What Kind of Society Do Americans Want?

A Nation With a Primitive Social Conscience

by LAWRENCE DAVIDSON

 

On 7 May 2012 a new study came out on healthcare in the United States. Based on research carried out by the Urban Institute, the report is published in the journal Health Affairs. Here are some of its findings:

• There is a prevailing “trend toward private insurance policies with larger deductibles and higher co-payments…”

• “Employers [are] shifting more [heath care] costs onto workers.”

• “Poor and uninsured adults [there are presently 41 million such people in the U.S.] had greater difficulties not just with health care costs, but finding doctors who would see them.” In addition, “too few providers are taking Medicaid” patients.

• One consequence of this trend is that “one in five American adults under 65 had an ‘unmet medical need’ because of costs in 2010, compared with one in eight in 2000.”

What all this means is that health care in the U.S. has deteriorated in the first decade of the 21^st century. That was also reflected in a 2005 study by the World Health Organization that ranked the United States (supposedly the richest of nations) as 141^st in government spending on health. Perhaps not unrelated, the U.S. ranks number 1 in the world when it comes to anxiety disorders.

The Philosophy Behind the Decline
This situation reflects a culture-shaping philosophy that has persisted in this country, with but brief interludes, since its founding. That philosophy teaches that we all are, or should be, rugged individuals. We should take care of ourselves and not rely on others. That is our responsibility in life and if someone can not measure up its their problem, not society’s.

Where does this attitude come from? There are no doubt multiple roots, but one source is an historically deep-seated national dislike of taxation. From the first moment of revolution against Great Britain, freedom meant escaping imperial taxes. Americans of that day claimed that only elected local legislatures could rightly lay down taxes. The claim was made, in part, because within such a localized system taxes could be kept to an absolute minimum.

This attitude toward taxation is, in turn, at the heart of the original capitalist outlook as it evolved in the 18^th century. According to this perspective there are only three things for which the government can rightly tax its citizens: national defense, internal security (including the court system) and the enforcement of contracts. Beyond that the government must leave people alone and that includes not “over taxing” them and not regulating any of their business affairs.

This philosophy has caused untold misery since its inception. For the first century of the industrial revolution when the government of Great Britain (the original industrializing nation) was controlled by people who wanted minimal taxation and no business regulation, working class people lived in dire poverty, environmental pollution was rampant, industrial safety was non-existent, and health care for the poor was the concern of private charity only. Why? Because for the government to address any of these concerns would cost money and that would mean raising the taxes of the folks who had money.

It took over one hundred years of labor organizing, strikes, riots, outbreaks of preventable diseases, and the incessant pestering of elected officials by that small minority of the population who thought all this was a scandal (mostly women and religious folks), to force politicians (kicking and screaming) to address social needs and enforce health and safety related regulations. The Great Depression beginning in 1929 forced the issue with a vengeance and led to larger government and the “welfare state.” In other words, it led to a sense of social responsibility on the part of Western governments–most reluctantly the U.S. government. In America, that lasted through the 1970s and then the situation reversed.

One would think that memory would serve us for more than a mere forty odd years. That after suffering all the misery brought on by 19^th and early 20^th century capitalism we would have learned that to achieve social peace and a modicum of general prosperity, the government must perform important community functions including supplying all its citizens with decent and affordable health care.

But no it hasn’t worked that way. In 1981 Ronald Reagan became president. He started the process of deregulation and shifting taxation away from the rich. Others, including Democrats like Bill Clinton, followed along. When recently Barack Obama proposed health care reform he was labeled a socialist. Now, just listen to Mitt Romney and his Republican cohorts. Just listen to the Tea Party cabal. Just listen to Fox News. All of them want to go back to the “good old days” of minimalist government and minimum taxes. By the way, in the midst of those good old days, about the year 1843, the median age of death in the industrial city of Manchester England was 17.

What Kind of Society Do Americans Want?
This leads us to the question, just what sort of society do Americans want? Indeed, do they want a meaningful society at all?. Why not just stick to family units or small tribes drifting about in a state of nature? Well, in a sense that is what we chose to do. The tribes have become larger and today we call them nation states. But in the American version, localism makes for myriad sub-tribes. In the state of Pennsylvania, where I live, the people in the relatively rural center of the state as well as those in the urban suburbs, not only care little for those living in cities such as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, they actively dislike them. They don’t feel like they live in the same society. And they certainly don’t want to be taxed to help an urban population with a lot of poor folks. In others words, whatever sense of social solidarity rural and suburban Pennsylvanians feel, it does not go much beyond their own local community (or “tribe”). And Pennsylvanians are by no means unique in this country

The fact is that, in terms of social conscience, the U.S. is still quite a primitive place. And this primitiveness is sustained by a philosophy of selfishness. Among other things, that prevailing philosophy is making an ever greater number of us unhealthy. Is this acceptable to most Americans? Is that the kind of society they want? The political practice since 1981 seems to answer, yes.

