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Fool the People All the Time By Perry Brass
That is really the question now: what does it mean? For some of my more right-wing gayish libertarian-capitalist friends, they're going to try to take all this with a good yuk and a smile. Politics for them means follow the easiest road to the money, and lots and lots of money, friends, will still be out there—just for fewer and fewer people. So, if they have to swallow a good dose of Christian fundamentalist castor oil to get to it, they will hold their noses and do it. In the last few years of the old twentieth century, which, by the way, like it or not, we're still pretty much in, I coined the expression to describe the current attitude: IGOMNYGY. Pronounced “Igomniggy,” it means “I GOT MINE, NOW YOU GET YOURS!” I heard this over and over again, while the good times were still rolling, even if there was almost nothing under them on which to roll. This is the attitude that the country is still running on (and face it: it brought us the “new” George Bushyism—that “no free lunch” attitude that the Republican rich smirk and sell, while slurping down the free lunch). IGOMNYGY is still in control, despite the staggering amounts of resentment around it, that are piling up worse than rotting mounds of plutonium. That resentment is plutonium volatile, but we want to pretend that it's not there—and we just have a bunch of kooks tripping around when their Prozac's run out, shooting up stock broker's offices, fast food joints, and post offices. Crime has become a direct by-product of this resentment. Although demographically, we are in a low-crime period (fewer kids, less crime) that is going to change very soon. Building prisons under W. will be one of the true growth industries, allowing even more IGOMNYGY. But just crowing that will change nothing. Because, get this: not everyone's going to get theirs. In fact, with Bubbadubbya in office, the response to IGOMNYGY will be“IGONNIWY” instead. That means: I GOT NOTHING, NOW I WANT YOURS!
America's economy is starting to resemble Brazil's: an incredibly steep pyramid with about one percent of the population now controlling about 30 percent of the wealth. With corporate CEO's making 79 times as much money as the workers who work under them. And with a constant shell game of moving and dismantling companies, literally blowing the legs off the people who work for them. The real news now is not on the front page of The New York Times, but on the business pages. There you'll find out that, at this point, exactly four mega-media companies control almost every aspect of “information distribution” in the country. This in itself would be the theme for another piece, in that “information” in our Information Age has become totally a corporate commodity: there is “Corporatable Information,” and “worthless” information; that is, information with no Corporate value. Much of what we now call “art” was a part of this “worthless” information. Universities, which used to exist to preserve Non-Corporatable Info, will now cease to do so: that is, either preserve it; or, in fact, exist. Information with no monetary value will simply die out. In George Orwell's novel 1984, he refers to “Newspeak,” the language of the State, as “the only language that gets smaller with time.” The controlling government controls language by de-accessing words: words that may have “unnecessary ideas” attached, simply cease to exist. We are now doing this in the corporatizing “dumbing down” of America. Anything which is not bottom-line entertaining to the sellable masses is dispensed with. What is immediately sellable is “entertainment,” is “art,” is “culture.” A good example of this is the corporatization of Hip Hop music, which has become a huge business, making a small number of white men at the mega-media companies very, very rich. Those “street people” who clutch to their dear hearts that notion that they are among the “niggers of any race”—and who are sure that the very exploitable simplicity of Hip Hop exemplifies their culture, feelings, rage, etc.— have not figured out that Hip Hop now goes nowhere. The music (and the culture behind it) have become so commercialized that it actually only exists as a parody of itself. We can no longer distinguish between Hip Hop and the Saturday night Mad TV version of it.
It is a short skip from Hip Hop to IHOP, from brain food that requires no chewing to fast food that requires no brains, but I think that in that distance you come to some of the problems that are going on now. One, of course, is that constant, gnawing fear—very, very real—brought on by the fact that very few people know exactly where their paychecks actually come from now . . . but most people know how fast they can be taken away. Millions of people now work three, four, even five layers of “Corporativity” away from the actual money behind their checks. So they have no idea where their paychecks come from: but they know that at the drop of a half a marketshare—somewhere, God-knows-where—they can be taken away. This was so even in a period when we had such a “growing” economy that unemployment was down to less than 5 percent. For most Americans, this meant that they could jump “laterally” and go from flipping hamburgers to flipping chicken. As our Corporate state has become more and more agglutinized, so that fewer and fewer mega-corps now control more and more people, as the old song goes, there's “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” My favorite new example of this is that the Senate recently allowed IBP, the country's largest beef processor, to buy the country's largest pork processor. So we will have one company to process more animal products than anywhere in the world. In the old days, this would be considered a monopoly, but not anymore. This redefines pork barreling. The same jamming together of power is now happening in real estate, so that a few huge real estate barons control more and more land, especially in cities, where terms like “rent guide lines,” and “tenant's rights” are eyed like the devil's children. Although the country is “veering” towards the right, the question is which mask is the “right” hiding behind. You have the “let's get down with the people” George Bush-bullshit, presentin' Bubbadubbya as jus' a regular ol' shitkicker and porkrind-muncher. To keep his faction of the American business class living even higher off the hog, Dubbya will have to pledge his new allegiance to the unborn (as if he truly cares about the born), cozy up to the fundamentalists, who, believe, me, will end up his hating his guts (the only good thing about the Fundy psychos is that no one is ever truly Fundy enuff for them), and give business enough rein to destroy the environment. Little stuff like that.
