.
   9 Mills, The Power Elite, 321.
   10 Joseph A. Soares, The Power of Privilege: Yale and
   America’s Elite Universities (Stanford, Calf.: Stanford
   University Press, 2007),
   http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/11/soares; Daniel
   Golden, The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling
   Class Buys Its Way into Colleges—and Who Gets Left
   Outside the Gates (New York: Random House, 2006),
   http://insidehigh- ered.com/news/2006/09/05/admit.
   11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-
   Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
   This is the last line of the book. The original publication
   was in the Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 1921: “Woven
   man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”
   12 William Deresiewicz, “The Disadvantages of an
   Elite Education,” The American Scholar (Summer 2008).
   http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages ofan-
   elite-education.
   13 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London:
   Transaction Publishers, 1957), 229.
   14 Ibid., 230.
   15 Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards, 121.
   16 Cited in Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, 230.
   292
   17 Deresiewicz, “Disadvantages.”
   18 William Hazlitt, “Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft,” in
   Collected Works, Vol. 2 (London: J.M. Dent, 1902), 155.
   19 Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors: The
   Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New
   York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 91.
   20 Andrew J. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York,
   Oxford University Press, rpt. Pittsburgh: University Of
   Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 837; Richard Teller Crane, The
   Utility of all Kinds of Higher Schooling (Chicago, H.O.
   Shepard, 1909), 106.
   21 Donoghue, The Last Professors, 3.
   22 David L. Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the
   Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education
   (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 243.
   23 Donoghue, The Last Professors, 56.
   24 Quoted in full in Condé Nast Portfolio.com, “Daily
   Brief: Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and F——You,”
   Oct. 17, 2008. http://www.portfolio.com/v
   iews/blogs/daily-br ief/2008/10/17/hedge-fund-managergood
   bye-and-f-you.
   25 Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” 6-7.
   CHAPTER 4: THE ILLUSION OF
   HAPPINESS
   293
   1 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Grafton
   Books, 1977), 99- 100.
   2 Randall Colvin and Jack Block, “Do Positive
   Illusions Foster Mental Health? An Examination of the
   Taylor and Brown Formulation,” Psychological Bulletin
   116:1 (July 1994), 3-20.
   3 One group that applies positive psychology to
   business practices, and touts the worldwide goodness this
   spreads, posts this laudatory message sent to the group in
   July 2004 by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan: “I
   would like to commend you for your innovative
   methodology of ‘apprecia tive inquiry’ and to thank you
   for introducing it to the United Nations. Without this, it
   would have been very difficult, perhaps even impossible,
   to constructively engage so many leaders of business, civil
   society, and government.” Business as an Agent of World
   Benefit (BAWB) Global Forum.
   http://www.bawbglobalforum.org/content/view/47/115.
   4 Anthropologist Laura Nader strongly disagrees with
   the assertion that positive emotions and health go together.
   5 Huxley, Brave New World, 99-100.
   6 Mihály Csikszentmihály, “Brain Channels Thinker of
   the Year Award: 2000: Mihály Csikszentmihály, ‘Flow
   Theory.’” Brain Channels. Accessed April 5, 2009.
   http://www.brainchannels.com/thinker/mihaly.html; Jamie
   Chamberlin, “Reaching ‘Flow’ to Optimize Work and
   Play,” American Psychological Association Monitor 29:7
   (July 1998), http://www.apa.org/monitor/ju198/joy.html.
   294
   7 Csikszentmihály, “‘Flow Theory.’”
   8 E. Diener, C. Nickerson, R. E. Lucas, and E.
   Sandvik, “Dispositional Affect and Job Outcomes,” Social
   Indicators Research 59 (2002), 229-259.
   9 S. E. Taylor, “Adjustment to Threatening Events: A
   Theory of Cognitive Adaptation, American Psychologist
   38 (1983), 1161-1173. Quoted in Colvin and Block, “Do
   Positive Illusions Foster Mental Health?”
   10 C. Peterson, “The Future of Optimism,” American
   Psychologist 55:1 (Jan. 2000), 4-55.
   11 D. A. Jopling, “‘Take away the life-lie . . . ’ Positive
   illusions and creative self deception.” Philosophical
   Psychology 9 (1996), 525-544.
   12 Chris Cochran. “The Production of Cultural
   Difference: Paradigm Enforcement in Cultural
   Psychology,” Psychology at Berkeley Spring 2008.
   13 “In Good We Trust,” in Mother Jones,
   January/February 2009.
   http://www.motherjones.com/media/2009/02/books-goodwe-
   trust.
   14 Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson, “Peaceful
   Parenting,” The Greater Good 4:3 (Winter 2007-2008).
   http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/2007winter/HartHodson.html
   15 Richard S. Lazarus, “Author’s Response: The
   295
   Lazarus Manifesto for Positive Psychology,”
   Psychological Inquiry 14:2 (2003), 176.
   16 “The New Industrial Relations,” Business Week
   2687 (May 11, 1981): 84-89.
   17 David Noble, America by Design (Oxford: Oxford
   University. Press, 1977).
