The Only Life There Is

As 2011 draws to a close, here's a little something to reflect on, in terms of a group purpose for all you NMIs and Wafers.

Remember that 1990 Kevin Costner film, "Dances With Wolves"? In it, the Sioux holy man, Kicking Bird, says to Costner (whose Sioux name is Dances With Wolves), "The path that matters most is the path of a true human being." I know everyone here, in their own way, is struggling to follow that path; and I'm hoping that collectively, we've created some sort of refuge here, to support each other in doing that. The context, as we all know, doesn't make it easy: not just having a president who has no problem signing into law a bill that makes it possible for him to snatch up anyone he doesn't like and throw him or her into a black hole forever; but having a populace who couldn't care less about that, or about anything, really, except the next dollar and the next electronic toy. Rejecting mainstream American values in favor of those of a true human being is not easy in these times; but as all of you know, What else is there? For those of us here, this is the only life there is.

May the Great Spirit bless you all.

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The Poetry of Kurt Vonnegut

A few years back, when he was still alive (obviously), Kurt Vonnegut published the following poem in the New Yorker, a tribute to his lifelong friend Joseph Heller. Here it is:

JOE HELLER

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

Interview With Suzi Weissman

This was a short interview held yesterday (Dec. 9) with KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Pacifica Radio. The program is called "Beneath the Surface," and the part that features yours truly begins about 43 minutes into the show. Link as follows:

http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/index.php

Go to Friday, December 9, 2011, 5:00 p.m., and click on 'play'.

Response to Douglas Dowd's Review of WAF

Dear Friends:

Counter Punch just (today, Dec. 6) published a review of Why America Failed by Douglas Dowd, a man I actually admire greatly, and one of America's leading economists. While I appreciated the review, I was greatly concerned about his misunderstanding and mischaracterization of ch. 4 of the book, the chapter on the Civil War. It seems to me he missed the nuance of the argument; a nuance that Amazon reviewers of the book, for example, did not fail to grasp. In any case, I just sent the following letter to Alexander Cockburn, the editor of Counter Punch, asking if he would run it in response, so that CP readers would have my side of the story. As follows:

I very much appreciate Professor Dowd taking the time and trouble to write a lengthy review of my most recent book, a review that is quite comprehensive. But I do want to respond to it, since I have a serious concern over what I feel is a misunderstanding of chapter 4. I make it explicit in that chapter that I do not condone slavery, that I don't regard it as a small thing in American history, and that the Civil War had to be fought to end it. But, following Eugene Genovese's work (which I regard as quite masterly), there is another side to the South besides that, and which the North never wanted to appreciate (to this day). This was the only political formation in US history that was opposed to laissez-faire capitalism and its accompanying way of life, that was in the alternative tradition of Thoreau et al., but that also had capability of being more than just exhortatory. That slavery was entangled, in the South, with a relaxed way of life is, as I note, part of the maddening paradox of the whole thing: that the worst of the South, and the best of the South, were not separable in practice. But they are separable at least in theory, which is very significant, to my mind; because one can and should, as Genovese does, rescue the South from being seen in a monolithic and one-dimensional way.

A familiar problem in this regard is the danger of what is known as "Whig history”: the belief that the people of the past should have had our present wisdom and insight, and recognized that things were supposedly moving toward our present enlightened state. Although, as I state, slavery was rather an anomaly by 1860, it wasn't totally so, on a world scale. Lots of societies had abolished slavery, but many hadn't; and the slow, noncapitalist way of life, in one form or another, was—as C. Vann Woodward pointed out—the world norm at that time (Northern American and Northern Europe being the obvious exceptions). Southerners were steeped in the Bible, which approves of slavery at a number of points; slavery was also enshrined in the Constitution. The fact is that very few individuals are able to live outside their time, including those of us today. Still, as I explicitly say, the Civil War had to be fought to get rid of slavery (although some historians claim it would have petered out soon enough without the war; I tend to doubt it, myself).

It also seems to me that an important aspect of chapter 4 is its discussion of the Northern destruction of the South as fitting into the pattern/narrative of Americans always needing an enemy, and as always regarding that enemy as “savages”--whether Native Americans, Mexicans, Southerners, or Vietnamese. The “scorched earth” policy of the North has been the norm, “shock and awe” in Iraq only being its latest manifestation. I would argue that it is crucial for Americans to start making these connections.

In a word, I believe the argument of chapter 4 is a fairly nuanced one, and I feel sad--and worried--that Professor Dowd missed this, that he was able to see my analysis in only one way, and to see the South through a very stereotypical lens. When all is said and done, nuance and paradox are not the same thing as “contradiction.”

--Morris Berman

Interview with Bob McChesney

This is a call-up show that Bob runs out of WILL-AM, local NPR station in Champaign-Urbana: "Media Matters". It aired today (Dec. 4).

http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/show/december-4th-2011/

La longue durée

La longue durée is an expression used by the Annales School of French historians to indicate an approach that gives priority to long-term historical structures over short-term events. The phrase was coined by Fernand Braudel in an article he published in 1958. Basically, the Annales historians held that the short-term time-scale is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist, whereas la longue durée concentrates on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures. Thus beneath the twists and turns of any economic system, wrote Braudel, which can seem like major changes to the people living through them, lie "old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic." An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular.

The “arc” of capitalism, according to WSA, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. In the classic study of the period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga depicted the time as one of depression and cultural exhaustion—like our own age, not much fun to live through. One reason for this is that the world is literally perched over an abyss (brilliantly depicted at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest). What is on deck, so to speak, is largely unknown, and to have to hover over the unknown for a long time is, to put it colloquially, a bit of a drag. The same thing was true at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire as well (on the ruins of which the feudal system slowly arose).

I was musing on all of this stuff last week when I happened to run across a remarkable essay by Naomi Klein, “Capitalism vs. the Climate” (The Nation, 28 November 2011). In what appears to be something of a radical shift for her, she chastises the Left for not understanding what the Right does correctly perceive: that the whole climate change debate is a serious threat to capitalism. The Left, she says, wants to soft-pedal the implications; it wants to say that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth, that it is not a threat to capital or labor. It wants to get everyone to buy a hybrid car, for example (which I have personally compared to diet cheesecake), or use more efficient light bulbs, or recycle, as if these things were adequate to the crisis at hand. But the Right is not fooled: it sees Green as a Trojan horse for Red, the attempt “to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.” It believes—correctly—that the politics of global warming is inevitably an attack on the American Dream, on the whole capitalist structure. Thus Larry Bell, in Climate of Corruption, argues that environmental politics is essentially about “transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth distribution”; and British blogger James Delinpole notes that “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, [and] regulation.”

What Naomi is saying to the Left, in effect, is: Why fight it? These nervous nellies on the Right are—right! Those of us on the Left can’t keep talking about compatibility of limits-to-growth and unrestrained greed, or claiming that climate action is “just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention,” or urging everyone to buy a Prius. Folks like Thomas Friedman or Al Gore, who “assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying ‘green’ products and creating clever markets in pollution”—corporate green capitalism, in a word—are simply living in denial. “The real solutions to the climate crisis,” she writes, “are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power.”

In one of the essays in A Question of Values (“conspiracy vs. Conspiracy in American History”), I lay out some of the “unconscious programs” buried in the American psyche from our earliest days, programs that account for most of our so-called conscious behavior. These include the notion of an endless frontier—a world without limits—and the ideal of extreme individualism—you do not need, and should not need, anyone’s help to “make it” in the world. Combined, the two of these provide a formula for enormous capitalist power and inevitable capitalist collapse (hence, the dialectical dimension of it all). Of this, Naomi writes:

“The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits....These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress.” (This is exactly what I argued in The Reenchantment of the World; nice to see it all coming around again.) “Real climate solutions,” she continues, “are ones that steer [government] interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.” Hence, she concludes, the powers that be have reason to be afraid, and to deny the data on global warming, for what is really required at this point is the end of the free-market ideology. And, I would add, the end of the arc of capitalism referred to above. It’s going to be (is) a colossal fight, not only because the powers that be want to hang on to their power, but because the arc and all its ramifications have given their class Meaning with a capital M for 500+ years. This is what the OWS protesters need to tell the 1%: Your lives are a mistake. This is what “a new civilizational paradigm” finally means.

Naomi then provides us with a list of six changes that must occur for this new paradigm to come into being, including Reining in Corporations, Ending the Cult of Shopping, and Taxing the Rich and Filthy. I found myself writing “good luck” in the margins of much of this discussion. These things are not going to happen (think Wal-Mart on Black Friday), and what we probably need instead is a series of major conferences on why they won’t happen. Although the answer is already embedded in her essay: vested interests, in both the economic and psychological sense, have every reason to maintain the status quo. After all, no one wants to have to admit that their lives are a mistake.

In terms of recommendations, then, the essay is rather weak. But it offers something very important by way of analysis, and also by implication: Everything is related to everything else. Psychology, the economy, the environmental crisis, our daily mode of living, the dumbing down of America, the pathetic fetish over cell phones and electronic gadgets, the crushing debt of student loans, the inanities (and popularity) of Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand, the farce of electoral politics, the box office sales of violent movies, the epidemics of depression and obesity—these are ultimately not separate spheres of human or natural activity. They are interconnected, and this means that things will not get fixed piecemeal. “New civilizational paradigm” means it’s all or nothing; there really is no in-between, no diet cheesecake to be had. As Naomi says, it’s not about single “issues” anymore.

