The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country. despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame, cheered on by millions of viewers, 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. Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and attention.

Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also 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. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

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. It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman Sachs, that willfully trashed the global economy and 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 program who lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre, perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.

The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture, however, are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The jobs we are shedding are not coming back, as the White House economist Lawrence Summers tacitly acknowledges when he talks of a "jobless recovery". The belief that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

America is sinking under trillions in debt it can never repay and stays afloat by frantically selling about $2 billion in Treasury bonds a day to the Chinese. It saw 2.8 million people lose their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions - nearly 8,000 people a day - and stands idle as they are joined by another 2.4 million people this year. It refuses to prosecute the Bush administration for obvious war crimes, including the use of torture, and sees no reason to dismantle Bush's secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Deficits are pushing individual states to bankruptcy and forcing the closure of everything from schools to parks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have squandered trillions of dollars, appear endless. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called 'near poverty.' One in eight Americans - and one in four children - depend on food stamps to eat. And yet, in the midst of it all, we continue to be a country consumed by happy talk and happy thoughts. We continue to embrace the illusion of inevitable progress, personal success and rising prosperity. Reality is not considered an impediment to desire.

When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children. We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge, moral renewal and new glory. It is not a new story. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher America into a new dark age. It was the economic collapse in Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Weimar Republic that vomited up Adolf Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to loudmouth talk show hosts, whom we naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. And as in all totalitarian societies, those who do not pay fealty to the illusions imposed by the state become the outcasts, the persecuted.

The decline of American empire began long ago 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 Harvard 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 level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. 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 very foundations of our society. In the 17th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.

As the pressure mounts, as the despair and desperation 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 why the Bush White House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension of habeas corpus, the practice of "extraordinary rendition," warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. The motive behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national security. It is to seize and maintain internal control. It is about controlling us.

And yet, even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure 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 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, by Hollywood or by Christian preachers, is 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 offshore penal colonies where it openly practices torture into the greatest democracy on earth. And it keeps us from fighting back.

Resistance movements will have to look now at the long night of slavery, the decades of oppression in the Soviet Union and the curse of fascism for models. The goal will no longer be the possibility of reforming the system but of protecting truth, civility and culture from mass contamination. It will require the kind of schizophrenic lifestyle that characterizes all totalitarian societies. Our private and public demeanors will often have to stand in stark contrast. Acts of defiance will often be subtle and nuanced. They will be carried out not for short term gain but the assertion of our integrity. Rebellion will have an ultimate if not easily definable purpose. The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. The goal will become the ability to endure.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best sellers War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

Source: http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/hedges-american-psychosis.html  (10/04/2011)

'Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are, and if we have decided where we want to go, we will generally know how to get there. If the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost. While this is obvious, it is something that most people to a greater or lesser degree choose to ignore. They ignore it because our route to reality is not easy. First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort. The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views on the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort. They feel certain their maps are complete'

M. Scott Peck The Road Less Travelled (Arrow books, 1995)

'As society externalizes, all things noneconomic pass out of view. As the university increasingly comes under the markets sway, this means that all aspects of intellectual life that are not directly relevant to increasing market productivity will inevitably be devalued'

Paul Stiles Is the American Dream Killing you ( Harper Collins, 2005)

'We can describe the bubble two ways, the first being what it stands for. The bubble is a world of entertainment, pleasure, and fun where happiness is derived from material things and sensual experience, where there are no limits on personal freedom, and where there are no consequences for our actions. Alternatively, we can define the bubble by what it opposes: the bubble exists to deny reality to us, to keep us from our truth, be it moral, cultural, spiritual or aesthetic. Truth is like a pin, poised to pop the bubble'

' The bubble thus represents the great narrowing of human horizons away from ulimate questions of meaning and purpose, being and existence, soul and god, and towards the cash register. The dulling of the intellect, the decline of philosophy, of religion, of literature, and the humanities in general, all begin here'

Paul Stiles Is the American Dream Killing you ( Harper Collins, 2005)

'NOWADAYS, MEN [women] OFTEN FEEL that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that, within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and, in this feeling they are quite correct: What ordinary men [women] are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits of which they live... In other milieux, they move precariously and remain spectators'

J.M Henslin Down to earth sociology (Free Press, 2007)

'I think we are displacing our anxieties and our isolation into these received lives, and it's a safe and passive way for us to not have to think about our problems and the fact that we are complicit with terrible political situations.'