   18 Frank M. Gyrna Jr., Quality Circles: A Team
   Approach to Problem Solving (New York: American
   Management Associations, 1981); Neal Q. Herrick, Joint
   Management and Employee Participation: Labor and
   Management at the Crossroads (San Francisco: Jossey-
   Bass, 1990); Paul Bernstein, Workplace Democratization:
   Its Internal Dynamics (New Brunswick: Transaction
   Books, 1976); Robert S. Ozaki. Human Capitalism: The
   Japanese Enterprise System as World Model (Tokyo:
   Kodansha International, 1991).
   19 Roberto González, “Brave New Workplace:
   Cooperation, Control, and the New Industrial Relations,”
   Controlling Processes: Selected Essays, 1994-2005.
   Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 92/93 (2005),
   113.
   20 Gyrna, Quality Circles, 53.
   21 Ozaki, Human Capitalism, 169.
   22 Ibid.
   23 Satoshi Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane: An
   296
   Insider’s Account of Life in a Japanese Auto Factory,
   Tatsuru Akimoto, ed. and trans. (New York: Pantheon
   Books, 1982), 71.
   24 Ibid., 24, 30.
   25 Ibid., 109-110.
   26 González, “Brave New Workplace,” 109.
   27 Noble, America by Design, 274-278.
   28 Ibid., 290.
   29 Ibid., 259-260.
   30 González, “Brave New Workplace,” 111.
   31 Ibid., 118.
   32 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 124.
   33 Eric Schmitt, “Pentagon Managers Find ‘Quality
   Time’ on a Brainstorming Retreat,” The New York Times,
   Jan. 11, 1994: A7; González, “Brave New Workplace,”
   107.
   34 J. P. Womack, D. T. Jones, and D. Roos. The
   Machine That Changed the World (New York: Harper
   Collins, 1990), 200-203.
   35 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 75.
   36 R. Ofshe and Margaret T. Singer, “Attacks on
   297
   Peripheral versus Central Elements of Self and the Impact
   of Thought Reforming Techniques,” Cultic Studies
   Journal 3:1 (1986): 6.
   37 González, “Brave New Workplace,” 116.
   38 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 48.
   39 Alejandro Lugo, “Cultural Production and
   Reproduction in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico: Tropes at Play
   among Maquiladora Workers,” Cultural Anthropology,
   5:2. (1990): 178-180.
   40 Kamata, Japan in the Passing Lane, 156-157.
   41 Mike Parker, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to
   QWL (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 19; González,
   “Brave New Workplace,” 115.
   42 Parker, Inside the Circle, 20; González, “Brave
   New Workplace,” 116.
   43 P. C. Thompson, “U.S. Offered Unusual Class on
   Diversity,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 1995: 34.
   44 R. E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market
   Democracies (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
   2000). Quoted in Barbara S. Held, “The Negative Side of
   Positive Psychology,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology
   44:1 (Winter 2004), 9, 24.
   CHAPTER 5: THE ILLUSION OF AMERICA
   1 Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power (New
   298
   York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 172.
   2 David Barstow, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-
   Media Complex,” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2008: 172.
   3 Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley and Los
   Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1985), 285.
   4 Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” Monthly Review
   (May 1949). Rpt. In
   http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Einstein.htm.
   5 Cited in Glenn Greenwald, “There’s Nothing Unique
   About Jim Cramer,” Salon 13 (March 2009),
   www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/13/cramer.
   6 Ibid.
   7 Ibid.
   8 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on
   Curbing Monopolies,” April 29, 1938. In John T. Woolley
   and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project
   (Santa Barbara, Calif.: University of California).
   http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15637.
   9 Dennis C. Blair, “Far-Reaching Impact of Global
   Economic Crisis,” Annual Threat Assessment, Senate
   Armed Services Committee (March 10, 2009), 3.
   http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2009_hr/031009blair.pdf.
   10 Quoted in James Bamford, “Big Brother Is
   Listening,” Atlantic (April 2006),
   299
   http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200604/nsa-surveillance/4.
   11 Nathan Frier, “Known Unknowns: Unconventional
   ‘Strategic Shocks’ in Defense Strategy Development,”
   U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute,
   http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB890.pdf
   12 George Orwell, The Collected Letters, Essays and
   Journalism of George Orwell. Vol, 4: In Front of Your
   Nose, 1945-1950. Eds. Sonia B. Orwell and Ian Angus
   (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 67.
   13 Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, trans. Robert
   Chandler (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 410.
   300
   Acknowledgments
   This book could not have been written without Eunice.
   She watched and transcribed everything from professional
   wrestling, to reality television shows, to the scenes
   described in the chapter on pornography. She edited and
   rewrote passages. She clarified incomplete thoughts,
   challenged shaky assertions, and added paragraphs that
   always enhanced the points I was trying to make. She
   stayed up many nights long after I had gone to bed,
   reworking sections of the book. Nothing I write is
   published before it goes through her hands. Our marriage
   is a rare combination of spiritual and intellectual affinity.
   “She’is all States, and all Princes, I, Nothing else is,” as
   John Donne wrote in his poem “The Sunne Rising”:
   Princes doe play us; compar’d to this,
   All honor’s mimique; all wealth alchimie.
   Thou, sunne, art halfe as happy’as wee,
   In that the world’s contracted thus.