What then, can we expect, as the arc of capitalism comes to a close? This is where Naomi shifts from unlikely recommendations to hard-nosed reality:

“The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. ‘Free-market climate solutions,’ as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

“As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed.”

To put it bluntly, the scale of change required cannot happen without a massive implosion of the system. This was true at the end of the Roman Empire, at the end of the Middle Ages, and it is true today. In the case of the Roman Empire, as I discuss in The Twilight of American Culture, there was the emergence of monastic orders that began to preserve the treasures of Graeco-Roman civilization. My question in that book was: Can something similar happen today? Naomi writes:

“The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.” She believes that the OWS movement embodies this; that they have taken “aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying...radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.”

Is this true? Three things to consider at this pt:

1. I personally haven’t been down (actually, up) to Zuccotti Park, but most of what I see on the Web, including very favorable reportage of OWS, seems to suggest that the goal is a more equitable American Dream, not the abolition of the American Dream. The desire is that the pie be cut up more fairly. I don’t have the impression that the protesters are saying that the pie, tout court, is rotten. But I could be wrong.

2. The Annales historians, along with the World Systems Analysis folks, have been accused of projecting an image of “history without people.” In other words, these schools tend to see individuals as somewhat irrelevant to the historical process, which they analyze in terms of “historical forces.” There is some truth to this, but “historical forces” can become a bit mystical. Just as it is forces that motivate people, so it is people that enact or manifest those forces. I mean, someone has to do something for history to occur, and at least the OWS crowd is doing just that. My own prediction is that the protest movement will probably melt into a kind of permanent teach-in, where Americans can go to learn about a “new civilizational paradigm,” if that is indeed being taught, and if there are a sufficient number of people interested in learning about it. This is basically the “new monastic option” I talk about in the Twilight book, and it reinforces the history of the marginalized alternative tradition discussed in Why America Failed. Innocuous, perhaps...but in the fullness of time, maybe not. After all, as the system collapses, alternatives are going to become increasingly attractive; and just as 2008 is not the last crash we are going to live through, so OWS is not the last protest movement we are going to witness. The two sides go hand in hand, and ultimately—I’m talking thirty to fifty years, but maybe less—the weight of the arc of capitalism will be too onerous to sustain itself. In la longue durée, one is far smarter betting on the alternative worldview than on capitalism.

3. That being said (ceci dit, in French), the WSA folks are probably right in their argument that historically speaking, effective revolt tends to emerge from the periphery rather than the core. The core countries are the ones that dominate the globe with their power, economy, and ideology. They are crumbling from within, again because of the very pursuit of that power etc.; but it remains very hard to confront them directly—they’ve got the guns, and the police and military are not likely to defect. Thus WSA claims that the most effective counterattack is at the edges of the empire, not at the center of it. Mexico, for example, has no clout vs. the US because it is too close; 80% of its manufactured goods are sold to the US market. But resistance to the World Bank and the IMF is rife at greater geographical distances: Ecuador, for example, or Bolivia. According to the core-periphery argument, we should be expecting protest movements to emerge in places like these, where sympathy for the US is not exactly great. Some of it might come in the form of terrorism; that’s what 9/11 was all about, after all. (“If you terrorize other people, eventually they are going to terrorize you back.”—Rev. Jeremiah Wright) But some of it might just consist of pursuing the alternative, the new civilizational paradigm; just living in a different way, along the lines Naomi Klein suggests. And as the old way of life dies, a new way of life comes into being.

(c)Morris Berman, 2011

Interview With Tom Kiely

OK gang, here's another one: I did this two days ago (Nov. 15) with Tom Kiely, the host of a show called the INN World Radio Report. He's based in Austin. As follows:

http://innradio.com/INN_Radio_2011-11-15_Morris_Berman.mp3

There's a bit of (inevitable) overlap with the other interviews, I believe, but it may not be too bad if you've got a glass of Scotch in hand while you listen. OK, a bottle of Scotch, maybe.

The Seattle Lecture

Dear Friends:

Here is the link for the talk I gave at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Nov. 4, as recorded by TVW:

http://www.tvw.org/media/mediaplayer.cfm?evid=2011110059

The same lecture was recorded by C-SPAN at Barnes & Noble Westwood in LA on Nov. 8, and will eventually run on BookTV; but I have no idea when that will occur.

I also want to bring your attention to the following upcoming events, for those of you in striking distance (so to speak). I'll also post links for these later on, if I have them:

Nov. 19, 5:00 p.m. est: firedoglake.com, online
Dec. 2, 5:00 p.m. pst: Suzi Weissman, KPFK, Los Angeles
Dec. 4, 1:00 p.m. cst: Robert McChesney, WILL, Urbana IL

Thank you all again for your support, and--enjoy!

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Interview With Thom Hartmann

This interview, which Thom did with me on 7 November 2011, is in two parts, and can be found at the following links:

Conversations with Great Minds with Morris Berman, Part 1. Why America Failed
Conversations with Great Minds with Morris Berman, Part 2. Why America Failed

Third Interview with Ken Rose

Go to www.pantedmonkey.org and scroll down to 10/31/11. Enjoy!

Berman Speaks; Millions Riot

In the wake of a 40-minute interview with Morris Berman on KPFT-FM in Houston last night, riots broke out in a number of cities across the country. In New York, OWS protesters flooded the offices of several major banks, hauling off the CEOs and shipping them out to The Hague, where they now await trials before the World Court for financial war crimes. The NYPD assisted enthusiastically in this effort, pepper spraying the bank officials before beating them senseless, while yelling, "We are servants of the people, not the ruling class." Meanwhile, protesters in Zuccotti Park unveiled a number of interesting banners, including the following:

-LLOYD BLANKFEIN'S HEAD LOOKS LIKE KIM KARDASHIAN'S ASS
-IF U OWN A CELL PHONE URA JACKASS
-VIVA ZAPATA
-RIDDLEY WALKER WAS RIGHT
-LOOK WHAT THEY DID TO MY BRAIN, MA
-PROCOL HARUM FOR PRESIDENT
-STAGE DELI, WE LOVE U
-MOST AMERICANS HAVE GROUND CHUCK IN THEIR HEADS

For those of you who missed this earth-shaking broadcast, here is the link:

HTTP://archive.kpft.org/mp3/kpft_111024_190009monitor.mp3

Please note that the Revolution will not be televised.

Thank you and good night.

My Schedule, and Other Stuff

OK you all, time for an update on what's going on with WAF and related material.

First, before I forget: my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, has been out of print for a while due to a publisher's miscalculation, sad to say. They didn't order enough books, sold out what they had (at least that's encouraging), and then had to order more from the printer...which is taking a whole lotta time. Anyway, for those of you wanting to read it, I'm hoping it will be once again listed as Available on Amazon before too long. Stay tuned.

And speaking of Available on Amazon: WAF now is, I'm happy to say. Somebody already took the trouble to write a rather hilarious review, in fact. So those of you who got in on the freebie offer or pre-ordered the book during the past month, should be getting your copy in the mail soon enough. Everybody else, please order one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom, and maybe one for the foyer. In addition, if the spirit moves you, and you can spare a minute, I would be forever in your debt if you could write a review on Amazon. I'm expecting to get murdered in the mainline hardcopy press, so a few good online reviews might help offset the damage. Thank you!

Moving right along...let me list my speaking/traveling/radio etc. schedule for the next month, so those of you within striking distance, who want to attend or tune in, can do so. As follows:

Oct. 31, 12 noon pdt: Ken Rose, KOWS, Occidental CA
Nov. 4, 7:00 p.m. pdt: Elliott Bay Books, Seattle
Nov. 7, 10:30 a.m. pst: Alex Jones Show, Los Angeles
Nov. 7, 4:30 p.m. pst: Thom Hartmann, Los Angeles
Nov. 8, 7:00 p.m. pst: Barnes & Noble Westwood, Los Angeles
Nov. 19, 5:00 p.m. est: firedoglake.com, online
Dec. 2, 5:00 p.m. pst: Suzi Weissman, KPFK, Los Angeles
Dec. 4, 1:00 p.m. cst: Robert McChesney, WILL, Urbana IL

That's it for now. There may be a few additions down the road; I'll keep you posted. In the meantime: Thank you all for your interest and support; it means a lot.

Why America Failed: An Overview

I got the idea for the book from a number of sources, but one of the most important was a book published in 2004 called Freedom Just Around the Corner, by Walter McDougall at the University of Pennsylvania, a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. I want to stress that McDougall is a very centrist historian; there is nothing left-wing or radical about him. But in the opening pages of his book he says that what most characterizes America, going back to the late sixteenth century, is hustling. American English, he writes, has more than 200 synonyms or related expressions for the word ‘swindle’, and when two Americans get together, they pretty much understand that the other person has an angle or agenda and is trying to promote it. We are a people relentlessly on the make, we are all encouraged to develop “The Brand Called You” and market it. It reminds me of the comment made by the comedian Chris Rock, that in the United States, when you are talking to someone, you are actually talking to that person’s agent.

