As we move further from those gagged days of the Second World War and as the last of that generation which bore witness passes from the living world we see a significant rise in interest in Hitler’s Third Reich. The memorabilia of National Socialism is in higher demand than ever. The most popular play of war reenactors are the battles of the Waffen SS. Nazism has become fodder for a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. Extreme Right-wing parties which romanticize Fascism are appearing across the globe. Just a few weeks ago the iconic sign which hung over the gates of Auschwitz, Arbeit Macht Frei (work will set you free) was stolen by a gang of thieves at the behest of an as yet unknown collector.

Our attitude toward Hitler’s Germany is increasingly complicated. On the one hand the Nazis remain the epitome of evil. A pack of racist mass murderers with illusions of world conquest. It’s impossible to think of the Third Reich without imagining newsreel footage of bulldozers pushing hundreds of naked corpses into mass graves. They are the quintessential boogie men. Used (to a nauseating degree) by politicians as shorthand for everything that is wrong between Heaven and Earth. On the other hand we exist in a world sixty-five years removed from the initial shock of such crimes. Our world is one that is both all too familiar with and also increasingly indifferent to the realities of genocide. In short we are desensitized. And so for many people living today the Nazis have become little more than caricatures. Fictional super villains. The bad guys of Quentin Tarantino movies and video games. Dressed in their Hugo Boss tailored uniforms, silver skulls shining from their caps, they have almost become cool.

Speaking of Hugo Boss, one needs only to look at the rise of “Nazi chic” in the world of high fashion. With military inspired styles dominating the marketplace (a sad statement on the values of our society in itself) we’re seeing a cornucopia of suspiciously Nazi-like apparel on the runway and the rack. Schott of New York for example, a clothing company that boasts outfitting American bomber crews during World War II offers a double-breasted “military-style” leather jacket for sale that looks like it slid right off Himmler’s back.

I’m not suggesting that Nazis have as yet crossed the line into the realm of acceptability. I couldn’t conceive of a time in the near future when someone strolling down the street with a swastika on their arm wouldn’t face a hostile reception (though stranger things have happened). As yet reenactors sporting War-era German uniforms go about their play discretely. Collectors of Nazi paraphernalia (legal and otherwise) are staying mainly in the shadows. However their numbers are growing. Prices are rising.

All of this comes at a time of increased extremism. Deeply nationalistic and fascist political parties are gaining power in governments across the globe. Even the European Parliament is today led by a coalition of far right parties, many espousing veiled bigotry if not blatant racism. Though perhaps such things are inevitable given enough time. Especially when a band of murderous thugs is made into caricature for the gain of political agendas and movie ticket sales.

At first we reject evil, but given enough time we commodify it, fetishize it. History defaults to whoever has the larger marketing budget. It’s not unthinkable or without precedent. Our history celebrates slavers and mass murderers. They appear on our currency. Our cities are named for them. Up is down. Black is white. The victims blame not their tormentors but each other. African Americans are said to “get handouts.” Native Americans become mascots. Jewish history is called a “propaganda tool.” Auschwitz is called a “Polish death camp.” Hitler’s willing executioners become the new cool. Absurdity becomes reality. Such is life in Naziland.