Sue Dodd.


Source:http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/03/1078295442582.html

'WHETHER we regard them as constituting a sea or a cesspit, we're drowning in them. Celebrities. In their shallow lives and shabby deaths. Our media and our minds are filled with celebrity affairs, celebrity marriages, celebrity honeymoons in celebrity resorts, followed by celebrity adoptions (the approved method of celebrity parenthood, in that they can cast the child as they would a kid for a movie - as opposed to taking the pot luck of conventional pregnancy) followed by revelations of trips to celebrity rehabs and celebrity divorce in celebrated brawls conducted by celebrity lawyers.

We have celebrity defendants in murder trials and celebrity candidates for elections, and can watch minor celebs on celebrity quiz or reality shows. And if the mainstream media is momentarily distracted from their meretricious doings by war or climate change, there are always specialist celeb mags and cable channels.

If there's one thing the fans love even more than a celebrated and worthless life it's an appropriately tawdry ending, preferably by overdose. Though I'd managed to be blissfully ignorant of Anna Nicole Smith?s existence, it became compulsory after it ended. As are the lives and lofty examples of our thuggish sports stars (now, there?s another devalued word) and the antics of the Barbie Doll army. Not to forget those other role models - the drug-addled models who totter like derelicts up and down the catwalks.

Semi-talented rock stars, boof-headed rugby players who treat women like dirt and gross businessmen whose claim to fame rests on obscene salaries join the conga line of those notorious for their notoriety.

What's going on here Are our lives so meaningless, so lacking in imagination or energy that we have to waste our time, money and neurons on this human trash It's a serious social illness if for no other reason than these useless idiots distract us from the achievements of people who really are worthy of our attention.

All this came to mind when I was helping launch the Caroline Chisholm Education Foundation in Melbourne, a marvellous venture to help kids over the hurdles. Chisholm was a secular saint, one of those indomitable women who profoundly changed the world around them, whether that world was Madras or Melbourne, Sydney or the bush. In her day she was cherished as a hero, a reputation gained through her work, not through a personal publicist. Now we see her face on our money - but not one in a hundred knows a damn thing about her.

Yet who isn't cursed with the knowledge of Paris Hilton This trashiest of all celebs makes the trailer trash on Jerry Springer look like European aristocracy. Eliminating junk email isn't the problem. How do we screen out all further reference to this megabrat.

Real fame, enduring fame, relates to achievement - whereas celebrity relates to ratings, cover stories and social pages. I'm not saying they don't blur and overlap, that mass marketing cannot commidify authentic, genuine fame and make it into nonsense - symbolised in the T-shirts of Einstein poking out his tongue at the celebrity he'd never wanted or sought. The full-time celeb wants and seeks nothing else.

Fame is often an unintended consequence of work in a lab, a jungle, a hospital, at the coalface of suffering. Whereas celebrity is pursued for its own sake, pulled along by a dog-team of showbiz hacks. At fever pitch for decades, the psychopathology of celebrity now seems a terminal disease - eclipsing the work of the unsung heroes who cure terminal diseases.

The opposite of fame isn't obscurity so much as infamy. (Somehow 'fame' seems inappropriate to a Hitler.) In a sense anonymity is the antonym of celebrity but, on another level, celebrity is its own opposite. The word evokes triviality, inconsequence, worthlessness. The only good thing Celebrity has the shelf-life of yoghurt. Celebrities are tissues (you choose between facial and toilet) compared to the chiselled marble of enduring reputation. Though as a trip to Westminster Abbey reminds us, even marble has its use-by date.