Significant Social Change...

The Story of Your Enslavement

Delivering Educational Products: The Job Formerly Known as Teaching

Tuesday, May 3, 2011 by Texas Observer

by Robert Jensen

 

Hi, I’m Robert Jensen, a provider of educational products to consumers at the University of Texas at Austin.

I used to introduce myself as a UT professor, but that was before I attended a Texas Public Policy Foundation session last week offering more exciting “breakthrough solutions” to the problems of higher education.

At that session in a downtown Austin hotel, I learned that these very real problems—escalating costs and questionable quality of undergraduate instruction—can be solved in the “free market.” You know, the free market, that magical mechanism that gave us the housing bubble/credit derivative scam/financial meltdown. The free market that has produced growing inequality in the United States and around the world. That good old free market.

The solutions offered by representatives of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in the morning’s first session focused on ending public subsidies for higher education and treating it like any other business. These insights come on the heels of the much-hyped “seven breakthrough solutions” that TPPF has been pushing. (Read about them here, and for a satirical treatment, watch this.

Not surprisingly, both panelists spoke in the language of the market, turning education into a commodity. Panel moderator William Murchison, a conservative syndicated columnist, chimed in during the discussion, referring to “consumers of the educational product.”

I think that means students.

That pithy phrase led me to the microphone in the Q&A period, where I asked whether in this mad quest to turn higher education into a business the panelists might not be promoting efficiency so much as guaranteeing the final destruction of what’s left of real education. I said that I found it difficult to understand my teaching— which focuses on how citizens should understand concentrations of power in government and corporations, and on how journalists should respond—as “an economic exchange,” in the words of Cato’s Neal McCluskey.

Both McCluskey and Matthew Denhart from CCAP responded with more of the market mantra and didn’t seem to recognize, or care, that commodifying education might have implications not just for how we organize institutions and evaluate professors, but for learning itself. Denhart responded that the “product” doesn’t have to be solely job training, but would include instruction in “esoteric concepts.” Those apparently are the two alternatives in college classrooms: purely practical or interesting irrelevance.

That got me thinking about my favorite class, “Critical Issues in Journalism,” the large introductory course I teach in the School of Journalism. The course tries to examine—rigorously, but in plain language using clear concepts—the nature of democracy and the role of the news media. My goal is to model the critical thinking that is crucial for citizens and journalists in a world facing multiple crises (political and economic, cultural and ecological) with dwindling hopes for a smooth transition to a just and sustainable future. Rather than accept the shallow platitudes of American democracy or the self-serving claims of American mainstream journalism, I encourage students to challenge the conventional wisdom (and me).

My students can speak to how well I do that, but my interest here is in how I understand the nature of what I do. When I think of when the class seems to work best -- the moments that students seems to be most engaged with these crucial questions—it’s difficult to think of myself as delivering an educational product or of my students as consumers.

Instead, I’m happy with being a professor. I profess.

“Profess” can be used in different ways—to make a disingenuous statement (“He professed to like his boss”) or to announce religious commitments (“She professed her faith in God”). But I use it in the sense of making a public claim to knowledge, with an openness to respond to critiques of that claim. When it really works, students not only listen to professors but learn to profess themselves. When it works, I’m just an older—and, one hopes, at least slightly wiser—version of my students.

That experience can happen in vocational training as well as in courses more philosophically focused. Good journalism writing teachers, for example, know the joy of professing the love of the craft and helping students discover that joy. The presumed division between training and intellectual work occurs only when teachers accept that false divide and abandon efforts to bring the two together.

I don’t want to appear naïve; I realize that much of what happens in American college classrooms (including mine, of course) falls short of these ideals on any given day. The question is not whether we sometimes fail, as we all do, but why failure sometimes becomes routine. On this count, ironically, I agree with some of the critiques coming from the TPPF.

After 19 years of full-time teaching at the University of Texas, I’ve heard a lot of legitimate student complaints about professors who don’t care about teaching. I’ve complained myself about the irrelevance and inanity of so much of the “research” produced in the disciplines I know in the social sciences and humanities. I played that research game for my first six years to pass inspection and get tenure, but after that I dropped out of the scholarly publishing arena to concentrate on writing for a general audience. Shortly after that I stopped teaching graduate courses out of frustration with the self-indulgence of so much of the research/theory crowd in the study of media and mass communication. These days, I enjoy the challenge of connecting with undergraduates, writing about political and social matters, and speaking in public.

Let me be clear: This is not an anti-intellectual screed or an attack on systematic thinking and inquiry. I have learned a lot from the work of other scholars, which is reflected in the courses I teach, and such thinking and inquiry is more needed than ever to face these deepening crises. My writing for general audiences is rooted in research, defined more broadly. But the critics of the university have a point. Increasingly, the academic game that most professors play is so self-indulgent that ordinary people—not just reactionary ideologues with libertarian fantasies—will not, and should not, support it indefinitely. Education is not a commodity, but economics are relevant in the sense that we don’t live in a world of endless resources.

