MARCUSE'S SLEEP WALK TURNS INTO A DEATH MARCH

The US is a mystery to me. You might say, it's a riddle wrapped in an enigma. The closest that I get to a solution or an explanation is described by Herbert Marcuse in his book, One Dimensional Man.

In that book Marcuse argued that "advanced industrial society" created false needs, which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought.

This results in a "one-dimensional" universe of thought and behaviour in which aptitude and ability for critical thought and oppositional behaviour wither away"

'One Dimensional Man' was a text of the New Left in the sixties. Angela Davis was a disciple of Marcuse, so that kind of "sexed" it up a bit. I acquired it, read it, and passed it on. I cant say that I understood it then, or even now, but to me Marcuse describes a nightmarish sleep walk. It seems to me that I have been watching the continuing institutionalization of his theory ever since.

I began to really appreciate the awesome power of this social construction, described by Marcuse, with the implementation of the very sophisticated, and long prepared neoconservative policies immediately after 9-11, all with little to no effective protest by 'public opinion'

But today, my appreciation finds a new level when I find this on the C&L site with no corresponding public outrage and demands
Mike Papantonio: Gulf Leak Can't Be Stopped.

And then I start thinking about other examples and this isn't the only massive hemorrhaging.

• There's the ongoing massive international bankster heist,
• the massive expansion of the monumental health care scam,
• the unimaginable military-industrial-complex $1 trillion budget with a 5 million person direct payroll and endless "privatization" scams,
• there is the international military-industrial drug cartel business whose laundered billions prop up wall street and whose market makes the US into a version of the comparatively small potatoes 'Opium Wars Period' of China with the added feature of the industrial-prison complex, and, of course,
• there are those massive hemorrhagings of which we must not speak or admit.
  

I think I'll read One-Dimensional Man again. I think it may finally be perfectly clear.