We Americans don’t realize what a strange, and indeed perverse, way that is to live, because if everyone is doing it, it just becomes normal. But Paul Fussell, in his book Class, has a very low opinion of this supposedly normal way of life: “In the United States,” he writes, “everything is coated with a fine layer of fraud.” I suspect most Americans experience the truth of this on some level, and I think it is why we always rate low on international happiness polls: very few of our relationships are real, including our relationship to our work, and consequently our lives are pretty empty. We attempt to fill that emptiness with cars and houses and computers and cell phones, but in the end, it doesn’t work. As one of Jimmy Carter’s advisers put it thirty-two years ago, the United States is “a goal-oriented society without goals.” “More” is not a real goal; it has no actual content.

The original title of Why America Failed was Capitalism and Its Discontents. My publisher was afraid that that sounded too academic, and insisted that I change it. Probably a good decision; I don’t know. But Capitalism and Its Discontents does reflect the thesis of the book: that although there was always an alternative tradition to hustling, with one exception America never took it, and instead it marginalized those alternative voices. The exception was the antebellum South, which raises real questions as to the origins of the Civil War, which were not about slavery as a moral issue, no matter how much we like to believe that. As Robin Blackburn writes in his recent book, The American Crucible, antislavery ideas were far more about notions of progress than about ones of racial equality. That’s a whole other discussion, however, and I have it out in the book for an entire chapter. But the main narrative here is that from Captain John Smith and the Puritan divines through Thoreau and Emerson to Lewis Mumford and Vance Packard and John Kenneth Galbraith to Jimmy Carter, this tradition of capitalism’s discontents never really stood a chance. It never amounted to anything more than spiritual exhortation. Reaganomics, also known as greedism, was not born in 1981; more like 1584. The result is that for more than four centuries now, America has had one value system, and it is finally showing itself to be extremely lopsided and self-destructive. Our political and cultural system never let fresh air in; it squelched the alternatives as quaint or feeble-minded. Appearances to the contrary, this is what “democracy” always meant in America—the freedom to become rich. This ideology is so powerful that we don’t even recognize it as such, but it certainly explains why socialism was never able to gain a foothold here, because the ideology has been the same for rich and poor alike. As John Steinbeck once remarked, in the United States the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In any event, the result is that we are now in a situation of irreversible collapse. The American Dream, as the Cornell University economist Douglas Dowd wrote thirty-seven years ago, is a twisted one. We treat Bill Gates as some kind of national hero, when the truth is that any system that allows one person to accumulate $50 billion, and leaves fully two-thirds of its population living from paycheck to paycheck (assuming they can even find a job, that is), is pretty sick. As many of us know—from Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times to the Wall Street protesters—in terms of collective wealth, the top 1% of the country owns more than the bottom 90%. This puts our social inequality on a par with Egypt and Tunisia, in fact.

Consider the fact that every religion, and every civilization worth the name, has as its central tenet the notion that you are, in fact, your brother’s keeper. But the ‘hustling’ way of life enshrines just the opposite: it says that virtue consists of personal success in an opportunistic environment, and that if you can screw the other guy on your way to the top, more power to you. “Looking Out for No. 1” is what really needs to be on the American dollar. As Jerry Seinfeld’s lawyer in the final episode of the series tells him: “You don’t have to help anybody; that’s what this country’s all about!” The problem is that if you live by the dollar, you die by the dollar. That’s what’s going on today. In fact, perhaps the really interesting question is not why we are finally coming apart, which strikes me as being more or less obvious, but how we managed to stay together for this long. Competition cannot be the glue of a society, because by definition it’s an anti-glue. Thus David Ehrenfeld, Professor of Biology at Rutgers University, recently wrote: “A society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.” There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.” Frankly, if I could summarize the argument of Why America Failed in a single phrase, this would be it. Unless the Wall Street protests manage to turn things around in a fundamental way, “They eat each other” is going to be our epitaph.

Of course, establishment journals and newspapers are going to dismiss Why America Failed as the ravings of the political Left—that is, if they review it at all. Of this, I have no doubt. Unless you are singing in the chorus, you don’t get to have a voice. As Chris Hedges repeatedly points out, any writer who formulates a critique of the U.S. that goes down to the root of things has been marginalized, rendered invisible. America has very little appetite for self-examination, as our history shows. But there is a good bit of irony in this, in that the line of analysis developed in my book has some very distinguished antecedents, going back way before myself or Walter McDougall. These antecedents include three of the greatest historians that America has ever produced.

1. Richard Hofstadter, in The American Political Tradition (1948), says that America was a market-oriented society from birth; that it never went through a feudal period; and the result is that all of the country has been united in a common political tradition that is fiercely capitalistic and individualistic. “A democracy of cupidity,” he once called the United States. “America doesn’t have ideologies,” he added; “rather, it is one.”

2. C. Vann Woodward, in an essay written in 1953, refers to the “Ironic contrast between our noble purposes and our sordid results,” and adds that “economic systems, whatever their age, their respectability, or their apparent stability, are transitory, and any nation which elects to stand or fall upon one ephemeral institution has already determined its fate.” A seer, that guy was.

3. Finally, Louis Hartz, in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), developed the idea of “fragment societies,” ones that, like ours, were founded on fragments of European ones, and that take their entire character from just one of those fragments. America, he says, was founded by the English middle class, a class that possessed a liberal, aggressive, entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of the bourgeoisie. America, he writes, was never really a society at all, but merely the embodiment of a fragment, a specific interest that from the first dominated the entire political landscape. What does the phrase “We the People” really mean, after all? The business of America, as Calvin Coolidge famously put it, is business. In the history of the United States, nothing much else has really mattered, and that chicken is finally coming home to roost. If you can’t or won’t understand your own narrative, then there is no way you can change it, and there exists very little evidence today that we will. “Americans never learn,” wrote Gore Vidal a few decades ago; “it’s part of our charm.”

©Morris Berman, 2011

Energy vs. Analysis

Dear DAA65:

If you've been following the discussion on this blog, the essay below will not contain very much new information; and I agree that we've probably worked over Steve Jobs ad nauseam, and should probably let the poor bugger rest in peace. However, I wanted to collect my thoughts in a more coherent form, so as to present what I feel is a generally ignored slant on the Wall St. protests. Or at least, I can't find any mention of this thesis anywhere, which is hardly surprising. The idea of a Stage 1 and Stage 2 of protest movements, and the possibility that the "screen culture" and the social media promote the first and then undercut the second, is to me an intriguing possibility, and I'm thinking it may even be correct. But that it would not be raised in the media (whether virtual or hard copy) should hardly come as a shock, given the enormous "religious" pull of technology as a supposed panacea in American history--as dear to the Left as it is to the Right. Anyway, I offer this reorganization of my previous scribblings as food for thought. As follows:

Like most folks reading this, I want the Wall St. protests to succeed, though at this point I'm not exactly clear as to what that would look like. Minimally, the arrest and trials (preferably at the World Court in The Hague) of numerous CEOs for financial terrorism; confiscation of the wealth of the top 1% and the redistribution of it among the rest of us; immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan; reduction of the Pentagon budget by 90%; massive reparations, plus heartfelt apologies, to Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, and several other countries, for the horror we visited upon them through the CIA and our foreign policy; and so on. In terms of what needs to be done in order to turn America around, these are admittedly very small steps—baby steps, really—but one has to begin somewhere, after all. However, this is to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, as far as Occupy Wall Street goes, anything might happen. Historically speaking, demonstrations that seemed tame suddenly caught fire, as in the case of, say, the Russian Revolution. So it’s hard to predict the outcome of these protests in any definitive way.

That being said, I confess it doesn't seem likely that these protests can reverse 400 years of a culture based on “hustling,” as I call it in my most recent book, Why America Failed, or the post-Civil War consolidation of corporate America. Which brings to mind a quote from Lincoln: we must "disenthrall" ourselves, he said. Are we now clutching at straws, and getting all enthralled? Look at the enthrallment over Obama in 2008, and how he turned out to be the very opposite of what he said he was. (Basically, a George Bush who can speak English.) I hear Michael Moore saying how these protests will sweep the country, and I think: but you thought Obama was going to sweep the country. Maybe it's time to look at our tendency toward enthrallment, and figure out why “sweeping” is not very likely.

A friend of mine, a journalist, was down at the Washington, DC, protests a few days ago and gave a talk about formulating a new foreign policy for the United States. Only 50 people attended, he told me, and of those only two were under 60 years of age. This for me is an ominous sign. Where can these protests wind up, if they are only about euphoria and youthful energy, and if a sober analysis of American history and our situation today is not a factor in the current uprising?

So much is made of the role of the “social media” in these types of uprisings; I remain skeptical on a number of grounds. I mean, Facebook didn’t play much of a role that I know of in Paris during 1789; and where is the Egyptian “revolution” now? But it goes much deeper than this. Even if we credit the social media with being able to mobilize youthful energy, this is only Stage 1 of any successful protest. Stage 2 is really being able to know and analyze what this country is about, or what a new US foreign policy might consist of; and on this score, the very things that made Stage 1 possible now ironically serve to make Stage 2 extremely difficult, if not impossible. For it is because of these media, and the cumulative impact of television and the Internet in our lives, that young Americans are literally unable to think. They don't know what the difference is between information and knowledge, nor do they really understand what an argument is; and thanks to the new telecommunications technologies, they now have the attention span of a gnat. Printed books take time; they are designed for thinking and reflection, whereas screens are designed for scanning, for bouncing around, for “Whassup, dude?” And if these folks should happen to attend a lecture, they typically sit there and check their e-mail or text-message their friends. In such a context, Stage 2 of the protest is not likely to come about.

