What is reality? Reality is defined as “the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.” America prides itself on being a nation of realists, people that strive for truth, justice etc… Yet when I talk to many Americans they have no idea what’s going on in the world around them. But it seems that everyone has plugged into their own private matrix of reality. A simple definition of a matrix is defined as something that constitutes the place or point from which something else originates, takes form, or develops. A better definition of American reality is a blend of phenomenological reality and consensus reality. Phenomenological reality is life as seen or experienced by one individual, thus shaping their unique idea of what reality is or as they see it.[1] They have formed their own definition of how the world works and in that, their own idea of truth. Now when a group of people find some commonality in their phenomenological realities, and they then verbally or non-verbally agree to a common idea of truth or what is truth as they have seen it or experienced, they have at that moment created a consensus reality, hence the formation of our matrix we call American Democracy.
The founding fathers had a consensus view of truth and freedom void of the idea of fairness which is defined as being free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice. These are men who accepted reality as it was fed to them by their environment, family, and larger culture. They were unable or unwilling to critically assess reality with an unbiased and analytical mindset to get to the truth of a matter. And even if they did see or feel some sense of hypocrisy or injustice they complied with injustice for their own self preservation and advantage. This mindset that so easily acquiesced to the commonly held belief that some people beings are more human than others also created our traditional consensus reality (history) which is the backbone of our current matrix which we call the United States of America and representative democracy. For America to see itself in context other than its traditional consensus reality means America has a deep seated conflict with its true identity, with its true self.
The American or rather human inability to deal with reality comes across in an article by Sherwood Ross entitled, "Has America Become Fascist?" in which he cites recent signals of fascism under the Bush administration. He also cites Naomi Wolf on several occasions in her new book, "The End of America." Both Ross and Wolf both work from the largely Eurocentric assumption that America was ever anything other than a fascist nation. Their phenomenological reality alters their ability to assess America’s historical pattern due the Eurocentric position they were born into in America and their own personal inability to impartially analyze their own assumptions. Every race in America has its own unique GUI (graphic user interface). Both Ross and Wolf are waking up to reality, waking up from the traditional America GUI framed within the prospective of being born white into the American Matrix called the American Dream.
The American ethos of the pursuit of happiness, the right to free speech, and the right to bear arms, the tenants of “Democracy” that Americans hold faith in versus the dark governmental policies that have historically made America work is something we cannot seem to reconcile within ourselves. Americans don’t want to see the code behind the American GUI; the worker bees in the kitchens of fine restaurants, the hotel cleaning person, the poor soldiers coming home in caskets, or young men and women in uniform with arms and legs blown off. They don’t want to know the details of the Chiquita Banana War, and the plethora of small wars carried out by government contracted corporate mercenaries.
America loves its Phenomenological reality. Take for instance drug use, Americans are the biggest consumers of illegal drugs in the world. But we don’t want to see the damage to third world countries, urban ghettos, and rural trailer parks with their meth labs and crack houses. Americans simply want to get high, real high; all they want to see is a nice little bag of powdered cocaine, heroine, or meth with no thought of the human cost that went into its production.
Fascism is defined as a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. The only part I will add to this definition is the merging of corporate interest with governmental policy and control, typically referred to in doublespeak as a public/private partnership.