1. China. All right, so China isn’t exactly America, but God knows that everything in America was made in China so it may as well be. The booming, ironically named People’s Republic has had quite the last couple of decades. Unprecedented growth. Massive capitalization. Frantic industrialization. Host to the Olympic Games. China, the country that invented everything from gunpowder to the printing press and yet failed to take credit for any of it has seemed determined of late to regain it’s status as a cultural and industrial powerhouse. The government of China is a Communist one. They enslave entire nations. Many of their citizens disappear on an almost daily basis, tossed into political prisons and concentration camps. Try Googling “Tiananmen Square” in Beijing and you’re likely to get a blank screen. But the products they produce are cheap and plentiful. So what that the toothpaste contains radioactive waste and those baby toys are dipped in lead paint? It may all be disposable crap that falls apart after a week, built by the hands of children and women living in conditions well below anything resembling poverty, but did I mention it was affordable? Also, let’s not forget that China is America’s biggest savings and loan. Currently, as of July 2009, our favorite exporter holds 24% of our public debt, or $800 billion. Some in the defense industry have warned that this could potentially threaten America’s security interests. That it leaves us vulnerable to economic extortion. That our foreign policy decisions might be compromised by our lender status. Wait. Walmart’s having a sale you say? It’s funny, isn’t it, how all that talk of democracy and human rights, of pushing back against Communist and defeating the Great Satan seems to dry up as soon as they can sell you a cheaper toaster? Many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that providing a “public option” in healthcare would lead to socialism and dictatorship, but we seem to have no qualms about selling our souls to a repressive, quasi-Stalinist, totalitarian state. We buy their cheap, disposable, dangerous products, we gleefully sell to them our debt, we turn a blind eye to their treatment of minorities and neighbor states, we demure to their interests even in the face of genocide (see: Darfur), and for what? Save a dollar today only to pay a pound of flesh tomorrow.

2. Food. The American obesity epidemic is well documented. We’re growing fatter and fatter with each passing year. As I’ve written about extensively on previous occasions obesity is close to surpassing smoking as the number one cause of preventable death. It is estimated that by 2015 nearly half of all Americans will tip the scale. This will further drive up healthcare costs and may result in the first major decline of life expectancy figures in the United States. My generation, those of us in our thirties and late twenties, may be the first to die younger than that of my parents. The main culprit for the fattening up of America is our over reliance on corn. We use it in everything from our breads to our sweeteners. Our beef is corn fed. Our potatoes are corn fried. All of this is thanks to the Federal government, which since Nixon does not subsidize farmers but the crop they grow. Without tax dollars being pumped into corn, maize would virtually disappear from our diet. But unfortunately corn is only part of the problem. The use of chemical pesticides has been linked to the increase of cancer rates. Leading some scientists to declare that we are seeing an apocalyptic scale event. The antibiotics given to animals as a way of treating the diseases that come from a corn-based diet have crossed into the food supply making people more resistant to medication. Each year more of us die from simple infections because the antibiotics we’re given are simply not effective anymore. But wait it gets worse. The United States is the leader in genetically modified foods. Banned in Europe, GM foods need not even be labeled on American store shelves. These modified foods include nearly everything we eat and often are a major factor for our increasingly poor health. Any attempts to reverse these food trends have been stone walled by corporations, lobbyists and the public officials meant to protect us. And the worst part is, that even if there was the political will to stop or slow the prevalence of genetically modified foods in our diet, many agriculturalists have warned that it may already be too late as modified crops have spread on their own, seeds carried by the winds, by animals to every corner of the globe. When you add to all this the growing lack of biodiversity in farming, the reliance on single varieties of a crop, you get a national food reserve that’s not only dangerous, but also more susceptible to disease. Ironically, as we get fatter and increasingly unhealthy we face the potential for crop failure and starvation.

