Toxic Culture USA

[Hey Bubu]

http://www.talentzoo.com/content/gue...ticle/167.aspx

Toxic Culture USA
by Kalle Lasn
08/17/2005

Back in 1989 we dubbed Adbusters "the journal of the mental environment," and ever since then we've explored this cerebral terrain and tried to give it the respectability and prominence it deserves. We've watched the "battle of the mind" intensify to the point where thousands of commercial messages are discharged into our brains every day. We’ve tracked the rise of addictions, anxieties and mood disorders as they have grown into what some public health officials now describe as an "epidemic" of despair. We've watched the media corporations merge, consolidate and vertically integrate until a handful of them now control roughly half of all the news and entertainment flows around the planet. Throughout this journey, we’ve marveled at human resiliency and wondered just how toxic our mental environment would have to become before some threshold of tolerance was exceeded and people got pissed off and started demanding a cleaner, less cluttered, more democratic mass media?

So far it hasn't happened. Nobody is throwing their TV set out of the window, in hopes it will land on Rupert Murdoch. No anti-trust actions are pending against Viacom, Time Warner or News Corporation. No media reform movement has gelled. The best we activists have been able to muster is a bunch of loose talk about MEDIA DEMOCRACY and the birth of A MENTAL ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT.

But now a number of groundbreaking psychosocial studies are energizing us and giving our movement new urgency. These studies point to a growing toxicity in American culture. They suggest that CULTURAL TOXINS have now reached dangerously high levels, helping to explain the high school shootings, the skyrocketing use of psychoactive drugs, our growing problems with obesity and psychosomatic illness, rage in public places, and the general sense of cynicism and hopelessness that has become the prevailing ethos of our time.

In 1996, social epidemiologist Myrna Weissman at Columbia University, along with a long list of collaborators, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association that more and more Americans are becoming depressed, they are becoming depressed at a younger age, and the severity and frequency of their depression is rising. People born after 1945 are ten times more likely to experience depression in their lives than people born before. Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor and former President of the American Psychological Association believes that the United States is now in the throes of an "epidemic" of clinical depression.

Rutgers University public health researcher William Vega followed recent immigrants from Mexico as they tried to integrate into American society. When they first arrived in the US, they were much better adjusted than the Americans they settled among with half the incidence of psychological dysfunction. But as they Americanized, they got sicker and sicker. After 13 years Stateside, their rates of depression, anxiety and drug use had almost doubled (from 18 percent to 32 percent), to the point where they were now on par with the average American's. Mexican men born in the US were five times as likely as recent immigrants to experience a "major depressive episode." Drug misuse among Mexican women born in the US was seven times as high as that of recent immigrants. Other studies have both replicated William Vega's findings and extended them to other ethnic groups. The inevitable conclusion: American culture is highly toxic.

A recent World Health Organization study predicted that if mental dysfunction keeps rising at its current rate, then mental disease will be bigger than heart disease by the year 2020.

These findings are fascinating, alarming, revolutionary. They have the potential to politicize the mental environment the way Rachel Carson's Silent Spring politicized the physical environment 40 years ago. But, for the moment, because these studies point an accusing finger at American culture and suggest that the “American Dream” may be one of the root causes of our mental ill health, they remain on the margins - disputed, denied and ignored.

[Trey Brister]

and the general sense of cynicism and hopelessness that has become the prevailing ethos of our time.

The fall of a Republic
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.�

“The average age of the world's civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed… from bondage to spiritual faith... to liberty... to selfishness... to apathy... to bondage.

From bondage to spiritual faith,
From spiritual faith to great courage,
From courage to liberty,
From liberty to abundance,
From abundance to selfishness,
From selfishness to complacency,
From complacency to apathy,
From apathy to dependency,
From dependency back to bondage.�

Thoughts to ponder…

These two quotes concerning the fall of the Athenian republic, and its parallels with our own country, have been attributed to a Professor Alexander Tyler during the period when the thirteen colonies were still a part of England, and were supposedly taken from his work The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic, coincidentally published in 1776.

There was in fact such a person as Alexander Fraser Tytler (1748 - d.1813), a.k.a. Lord Woodhouselee, who was a Scottish professor of history at Edinburgh University. However, there is no record of this work in the Library of Congress, which has several other titles by Tytler, nor can any direct quoute can be found in any of his work currently held by the Library of Congress..

This quote has also been cited as being from Tytler's Universal History or from his Elements of General History, Ancient and Modern, books that do exist. These books seem the most likely source of the quote, as they contain extensive discussions of the political systems in historic civilizations, including Athens.

Having read what Professor Tyler had to say, now read the following and see what Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote about the 2000 Presidential election between Al Gore and George Bush
· Population of counties won by Gore 127 million – by Bush 143 million.
· Square miles of country won by Gore 580,000 -- by Bush 2,427,000.
· States won by Gore 19 -- by Bush 29.
· Murder per 100,000 residents in counties won by Gore 13.2 -- by Bush 2.1.
Professor Olson adds: "The map of the territory Bush won was (mostly) the land owned by the people of this great country. NOT the citizens living in cities in tenements owned by the government and living off the government."
Professor Olson thinks the US is now between the apathy and complacency phase of democracy although he believes that 40 percent of the nation's population has already reached the dependency phase.

[Trey Brister]

http://www.google.com/search?q=apath...en-US:official


Second Google Result
http://www.wetworx.com/posts/00000054.html

[PETA]

Originally Posted by Trey Brister

http://www.google.com/search?q=apathy+bondage&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-USfficial


Second Google Result
http://www.wetworx.com/posts/00000054.html

Joe's a piece of work...... very outspoken and perhaps talks a bit more extreme than what he thinks - even if, imho, he's mostly right