All this current worship of Steve Jobs is a symptom of massive cultural dysfunction and decay, in my view; but not just mine. There is by now a large literature on the damage caused by the Net, Google, Facebook, and so on, even detailing the negative impact they have on synaptic connections in the human brain (cf. Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, Christine Rosen, et al.). Nevertheless, I think we are still a long way from really grasping the incredible damage wrought on ourselves, and our culture, by the googlification of American society; from understanding that Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg have been little more than cultural undertakers.

This is something I deal with in Chapter 3 of Why America Failed, devoted to the history of American technology. One can of course argue that there are good and bad technologies, or good and bad uses of technology; this is the conventional wisdom on the subject. But the truth is that technology is never neutral, never value-free: as Marshall McLuhan (among others) argued decades ago, any particular technology carries a value system with it, and introduced into a culture it will change the nature of that culture quite profoundly. In short order, thanks to Jobs & Co., we've gone from a literate culture that had a human depth, and a sense of self, to a screen culture that has neither. All that remains is the flickering image of the moment—not exactly the stuff of revolution, or even serious protest. Really, what could be more congenial to the American corporate state? If I could get myself appointed Dictator of America (benevolent, of course), my first order of business would be to require that (a) everyone own a cell phone, and be using it almost constantly; (b) everyone be signed up on Facebook and Twitter; and (c) everyone be taking Prozac or Zoloft on a daily basis. I would reign in perpetuity, no doubt about it.

©Morris Berman, 2011

Dumping the American Dream

Many years ago, as an undergraduate at Cornell, I heard about a radical economics professor, Douglas Dowd, who stood out from the pack and gave riveting courses. As a mathematics major, I didn't have much time for social science classes, so I had to miss Prof. Dowd's teaching. I really regret it now, but lately I've been trying to make up for lost time by dipping into his work. The Twisted Dream, published in 1974, is a history of US capitalism since 1776, and makes for fascinating reading.

At one point Dowd quotes from Thorstein Veblen's The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), that "history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation." Dowd goes on to talk about the destruction of the environment and of our cities, stating that "growth for its own sake, production for its own sake, consumption for its own sake, and power for the sake of continuing the rest--these are the drives that have shaped the modern world, whose leader is presently the United States." He continues:

"We can seek to live at peace with our environment, our fellow human beings, and ourselves in an urban and industrial civilization. We can, but not so long as the bulk of Americans continue to strive for profit and power and an overflowing cornucopia of increasingly contrived and expensive consumer goods--strive as donkeys strive for carrots fixed beyond their noses. The bulk of Americans cannot achieve what they seek.

"The time has come to take thought, to reflect on what the genuine needs and pleasures of life are, and to find some symmetry between our ends and our means. Those ends are not mysterious, or the province of a few: we wish ourselves and our loved ones to eat well, to be comfortably clothed and housed, to learn through education what we can become and do, to be healthy, to enjoy nature and the works of the species; to have control over our lives. Each of these ends moves away from us, not closer, with each passing year. We count as our treasures what we have been socialized to count as treasures, though they defile our lives and make robots of us all: the automobile, the TV, the encapsulated suburban existence, the gleaming high buildings, the ever-rising GNP, 'fast' food. [To which we might add: the terrible legacy of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg--"heroes" only in an upside-down world.] We are moving in the wrong direction for human beings."

Nothing like telling it like it is, and I hope that the protesters on Wall St. and elsewhere understand that the proper goal for their movement is not extending the American Dream, but putting it to rest. As for Prof. Dowd: he is 92 years old and lives in Italy. Until very recently he was teaching classes on a p/t basis at the University of Modena. A truly great American figure, who understands what it means to live a genuine life.

(c)Morris Berman, 2011

Letter to the New Yorker

Dear DAA-ers,

Below is the full text of a letter I'm about to submit to the New Yorker. Given the size allotted to the letters they print, I'm going to have to reduce it by about 50%; but no reason not to post the pre-cut version here, for you to read. As follows:

As a long-time subscriber to the magazine, I found the issue of September 12, 2011 one of the funnier ones I’ve had the pleasure of reading. First we have an essay by Adam Gopnik, arguing that “declinist” theories of history are misguided and/or illusory (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat”); then one by George Packer documenting the very real decline of the United States (“Coming Apart”). Packer even writes that after 9/11, “the deeper problem lay in an ongoing decline that was greater than any single event or policy.” But besides taking pot-shots at easy targets such as Oswald Spengler, Niall Ferguson, and Thomas Friedman/Michael Mandelbaum, Gopnik’s argument strikes me as being rather glib and superficial, and mistaken on a number of key points. I’ll cite only three:

1. The notion that for “declinist” historians, the catastrophe never quite arrives. Gopnik makes no mention of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, or Jared Diamond’s Collapse, but it is common knowledge that history is a graveyard of empires and civilizations, and decline and fall is the one thing we can be absolutely sure of. “American exceptionalism” won’t save us now; in fact, it is a major factor in our decline.

2. This mistaken premise leads Gopnik to assert that the most recent declinist book (whatever it is) has to explain why the previous ones were wrong. But in fact, it’s not like predicting that the world will end on such-and-such a date; rather, being large-scale processes, declines take their time. They do not occur on, say, August 4, A.D. 476, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. In addition, declinist works that discuss or focus on contemporary America include, inter alia, Andrew Hacker, The End of the American Era (1970); George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (1987); and my own trilogy (The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed), for which I certainly did not feel any need to “explain why the previous declinist books were wrong.” They weren’t wrong at all; rather, they can be seen to form one more-or-less continuous argument that the American empire is coming to a close.

3. Gopnik asserts that ever since Spengler, historians have found it necessary to show that the errors contributing to the decline were “part of some big, hitherto invisible pattern of decline.” The “saner” idea, he argues, is that “things were good and now they’re bad, and that they could get either better or worse, depending on what happens next.” Whose definition of sanity? The fact is that the writing of history does consist in finding or mapping patterns; and instead of citing Karl Popper’s “proof” against historicism, Gopnik would have done better to have referred to E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, which made short (and embarrassing) work of Popper’s so-called proof. Indeed, the belief that “history is just one damn thing after another” (Toynbee’s contemptuous characterization of his critics) is about as outworn as the Great Man theory of history.

There is, of course, the question of why Gopnik wants to refute declinism, which I suspect has a lot to do with not wanting to face the very real decline George Packer talks about. Garrison Keillor once wrote that “We have this ability in Lake Wobegon to look reality right in the eye and deny it.” Gopnik’s essay is a good example of this, it seems to me. The author may not be a declinist, but he is, quite clearly, a denialist.

The Wall Street Protests

It began on September 17, and has now run for thirteen days. There are, perhaps, only a couple of hundred of them, but young people especially have shown up to protest the greed and corruption endemic to the American economy, epitomized by Wall Street financiers. The regular news media gave them almost no coverage; the NYPD overreacted with predictable violence. Many got arrested and hauled away, but the protest continues. Unions have pledged their support, and the movement is now spreading to other cities across the nation. Finally, it would seem, someone is standing up and saying No. Even more, “Go fuck yourself.”

I agree with Chris Hedges when he says that these folks are the best of society; I also think the crowd at Goldman Sachs and their ilk are the worst: bloodsuckers and leeches, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I hope the protest grows from 200 to 2 million, and affects every city in the land. I hope it succeeds…but this is where I start to have certain problems. What is, in fact, the goal? What would success look like in this case? It’s not altogether clear; and beyond a desire to have an economy not run by vampires, by a gangster elite, the protesters’ message is rather muddy.

On one level, it would be great if the protesters could put it on their signs, and say it directly to the American public: socialism; we want a socialist economy. It’s not exactly the way to win friends and influence people in the U.S., and I’m not sure that is what they really want anyway. But there’s at least this, that they want a fairer society, one that does not have a huge gulf between the top 1% and the rest of us. Some form of redistribution of wealth, that presumably would resurrect aspects of the New Deal that the GOP has striven to destroy since Ronald Reagan (and actually, before). After all, we have millions now thrown out of their homes, millions with no prospect of a job, millions living in tent cities and on bread lines, millions without any health insurance, and so on. Re-instigating things such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1934, real union strength, collective bargaining, workers’ benefits—all of this would be to the good, and I’m assuming that this is on the protesters’ agenda.

The problem is that we did have all this once, and to be sure, it was a much fairer and healthier society; but it was still capitalism. This, as most historians will tell you, was FDR’s historic role: he wanted to save capitalism, and he did. In the end, the mental framework, that of a society and way of life based on greed, was still the same. It was just that with the New Deal there were some constraints in place, and it is those that were unraveled in the ensuing decades. But as I argue in Why America Failed, greed has been the touchstone of the American experiment since 1584, since the earliest colonization of the continent (for its resources); it didn’t suddenly emerge 400 years later with Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko. Asked, on one occasion, what it was that the working man wanted, labor leader Samuel Gompers was quite explicit: “More.” Socialism doesn’t envision a different type of system; it envisions the same system with the goodies spread around more evenly.

That some labor unions have indicated their support for the protesters is therefore not surprising. Nor am I condemning them: in the face of Reaganism and Gekkoism run riot, fighting against a 1%-99% split in the wealth is obviously necessary. But when the dust settles, it will still be the United States, with the 400-year-old ideology of the United States; even if we could get the New Deal back, the slogan would still be More. Even so-called progressives think the American Dream is where it’s at. They see no problem with “growth” at all. They just want to extend its benefits to everyone. But suppose—radical thought—that the American Dream was the problem, not the solution? Unfortunately, the ideology of the Dream, of an endless frontier, casts a long shadow over all of us, so that grasping this possibility is quite difficult even for the most intelligent Americans.