3. Wall Street. If you’re not getting fucked by foreign powers, the food in your refrigerator or the various products around your home you’re probably being fucked by the business establishment. Wall Street, and the various institutions of capitalism that it represents, is no stranger to cheating basically anyone it can. That’s the nature of the beast. They take away your pension. They take away your healthcare. They take away your home. They’ve always done it if there’s profit in it. But whereas once they did it all in the hopes of creating long term gain, or at least of gaining power, now the idea is to take the money and run. Whereas once the robber barons built infrastructure, libraries, museums and hospitals, now they leave only a wake of destruction in their path. The ongoing housing and banking crisis is perhaps the most recent example, but lest we forget that Enron and Worldcom weren’t all that long ago. For every Bernie Madoff in jail another hundred are still walking the streets. It makes you wonder if they know something we don’t. Is the ship sinking? Are the lifeboats already full? In the 1950s and 1960s a family of four could live a comfortable Middle Class lifestyle on one income. One income. Two cars in the garage. A dog. Summer vacations and weekends off. Food was more expensive then (thank you corn!), so were many of the products on the store shelves, but incomes relative to inflation were higher. People could afford more then. Today that same family of four has two incomes to live virtually the same lifestyle. We’re more isolated from eachother. Rates of divorce are higher than ever before. Unions are corrupt and beaten down. Corporations lay off workers by the tens of thousands while the salaries of CEOs are astronomical compared to what they were even twenty years ago. Retirement age gets pushed back further each year while our life expectancy grows shorter. There are more elderly Americans working today than since the introduction of Social Security. The entire system is designed to put us into debt. To make us buy crap we don’t really need. The GDP, the basic measure of a country’s economic performance goes up not when you save money, it doesn’t count the value of domestic work or the inequality of wealth distribution, but it does add points for every patient diagnosed with cancer or every casket that’s sold. It’s not anyone industry. It’s not just Big Oil. It’s not just food. It’s not just Walmart. It’s all the bastards. Modern capitalism at its core. We once had made great strides in our economic relationships. In the regulation of our financial industries. In evaluating our worth. But more than ever we seem to be reverting to an owner class society in which most of us will likely be owned. They won’t stop till they take everything away, and once they do they’ll sell you a dozen times over until one day you’ll get a letter from your masters in Beijing. You’ve been bought and paid for, fat, diseased body and empty soul.

4. Military-Industrial-Complex. Let’s just put it out there, Eisenhower was right. For a man who spent most of his time on golf courses, the 34^th President of the United States left office in January of 1961 on a note of terrifying brilliance. Speaking to the American people he warned “against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” A cabal of sorts, comprised of the Defense Industry, the Military and Congress that would turn the land of the brave and the home of the free into a glorified arms factory, exporting only war and militarism throughout the globe. The Military budget of the United States for the 2009 fiscal year was $515.4 billion. Adding emergency discretionary spending and supplemental spending brings the sum to $651.2 billion. This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget. Overall the United States government is spending about $1 trillion annually on defense-related purposes. In other words, we Americans spend more on the business of war than every other country in the world combined. Increasingly military solutions seem like the only solutions and we tend to most often fight the very monsters that we create. Creating new monsters in the process. The frightening trend of the last several years has been the privatization of the military. Mercenaries trained by tax dollars. Corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton have taken over many of the duties once performed by soldiers. Often time above the law and motivated purely by profit, these groups operate with impunity abroad and at home. Blackwater doesn’t only operate in Iraq or Afghanistan. If anything their increasing role in domestic security makes foreign operations look like pocket change. How does this translate to you and me? A permanent war economy means permanent war. We’ve been in Iraq for six years now and the war in Afghanistan is just reigniting. If we ever leave the Middle East new conflicts will arise simply because they have to. Peace may be nice for reasons of longevity but it hardly justifies the largest defense budget in history. More war means more debt, more death, increased instability and an Empire in freefall. The Europeans will complain but won’t ever do anything about our love of war. They can’t. We are their army. All those social programs are nice as long as you don’t have a defense budget. Though China may feel intimidated, more spending here means bigger profits there. There will always be a new enemy. There will always be another war. Conflicts will breed conflicts. Young men and women, inspired to fight for country will die never knowing why.

