JOE BAGEANT: Under the Blue Mango

[Tace]

Belize on 5-K and a pack of smokes

Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

There are superficial people everywhere, but a whole section of the human soul is simply missing in Americans. Most foreigners can never understand it unless they have lived inside America's total dominance of the material slave-state -- Fritz Lang's Metropolis
--Gui Rochat

Once one becomes aware of that babies die in the third world as an indirect result of our simplest choices such as buying Ziploc plastic bags or bottled water or driving a car, life changes for any approximately moral American. Restlessness sets in, a nagging guilt that only swells with time until finally night thoughts grow so damned anxious that something has to be done. It's been that way with me for a long time. About a year ago I decided to do something more about it than pat myself on the back for recycling the mountain of bottles and unread magazines our household seems to generate. So last fall I vowed to find a decent third world family and put up the money to do something together to better their lives and my own. The issue was so unbearable by spring this year that, by god, I was determined to get it done.

(Following this essay, there's a link to an album of photos taken by my good friend Arvin Hill.)

Consequently, I found myself at the Belcove Hotel in Belize City, Belize, that town being the place visitors on discount are most likely to find themselves when flying in or out of the country. The hotel is situated in the gritty core of the city and as good a place as any to stew over the next move. Rooms run as low as $20 a night and the Belcove is conveniently located by the waters of Haulover Creek, right next to the Blue Marlin bar where a man can drink with Mayan Indians and DEA agents or catch fish right off then deck if he cares to. Most nights at the Belcove you'll find several Americans on its balcony drinking Beliken beer and watching the boats pass under old manpowered turnbridge in the heart of this not-so-gently rotting British colonial town.

During my first night on the balcony all the city lights went out in another of the city's power outages, which usually last about an hour. From more affluent sectors across the water came the sound of generators kicking in. An American developer, checked into the hotel's only air conditioned room for a break during a yachting trip through the Caribbean, looks at his trim, fiftyish wife who is wearing about $500 worth of Henri Lloyd casual boating wear, and says, "I guess the looting will start shortly." "Do you think we should ask the owner to lock the big doors down front?" asks his deeply tanned mate. Another American, a chubby young guy with a shaved head, joins the conversation, telling the Henri Lloyd clothes rack: "The night clerk must surely have a gun. In this city, who wouldn't?" The automatic assumption was that Belize residents, being mainly black, would loot their own city at the slightest opportunity. Personally, I'd rather be in Belize City during a power outage than in New York or Los Angeles.

Rommel drives on deep into Hopkins

Fortunately for my quest in Belize, fate is sometimes expedient. It was on the balcony of the Belcove that I found family I had come looking for. A Garifuna (also known as Black Carib) couple sat in the darkness. And as I listened to them talk I actually had tears in my eyes, such was their plain honesty and dignity in their obvious poverty and mutual love. An hour later I knew they were the people I'd come to meet -- Luke and Marzlyn Castillo.

A couple of days later I was in their home village of Hopkins, originally settled by descendents of escapees from a West African slave ship run aground in 1635. Having escaped, the Garifuna people have never been slaves and are proud of it. Soon I was sleeping in their 600-square foot house with ten other family members, six children, a cousin and a friend who met up with me at the hotel, and enjoying every minute of it, every human sound and smell of a natural boisterous native Caribbean household. Roosters crowed outside and pots rattled and kids squalled inside.

more

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=3700

[The River]

1. I Really Like His Writings

As a near "neighbor" I know the people and area
he writes about and he is spot on in his observations.

His words are like a literary flocculant;
they precipitate the BS and leaves the reader
seeing things much clearer.

His essay on the "Simulacrum Republic" is his best, IMHO.
I quote him often.

[Tace]

2. The Simulacran Republic

The hologram ripples with the cry of a thrush

Joe Bageant

"It's a world of appearances ... packaged to the showroom specifications of a sit-com. She asks her hairdresser for 'tinted highlights' he mumbles something about going to the gym. He feels he should do something that requires him to clutch a bottle of mineral water and wipe his brow with the firm conviction that he's accomplished something more than providing the illusion that his presence in his own life is necessary. They believe in nothing as fervently as their own goodness. When she's asleep, he absently gazes at porn sites, before he checks out his stock portfolio online."
-- Writer and social critic Jennifer Matsui

A while back it was announced that a Japanese inventor had successfully created an invisibility cloak using a material made of thousands of tiny beads called "retro-reflectum." I found this so amazing that I told six friends, three men and three women, about it over the next two days. Not a one of them found it even interesting, much less amazing. Two of the men subsequently showed mild interest when I pointed out that it could be used to mask tanks and soldiers in combat, and one speculated on its terrorist implications. Our techno hyper-reality has so gutted and rewired the brains of Americans that ordinary intelligent people are not even capable of amazement at such a thing as invisibility! To me, this is an indication of a near-total death of the individual mind and imagination caused by our over-technologized, effects glutted sensory environment.

The pure miracle of invisibility is uninteresting unless it can be linked to, say the rumbling terror of an armored tank -- made perhaps even more attention-grabbing by squashing the bloody guts out of an Iraq under its tracks? It’s the sensory effect that matters, the simulacrum, not the reality. It’s the kind of thing about America that drives me to thoughts of emigration daily.

Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through, simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now, especially in America's heartland. Our national reality is held together by a pale, carbon imprint of the original. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics ... politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process, not a process. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacran republic of eagles, church spires, brave young soldiers and heroic firefighters and "freedom of choice" within the hologram. America's citizens have been reduced to Balkanized consumer units by the corporate state's culture producing machinery.

We no longer have a country -- just the hollow shell of one, a global corporation masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information. Sure there is flesh within the machine, but its animating force is a viral concept, a meme run amok. Free market capitalism. We got to move them refrigerators, got to sell them color teevees.

more

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2005/12/the_simulacran_.html

On Edit: Just fixing some garble

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Kick

kick

[Tace]

4. .

[papau]

5. Joe packs a lot of excellent writing into 4100 words - well worth the

time to read.

:-)