The New American Mythology: Boy. Are We In Trouble

The citizens of the United States, in this, the first part of the 21rst century, are living in a land of make-believe. We are making our way through every day, pretending to have our lives dependent upon, and grounded in, two myth-guided (sorry), retrograde and faulty suppositions. The first one revolves around the once-sacred notion of “democracy”; the second hinges on the modern misconception of “progress”. Boy. Are we in trouble.

For most of the last century, and most especially during the last decade, we were all sent to bed with visions of terrorists and catastrophe dancing in our heads. We have been told, taught, propagandized into believing and cajoled into maintaining a trance-like mental state that stated that democracy was the answer to everything. Well, it’s not. This is 2009, and panaceas are as dead as Kelsey’s nuts (Ask Bill Maher). The predominant notion has been that any nation in the world which did not already have a democratic form of government should be made to have one, whether it wanted one or not. If a nation did not seem willing to accept democracy as way of life and government, it would have democracy imposed upon it, bribed to accept it or bullied into it through the imposition of a titular administrator (Iran) who could be paid enough to abide by the general norms of democratic life in America(think Egypt). Of course there was also the technique of employing a totalitarian military onslaught, designed to end in “democratic” submission (This oftentimes failed: I give you Viet Nam and Iraq). This particular form of retrograde thinking is our continued salute to the British Empire. I thought we were done with them? But gosh: look at how well all that worked out for them in India.)

There are many rationales for this sort of thinking. First of all, if every nation in the world was democratic, it was supposed to mean that we would not have any enemies. This would be enhanced by the fact since we had “converted” them to democracy, they would be forever thankful and love us unconditionally. This thankfulness and eternal affection would come about, we believed, for one reason: everyone knows (or is supposed to) that democracy works. This “given” is precisely the fly in the ointment, the wrench in the works, and the shoe in the machinery. This idea is its own sabotage. Contrary to popular mythology, democracy does not automatically guarantee bliss, equal wealth and happiness. All too often it works just the other way around: bliss, contentment and happiness only come well after you have worked hard enough to establish real democracy.

And incidentally, democracy and Christianity were not born as conjoined twins. In fact, they are not even kissing cousins. That is just one thread in the fabric of the new American mythology, and one which has proven disruptive, dangerous and toxic in the culture wars (see below). So don’t try to hit me with your Bible.


Why any population, governmental body or group of sane individuals would actually want democracy because it works, is beyond me. The prime example of why this set of beliefs is fallacious is the current, sad state of democracy in the United States. Nearly every day, democracy in this country is failing us. There are many causes for this continual failure, but it all boils down to just two.

The first is that democracy in America is now governed by very weak ideas or ideas that have already died (read The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller. “Taxes will go down”: not). Nearly every day, people in decision making positions at every level of every government make decisions based upon old, stale, faulty, worn-out and ineffective and grossly inappropriate ideas. They prolong sloth and waste. They perpetuate bad habits and injustice. They foster and breed misery and injustice. Democracy in the United States is broken, in large part because it relies upon out-moded ideas, problem solving without adequate forethought and ideas which no longer “fit” our needs and realities. Our thinking tries to apply the solutions of ages past to the new age of the internet, global warming, international mercantilism and financial terrorism. Our ideas are no longer appropriate to the age in which we live. We seem to keep forgetting that learning from history also means that simply repeating it is most often a mistake. (These decision makers are almost invariably the reason we have those little signs that say, “Plan ahead”, and the last letters are jammed together because the sign space is too short.)

Put somewhat differently: information travels 50 times faster than it did five years ago; we are outstripping our planet’s resources and/or polluting them at a rate which may leave the succeeding populations dying of hunger, thirst and heat in just a few decades; the world’s goods are no longer produced “locally” anywhere on the planet, which has caused massive shifts in work force locales and wealth distribution; the titans of industry are still acting like this is 1925 in America; bankers still manage money and capital like it is still 1850..and all the while, our democratic government ( which many say is “too big”) is using thinking which is “too small”. Instead of governing by thinking in bigger, new and healthy ideas, which are in turn big enough to embrace, regulate, manage, coordinate and respond to all the changes evident in the 21rst century, it thinks only in ways that accommodate all of the strategically inappropriate, and outmoded cultural behaviors just outlined. We are dying from an overdose of status quo. Instead of being Darwinian, and evolving to keep pace with contemporary cultural and economic developments, the government is remaining a carnivorous dinosaur and hatching the same old eggs, day after day. And if you continue to reproduce the same old same old, and ignore the incoming asteroids…well, you get the idea. Boy. Are we in trouble?