From the perspective of a person of color, America has always been a fascist nation. America in the context of empire and hegemony, did everything right; killing and subjugating the indigenous people originally on the land, developing a free labor class of black slaves to work the land, and a largely white and uneducated proletariat to manage the empire’s daily affairs and fight its wars. This was all done through the co-mingling of corporate interest with governmental policy and funding. This is the definition of fascism. This was done while also espousing an American mythology/ideology of patriotism and Christianity that reinforced the idea that America was the divine manifestation of Eurocentric Christian values. It then set about industrializing the nation using its vast national resources by exploiting cheap European immigrant labor in unsafe conditions, whom when they organized and protested, were squelched by government intervention when prodded by corporations under the guise of protecting free market capitalism. In the American south, Jim Crow maintained a cheap and compliant agriculturally-based labor force. Complicit in this development was America’s burgeoning middle class (Quigley’s Petty Bourgeoisie) who were instrumental in the maintaining of fascism better known as the “American Way of Life.” In 1966, Historian Carroll Quigley wrote this about America’s petty bourgeoisie fascist leanings:
The second most numerous group in the United States is the petty bourgeoisie, including millions of persons who regard themselves as middle class and are under all the middle-class anxieties and pressures, but often earn less money than unionized laborers. As a result of these things, they are often very insecure, envious, filled with hatred, and are generally the chief recruits of the radical right, Fascist, or hate campaigns against any group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle-class values. Made up of clerks, shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers in business, government, finance, and education, these tend to regard their white-collar status as the chief value of life, and live in an atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They form the major portion of the Republican Party’s supporters in the towns of America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago. (Tragedy and Hope, page 1243-1244)
Even so, facing up to the real America behind the GUI would mean the end of reality as we know it: nail shops, sushi bars, lattes; the normal benign normalcy of strip malls, pop culture, gadgets, movies, and reality television. But deep in our collective subconscious we know the party is over. We are afraid to face a future that each of us helped to create. Peak Oil, Climate Change, Economic collapse, we have all played a part in creating the factors that will eventually lead to our demise as a nation. Our matrix is crumbling around us, yet we want the illusion that things don’t change, that today was just like yesterday and tomorrow will probably be the same as today.
But America’s problems are beyond its control with massive trade and federal deficits; multiple wars, social dysfunction, and a growing underclass. The US government is borrowing money from foreigners with all the added value of a crack addicted whore offering toothless blowjobs in exchange for her next high. Meanwhile Wall Street hustlers who made unfunded bets on which way the economy will go to the order of trillions of dollars beg for and get handouts. The American mantra has always been that America goes down on no one, everyone goes down on America. Well America the reality is that in the future many citizens better be ready to get on their knees.
Obama also represents to most people a hope that things can get back to normal, yet at the same time does represent a certain amount of change to the matrix, and in that I mean the variables of color and patriarchy. The American matrix mandates that life is suppose to operate in one way. This faith in popular consensus consists of ideas of history, class, race, and power has been shaken of late. Massive deficits, war, social dysfunction, and economic decline are frightening those who formally could not conceive of an American reality other than the GUI of supremacy.
Yet Obama does hit a psychosexual component of the matrix; that of the diminishing white male patriarchy. Obama was born of a white woman and sired by an African man. The deep-seated psychosexual component is the fear that the white male patriarchy will decline or die out. His mother being white American female broke a cardinal rule of the matrix to not reproduce with inferiors, yet Obama is by no means an inferior person, which adds another layer to the variable, if Obama is not inferior, but not of pure European ancestry, what does that say about the necessity and superiority of the white patriarchy?
I once did a radio call on a show in which a gentleman told me a story of his grandmother witnessed in 1940s Arkansas. He spoke of a white foreman who essentially raped the wife of one of his field hands on a daily basis. When the field hands would go home for lunch, this man would find the white foreman’s horse tie up outside of his shack. The black man had to wait until the white foreman was done screwing his wife before he could enter his own house. If he killed that white man which he probably felt like doing, the town would have colluded to kill the man and release the white man (with federal, state, and local blessings) under the guise of self defense. This shameful truth about what has occurred in America is what quantifies Michelle Obama’s statement about being proud of her country for the first time. This also feeds into the psychosexual elements inflamed by the McCain campaign; the fear of payback, of a new alpha male patriarchy which conflicts with the historic American matrix.
It's November now, and traditionally hog killing time. On the plantation, hog killing time took place in November or December, depending on the cold needed to cool the freshly killed hogs. The slaves would kill, scald, and gut the pigs in mass for winter meat. The choicest piece of the pig, the pork loin went to the master of the house. The choicest pieces always went to the master. The slaves got the guts or intestines, the chittlings, the scraps their masters didn’t want. Soul food is really based on making the best of circumstances beyond one’s control. To slaves, fresh chittlings were seen as a delicacy, and still are to this day in many parts of the south. This adds a symbolic element to Obama’s campaign and presidency, in that the true owners of this country have already divided up the hog and he’s being handed a fresh bucket of warm stinking, fecal filled chittlings, the leftovers of America, where the choicest parts of America’s wealth, value, and usefulness have been picked clean and devoured.
