Chris Hedges: The Lonely American

[marmar]

from truthdig:


The Lonely American

Posted on Jun 28, 2015
By Chris Hedges


Michael P. Printup, president of Watkins Glen International, one of the country’s largest racetracks, stood with a group of about a dozen race fans at 8:30 a.m. Saturday. Next to him were boxes of free doughnuts and coffee. A line of men with towels, who had spent the night in nearby RV campers, pop-up campers and tents, stood patiently outside the door to a shower room. A light drizzle, one that would turn into a torrential downpour and lead to the races being canceled in the afternoon, coated the group, all middle-aged or older white men. They were discussing, amid the high-pitched whine of cars practicing on the 3.4-mile, 11-turn circuit racetrack, the aging demographic of race fans and the inability to lure a new generation to the sport.

“Maybe if you installed chargers for phones around the track they would come,” suggested one gray-haired man.

But it is not just sporting events. Public lectures, church services, labor unions, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, Masonic halls, Rotary clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the Lions Club, Grange Hall meetings, the League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, local historical societies, town halls, bowling leagues, bridge clubs, movie theater attendance (at a 20-year low), advocacy groups such as the NAACP and professional and amateur theatrical and musical performances cater to a dwindling and graying population. No one is coming through the door to take the place of the old members. A generation has fallen down the rabbit hole of electronic hallucinations—with images often dominated by violence and pornography. They have become, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, “atomized,” sucked alone into systems of information and entertainment that cater to America’s prurient fascination with the tawdry, the cruel and the deadening cult of the self.

The entrapment in a world of nonstop electronic sounds and images, begun with the phonograph and radio, advanced by cinema and television and perfected by video games, the Internet and hand-held devices, is making it impossible to build relationships and structures that are vital for civic engagement and resistance to corporate power. We have been transformed into commodities. The steady decline of the white male heaven that is NASCAR—which has stopped publishing the falling attendance at its tracks and at some speedways has begun to tear down bleachers—is ominous. It is the symbol of a captive society.

“We don’t see the youth coming in,” Printup said. “The millennial, the younger adults 18 to 35, is our target. We spend millions of dollars a year to target that group. But it’s hard. Look around. Who’s the youngest person here? That’s our problem. Every sport from the NFL to NHL is struggling with the 18 to 35 demographic. They call them weird. They call them difficult. They only want to look at their computers.” .................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_lonely_american_20150628

[Fumesucker]

1. Tickets to events are *expensive* compared to forty years ago

It's no surprise that young people who are financially stressed aren't going to paid events, an afternoon or evening at the pro sporting event or a concert can cost a week's wages for a minimum wage worker.

Specifically regarding racing, you can set up a pretty nice simulator and drive on tracks all over the world against opponents all over the world online for about what it would cost to attend and watch one race. If you figure the length of reward vs the cost the simulator is a far better bargain.

https://www.simraceway.com/

[BeyondGeography]

4. Money has nothing to do with it

These events last 2-3 whole hours! You can't get these kids to focus on ANYTHING that's not on their phones for that long. It's not just the live events; they aren't watching sports on TV. They don't know what time the game starts or who's playing. All that stuff a typical fan does; reading up on the game beforehand and following teams and players for whole seasons, also takes waaaaaay too much time.

And when they do go to a sporting event, they are about 1/2 as focused (if that) as prior generations. The loudest they'll get is during timeouts when they can see pictures of themselves on an Instagram wall on the scoreboard.

Technology and, especially, social media, is completely annihilating attention spans. I have kids in college and grade school. Dear things. Way ahead of me in some ways when I was their age, ie socially and emotionally, but the distraction factor in their lives is so high, they don't get deep into any one thing like kids in the past who were not walking around with non-stop conversations in the palm of their hand involving every friend and everything under the sun.

[Alkene]

7. +1

"an afternoon or evening at the pro sporting event or a concert can cost a week's wages for a minimum wage worker."

There it is.

[DonCoquixote]

2. Bovine Excrement

We must free ourselves from corporate tyranny, which means refusing to invest our emotional and intellectual energy in electronic images. We must build what the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin called “voluntary associations for study and teaching, for industry, commerce, science, art, literature, exploitation, resistance to exploitation, amusement, serious work, gratification and self-denial.”

Mr. Hedges, have you ever considered that maybe the reason the young do not go to you vaunted civic organizations is because so many of them have been exposed as the places where the good old boys and their subservient spouses go to hide or worse, help to make things worse? How many of these civics clubs helped to do nothing but protect the interests of the powerful? Of all the things you defend, you defend NASCAR: aka the confederate flag on wheels? You defend the NFL?

You folks that demonize the internet are the same folks that are never heard anywhere but on the internet, including this vile bit of publishing you did. Yes the internet is beign swallowed by the coproartions, in part because your lazy baby boomer asses leave it to the kids, those same kinds like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and the kids in Cairo in the arab spring that did more in five years than you did in 20.

[marmar]

3. Where is he "defending" NASCAR or the NFL?

[DonCoquixote]

9. his op is that since young people are not going to them

they are simply diving into the internet, which is not true. How many young people can afford a ticket to their events?

[Alkene]

5. It's a pity that you've allowed your passion toward the author...

deteriorate into ageist incivility by the end of your post.