But here’s where I part company with the critics: Instead of pretending to be able to measure faculty output and draining the life from teaching, we need to embrace the ideals of the university rather than capitulate to the false promises of failed market ideology. The obsessions with measurement and testing have nearly destroyed K-12 public education, and if applied to higher education it will have similar effects.

That model may be particularly attractive to those on the right precisely because it is so effective at undermining the kind of critical thinking some of us are trying to encourage in our classes. As U.S. society has moved steadily to the right over the past three decades, conservatives have been eager to eliminate the few remaining spaces in the culture where critiques of power—especially concentrated economic power in a society marked by obscene wealth and indecent inequality—can flourish. Some parts of the modern university—especially those teaching business, advertising, and economics—are devoted to propping up that power, and much of the rest of the campus is not far behind. The corporatization of the modern university—both in internal organization and reliance on funding from corporations and corporate-based foundations—has done much to eliminate critical thinking that is connected to struggles for political and economic justice. The victory of the market model would be the end of real education, if by education we mean independent inquiry into the power that structures our lives.

I’m encouraged that UT President Bill Powers—who appeared on the second panel of the day, and had to endure the self-aggrandizing ramblings of fellow panelist and TPPF Senior Fellow Ronald Trowbridge—supports faculty in this debate and recognizes the threats to academic freedom embedded in this market madness. I have disagreements with the university administration about many things, but we faculty would make it easier for administrators in that debate if we not only press the institution to support us but engage in critical self-reflection about ourselves.

In hallway conversations, faculty members will express frustration about bad teachers (though there is not always agreement on which colleagues are the bad teachers) who are allowed to continue to muddle along. Many worry that the demands for scholarly production have become so focused on quantity rather than quality that much of what is published in academic journals is of little value, even for specialists in a disciple.

Acknowledging these systemic failures doesn’t detract from all the good teaching done in universities, nor does it lessen the value of the important research of many faculty members. Instead, it should simply remind us that we owe it to the state, our students, and ourselves to confront these issues. If we don’t, the reactionary forces that increasingly dominate the culture will take care of it for us, and instead of breakthroughs in higher education we will witness an accelerating breakdown.

Carpe Libertatem

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." ~ Voltaire

"Liberty is to the collective body what health is to every individual body. Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man; without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society." ~ Henry St. John

"In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State." ~ Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"[When a victimless criminal] is treated as an enemy of society, he almost necessarily becomes one. Forced into criminal acts, immersed in underworld-related supply networks, and ever-conscious of the need to evade the police, his outlooks as well as behavior become more and more anti-social." ~ Edwin M. Schur

"It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." ~ Bruce Schneier

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)" ~ Carl Sagan

"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." ~ Mayer Amschel Rothschild

"Petty laws breed great crimes." ~ Ouida

"If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them." ~ George Orwell

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular." ~ Edward R. Murrow

Google's Schmidt: Society not ready for technology

by Ina Fried | August 4, 2010

TRUCKEE, Calif.--For those concerned with privacy, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave them a few more things to start worrying about.

At a conference here Wednesday, Schmidt noted that using artificial intelligence, computers can take 14 pictures of anyone on the Internet and stand a good chance of identifying that person. Similarly, the data collected by location-based services can be used not only to show where someone is at, but to also predict with a lot of accuracy where they might be headed next.

"Pretty interesting," Schmidt said. "Good idea, Bad idea?...The technology of course is neutral but society is not fundamentally ready."

His comments came at the start of Techonomy, a new conference devoted to looking at how technology is changing and can change society.

Schmidt said that society really isn't prepared for all of the changes being thrust upon it. "I think it's time for people to get ready for it."

Schmidt said these records are a challenge for everyone, himself included, as he noted he was a child of the 1960s.

"Raise your hand if you were a well-behaved teenager," Schmidt said, drawing few if any hands from the high-powered crowd.

Techonomy, which runs through Friday, is the brainchild of ex-Fortune staffers Brent Schlender, David Kirkpatrick, and Peter Petre. Other speakers include Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Sun co-founder Bill Joy.

Schlender said that the conference organizers remain fundamentally optimistic, a point echoed by Petre.

"We invent our way out of problems, even the problems we create," Petre said. "This is the truth we need to show to our children and their children."

Schmidt said he sees a balance eventually coming with society and governments coming to terms on how to regulate the collection of information. The end result, he said, will be that computers will be able to do what they are good at--store and recall information, while humans focus on intuition and problem solving.

"That separation of power is a reasonable one," he said.

On balance, Schmidt said that technology is good, but he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity."

Schmidt said that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."

Social Media and the Architecture of Anomie

A Heap of Broken Images
By PHIL ROCKSTROH

In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost ... marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self. Whether urban, suburban, or rural dwelling, the sense of alienation, for an individual, is profound ... as discernible to the eye as the constellations of foreclosure signs stippling overgrown front lawns across the land ... as hidden as the abandoned dreams within.