THE FIGHT TO MAINTAIN THE AMERICAN GUI
"The Matrix is a system, and that system is our enemy. When you are inside it, you look around and what do you see? Businessmen, Teachers, Lawyers, Carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are part of that system and that makes them our enemies. You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be `unplugged`. And many are so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to defend it." Morpheus, The Matrix
When Obamaniacs came to my door, they were typically middle age white men and women, campaigning for "Change." I usually blew them off. They seemed surprised that I'm not thrilled that a black man is close to being president of the United States, but I say it wouldn't mean anything if America had simply upheld the values it espoused. At that response I was typically met with silence.
Now we have “In Obama we trust,” and in him America now clings to the matrix by her finger tips, hoping for a form of "change" that is not so radical as reality calls for, but “change” that will allow us to return to the selfish, self absorbed, narcissistic people we've always been. This is hope in Obama, that at the end of the day his “Change” will only amount to a few tweaks which equated to a crying toddler’s pleadings of “fix it” to a parent so they the child can get over this traumatic inconvenience and back to a life of play.
It's about maintaining the status quo, it's about not having to look behind the GUI, and remaining plugged into the matrix, plugged in to the giant pyramid scheme where some slick guy at the top convinces the bottom of the pyramid to believe in his system, his matrix, and with time, effort, and energy they will each get the chance to be at the top of his or her own pyramid. Think about the big three automakers, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Insurance, Banking, etc. They all essentially decided to gobble up market share to suppress competition and innovation. By maintaining a large consumer base that perpetually spends it money on a myriad of industries run by small elite cartel corporations they insure that no one really climbs up the pyramid.
The American consensus reality, the GUI of the matrix, formally known as the American dream, of suburbs, easy credit, racism, sexism, feminism, multiculturalism, political correctness, and classism are all programs designed to artificially supports the idea that we are all special and autonomous individuals when in actuality we are all dependent upon the matrix for that very sense of autonomy. People now live in their own virtual pods of independence and autonomy. It’s a form of virtual existentialism in which the matrix preoccupies us with contrived obstacles, challenges, thrills (bungee cord jumping, skydiving, swimming with sharks, illegal drug use, sex addiction) to provide us with a sense of significance to our lives.
But the fear that conjures up America’s hope in Obama is really a fear of change. It’s akin to the angst techies feel when they are forced to leave Windows 2003 behind for the upgrade to Windows 2007. They worry about the bugs in the system and functionality. Rather than change, they’d prefer what they already know, Windows 2003 with a few patches. They want the economy back on track. They want family values, the return of high home values, 401ks, mutual funds, $1 beers, condom free sex, cheap porn, plentiful drugs, EZ credit financing of RVs, second homes, boats, and timeshares.
In a symbolic sense, Obama may be America’s Morpheus, albeit a bit coquettish, but he has to be given that he now must lead a nation of 300 million Neos’ contently asleep in high-fructose corn syrup filled embryonic sacks, oblivious to reality, intravenously fed mass media and virtual experiences through multiple umbilical cords. We can no longer support this artificially high standard called American life based on the consumption of imported goods bought with imported debt.Whether we like it or not, America is now in the slow process of a collective unplugging. We no longer have the choice between the red or the blue pill. But I think the American people and Obama have vastly different ideas of what change means. Yet we collectively pin our hopes on Obama’s ability to maintain the matrix with a few social programming tweaks. His ideas of inclusiveness are simply feel good rhetoric that espouses expanding the matrix, by making the American GUI more user-friendly to a large base of people that simply came too late to the party, and those that thought the party would never end.
The social contract that has existed between the Power Elite and middle class is now null and void. Those that control the matrix no longer need the faith or the energy of humanity to maintain the matrix, making most of us, and the matrix that we so precariously cling to, unnecessary. Our GUI is being dismantled and upgraded without our permission, and we don’t like it. We don’t want a future reality of deprivation, sacrifice, future-preference, and abstention. Obama, whether we know it or not, may be our guide into a new world, into an unwanted paradigm shift of our consensus reality to a “reality” that does not encompass ease, convenience, and plenty. It is similar to the moment when Neo is yanked from his pod and like a newborn baby he opens his eyes and the first thing he sees is Morpheus who says, “Welcome to the real world.”
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