Written by Lily Consol and Hop Wechsler   

The Matrix as metaphor: what if the world we know and live in is actually not a world but a simulacrum, created by omnipotent machines in order to numb and distract us while draining us of our labor (in the 1999 film, the machines use our body heat as an energy source). With corporations as the machines, we are numbed and distracted by the purported opposition of free market democracy to socialism, terrorism, and (at least among secular liberals) theocracy, as if the separation of church and state which shifts power—i.e. the power to enslave—from the cloak to the white collared suit is an improvement.

The US government is run not as a democracy—do a majority of us want troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, or bailouts of AIG and Bank of America?—but as a corporation. As law professor Joel Bakan writes in The Corporation: “Only pragmatic concern for its own interests and the laws of the land constrain the corporation’s predatory instincts, and often that is not enough to stop it from destroying lives, damaging communities, and endangering the planet as a whole.”

The opposition to a public option in the healthcare reform debates, as much as the denunciation of a single payer system as dangerously socialistic (even by Medicare recipients), underscores the corporatization of both government and discourse. At the mercy of private insurance companies, health care becomes completely arbitrary: practitioners are forced to deny coverage or bill for care they never actually provided, dates and descriptions are altered, unnecessary treatment is prescribed and the health care consumer is penalized while the perpetrators avoid accountability. Where else can such large sums of money be exchanged for a product that doesn’t actually exist, only to benefit those further removed from the point of care?

Blue collar jobs reflect a similar disregard for accountability. Plumbers, auto mechanics, and handymen can all inflate their prices and charge for unneeded services. Lily’s 20-year old washing machine was recently repaired for over $200 ($75 of which was for the house call itself) only to break again soon afterwards, when ethically it should have been replaced, not repaired.

As a culture we’re taught to blame the people victimized by greed rather than the victimizers, whether those with balloon mortgages and subprime loans they can’t afford and didn’t understand or those who max out their credit cards on groceries and emergency room visits. We’re never taught to blame marketing. We ignore the 2008 Dodge Caravan commercials targeting blacks and Latinos on BET, Univision, and Telemundo, suggesting that the American Dream is available to everyone who works and spends hard, regardless of fuel efficiency. We ignore the reality of the war machine and manual, low-paying jobs, proving that as Adolph Reed Jr. notes in a recent Left Business Observer, “those most visible in the excluded class are disproportionately black and Latino.” War, marketing, and corporate greed are meant to exclude and exploit the have-nots in support of the haves. Note as well the replacement of pension plans with 401(k)s, creating more wealth for the top tier (portfolio managers, short sellers) at the expense of retirement security for the bottom tiers. Lily’s mother has worked as a hairdresser for over 40 years. She won’t receive a pension for her efforts nor will her coworkers. Her 401(k) is in decline. Someone is making the money she won’t be.

Within a war and usury culture, patriarchy becomes more deformed than usual. Drew Peterson’s house of horrors (the retired police officer suspected of murdering two of his wives) is one example. Peterson’s former stepdaughter Lisa Ward has described being beaten with a belt as well as how Peterson would detain her biological father on visitation days so he would miss his scheduled pickup time. “Drew did not want me to have anything to do with my father. He wanted to be my father.” Other examples of patriarchal abuse and hypocrisy include disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, who once told a member of the New York legislature, “I’m a fucking steamroller and I’ll roll over you and anybody else” and who both prosecuted prostitution rings and paid for prostitutes; South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who called President Clinton “reprehensible” and supported impeachment in 1998, then began an affair with an Argentine mistress and refused to resign; and John Edwards, who videotaped sex with his mistress, impregnating her as his wife suffered from terminal cancer, then attempted to fake his paternity test. Why not fake the orgasm in order to avoid fathering a child he never intended to raise or acknowledge? Recall as well Orange County Republican Michael Duvall, who recounted his affair with a lobbyist: “I like spanking her. She goes, ‘I know you like spanking me.’ I said, ‘Yeah! Because you’re such a bad girl!’”

Where women aren’t objectified and spanked, they are raped, tortured, and murdered. In rural Afghanistan, schools for girls have been burned down and girls who try to attend them attacked with battery acid. Women are raped in the Congo War (5,400 total from January-June 2009, according to the UN) and in Darfur on a regular basis. Women in many Muslim nations are required or encouraged to wear burqas covering them from head to toe as symbols of “chastity and decency,” in other words, so men won’t be tempted and excited by them. Why won’t men require themselves not to live like mutant dogs in heat without involving women? Meanwhile, a French law requires airbrushed fashion magazine photos to carry a health warning with regard to women’s body images. According to one politician, “These images can make people believe in a reality that often does not exist.”

Our world runs on exploitation of what does exist (resources, labor) in support of what doesn’t (the power of the simulacrum). Within our oceans are hunted whales, dolphins, and sharks and declining coral reefs. “Offshoring” also refers to the movement of jobs outside the US. India’s revenues from offshoring in English-language publishing (mostly copyediting and composition) in 2008 were $660 million. Offshore employees don’t take our health care, only our jobs. We lost the “jobs no American wants” (apparently excluding South and Central America) and then lost the jobs everyone else had.

Our ozone layer is depleted. Southeast Asia is perpetually devastated by typhoons and earthquakes without enough food or relief. According to a recent report, the US must cut carbon emissions by 100 percent by 2020 in order to avoid catastrophic climate change; Congress has proposed 5 percent. Our infrastructure, from an archaic monopoly of a railroad system to structurally unsound bridges, is obsolete. Improved public transportation would threaten the auto industry—not in the US where it’s already dead or dying but in the rest of the world that controls our economy, namely China, whom the US owes $800 billion, and Japan, whom we owe $725 billion. (We exported $71.5 billion worth of goods to China in 2008 and imported $337.8 billion; we exported $65 billion to Japan and imported $139 billion—both poor exchanges.)

And of course the wars—not only Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan but the temptation of pre-emptive war on Iran and the spoils of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. Our wars don’t merely drain our economy (almost $700 billion in Iraq and $225 billion in Afghanistan since 9/11) and murder our workforce but destroy our national and individual character. In the words of Penny Coleman, “It is both unjust and disingenuous to focus on what our soldiers have become without talking about what we have become: a society that romanticizes its warriors, demonizes its veterans, and devalues its women.”

Our world is in decay, and the worst option for us is to feel helpless, to live on our couches and obsess with Dancing With The Stars and American Idol. But we do. We aren’t used to having to do for ourselves; we aren’t used to things being difficult. As Morpheus warns Neo in The Matrix: “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

Article by Lily Consol and Hop Wechsler