Case in point: an article in the 10 October 2011 edition of The Nation by Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel entitled “Can a Movement Save the American Dream?” The authors rightly describe how the very rich have screwed the rest of us out of the A.D., and argue that we need to restore it—redistribute wealth and benefits so that every American can live it. But again, there is no recognition that this Dream is conceptually grounded in the notion of a world without limits; that it is the core of what America is and has always been about; and that it is (as a result) the rock upon which we are now foundering. In spite of the identification (or excoriation) of this ideological pathology by a rather long list of eminent historians, including David Potter, Louis Hartz, C. Vann Woodward, Richard Hofstadter, William Appleman Williams, and Jackson Lears, “progressives” just don’t get it, any more than neoliberals do. Writing in the New Republic nearly twenty years ago, Lears stated that “myths of progress continue to mesmerize intellectuals at all points on the political spectrum, from The Nation to the National Review.” Thus Williams repeatedly pointed out that the Dream was based on a program of endless economic expansion, which eventually made imperialism, and thus the suffering of millions, inevitable. Cornell University economist Douglas Dowd made his own opinion of our way of life explicit in a book he published in 1974: The Twisted Dream. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued many years ago, there is a great difference between the “ethics of maxima” and the “ethics of optima,” and the U.S. is definitely addicted to the former: “growth”. A more accurate word for it might be “cancer.” In recent times, only Jimmy Carter had the courage to tell the American people that this was the vision of those who were spiritually empty, and his audience wasted no time in voting him out of office in favor of a man who told them they could and should have it all; that the A.D. was Life Itself.

So I don’t really know what the protesters’ goals are, and I’m not sure they do either, beyond shipping Lloyd Blankfein out to Antarctica, to live among the penguins. The problem is that historically speaking, protest against the system is not really against the system as such. We like to talk in terms of a multicultural society, but women, blacks, Hispanics, union leaders, you name it: they all really share the same vision. The goal is to get my group a bigger cut of the pie; it’s not to suggest that the pie is rotten. The environmental movement excepted, there is very little thinking in America about getting beyond “growth” and “progress,” beyond a purely materialist-consumerist society, and this certainly applies to the poor as well. As John Steinbeck famously remarked, in the U.S. the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

One protest leader who did understand the spiritual dimension lacking in all this was Martin Luther King. The story might be apocryphal, but one black colleague of mine told me that just before he died, King said to Harry Belafonte that he sometimes had the uneasy feeling that his activism was only serving to “herd people into a burning church.” Sure, he was saying: we might be able to get black people a larger share of the pie, of the American Dream; but the pie is an inferno, a hellish way of life.

Are the protesters saying that?

(c)Morris Berman, 2011

Jonathan Swift Revisited

Readers of this blog may remember a post I did a while ago entitled “Fork in the Road,” briefly referring to the deleterious effects of screens on the brain. The bulk of the article, however, dealt with the effects of anti-depressant drugs, as discussed by Marcia Angell in two essays in the New York Review of Books that pulled no punches on the subject. One thing that particularly impressed me was the impact of the “better living through chemistry” model of mental health on our children. During 1987-2007, the stats of mental disability among children multiplied by a factor of 35, such that mental illness is now the leading cause of disability among this segment of the population. Cruising the Net, one finds numerous studies regarding the effects of Prozac on infants derived from mothers taking the drug during pregnancy, or while breastfeeding: autism, heart defects, poor feeding, insomnia. Not the greatest way to come into the world, it would seem.

Even beyond this is the fact that a certain percentage of American preschoolers—and I was not able to determine what that figure currently is—are on anti-depressant drugs. I find the idea of a three-year-old on Zoloft absolutely chilling, in a Brave New World kind of way. This has got to be a terrible mistake; it’s got to be a way of destroying an infant’s self, so that dependency and psychological disorientation become the “normal” way of being in the world, for these poor kids. Research has suggested this in the case of adults: that the use of anti-psychotic drugs is associated with atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, and that after only a few weeks of drug use the brain begins to function in a different way. How much more powerful and long-lasting must these effects be in the case of toddlers?

The real motivation for getting very young children hooked on these meds is, of course, money: the use of such drugs from a very early age pretty much guarantees Big Pharma an endless supply of customers. It is not, à la Jonathan Swift (“A Modest Proposal”), that there is some kind of plot out there to destroy our children, wreck their intellectual and emotional functioning from age two or even earlier. But if that is the result, does it matter? If the percentage of the under-four age group on anti-depressants continues to grow, then it might be said that deliberately or not, we are eating our children alive. The jury is still out on all this, but the indications are certainly not encouraging.

When it comes to screens, however, so dramatically represented in American society by things such as Facebook and Twitter, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt: these are killers. As Sherry Turkle shows in her most recent book, Alone Together, the much-touted idea of “virtual community” proved to be a fraud. What we really have is increased alienation and depression. All of these social media and accompanying devices peddle a phony intimacy, because if you are at home alone with a screen, that’s where you actually are. Let’s take a look at some of the evidence.

In 1998 a research team at Carnegie Mellon University published an empirical study entitled “Internet Paradox,” demonstrating that within the first year or two online, people were experiencing less social engagement and poorer psychological well-being. The researchers also found that a greater use of the Internet was associated with less family communication, a reduction in local social circles, and an increase in loneliness, as well as higher rates of depression. The authors of the study concluded by suggesting that by using the Net, people were “substituting poorer quality social relationships for better relationships, that is, substituting weak ties for strong ones,” with consequent negative effects. One thinks of Mark Zuckerberg, poor rich asshole, destroying the one real friendship he had (with Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin), so that he could acquire a million meaningless ones.

A more recent study, conducted at the University of Michigan for the period 1979-2009, revealed a 48% decrease in empathy among college students during this time, and a 34% decrease in the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. Most of these declines, it turns out, occurred over the past decade, and the general interpretation is that this is related to the isolation involved in the use of personal technology and popular social networking sites that have become so much a part of student life. The study suggested that this was not surprising “in a world filled with rampant technology revolving around personal needs and self-expression.” But it is also the nature of the technology that is at issue, because the Internet and other electronic media are based on speed and distraction, on rapidly shifting attention. It turns out that the higher emotions, such as empathy and compassion, emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow. Various studies have shown that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience such emotions, or see things from the perspective of others. In a word, these technologies may be undermining our moral sense. At the very least, it becomes hard to argue that they are promoting community.

It also seems to be the case that the use of screens is creating a different type of human being, partly as a result of the neural rewiring of the brain that these devices engender. Much of the evidence for this argument has been collected and expanded upon by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Marshall McLuhan had argued that the brain takes on the characteristics of the technology it uses, and we now see this in the cultural shift from print media to screens. For the Internet’s emphasis (and of course, that of Facebook and Twitter) is on searching and skimming, not on genuine reading or contemplation. As a result, given what we now know about the relative plasticity of the brain, the ability to reflect or to grasp the nuance of a situation is pushed to the margins. The Net, he says, is literally rerouting the pathways in our brains, making our thought processes increasingly shallow. It breaks up the content of a text into searchable chunks, and surrounds it with other content. This is why a page online is very different from a page of print. The concentration and attention factor are high for the latter, low for the former. Then there are the various links, which encourage us not to devote our attention to any single thing but rather to jump from item to item. Our attachment to any single item is thus provisional and fragmented. The Net and its related technologies thus constitute an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”

Print, on the other hand, has (or should I say had?) a quality of calm attentiveness. “The quiet was part of the meaning,” as the poet Wallace Stevens once put it. When a printed text is transferred to an electronic device, says Carr, it turns into something like a website; the calm attentiveness disappears. Instead, the Net & Co. deliver repetitive, intense, and addictive stimuli, promoting very superficial understanding. Basically, you don’t really read on a screen; it’s a different kind of activity: browsing, scanning, keyword spotting, and so on. And the better you get at this, the less able you are to think deeply or creatively. We are, Carr concludes (quoting the playwright Richard Foreman), turning into “pancake people”—spread wide and thin. Facebook and Twitter are turning out such folks by the IHOP-load.

The lack of interest in printed material, and the corresponding upswing in interest in screens is, of course, especially pronounced among the young. In 2009 the average American teenager was sending or receiving 2,272 text messages a month(!). Meanwhile, the amount of time the average American between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age devoted to reading print in 2008 was forty-nine minutes a week. As Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University cogently puts it, “the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousand years.” Collectively, adds author Christine Rosen, this is the endpoint of the tragedy we are now witnessing:

“Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.”

There is little room in this world, Carr points out, for “the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation.” In such a world, he goes on to say, “Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.” The cultural impact follows upon the individual one, then: what we are witnessing is the replacement of a complex inner diversity with a new kind of self, one devoid of any sense of cultural inheritance. Screens are generating the emptiest people in the history of the world, and as in The Matrix, there is no way for these folks to get outside themselves and perceive this. This is the “frenzy” of technological society famously referred to by Martin Heidegger. In the pathological climate of “techno-social Darwinism,” as Rosen calls it, there is no time for stillness. All of these brave new people lack the ability to be alone with their thoughts, or to appreciate the importance of silence. I have found that even the brightest people don’t get it, have no idea what George Steiner meant when he called modernity “the systematic suppression of silence.” Silence, after all, is the source of all self-knowledge, and of much creativity as well. But it is hardly valued by societies that confuse creativity with productivity, and incessant noise with aliveness. As a result, we don’t notice that fundamental aspects of being human are disappearing. During his time at Yale, William Deresiewicz asked his students what place solitude had in their lives. In response, they seemed to be puzzled that anyone would want to be alone. “Young people today,” he concluded, “seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, [and] can’t imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology…seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude.” The world of creativity, of imagination, of depth of the self, is closing down.