A side note: when the overriding government practices and prolongation of this mythology are pervasive and unavoidable, the population tends to drink deeply the toxic wine of nostalgia. They long for today to be yesterday, this month to be last month, or this year to be last year: those were the times they (we) understood and could cope with, without extra thinking, configuring, concentration or devoting time to problem solving or adaptation. But that is another essay.
However, this national pastime of drinking the old wine generally tends to lead to the election and (sadly) re-election of politicians who have learned to benefit from the hangover effect of nostalgia: Politicians who can continuously reinvigorate the vision of the happiness of what was once (thought and remembered) to be “good”, can manage to live long and prosper in this environment, as long as no one discovers the dinosaur eggs. And because everything is relative, i.e., everything is connected to everything else, when you link up that political marketing-prolongation strategy with the antiquated financial institutions, heavily laden themselves with motives of self-preservation and irrepressible greed, you get the main component of broken democracy: politicians who are bought and sold and no longer represent the very people whom they can thank for their office. As such, they become the main catalysts and perpetuators of stale and dead ideas and keep the dinosaur eggs warm. And they keep telling us that taxes will go down. Boy. Are we in trouble.

Another side note or two: If the notion that making, causing or insisting that every nation be democratic will make everyone love us were to be true at all, it would seem to follow that we would need less military might. In reality, one enormous proof of our stale and inappropriate ideas, and the influence of the financial communities, is the existence of the largest military industrial complex in the history of the world. And the United States has the largest military budget in the world, which is wildly disproportionate to the GDP. The Navy, for example (a huge component of the military) is today largely irrelevant. It consists in the main (on the main?) of floating city/state airports and skulking, stealthy black atomic powered and armed submarines which carry enough firepower to scorch the face of the earth many times over. And just recently the Secretary of Defense “defended” (how ironic) his re-allocation of military weapons funding by explaining to the American people (you and me) that now funding would be distributed more “appropriately” amongst conventional weaponry, unconventional weaponry and weapons of “future conventionality”(or some crap like that). This political hot-air and antiquated thinking is all stale and wrong-headed. It is buried in the past. It is lethal nostalgia. Nuclear armed submarines, robot drone airpower and laser guided missiles fired from another continent still do the “same old, same old”: they kill lots of people indiscriminately and without feeling or emotion or responsibility. And our “bought and paid for”, not-fairly-elected politicians perpetuate this not-any-longer-here world of non-thinking. This is not the democracy envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Their democracy, especially as viewed by Jefferson, periodically revised, refreshed and re-invented itself through the infusion of new ideas. By breaking with England, they were declaring war on the regurgitation of old ideas and ways of life. Where did that get to? Boy. Are we in trouble.

Which brings us to the second tear in the fabric of the new mythology: the fallacy of the idea of “progress”? You might be led to think (there is a very funny book by Texas author Kinky Friedman, called, You Can Lead a Politician To Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think), that what with the speed of electronic communication, the daily exponential advances and discoveries in health and science and the increasingly sophisticated developments in manufacturing, that we would be moving forward, making progress, as a civilization. Not so. For several reasons, we are, as far the economy, the culture, race and healthcare, running backwards. The United States is in retrograde. We are suffering from self-imposed entropy. Boy. We are in trouble.

