December 23, 2012
The Washington Times Interview
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conscience-realist/2012/dec/22/morris-berman-americas-culture-me-myself-and-i/
December 22, 2012
Thomas Naylor (1936-2012)
I just learned yesterday that my friend and staunch Vermont secessionist, Thomas Naylor, died on December 12 from a massive stroke. He was only 76 years old, and very actively writing and organizing conferences for next year. I spoke to Tom about two weeks ago, and although his voice was kind of thin, he seemed fine: happy to chat, intellectually alert. A few days later, he was dead. I also spoke to his wife, Magda, yesterday afternoon, who told me that no one saw it coming.
December 16, 2012
Further Thoughts on Japan...and America
Recently I've been reading The Kimono Mind, a study of Japanese culture written in 1965 by the Austrian-born architect Bernard Rudofsky. It also happens to be, by way of comparison, a study of American culture; and the author is quite clear that he regards Americans as a large collection of morons. This alone, of course, makes the book quite enjoyable, since Americans are, in fact, a large collection of morons. In his 1982 Postscript to the paperback edition Rudofsky writes:
December 05, 2012
The Diamond of the Mind
“The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard."—From the Katha Upanishad
November 22, 2012
The Question Concerning Technology
Dear Wafers and Other Friends:
November 07, 2012
Mittney, we hardly knew ye!
Ay, Mittney, Mittney!
November 02, 2012
The Truthout Review
Dear Wafers and other friends of the blog:
September 28, 2012
Land of the Rising Sun
Dear Wafers,
September 20, 2012
September 08, 2012
Oku no hosomichi
Well, since we are fast approaching the 200-comment mark, after which subsequent comments disappear into some sort of limbo state, I figured it was time for a new post.
For a year now, I've been doing research on Japan, and studying Japanese. And now the time has come to go there, which I shall do on October 1st, and stay for six weeks. Whether I'll actually be able to write a book on Japanese culture--not being able to read a word of the language--remains to be seen. The only thing I'm sure of is that it won't be easy.
I'm spending two of those six weeks retracing the journey that the great poet, Matsuo Basho, made in 1689, into the north of Japan. The result was a poetic diary called Oku no hosomichi, The Narrow Road to Oku. Basho's haiku (known in the 17th century as haikai) are quite famous; the basic form is syllabic in a pattern of 5-7-5 (in Japanese, of course, not English). When he came across a ruined castle in the far north, he wrote:
A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.
An early "Ozymandias," I guess.
Basho died five years later. This was the last poem he wrote:
Falling sick on a journey
My dream goes wandering
Over a field of dried grass.
My "Japan Project," as I call it, does seem a bit overwhelming, as I hope to talk to philosophers at the U of Tokyo, shokunin (craftsmen) in the Kansai region, and friends/contacts I've made over the last few years. Plus sit in pachinko parlors, watch some Kabuki, and try not to die from fugu (blowfish). For inspiration, I sometimes bring to mind a haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827):
Snail slowly slowly
Climb
Mt. Fuji.
mb
9/8/12
For a year now, I've been doing research on Japan, and studying Japanese. And now the time has come to go there, which I shall do on October 1st, and stay for six weeks. Whether I'll actually be able to write a book on Japanese culture--not being able to read a word of the language--remains to be seen. The only thing I'm sure of is that it won't be easy.
I'm spending two of those six weeks retracing the journey that the great poet, Matsuo Basho, made in 1689, into the north of Japan. The result was a poetic diary called Oku no hosomichi, The Narrow Road to Oku. Basho's haiku (known in the 17th century as haikai) are quite famous; the basic form is syllabic in a pattern of 5-7-5 (in Japanese, of course, not English). When he came across a ruined castle in the far north, he wrote:
A thicket of summer grass
Is all that remains
Of the dreams and ambitions
Of ancient warriors.
An early "Ozymandias," I guess.
Basho died five years later. This was the last poem he wrote:
Falling sick on a journey
My dream goes wandering
Over a field of dried grass.