   I am deeply indebted to The Nation Institute and the
   Lannan Foundation. The support of these organizations
   permitted me to write this book. I am especially grateful to
   Hamilton Fish, Ruth Baldwin, Taya Grobow, and Jonathan
   Schell, as well as Peggy Suttle and Katrina vanden Heuvel
   at The Nation magazine. Carl Bromley at Nation Books is
   a remarkably talented and brilliant editor, a fine writer and
   scholar in his own right, who helped shape and guide this
   book. In an age when editing seems to be a dying art, he
   upholds the highest standards of the craft. He loves books
   301
   and ideas, and his insight and enthusiasm are infectious. It
   was a privilege to work with him. Michele Jacob, whom I
   have worked with before, handled publicity and book
   events with her usual efficiency. Patrick Lannan and Jo
   Chapman at the Lannan Foundation have been constant
   and steadfast supporters of my work. It was Patrick, who
   has done more than perhaps anyone in the country to
   nurture, promote, and protect great writing, who first gave
   me Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated.
   The Reverend Coleman Brown, my professor of
   religion at Colgate University and mentor, once again
   guided me through the writing. Coleman generously
   shared his profound wisdom, at once always humbling and
   always correct. His voice of compassion and deep insight
   into the human condition serve to temper the tone of my
   writing and pull me back from the edge of despair to
   remind me, and my readers, that good exists and is never
   as powerless as it appears.
   John Timpane, a fellow lover of books, poetry, and
   theater, again edited the final manuscript. All my final
   manuscripts end up in his hands at my request. John, the
   greatest line and content editor in the business, is the
   Olympian authority who makes the last decisions on what
   is in or out, what should be changed and what amended.
   No writer could be in better hands, even if he has a hard
   time accepting my supremacy at Balderdash.
   Chris Hebdon, a student at Berkeley, worked tirelessly
   on the book. He attended the seminar on positive
   psychology, did all the interviews and recordings, and
   wrote up the proceedings. The chapter on positive
   psychology is largely his work. Chris is a very talented
   young man whose conscience is as impressive as his
   302
   intellect, which must make some of his professors very
   uncomfortable. My son Thomas, whose integrity is
   matched by a superb intellect, as well as a maturity and
   sensitivity that extend far beyond his years, worked during
   his Christmas vacation from Colgate University on the
   book in the Princeton University library. Robert Scheer
   and Zuade Kaufmann, who run the Web magazine
   Truthdig, where I write a weekly column, care deeply
   about maintaining the standards of great writing and
   reporting. I am fortunate to count them as friends and write
   for their site. Gerald Stern, Anne Marie Macari, Mae
   Sakharov, Rick McArthur, Richard Fenn, James Cone,
   Ralph Nader, Maria-Christina Keller, Pam Diamond, June
   Ballinger, Michael Goldstein, Irene Brown, Margaret
   Maurer, Sam Hynes, Tom Artin, Joe Sacco, Steve Kinzer,
   Charlie and Catherine Williams, Mark Kurlansky, Ann and
   Walter Pincus, Joe and Heidi Hough, Laila al-Arian,
   Michael Granzen, Karen Hernandez, Ray Close, Peter
   Scheer, Kasia Anderson, Robert J. Lifton, Lauren B.
   Davis, Robert Jensen, Cristina Nehring, Bernard Rapoport,
   Jean Stein, Larry Joseph, Wanda Liu (our patient and
   skillful Mandarin tutor), as well as Dorothea von Molke
   and Cliff Simms, who together run one of the finest
   bookstores in America, are part all of our cherished circle.
   Cliff was one of the most prescient critics of the
   manuscript and greatly improved its sharpness and focus.
   Thanks as well to Boris Rorer, Michael Levien, who
   recommended David Foster Wallace’s brilliant essay on
   the porn industry, and the staff at Bon Appetit, where I buy
   my daily baguette.
   Lisa Bankoff of International Creative Management, as
   she has for all my books, negotiated contracts and eased
   303
   the maddening minutiae of putting this book together. I am
   fortunate to be able to work with her.
   My children, Thomas, Noëlle, and Konrad, are my
   greatest joy. After years in which I have witnessed too
   much violent death and suffering, they are the balms to my
   soul, the gentle reminders that trauma can be slowly healed
   through love and that redemption is possible.
   304
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   317
   Index
   318
   Abbott, Jennifer
   Abdul, Paula
   Abu Ghraib
   Achbar, Mark
   Adorno, Theodor
   Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation
   Adult Pay Per View
   Adult Video News (AVN) Awards
   Adult Video News (AVN) expo
   Adult Video News (magazine)
   Aerospace Industries Association (AIA)
   Afghanistan
   AIG
   Amber (Survivor contestant)
   America by Design (Noble)
   American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
   America (Hedges)
   American Idol (television show)
   American Medical Association
   American Psychiatric Association
   American Psychological Association (APA)
   The American Scholar (magazine)
   America’s Next Top Model (television show)
   Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman)
   Anadarko Petroleum
   Andersen, Hans Christian
   Anderson, Pamela
   319
   Anderson, Ray
   Andover
   Andrejevic, Mark
   Anne, Lisa
   Annual Positive Psychology Forum
   Antitrust laws
   AOL Time Warner
   Appreciative Inquiry
   Arendt, Hannah
   Army War College, U.S.