[DonCoquixote]

10. sorry to say

his whole post is another "bash the young people because they are not like us" speech. As a Gen Xer, I get tired of hearing those that claim to speak for Boomers bash the young, especially the millennials. I will ell those offended the same thing I tell others, if these people do no speak for you, do not defend them when their actions demand challenge.

[KG]

6. society is evolving in ways and speeds that are hard to grasp. no surprise Hedges may not

understand What It All Means.

[hatrack]

8. And as far as movie attendance goes, how about really shitty comic book movies @ $10/ticket?

Oh, and they pound 20 minutes of blaring commercials into the breaks between showings - commercials that you pay to watch.

That, along with big-screen Blu-Ray players and home theaters - that might have something to do with that particular wrinkle.

[GOLGO 13]

11. My wife gave me tickets to see one of my favorite musical performers in NYC

Between tickets & parking I'm in the hole almost $150 not including gas/tolls. It's no wonder the last time I saw him was almost 4 albums ago in NYC.

For my kids I'm swinging them away from high equipment sports like baseball to soccer/baseball. All they need is a cheap ball and decent shoes.

Hedges makes good points in the article. But, my reason for dropping a lot of activities is money.

[KingCharlemagne]

12. Thanks for posting. This was first thing I read (via my FB feed) this a.m. Fair

warning: expect the usual crowd of Hedges bashers to show up to trash your thread later today. They'll even trot out the now thorougly debunked and discredited smear that Hedges plagiarizes.

So far, no one who has responded here has grappled with Hedges' central point about 'atomization' (or what Herbert Marcuse 50 years ago would have called 'alienation'). Occupy Wall Street represented a melding of modern technology with reversion to communal forms and, as such, had to be smashed lest it start subverting the totalitarian structures Hedges illuminates here.

[gratuitous]

13. I agree it's a complicated phenomenon

There are several things going into it, from what I see. Money is one thread. The increasing impoverishment of workers, who are putting in more hours, working more efficiently, continue to see their pay lag, as they have for the last 35 years. That has caught us up in so many ways.

Another thread is the atomization of society. People gather for one-off events, but there isn't much that draws people together consistently, and even less that draws people together just for the sake of drawing them together. Even in our leisure time, it seems we have to have a reason to socialize with one another.

Both of which threads tie into the "purposefulness" of everything anymore. Even on our too-few holidays we're expected to be doing something. It's not enough to relax with the family in the back yard or head over to the park to participate in a group play activity. No, we're expected to participate in some service project or another. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but if service projects are truly important to the movers and shakers, then give us paid time off to do them, instead of demanding a full work week in addition to our scheduled holiday.

[Octafish]

14. Atomization...Bowling Alone...captive Democracy.

I work with a ton of non-profits, mostly arts and cultural organizations, in Detroit. They ALL are experiencing the same phenomenon.

The audiences, visitors and memberships are declining in numbers while getting older with age. Even with free or discounted tickets for students, young people don't participate in the numbers needed to maintain equilibrium, let alone expand.

Chris Hedges isn't warning us about the loss of the local art museum, though. He's spelling out how the powerful few are using technology to further isolate and control the many. Hedges is what I call a "Democrat."

[Octafish]

15. Kick for those opposed to a dangerous and passive reliance on the state.

Totalitarian societies, including our own, inundate the public with a steady stream of propaganda accompanied by mindless entertainment. They seek to destroy independent organizations. In Nazi Germany the state provided millions of cheap, state-subsidized radios and then dominated the airwaves with its propaganda. Radio receivers were mounted in public locations in Stalin’s Soviet Union; and citizens, especially illiterate peasants, were required to gather to listen to the state-controlled news and the dictator’s speeches. These totalitarian states also banned civic organizations that were not under the iron control of the party.

The corporate state is no different, although unlike past totalitarian systems it permits dissent in the form of print and does not ban fading civic and community groups. It has won the battle against literacy. The seductiveness of the image lures most Americans away from the print-based world of ideas. The fascination with the image swallows the time and energy required to attend and maintain communal organizations. If no one reads, why censor books? Let Noam Chomsky publish as much as he wants. Just keep his voice off the airwaves. If no one attends community meetings, group events or organizations, why prohibit them? Let them be held in near-empty rooms and left uncovered by the press until they are shuttered.

The object of a totalitarian state is to keep its citizens locked within the parameters of official propaganda and permanently isolated. Propaganda and isolation make it difficult for an individual to express or carry out dissent. Official opinions, little more than digestible slogans and clichés, are crafted and disseminated by public relations specialists on behalf of the power elite. They are repeated endlessly over the airwaves until the public unconsciously ingests them. And the isolated public in a totalitarian society is unable to connect its personal experience of despair, anxiety, fear, frustration and economic insecurity to the structures that create these conditions. The isolated citizen is left feeling that his or her personal misfortune is an exception. The portrayal of society by systems of state propaganda—content, respectful of authority, just, economically secure and free—is mistaken for reality.

Totalitarian propaganda, accompanied by isolation, or what Arendt called “atomization,” makes it possible for a population not to “believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself.” This propaganda, Arendt went on, “gave the masses of atomized, undefinable, unstable and futile individuals a means of self-definition and identification.”

SOURCE: http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_lonely_american_20150628

Rec again, were it possible.

[JEB]

16. K&R