My "Japan Project," as I call it, does seem a bit overwhelming, as I hope to talk to philosophers at the U of Tokyo, shokunin (craftsmen) in the Kansai region, and friends/contacts I've made over the last few years. Plus sit in pachinko parlors, watch some Kabuki, and try not to die from fugu (blowfish). For inspiration, I sometimes bring to mind a haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827):
Snail slowly slowly
Climb
Mt. Fuji.
mb
9/8/12
August 22, 2012
Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012)
I think I may have posted the following link in the Comments section on this blog, shortly after Chick Callenbach died (April 16) and an unpublished article was discovered on his computer, but let me post it again:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175538/
I knew Chick briefly when I lived in San Francisco, and Peter Berg (who died last July) and I invited him to speak at an ecology conference we co-sponsored in 1979 entitled "Listening to the Earth" (Gary Snyder and Murray Bookchin were also participants). The thing that struck me about him was his humility, his low-key, understated quality. After all, in the wake of his best-selling novel, Ecotopia, he had been heavily lionized by the media and green folks everywhere, but none of that interested him. He was completely unaffected: a man without a mask. That same quality is evident in his posthumous essay. I encourage everyone to read it in full, but let me just quote a few passages, to give you the flavor of it. I should add that 25 publishers rejected the novel before he self-published it (in 1975), and to date it has sold nearly a million copies. The book remains a major contribution to an understanding of what I refer to, in Why America Failed, as the alternative tradition in American history.
Chick believed that we were entering some very dark times, and that these could last a century or more. Thus he saw the changes we are going thru in slo-mo, as a process I have likened to the "waning of the Middle Ages," when a long-standing way of life starts to disintegrate, and a new way of life begins to take its place. So Chick was an optimist, but only in the long run. He writes:
"When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.
"We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire.
"The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.
"As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent -- petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.
"No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.
"So I look to a long-term process of 'succession,' as the biological concept has it, where 'disturbances' kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state -- not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically -- since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.
"That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.
"All things 'go' somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi -- the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.
"There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads 'to bed,' help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth."
Amen. (This is me, not Chick).
-mb
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175538/
I knew Chick briefly when I lived in San Francisco, and Peter Berg (who died last July) and I invited him to speak at an ecology conference we co-sponsored in 1979 entitled "Listening to the Earth" (Gary Snyder and Murray Bookchin were also participants). The thing that struck me about him was his humility, his low-key, understated quality. After all, in the wake of his best-selling novel, Ecotopia, he had been heavily lionized by the media and green folks everywhere, but none of that interested him. He was completely unaffected: a man without a mask. That same quality is evident in his posthumous essay. I encourage everyone to read it in full, but let me just quote a few passages, to give you the flavor of it. I should add that 25 publishers rejected the novel before he self-published it (in 1975), and to date it has sold nearly a million copies. The book remains a major contribution to an understanding of what I refer to, in Why America Failed, as the alternative tradition in American history.
Chick believed that we were entering some very dark times, and that these could last a century or more. Thus he saw the changes we are going thru in slo-mo, as a process I have likened to the "waning of the Middle Ages," when a long-standing way of life starts to disintegrate, and a new way of life begins to take its place. So Chick was an optimist, but only in the long run. He writes:
"When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.
"We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire.
"The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.
"As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent -- petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.
"No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.
"So I look to a long-term process of 'succession,' as the biological concept has it, where 'disturbances' kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state -- not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically -- since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.
"That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.
"All things 'go' somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi -- the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.
"There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads 'to bed,' help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth."
Amen. (This is me, not Chick).
-mb
August 13, 2012
September Lecture Schedule
Dear Friends:
Time for me to hit the road again. For those of you living in or near the cities indicated, please feel free to attend, if you want. Here's the info I have so far, in any case:
Sept. 11: Librería El Péndulo, Alvaro Obregon 86, Col. Roma, Mexico City, 7 p.m. (más o menos)
Sept. 14: House Chamber, Vermont State House, Montpelier, VT, 9 a.m.
Sept. 17: Clark University, Dept. of Humanities, Worcester, MA, time TBA
Hope to see you there!
-mb
Time for me to hit the road again. For those of you living in or near the cities indicated, please feel free to attend, if you want. Here's the info I have so far, in any case:
Sept. 11: Librería El Péndulo, Alvaro Obregon 86, Col. Roma, Mexico City, 7 p.m. (más o menos)
Sept. 14: House Chamber, Vermont State House, Montpelier, VT, 9 a.m.
Sept. 17: Clark University, Dept. of Humanities, Worcester, MA, time TBA
Hope to see you there!
