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It amazes me how shallowly "progressive" many people are, even the seeming majority of what passes for the left in American politics.How do we progress when we refuse to look back at history or even attempt to comprehend the present?
It is now overwhelmingly apparent that the recklessly optimistic relegating of history solely to the realm of nostalgia and outdated modes of style, behavior and consumption, to paraphrase Christopher Lasch nearly 40 years ago, and/or the association of all the founding American republican and legal traditions with bigotry, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, etc... has had some rather dire consequences for American republicanism and democracy, as well as western civilization as a whole.
The global Islamists are correct to identify a crisis of national identity, to challenge our ability to perceive the implications of our actions and to criticize civic values and governmental practices of the western world, namely the United States, the preeminent economic, cultural, and military leader of that community.
Undoubtedly, literacy, education, and media saturation are to blame for the American public's basic inability to contextualize or respond to appeals based upon reason and analysis as opposed to fear and impulse, an inability which is encouraged by the firm entrenchment of private economic interests pursuing a global agenda via the governments highest offices.
Power has been highly concentrated within this country and within the world, and global, economic entities working closely with governments and exercising the authority of governments minus the accountability to a majority of people have been granted a license to deceive and manipulate the population since the end of the Second World War. They have now enjoyed over 50 years of practice in both overt and covert indoctrination and oppression of the general American public, via advertising and sloganeering specifically aimed at dissolving meaningful national and group identities, their sole concern being to maintain perpetual public irrationality in order to sell unneeded and unsafe consumer goods around the globe and in violation of national sovereignty while still collecting tax dollars from the nation's taxpayers to finance their private endeavors.
Furthermore, the nostalgic experience that commercial media, the primary tool of our global economic chieftains, relates to human beings in regards to history and historical awareness is not grounded in the science of history, if we define history as the entire accumulation of human knowledge as it can be interpreted through commentary and recorded events, nor does the nostalgic experience, which is merely a feeling we are now sold through images or calculated understatement, promote an understanding of historical context or communicate anything close to what only the written, historical narrative can, because that knowledge would be dangerous.
Truly, the idea that we are part of a great tradition grasping for civil rights, justice, and autonomy, and that there are demonstrable human virtues as well as vices, that political movements span generations and transcend novel issues, that in some regards we are all accountable to posterity, that some movements, especially those that are unjust, ruthless, grasping for control and illegitimate authority, and dehumanizing to a majority of human beings, have resurfaced within human communities since the beginning of civilization, and that each generation must take up the struggle where the last movement left off to ensure the preservation and transmission of democratic institutions and virtues which counter these more base and nasty human tendencies towards domination, subjugation and lust for power, a tradition which is achieved only by connecting through historical analysis and study, through intellectual communion with traditions and individuals that have checked greed, power, and criminality, throughout history; truly, this is a dangerous concept.
Unfortunately, a TV show or a movie cannot communicate that in 30 minutes.
Visual and aural media, based on awe, speed, and gratification rather than communication, comprehension, or contextualization, has now been given sole responsibility for the transmission of cultural values, and is logically causing the government to be more dysfunctional since it no longer has to consider an informed populace as an impediment, and is logically causing the average citizen to be more emotional, unreasonable, and incapable of comprehending events and his/her own responsibilities as a citizen.
As the Constitution mandates and suggests a free press (which implies the written word), a public education system (which implies scholarship and understanding of government and not merely vocational training) and a public library system (which presupposes an interest in lifelong learning primarily through reading), it is no wonder that the predominance of unwritten media and the shift away from the word, the sustained narrative, facilitates alienation from history, from democratic government which requires self-knowledge, and from other human beings, endangering not only the ability of the human race to record and observe their own place in history but to continue democratic traditions and preserve civility as well, two traditions that are now in greater peril than has been seen for nearly five hundred years, perhaps a thousand.
So when the media, an agent devoted to irrational and unrealistic conceptions of mankind, reality, politics and the world, and in complete thrall to those with real political power, tells us, the vast majority, the allegedly well-informed electorate, that we are being offered a great choice, such an obviously facetious statement should alert our intellect to the reality that if we are being sold "change" and "progress" on the TV, it must only be a cheapened, inauthentic version, which we will never see outside our door, and that there is truly no choice at all, and we are, in light of the measurable experiences from the past hundred years or so, simply being manipulated and pacified by yet another pleasant illusion.
We are being told, like the inmate in the prison cell who is told that he can choose his jailer, that the choice is ours, the choice is important, and that we are in control, in order to guarantee our amiability while our confinement continues and while the walls of our cell are reinforced by the keepers of the keys, to prevent any possibility of our escape.