In large part, precisely because politicians can zero in on the power of the elixir of nostalgia, moving (in fact very nearly rushing) backwards has been promoted and disguised as moving forward: only skillful politicians can turn wine onto water and make you pay extra for it. After we rolled out of the conflicted legal ideas and moral concepts of the Nixon years, and muddled through the doldrums of Jimmy Carter, we strode into the Reagan years, the first Bush era and later on to Bush II, wherein the operative word was “fear”. (I have not forgotten Bill Clinton. His administration capitalized on the unrealistic giddiness of not being gripped by fear. Please read on). The Reagan gang sought to make us afraid of “big govmint” (yet another example of small thinking). As such, they went about demolishing government structures, union organizations and regulations that kept affairs in order, financially. The Reagan crowd made the term “general welfare” obsolete. The first Bush was still fighting the cold war, telling us to fear oil shortages, threats to democracy, fear losing the Saudis (his bankers), middle-eastern madmen and lack of military might (all old, stale and moribund ideas). The second Bush took all this much farther, urging us to fear (post 9/11) Arab/Muslim terrorists, even more oil loss, WMD’s, loss of jobs, unknown threats to democracy and the potential failure of fundamental Christianity to save the western world (interestingly, we were told to trust his ‘gut” instead of his faith. Oops). We were also told we were too stupid to defend ourselves, and that we needed wars and a larger military industrial complex to protect us and that Dick Cheney should supervise that from an undisclosed location, while W cleared brush on the ranch and fed his pet goat. The only lasting and tangible net result of all of this is that you cannot board an airplane without taking your shoes off. Yes. Trouble. Us.

Naomi Klein, in her book, The Shock Doctrine, explains this nicely. To loosely paraphrase, the mentality throughout these years was this: as long as the population was kept in a state of “shock”, kept constantly on edge and worried, driven by a non-descript fear of anything and everything that moved, it would approve of, support, fund and be complicit in almost anything (like torture?). These would include bigger military budgets, increased laxity in and inattention to financial affairs, more deregulation, distorted human rights and a decrease in both social services and concern for the environment. Deplorable, politicized and inept Ashcroft/Gonzo judicial malfeasance did not help. The net result of all of this was that we have moved backwards. Our social and financial institutions have gone retrograde.
If your neck hurts, it is from looking backward over your shoulder, too much.

(Many will argue these following points, but… during the Clinton years, the smiling, happy mantra of the big guy in the White House were that “Happy Days are here again”. FDR and the cigar had returned and we largely ignored the failure of the movement to make any progress on the biggest “old-thinking” gorilla-in-the-room we had (and still have), which was health care. In the years that followed, health care has gone retrograde even more, but we were too busy being in shock to pay attention. Fast forward to 2008-2009: We were told that we could rescue ourselves from fear and escape from the tendrils of shock by embracing “hope and change”. The electorate chose that and now there is a not-quite-as-big big guy in the White House who smokes cigarettes instead of cigars and hope is fading as change seems to be more and more elusive every day: military strategies and spending appear unchanged, financial woes grow more woeful every day (it is too early to tell yet whether Obama is bought and paid for, but he hired Larry Summers and is moving along the same path from normal beginnings to millionaire, just like Bill and Hillary Clinton) , unemployment grows by leaps and bounds, health care becomes more expensive and less available all the time, and the much-vaulted “progress” (change) has yet to make an appearance. Perhaps what occurred is that “Happy Days Are Here Again” was merely replaced by ,”Happy Days Will Return Again”, which, of course, they never will. Tomorrow will never be yesterday and such thinking is deceptive and retrograde.
Consider this: another old, stale and obsolete idea is that you should “keep your enemies closer”. That is bullshit. You should keep your enemies (and the enemies of the people) at bay by pummeling them with honesty and strong doses of reality. Instead, Obama retained a Secretary of Defense who has prehistoric thinking, has brought the health care industry to the table (so?), appointed banker-foxes to oversee banker-foxes who are living n the chicken coops rent-free, placed Neolithic-reasoning conservatives in positions of national and international influence. Then he placed Hillary, the wife of our last unrealistic master of Make Believe and mythology (President Clinton), who is his unabashed and outspoken arch-rival, in charge of international foreign policy. This is all small thinking. It is nothing new. It is not change. It is com-promise without the promise. So far, no good. Boy. In trouble we are.

To go into retrograde mode means that you are moving backwards and deteriorating. But few seem to be noticing. Experiencing entropy is the same phenomenon only worse: energy and essence disappear without any hope of being renewed, ever. The United States is in clearly in retrograde, as can be clearly observed in several key areas: the military posture, the economy, race relations and cultural “dumbing down”: it is all an entropy of our collective consciousness.