-mb
August 04, 2012
Sociopath's Delight
OK, let's continue this discussion with Comment No. 1, having exhausted our 200 limit on the last post. Ball's in yr court, amigos...
July 24, 2012
Sociopaths Rule
Sociopaths Rule: A Review of Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?, by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher (2011)
At the outset let me say that reviewing this film was, for me, a bit of an odd assignment. I love this film. I think it’s punchy and provocative, and that it speaks with an authentic voice. I think it’s important to get it into every Multiplex in the land, because the issues it raises are basic, controversial, and need to get discussed in every home, luncheonette, drug store, firehouse, and community college in the nation. A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen. The odd part of it, for me, was (since I’m not really a “progressive” or a socialist) that I found myself in serious disagreement with much of it. But the power of the film is its enormous potential to generate substantive dialogue, and this is the real source of my admiration of it.
Let me start with the good stuff, as it were. Beyond generating dialogue, Heist provides an alternative narrative to what’s been going on in this country since 1981. “Reaganomics,” or what we now call “neo-liberalism,” is the philosophy that economic growth is the answer to all our problems, because as the rich make more money, some of that will supposedly “trickle down” to the rest of us. This has been the dominant narrative in this country for the last thirty years, and what Heist clearly demonstrates is that it’s nothing more than pure kaka. What actually happened under this narrative was that wealth got transferred upward; that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer; that virtually nothing “trickled down”; that unions were busted, public services gutted, American manufacturing crippled, the media collapsed into six major corporations and turned into corporate propaganda mouthpieces, and so on—the America we have today, in other words, in which 1 out of every 5 of us is without work and without prospect of same for at least a decade, and in which 2 out of every 3 of us lives from paycheck to paycheck, hoping that some major accident won’t occur in our lives and put us underwater for good.
Heist is thus an exercise in counter-brainwashing: Reagan and his ilk, the Powell Memorandum and the so-called think tanks (read: propaganda machines) of the political right (American Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, etc.) all sold us a bill of goods, stole the American Dream out from under us, and we need to recognize that we’ve been economically and intellectually fleeced. Unless we can debunk the dominant narrative, and realize what really went down since 1981, we will not be able to take back the American Dream—which Causey and Goldmacher define as everyone getting a fair share of the economic pie.
The film also demonstrates that there really isn’t much of a difference between Democrats and Republicans on this score; all appearances to the contrary, Wall Street really is the government, and both parties understand this. Thus Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers worked in the Clinton administration; Clinton destroyed the welfare system; the gap between rich and poor widened during his presidency; and legislation making possible the whole system of CDO’s , credit-default swaps and the like—the further deregulation of the banking industry—occurred on his watch as well. As Gore Vidal wryly put it, the American political system consists of one political party with two right wings.
Finally, without being explicit, the film does suggest that there is something mentally unbalanced, if not downright sociopathic, about the American ruling class. The top 1% could care less about society at large, is the impression we get from this documentary; the only thing on their minds is profit. Recent years have seen the publication of a fair number of articles claiming that psychological studies of such people show that they have very little capacity for empathy, along with very high dopamine levels in the brain, which also depresses empathy and keeps them hyped up, always “on the go.” These people cannot grasp, as former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall says at one point in the movie, that taxes are the price of civilization; that every society must have civil institutions; and that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization—the ideology of lunatics, if I may embellish on his remarks.
So why am I having problems with this? It all seems reasonable enough, especially if you believe that if we don’t undertake a serious redistribution of wealth, we are finished as a society. Let me say a few words about Heist, then, by way of critique.
1. Greed, and the free-market ideology, were hardly born in 1981. In this sense, the film lacks a genuine (which is to say, long-range) historical perspective. Greed showed up on the American continent in the late sixteenth century, when what would later become the United States started to be colonized by a particularly aggressive and entrepreneurial segment of the English middle class. Louis Hartz makes this point in his classic work, The American Liberal Tradition (1955), when he says that America is a “fragment society,” i.e. one that took a particular strand from the mother country—in this case the mentality of hustling, of go-getting, of unlimited economic expansion—and made it into the whole of the new country. One might argue that Reagan represented a “quantum leap” in this ideology, but he hardly invented it; from Day One, it is what America has been about. Credit-default swaps are merely the inevitable culmination of a process that has been going on for more than four hundred years.