The so-called "progressivism" and "progressive resurgence" that I'm hearing so much about from supposedly intellectual commentators, the many aged, excited, talking heads spouting on and on about the "progressivism" which the radical demonstrations of the 60's supposedly inserted into the "system" via political and institutional safeguards and initiatives(like women's studies departments, affirmative action, and the like), the commentary that is so self-satisfied to see the effects of two rather illusory social measures culminated in the sheer identities of two Democratic candidates, is pretty much sabotaging rational discourse and real political dialogue in exactly the same way as the racist and imperial military-economic elites did during the 50's with their talk of segregation, Christianity and anti-communism, which is ironically when the "progressive" outrage of the left was initially provoked; it is simply the left's use of religious sloganeering and irrationality: Hope, Change, Progress, etc... All are appeals to a mystified audience and not reason, all ignore talk about substantive issues.
There are now only a few perspectives that matter when we talk about politicians, and they must be talked about.
But first, the political and social effects of the "60's" cultural revolution must be addressed, as the immediate and concrete political victories which it gained, supposedly embodied by the two leading Democrats, were in fact betrayed by new, greater injustices which it unknowingly helped to establish, as Martin Luther King observed shortly before he was killed. What does it matter if a man can vote if, once elected, the politician has no concern for the man? What does it matter if a woman is president, if our entire society is dedicated to war and destruction on a global scale.
A deep understanding and analysis of the 1960's, minus the gratifying nostalgia inherent in the TV special or the kitschy "era piece," is essential, necessary, and imperative as modern media perceptions of the decade continue to transmit the same false hopes in false achievements, which we can no longer afford to strive for, and fail to address the bigger issues beyond race, creed, color, and sex which MLK and others saw as the greater issue, it is essential because the candidates either came of age during this period or were affected by the shift of social values, and the shift in political values which took place at the time, steps that marked the current trajectories our society and government are now following, which must be altered if we are to live peacefully, justly, and morally on an un-poisoned planet.
I'm not denying the courage, audacity, or bravery of the people who protested for civil rights, environmental protections, and social equality during the sixties, my intent is not to patronize the best and most humane elements and actors of that era; rather my intent is to look at the educational reforms, the government response to public unrest, and the trends followed by the polity and the government ever since the confrontation over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the basic structure of government and economic society, all of which are truly continuations of a struggle for democracy and justice started over 500 years ago, a struggle whose main enemies have always been a cruel mysticism and religious bigotry exercised by a minority or a monarch, and interests which are naturally subversive to political authority, such as economics, finance, and possession of the tools of warfare. The break from state-sponsored religion has been replaced, I believe, by a more dangerous belief in unreality perpetuated by our commercial media, and it is obvious that allowing so much money to infiltrate our democratic processes allows the government to remain, in the word of John Dewey, the "shadow cast over society by business."
The many people's movements of the sixties were exactly right to assume that there was such a thing as "the man" and that he was part of "the establishment" which had become an evil, destructive, murderous force, contrary to the values of the majority of the nation, that "the man" had become, in the post-War world, a great enemy to humanity and thus basic human concepts which we all value, such as truth, freedom, beauty, and justice.
"The man" got the message loud and clear. "The man" adapted so as not to provoke unrest, outrage and resentment, he learned to not flaunt power or oppose the revelry and unreasonableness of youth culture, but rather to encourage it, so that the institutional structures which caused war and global injustice, seats which "the man" occupied, would not be realistically challenged, and so that the project for world governance and dominion could continue. It was good to allow people to talk about global values, and global revolution, because that was essentially the same project business, finance, and government were pursuing, which required the elimination of democratic institutions on a national level.
Seats at the table of the global council for war, murder, fear, manipulation, extortion and oppression are now available to "the black man" as well as "the woman" and the authoritative, murderous, compromised institutions have proven to be just as murderous and imposing when occupied by minorities as they were when they were solely occupied by members of the elite Eastern establishment, which C. Wright Mills documented so lucidly in "The Power Elite."
In other words, true to the spirit of equality, the Dulles brothers indeed have nothing on Condoleeza Rice, who has done just as much to subvert, murder and steal around the world, and at the expense of a functioning republican democracy for 300 million Americans.
The positions of supra-Constitutional power which emerged after WW II were not unique to the American republic, and republicanism and democracy had faced serious challenges before, notably in the wake of the Civil War and in the years preceding and following the first World War, however the scope of American power after WW II was for the first time truly global, and staggering, and the supremacy of the American post-war economic, and military institutions as well as the humaneness of her legal philosophy has yet to be seriously challenged.