5. Government. There is perhaps no way to adequately capture all that’s wrong with the United States of America without mentioning its political system. It’s the bastards we elect, supposedly there to represent our interests, who are most directly responsible for all the misdeeds mentioned in the points above. Our public institutions are not part of the problem. They are the problem. In fact, the government is not only guilty of negligence but I would go so far as to say that they are guilty of willful criminal acts against the people. Should we start with scandals? Watergate may be the most obvious example but we need not travel that far back in time. In the last decade we’ve seen a torrent of scandals involving corruption, thievery and sexual misconduct. Alabama Governor Don Siegelman (D-AL) found guilty of bribery. Connecticut Governor John G. Rowland (R-CT) pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud and tax fraud. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D-IL) charged with conspiracy to commit mail, wire fraud and solicitation of bribery. Illinois Governor George H. Ryan (R-IL) found guilty of illegal sale of government licenses and contracts as Secretary of State. Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards (D-LA) convicted of extortion. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey (D-NJ) resigned from office after admitting his homosexuality and the inappropriate appointment of his alleged male-sex partner to a government paid office. Ohio Governor Bob Taft (R-OH) guilty of four first-degree misdemeanor ethics violations. Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) who had voted for the Bill Clinton impeachment, admitted during a press conference that he had traveled to Argentina to have an extra-marital affair with an Argentinean woman. I could go on. The list is quite extensive and this is only a partial look at what’s going on at the gubernatorial level. Local political scandals list in the hundreds. Should we try Federal? Karl Rove, Jack Abramoff, NSA Wireless Surveillance, Lawyergate, Ted Stevens, Tom Delay, Jim Traficant, Sarah Palin. Those are just the big ones. Just the ones who got too greedy or too stupid and got caught. And even now, some are still respected names in politics. Some may even stand for President someday. Bribery, graft, patronage, nepotism, embezzlement, kickbacks, every last member of every branch of government is guilty, if not by direct involvement than simply by association. Our government is run by a pack of shortsighted, self-serving crooks. The mob has gone legit and it’s writing legislation. When not stealing from the coffers to enrich themselves or to pay for those high-class hookers, our government fucks us with the legislation they pass. Again, the list is too extensive. They’ve dismantled nearly everything good in the last thirty years. Labor protection. Oversight. Clean air and water laws. They subsidize a corn diet that will kill us. They turn a blind eye to an ecosystem in collapse. They spy on us. They take away our basic rights. They use double-speak and change the meaning of language. The Patriot Act. No Child Left Behind. At this moment John Mccain’s Internet Freedom Act, a piece of legislation meant to provide the exact opposite of what its name implies is finding popular support. They think we’re stupid. They think we’re saps. And the sad part is we are. We are stupid. We are saps. We reelect them over and over again. We give money to them. We buy into their bullshit. We let them distract us with fear mongering and race bating, with abortion and homophobia. The Chinese will never be the superpower they crave to be because they don’t understand that the illusion of democracy will triumph over brute force every time. This country was founded by a slave owning wealth class and it remains so till this day. They raped and pillaged the land and when that was all gone they started in on us. We are so stupid we willingly fight for them. Die for them. We provide moral justification for their crimes. And when they finally leave office where do they go? They become consultants, CEOs and members of the board. Because it’s the corporations they serve. Not us. Not us. At this moment the United States has a national debt of over $11 trillion dollars. That translates to nearly $40,000 per person. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security could be bankrupt in ten years. If Congress manages to pass a healthcare bill you better believe it’ll be overpriced, corrupt and ineffectual. We’re long past the days of the New Deal or the Great Society. What we have here is a free-for-all. Pork and shit sandwiches, hypocrisy slathered on thick. Maybe I should vote for a third party? HA! Go ahead you idiot, throw your vote away!