2. How deliberate is the so-called conspiracy against the poor and the middle class on the part of the rich and big business? Two points here:
a) These folks really do believe what they are saying. I’m absolutely convinced of that. In other words, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, they were and are convinced (conveniently for them, of course) that if they could become rich with no holds barred, everyone would be better off. This is not just a pose; they really did, and do, believe this. The goal was not to screw the working class, in other words; it was to create a template for even greater levels of business profit and expansion. “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA” rings true for them; they probably sew it on their pillows as a motto. Like the Tea Party, the rich believe that it is truly evil to limit the amount of wealth any one individual can accumulate, and that the government must not be allowed to get in the way of that. “It’s what made America great, etc.” This may not make the final result of what they are doing any different than if there were a genuine conspiracy afoot, but I do think we need to realize that these convictions are held as deeply by this class as are the semi-socialist convictions of the political left.
b) Ironically enough, the “oppressed” 99% that the Occupy Wall Street movement claimed to represent may not be that far from the ideology of the upper 1%. There has been much discussion, on the part of sociologists, as to why socialism never managed to take root in the United States, and the general consensus boils down to a remark once made by John Steinbeck: “In the U.S., the poor regard themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In ideological terms, the only difference between rich and poor in this country is that the latter don’t have any money. The interest of the poor or the middle class has not been to have the sort of civilization Robert Crandall talks about, or (also interviewed in the movie) Bernie Sanders does, which would include concern for the environment, the welfare of society, the fairness of our institutions, and so on—not at all. Their goal has been, since the late sixteenth century, to get into that upper 1%. When Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt in 1922, a biting satire of the hustling way of life, the reaction to the book on the part of Americans was not to smirk at George Babbitt, but to speculate on how they might become George Babbitt. There really are limits to the argument that a small cabal of the wealthy and powerful “did this” to us—the rape theory of American history, one might call it. It’s more likely that the process was one of consensual sex. It is hardly an accident that Mr. Reagan won the election in 1980 by one of the biggest landslides in American history, or that every year, when polls are taken of the “who’s-your-favorite-president” variety, Mr. Reagan comes out on top or close to it. Consider also the unrelenting popularity—for decades now—of a book such as Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. If Alan Greenspan was her protégé, so are we all; we all swim in the stagnant pool of her ideological pathology.
3. Like Occupy Wall Street, the film insists that we must “take back” the American Dream. Like OWS, it never seems to grasp the fact that rather than recovering or restoring the A.D., we need to abolish it. The A.D. is part of the American frontier mentality, coupled with the mythology of extreme individualism, and is in fact based on the idea of infinity: there can and should be no end to economic and technological expansion. Unfortunately for that hopelessly neurotic vision, we are fast running out of resources; the planet cannot support the A.D. extended to every American, let alone every person on the planet. In fact, it was once calculated that for everyone on the planet to have a “modest” middle-class American life, we would need the resources of six Earths. This is why socialism, or spreading the A.D. around more fairly, is not an adequate response to capitalism, because it too is based on the notions of “growth” and “progress,” and those notions are fast becoming obsolete. The real shift required is not to (let’s say) a Scandanavian-style economy, but to a steady-state one: no growth, and not profit-oriented. And if the left hates this, as I’m sure they do: well hard cheese, folks, because in thirty to forty years we are going to be forced into this, when petroleum runs out and the dream of unlimited energy turns into the nightmare of scarcity. To socialists and capitalists alike, to Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and every other so-called liberal, I can only say this: permanent growth means permanent crisis. It’s time to start equating this type of growth with cancer.
4. Which means to me that significant historical change will come to America as “capitalism hits the fan,” to quote Richard Wolff, and it will obviously involve more than just the United States. Heist puts a lot of stock in Occupy Wall Street and grass-roots organizing, which gives it (in my view) a rather dated flavor. OWS was a colossal flop; it didn’t amount to much of anything, when the dust settled; it just came and went, like yet one more American fad, and the question we have to ask is Why? Again, I refer you to the comment of John Steinbeck, and the discussion in 2(b), above; but beyond that, let me make two crucial points here:
First, when Robert Crandall argues that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization, we need to recognize—again—that extreme individualism is literally the core of American civilization, and thus that we never really constituted much of a civilization. We do not operate out of a moral center, in the U.S.; “more” is hardly a reasonable philosophy of life, and that is pretty much what we’ve been about. Don’t kid yourself: Miles Davis and Melville and J.D. Salinger and Thomas Cole arose in spite of the American way of life, not because of it, and Georges Clemenceau was on the mark when he commented that America was “the only nation that went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening phase of civilization.” I mean, let’s call a spade a spade here: Heist’s idea of change, as with OWS’ idea, is purely economic in nature; it’s not really about a truly different kind of culture. Nor can we expect such a shift, after four hundred years of doing just one thing. Over and over again, I heard OWS tell us that we needed to cut the pie up in a fairer way. Not once did I hear them say that the problem was the pie itself; that it was, in the final analysis, rotten.