The similarity of all this to toddlers on anti-depressants is thrown into stark relief when you realize that the corporate goal is to hook children as early as possible. Last month, Rullingnet Corp. (based in Canada) launched Vinci, a 7” touch-screen tablet for the under-four age group. It is the first tablet designed for babies as young as one week old—the product of a technological mindset that one can only call “creepy,” in my opinion, although the company’s tag line is, ironically enough, “Inspire the genius.” “We are just leveraging their curiosity,” says the inventor of the device. (Notice how a word from corporate finance gets imported into the world of child-rearing. It was leveraging that brought on the crash of 2008.) In fact, a recent study conducted by Parenting magazine and BlogHer found that 29% of Generation-X moms say their children were onto laptops by age two, and the figure rises to 34% for moms of Generation-Y. In the first month of its release, Rullingnet sold 600 Vincis.

In chapter 3 of Why America Failed I argue that technology has always functioned as America’s hidden religion, and that if you deprive Americans of their gadgets, they become depressed or enraged. What can one say when many users of Apple’s iPhone refer to it as “the Jesus phone”? This is not an accident. Technology in America has been associated with unlimited progress and therefore with utopia, with redemption, and when we are now giving touch-screens to one-week-old babies we are imprinting them in the same way that, say, a baptism might. But the reality of Facebook, Twitter, Vinci and the like is a story of false redemption. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, what is omitted from public discussion today is the fact that almost every technological “advance” in recent years has deepened the “continuing decomposition and crumbling of social bonds and communal cohesion.” It goes way beyond the dumbing down of the culture, in other words (horrific as that is); it also involves increasing human disconnectedness, social atomization, rudeness, incivility. One effect of spending most of your time in a virtual world is that of “absent presence”: you treat the world as a mere backdrop, and devalue those around you. These are the hallmarks of a superficial, narcissistic society, one which possesses no inherent meaning, and whose Twittered citizens don’t as well. With techno-imprinting going on now at age one week, I think we can expect that things can only get worse. For there is no getting around it: eating our children alive means we are eating our society alive as well.

©Morris Berman, 2011

Zucker-Punched

(Partial disclaimer: in some cases my publicist didn’t say exactly what I have her saying, so I hope both she, and the reader, will allow me a bit of poetic license here. I do think I’ve preserved the spirit of our exchange, however. She’s just trying to drag me into the 22nd century, whereas I retain a certain fondness for the late 17th.)

OK, gather round, you DAA-ers; time to give you the low-down on publicity for WAF. It seems that Wiley, my publisher, finally came to the realization that in order to make money, you’ve got to spend it. Since Western Europe figured this out around A.D. 1500, I had hoped anxiously from the beginning that they would be onto the fundamentals of capitalism more quickly. No such luck (perhaps a bad case of cultural lag, hard to say). I kept sending them messages on the subject, reviewing the work of Ricardo, Smith, J.S. Mill, and Karl Marx for them, discussing the theory of surplus value, adding in Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and the like, but they seemed to be clinging to the theory of clinging: if we hang on to our money, we’ll be OK. So they kept squeezing quarters till the eagles screamed. But finally—it may have been the winter storms in New Jersey, or the flooding that subsequently occurred there, or maybe a stray lightning bolt—they woke up one morning and said, “Let’s give the poor shmuck (i.e., me) a publicist.” When I heard that they had actually hired someone, and were even going to pay her—i.e., actual money; this was not a barter in New Jersey corn or whatever—I had to lie down for a couple of hours just to recover from the shock. Maybe there is a god, I thought; maybe he likes my books. (I was heavily sedated at the time.)

Anyway, that’s Step 1 in this strange adventure. Step 2: my new publicist says to me: what’s really crucial these days are the social media. Things such as magazines, reviews, bookstore presentations, radio and TV interviews—all of that has shrunk in influence, been marginalized. Americans don’t really read that much anymore (as you’ve documented in your previous books); instead, they Twitter and Facebook, so that’s where you’ve gotta be.

Me: But if they don’t read any more, aren’t they the wrong audience for us? I mean, let’s say you take stuff off my blog and put it on Twit and FB (since I’m not going to Twit or Face myself, because I have no interest in those social media, which I think should really be called anti-social media, and think they were designed for addicted, narcissistic morons whose main interest in life revolves around stuff like the fotos Kim Kardashian posted of her psoriasis, not to mention her rear end). Those folks aren’t going to run out and read WAF; no way! For one thing, it has polysyllabic words in it, not to mention—gasp—concepts. And then these media reduce one’s attention span to that of a gnat. It’s not merely that these people don’t read books anymore; they can’t.

Publicist: Not so fast, shmendrick. For better or worse, most Americans now get their information from the web, and this even includes a few intellectuals. The social media reach millions; there’s no such thing now as book promotion without them. We need the folks who are reading your book to be out there talking about it, and one place we can be sure to find them is online. In short, adapt or die, boychik.

Me: But what about the bookstores? Isn’t anyone going to show up to hear me at bookstores?

Publicist (shaking her ahead, in the sense of ‘What a yokel’): You’ll be lucky if you pull in 5 people in Seattle and 10 in LA. Don’t forget your famous appearance in downtown Philly in 2006: 3 people showed up for your talk, and one of them fell asleep during it. The bookstore also had you billed as “Dean of Optometry at UC Fullerton,” or something like that. It can’t get much worse than that, can it?

Me: Yeah, that was indeed a humbling moment, I have to admit. So your idea is that for the next two months I post various rants and raves on any subject I want, including Twit and FB and Kim’s behind, and then you feed these things into Twit and FB, in the hope that someone who reads it will also want to read WAF? Shit, I’d rather chew on razor blades. As far as I’m concerned, Twit and FB are further examples of the collapse of American culture, of our national decline. As someone recently said, screen people are “pancake people”—all breadth and no depth.

Publicist: Perhaps, but it still makes for good PR. Even anti-PR is good PR.

Me: Were you aware that a Canadian company just released a computer tablet for toddlers, designed for babies as young as one week old? It’s not enough that we are killing our infants with Prozac and Zoloft; now we are also going to do them in with screens and touch pads.

Publicist: That’s good! Write about that! Tell your blogfolks (all 65 of them; what a huge following you’ve managed to accumulate!) that the US and Canada, through meds and hi-tech, are deliberately trying to kill our children. I mean, even if it isn’t an actual conspiracy, it seems like they’re doing a good job of it, no? You remember that essay by Jonathan Swift, right? About how Ireland should start cooking and eating its children? Well, do a new post and call it “Jonathan Swift Revisited.” That’ll get the pancakes all a-Twittering.

Me: (Heavy sigh)

Publicist: Frankly, I’m a believer in Bermanism: any culture that is designing computer screens for one-week old babies, and feeding anti-depressants to toddlers, has no future at all. What could be more obvious? When they grow up, they won’t even know what a book is, fer chrissakes.

Me: Jesus…Well, this seems like a fool’s errand, but you’re the publicist, what can I say.

Publicist: You got that right. Now get busy, shmuck. And don’t forget to give your readers the crucial contact info:

Facebook: Whyamericafailed

Twitter: @Yamericafailed

The WAF Dust Jacket

Dear Friends,

The text below constitutes the dust jacket of my forthcoming book, Why America Failed. It is already posted on Amazon, but I thought I would post it on this blog as well, fyi. Scheduled release date for book is Nov. 1, but I think it will be in Wiley's NJ warehouse on Oct. 17. Anyway, here goes:

From the Inside Flap

During the final century of the Roman Empire, it was common for emperors to deny that their civilization was in decline. Only with the perspective of history can we see that the emperors were wrong, that the empire was failing, and that the Roman people were unwilling or unable to change their way of life before it was too late. The same, says Morris Berman, is true of twenty-first century America. The nation and its empire are in decline and nothing can be done to reverse their course. How did this come to be?

In Why America Failed, Berman examines the development of American culture from the earliest colonies to the present, shows that the seeds of the nation's "hustler" culture were sown from the very beginning, and reveals how the very tools that enabled the country's expansion have become the instruments of its demise.

At the center of Berman's argument is his assertion that hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others have been powerful forces in American culture since the Pilgrims landed. He shows that even before the American Revolution, naked self-interest had replaced the common good as the primary social value in the colonies and that the creative power and destructive force of this idea gained irresistible momentum in the decades following the ratification of the Constitution. As invention proliferated and industry expanded, railroads, steamships, and telegraph wires quickened the frenetic pace of progress—or, as Berman calls it, the illusion of progress. An explosion of manufacturing whetted the nation's ravenous appetite for goods of all kinds and gave the hustling life its purpose—to acquire as many objects as possible prior to death.

The reign of Wall Street and the 2008 financial meltdown are certainly the most visible examples today of the negative consequences of the pursuit of affluence. Berman, however, sees the manipulations of Goldman Sachs and others not as some kind of aberration, but as the logical endpoint of the hustler culture. The fact that Goldman and its ilk continue to thrive in the wake of the disaster they wrought simply proves that it is already too late: America is incapable of changing direction.

