Living In the Great American Fun House

MILLIONS OF AMERICANS live below the poverty line, and most of them are neither lazy or stupid. Millions more in the working and lower middle classes live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay mortgages and bills. They are, for the most part, neither stupid nor lazy. Those who live more comfortably are often deeply in debt, and not doing well digging out. It all adds up to a financially stressed, hence emotionally stressed society of fearful, angry people. You can see it in people's faces, in the way strangers look at each other with expressions of contempt, dismissive indifference, or worse. The joy isn't there, and neither is the love. Then there's the health factor. Most Americans are either overweight, out of shape, or both. One tenth of the population has diabetes, and there is an epidemic of cardiovascular disease and various forms of cancer. Tens of thousands of Americans have been victimized by crime and violence, ranging from identity theft to rape. Our many foreign wars of aggression have left tens of thousands more with debilitating injuries, physical and mental. Veterans hospitals are overflowing, with many waiting outside, the system unable to handle the demand. Twenty thousand murders, forty thousand automobile deaths per year. Factor in the divorce rate, well over fifty percent, with the accompanying emotional and financial cost, the victimization of innocent children; is anyone in this beleaguered country healthy and whole? Simply, no. Its a wonder we even have the energy to gin up our enormous hatred of minorities - blacks, Hispanics, gays, and so forth. Long standing staples of American society, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, keep marching right along. Our communities, such as they are, are pathetically inadequate to address any of this. Instead, we take it out on the rest of the world. The disintegration of America's communities is well documented and detailed in a marvelous monograph entitled "Bowling Alone", written by prominent Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam. Just when we need our social support systems more than ever, they have abandoned us, or rather, we have abandoned them. And so we escape into our big flat high def screens, with five hundred choices of vacuous, vicarious violence and stress; just what we need. We go online to post our shallow, inane messages to strangers, whom we pretend are our friends. We tell each other how much we like each other, but we ignore the true feelings of disgust and contempt. We have few face to face friends, fewer than ever, studies reveal, and we hardly know our neighbors, so we carefully list our Facebook friends, people we will never know nor care about. But they are n our list, and we have pushed our "like" button, which is the only button we have, and thus, they are our "friends". We beg them to add us to their list of friends, we trade lists. They friend us, we friend them. All with the click of a button on a computer screen. this, dear friends, is a culture of death, inexorably dying. This is a culture of illusion, the great American fun house. Somehow, strangely appropriate in a country which was named after a con man. If American culture were a horse, it would have been put out of its misery, long ago, with a compassionate bullet to the head.