The American citizen's response to the obvious hypocrisies and injustices of American's post-WW II measures in the absence of a major opponent for military dominance, has been carefully examined and in some cases co-opted, first by the global, economic war chiefs who served as planners of the post-war world, in the name of fighting communism, and now by the inheritors of that tradition, who simply do what they were taught to do. Imagine a boxer who forgets his technique and simply punches, punches, punches, and once his opponent is down, and the match is over, he is still punching, punching, punching, at air, at noone, until he exhausts himself and eventually has a heart attack. That's basically what I consider the dominant philosophy to be within this country. Keep punching.
To elaborate: I don't care whether Barack Obama's boot is stomping an Iraqi kid's head into the ground or whether Hillary is waterboarding someone who's been at Guantanamo without charge for the past 4 years, or John McCain decides to bomb France for being so French, the United States government and western society as a whole is becoming increasingly irrational, religious and ignorant, and this is due to the fact that we've tried to manage a global society since the end of WW II, in a state of perpetual emergency at home, while ignoring and violating the concept of the nation state, which, in my view, cannot be reduced nor transcended due to the inevitable plurality and diversity of human beings and human communities. In the absence of a belligerent competitor, such as the Soviet Union, there is no reason to continue this behavior and doing so will probably see more violence and terror and injustice, as if the Soviets had invaded and won the Cold War.
The brief flowering of Enlightenment values in North America that laid the foundations of our laws and supplied us with the mechanisms to govern ourselves thoughtfully, with man's capacity for reason and right to autonomy as the only prerequisites for establishing a new nation, has since been trampled into the ground by a resurgence of old imperial, monarchical, autocratic, and globalist ideas that were absorbed from the European elite during and after WWII, and wholeheartedly embraced by an ignorant and unthinking polity in the name of necessity, ideas which now threaten our very existence and freedom.
Economic, political, and military power is centralizing itself above the sovereignty of nations and beyond any law without reasonable claims of legitimacy, virtue, or responsibility, and now exercises exploitative and violent methods unseen since the Feudal Era, hence the response we've received from the Muslim world and from indigenous resistance groups everywhere, who rightfully perceive us as crusaders pursuing a global mission or merely as slave traders coming to capture or demean their lives and steal their resources.
So many people are so satisfied by the mere image of a woman or a black man as the spokesperson for a violent American Empire, even though the Empire will still blatantly defy the basic concepts that the Republic was founded upon; a nation united under law and dedicated to justice. But nevertheless, so many people are so accustomed to an Empire operating globally without any respect for human rights or even its own established democratic rules, and capable of the most criminal licentiousness on the largest scale, that the polity is virtually incapable of understanding that the change of the figurehead, the change of the spokesperson for those who grasp at economic and military supremacy on a global scale, won't change the script so long as the money of those interests are allowed to determine elections, and the members of the board of directors occupy positions within the government.
As long as the most powerful economic and political elites pursue global governance and control, we are guaranteed that the next four years, regardless of who gets elected, are going to be just as nasty for the real world as the past administration, though the actor in the pictures on American TV sets might be softer or darker and undoubtedly more eloquent.
Furthermore, we'll be following the same dangerous, unthinking psychological tendency which gave us the image of the "Cowboy" by subscribing to the media event, and the new Mandarin, seeing how unthinking we are, and not having to answer any real questions, will continue to perpetuate the same atrocities and degradations out of malice towards our ignorance, only it might be a version which is more "modern" in accommodating the majority's taste in diverse entertainment.
Most people, I think, are fully capable of understanding that those who are truly politically empowered in the world, those few thousand corporate chieftains and the economic blocs they administer, will continue to glut themselves on blood and oil and inspire massacre among the less fortunate by perpetuating fear, ignorance, hatred, and destruction, and that the great malaise affecting democracy, republicanism and moral self-governance will continue as long as the Empire passes through another election cycle unscathed by public awareness or even confrontation with its existence, although I expect the current political enthusiasm, sensationalized by gender and sex, will quickly dry out once we're clearly back to the business of subjugating the world's population for American weapons manufacturers, credit lenders and salesmen.
Voting for a woman because she is a woman, or a man because he is a man, or a black man because he is black, or a unhappy old white man because he is old, frigid and white, truly brings out the worst and most base parts of our beings, and allowing ourselves to be sensationalized and hypnotized out of demanding real discussion and dialogue in an event as potentially crucial as the election of a president is completely disheartening, cowardly on the part of journalists and intellectuals, and even frightening.
The key questions should be:
Is the emergency over? Can we return to republican government? Can we feed and provide at least minimal care for each other withing our own borders? Can we keep our borders safe and our citizenry connected by one rule of law? Can we live within our own hemisphere safely without stationing weapons and soldiers around the entire globe and in space? Will this candidate retract the claws of empire and restore citizenship to those of us who are now merely subjects of elite, corporate autocrats and the imperial administrators who serve their interests behind a facade of dysfunctional democratic institutions?
