You Are The 98%

There is a fascinating discussion over at The Last Psychiatrist that warrants further discussion: You Are The 98%:

Here is an excerpt:

“What you don’t realize about those pictured as “the 99%”–what they have in common is not that they are young or college educated or indebted or white females, but that they were willing to put a picture of themselves on the internet, fully of the belief that they stand for something worth being pictured for. Bad move.

You think marching on Wall Street gives you power, a voice; but it is a wholesale surrender to the media, you have signed a waiver allowing them to use your image any way they want, and they will tell the rest of us what to think of you and titrate our exposure and emotional responses, all while feeding us with marketing for the very things that got us into our predicament. The income disparities, the education pyramid scheme, the personal and public debt, the anxiety, brought to you by Revlon and the makers of CNN.

Take a guess which side Fox, MSNBC, John Stewart chose. How did you know? Wrong: it isn’t their “bias” because it doesn’t matter what the protestors want, it’s because they predictably transmorph the protestors into what they need them to be.

“Marching gets our message out.” No it doesn’t, it gets CNN’s message out. “We don’t watch CNN, we use the internet.” Yet given the infinity of the internet you still surf the same 5 websites, looking for and finding exactly what you want, like a baby playing peekaboo in a mirror over and over and over and over and over and over and…

You are the 98%, you are totally without any access to the machinery of power and worse, much worse, you plug yourselves into the machinery of media and become a slave.

“That’s why I don’t watch television!” Well, a) you mean TV dramas, and 2) it’s because you’re not a 45 year old woman, the target demo of TV. But maybe you’re proud that you skip the commercials and avoid the “mainstream media”, you don’t want to be part of the corporate consumerist machine and good for you, yet your independence is why Whole Foods knows you’ll buy anything wrapped in brown and you already have a subscription to The New Yorker, which has a curiously large number of ads for mental institutions. If you’re reading it, it’s for you. The New Yorker is also at the checkout counter in Whole Foods, along with Rolling Stone and Psychology Today and not along with Sports Illustrated and The Weekly Standard. You think you shop at Whole Foods because it has better quality food? It’s because of those magazines. Even the neocons who shop there– they don’t shop at Acme– shop there because of the branding: liberal=organic, so the more left wing magazines and the more dred locks the more it has reinforced the “liberalism” and therefore the “quality,” and so you go, “reluctantly”, shaking your head at the crazy commies stocking the store as you hand them 3x more than anything is worth. “Would you like to donate $1 to help Ethiopian refugees?” Son of a bitch, this apple is delicious.”

The full piece is worth exploring . . .