   Arnold, Matthew
   AT&T Broadband
   Auden, W. H.
   Augustine, Saint
   Austro-Hungarian Empire
   Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive
   Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting
   Fulfillment (Seligman)
   Authorization for Use of Military Force (congressional
   resolution)
   Bacevich, Andrew
   Bakan, Joel
   Balkans
   Balzac, Honoré
   Banks
   bailing out
   collapse of
   faltering
   and Glass-Steagall Act
   insolvent
   leaders of
   320
   and looting of financial system
   nationalizing
   and poor
   and Stewart
   Banks, Russell
   Barry (porn producer)
   Batista (wrestler)
   Bear Stearns
   Bearer, Paul
   Bellah, Robert N.
   Ben-Shahar, Tal D.
   Benjamin, Walter
   Bernanke, Ben
   Berry, Wendell
   Bewitched (television show)
   Biden, Joe
   Big Brother (television show)
   Big Show (wrestler)
   Bigg Boss (television show)
   Blackwater/Xe
   Blade, Barrett
   Blair, Dennis
   Blanc, Mel
   Blankfein, Lloyd
   Blue, Ashley
   Bluebird Films
   Boeing
   Boileau, Jay
   Boorstin, Daniel
   Born to Be Good: The Science of the Meaningful Life
   (Keltner)
   321
   Botton, Alain de
   Bradbury, Ray
   Bradley, Betty
   Bradley, James
   Bradley, John
   Brave New World (Huxley)
   Brint, Steven
   British Petroleum (BP)
   Brownmiller, Susan
   Budden, Jackiey
   Buddha
   Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S.
   Bush, George H. W.
   Bush, George W.
   Business Week (magazine)
   Buying the War (television documentary)
   Byram, Amanda
   322
   California, University of, Berkeley
   California, University of, Los Angeles
   Calvin, John
   Cambodia
   Cameron, Kim
   Campaigns. See Political candidates and leaders
   Canada
   Cantor, Paul A.
   Carbon dioxide
   Carnegie, Andrew
   Cash, Johnny
   Cassidy, Brent
   Cassidy, Tyler
   Cato Institute
   Celebrity
   and adoration and worship
   and appearance and lifestyle
   and Christian Right
   and commodity culture
   Eggers on
   and emptiness and purposelessness in life
   and fantasies of fame and success
   and foibles and scandals
   gossip
   hunger for
   and implosion
   interviews and profiles
   323
   and love
   Mills on
   as mirror
   and reality television
   reporters
   and revenge and triumph
   and wealth
   and wrestling
   See also Celebrity culture; Corporations: and
   celebrities as sellers
   Celebrity culture
   and closeness to celebrities
   and commodities
   as culture of narcissism
   and degradation as entertainment
   Deresiewicz on
   and escape and fantasy
   and exhibitionism
   and family
   and fictional personas
   and frustration and despair
   hollowness of
   and illusion
   and immortality
   and inauthenticity
   and Internet
   and isolation
   and junk politics
   and magical thinking
   manipulation and deceit of
   moral nihilism and void of
   324
   and personal screenplays
   and politicians’ artificial intimacy with public
   Roth on
   and surveillance
   and validation
   Celebrity Driving School (television show)
   Celebrity (Rojek)
   Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes (television show)
   Celebrity Weakest Link (television show)
   Celebrity Wife Swap (television show)
   Center for Representative Politics
   Center for the Advancement of Women
   Central Command, U.S.
   Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
   Chaplin, Charlie
   Cheney, Dick
   China
   Chomsky, Noam
   Christian Broadcast Network
   Christian Right
   Church, Frank
   Civil liberties
   Claremont Graduate University
   Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA)
   Class divide
   Clinton, Bill
   Clinton, Hillary
   CNN
   Coal
   Coast Guard, U.S.
   Coca-Cola
   325
   Colbert Report (television show)
   Colby (Survivor contestant)
   Cold War
   Colgate University
   Collapse (Diamond)
   Columbia University
   Comcast Cable
   Commission on Presidential Debates
   Conrad, Joseph
   Consumer price index (CPI)
   Conyers, John
   Cooper, Marc
   Cooperrider, David
   Corkrey, Megan
   Corkrey, Ryder
   The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit
   and Power (Bakan)
   The Corporation (film)
   Corporations
   bailing out
   and celebrities as sellers
   and coercive persuasion
   and control
   and cult of self
   and Democratic Party
   and education
   and false economic statistics
   and health care
   hijacking and dominance of America by
   and illusion
   and intelligence
   326
   and military spending
   and NAFTA
   and New Industrial Relations
   and outsourcing
   and political fund-raising
   and pornography
   and positive psychology
   and psychopaths
   and recession
   and social responsibility
   and surveillance
   and worker “uplift” programs
   See also Mass media: and corporations; particular
   corporations
   The Cost of Freedom (television show)
   Coughlin, Father
   Cowell, Simon
   Cramer, Jim
   Crane, Richard Teller
   Creationism
   Credit cards
   Credit Suisse
   Crisis Ministry
   Cristina (The Swan contestant)
   Cruise, Tom
   Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály
   Cult of self
   Culture and Anarchy (Arnold)
   Cyrano
   327
   Daily Show with Jon Stewart (television show)
   Dalai Lama
   Darfur
   Darwin, Charles
   Dean, James
   Debt, U.S.
