It's a striking confirmation of how the total system works, and how unfree all of us -- including me -- are when it comes to even dimly entertaining the prospect of change. The more mediatized the total society becomes, the less any individual subject is able to pierce the veil of the totality (unless they somehow access a network of resisting subjects).
It's not that Americans are indifferent to the 2 million US citizens in jail, the 43 million without health insurance, and the madness and horror of the Terror War, it's that Empires brutalize and barbarize their subjects, twisting them so cruelly that they can't even begin to imagine alternatives. This cruelty isn't directly physical - it's not about dungeons and state-mandated rallies anymore. It's much more subtle, the violence of the job market, the violence of the consumer culture, the violence of identity, the violence of Bourdieu's doxa. To acknowledge the reality of the decline of the US Empire would be to acknowledge the reality of the US Empire, and that, quite literally, *hurts*: the realization that all this suffering is in vain, pointless, useless. All those reactionary demographic nightmares of an overpopulated Third World suddenly turn into their opposite at that moment, all the carnage and horror inflicted by the Empire recoils into its opposite: the bodies of the dead walk again, their faint voices testifying to the unending slaughter of the First Nations, slavery, colonial expansion, the Cold War, neoliberalism, etc. As Benjamin put it, in the struggle for the future, the dead fight as well as the living.
The question is, how to build networks of resistance to this sorry state of affairs. I don't really have a cookbook -- all I know at this point is that we need resistance(s) at every level of the society. Aesthetic, political, economic, social, micropolitical, intellectual, non-intellectual, informatic, electronic, etc. We have to be more totalized and ubiquitous than the total system itself.
-- DRR