Many readers will take exception to much of Why America Failed—beginning, perhaps, with its title. But many more will read this provocative and insightful book and join Berman in making a long, hard reassessment of the nation, its goals, and its future.

From the Back Cover
Praise for Why America Failed

"Morris Berman is one of our most prescient and important social and cultural critics. He marries a laser-like intelligence with a deep moral core. His writing is as lucid and crisp as it is insightful. His newest book, Why America Failed, rips open the dark and dying carcass of empire. His analysis is sobering and often depressing. But the truth at this stage in the game is depressing, very depressing. Those who refuse to face this truth because it is unpleasant, because it does not inspire happy thoughts or offer false hope, are in flight from the real. The collective retreat into self-delusion has transformed huge swaths of the American populace into a peculiar species of adult-children who live in aPeter Pan world of make believe where reality is never permitted to be an impediment to desire. It is too bad Berman, who sees and writes about all this with a stunning clarity, lives in Mexico.It gets lonely up here."

—Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion

"Morris Berman's masterpiece is a brutally honest, wonderfully crafted,exceptionally well-documented treatise on how America was spawned, several hundred years ago, to devour its offspring—financially, socially, and technologically. Why America Failed shines a harsh, unavoidable light upon the cunning business mindset at the core of America's creation, expansion, and devolution. Berman describes with stunning clarity how and why the 'hustler' mentality, upon which our country was predicated, eviscerated alternative moral or social doctrines, and thus incorporated the seeds of our self-destruction from its very inception. This book is as uncomfortable to read as it is impossible to miss."

—Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage and Other People's Money

"Morris Berman noticed that it's not morning in America anymore. His message may wake up the millions who are oversleeping while the late-day storm cloudsgather over this land."

—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency

"As the decline of America's empire becomes both starker and gradually evident, nothing is more important than accessible analyses of the causes of that decline. Far too few such works exist because of the taboos against writing them. All the more welcome then is Morris Berman's clear, bluntly but cogently written work. Sensitive to the contradictions of U.S. history and how they are now playing themselves out in a changed world, this book will challenge and provoke in all the best senses of those words. Genuinely important to read and to think about."

—Richard D. Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics,University of Massachusetts Amherst

Freebies

Dear Friends at the DAA65:

We are now going to switch to the WAF50. My publisher, Wiley, wants to do a promo for my new book, Why America Failed. In a word, the first 50 of you writing in to my editor and requesting a free copy, will get one. Not too shabby, eh? Here's the address (you'll need to do the at and the dot correctly, obviously):

enelson*at*wiley dot com

And you folks keep saying I never do anything for you...

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Time for a New Post

Dear Friends,

We seem to have run out of space on the last post, hitting 201 messages, with me inanely going on about my undying love for Barbara Ann Nowak, so I figured it was time for a new one. Unfortunately, I'm plumb out of ideas rt now; my mind is like a wind tunnel (think George W. Bush, or perhaps Barbara Ann Nowak). So all I can do is give you my speaking schedule, at least what I know at the present time, and you can make plans to charter a huge jet and fly to Seattle and/or LA. Here's the info:

Nov. 4, Seattle: Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave, on Capitol Hill between Pike and Pine, 7 or 7:30 pm.

Nov. 8, LA: Barnes & Noble, Westside Pavilion, 10850 West Pico Blvd., 7 pm.

I'll be speaking about my new book, "Why America Failed," the 3rd (and last) in my American Empire series.

Hope to see you all there...

mb

Fork in the Road

There is a theory that the real cause of the collapse of Rome was purely chemical: the Romans manufactured their utensils from lead, the lead slowly leaked into their food through repeated use, and from there the lead entered the bloodstream and finally the brain, which thus deteriorated over time. Most historians don’t put much stock in this, correctly seeing it as one-dimensional and purely material in nature, and dismissive of the social and economic factors (along with Rome’s “imperial overstretch”) that clearly did the ancient empire in. But one wonders if there may be some truth to the theory, even if only a small one. Maybe it was a factor in the overall drama, part of the synergistic forces that led to the empire’s decline. It’s an interesting thought.

I was thinking about this in the context of mounting evidence that in a mechanical-material way, Americans may also be destroying their brains. It now turns out that constant cell phone use may be a cause of tumors in the brain, although the evidence is not definitive at this point. More definitive is the neurological fallout from the use of screens—TV, Internet, e-books, text messaging—along with the phenomenon of multitasking that typically accompanies this. Here the pile-up of data is quite large, collected in articles that have appeared over the last decade in journals such as Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the New Atlantis, and discussed at length in Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows. (In particular see studies by Walter Kirn, Christine Rosen, and Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University.) Persistent staring into screens, it turns out, changes the brain, and not in positive directions. Constant screen use seems to have an effect similar to constant marijuana use. It should thus not be too much of a surprise that concomitant with the so-called information revolution has been a dumbing down of the American population, although obviously there are other factors involved (the commodification of education, e.g.). But unlike the Roman fork, which is highly debatable, this material factor is quite certain.

Equally interesting (or horrific, in my view) is what appears to have happened to the American brain as a result of the shift in psychiatry from therapy to drugs. Three comprehensive and very well documented studies have just appeared, arguing that the model of mental illness being caused by brain chemistry is full of holes: The Emperor’s New Drugs, by Irving Kirsch (psychologist at the University of Hull in England); Anatomy of an Epidemic, by Robert Whitaker (author of a 2001 study of the history of the treatment of mental illness); and Unhinged, by Daniel Carlat (a Boston psychiatrist). All three of these men are highly respected in their fields, and their conclusions, along with a discussion of the bible of psychiatry, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, about to go into its fifth edition), are presented in two recent articles by Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books. The overall picture is quite grim.

First, the stats: between 1987 and 2007, the number of those so disabled by mental disorders that they qualified for Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance increased 2.5 times, so that 1 out of 76 Americans now falls into this category (what an amazing statistic). For children, the increase is 35 times during the same time period, and mental illness is now the leading cause of disability among this population. A survey of American adults conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, 2001-3, found that 46% of them met the criteria of the American Psychiatric Association for being mentally ill at some point in their lives. Ten percent of Americans over the age of six now take antidepressants, and I read elsewhere that in terms of the global market (i.e. in dollars, in sales), American consumption of these drugs amounts to 2/3 of the entire world’s—this for a country that has less than 5% of the planetary population. Even so, as Ethan Watters documents in Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, “the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.”

As Ms. Angell points out, much of this spread (at home and abroad) has been economically driven, because once you say that mental illness is the result of an imbalance in brain chemistry, then the obvious “solution” is a pill that will rebalance the brain; and Eli Lilly, Pfizer and the rest are right there to market Prozac, Zoloft, Risperdal, and etc., and make fortunes from the lot. These companies, she writes, “through various forms of marketing, both legal and illegal, and what many people would describe as bribery—have come to determine what constitutes a mental illness and how the disorders should be diagnosed and treated.” But the brain chemistry argument, as all three of her authors point out, involves a great leap in logic. It was found that psychoactive drugs affect neurotransmitter levels in the brain, and from this it was concluded that “the cause of mental illness is an abnormality in the brain’s concentration of these chemicals that is specifically countered by the use of the appropriate drug.” As Daniel Carlat notes, by the same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain is a deficiency of opiates, or that headaches are caused by having too little aspirin in one’s system. The logic, in short, is upside down; and as far as the empirical evidence goes—there is none. Decades of research have demonstrated that neurotransmitter function is normal in people with mental illness before treatment. (One has to wonder about the whole cholesterol industry as well. I read one study that indicated that half of Americans who have heart attacks also have low cholesterol. But that’s another story.)

This type of research tends not to make it into the public eye, however, because negative results on drug efficiency “often languish unseen within the FDA….This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.” Positive studies by drug companies get extensively publicized; negative ones get suppressed. And there is a lot of evidence to show that it is the drugs that cause the mental illness. Schizophrenia and depression used to be episodic, interspersed with long periods of normalcy. Now, they are chronic and lifelong. The results of long-term use of psychoactive drugs, says Steve Hyman (a former director of the NIMH and former provost of Harvard), are “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function.” The brain begins to function in a different way, in other words, even after only a few weeks of drug use. Complex chain reactions ensue, ones that require additional drugs to combat the side effects of the original drugs. One researcher, Nancy Andreasen, has published evidence that the use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with shrinkage of the brain—atrophy of the prefrontal cortex. (This did make it into the public domain, specifically the New York Times, 15 September 2008.)

Angell’s discussion of the DSM is equally chilling. It turns out that a lot of the decisions regarding what to include as a mental illness have been arbitrary, even whimsical. George Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote in 1984 that the book represented “a bold series of choices based on guess, taste, prejudice, and hope.” In fact, there are no citations of scientific studies in the DSM to support its decisions--! The actual “science” of the book is thus dubious. Coming back to the economic factor, it turns out that drug companies lavish huge attention and largesse on psychiatrists—gifts, free samples, meals, plane tickets to conferences, and jobs as consultants and speakers. Of the 170contributors to the current version of the book, the DSM-IV-TR, 95 of them have financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia. What these folks do is expand diagnostic boundaries or create new diagnoses, new “illnesses,” which meshes pretty well with the financial goals of the companies who employ them. David Kupfer, the head of the task force currently working on the fifth edition of the DSM, was (prior to his appointment in this capacity) a consultant for Eli Lilly, Forest Pharmaceuticals, Solvay/Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, and Servier and Lundbeck. What a shock, that the already large list of mental disorders will be even larger in the new edition. So much for “science.”

