Yes, We're The Great Pretenders
Americans and Their Leaders Are Professionals At Fooling Themselves, But Now, The Entire World Has Joined In Playing A Child's Game
Oh-oh, yes, I'm the great pretender
Pretending that I'm doing well
My need is such that I pretend too much
I'm lonely, but no one can tell
Buck Ram- Songwriter
The great pretender lyrics © Panther Music Corp
Many truly revolutionary things happened in the 1960s: The British Invasion, a sweeping antiwar and civil rights movement, and changes in mass consciousness due to the widespread use of both mind-altering chemicals, and naturally occurring substances like LSD and Marijuana.
I think what is often overlooked, and perhaps largely uncredited, is the fact that a major social taboo was broken in 1964 when the Hasbro Toy Company made it acceptable for little boys to play with dolls when they invented G.I. Joe. In that same year, The Beatles were arriving on the shores of the United States for the first time, an event that was changing and shaking up trends towards stagnation, formula, and gentrification in the popular music industry. The Beatles were pioneers not only in the music they were creating but in pushing gender boundaries with their “long” hair.
To look at it another way, young boys in 1964 were strictly forbidden from playing with their sister’s “Ken” doll, at least out in the open. There were unspoken, yet clearly defined “gender-appropriate” behaviors and appearances, and at the top of the list was the consensus that boys didn’t play with dolls. Boys were supposed to LOOK and ACT like boys, thus, they were resigned exclusively, pre-G.I. Joe, to aggressive games like “playing” Army, or rough and tumble sports like Football. It was, like the flat top crew cut, the seal of approval, mandated by patriarchal societal consensus.
Was G.I. Joe part of some larger, psychological experiment to normalize the occupation of being a soldier to a young boy, and by proxy, war? It seems ludicrous, but possible. Real war and its painful consequences were just ramping up.
Perhaps it was less sinister. Perhaps, Hasbro simply saw an opportunity to create a new, completely untapped market for their product and make a ton of money. I would love to have been a fly on the wall at marketing meetings between Hasbro and rival Mattel, with Hasbro desperately trying to figure out how to counter the immense success of Barbie, Ken, and their profit-generating accessories. Plastic manufacturing, no doubt, went into overdrive.
So, G.I. Joe was put on the market, and it was a must-have toy. Every pre-teen boy in America wanted G.I. Joe, preferably more than one, and ALL the accessories: Space capsules, tanks, jeeps, frogmen wetsuits, and scuba gear. I specifically remember the television marketing appealing to a childish sense of greed, as pictures of multiple outfitted “Joes” flashed past on the screen, an unseen drill Sargent called out “Hup, Two, Three, Four! Got One Joe, Get Some MORE!”
Being totally absorbed into NASA’s Mercury Space program, for me, that must-have accessory was the space capsule. It was one that my parents couldn’t afford, and a classmate, a nice and uniquely unselfish kid, loaned me his. Unfortunately, I broke the clear plastic hatch and spent a week contemplating the anger and the possible loss of a treasured friendship. All was, fortunately, forgiven.
What I don’t think Hasbro anticipated was that their creation, G.I. Joe, and rival Mattel’s creation Barbie (sans Ken) would create a brand new game of pretending, one I know well because I lived it. Two Universes colliding: One where the boys and girls joined together to play “G.I. Joe and Barbie”.
In all my childhood memories, and even considering how easy it is for a child to suspend disbelief and pretend, I vividly remember how breaking another social taboo, boys playing not only with girls but ALSO with dolls, expanded the Universe of possibilities.
Maybe because we were combining the power of both the female and male imagination and simultaneously exploring pre-pubescent sexual awareness without actually being aware of it, the role-playing became integrated as reality.
For example, one G.I. Joe would go out on a “date” in the Army Jeep with Barbie, played with theatrical level passion by the girl down the street you had a crush on in real life, before heading out to Space, or off to the next battle in an imaginary war. It was the ultimate game of “pretend”. It was also a way of acting out, but not acting ON your crush.
The boomer children of 1964, and those that are older, are past grown up now, heading on a rocket ride to old age and their ultimate fate. It seems incomprehensible that so few of them, many in positions of alleged “leadership” lack the capacity to think about the future of younger generations with any sense of empathy. They embrace pretending with unparalleled exuberance. They promote the fallacies and abuses of financial capitalism without a shred of guilt as if they were children wanting ALL the toys.
To be fair, the sycophantic, celebrity, and fame-obsessed members of the American public, and the world, can’t seem to realize that in cheering on delusion, and projecting moral absolutes on the most aged and flawed human beings, they are helping to accelerate and ensure our collective demise.