We live in an era when more US citizens vote for contestants on TV's American Idol than for their presidency (and then elect and re-elect a dolt like Dubyah), in a time when Paris Hilton defames both a hotel chain and a city, when Madonna can happily infringe the Vatican's copyright, and the Dalai Lama depends on the endorsement of Richard Gere. You wonder whether the weather is, after all, the greatest of human crises. Isn't the gush and tosh of celebrity culture (sic) every bit as threatening.

With climate change, we might all be drowned by rising sea levels. But wouldn't you rather drown in seawater than in the rising tide of celebrity bullshit?'

Source: http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/phillipadams/index.php/theaustralian/comments/why_celebrity_portraits_are_just_fake_art/  ( Saturday, April 28, 2007)

'We live in an image based culture, in which most of the images we see come out of Hollywood, most of them are faces, and most of them are faces that have had cosmetic surgery. All of us are part of that culture, its not something that is going to go away.

Makeover culture refers to all sorts of things that we feel the need to makeover, so those could be; buildings, houses, our careers, our bodies and faces, our gardens, our homes, and I think that is what cosmetic surgery is about, its not about achieving a point of beauty that is static and final and definite, its actually about showing that you are a happening individual in makeover culture... that you are in a continual  process of self improvement.'

 Meredith  Jones - Author "Makeover Culture" 

'A lot of people like to renovate the house, um decorate. I like to renovate me, and decorate me. I don't think it's vain, because I mean, people may say its vain, but they have there hair coloured, they wear high heels, they wear bras, they put make up on, and are still announcing themselves, so i consider this announcing me, I hope.'

Joan Wilkinson - Cosmetic surgery veteran

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/special_eds/20061023/default_full.htm (16 April, 2007)

'But suppose we thought about representation, not in terms of a particular kind of object (like a statue or a painting) but as a kind of activity, process, or set of relationships. Suppose we de-reified the thing that seems to stand before us, standing for something else, and thought of representation, not as that thing, but as a process in which the thing is participant, like a pawn on a chessboard or a coin in a system of exchange. This would bring us back to the notion of representation as something roughly commensurate with the totality of cultural activity, including that aspect of political culture which is structured around transfer, displacement, or alienation of power. culture understood as an economy, a system of exchanges and transfers of value'

Mitchell, W. J.T, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. (1994, University of Chicago Press)

'Pictures are things that have been marked with all the stigma of personhood and animation: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively; or they look back at us silently across a gulf unbridged by language. They present not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder. In short, we are stuck with our magical, pre-modern attitudes toward, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology. If we indeed are living in a time of the plague of fantasies, perhaps the best cure that artists can offer is to unleash the images, in order to see where they lead us, how they go before us. A certain tactical irresponsibility with images, what I call 'critical idolism' or 'secular divination', might be just the right sort of homeopathic medicine for what plagues us.

Walter Benjamin concluded his meditation on mechanical reproduction with the spectre of mass destruction. The dangerous aesthetic pleasure of our time is not mass destruction but the mass creation of new, ever more vital images of life-forms  terms that apply figuratively, as we have seen, to everything from computer viruses to terrorist sleeper cells.  The epithet for our times, then, is not the modernist saying, things are falling apart, but an even more ominous slogan: things come alive. Artists, technicians, and scientists have always been united in the imitation of life, the production of images and mechanisms that have, as we say lives of their own. Perhaps this moment of accelerated stasis in history, when we feel caught between the utopian fantasies of biocybernetics and the dystopian realities of biopolitics, between the rhetoric of the post-human and the real urgency of universal human rights, is a moment given to us for rethinking just what our lives, and our arts, are for.'

