Escape from the Zombie Food Court

Escape from the Zombie Food Court

By Donal on Sun, 05/15/2011 - 7:00pm |

I just returned from several months in Central America. And the day I returned I had iguana eggs for breakfast, airline pretzels for lunch and a $7 shot of Jack Daniels for dinner at the Houston Airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don't let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free.

Anyway, here I am with you good people asking myself the first logical question: What the hell is a redneck writer supposed to say to a prestigious school of psychology? Why of all places am I here? It is intimidating as hell. But as Janna Henning and Sharrod Taylor here have reassured me that all I need to do is talk about is what I write about. And what I write about is Americans, and why we think and behave the way we so. To do that here today I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

No matter how smart we may think we are, the larger world cannot and does not exist for most of us in this room, except through media and maybe through the shallow experience of tourism, or in the minority instance, we may know of it through higher education. The world however, is not a cultural history course, a National Geographic special or recreational destination. It is a real place with many fast developing disasters, economic and ecological collapse being just two. The more aware among us grasp that there is much at stake. Yet, even the most informed and educated Americans have cultural conditioning working against them round the clock.

[Bageant has passed away, of course, so this is not new - but it is new to me]

URL:

http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2009/04/escape-from-the-zombie-food-court.html

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Excellent, I hope everyone reads this.

by A Guy Called LULU on Sun, 05/15/2011 - 10:02pm

Yes indeed. Powerful stuff.

by acanuck on Mon, 05/16/2011 - 1:54am

I for one try to avoid this miserable mess as much as possible. having been totally turned off by the audio pablum that is so loosely referred to as music these days, I have been searching the web for anything that is different and have come up with quite a few groups/bands/performers that have managed to avoid becoming the musical hamburger to the industry. Though most of these are NOT in this country, a few are. My hope is that they manage to avoid the lure of the entertainment industry so as to be able to grow and evolve.

by cmaukonen on Sun, 05/15/2011 - 11:04pm

The "must-read" of the day. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

by miguelitoh2o on Mon, 05/16/2011 - 3:08pm

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