This is another Big Biz shell game, considering what portion of the “legitimate” population is now on “mood elevators,” anti-depressants, and chemical tricks to cure ADD, etc. That we have a “legitimate” population (those who can do the Big Corp dance) and an illegitimate one (now called—with a big wink—“Hip Hop nation”) provides endless patter for the long-running white minstrel show, our national Grand Ole Opry, as we see it on TV each night. On TV and at the shopping mall we have brought into the Mainstream culture—that is, the Corporate show itself—little pieces of the American infatuation with rebellion: a rebellion that is simply cosmetic. We have “cutting edge” entertainers, like the Blue Man Group, who sell computer innards. We have "real" tough-ass bad guys who have become blueblood Republicans and Hollywood aristocracy. We have our impetuous, black-clad, urban pioneers, pierced to the tits, who'll tell you that anyone who sends his kids to public schools is a loser and deserves what he gets. James Dean, sweet, faggoty, alienated, is a co-ed dorm icon. And girls, he's almost as cute as Brad Pitt. This does not let the Democrats off the hook. In the last election, we learned that the Democrats were doing Republican Lite. But the Dems could not (so far) do the George W. shit-eatin' smile and lead us in the “Let's Show those Ol' 1960s Hippy-Dippy-Faggot-Commie-Queers Who've Taken Over Our Great Land the Road to Jesus!” cheer. No, the Dems could not do that because the Democrats (i.e., the Old Liberals, as opposed to the old New Lefties) had managed to clone themselves with the New Technocratic cousins of the Corp, to produce a world that will be easily palatable to Smith & Hawkens customers everywhere. It is touchy-feelly, natural-foody place that does not have to worry too hard about all those people hanging out in front of the free-range chicken ranches (high-end versions of IHOP), sleeping on cardboard in the snow. This leads us to an interesting place. If, as the Republicans used to say, “The business of America is business,” and the Republicans are better for business than anyone else, at least better for the Upper Echelon business class, where does that leave us? Behind whose mask will we find someone we can actually trust? (And the answer, Regis, is:) The player in our own national minstrel show who consorts the least with our enemies [and we, sure as shit, know who they are!]. Because those other swell, born-again “reg'lar guys” will flush us down the drain real fast. In other words, I want wiggle-room around me, and I'm not going to find that in what's coming up out of Texas. I have been describing this period for about five years now in two terms. One is the Age of Corporate Feudalism, when nationalism virtually doesn't exist, and neither does allegiance to anything else except Corporate power. People will follow their business leaders now anyplace, as they eat each other up and any weaker business entities with them. In this peculiar environment, the man of “suave” Corporate knightliness has become a hero. He takes his secretary and a few chosen underlings with him when he goes in and dismantles airlines, destroys hospitals, and ruins school districts. But to show that he's a good guy, he will build a ballpark. The knight will send his kids to the most exclusive private schools, while he argues with you that public schooling (which, by the way, literally produced that very white-bread Norman Rockwell image of America that Bubbadubbya is enchanted with) is worthless and evil. His kids will learn Latin and trigonometry, while posing for Ralph Lauren ads. The knight in this Age of Corporate Feudalism will actually try to rise above the very Corporation that feeds him, and then he'll eat you in the process. Expect no mercy here. He has already set the style of our style-obsessed period, one in which people console themselves with the perfect room lamp because they cannot afford the room it goes with. Everything that the knight himself does, from his secretly kinky sex life to his latest trophy marriage, will hide, like the perfect “show face,” the naked power game behind it. The only problem with this is that even the show-face does not have a lot going on in it. In the Old Feudalism, there were some pretensions towards saintliness. Remember: protecting the weak; damsels in distress. In the new Corporate Feudalism, the weak end up breakfast and any damsel is just as hard-assed as you are. The other term, I'm afraid, is that we are in Pre-Fascist America. I find the symptoms too ugly and obvious. One of the worst is that the “lumpen people,” the guys on the street, the George Bush fellow-porkrind-chompers, will be “exalted.” German Fascist baddies invited the ones who had suffered so badly after World War One, the menschen from the beergartens, to come in and “share” the power. The regular “folk” were going to get everything. Cars, good radios tuned to one station, autobahns, and the country all to themselves without those Jews (now replaced by equal bogeymen: homos and druggies) to schmutz the future up. The Nazis made their calling into a sacred one and had their own Hip Hop music: popular drinking and marching songs with that stomping German umpah beat. It was going to be a big picnic for everyone who'd been silent, who'd lost out before; for that good pure “Silent Majority” who had been given a kick in the heinie at the Treaty of Versailles. Of course all the while, the old Teutonic families with the big gelt were smiling. Hitler could do their dirty work for them—he was not one of them—but he was useful. I am not saying that Bubbadubbya is Hitler, but I do see us sliding on a greased floor sloping downward into a Corporate fascism that will become just as frightening as the old State fascism was. In this era, the watchword is: “Give the people what you can convince them that they want.” Make sure that “lifestyle,” one of the most gelded terms of any time, replaces life. Keep them dumb, laughing, and Hip-Hopping, and make sure that any words that describe what is really going on, conveniently disappear. Perry Brass is the author of 11 published books. He has dealt with the rise of Corporate feudalism and the re-emergence of animatrons like George W. Bush in several of his novels, including Albert, or the Book of Man, and The Harvest. His latest novel is Angel Lust, an Erotic Novel of Time Travel. You can find out more about his work, and reach him, at www.perrybrass.com |
This CD from Ice T, best known for his early 1990's single Cop Killer illustrates the rage in Hip Hop 
Ice Cube, like Ice T, is one of the leaders of the Hip Hop movement in music 
Will George W.Bush's presidency widen the gap between America's rich and poor? 
© 1997-2002 BEI