Friday, July 20, 2012

There Are No Superheroes, Just a Decadent and Depraved Culture


Mass shootings have become so common in America in recent years that most of the time they no longer even generate screaming national headlines—instead often fading into the media background noise along with all of the other horrible shit happening these days. If you are an aspiring mass shooter, you’ve got to come up with something truly creative to really get noticed. Show us something we haven’t seen before, you know, like attacking a crowded theater during the midnight premiere of the latest $200 million mindless comic book movie.

Today’s mass shooting tragedy in Aurora, Colorado—incidentally located not too far from the scene of the horrific 1999 slaughter at Columbine High School—was spectacular enough to get our collective attention. Once again, grisly images of bloodied bodies, including children, being littered across a typical suburban landscape have been seared upon our collective conscience, momentarily shaking us out of our media-induced stupor, if only long enough to merely condemn the killer as an asocial monster. And once again, as soon as the initial shock has faded we will collectively go right back to sleep without asking any of the larger questions about just why it is that so many of our fellow citizens “suddenly” turn rabid and try to kill as many others possible.

No doubt that in the aftermath of the shootings, before the blood and gore has even been scrubbed from the crime scene and the bodies of the dead buried in their graves, we will hear the same tired old bromides from both sides of the political spectrum. Liberals will insinuate that we need more gun control, though few Democratic office holders will say so too openly out of fear of offending the gun lobby. Many conservatives, meanwhile, will trot out the even more ridiculous line that the shootings just show that everyone should be packing heat and ready to defend themselves, even though most people are so incompetent that if all of the patrons in that theater had opened fire at once they would likely ALL have ended up dead in the resulting melee.

I’m sorry to disappoint the members of my former political tribe, but easy access to guns really isn’t the problem. Owing to its frontier heritage, America has always been a gun culture, and yet the epidemic of mass shootings is a relatively recent phenomenon. What’s changed is not the available weaponry but a the emergence of a decadent and depraved culture that has left countless millions of people alienated and disaffected with little hope that their shitty lives will ever get any better.

After World War Two, thanks greatly to the rise of television, America became the perfect consumer society just as it was also building soulless artificial suburban communities farther and farther from central cities. Whereas previously most people never strayed more than handful of miles from the place of their birth, meaning that they were always surrounded by a strong support network of friends and family members, suddenly in the pursuit of ever higher paying jobs in order to be able to afford the “good life” being sold to them on their television screens it became the norm to move hundreds or even thousands of miles away to places where they did not know anybody.

Instead of living in a modest homestead with maybe three generations under the same roof, they now occupy oversized McMansions on leafy cul-de-sacs where they barely even know the names of any of their neighbors. Burdened by ever higher levels of debt as they try to keep up with the Joneses despite stagnating salaries, they work ever longer hours with ever less vacation time to try to keep from falling off of a gigantic economic treadmill that seems to move a little bit faster every year.

Rather than having one parent stay home to raise the children, both have to work to afford their expensive lifestyles, meaning that the children get dumped off to day care, often before they are even old enough to walk. When the kids are old enough, instead of being sent to a small local schoolhouse they instead find themselves shipped every morning to gigantic education warehouses where the more socially awkward among them are relentlessly bullied by their peers. And when the kids do finally get to college they find themselves being buried under a gigantic mount of student loan debt before they even have a chance to get started in life. Oh, and just for shits and giggles (and Hollywood's profit margin) we'll make it so much of our popular culture consists of mindlessly hyperviolent movies, video games and teevee shows like The Dark Knight Rises, and get people so amped up to see them that they will stupidly rush out like lemmings to wait in long lines at the ridiculous hour of midnight to see the latest spectacle that will be available in their homes on Netflix within six months.

And now, in this age of permanent economic contraction, having completely bought in to an “American way of life” that has been sold to them relentlessly ever since they were little children, people are staring slackjawed as all of it is slowly being taken away from them by a greedy and predatory elite who have always felt that the rise of the middle class was only made possible in the first place by stealing what was rightfully theirs. At this point, the wonder is not that there are those who go off in a mindless rage and begin randomly killing everyone around them, but that it doesn’t actually happen more often.


Bonus: "Keep everyone afraid, and then they'll consume"

16 comments:

  1. That interview was easily the best part of Bowling for Columbine.

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  2. "A campaign of fear and consumption"...yep. I'm glad you posted on this Bill Hicks, it's all very disturbing, and I was waiting for someone to say something intelligent about it. HuffPo still has the headline "Horror in Aurora" despite many complaints about how stupid and revolting it is.

    It's funny, so many people posting comments ask why, why...when to me it's so obvious that we're all going crazy trying not to see the collapse that is consuming us. I think it's not just the economic insanity, it's that our culture has been so removed from anything that really matters and is intrinsically beautiful in the natural world, and replaced it with fetishes.

