“The American Dream
has run out of gas,” wrote the novelist J.G. Ballard. “The car has stopped. It
no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No
more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now. …”
Posted on Nov 11,
2012
By Chris Hedges
The presidential
election exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It
stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists
not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a
functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of
personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents. Liberals, by
voting for Barack Obama, betrayed the core values they use to define
themselves—the rule of law, the safeguarding of civil liberties, the protection
of unions, the preservation of social welfare programs, environmental accords,
financial regulation, a defiance of unjust war and torture, and the abolition of
drone wars. The liberal class clung desperately during the long nightmare of
this political campaign to one or two issues, such as protecting a woman’s
right to choose and gender equality, to justify its complicity in a monstrous
evil. This moral fragmentation—using an isolated act of justice to define one’s
self while ignoring the vast corporate assault on the nation and the ecosystem
along with the pre-emptive violence of the imperial state—is moral and
political capitulation. It fails to confront the evil we have become. >complete article<
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