The country has seemingly chosen not to be prepared as much as grow inured.
-David Wallace-Wells, “Sleeping Through Hurricane Helene,” New York Times, October 2, 2024
Live-streamed genocide inflicted by Israel and its sugar daddy the United States in Gaza, replete with regular images of dead Palestinian children being pulled from the rubble produced by American-made bombs, and now a vicious Israel-US assault on Lebanon possibly spiraling into a mass murderous regional war across the Middle East?
A seemingly endless meat-grinder of a US-provoked inter-imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, with regular images of mass destruction and death and the ever-present heightened risk of nuclear war?
More people killed and towns leveled by recurrent outbreaks of unprecedented extreme weather clearly resulting from the heedless US-led carbon capitalist project of turning the planet into a giant Greenhouse Gas chamber — this as predicted by climate scientists who have been warning us for years about the dire consequences of the reckless mass extraction and burning of fossil fuels?
Masses of people turned into desperate migrants trying to flee social, environmental, economic, and political disasters produced by the US-led imperialist order?
Yet another mass shooting in the Armed Madhouse that is the contemporary US, home to 115 guns for every 100 people?
The takeover of one of the nation’s two dominant political parties by a truth-crushing Christian white nationalist neofascist movement that is ready, willing, and able to overthrow previously and long normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy, such as it is?
“Oh well, whatever, that’s how it is, that’s life. Let’s not get all crazy and radical about things. It is what it is. Nothing I can change. None of my business. What’s for dinner?”
One of the different “manufacturing consent” roles of the capitalist state media is to inure masses of people to the lethal insanity of the capitalist-imperialist system. Let’s call it manufacturing enurement.[1]
Inure (enure in British English) is a clever and underestimated word. Merriam Webster online defines it as follows: “to accustom people to accept something undesirable as in ‘children inured to violence.’”
Microsoft Word’s thesaurus function brings up these words as related and similar to “inure”: harden, toughen, accustom, season, habituate, acclimatize, desensitize, naturalize.
I might add “deaden” and “normalize.”
We are seeing this key mass media function — manufacturing enurement — in operation quite a bit these days.
Take Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump and the US presidential election. Here we are again for the third US quadrennial electoral extravaganza in a row with one of the nation’s two major and viable parties running a malignant narcissist and fascist lunatic – Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump – for the most powerful and dangerous office on Earth (an office this demented maniac actually held between 2017 and 2021). Almost every day brings a new insane comment, lie, and promise from this unspeakable ogre, this adjudicated sex offender who openly channels Adolf Hitler.
The other party is running a blood-soaked imperialist and longtime mass incarcerator who backs genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza and promises to keep the United States military “the most lethal [killing] force on the planet.” Killer Kamala joins the Fatherland Party (the Republifascists) in backing ecocidal fracking and draconian nativist barriers for Latin Americans trying to escape the Hell that US imperialism has made of life for millions in their home countries.
Both parties and their candidates are committed to a growth-addicted fossil capitalist-imperialist system that is cancelling prospects for a decent future and raising the specter of human extinction via the deepening climate catastrophe and/or nuclear war. Never mind the images of dead children buried in hospital rubble caused by US-made 2000-pound bombs.
Never mind the images of whole towns destroyed by wildfires and floods, burnt and drowned corpses on display as capitalism turns the planet into a lethal oven.
Never mind the weather maps showing three new hurricanes forming in the dangerously warmed Gulf of Mexico, including now Milton, a Category 5 storm headed for the fascist-run state of Florida.
This is all treated across the dominant US mass media as things to which we are to be properly accustomed, acclimated, desensitized, familiarized, seasoned, and deadened – inured.
An ecocidal capitalist-imperialist fascist party running malevolent Nazis is presented as the latest version of the nation’s “conservative” politics. An ecocidal capitalist-imperialist bourgeois-democratic party running a faux-progressive genocide apologist and warmonger ready to tip the world ever closer to nuclear war with Russia is reported as the “liberal,” even “left” alternative.
Inuring us to the extreme destructiveness and oppression of the system is a big part of what “our” – the ruling class’s – media is all about. It’s mission includes accustoming us to the sociopathic class rule and anarchy of capitalism-imperialism. It’s about getting masses to shrug their shoulders and say “well, that’s how things how go” or “that’s the way it is” (the iconic CBS newscaster Walter Cronkite’s nightly news sign off during my 1960s childhood) and/or “what else is new?” and/or “oh well” as despicable horrors unfold before our eyes if we bother to look anymore. Any radical criticism of this insanity is labelled as, well, “extremism” and therefore as beyond the parameters of acceptable debate.
Let’s not get extreme! As if what the capitalist-imperialist system and its top power the United State are doing to the world and even to its own people isn’t extreme. You want extreme? Look at the shocking pace and scale of the genocide that Israel has carried with the full backing of its imperial sponsor Uncle Sam in Gaza. Look at the tremendous fossil-capitalist heating of the oceans and the air that is producing gargantuan devastation via floods, landslides, storm surge, drought, heat waves, tornados, derechos, cyclones, wildfires, and tornados the world over. Look at the ongoing and accelerating destruction of essential biodiversity that results from the relentless expansion required by capital’s holy rate of profit. Look at the desperate mass migrations caused by capitalist climate destruction and other forms of imperial ruination in Africa and Latin America. Look at the insanely reckless US provocation of nuclear Russia and nuclear China on their immediate borders. Look at the 30-year life expectancy gap between Chicago’s affluent white Streeterville neighborhood (90 years) and the city’s impoverished Black community of Englewood (60 years). Look at the wild maldistribution of means in the US, where the top tenth of the upper One Percent possesses as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent.
Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).
Source: CounterPunch
