Recently I brought up up Kalle Lasn and his excellent work the Uncooling of America. Since it became painfully obvious that Obama was not King of the Ponies, I have been viewing American politics more or less as wrestling. While the vision of wrestlin' is true to my backwoods origins, the obvious conclusion lies more in my current Madison Avenue setting.
Obama is a brand. Nice guy, but a brand.
He is selling American Exceptionalism.
One of the biggest assholes ever to live was Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud.
This chump was the father of political stage craft as we know it today. He freed the unwashed masses, saving us from ourselves.
See, he thought the people were just a herd and would stampede instinctively to the worst possible of choices. It was the duty and responsibility of the powered elite to manipulate us for the common good of the republic.
Being such a class act, Bernays wrote a book called Propaganda, which stated the following:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
Bernays basically lays out a game plan for corporate titans to control the economy of ideas in this country. Coupled with the new fundraising techniques of an up and coming political star, LBJ, the apparatus for the elites to control the great Remote Control of America was crafted in the forbidden fires of propaganda and up and going by the 40s.
Berneys really hit his stride in the 50s with his work in Guatemala on the behest of United Fruit Company. Yes, those bastards.
Operation PBSUCCESS and our adventure in Iran opened up the doors for the American exceptionalism expansion of the last century which would claim 50 countries and 30 liberation movements, all of them striving for the human liberties that we attacked to bring them.
American Exceptionalism is what gives the military-industrial its cover, and what Presidents use to justify the expansion of jingoistic ideology, which is self-serving at best.
At least France and England prided themselves on being colonial titans, the paradox of American Expectionalistic ideology is how it claims not to be an ideology at all, that it just is.
This is a myth, or more bluntly, a lie.
This lie is what America uses to justify its actions both at home and abroad and still feel smug with self-righteousness. It is how America lies to itself, the bases of both our nationalism and our xenophobia.
Everyday the talking heads on nonstop infotainment, the commercials for manly man trucks and even babies trading stocks reinforce this rhetoric that only Americans know how the world really works, and only Americans should know how it works.
We are the truth holders, the world is an unwashed horde.
This creates the Iron Curtain of Global Information and ideas from reaching our shores where the powered elite can control the memes and economy of mass culture based on years of marketing data to perpetuate their ideology over a captive American population.
This Exceptionalism knows no party identity, it only knows class. And not an economic class either, but a cultural class of elites empowered by corporate structures, who insist they are just saving us from ourselves and our country, while they loot us, both economically and morally.
Still, American Exceptionalism is a very popular brand in America, used to justify wars to corruption.
And Obama is the new poster boy.
The product is you.
The only thing that changed was the name on the check from these cultural elite paymasters.
Hope was the new opium of the masses, when what America needed was Help.
News at 11.