Second, the movie tells us that Americans have the drive and initiative to change things, to “take back” our country (whatever that means), and to challenge the power elite. I’m not sure Frances and Don are living on the same planet I am, if I can level with you here. Even a casual observation of Americans, and of American behavior, will tell you that we have no such drive and initiative—we seem exhausted, spiritually spent—and truth be told, we are not very bright, as a people. I remember marching against the invasion of Iraq in DC in 2003, and noticing how many of the signs were misspelled. Friends tell me of conversations they had with the OWS folks, and how out of it these people were—with beliefs such as “all we need to do is switch to solar energy, and our problems will be solved” (one example among many). A good friend of mine, a prominent journalist, gave a talk at OWS in DC on U.S. foreign policy last October, and all of fifty people showed up (only two of whom were under sixty, by the way); the majority weren’t interested and had no time for serious intellectual analysis. The number of books that have appeared over the past decade, providing massive statistical evidence of the sheer ignorance and stupidity of the American public, has been quite impressive (Just How Stupid Are We?, Idiot America, etc. etc.); and if you look around at young people today—our supposed future—they can’t read. Their lives are comprised of cell phones and Twitter and Facebook. I am frequently in Mexico City, and I can’t tell you how often I’ve had conversations with taxi drivers about history, literature, and philosophy—all initiated by them. Try having similar discussions with a taxi driver in New York, see how far you get. Or just go out into the street of any American city, and ask the first person you run into how many justices there are on the Supreme Court, or what nation we seceded from in 1776, or where Europe is, or if they can define “retrograde” or “trachea.” If that doesn’t wake you up, my friends, nothing will. Bottom line: we are a collection of dummies, and dummies cannot “take back the country” any more than they can discuss the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If Americans don’t actually have fried rice inside their heads, they are doing an excellent job of imitating people who do; and with that level of cranial impairment, there will be no reversal of the disastrous downhill slide in which we are now engaged.
So let me conclude with my original point. As the above discussion would indicate, Heist is a film that gets you going. It contains much to admire, and (in my opinion) much to criticize; but that’s a good thing, as I’m sure Frances and Don would agree. Somehow, the movie needs to get wider exposure than a six-day run in some dilapidated repertory cinema in Berkeley, California. Frances and Don are courageous folks, and they have done this culture a great service. Whether the culture can appreciate that remains to be seen.
©Morris Berman, 2012
At the outset let me say that reviewing this film was, for me, a bit of an odd assignment. I love this film. I think it’s punchy and provocative, and that it speaks with an authentic voice. I think it’s important to get it into every Multiplex in the land, because the issues it raises are basic, controversial, and need to get discussed in every home, luncheonette, drug store, firehouse, and community college in the nation. A fundamental examination of the nature of our economy and its consequences is long overdue, and widespread distribution of Heist could go a long way toward making this happen. The odd part of it, for me, was (since I’m not really a “progressive” or a socialist) that I found myself in serious disagreement with much of it. But the power of the film is its enormous potential to generate substantive dialogue, and this is the real source of my admiration of it.
Let me start with the good stuff, as it were. Beyond generating dialogue, Heist provides an alternative narrative to what’s been going on in this country since 1981. “Reaganomics,” or what we now call “neo-liberalism,” is the philosophy that economic growth is the answer to all our problems, because as the rich make more money, some of that will supposedly “trickle down” to the rest of us. This has been the dominant narrative in this country for the last thirty years, and what Heist clearly demonstrates is that it’s nothing more than pure kaka. What actually happened under this narrative was that wealth got transferred upward; that the rich got richer and the poor got poorer; that virtually nothing “trickled down”; that unions were busted, public services gutted, American manufacturing crippled, the media collapsed into six major corporations and turned into corporate propaganda mouthpieces, and so on—the America we have today, in other words, in which 1 out of every 5 of us is without work and without prospect of same for at least a decade, and in which 2 out of every 3 of us lives from paycheck to paycheck, hoping that some major accident won’t occur in our lives and put us underwater for good.