The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie. Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.

After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I-Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.

While above the street -- corporate towers -- that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension -- blot the skyline ... these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.

This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.

And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will ... No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook -- with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection -- reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one's heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.

One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.

And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan. We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions. The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.

Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.

Possessed by this mode of being: we languish in a zoo of our own making where we gaze, without comprehension, at the confines of our enclosure, chew our paws, pace the cage, and are restless for mealtime. Like an animal in a cage, we are no longer what we were meant to be ... we have forgotten what it is to be alive. With the exception of superficial form, we begin to lose our affinity to what makes us recognizable as a human being and as an animal -- for we have become simply a sad thing that waits for lunch. And I defy any caged clock-watcher in a cubicle to defy that point.

Restless and agitated in our confinement, we sink further into anomie ... into the benumbing embrace of comfort zones (over-eating, anti-depressants, consumerism as emotional distraction, addiction to electronic media) where we chose safety over the truth of our being. In these cages of inauthenticity, our heart's longings and human needs are held in stasis by the perfunctory persona we cultivated for approval and acceptance; there, consigned to a barren region of mind where one is rewarded for docility and duplicity, one languishes, bereft of eros and pothos ... unconsciously self-convicted and sentenced for the crime of being a serial betrayer of one's essential self.

So much of the criteria of the modern condition has atomized us, stripped us, collectively, of ritual, purpose and meaning, and placed us in the midst of what T.S. Eliot expressed in prosody as a "heap of broken images."

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

--From: The Waste Land

There is danger, of course, in such places -- but there is also the possibility of renewal.

Personal and historical traumas leave a legacy of bewilderment. And being bewildered i.e., being in a psychic wilderness, lost, having wandered or been cast past the known horizon of experience ... is to be in position to engage the novel, be in the thrall of unfolding mystery, and wander in a soul-suffused landscape of the sublime.

A state of alienation is right where we should be: To be able to adapt to a culture dedicated to little more than finding efficient means of exploiting the hours of the greater public's lives for the benefit of a greedy few ... would be a tragedy. Living within this culture should bring on despair ... It is a leviathan that has devoured your existence. Do you think you can renovate the belly of the beast ... set up a time-share with Jonah and Pinocchio there ... and live in comfort?

Should not one stagger and stammer in mortification when shown a handful of dust?

Moreover, the solution we are offered -- making ourselves a dwelling within a prison of consumer kitsch -- should and does only bring on more anomie. Eliot wrote the following regarding a psyche attempting to adapt to a dying culture:

[...] Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

--From: The Journey of the Magi,

One of the notions, as Rilke might put it, that is "brooding like a seed" in my psyche has been the distinction James Hillman makes between civilization and culture. Hillman avers that, and I agree, civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux ... our forced reverence is but a perfunctory prayer muttered before the iconography of a dead religion; in contrast, culture is a living, breathing phenomenon of the collective mind, heart, and soul of the people within it. Its logos inhabits the very air of existence, permeating it like the sound of birdsong, and cricket and cicada stridulation throughout a high summer night.

Moreover, he avers that culture is akin to a madhouse; in fact, the solution lies in the back ward of the asylum, the area where are housed the hopeless cases. In other words, like Dante ... proceed to the place you most fear looking upon, embrace it, and hear its awful keening and heart-opening agonies. There is the location of rebirth, the last circle of hell ... retreating to a comfort zone will simply leave the situation is stasis.

So the question arises: How does one enter the soul-making shabbiness of the human condition, even though, as always, we are powerless against the trajectory of history and lost within the mad proliferation of culture -- and, as Bob Dylan limned in lyric regarding the alienation this situation evokes, "[one has] no direction home?"

Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder of upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment ... Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.

Wendell Berry believes such ventures to be one of the true vocations of the soul:

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry

In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home ... to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.
Phil Rockstroh is a p

Our Society Is Turning Into One Giant Prison

We've gotten to a point where society is so unmanageable we must partition ourselves off from every feature of it.
By Tolu Olorunda, TruthOut.org
June 21, 2010

Those were the good days when a man had friends in distant clans. Your generation does not know that. You stay at home, arid of your next-door neighbor. 

- Chinua Achebe, "Things Fall Apart"

With too many fists slung, too much spittle hurled, too many guns pointed, too many bats swung, it has now become necessary for tellers, bus drivers and even cashiers to partition themselves from customers. A couple of weeks back, driving through an unnamable Indiana town, I walked into a gas station for a brief break. While waiting in line behind a young black boy (of about 8) who had in hand a bag of chips, I noticed a thick glass window protecting customer from cashier, but with limited opening underneath to roll cash or change through. Excitement built up at once: I self-assured whatever concerns I could conjure were but the exaggerated fears of a paranoid leftist thinker, and that in the next few seconds those fears would be allayed good and well.