The military budget and stance are either static or growing. The recent military budgets have increased rather than decreased (more backwards disguised as frontwards), we still have two major wars in progress and we are building more aircraft carriers and submarines. We still have Blackwater in our employ. We have a billion dollar embassy of dubious value and usefulness in Baghdad and are building another in Islamabad…for another billion dollars. Our military efforts are moving backwards in terms of real-life usefulness while claiming progress. And we have 50,000 troops stationed in Germany? The less we are supposed to need the military, the more we feed it. This is regress, not progress. We are being snookered. Boy. Are we in trouble.

The economy is upside down and running in reverse. We continue to used borrowed money and increase future debt loads by giving money to bankers (whose old thinking, combined with deregulation, failed) to ensure that they can continue doing what they have always been doing ( the definition, according to Einstein, of course, of “insanity”). This will guarantee that nothing will change; the bankers will not be required to embrace any new ideas and can remain comfortably ensconced in their old thinking. (Read anything by Paul Krugman). The banking and auto industry bail-out programs have been sold as life support systems, to be used to keep the patient alive until it can breathe on its own. Instead the money is flowing upward, padding banker’s coffers, rewarding them for thinking in antiquated fashion, instead of flowing (trickling?) downward, into the economy at large. Some of it is even going out of the country altogether (GM will build its next “profitable” car in China?). This is retrograde, entropic disintegration at its best. Boy. Are we in trouble.

Racism, bigotry, ethno-centrism and xenophobia are at their worst and getting worse than that. Black men are blamed for everything and universally labeled as drug dealers; people of (any) color are held in suspicion, arrested for almost no reason and routinely jailed for practically nothing: the United States has the highest per capita rate of incarceration of any country in the civilized world. Our fear of immigrants has never been more heightened and we have been conditioned to believe that any Muslim is a terrorist and an infidel (Contrary to current rumors, the Quran is no more a “how-to” manual for killing people than is the Bible: read them both). The membership rolls of racist, ultra-right wing hate organizations have exploded and the Reagan-era defamatory slurs about “welfare mothers driving Cadillacs” are everywhere again. I receive at least one cartoon or joke on my computer each week, equivocating the POTUS with a monkey. This is retrograde human relations. Anyone who thinks this is progress needs to seek professional help. Boy. Are we in trouble.

But beneath nearly all of this is our cultural retrograde. What many call the “culture wars”, it is an expression of the right-wing, left-wing bifurcation that expresses itself in poorly thought-through positions on guns, abortion, the immorality of war, the justification for greed and religion , all run amok. Pick one. Charles Pierce has written book called, Idiot America, subtitled, “The culture wars are over and the idiots have won”. I have not read it yet, but if what he said while being interviewed on television is any indicator, I had better read it soon. Pierce’s observations go hand in hand with the now-long standing trend in the U.S. identified as “anti-intellectualism”. As daily life becomes ever more difficult, we are admonished to, for heavens’ sake, whatever you do, DON”T THINK! To do so might mean you might learn something, your head might hurt, you might have to forego or give up a prejudice and might have to face the reality that tomorrow can and never will be yesterday. Idiots employ that faulty reasoning and huge cross-sections of the population follow that course (It cannot be called a train of thought, because the boiler in the engine is cold). The O’Reillys, the Limbaughs, Inhofes, Steeles, McConnels and Boehners live for, in and of this misconstrued vision of reality and misunderstanding of the basic constructs of our cultural milieu. And they all believe that taxes will go down, as well. And before you get all excited, there are many questions about Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (and other liberals), as well. Curiously, but hardly surprising, the Democrats have found the very same night deposit box at the bank that the Republicans use.

In the past several months, after the TARP intervention, the banking industry has reportedly spent more millions on lobbyists and legislative contributions than has been spent for welfare and food stamps in most major U.S. cities. Google let me down here: I can’t find the source.

When you think in retrograde, you get retrograde, backwards, non-progressive and entropic results. Such non-thinking turns in on itself and becomes hugely counter-productive. Retrograde thinking and behavior allows you to continue to believe that being a white, Anglo-Saxon male who suppresses female, gender and minority rights is “OK”. It’s not. In the whole of the world, in the “big picture”, being that white Anglo just described increasingly means you are increasingly becoming a minority. And Jesus did not have blonde hair and blue eyes, did not handle snakes, was probably a progressive Jew who may have been black and “Aryan” is the derivative form of the word “Iranian”, which means your great, great, great grandfather may have been a camel-riding “towelhead”. Get over it. Get over all of it. But yes, I know: if the idiots have won, this has all been a big waste of time.

