Wanderluster,
Winner for longest response! You bring up a lot of good points and ideas. I’ll probably use it as fodder for another post, so I’ll keep this reply short. I definitely agree with you about the education in the US and that we need to teach people how to think critically at a younger age. Many good ideas introduced here…I’ll expand in a post. Thanks!

topspeedroller,
Thanks for the comments! I’d say a lot of parents put their kids on a set of tracks and essentially guide them in a certain direction. Not all, but some. You need to go to college right out of high school, then get a job doing this…A lot of decorating and pretending for sure. But, assuming the parents are doing the best they can with what they have and what they know…can we really blame them? Depends I guess…

You write so it is easy and fast to read and you can work the wordpress thing and somehow you have the patience to deal with all this.

Thank you.

I think the big companies would just love it if more peope got together and served the customers.

A business manager is limited, they like to manage their department or section ,but they really don’t like getting surprised by people who also want them to manage a suburb or a small region along with their company duties.

I think if the business manager is awake, they will simply mirror the image the people earned back at them.

They are not robbng you of your identity they are showing you your real identity.

This is from parents dolling their cute sons up like managers so they can get a great job afte rhigh school and then the kids real identity is totally fake, when it all comes from a credit card, not his real integrity.

They “decorate” the kid, to “look” like a Leader.

I have been building some of the nastiest blgsites you could imagine to tell a story of mine that is wicked

http://snackoncorporatism.wordpress.com/several-more-teeg-sites

The way you put this place together is correct,. you are so much nicer than I am, and thre is a cool newness to it.

I still like the idea of peope building and making a lot of their own stuff at home and then not needing so many other people involved with the data and statistics.

I sort of think that is what is going on here, good luck.

Teeg

Robert,
I’ve been thinking about how much money Obama and Hillary have raised as well…Haven’t quite formulated an opinion about that yet…regardless, it’s astonishing how much they’ve raised in such a short period of time. In one sense, it speaks to how much people do care about politics and support the candidates. In another, well, it’s just a lot of fucking money that will probably be used against each other.

Meek,
Great addition to the post…i’ll check out your blog as well!

Dan,
I know the perception of the US and its people is very poor these days. While it’s true we have a lot of people here that fit the stereotype you were talking about, we also have many people that disagree with our government just as much as other nations. Sad, but true. Anyhow, thanks for your comments, and I’d say you did an excellent job of writing english! I can relate, since I am trying to teach myself another language at the moment. Your english is great!

Nigel,
I will definitely check out the book you mentioned…thanks!

Marie,
More reading material…thanks! and thanks for the comments!

bootslavewilliam,
Very true, thanks for the comments…great addition to the post!

Certainly, in the last decade, American foriegn policy had some serious problems, and the USA did some bad things, but that was all based on rational choice analysis. The false image of America wasn’t so much a problem until 9/12/2001 when Americans suddenly realized that an outside world existed beyond that which is served up to tourists. Then, suddenly, American citizens, whose ability to think about the outside world had atrophied through tourism and the lack of a literary education turned to entertainers for insight and were given illusion instead.

You can’t blame the entertainers for that, illusion is what they do and illusion is the only way we, as human beings, can portray something outside our own direct experience. In my opinion, the problem is in our education system and which brings me to a point on which I agree with you: We are losing our identity. This, in my opinion, is because we are engaged in an attempt to be everything at once while, in fact, becoming nothing at all through multicultural education.

Everyone reads a bit from this tradition, a bit from that tradition, a bit from this place, a bit from that place, and the result, stemming from the fact that the world is just too large and time is too short, is that everyone comes away from multicultural education horribly and disoriented and finds watching television more satisfying than understanding a literary tradition. Because of this, we have lost our ability to think critically about illusion. I’m not saying books delve more deeply into the affairs of human beings than television, but from books, you can learn to think critically about illusion in that you can go back and reread. From television, it flows by quickly and you only get to watch it in a given form once, though TiVo is changing that.

I don’t know exactly what the problem is nor what the solution should be, but it does seem to me that American life today is different from the image portrayed by the media.

I saw an image of school students in Afghanistan and it changed my opinion of what life is like in Afghanistan. I had thought, in my visual memory, that it was all bombs exploding because that was the last image of Afghanistan I had seen in the media.

People watch American news all over the world because American news puts on a good show, its exciting and scary and looks real despite it being ultimately illusion. I often wonder what people in the world outside America think American life is like based on the images of that life portrayed by our media.

Life is good in America. People struggle, sure, and there are bad parts, but it is a difficult process to understand why they struggle and which parts of their lives are bad and which are good. The meaning of life may be simple, I agree with you there, but life itself is rather complicated for many people. The media makes it seem simple.

Don’t get me wrong, even here, it isn’t the media’s fault. They just show whatever people want to watch.

Have you read “feed” by M.T. Anderson? It’s kinda futuristic, but it also has the whole “They’re buying your identity and then selling it right back to you” theme, so you may enjoy it.