Then through a microphone the cashier boomed to the boy, "Is that all?" I wondered if he knew what was about to happen, or if some form of oral manual was required to hold his hand through. Like an expert, however, he flawlessly, and without prompting, held up his bag of chips to the glass, the cashier scanned it from inside, he dropped his cash, she pushed his change, and he walked off undaunted. "Next!" she called out. Disturbed to my core, I burst my gums open, and undoubtedly inspired security concerns. It took a couple of minutes to recompose and let out a short request for $20 worth of gas.

As I returned home, the scene replayed in my mind - the boy stepping before me, lifting his baggage; the cashier responding with precision; the boy stoic but studied in this art, walking off without care; and my inability to pull him aside, shake him up, and let him know what had just happened was a travesty and a manifestation of how unmanageable society has become - where human beings fall into cubicles in the workplace of life, where contact is diminished drastically, where the frenzy-for-safety forces many into partitioning themselves (professionally and personally). I felt a failure for stifling the urge to put in his hand Henry Giroux's "Public Spaces, Private Lives" and clamor: "Read this or Die! You now live in a Glass Society, younger brother; and you had better get used to it because the worst is yet to arrive, and your elders rank you so low on the priority rung that to expect rectification anytime soon would usher in many dashed hopes which at your age cannot be healthy."

So far gone are the days when corner stores provided meaning for a whole community: when customer and clerk spoke the same tongue, shared the same values and communicated without concern. In a Glass Society, occasional "hi's" and "hellos" are exchanged, but sincerity falls short. It becomes just polite conduct to acknowledge the other person's humanity - but briefly enough to prevent unnecessary badger. Workers in the same office don't know each other. Sure, they "collaborate" on "projects" and "brainstorm" on "ideas," but relationships are outlawed. Each one is against the other. Each one just as suspicious of the other. Each one trying to annihilate the other - at any signs of weakness.

Society, not just schools anymore, is becoming modeled after the prison culture: most are inmates, a few are guards (who fare little better than inmates), and only one or two, wardens, can claim autonomy over their affairs. Inmates know guards have families to feed, and that the paycheck often comes at their expense. Guards know inmates deserve better from the society they owe debt to, but to protest policies could lead to loss of paycheck - or worse. Each one works daily to bend rules and cut schemes. Each one is aware of the other's deeds. Each one has, more or less, abandoned hope for a transformed society.

Inmates get their share of family visits - but under the jurisdiction of guidelines and regulations which, if followed correctly, smother just about all that is real and authentic about family time. And time is crucial here - for only a few minutes can inmates spend catching up on the last week, month or year: filled with birthdays, sick stories, prison hardship, Halloween costumes, academic issues, loss, joy, loneliness, melancholy, drama. Many inmates cannot even share the warmth of a child or spouse's hands. A glass window would have to suffice.

Skeptics can wonder through any corporate workplace today, and observe the conducts of employees - how close contact is, how high voices rise, how thick the tension feels. Most likely they would find human beings reduced to numbers and drones, who have functions to perform that must be carried out without complaint - however dehumanizing, however demoralizing. The same batch of skeptics should also escape to any Ivy League school in the country, and take note of the sounds issuing from most classrooms, of the communication between teacher and student, of the sense of rancid competition that destroys any possibility of meaningful education.

The more society drifts toward a partitioned and prisoned sensibility, the less chance young people have at any existence worthy of the title "human." In December 2006, a Texas four-year-old was hit with an in-school suspension for "inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment." He hugged a teacher's aide and "rubbed his face in [her] chest." (There goes tomorrow's felon!) With no-touch policies increasingly frequent - and, school officials argue, necessary - five-year-olds comforting grieving friends could end up whacked with the discipline stick.

It's easy to tell the bolts safeguarding the sanity of any society have been capped off when affection is criminalized, when children learn that to care for others, to resist narcissism, might incur harsh reprimand - and even be branded "sexual harassment." Awful as it is that kids today find few adults interested in their affairs, now when they attempt to correct a society losing touch with its humanity, all sorts of arbitrary - and, really, asinine - regulations show up to keep them in check.

If partitioning and prisoning wouldn't do, privatizing sure would. Advertising creeps up at every nook, cranny and corner of schools these days. On buses and scorecards, in hallways and cafeterias, in textbooks and bathrooms - brands drive hard bargains to kids. Schools even push snack and soda products without mercy - the same products highlighted in health classes as sure to command an early grave. No longer considered a public necessity, a condition without with a useful society ceases to exist, schools now fall under the impressions of companies and corporate foundations, flailing around market concepts like "bottom line" and "balancing budgets" and "tightening belts." Four decades back, Hannah Arendt spoke of this "decay of public services" as "the automatic results of the needs of mass societies that have become unmanageable."

