Various sources report that the initiation of this ‘economic growth package’ was enacted as a preemptory measure in light of a projected recession looming in the not too distant future.  We are told that this new legislation is in place for our benefit as a precautionary jumpstart to our economy.  However, that I am aware, the big business of our government has never acted in accord with the best interest of its customers (us citizens) unless they benefit exponentially; it seems this legislative act is no different.  “It is clearly intended that the act will provide consumers with additional purchasing power and businesses with additional incentives to increase or accelerate capital spending. It is hoped that both of these stimuli will allow the country to spend itself out of its current economic difficulties” (“Understanding…”).  Yet, according to recent poll conducted by Pew Research Center, it does not seem that a vast majority of Americans actually plan to ‘spend themselves’ out of their “current economic difficulties.”  The study found that “47 percent of those interviewed intended to use the rebate to pay down their debt and another 23 percent say they are planning to save the money,” leaving only 30 percent of taxpaying Americans who plan to ‘remedy’ their troubles with continued spending (Cramer).  Even so, regardless of taxpayers’ plans for their money, in light of such ‘economic peril,’ can it be that the cure our ‘educated,’ ‘intuitive,’ and ‘caring’ leaders promulgate is for Americans to continue their consumption habits and carry on as if all is well?  Is this really what is in our best interest? I think not.  Rather, once again, it would seem the ‘powers that be’ are escorting us to our places as “cogs in the corporate capitalist machine” (Aronowitz 3).  Within this “capitalist machine,” we are being duped into thinking that we will receive these income tax credits to our benefit, when, in all actuality, we are expected to use them to our detriment.  If America’s minatory spending habits are what led us to our “economic difficulties,” then how can giving taxpayers more money to happily proceed within the ‘one-dimensionality’ of consumerism realistically help our current state of affairs? 

               In essence, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 signifies another attempt at the “co-optation” of our attempts at societal progression.  Gerald Graff’s concept, “co-optation,” is rooted in the precepts of new-historicism—it is “the idea that societies exert control over their subjects not just by imposing constraints on them but by predetermining the ways they attempt to rebel against those constraints, by co-opting their strategies of dissent” (Graff 168).  In this period of war-time inflation, ludicrous increases in gas prices, and a projected recession, perhaps our government recognizes dissonance among the masses and realizes the potential for “dissent” is on the horizon.  Consequently, our governmental ‘powers that be’ manipulated legislature through “repressive desublimation” to ‘repress,’ “paradoxically, by being permissive: it embraced threatening ideas and channeled them into politically unthreatening forms,” thereby “triumph[ing] over opposition not by negating it, but by producing it according to its peculiar requirements” (Graff 170/169).  Essentially, instead of risking societal action opposed to the current path our leaders have led us down, we are tossed pacifying, ‘co-opted’ solutions, for which the rationale behind and language within are never made explicit to the public it affects most.  As Marcuse explains, “For precisely the setting aside of a special reservation in which thought and language are permitted to be legitimately inexact, vague, and even contradictory is the most effective way of protecting the normal universe of discourse from being seriously disturbed by unfitting ideas” (Marcuse 184).  It is through strategies such as this, that the ‘powers that be’ are able to placate the masses and divert any subversive mode of action—or thought, for that matter.

               Conceptualizing an alternative epistemic reality for our country, other than it being the last legitimate stronghold of “liberty and justice for all,” is quite difficult.  But the more critical one becomes of this environment, and the more thoroughly we delve into examining our societal structure, the possibility that the ‘powers that be’ manage our government and its policies for empirical purposes becomes increasingly viable.  That is, we are tested and monitored in order to determine how to ‘co-opt’ society most efficiently.  In relation to the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, for instance, could it be possible that “by observing and measuring the economic modes by which the public tries to run from their problems and escape from reality, [the ‘powers that be’ can] predict the most probable combination of created events (shocks) which will bring about a complete control and subjugation of the public through a subversion of the public economy”? (Cooper 51).  With regard to the notion that “commodification is a radically deconstructive force that produces a form of character systematically divided from itself and doomed perpetually to fail in its search for self-identity,” perhaps society is being manipulated as a fiscal ‘guinea pig’—or perhaps the mindless cattle—to be poked and prodded for the benefit of ‘those in power,’ experimenting as we 'failingly search for ourselves' (Graff 177).

               In effect, the ‘powers that be’ instill unnoticeable determiners within members of society that make us malleable to their whim.  We become what they want us to be—spenders of economy stimulating tax rebates—assuming we are acting righteously and doing what we are ‘supposed’ to do, yet subconsciously succumbing to the imposed sense of futility within.  Again, the idea that this happens without our awareness is key because, as Russell Ferguson recognized, “In our society, dominant discourse tries never to speak its own name.  Its authority is based on absence…It is also the lack of any overt acknowledgment of the specificity of the dominant culture, which is simply assumed to be the all-encompassing norm.  That is the basis of its power” (Goodburn 71).  In consequence, we have been brainwashed by the façade of normalcy which coerces us to ‘buy’ into, both figuratively and literally, exactly what they want.  And it is this ‘internal colonialism’ of the psyche, the sense that “there is no [metaphysically] distinct 'metropolis' separate from the 'colony',” that enables the continuing banality of thought (Barrera 194).