   Defense, Department of, U.S.
   Defense Solutions, Inc.
   Defense spending. See Military spending, U.S.
   DeMille, Cecil B.
   Democracy Incorporated (Wolin)
   Democracy Now
   Democratic Party
   and corporations
   and courtiers
   and left
   and war
   and workers
   DeMott, Benjamin
   Depression
   Deregulation
   Deresiewicz, William
   Devereaux, Tricia
   Devil’s Film
   DeVry University
   Dewey, John
   Diamond, Jared
   328
   Diana, Princess
   Dickens, Charles
   Diener, Ed
   Dines, Gail
   DioGuardi, Kara
   DIRECTV
   Disney
   Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance
   Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It (Geyman)
   Donoghue, Frank
   Douglas, Stephen A.
   Downey, Fred
   Drake, Jessica
   Drucker, Peter
   Dunleavy, W. P.
   Dwan, Allan
   Dworkin, Andrea
   329
   E! True Hollywood Story (television show)
   Economy
   and borrowing
   contracting
   and corporate grip on government
   and courtiers in media
   and education
   and ideology of unlimited growth
   and illusion
   and job loss(see also Job losses)
   and military spending
   and pursuit of status and wealth
   and re-enfranchising workers
   recession and crisis
   and totalitarianism
   and universities
   and Wall Street
   Eddy, Nelson
   Education. See Universities
   Education Department, U.S.
   Eggers, Dave
   Eggers, Toph
   Egypt
   Einstein, Albert
   Eisenhower, Dwight
   El Salvador
   The Emperor’s Tomb (Roth)
   330
   Empire, American
   Environmental Protection Agency, U.S.
   Environmental regulation
   Euripides
   Extreme Associates
   Exxon Mobil
   331
   Facebook
   Factor, Max
   Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)
   Fairbanks, Douglas
   Faludi, Susan
   Fannie Mae
   Fascism
   Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
   Federal Communications Commission
   Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
   Federal Reserve
   FedEx Kinko’s
   Ferrara, Manuel
   50 Cent
   Figueroa, Elba
   Financial Services Modernization Act (1999)
   Finley, Dave
   Fire, Jada
   FISA bill (2008)
   Fitness trainers and gurus
   Flags of Our Fathers (Bradley)
   Flow
   Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
   (Csíkszentmihályi)
   Food Research and Action Center
   Ford, Henry
   Forever Network
   332
   Fox News
   Freddie Mac
   Frederickson, Barbara
   Free Lunch (Johnston)
   Freier, Nathan
   Freud, Sigmund
   Frot-Coutaz, Cecile
   Frye, Northrop
   Fulbright, J. William
   Fuld, Richard (Dick)
   333
   Gabler, Neal
   Gag Factor (movie)
   Gagnon, Rene
   Gaza
   Geithner, Timothy
   General Electric
   General Motors
   Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity
   (Jensen)
   Geyman, John
   The Girls Next Door (television show)
   Giroux, Henry
   Glass-Steagall Act (1933)
   Global warming
   Globalization
   Golden, Daniel
   Goldman Sachs
   González, Roberto
   Goodman, Amy
   Goody, Jade
   Gordon, Michael
   Gore, Al
   Gossip Girl (television show)
   Graceland
   Graham, Elyse
   Great Depression
   The Great Transformation (Polanyi)
   334
   The Greater Good (magazine)
   Greenberg, Maurice R.
