A diamond in the rough...

TIA trips me out. The posts are great, but boy do they wander all over the place (and they're long enough to make your eyes hurt). If you've the patience to follow them though, you can get some great insights. This post is ostensibly euphemasia, but buried in the is a phenomenal observation.

Look for the bit on Americans as consumers rather than citizens:

And it is indubitably a 'piece', not a mere op-ed. Peggy is good at what's known as 'creative writing' (it's not just writing; it's creative writing!), a concept invented in the US sometime in the late 60s - early 70s. A particularly cheesy remnant of that era, 'creative writing' was one manifestation of the vaguely leftish idea that 'expressing yourself' (however incoherently) trumps reason, persuasion, logic, critical thinking. In other words, just having an opinion or a 'feeling' of some kind is the total extent of your responsibility as a, pardon me, sentient human. This overall concept's wholesale political adaptation by the GOP gradually affected a change in how Americans see their own basic role as Americans: the role of 'citizen' was supplanted by that of 'consumer'. It's a subtle but fundamental change. A citizen is active and makes judgments; a consumer is passive, and has only to have an opinion. This confusion of the two roles is summed up in the cliche 'voting with your pocketbook'.

Wow. That is so true. Citizens wouldn't be force-fed pre-packaged news, sound-bites, and talking points...but consumers would. I'm not about to get all Starship Troopers on "citizen" nor pretend that people haven't voted on their wallets since democracy began, but I would love to see an entire post on this rather than reading it as a tangent from a tangent.