6. Media. It’s the circus, baby! If the politicians and the business interests are guilty of criminal acts, the media is responsible for letting them get away with it. As newspapers close down across the land, journalistic ethics go the way of the dinosaur and the trend of media conglamerization continues unabated we are left with little in the way of real information. All we have is a sideshow of pundits and bloggers more interested in winning an argument then telling us the truth. Facts get twisted out of shape or go unreported all together. MSNBC and Fox scream to the fringes while networks like CNN report opinion as news. In a 24-hour news cycle there’s no room for content. All stories become old stories as soon as they’re reported. Spin rooms become credited areas of expertise. News broadcasts become infotainment and platforms for cross-promotion. Disney has a new movie coming out? Expect full coverage on the ABC Nightly News. But we give the people what they want, every media executive will be quick to say. The problem is that you can’t give people what they want. People would gorge themselves into the grave if given half a chance. What you need to give the people is what they need. Not that it’ll happen. It’s all part of the show. A ruling class happily in bed with the political elite. John Mccain’s new bill? Who do you think sponsored that piece of prose? The government leases to the media the public airways as to inform and guard the public trust. The fifth estate exists, in theory, to protect the fragile institutions of democracy. But instead they aim to destroy them. What we have is “news” organizations sponsoring white fear protests. Movie stars peddling dangerous drugs on the market. Commercialization run amok. Whereas China sensors its media our media sensors itself. That’s the beauty of the American system. Delusion built upon delusion. Lie upon lie. And where does that leave us? George W. Bush liked to say that people crave freedom, but the truth is all that people really want is entertainment. As long as you distract them enough they’ll happily swallow whatever pills you feed them. And so here we are. Fucked from all sides. A fat, ignorant populace with neither the power or desire to fight back. God bless America.

But wait, you say, why so negative man? Just because something’s popular doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Well, first of all, that’s not true. If something popular isn’t bad right out of the monkey factory it invariably becomes bad as a direct result of its popularity. Remember how good Weeds was before people started watching it? Dexter? Remember how bad everything on the CW always was and always will be? And look at the flip side. Notice how consistently awesome Mad Men is despite the fact that four of us ever tune in? How The Wire never lost its edge? Popularity is like snake venom, it spreads slowly but without antivenin can cause paralysis and increasingly bad writing, eventually death.

Second, the popularity adage was most certainly coined by a television executive at some forth-rate network (say ABC), who was hoping to preemptively defend himself against the inevitable charge of crimes against humanity that will be brought against all television executives in the not-too-distant future for their culpability in the destruction of human culture.

At this “trial of the millennium,” as I’m sure it will come to be known by a traumatized and fearful global population, prosecutors will play hours upon hours of sitcom footage, reality TV shows, and of course, reruns of Grey’s Anatomy.

“There were worst things on television,” the chief prosecutor will say, his eyes heavy, his brow twisted into knots, “but few other programs did as much harm.”

Now that the show is in its sixth season I often wonder what it was like all those years ago when Grey’s Anatomy was being conceived.

So okay, we have a group of superficial, mean-spirited, emotionally stunted, self-absorbed assholes and all they do is fuck each other’s brains out in a hospital. Can some of them be lesbians?

And… scene!

It’s one of those shows that’s very hard to critique in any rational way as even after watching every season it seems like the episodes just blend into eachother until eventually everything becomes consumed by the gallons of oil pouring out of Patrick Dempsey’s hair. And so instead of forming constructive thoughts you find yourself sobbing in a corner wondering if Izzie will ever win her battle with cancer, if Cristina will finally let someone into her heart or whether Elizabeth will just settle down already. You find meaning in the show’s pop-philosophy/Oprah brand self-help “this is what life is all about” narration. And life changes. People become more beautiful and you feel less obligated to care for anyone other than yourself. It’s nice to live in a universe where women stop maturing past their teens and all men are just boys with a fetish for lip fuzz. Fuck any sense of mutual morality, I’m a heartless douchebag with great hair.

Hey look! That woman they gave that face transplant to is hot now too! Better go buy some of the music I heard on the show and go to the park where I can snicker at the ugly people, cause God knows if someone doesn’t fit into a McDreamy/McSteamy classification system they just aren’t worth my time!

God, like I totally agree! Do you have forth period lunch? We can go give one another handjobs in the parking lot.

Wait, where was I?

Why am I in a lab coat and why are my pants gone?