Our democracy is a broken mythology (largely because of money) and its failure to function has joined forces with anti-intellectualism and idiots to impede and deny what is now mythological progress. Boy. Are we in trouble?

This just in (compliments of Clint): http://www.openleft.com/diary/13658/the-human-development-indexa-better-measure-of-where-we-stand. Yes. Are we in trouble.

No Longer News or General

I just heard another story on NPR about the “death of newspapers”. This particular story was about the small publications and electronic postings and blogs that have rushed in to fill the “void” created when the Seattle Intelligencer folded recently. (Note to NPR: There is no void) I was immediately reminded of the book I mentioned a few weeks back, The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. (Matt Miller) That book is about our desire to hold on to dead ideas that prevent progress and throttle forward thinking.

Let’s face facts: “newspapers” have not printed any “news” for a very long time. They report on what happened yesterday or last week or last month. They tell us about the automobile accident in front of the local liquor store yesterday morning, the missile North Korea fired two days ago, who died during the past week and what line of judiciousness has been taken out of context from an appeals decision made by a SCOTUS nominee seven years ago. They offer (all too often) locally biased reporting of actions, social deeds or indecency, political misdeeds, unfaithful womanizers, corrupt former mayors, illicit love affairs of last year, some yellow journalism: most of this is sensationalism, but hardly “news”. And of course there are pages and pages of advertising for products we do not need, everyone apparently desires and fewer and fewer of us can afford to pay for, on each succeeding day the economy continues to crumble. And on Sundays, more than other days, the paper is used as a “propaganda mule” to carry pounds of glossy paper advertising “supplements” for even more “stuff” we don’t need, or “Sunday Magazines” that report and recount even older social trends, gossip and lengthy nostalgic recounting of the warm and fuzzy remembered events of days gone by. And we waste countless reams of paper which we (mostly) trash and (sometimes) recycle.

We do not get news from newspapers anymore. We get, at best, stories that are 24 hours old, that we have already heard from CNN, MSNBC-TV (or .com), Yahoo News or the AOL home page on our laptop. We saw or read all of these from the flat-panel TV in the coffee shop or taco restaurant or while surfing the net on our Dell mini-laptop or Apple Air or IPhone in whatever friendly locale has free wi-fi (another reason to skip Starbucks). Maybe (probably) we can do this on our computer at work, while the conclave of managers down the hall decries and bemoans our corporate lack of productivity.

The electronic age has rendered the printed page a Tyrannosaurus Rex Press. It is serves no more purpose than to exist as a reporting device about what was or was not yesterday. And as far the value of the research and exposure/educational value of the investigative reporter go, the good ones now have daily blogs or work for web sites, and just as many quickly manage to publish books, almost overnight. And Amazon’s Kindle means you don’t even need to buy the printed version of that.
Newspapers are no longer “news” papers and have not been such for a very long time. Like so many other aspects of modern life, newspapers have lost their way, been preserved and perpetuated for too long and have lost their relevance. Hell, most people in the U.S. don’t even read anymore, anyway. In increasing numbers they wait for John Stewart or perhaps Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olberman to tell them what it all means. Newspapers continue trying to inform people who do not want to be informed, unless it is about their 401K or something about Brittany’s underwear. Like the British Empire, the newspaper empire no longer exists. And that noise you are hearing in the background is the sound of the magazine industry crumbling alongside the newspapers. I have heard it said that the average New Yorker knows more about current events from looking briefly at the jumbotron TV in Times Square than from almost anything else. We should stop weeping for the dead newsprint mastodon and put our efforts and energies behind the continued expansion of unfettered, un-managed, open electronic information systems. If the government wants to do something really helpful to American life, it should guarantee and (OMG) subsidize the internet and not let Time-Warner et.al. get richer by metering and charging for my emails and WWW access. And it would naturally follow that taxing internet usage is counterproductive as well. (That is a message that should be sent to the Congress, but I understand that most Arlen Specter types don’t know what the internet is, anyway. There was story about it in the newspaper, but they didn’t read it).