Mitchell, W. J.T, What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. (2005, University of Chicago Press)

'It was an attempt to diagnose the 'pictorial turn' in contemporary culture, the widely shared notion that visual images have replaced words as the dominant mode of expression in our time. Picture theory tried to analyse the pictorial, or (as it is sometimes called) the 'iconic' or 'visual' turn, rather than simply accept it on face value. It was designed to resist received ideas about 'images replacing words', and to resist the temptation to put all the eggs in one disciplinary basket, wether art history, literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, or anthropology. Rather than relying on a pre-existing theory, method, or discourse to explain pictures, I wanted to let them speak for themselves. Starting from metapictures, or pictures that reflect on the process of pictorial representation itself, I wanted to study pictures themselves as forms of theorizing. The aim in short, was to picture theory, not to import a theory of pictures from somewhere else.

I don't mean to suggest, of course, that Picture Theory was innocent of any contact with the rich archive of contemporary theory. Semiotics, rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethical and ideological criticism, and art history were woven (probably too promiscuously) into a discussion of the relations of pictures like description and narration; the function of texts in visual media like painting, sculpture and photography; the peculiar power of images over persons, things, and public spheres.'

Mitchell, W. J.T, What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images (2005, University of Chicago Press).

'Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad of impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpest of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves onto the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from the old; the moment of importance came not here but there, so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work apon feeling and not upon conviction, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it... Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'

Woolf, Virgina. 'Modern Fiction', printed in The Common Reader, Hogarth Press, 1925.

'She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn't mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination'

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. (Wordsworth Editions Limited 1996)

'The cultured and facinating liar, is both an object and source of desire. The liar is important because he or she contradicts not just conventional morality, but its sustaining origin, 'truth'... art runs to meet the liar kissing his 'false' beautiful lips knowing that 'truth' is just a matter of style.'

Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence. (1998. Clarendon Press)

'I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.'

Bill Cosby (1937 - )

I view my work as working with artefacts, the magazine image is the original artefact, and by painting over it I enact a form of reverse restoration. Through the painting over, highlighting and accentuating elements of the original, I reveal symbolism within the image... but instead of revealing new colour and form through a process of removing dirt and accumulated blockages to meaning, as with traditional restoration. I reveal layers in reverse by adding, highlighting and exposing elements of the image, investigating visually and metaphorically the culture that created it.  I make a puzzle or fragmented mosaic out of an image that had an initial appearance of wholeness and uniformity as a printed image on paper, now reworked to be a constructed physical representation of the puzzling  and fragmented collective cultural and psychological space that we encounter on a daily basis.

Our individualist driven culture espouses that we all have the capacity to access the financial bounty on offer, if we work hard enough. That, we all have the opportunity to rise above our innate lack of financial security, if we are unlucky enough to be burdened with this journey. (Others, like Paris, have it easy it seems?) Figures of success (rags to riches) are held up as proof that capitalism rewards those who aspire for the pivotal symbol of success, money!  

But what happens to those who do not fit this picture? Who do not base their own success on these lofty ideals, if they were blessed with the opportunity and or the intelligence to do so? They are left in a powerless position that robs them of personal dignity. Through a gradual erosion of the welfare system and reforms of Industrial Relations laws (In Australia), this divide is sure to grow,leaving us who are not fortunate enough to have found a place for ourselves on top of the heap (If our ideology could allow us to do so?) begging the question, why?   

 Our social and cultural fabric should not be built upon a financial system that propagates social inequity - It should not be 'financial', it should be based upon building community and self sufficiency among citizens, not disenfranchising and disempowering people - placing them in a subservient role that ensures they are not able due to the position they are placed, capable of demanding for or actively creating a situation that is more equitable.

 We live in a barren landscape, the 'drought' is more than just environmental - it is psychological and cultural - as long as globally we are prisoners to a financial market that is detached from the 'human' and 'environmental' forces that in the end must be acknowledged - we destroy our natural environment, severing our humanity and capacity for compassion in the process... creating a disconnect with our ability to connect on a meaningful level, collectively and individually.