What a Way With Words

A few other sites have noted this already, but in case you haven't seen it yet here's some poignant parting words from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut (from a 2003 interview in In These Times):

"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!"

It calls to mind one of my favorite Deconsumption posts from early last year entitled "Breaking the Chains -- What You Should Know Before You Revolt Against the Empire". It highlighted our present culture of manipulation, then outlined the basic "rules of manipulation" according to Dr. Harriet B. Braiker, Ph.D, and shed light on how we might break free of the manipulator's grasp. Here's just a smidgen of Braiker's insight:

"If you attempt to exercise power and control--even if it is just over your own decisions and behavior--the manipulator will feel threatened because she needs all the power that is around to get. If you exercise power in your own life, then from the manipulator's stand-point, you are taking power away from her. She therefore will feel compelled to take immediate retaliatory steps to regain control....The need to maintain control over others is frequently manifested by a need to "be right" and to make others "wrong". There is no room in the manipulator's mind for both people in a given argument or conflict in which he is involved to each have valid positions, nor is their room for two different and equally "right," albeit separate, points of view. For the manipulator, only one person can be right--and that must be him....Because control is such a big issue, manipulators tend to dislike any situation that involves ambiguity. They like to think in black and white, either/or terms. Gray areas make them nervous....Manipulators see no other way that relationships operate...they simply cannot imagine their role in a mutually inter-dependent relationship in which there is balanced decision making and shared control and in which the rights of both parties to make critical decisions about their own lives are acknowledged and respected by both participants."

Comments

[mark]

I loved Kurt Vonnegut's work's. he will be greatly missed.
Your back, Yaaaa. Thank you.