               Furthermore, I agree with Graff that ‘co-optation is unopposable.’  With regard to this year’s Economic Stimulus Act, “The most we can say is that we can choose our interpretations but we can’t choose our range of choices” (Michaels 199).  We can all choose to interpret American society as the paradigm for freedom, yet we must simultaneously recognize that our range of choices within this supposedly "free country" is still limited by the ‘powers that be.’  It is up to us to distinguish that “The totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the traditional ways and means of protest ineffective,” stressing the imperativeness of going beyond our current torpor of consciousness to generate new methods of protest (Marcuse 256).  Marcuse suggests we strive for a realization of a transcendent ‘truth,’ raison d'être, “If truth presupposes freedom from toil, and if this freedom is, in the social reality, the prerogative of a minority, then the reality allows such a truth only in approximation and for a privileged group” (Marcuse 129).  Despite the fact that the masses of America are obviously not representative of a “privileged group,” Marcuse asserts that our collective working class, is still empowered enough so, that we can and must discern the superficiality of the truth given to us by the ‘powers that be’ in order to exist outside the “structure of the slave or serf society which [we can] not transcend” without a conscious effort (Marcuse 129).

Understandably so, indentured to the capitalist architecture in which we live, societal emancipation from such a livelihood seems far-fetched.  Nevertheless, such a release from our embraced consumerism is indispensable because, only then, can we internalize “the insight that those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence”; if we allow our lives to be consumed by the unending quest for material accumulation, in the end, we are negating the existential human quality of the simple appreciation for life (Marcuse 130).  In any case, we are still part of the capitalist ‘machine’; yet, despite our existence within the machine, we are not necessarily 'mechanistically' restricted to lives of 'automated' servitude.  To Savio:

“You’ve got to be a part; part of a machine.  Now, every now and then, the machine doesn’t work.  One of the parts breaks down.  And in the case of a normal regular machine you throw that part out; throw it out and you replace it.  Well, this machine,…its parts are human beings.  And, sometimes when they go out of commission, they don’t simply break down, but they really gum up the whole works!” (Aronowitz 33)

Savio’s metaphor for the layman, encourages the common man to “break down” the walls he has allowed the ‘powers that be’ to build around his mind forcing him to think in a mode exemplary of Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man.”  He calls for society to begin by “breaking down” the conventions of culture, until we are finally able to “gum up the whole works” with new modes of thinking and acting.  As Descartes remind us, “the existence of light, color, sounds, taste, etc.,…is uncertain” (Michaels 196).  In the same vein, just as the concepts of money, happiness, freedom, are similar abstractions of the mind of man, concrete delineations as to what constitute these  concoctions remain "uncertain" as well.  With no explicit definition as to what constitutes ‘existence,’ as a result, we have the capacity to manifest a plethora of alternatives to the conceptions of ‘being’ imposed on us by society; in turn, we possess the ability to “manage great, unmanageable unknowns by means of small knowns”--by managing the "small knowns" of our own everyday lives, we can impact the "unmanageable unknowns" of the world at large (Holland 127).

               Although a complete disconnection from reality as we ‘know’ it is absurd (not to mention its impossibility), options are plausible—to a certain extent.  But one must stay grounded when imagining such choices, remembering it is “foolish to ask whether you like or dislike capitalism because ‘there is no ‘outside’ to capitalism’; “you can’t really transcend your culture but because…you don’t like or dislike it, you exist in it, and the things you like and dislike exist in it too” (Graff 175/176).  In this sense, rationality will prove to be the key to the transcendence beyond societal ‘norms’ to a heightened level of epistemic consciousness, for, “Rational is the imagination which can [lead us] toward a pacified existence, a life without fear” (Marcuse 250).  Without such rational imagination we are doomed to the perpetual ‘flatness’ of ‘one-dimensional’ thought.

Most importantly, it is our duty to realize that “One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information.  Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validated hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations” (Marcuse 14).  Instead of facilitating our own hypnosis, and rather than literally ‘buying’ into the government’s plan for the Economic Stimulus Act, perhaps we need to move away from the government’s expectations that we will spend ourselves into security and learn that saving and monitoring our spending is the only way to free ourselves from the stranglehold of our carefully architected consumer culture.  By honing our own critical thinking skills, I feel we can gain awareness and finally comprehend that there are ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that exist outside the consciousness that has been socially imbued within the individual.  Only such analytical evaluation will guide our move beyond ‘one-dimensionality,’ hence enabling us to make informed and rational decisions for the good of society and, in turn, empowering our abilities to make changes when recognizably necessary.  After all, in the words of Marcuse, “Self-determination will be real to the extent to which the masses have been dissolved into individuals liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and manipulation, capable of knowing and comprehending the facts and of evaluating the alternatives” (Marcuse 252).  Venerating such possible alternatives, we must ‘go against the in-grained’ principles of society delegated from on high by the ‘powers that be.’  Ultimately, it is up to us to establish our own socially legislative ‘Act’ of rationality in order to truly revolutionize the people's ‘Economic Stimulus of 2008.’

              --please e-mail any comments to gdoggzero@yahoo.com