   Greenhouse gases
   Greenwald, Glenn
   Grossman, Vasily
   Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
   Gulf War
   335
   Hackett, James
   Halliburton
   Hansen, James
   Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting
   Fulfillment (Ben-Shahar)
   Happiness
   and celebrity
   and culture of illusion
   and Huxley
   and Lane
   and positive psychology
   and self-deception
   Hard Rock Cafe
   Hardcore, Max
   Hare, Robert
   Harmony
   Hartley, Nina
   Harvard University
   Business School
   Divinity School
   and donors and alumni
   and endowment
   and entitlement and elitism
   Medical School
   and positive psychology
   and student applications
   Have More Money Now (Layfield)
   336
   Hawn, Goldie
   Hayes, Ira
   Hazlitt, William
   Head Start
   Health Affairs (journal)
   Health care
   and corporations
   and Democrats
   for-profit
   and optimal worker
   and poor
   and pornography
   universal
   Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
   A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers)
   Hebdon, Chris
   Hedonism
   Hefner, Hugh
   Heil, Russell Alex
   Henry, Mark
   Hersh, Seymour
   The Hills (television show)
   Hilton, Paris
   Hitler, Adolf
   Hoggart, Richard
   Holly, Buddy
   Hollywood Forever Cemetery
   Holocaust
   See also Nazi Germany
   Home foreclosures
   Homeless
   337
   Honest, Steve
   Hooker, Richard
   Hornswoggle (wrestler)
   The Hot Network
   Household wealth
   How to Win at College (Newport)
   The Howard Stern Show (television show)
   Human Capitalism (Ozaki)
   Human Comedy (Balzac)
   Humanities Indicators Prototype
   Hume, David
   Hunger
   Hussein, Saddam
   Hustler Video Group
   Huston, John
   Huxley, Aldous
   338
   Ignatowski, Ralph (Iggy)
   Illiteracy
   and academic specialists
   and divide with literate minority
   epidemic of
   and images and slogans in media
   and lack of understanding
   Illusion
   and America
   and Auden
   and celebrity culture
   and Christian Right
   and comfort
   creators of
   culture of
   and death of cultures
   and economy
   and historical amnesia
   and illiteracy and language
   and love
   and pornography
   and positive psychology
   and pseudo-events
   and Sands of Iwo Jima
   and war
   The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
   (Boorstin)
   339
   Immigration
   Imperialism
   Income inequality
   India
   Individualism
   Inflation
   Infrastructure
   Inside Higher Education
   Institute of Medicine
   Interface Corporation
   International Monetary Fund
   Internet. See Celebrity culture: and Internet;
   Pornography: and Internet
   Internet Filter Review
   Interrogations
   Irani, Ray
   Iraq
   and corporations
   and journalists
   and mercenaries
   occupation
   War
   and withdrawal
   The Irony of American History (Niebuhr)
   Israel
   340
   J. P. Morgan Chase
   Jackson, Randy
   Jameson, Jenna
   Japan in the Passing Lane: An Insider’s Account of
   Life in a Japanese Auto Factory (Kamata)
   Jaxin, Jersey
   Jefferson, Thomas
   Jensen, Robert
   Jerri (Survivor contestant)
   The Jerry Springer Show (television show)
   Jesus Christ
   JM Productions
   Job losses
   See also Unemployment
   Johnson, Chalmers
   Johnson, Lyndon
   Johnston, David Cay
   Jollee, Ariana
   Jopling, David
   Journal of Happiness Studies
   The Jungle (Lewis)
   Junk politics
   Justice Department, U.S.
   341
   Kamata, Satoshi
   Kane (wrestler)
   Kant, Immanuel
   Keller, Bronwen
   Keltner, Dacher
   Kenci (porn actress)
   Kennedy, John F.
   Kerbel, Jarrett
   Kerry, John
   Khomeini, Ayatollah
   Khosrow Ali Vaziri, Hossein (Iron Sheik)
   Klein, Naomi
   Knowledge Is Power Program
   (KIPP) schools
   Known Unknowns: Unconventional “Strategic
   Shocks” in Defense Strategy Development (Freier)
   Korten, David
   Kristy (The Swan contestant)
   Krypton, Roger
   Ku Klux Klan
   Kucinich, Dennis
   342
   LA Weekly (newspaper)
   Labor unions
   LaFarge, Peter
   Lahde, Andrew
   Landay, Jonathan
   Lane, Robert
   Lane, Sunny
   Las Vegas, Nevada
   described
   porn expo in
   Lasch, Christopher
   The Last Honest Place in America (Cooper)
   The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the
   Fate of the Humanities (Donoghue)
   Law, John
   Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
   Layfield, John Bradshaw (JBL)
   Lazarus, Richard S.
   Left, American
   Lehman Brothers
   Lehrer, Jim
   Lei, Kaylani
   Lenin, Vladimir
   Lewis, Sinclair
   Libby, Scooter
   Liddy, Edward
   Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered
   343
   Reality (Gabler)
   Life and Fate (Grossman)
   The Limits of Power (Bacevich)
   Lincoln, Abraham
   Lippmann, Walter
   The Living Channel
   L.L. Bean
   Lockheed Martin
   The Lonely Crowd (Riesman)
   Long, Huey
   Loomis-Chaffee
   Lorre, Peter
   The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (Lane)
   Love and kindness
   Lovelace, Linda
   Lubben, Shelley
   Lugo, Alejandro
   Luther, Martin
   Lynn, Jessica
   344
   Mad Money (television show)
   Madonna
   Maier, Charles
   Mandelstam, Osip
   Manipulative character
   Maquiladoras
   Maralyn (Survivor contestant)
   Marcuse, Herbert
   Margold, Bill
   Marie, Dawn
   Marx, Karl
   Mass media
   and America’s decline
   and celebrity culture
   and class divide
   and corporations
   and courtiers
   and ethical journalism
   and info-tainment
   and the powerful
   and pseudo-world
   and radical evil
   and sensationalism
   See also Television
   May, Gregory
   McCaffrey, Barry R.
   McKibben, Bill
   345
   McKinney, Cynthia
   McMahon, Vince
   Medicaid
   Medicare
   Meet the Press (television show)
   Melina (wrestler)
   Mellman, Seymour
   Merrill Lynch
   Methane
   Mexico
   Meza, Jan
   Michaels, Shawn (Heartbreak Kid)
   Michigan, University of
   Middle East
   Military analysts
   Military spending, U.S.
