Normalizing Insanity as the Job of US Media

Reflections on Toxic Capitalist Culture

One of US-American corporate media’s key roles is to condition masses of people to accept oppression by normalizing lethal insanity that should never be seen as normal.  

It’s no minor matter. As the brilliant healer and author Gabor Maté notes in his book The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Healing, and Illness in a Toxic Culture, “our culture’s skewed idea of normality is the single biggest impediment to a healthier world…” US-American and US-American-led “toxic culture” has normalized the lethal pathologies of capitalist hierarchy, inequality and competition, racism, sexism, eco-cide, and war/empire in ways that are literally cancerous, damaging the very genetic structure of our bodies and the integrity of our minds.

For better or worse, I turn capitalist-imperialist National “Public” Radio (N“P”R) on when I make coffee in the morning. The other day, between commercials for neoliberal “wealth management” firms, the “public” network nonchalantly reported that 250 US workers have died in recent years while building trenches. Their employers deemed it too costly/unprofitable to install trench boxes that protect workers from cave-ins and thereby keep workers alive.

It is a criminal violation of federal (OSHA) rules for employers to kill workers in this way. The trench boxes are legally required. The requirement is commonly ignored, workers die and no employer has yet been prosecuted for this crime.

Oh well. N“P”R  quickly moved on to some trivial story with soothing electronic music between the segments. It’s sad, but these dead workers are disposable people. That’s the way capitalism, understood as life, is.

The corporate crafted toxic culture has long made it harder to masses of people to imagine the end of capitalism than to envision the end of life on Earth.

The same thing happened after a dispassiolnate N“P”R report on how more North Americans can expect to be killed by mosquito-borne diseases this year thanks to unmentionably capitalism-caused climate change. Oh well, that’s life.  Get used to it.

This morning (August 25, 2024), some N“P”R campaign reporting treated Donald “Clear Out the Marxist Vermin” Trump like just another normal presidential candidate. An upbeat reporter detailed some of the policy ideas Trump supposedly wants voters to consider. A clueless listener would have had no idea that Donald “Brown Immigrants are Poisoning Our Blood” Trump is a malignant fascist, a virulent women-hating racist, an open Hitler-channeler, and an adjudicated sexual abuser who: (a) tried to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy as US president four years ago; (b) stands atop a campaign whose open goal it to makeover US government and society on Christian white nationalist and neofascist grounds with mass violence if “required” by “radical left” resistance; (c) will spark fascist violence on a much bigger scale than January 6 if he does not win the election.

Trump’s opponent Killer Kopmala Harris also gets a pass from N“P”R.  The Prozac-like “public”  network won’t tell its listeners about her long history as a cold-blooded mass- incarcerator or her more recent and ongoing record as a deranged supporter of her boss Joe Biden’s reckless proxy war on nuclear Russia’s western border and of Biden’s many-sided backing – funding, equipping, and militarily and politically/diplomatically protecting – of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza.

As the post October 7^th Palestinian body count heads towards 200,000 by the reckoning account of the leading medical journal The Lancet, Harris screws up her bloody-jawed face at her NNC lovefest to proclaim that she will “always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself, and I will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself…”

When protesters in Arizona two weeks ago cried out against her support for literal soul-crushing and live-streamed genocide – the open US-backed slaughter, poisoning, crippling, starvation, and orphaning of tens of thousands of Gazan children – she tells them to STFU “unless you want Trump to win.”

That is some straight up psycho-killer shit, y’all!

Normalization? Images and reports of US-sponsored mass death and maiming in Palestine are widely available on American television, computer, and smart phone screens.  The genocide is being reported without anything like remotely approproate outrage, folded into the general deadening drivel of media content between infantilizing drug, insurance, car, pet-food and investment-advice commercials. It’s being, well, normalized and banalized, made part of commonplace background along with images and stories of escalating climate catastrophe.

One slick US cop show after another (CSI, the Closer, Blue Bloods, Law & Order, Bones, you name it…the list is endless) routinely normalizes illegal and terrorist conduct by American police. The gun-blazing violation of basic civil liberties in interrogation rooms and on the streets is regularly presented as justifiable in response to evil criminals. Police state fascism is normalized and even celebrated on American television.

One Hollywood movie after another portrays sadistic violence perpetrated by people inside and outside the gendarme class as normal “human nature” and typically celebrates and indeed promotes such violence. Hollywood is said to “lean left” even as it promotes fascism and imperialism, commonly working with the Pentagon and the CIA in the endless celebration of mass-murderous US militarism.

N“P”R and the rest of the mainstream media acts like the contest between Fascist Trump and Killer Kopmala isn’t a sick and deadly insult to humanity. The corporate mass media works overtime to put us to moral, existential, and intelellectual (anti-scientific) sleep. It wants to deaden our hearts and minds.

It wants us to think that we can afford to continue treating the nation’s savagely time-staggered quadrennial electoral extravaganzas — right-skewed contests pitting deranged white-supremacist and ruling class police state Republi-fascists against demented and white-supremacist ruling class police state Democratic imperialists — as the only politics that matter.

Manufacturing mass consent? Sure – along with mass moral and intellectual death. The owners want us benumbed, dead to the real social and natural world we inhabit, deaf to the cries for and possibilities of a whole different way of living.  The anarchic and cancerous mode of production beneath the multi-tentacled ideological superstructure mandates this normalization. By systemic requirement, the vast multi-platformed communications complex relentlessly seeks to plant deep in our brains the now suicidal belief that we can afford to continue ignoring Dr. Marin Luther King, Jr.s counsel near the end of his life – that “the real issue to be face” beyond “superficial” matters is “the radical reconstruction of society itself.”  (King could have had now idea of how far capitalogenic environmental catastrophe would advance in the decades after the violent and premature martyrdom he rightly predicted racist America would grant to him.)

But we can’t afford this toxic media and political culture anymore.  Time is up.  Things change over time. What might once have seemed avoidable can no longer be avoided. The ecological and epidemiological alarm bells are ringing loud and clear.  The US-led anarchy of capital and the world capitalist system is pushing us ever closer to the collapse of a livable environment and to terminal war. It has unleashed new fascist movements and leaders around the world, nowhere more menacingly than in the world’s most dangerous nation – the United States. All these apocalyptic menaces overlap and mutually reinforce each other, with dystopian capitalist Artificial Intelligence further threatening chances for a decent future. It’s not “our culture,” it’s ruling class culture. A revolution in the belly of this unnatural, abnormal, reckless and anarchic capitalist-imperialist beast — seriously advanced by the Revcoms alone among political organizations in the US — is long past overdue. The fate of humanity requires such a radical break from normality.