This nails a whole range of points in one concise essay.

I live much of the year in the Third World country of Belize, Central America. A nation so damned poor that our cash bounces. True, it ain’t Zimbabwe, or the Sudan — there are no dying people in the streets. But food security is easily the biggest problem, and growing by the day.

Yet, despite our meager and diminishing resources down there, and much government corruption, people are still citizens, not marketing demographics, not yet anyway.

Citizens who struggle toward a just society. They have made more progress than the United States, in some respects. For instance, we have: A level of free medical care for the poor, though we lack much equipment and facilities. Maternity pay if either you or your spouse are employed. Retirement on Social Security at age 60. Worker rights, such as mandatory accrued severance pay for workers, even temporary workers.

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I mention these things because it’s a good example of how North Americans live in a parallel universe in which they are conditioned to see everything in terms of consumer goods and “safety,” as defined by police control, conditioned to believe they have the best lives on the planet by every measure.

So when they see our village and its veneer of “tropical grunge,” they experience fear. Anything outside of the parameters of the cultural hallucination they call “the First World” represents fear and psychological free fall.

Yet, even if we think in that sort of outdated terminology, First, Second and Third World, and most Americans do, then America is a Second World nation. We have no universal free health care (don’t kid yourself about the plan under way), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status — if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a “career” — high infant-mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy. Even by our own definition we are a Second World nation.

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Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a “theater state.”

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Anyway, when the media and government people in power made that selection, they were managing your consciousness. What you know and don’t know. Keeping you calmer by withholding the truth. Rather like not upsetting little children so they will continue to quietly behave the way you want.

But, like children, the American public got bored with the subject of torture long ago, so we quit seeing the victims. Plenty of new evidence has been coming out for years since Lynndie’s famous pics from Abu Ghraib. But the short American attention span, created by our rapid-fire media, says, “Move on to the next hologram please. Whoa! Stop the remote. Nice butt shot of Sarah Palin there!”

The result is that Americans cannot achieve the cathexis we need. Cathexis is the ground zero psychic and emotional attachment to the world that cannot be argued. It is “beyond ideological challenge, because it is called into existence affectively.” Americans are conditioned to reject any affective attachment that does not have a happy ending. And in that, we remain mostly a nation of children. We never get to grow up.

So, we tell ourselves the Little Golden Book fairy tales — that we are a great and compassionate people and that we are personally innocent of any of our government’s horrific crimes abroad. Guiltless as individuals. And we do remain innocent, in a sense, as long as we cannot see beyond the media hologram.

But it is a terrible kind of self-inflicted innocence that can come to no good. We are a nation of latchkey kids babysat by an electronic hallucination, the national hologram.

Yep. Right on.

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