A week back, I walked into a recently renovated branch of my local public library and, feeling a bit groggy, whisked off to the coffee table. On it stood two electronic coffeemakers, cream and sugar jars, stir straws and cup lids. There were, however, no cups. A librarian I complained to explained cups were no more free and would have to be purchased at 50 cents apiece. The urge once again overwhelmed me badly, and I let loose in front of him. I ended up with a steaming cup that day, but I knew complicity this time was indefensible.

At the same branch, a lady stands daily by the reception door - the last of three - welcoming and sending off customers. One door away, a DVD vending machine waits, stocked with scores of recent flicks, as well featuring a built-in screen displaying trailers. At the same branch, a plastic "Customer Service" banner hangs high in the main room. No wonder that when most kids stagger into libraries nowadays, their first stop is the computer's section; and not to tidy up an assignment, but to waste hours away on gaming sites.

And who dares blame them?

When they find more in common with animated characters than human beings, who dares blame them? When the jolting thrill that exercise or playtime or recess once afforded is deprived, who dares blame them? When all around glasses are erected, insane policies are presented and public spaces are resented, who dares blame them?

This emerging generation has been set up for what might mark the greatest disaster of a century - and it remains oblivious. Life has been so distorted but yet so normalized that many kids growing up today couldn't tell the difference between W. E. B. Du Bois and Wal-Mart - after all, both have something to say about education. It is natural that kids should imitate adults, but it is self-damning that adults should see how shabby a future awaits youth and refuse to take up necessary action.

It's time for true "revolution of values," as King called for almost 50 years ago. Only few today relish this current mode that has made life intolerably burdensome and even tyrannous to most. Many would rather do away with it and restore some semblance of sanity. There is, of course, the danger of hearkening to the cries of insincere pariahs like Glenn Beck who order a return to "simpler times"; but such commands nonetheless resonate high amongst crowds - boundless by ideology or political alliance - who find little substance in the world today.

Neoliberalism has run amok; extreme materialism has broken its countless promises; jingoism is losing grip fast. Only a real movement against any abuse of public life can restore hope in such dark times as this. The Civil Rights Movement did it. The Women's Rights Movement did it. The Labor Rights Movement did it. And this generation has no other choice. But the powers-that-be will only surrender when citizens work and struggle like the devil for a world deserving of their daily sacrifice.

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,-the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all!

Glass society: have sledgehammer, will shatter.

Plug in and Be Lit up by the American Hologram

Were I to possess more than basic writing skills, this is an article I wish I would have written...

-~+#x0x#+~-

We're Living in a Theater State
TV and movies keep us in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted.
May 16, 2010 |

Ajijic, Mexico -- I've spent most of this week watching American television and movies. I leave the TV on all night long. I toss and turn with my bad back, and bad lungs, catch a rerun episode of Two and a Half Men, or CSI, and conk out again. Then I awaken to the U.S. morning talk shows. It's a grueling regimen, only for the strong. Or the lonely. For periodic relief, I switch to Mexican television (be patient, I really am going somewhere with this). Mexican TV is not one iota better than US television, but is veeerrry heavy on the booty. More than heavy. Astronomical. Think all-but-bare tits and ass close-ups every fifteen seconds, straight through commercials, dramas, comedy shows, history shows, and even the news where possible. Every show but the bullfights and that old nun who comes on at ten PM, who invariably drives me back to the U.S. channels.

Ahhhh … Safely in the American national illusion, where all the world's a shopping expedition. Or a terrorist threat. No matter, as long as it is colorful and wiggles on the theater state's 400 million screens. Plug in and be lit up by the American Hologram.

This great loom of media images, and images of images, is so many layers deep that it has replaced reality. No one can remember the original imprint. If there was one. The hologram is a hermetic snow globe, a self-referential circuitry of images, and a Möbius loop from which there is no logical escape. Logic has zilch to do with what is going on. The smallest part holographically recapitulates the whole, and vice versa. No thinking required, we just cycle and recycle through an aural dimension. Not all that bad, I guess, if it were not generated by forces out to fuck every last pair of eyeballs and mind plugged into it.

The investing class has put thousands of billions into movies, TV and other media to keep the hologram lit up over the past six decades. Which is to say, keep the public in an entertained stupor, awed, mislead, and most importantly, distracted. But the payoff probably runs in the trillions.

For the clear-eyed citizen, there is a growing inner horror and despair in all this, with nowhere to turn but the Internet. The Net is a cyber reality, no more real than the hologram, and indeed a part of the hologram, though not quite yet absorbed and co-opted by capitalism. We take what relief we can find.

However, for the unquestioning rest, the hologram, taken in its entirety, constitutes the American collective consciousness. Awareness. It enshrouds every citizen, defining through its permeation the daily world in which we all operate. Whether we love or hate it, there is no escape. Go live in a shack in the woods. Call that escape. But everything in the outside world continues to run in accordance with the humming energy of the hologram. There is no cutting our umbilical link to the womb of this illusion, this mass hallucination. There is only getting a longer umbilical cord, closing your eyes, and pretending that what the rest of the nation does has no effect on you. We were all born and raised in that womb. We can no more divorce the neurochemistry and consciousness it shaped in us, than we can deny that we had an earthly mother and are of her tissue. Our consciousness is born of the hologram's connective neural and electrical tissue.