The newspaper ship of state has become the Titanic of the information industry. It has a huge hole ripped in its hull, it is sinking without hope of rescue for any good reason, and the best thing we can do is to save as many passengers as possible, so that they can go back to work somewhere else.

And speaking of sinking ships, those newspapers almost daily carry countless pages of advertising for automobiles. Despite cars.com, electronic AutoTrader and countless others like them, too many auto dealers continue to advertise too much for an ever shrinking audience. Which brings us to General Motors. We seem hell-bent on bailing out this behemoth and no one is clear as to why. The obvious answer is always that we will save thousands of jobs, but the General is not as has not been ”general” for a long time, except to generally subsidize fat cat top exec salaries and offer meager returns to the myopic and backwards-thinking stockholders, who are still driving Cadillacs. The General has been largely out of touch with the changing needs of the personal automobiles for decades. The General should have started being specific about the time the first Datsun hit our shores and it has not (The General gave a disdaining nod to the Volkswagen, called the Corvair, and we all know how that turned out). The Chevy “Volt” is too little, too late and too expensive and already laden with dated technologies, and the recently disclosed revelation that GM will return to maybe a new prosperity, which may be just a still-born and very expensive re-birthing of a dead monstrosity by importing more fuel efficient, old-technology, cheaply produced autos from China is an affront to all Americans and American workers, who are paying the bill to save a dead whale. Despite the current hoopla and the kind (and empty words) of Barack Obama, General Motors is doomed. Get over it.

General Motors is the automotive version of the Titanic newspaper sinking, while working for decades to live off the past and throttle new ideas. And while guilty of greed, poor or non-existent visions of the future, haphazard bookkeeping, and short-sighted gain taking and tax breaking, they are not alone, just the most immediately visible. Chrysler, is about to go on life support, with the help of the American taxpayer and the Italians. But Tony’s Tiny Buggyworks has never made it in the US and this will only be a postponement (albeit it glamorous and expensive) of the end. Ford appears to have more alert accountants, a little better balance sheet and slightly more and better vision, but no one believes they can re-invent themselves fast enough to keep from eventually being overtaken by the world-wide shift in eventual transportation needs. Despite the recent and difficult to imagine developments in auto production in China and India, the future of transportation lies in mass transit (Chinese and Indian peoples are thinking like 1950’s and ‘60’s Americans and will strangle themselves with oil woes and highway construction) and the former “Big Three” will wind up being footnotes in the history books.

The Mercedes arm of Daimler-Benz (the Smart Car is ultimately not so smart) and BMW will discover one day soon that, despite their aura of haute couture , or VW’s insistence that they will be the eternal “people’s car”, the future of what they do best in this decade will be almost hopelessly irrelevant in the next one. Toyota is obviously out in front, with Honda pulling a close second, but they, too, need to start thinking in terms of mag-lev trains and something they can sell that does not use an internal combustion engine (or some variant) and runs of four rubber tires. Mitsubishi and Fuji Heavy Industries will either wind up building personal conveyances as a novelty or find something else to manufacture, altogether. The General, given the world-wide prognosis of the industry and the transportation needs of the future, does not deserve any hall passes to go to men’s room and smoke something funny in perpetuity. We should quit playing pretend and “used-to-be” with both newspapers and the auto industry. And the US needs to begin thinking transportation “new-frustructure” instead of re-paving interstate highways for autos we do not need.

After the battle of the Alamo, in a surprise series of military “lucky strikes”, the Texian Army destroyed the arrogant General Santa Anna’s army and captured him (he was betrayed by the discovery of his silk underwear). There were many who wanted to hang him from the limb of one of our famous Texas live oak trees. But Stephen Austin and others thought it best to make the General sign away his claims to lands and property rights and send him home to Mexico in disgrace. It was a quiet, discreet and mostly un-objectionable way to get rid of the problem and end the nuisance. We should work out the same sort of arrangement with newspaper corporations and the US auto industry.

Nostalgia is always counter-productive and winds up smelly, musty and stale. The least we can do is stop making it so damned expensive. And does anyone have a clue what we should do with all of these soon-to be-dead, toxic used car batteries? Maybe the General can devise a way to manufacture an electric Yucca Mountain and the non-newspapers can report on how they did it yesterday.