   Miller, Judith
   Mills. Wright
   Milosevic, Slobodan
   Mining
   Mitchell, Sharon
   Mitchell (Survivor contestant)
   Modern Language Association
   Mon Ami Gabi bistro (Las Vegas)
   Monks, Robert
   Monroe, Marilyn
   Monthly Review (journal)
   Moral autonomy
   Morrison, Jim
   Moyers, Bill
   Multiculturalism
   346
   Murdoch, Rupert
   Murtha, John
   The Music Man (musical)
   My Super Sweet 16 (television show)
   347
   Nader, Laura
   Nader, Ralph
   Nailz (wrestler)
   National Institute of Mental Health
   National Public Radio (NPR)
   National Security Agency
   Nazi Germany
   Nero
   New Age mysticism
   New Deal
   New Industrial Relations
   New Sensations
   New York City Transit Authority
   The New York Review of Books
   New York Times
   New York University
   Newport, Cal
   NewsGroup
   Nicaragua
   Niebuhr, Reinhold
   Nietzsche, Friedrich
   Niskanen, William
   Nixon, Richard
   Noble, David
   North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
   North Carolina, University of
   Northrup Grumman
   348
   Nuclear weapons and power
   Obama, Barack
   and Cramer
   and economy
   and elitism
   and health care
   and presidential campaign (2008)
   and staff salaries
   and trivia
   and Wolin
   Occidental Petroleum
   Oil
   The O’Reilly Factor (television show)
   The Organization Man (White)
   Ortega y Gasset, José
   Orwell, George
   Osteen, Joel
   Overpopulation
   Ozaki, Robert
   349
   Pacifica
   Pain and Orgasm (company)
   Palestinians
   Palin, Sarah
   Paramount Studios
   Paratelics
   Park, Nansook
   Patriot Act
   Paulson, Henry
   Pelosi, Nancy
   Pennsylvania, University of
   Pentagon Capitalism (Mellman)
   The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (Fulbright)
   The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in
   Decline (Mellman)
   Perón, Eva
   Perot, H. Ross
   Peterson, Christopher
   Phoenix, University of
   Physicians for a National Health Program
   Picasso
   Pincus, Walter
   Pink Cross
   Pitt, Brad
   Plastic surgery
   Plath, Sylvia
   Plato
   350
   Playboy (company)
   Playboy (magazine)
   Polanyi, Karl
   Political candidates and leaders
   and artificial intimacy with public
   as courtiers
   and fund-raising
   and impoverishment of language
   and later employment
   and pseudo-events
   Politics and Vision (Wolin)
   Pop psychology
   Porizkova, Paulina
   Pornography
   and addiction
   ages of users
   AVN Awards
   and diseases
   and dolls
   and drugs and alcohol
   entry into
   and fan participation
   fusion with commercial mainstream
   gonzo
   and income
   and increased cruelty and abusiveness
   and Internet
   Las Vegas expo on
   and love
   number of films and revenue from
   as pantomime of sex
   351
   and prostitution
   and racism
   and relationships
   and revenge and triumph
   and sadism
   and television shows
   Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the
   Healthy Mind (Taylor)
   Positive psychology
   Post-traumatic stress disorder
   Postman, Neil
   Poverty
   Power, Tyrone
   The Power Elite (Mills)
   The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite
   Colleges (Soares)
   Powers, Jim
   Presidential debates
   Price, Kirsten
   The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class
   Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left
   Outside the Gates (Golden)
   Princeton Review
   Princeton University
   Prisons
   Probst, Jeff
   Propaganda
   Protest
   Pseudo-events
   Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
   Public Opinion (Lippmann)
   352
   The Purpose Driven Life (Warren)
   353
   Radnóti, Miklós
   Raytheon
   Reagan, Ronald
   The Real Housewives of . . . (television show)
   The Real World (television show)
   Reality television
   American Idol
   America’s Next Top Model
   and Goody
   moral nihilism of
   and pornography
   and revenge and triumph
   and sadism
   and surveillance
   Survivor
   The Swan
   See also other specific reality shows
   Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Andrejevic)
   The Republic (Plato)
   Republican Party
   Rice, Condoleezza
   Rida, Flo
   Riesman, David
   Rivera, Diego
   Road Rules (television show)
   Robbins, Tony
   Robertson, Pat
   354
   Rock of Love (television show)
   Rockefeller, John D.
   Rojek, Chris
   Roldan, Patrice
   Romans
   Roosevelt, Franklin D.
   Rosenthal, Joe
   Roth, Joseph
   Roth, Philip
   Rover (company)
   Rubin, Robert
   Rumsfeld, Donald
   Ruskin, John
   Russert, Tim
   Rwanda
   355
   Sadism
   Salon.com
   Sam (FedEx Kinko’s trainee)
   San Jose State University
   Sands of Iwo Jima (movie)
   Satan
   Saul, John Ralston
   Savio, Mario
   Scheer, Robert
   Schumpeter, Joseph
   Schwartz, Charles
   Scientific management
   Second World War
   Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S.
   Select Committee on Intelligence
   Self-help books and specialists
   Seligman, Martin
   Senate Intelligence Committee
   September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
   700 Club (television show)
   Sex and the City (television show)
   Shadow Statistics
   Shetty, Shilpa
   Shopping
   Siegel, Bugsy
   Simon, Bob
   Simon, Scott
   356
   Simpson, O. J.