Apparently, then, we have our own leaden forks, to the extent that lead may have attacked the Roman nervous system. It’s the result of a number of factors, including the American worship of technology, the search for simple (and individualistic) answers, and a lust for profits that is so huge that Lilly and all the rest couldn’t care less as to whether they are harming the American public. Nor is it very likely that any of the literature on cell phone cancer, neurological damage from screen usage, iatrogenic mental illness (i.e. illness that is doctor-generated, or Big Pharma-generated), will make any difference at all. For the fork in the road occurred decades ago, in psychiatry as well as telecommunications, and a reversal of any of this seems virtually impossible at this point. And as the American brain goes, so goes the empire. I can't help wondering if any of this will make it into the history books, on our decline and fall.

At Last, The Poems

Dear Friends:

It took more than two years, but my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, has finally rolled off the press. You can order it direct from the publisher at cervenabarvapress.com; it should also get posted on Amazon before too long. Here is the description from the back cover, in any case:

Counting Blessings is an expression of gratitude for a life lived away from the madding crowd. This poetry collection was penned about a year after Berman moved to a small town in Mexico. With the frenzy of American life receding into the background, he was able to sink into the stillness of his new surroundings, allowing long-dormant creative energies to surface. In addition to Counting Blessings, he also wrote a novel and a collection of essays questioning the values of American society, roughly during the same time.

As it turns out, only a few of these poems are about life in Mexico per se. For the most part, Mexico provided the backdrop, the peaceful context in which the author’s unconscious processes were free to roam over the inner landscape, explore its contours and fine details. What emerged were vibrant memories of childhood and adolescence, of times lived abroad, of people who have come and gone. These lyrical poems capture the extraordinary essence of ordinary lived experience, and in doing so represent the true content of our lives, the simple core of what makes us human.

The poet Paul Christensen wrote of this work:

“The[se] poems are a kind of sketch pad for how one regains a life little by little from a culture that had wrapped its tentacles about you and squeezed out your breath. There is the slow process of putting oneself back together again, far from the screeching music of the television, the hard sell of the radio, the hysterical momentum of consumption as a stay against loneliness. All that abates as the exile sits in his [courtyard] with a good book, a quiet heart. The reader who pores over these memories and observations will feel the ache to slip away to one’s own courtyard in a foreign country, to sit and let the mind idle over its thoughts, to float back to the quiet and calm and, as Berman says, to count one’s blessings.”

Meanwhile, ten of the poems are available via audio link, from a reading I did in Berkeley in 2009: go to www.juliollosa.com, click on my name on the left hand side of the page, and then on "Audio Interviews"; and then scroll down and click on "Poetry Reading at Moe's Books."

Rainbow Pie

Given how much we had in common, it’s perhaps a bit odd that Joe Bageant (1946-2011) and I never met (although I think we did correspond at one point). He even wound up living in Mexico a good part of the time. But the real connection between us is the congruence of perception regarding the United States. Joe came from unlikely roots to have formulated the political viewpoint that he did: working-class, right-wing, anti-intellectual, flag-waving, small-town Virginia. A “leftneck,” someone dubbed him; it’s not a bad description.

There aren’t too many leftnecks in the United States; of that, we can be sure. This
was the source of Joe’s frustration: extreme isolation. Because he realized that the U.S. was the greatest snow job of all time. He likened the place to a hologram, in which everyone in the country was trapped inside, with no knowledge that the world (U.S. included) was not what U.S. government propaganda, or just everyday cultural propaganda, said it was. He watched his kinfolk and neighbors vote repeatedly against their own interests, and there was little he could do about it. The similarity between his last book, Rainbow Pie, and my forthcoming Why America Failed, is in fact quite startling. True, I’m analytical where Joe is homey, and my historical perspective is that of 400 years rather than just the twentieth century; but Joe’s way of addressing the issues is gritty, and right on the money. One can only hope that his book gets the posthumous attention it deserves.

Joe’s focus was his own class: the white underclass of America, 60 million strong. “Generally unable to read at a functional level,” he writes,

“they are easily manipulated by corporate-political interests to vote against advances in health and education, and even more easily mustered in support of any proposed military conflict….Low skilled, and with little understanding of the world beyond either what is presented to them by kitschy and simplistic television, movie, and other media entertainments…the future of the white underclass not only looks grim, but permanent.”

On the positive side, however, these folks lived in what can be called the last genuine community in the U.S.:

“One neighbor cut hair; another mended shoes. From birth to the grave, you needed neighbors and they needed you. I was very lucky to have seen that culture…[and I learned] how our [present] degraded concepts of community and work have contributed to the development of physical and cultural loneliness in America. Not to mention the destruction of a sense of the common good, the economy, and the the natural world.”

“Damn few of us,” he concludes, “grasp how the loss of traditional aesthetic and foundational values…are connected with so much American tragedy.”

One of Joe’s descriptions of that vanished world reminds me of a very moving poem by Gary Snyder, “Axe Handles”. Joe writes of his father:

“All his life he had made his own world with his hands, and fixed it the same way. I’d watched him and [Uncle] Nelson make hickory axe-handles, hoe handles, and oaken mallets, and watched them smooth out the hickory and oak wood by scraping the handles with large shards of broken glass, a practice that went back to pre-sandpaper colonial times. They were quiet and thoughtful as they worked—with their long, patient strokes, handle in lap, pulling the glass along the contours—in what I don’t think it would be exaggerating to call a metaphysical, reflective space…. Pap had learned it from his father, and Nelson had learned it from Pap, and by watching, I learned it from them.”

All of this, he continues, got replaced by the world of chasing money, and by jobs that have no inherent meaning. We no longer have any sense of who we are as a people, he asserts; the “American exhortation to ‘follow opportunity’ is birth-to-grave and relentless.” Meanwhile, with millions unemployed (nearly 20%, in fact), we now have a government “that sends police to break up the tent camps and car camps of homeless unemployed citizens who once belonged to the middle class.” And yet—no one complains! America, Joe tells us,

“doesn’t like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be here in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol-whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheerfulness.”

Yet some refuse to take it, and like Timothy McVeigh, come up with a pathological reaction to a pathological situation—in his case, the Murrah Center bombing in Oklahoma City. For McVeigh understood that whatever democracy we once had

“has been subverted by corporations and bought politicians…[he] believed that America had become a corporate-backed police state consisting of only two classes—the elites and the rest of us—regardless of the party in power. If he was paranoid, he certainly was not alone…. [For] no matter how you connect the dots, or which dots you choose to connect, it comes out the same: our parents’ lives were displaced; our own have been anxious and uncertain; and our children’s are sure to be less certain than ours.”

Nevertheless, the fear that some elites have, that the poor and the working class might eventually figure out where their true political interests reside, is an unfounded one:

“We dumb working folk were clubbed into submission long ago, and now require only…a 24/7 mind-numbing spectacle of titties, tabloid TV, and terrorist dramas. Throw in a couple of new flavors of XXL edible thongs, and you’ve got a nation of drowsing hippos who will never notice that our country has been looted, or even that we have become homeless ourselves….And besides, there’s always bourbon.”

One would think that the widening gap between rich and poor would inflame these folks, right? No such luck, because both classes refuse to acknowledge it. The reigning dogma is that there are no classes or masses, just 310 million individuals, “Marlboro Man types in charge of their own destinies.” Meanwhile, at least 67% of Americans are counting on Social Security for their entire retirement income, and by 2008, the top 1% of Americans earned as much as the bottom 45%. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, in 2009 the U.S. ranked 46th in infant mortality rates (behind Cuba, among other countries), and more than 40 million citizens suffer food scarcity or hunger. “The combination of our poorly educated workforce,” Joe observes,

“and ruthless demagogic oligarchy are not a nationwide problem: they are a national tragedy. It’s one that’s getting worse and is not likely ever to be fixed. The Empire is collapsing inward upon its working base. The oligarchs have skipped town with the national treasury; many have multiple homes in other countries. The inherent natural resources upon which America was initially built by laboring men and women have been squandered….When empires die, they die broke.”

That’s the domestic situation. As for Americans’ awareness of what their government is doing overseas—forget it. We are, he writes, the “Republic of Amnesia.” Couple this historical amnesia with our abysmal public educational system and our daily “engorgement on cheap spectacle, and you get a citizenry whose level of world and social comprehension is somewhere between a garden toad’s and a bonobo chimp’s.”

Meanwhile, we live out a “homogenized national story line.” Corporations own the media, and they employ writers to do our dreaming for us. And the dream they produce is strictly about wealth, and why we as Americans are particularly entitled to it, with no reference to its historical costs—such as the money spent on meaningless wars. In fact, “historical memory has been shaped to serve the ends of empire.” As for the American Dream, this is simply “one of maximum material wealth and ownership of goods and commodities, and the ‘freedom’ to pursue those things until you drop dead.” But the questions won’t go away: “If we are so rich, why do I feel so insecure? If we are so united in our goodness and purpose, why am I so lonely?” Why indeed.

Joe knew what he was talking about, and knew it intimately; which meant he understood that there was no reversing the situation, no saving America at the eleventh hour. He made his own exit, from cancer, on March 26th of this year.

A great American. R.I.P.

©Morris Berman, 2011