That common womb of American consciousness is dying. Slowly or rapidly, depending on how you assess the global ecocide and peak everything, it is dying. There will be resuscitations along the way, more massive infusions of money, fear and the rawest sort of fantasy fed to a mood and commodity drugged public. Still, its condition is terminal, because the hyperdrive consumer culture it was built to sustain, is itself unsustainable. Its appetite ate the world. In fact, so voracious is its appetite that even if our "consumer economy," (legalized feudal theft) sees a recovery, and resumes the level of growth required just to keep capitalism alive, it will die just that much faster. It is not in capitalism's DNA to care about the death of the earth. Nor is it in the brain chemistry of an American satiated on prime beef and sailing across the landscape at 70 miles per hour in a $40,000, steel exoskeleton from General Motors, to care. Hominid gratification is what it is -- hard wired -- and there is no circumventing it.

The system has just begun its crash, and already we are seeing an armed infantilized nation wail, hurl blame and do horrific things, the worst of which we do to one another (excluding sending predator drones after Middle Eastern school kids). Surveillance, witch hunts, destruction of civil liberties, and the government inching toward star chamber trials for those who do not display correct traits. Citizens embracing totalitarianism as stability in the face of the ultimate instability -- the death of the planet.

The political regime or philosophy does not exist which can turn this scenario around. Slow it down, maybe, but put things in reverse, nope. Not when six billion mouths are munching at one end of the last noodle, and at the other end a fraction of a billion well armed technological people want the entire noodle. Not when life is already so damned cheap you can buy a girl slave in Haiti for twelve bucks, or 50 child slaves for your Asian sweatshop for less than the cost of a new car. Or an American working man for half of what it takes to support a family, then throw his ass over the company fence when he's no longer needed. Or bury him in mines as he cries out in Jesus' name, blow him up in Iraq, and Stelazine his kids minds and souls under the hot lights of the hologram, readying them for "the labor market." Schenectady or Soweto, life is dirt-cheap and getting cheaper everywhere on the planet.

Meanwhile, gangster capitalism needs that hologram to maintain the illusion that life is not cheap, and that Jennifer Anniston's ass can be yours in mind and dream (Personally, I'm a Julianna Margulies fan -- The Good Wife"). And most of all, "The Gram" is required to keep its captives deluded and sated enough to remain productive and consuming -- not to mention hating the right people -- right up to the last moment before total collapse, and they are no longer needed. The higher owning/investing class is safe, no matter what happens. Oh sure, as Edward Bellamy wrote, a few of them topple from their high perch on humanity's coach during the hell bent journey, but their class remains.

What happens to the rest of us in that great, sweating, moaning throng who have drawn the coach these centuries? What will remain for us on ruined plains of collapse?

Here is what I believe will remain. Reality and the truth, and the opportunity for spiritual evolution, which, in the end, I think will include most people. And much suffering. The reality of the world has always involved suffering. Despite the ballyhoo of modern science and technology, just as much suffering remains, more actually, given our increased numbers on the planet. Suffering happens to individual human beings and there are far more of those now. Of course, fat cat NGOs and governments deal in percentages and rates, so they will not have to account for the increased millions of miserable beings. We have more humans suffering -- and not just from poverty either, think of depleted uranium, toxic waste, sweatshop slavery -- than we had humans on earth a couple hundred years ago.

The hologram has, and still does, prevent Americans from grasping any of this. Instead, the hologram allows us to believe that life can exist without suffering. We actually achieved that state for a while, too, by forcing the suffering on unseen people elsewhere. We accepted the hologram's one voice to the many as truth (not that we had much choice, The ‘Gram was all we knew), then let our souls and national character necrotize in the warm bath of self-gratification and statist hubris.

Nasty picture ain't it? One surely painted by a bitter, sick old man who hates America. Years ago, my fellow countrymen used to ask if I hated America. They finally quit asking me when I started answering, "Hell fucking yes!" But I don't hate Americans. In fact, while I do not believe in "hope" -- that superstitious, childish wishing upon a star -- I do believe America is once again, for all the wrong reasons, the last best hope of the world. If we do not succeed in destroying it first.

Clearly, we have taken an unimaginably disastrous course, and intend to take everyone else out with us. Yet we have only done what most of the world's nations would have done, given such brute power and wealth for such a time. Perhaps more accurately, done what most of the world's governments and leadership would have. So long as nations have hierarchical leadership, they will have escalating hierarchical greed, power hunger and destructive folly -- and therefore, eventually approach hierarchical evil at some point. It may be an old saw, but power does corrupt.