It began with rival tribes. Cities warring for resources of food and water. Walls were built to keep the barbarians at bay. To guard against the onslaught of Alexander, Hannibal, Attila. A hundred other conquerors bent on immortality. As the technology of war improved increasingly walls were built to keep people in, not out. And to guard against invasions not by armies but by the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. With digital walls came digital enemies. Viruses. Bots. Spammers. Trojan horses. An array of binary conquerors obsessed not with immortality, but the chaos of anarchy, the beauty of annihilation, the desperate desires of consumption.

Globalism reverts to tribalism. Instant information and instant revelation connecting human consciousness as not since the days of tiny fishing hamlets, and disparate city-states. A vast planetary town square, a billion voices raised.

We gather round the nodes. Drunk off the information overload. A million frames per second. Soundless flashes of light. Bebop fantasia without the prerequisite of muscle mass. All of infinity jammed within a single terabyte of near indistinguishable computer code. Light replaces flesh. The residual static a new language for a new species.

Whereas the universe arrived in an explosion of electrical energy, so we return, evolving, devolving back into a stream of dancing electrical strings. God is absent. We have become the new Creator. Molding bodies, landscapes, entire worlds out of cybernetic clay.

It began with walls and it’ll end the same way. Constricted. Marginalized. The limits of life itself determined not by intelligence, ideals or the brute force of strength, but by the terrifying perfection of bandwidth. Our obsessive desires for freedom replaced by a desperation for peace. Self-imposed purgatory. Even the anarchists will be begging for the reassurances of mortar and brick against the onslaught of data seeping through their binary walls. And in the end we will render worlds like those we left behind, back to a time when we had blood and skin and we worked with our hands to lay stone along the ground. And those virtual worlds will become real worlds. And in time the barriers will again become electric. And the loop will start over again.

Marshall McLuhan

I’ve become convinced that there exists a multi-trillion dollar, international conspiracy in the world that at this very moment is working furiously against us. Its agents include everyone from the wealthiest robber barons to the lowliest anchor on the local news. At their employ are tens-of-millions of your neighbors, as well as, actors, sports figures and all other manner of celebrity. I can only deduce that their insidious final master plan is world domination, but their immediate goal is all too simple: they want you to join Twitter.

Topping the list of things that scare me and which I don’t understand, is the “micro-blogging” site Twitter that the mass media has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that none of us should be allowed to live without.

The idea behind the site is based on the presupposition that human beings have finally reached such a state of critical stupidity that we cannot comprehend any notion disseminated through more than 140 characters. Our attention span has apparently been so corrupted that we can only consume information in tiny bites. This perhaps helps partly to explain why the media (which has been trying to manipulate information into increasingly smaller grains for years) is so overly obsessed with the idea that they’ve actually turned some local news sources into glorified Twitter ads.

One of the worst consequences of “social networking sites” such as these is that it adds fuel to the fire of vapid self-obsession that has already turned most of our fellow man into ignorant narcissistic cultists, while at the same time further draining any sort of worthwhile expression from the web. Personally, I don’t find anyone interesting enough, including myself, to have to keep up with their constant random thoughts in quick-fire succession. Sites like Twitter unfortunately trick most people into believing that they have something in their brains worth communicating, when they simply do not. Leaving most us to dwell in tiny isolated bubbles of delusion, in which we mistakenly believe that we actually matter to anyone outside of our immediate breeding circles.

In addition to this, Twitter and sites of its ilk only further exacerbate the problem which is already destroying our political and cultural dialogue, namely, the rendering of complex feelings and ideas into overly-simplified forms lacking substance or context. Our discourse is already remedial enough as it is, we really don’t need it to be even further deluded.

Interestingly enough a recent study from a neuroscience research group has discovered that instant social interaction and rapid-fire news updates are too fast for the “moral compass” of the brain to process. The study showed it takes longer to activate processing of social emotions such as admiration and compassion, which are critical for developing a sense of morality. Perhaps this could be a new Twitter tagline: we undermine your sense of morality!

