Our culture is based on two things; television and petroleum. Whether you are Pootie or the president, your world depends on an unbroken supply of both. So, it is a small wonder that we all watch a televised global war for oil as brain-wave entertainment. As a consequence, we receive the conditioning required to sustain our acceptance of the sate brutality occurring at the edges of the empire in the quest for oil. How much of this convenient symbiosis linking corporate television, wars as a corporate profit center, and corporate oil was consciously planned we can never know until we are redeemed from the blinding effects of the corporate sponsored hologram.
We live in an age of corporate domination just as we once lived in an age of domination by royal families, kings and war lords. From inside the hologram there is no history, no memory, no way to equate the tribute rendered to the credit card companies, the insurance companies, the IRS, the power cartels, and the home mortgage banks with the kind of debt bondage they actually represent. Yet we must pay such tribute to be allowed to survive in our society, even if that tribute is a trailer payment at usury rates or allowing a credit card company access to our medical insurance payment history. We must trade liberty and privacy in increments for comfort and perceived security. That has been the devil’s bargain from the beginning. If middle-class Americans do not feel threatened by the slow encroachment of the police state or the Patriot Act, it is because they live comfortably enough and exercise their liberties very lightly, never testing the boundaries. You never know you are in prison unless you try the door.
– by Joe Bageant from his book, “Deer Hunting for Jesus”