From Fora.tv: Chris Hedges: The Empire of Illusion

My partner, John Heckman Wright, and I have been contemplating how to compassionately and mischievously engage in reality hacking--pointing out to a sleeping population the mechanisms of the reality paradigm corporations and their Hollywood and Madison Avenue and 24-hour cable "news" pundits have constructed for them. We want to make that reality clear in practical terms: what operators are in place, what syntaxes reinforce those operators, and what the impacts of that reality are--dehumanizing us in the immediate and depleting and decaying our world in the near future. It's something we'd like to work on this summer or fall, and our goal would be to just shake people up, break them out of their slumber, help them see one or more of the control mechanisms employed to corral and contain them. What we're ultimately hoping people will see and react to on their own is exactly the reality Chris Hedges perfectly and frighteningly articulates in this video posted on Fora.tv. (See the embedded video.)

http://fora.tv/2009/12/08/Chris_Hedges_Empire_of_Illusion

His lecture runs an hour. To say that "it's worth seeing" is an understatement. Few writers and thinkers today articulate the state of our world as bluntly and as persuasively as he does--from the "hopeful" adulative reactions to the fallacies of Brand Obama to the true mechanisms that created the extreme right wing nationalist groups like the "tea baggers." Hedges has true compassion for the disenfranchised, whether he agrees with their responses to their disenfranchisements or not, and he has flawlessly reasoned contempt for the Democratic Party, which he agrues has betrayed liberalism, the working class, and, at this moment, the middle class in service to their corporate masters.

He closes with a compelling and urgent plea: That the fringe groups active today--particularly those with liberal and progressive leanings, and both political groups and businesses and organizations promoting sustainability movements--need to mobilize and come together rapidly and establish a clear and truely alternative response to the corporo-fascist power structure upheld by both political parties, a movement that reinfranchises the disenfranchised workers who's jobs have been shipped overseas and who's hometowns have been rendered burned-out hells and who's only recourse for hope has been up to now to turn to the fringe nationalist Christian groups demanding righteous vengeance against the very liberal elites who betrayed them, and a movement that works rapidly to remake not only the political make up of our government but re-establishes the very liberties that truly promote our livelihood and happiness. The alternative for inaction is simply too dire, and its outcome too soon.