    People are sleepwalking through a nightmarish, filthy graveyard of decay and death, no wonder they become neurotic, it must take a lot of effort - or drugs, or videogames - to ignore. Just a few days ago, Guy McPherson wrote a post called Global Madness that is worth reading, especially the comments: http://guymcpherson.com/2012/07/global-madness/

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  3. The Next 48 Hours Summarized For You in One Short Post

    R- Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

    D- Yes, but guns make it very easy to kill people in large quantities. He would not have been able to stab 71 people.

    R- Stop trying to politicize this tragedy! What we need are not fewer guns, but more guns. If only someone else in that theatre had had a gun, they would have been able to stop him in his tracks.

    D- Yes. Nothing could go wrong with crossfire in a dark theatre. This is absurd. There is a clear lesson here, and we need to do something about the ease with which people get firearms.

    R- There’s no lesson to be learned, the guy was crazy. You can’t stop every crazy person.

    D- We could try to make it harder for crazy people to walk around with a shotgun, a rifle, two handguns, and gas cannisters.

    R- I knew Obama and you liberals were coming for our guns. Second Amendment!

    And after 48 hours, the topic will die down as me move on to the next scandal/tragedy du jour, and then we can have this same exact conversation again the next time someone murders a dozen people with a gun.

    http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/07/20/the-next-48-hours-summarized-for-you-in-one-short-post/

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  4. Very well said.

    How else can one explain the massive numbers of Americans on psychotropics, illegal drugs, and alcohol? And the rest, if they're not combining it with drugs, are spending most of their free time pursuing escapism. We're all a little crazy - some more so, some to the extreme. How can we not be? It's not a nurturing culture - it's completely about the self, it's about competition, it's about replacing the real with the artificial.

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  5. Yes, it's a funny thing. Switzerland has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, yet they rarely go on shooting sprees. My father was a member of the Irish reserve defense forces in the 1950s, everybody in the service had their rifle at home under the bed, the country was awash with guns and ammo yet there were no crazy shooting incidents. How to explain all this craziness is a dilemma alright?.

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  6. Just for fun, enter the tin foil hat brigade:

    http://www.naturalnews.com/036536_James_Holmes_shooting_false_flag.html

    Although I have to say, the first thought I had - even before I knew the extent of his SWAT equipment - was how the hell did he get the money for all those weapons and ammo? Apparently he went to grad school because he couldn't find a job with a master's degree.

    It will be very interesting to see the facts about this shooter emerge. Maybe instructive about American culture, maybe not.

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  7. @Bill Hicks said:
    "Owing to its frontier heritage, America has always been a gun culture, and yet the epidemic of mass shootings is a relatively recent phenomenon. What’s changed is not the available weaponry but the emergence of a decadent and depraved culture that has left countless millions of people alienated and disaffected with little hope that their shitty lives will ever get any better."

    The problem with today's weaponry is that it's a little more effective and deadly than that of the frontier days. I doubt the shooter would have caused such mayhem with a musket gun. I do agree on the degenerating culture, but for somewhat different reasons that you write about.

    Collapse of Industrial Civilization

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    Replies
    1. Exactly - I don't think the society that gave rise to the second amendment could conceive of a scenario where a single person could have taken on the entire Continental Army.

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  8. You know, something they never really say about Columbine, Eric Harris was on anti-depressants. One of the kinds that causes "suicidal" thoughts and so forth in teens.

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  9. Its 2:20am. I am drunk, and listening to the Blues on Pandora, thinking about a womanI am still very much in love with. And I could not agree more with what you said Bill Hicks. Give'em hell Bill Hicks. You are absoulutely right. The "good life" is being taken away from us. by the scumbag elite. We have been sold a false bill of goods. For the record, I miss my home and all of my neighbors that I use to know. I to move far from home in search of wealth. It is all false and wrong. I regret it all.

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  10. After reading this article you have convinced me that actually arming everyone is definitely the way forward for the United States of America.
    And it just might come about too.

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    Replies
    1. Then you missed the point of the post.

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    2. No, I didn't. Maybe you missed my attempt at sarcasm, or irony, I can never decide.

      Or maybe I really did mean it!? Yes, that's more like it

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  11. I typically enjoy all your posts, Bill, but have to diverge on this one:

    "people are staring slackjawed as all of it is slowly being taken away from them by a greedy and predatory elite who have always felt that the rise of the middle class was only made possible in the first place by stealing what was rightfully theirs... the wonder is not that there are those who go off in a mindless rage and begin randomly killing everyone around them, but that it doesn’t actually happen more often."

    I would prefer we withhold that connection till more is uncovered about his background. On its face, it's just hard for me to see a clear correlation so far between this guy's actions and the economic situation today. Maybe, but there are also all sorts of other personal reasons someone might do that.

    Having said that, you noted how he relates demographically and geographically to the Columbine killers. In general, it's interesting how many of these people doing these things are young white males. There's something weird, perhaps uniquely American, manifesting itself in stuff like this.

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