Study us. See how an essentially good people (although the Native Americans would never agree) went wrong. After all, we were born the same unblemished child as everywhere else on the planet. And even now, given what has happened, one cannot fully indict all the "little people," past or present. My granddad was a decent guy until the day he died. So were my dad and mom. And I try to be. But all of us can be rendered blind by faceless machines not entirely of our own creation, and then made submissive beasts to the coarsest among us. Ask any German. Or Hutu. We can be manipulated to believe that the rules do not apply to us, as in the cult of American exceptionalism. Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. I've been there and back several times in my life, and I am sure of that. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade.

Inside most Americans is a globally brattish child. Thanks to our endowed natural resources (since squandered) and to armed national theft abroad, the American has not suffered enough to become a responsible adult on the planet. I suggest that others learn from our example and do differently while they still have the chance. Take heart that they may yet live in a country where capitalism's nihilistic dynamo has not built up such a head of steam. There are still some left, but as near as I can tell -- and mind you, I don't know shit -- their leadership is caught up in the same elite games and traps. National leadership is its own moral and spiritual trap.

Who am I to give advice? Nobody. But this is the Internet, and any dick brain with a keyboard may do so.

My advice is to resist pride in anything said to be national, whether it be prosperity, healthcare, culture, competence, social cohesion and identity, or whatever. Pride and courage do not live in the same house. Courage, which has little to do with blood and guts, but everything to do with sacrifice, chooses to dwell alongside humility.

Again, what will be left after the big collapse? Perhaps after a period of terror, violence and chaos, when the undeniable on-the-ground truth becomes apparent, through ecological disaster, war and other events, a more positive national cathexis will occur. If it does, it probably will not resemble anything we can conceive of in these times. If we can get past the terror involved from our present apprehensive vantage point, it is easy to see why positive national, even global cathexis may be unavoidable.

Cause for well-reasoned optimism exists. Its way the fuck out there, but it's there. Not that it is something to cling to, or even pursue. Clinging and desire are the cause of all suffering in the first place. Doing so only prolongs suffering, personal, national or planetary. The Buddhists are right about that one. So are the Baptists when they say "The world gets right when the people get right."

The big problem at the moment though, for us as sentient beings, is:

What to do when I get out of bed each day? Give money to the Democrats? Move out of the country? Stay and fight the bastards?

Throwing money at frauds and fools doesn't work. Moving to Mexico or Canada takes money in a time when money and jobs are scarce everywhere. As for staying and fighting, really fighting, there is not one person reading this who is going to go strangle the sleazy fucks having martinis on Wall Street with their pet Senator. Nobody reading this is going to instill genuine physical fear, which is the only thing such lizards might respond to. We are left to work within the system, as per the hologram's directive. Their system. Ha!

The answer, to me at least, is to do the most obvious thing first. And I do mean obvious in the most mundane sense. Like fixing breakfast with all the contemplative awareness possible. Seriously. The tiniest right action, the action in complete unself-conscious natural awareness, connects to all the rightness in the universe. And the universe is always right. Because it owns all of our asses, plus black holes, and those teensy pinholes in time that physicist say make you an immediate neighbor of Shakespeare and mastodons -- only you don't know it. It owns the molecules of the ages. Everything.

This proposition is unappealing to Americans and just about everyone else in the western world. To be perfectly honest, a big screen TV, the Internet, and tickets to a Rams game are more accessible and immediately gratifying. Right action in the moment does not light up your neural pleasure centers like cheap sex or jalapeno Doritos. However, I am trying to do it anyway, at least until the opportunity for cheap sex presents itself. When it does, it will most likely be the right action for that moment. Funny how things work.

In any case, by the mundane right action of breakfast, I mean fixing breakfast to locate one's heart in that particular day. Then proceeding toward the least harm one can discern to do, with full knowledge that we always do harm, whether we intend to or not (the world is full of subtle unintended violence). Eliminate whatever suffering in sentient beings one encounters, whether it be in bums, dogs, kids, plants, or the rich fucker next door moaning over his enormous tax bill. To him that is suffering. There's no sliding scale about this shit. I once worked for a guy who bawled when some kid keyed his Porsche. Misery is relative. Compassion is sublime.

Besides, this is what the heart is designed for -- to serve as a compass for the spirit, regardless of how one defines spirit or denies its existence. What the hell, we gotta call the best in ourselves and in our species something, so we can connect with it. The mind has some terrible limitations in doing that sort of thing. As in, it cannot. Necessary as rationalization is for survival, reason ain't everything. In the big picture, it is a small ingredient. Merely an asset, a monkey tool.

Even thinking seems ultimately to lead to the value of non-thinking, which is to say, pure human existence and consciousness. Pure unadulterated duration. This is the most fearless plain, the one on which all things are manifest as they really are, in their purest form, before social and personal hallucinations settle over them like a shroud.

In such times as these, that hard bright plain is bitch to find, much less travel. For sure it starts with the moment called now.

And right now, good god, it's two AM! Time for the nightly Law and Order rerun on Mexican TV.

Hologram take me home.