Seriously speaking, it’s something worth pondering. Could Twitter and similar technologies actually be undermining the development, or altering the alignment of a moral compass?

This isn’t at all far off from what Marshall McLuhan (I can already hear some of my students laughing), the one-time famed oracle of media studies, warned might be a consequence of extension. You see, McLuhan believed that every technology is an extension of man, altering and shaping human behavior (a car would be an extension of the foot, for example). Ultimately every technology gets over-extended, or in other words, the benefits of any media are always eventually undermined by its faults. This happens with cars and planes (i.e. global warming), with television and computers (i.e. illiteracy or stifled literacy, isolation), and every other form of technology we invent to make life “better.” Then instead of simply eliminating that technology we create a new one to take its place, thus further extending ourselves. Further changing us away from our previous or original constructs (i.e. essential humanity).

In this case, as McLuhan would say, it’s not the information that is transmitted by a site like Twitter that matters, it’s the vehicle, the medium that is of importance. It is the medium that is the message. How is the use of this technology, the very existence of this medium changing or shaping human interaction and human construction?

Although McLuhan would probably not make a judgment call, I for one cannot see any benefits from such an extension.

Human interaction cannot and should not be whittled down into bite-size pieces. It not only inflames the over-obsession people have with instant, undeserved fame, while adding another layer of dependence on technology based on trivial needs (another extension), but it also isolates us further from genuine social interaction. Far too often as it is I find myself in face-to-face encounters where the other person is so consumed with their artificial networks that I might as well be meeting them in a chat room. I’ve actually met people who would rather text on their phone than have a real conversation.

I for one will never join Twitter for many of the same reasons why I despise instant messages and the iPhone brand of technologies that have been developed around them. These forms of media serve only to twist and fracture our social identities, transforming passive, indifferent, impersonal gestures into acceptable forms of close human interaction. Nearly instantly these technologies seem to develop into over-extensions and the consequences are dire. Friendship (companionship) becomes increasingly artificial and meaningless, and we become little more than micro-social junkies, constantly looking for our next unfulfilling fix.

The most vital question, the one that the mass media conspiracy has failed to ask, is what will this brand of technology ultimately lead us to become?

Partly also, the answer is that politicians have become masters of spin. In my brief stay in the Communications department of the Illinois State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, also the Republican nominee for Governor, I saw first hand how easily the press is pushed along. Potential scandals are nearly everywhere, but no one bothers to seek them out. Press releases are treated as fact.

It seems that social unrest (reaching its heights in the 60s and 70s), maybe even the threat of all-out conflict (dating back to the Civil War), has filled media and politics with so much fear of breakdown that they rather keep us under informed than relay the truth. Both sides win. The media gives little time or real understanding to modern social movements, opting to distract us with suburban murders, abductions and culture wars. They can claim to have reported it and dismissed it, the details being lost in the 24-hour news cycle. The politicians simply want to hold on and centralize power.

Aren’t the Republicans the small government party?

And the people doing the masking? The spinners, the speech writers and reporters? What about them? Is it a conspiracy? Is it ignorance and systemic corruption?

Not really. They’re good people for the most part. But in a society where gaining wealth and power are more important than truth, it’s easy to lose one’s soul. It’s easy to abandon the ideals of youth when family and social responsibilities make a paycheck more important. It is also easy to start getting caught up in the ideologies of those you work for. After all, when you represent a thing, and people are quick to blame you for the system, the easiest thing to do is to defend your side. That’s it isn’t it? Sometimes good people find themselves under attack and retreat to those who are causing the corruption, becoming corrupted themselves.

How easily we sell our souls. But of course, what is the alternative?

“All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven – whoever speaks against the eternal truth in the spirit of men, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come – Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt; for the tree is known by his fruit. Oh generation of vipers!” — Jesus Christ