We are collectively pretending that concepts that are not based in reality such as “monetary policy” “stock market numbers” “unemployment numbers” and “legislation” are more important than actions in real life: kindness, charity, awareness, empathy, and sharing of soon to be limited resources. We can’t pretend it away. Political tribalism is accelerating the disconnect and literally eclipsing perceptual awareness.
The people in power are more than happy to pretend and create a false reality where they have solved critical, existential problems with the stroke of a pen or the allocation of monetary resources. They enthusiastically pander while simultaneously immersing themselves in self-congratulations and phony self-adulation for their mediocre, minimalist responses. The faithful servants of the people are now “delivering” and “getting it done.” Not with pretend results but for the first time, tangible REAL results!
We see this every election season, of course, nothing new here.
We pretend that these “leaders” haven’t always, and continue to, look out for themselves first and foremost, as Julia Rock reports in this excellent report from independent news publication The Lever.
“The world’s largest private equity firm hired Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) son-in-law as a lobbyist around the time Schumer announced a deal that would have marginally limited a tax loophole enriching private equity moguls, before reportedly dropping the planned tax altogether.
The hire spotlights the network of Schumer's family and former staff with ties to the major companies with legislative business now before the upper chamber run by Schumer.
Indeed, Schumer’s relatives and former staffers are now lobbying for the Blackstone Group, Amazon, Intel, and Google, among other corporate giants — all of which have been lobbying on pending Senate legislation.”
The climate crisis and the pretense of a “response” in the form of the provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, is cheered on by people who should know better. Maybe they don’t have time to ferret out the details which are all that really matters. We’re bombarded with cascading flows of information now more than ever before in history.
I know a younger, intelligent, politically aware former co-worker that literally had no idea of the “Poison Pill” provisions of the climate portion of the IRA, that’s how effective pretending is. The corporate media sycophants and stenographers pretend, as they always have, that repeating the lies from a place of permanent mendacity is informing the public. The IRA is promoted heavily, and the major, horrifying, detrimental effects of climate change, which the IRA was never intended to address anyway, are put on the back burner. We’re deeply in the crisis moment and it’s a little late to think solar panels manufactured over the coming years to come will stop any of this.
In the above example, we can pretend that we have clever, innovative solutions like keeping a kayak handy while the floodwaters rise turning it into a vacation of sorts.
The individual and collective leadership of NATO and Western nations are, possibly, the greatest pretenders of all time. The clownish, lame duck Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and his US counterpart Joe Biden, continue to pretend prosperity for Britain and The US, overseeing empires that have bled off and redirected wealth into the great Ponzi scheme that is the Ukrainian proxy war with Russia, while the citizens suffer under economic calamity.
The average citizen in both nations, faced with real economic calamity, and desperate to survive, can’t afford to play pretend in any sense. Pretending is so essential from the leader’s perspective, however, that any narrative beyond the one that Ukraine is fighting a moral battle for democracy and freedom against an evil tyrant, a childish perception at best, is censored and redacted. We all must pretend that Ukraine will win the war and join the good and moral military alliances that form NATO to defeat Russia, China, Iran, or any other country with the audacity to challenge the dollar hegemony of Western financial capitalists.
In the United States, people will dutifully march to the polls pretending their efforts make a dent, conveniently forgetting that the same people, BOTH parties, brought us to our present circumstances.
It’s as tiring for people like myself to keep hammering the point home as it is for anyone to read about it day after day, but one of the most currently harmful examples of great pretense is the one where Western nations have adopted the lie that the acute emergency phase of COVID is over.
It was a lie concocted to serve the interests of Western financial capitalism, ensure election results, and keep people in the workforce and kids in school no matter the long-term, harmful costs to their health. We pretend that, simply because a person is affiliated with the medical profession, they have no intent to harm, or aren’t profiting from misdirection and widely promoted bad advice. It’s easier than realizing that whole segments of the medical profession are compromised and have no interest in mitigating disease or promoting real public health. We also pretend that the lines pouring out of Emergency Room doors in overtaxed Hospitals are exceptions, not the rule.
We need to collectively grow up and stop the silly games of pretending we play. Your political ideology, your “loyalty” to a particular tribe, or cult figure, political or medical, is nothing more than a distraction.
What you do in real life, at the moment, with direct action helping each other is really the only way things will ever change.
Ask yourself if Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, or Vladimir Putin will be there with a bag of groceries, money to pay your heating bill, or paddling a kayak to rescue you from rising floodwaters.
Ask yourself if Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi or Elon Musk are thinking about you not being able to pay rent next month.
Please, stop pretending.