   65 Guy Cream Pie (movie)
   60 Minutes (television show)
   Slaughter, Sergeant
   Slut Bus (Web site)
   Smith, Adam
   Smith, Scott
   Snoop Dogg
   Soares, Joseph A.
   Social Security
   Socialism
   Socrates
   Solon
   Soviet Union
   Spencer, Herbert
   Springer, Jerry
   Stagliano, John “Buttman,”
   Stagliano, Karen
   Stalin, Joseph
   Stanford University
   Status Anxiety (Botton)
   Steinem, Gloria
   Stereotypes
   Stern, Howard
   Stewart, Jon
   Stewart, Martha
   Stock market
   Stone. F.
   Stoya (porn actress)
   Styles, Nadia
   Subprime mortgages
   357
   Summers, Lawrence
   The Sun (magazine)
   Sunset Boulevard (movie)
   Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape (SERE) program
   Survivor (television show)
   Susman, Warren
   The Swan (television show)
   Swirlies (movie)
   Switzerland
   358
   T, Mr.
   Tacitus
   Talk Radio Network
   Taylor, Frederick
   Taylor, Ronald
   Taylor, Shelley
   Telecommunications companies
   Television
   and celebrity interviews
   and Christian Right
   and corruption
   and Fahrenheit
   hours watched by Americans
   and hunger for celebrity
   and illusion
   and Iraq
   journalism
   and Las Vegas
   predictability of
   and pseudo-events
   pundits
   and sensationalism
   tabloid shows
   talk shows
   and validation
   and wealth
   See also Mass media; Reality television
   359
   Temptation Island (television show)
   Terrorism
   Thinking XXX (television special)
   Thomas, Dylan
   Thrill, Jeff
   Tiberius
   Tillerson, Rex
   Tina (Survivor contestant)
   TMZ (television show)
   Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (Wolin)
   Today (television show)
   Totalitarianism
   Town & Country (magazine)
   Toyota
   Transformational Positivity
   Traylor, Ray (Big Boss Man)
   Treasury, U.S.
   Trenton, New Jersey
   Trilling, Lionel
   Tweed, Jack
   Twight, Charlotte
   Twitter
   360
   Undertaker, the (wrestler)
   Unemployment
   See also Job losses
   Unilever
   United Auto Workers
   United Nations
   Universities
   and America’s decline
   and assault against humanities
   and corporations
   and critical thinking
   and deference to authority
   and diversity
   and donors, alumni, and fund-raising
   and entitlement and elitism
   and evil and crimes against humanity
   for-profit
   and How to Win at College
   and intelligence
   and military-industrial-academic complex
   and professors
   and specialization and jargon
   and standardized tests
   and student activism
   and working class
   See also specific universities
   The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-
   361
   Industrial-Academic Complex (Giroux)
   The Unsettling of America (Berry)
   U.S. News & World Report (magazine)
   The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart)
   362
   Valentino, Rudolph
   Vasquez, Anthony
   VegasGirls
   Viacom
   Vietnam War
   Volkoff, Nikolai
   (Boris Breznikoff )
   363
   Wagoner, Rick
   Wall Street
   bailing out
   and cult of self
   fortunes
   and jargon
   and journalists
   speculators
   titans
   Walters, Barbara
   War
   and Cassandras
   and illusion
   and intelligence
   and love
   and military spending
   as movie
   and popular culture
   and Wolin
   See also Afghanistan; Iraq: War; Second World War;
   Vietnam War
   Warhol, Andy
   Washington, University of
   Washington Post
   Wattleton, Faye
   Wayne, John
   Weber, Max
   364
   Weimar Germany
   Welch, Mary
   Weldon, Felix de
   Welfare
   Wellesley College
   White, David
   White, Jonathan
   White, William H.
   Wicked Pictures
   Wight, Paul
   See also Big Show
   Williams, Dolores
   Williams, John
   Wilson, Al
   Wilson, Torrie
   Winfrey, Oprah
   Wittgenstein, Ludwig
   Wolin, Sheldon S.
   Woolhandler, Stephanie
   World Database of Happiness
   World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)
   World Wrestling Federation
   Wrestling
   and authority
   as choreographed rituals and acts of retribution
   and clans
   and communism and racial stereotypes
   and hidden cameras
   and referees
   and shifting identities
   and social breakdown
   365
   and women
   366
   Yale University
   and big questions
   and children of alumni
   and endowment
   and entitlement and elitism
   Yeats, William Butler
   Yella
   Yugoslavia
   367
   Z, Dr.
   Zinn, Howard
   368
   Copyright © 2009 by Chris Hedges
   Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group
   116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor
   New York, NY 10003
   Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute
   and the Perseus Books Group
   All rights reserved. No part of
   this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written
   permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
   articles and reviews. For information, address the Perseus Books Group,
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   Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200,
   Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, extension 5000,
   or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.
   Design and composition by Cynthia Young.
   Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
   Hedges, Chris.
   Empire of illusion :
   the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle / Chris Hedges.
   p. cm.
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   eISBN : 978-0-786-74955-3
3. Mass media—United States. 2. Popular culture—United States.
4. Title.
   P92.U5H365 2009
   302.23—dc22
   2009013585
   369