Heist is thus an exercise in counter-brainwashing: Reagan and his ilk, the Powell Memorandum and the so-called think tanks (read: propaganda machines) of the political right (American Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, etc.) all sold us a bill of goods, stole the American Dream out from under us, and we need to recognize that we’ve been economically and intellectually fleeced. Unless we can debunk the dominant narrative, and realize what really went down since 1981, we will not be able to take back the American Dream—which Causey and Goldmacher define as everyone getting a fair share of the economic pie.
The film also demonstrates that there really isn’t much of a difference between Democrats and Republicans on this score; all appearances to the contrary, Wall Street really is the government, and both parties understand this. Thus Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers worked in the Clinton administration; Clinton destroyed the welfare system; the gap between rich and poor widened during his presidency; and legislation making possible the whole system of CDO’s , credit-default swaps and the like—the further deregulation of the banking industry—occurred on his watch as well. As Gore Vidal wryly put it, the American political system consists of one political party with two right wings.
Finally, without being explicit, the film does suggest that there is something mentally unbalanced, if not downright sociopathic, about the American ruling class. The top 1% could care less about society at large, is the impression we get from this documentary; the only thing on their minds is profit. Recent years have seen the publication of a fair number of articles claiming that psychological studies of such people show that they have very little capacity for empathy, along with very high dopamine levels in the brain, which also depresses empathy and keeps them hyped up, always “on the go.” These people cannot grasp, as former American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall says at one point in the movie, that taxes are the price of civilization; that every society must have civil institutions; and that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization—the ideology of lunatics, if I may embellish on his remarks.
So why am I having problems with this? It all seems reasonable enough, especially if you believe that if we don’t undertake a serious redistribution of wealth, we are finished as a society. Let me say a few words about Heist, then, by way of critique.
1. Greed, and the free-market ideology, were hardly born in 1981. In this sense, the film lacks a genuine (which is to say, long-range) historical perspective. Greed showed up on the American continent in the late sixteenth century, when what would later become the United States started to be colonized by a particularly aggressive and entrepreneurial segment of the English middle class. Louis Hartz makes this point in his classic work, The American Liberal Tradition (1955), when he says that America is a “fragment society,” i.e. one that took a particular strand from the mother country—in this case the mentality of hustling, of go-getting, of unlimited economic expansion—and made it into the whole of the new country. One might argue that Reagan represented a “quantum leap” in this ideology, but he hardly invented it; from Day One, it is what America has been about. Credit-default swaps are merely the inevitable culmination of a process that has been going on for more than four hundred years.
2. How deliberate is the so-called conspiracy against the poor and the middle class on the part of the rich and big business? Two points here:
a) These folks really do believe what they are saying. I’m absolutely convinced of that. In other words, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, they were and are convinced (conveniently for them, of course) that if they could become rich with no holds barred, everyone would be better off. This is not just a pose; they really did, and do, believe this. The goal was not to screw the working class, in other words; it was to create a template for even greater levels of business profit and expansion. “What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA” rings true for them; they probably sew it on their pillows as a motto. Like the Tea Party, the rich believe that it is truly evil to limit the amount of wealth any one individual can accumulate, and that the government must not be allowed to get in the way of that. “It’s what made America great, etc.” This may not make the final result of what they are doing any different than if there were a genuine conspiracy afoot, but I do think we need to realize that these convictions are held as deeply by this class as are the semi-socialist convictions of the political left.
b) Ironically enough, the “oppressed” 99% that the Occupy Wall Street movement claimed to represent may not be that far from the ideology of the upper 1%. There has been much discussion, on the part of sociologists, as to why socialism never managed to take root in the United States, and the general consensus boils down to a remark once made by John Steinbeck: “In the U.S., the poor regard themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In ideological terms, the only difference between rich and poor in this country is that the latter don’t have any money. The interest of the poor or the middle class has not been to have the sort of civilization Robert Crandall talks about, or (also interviewed in the movie) Bernie Sanders does, which would include concern for the environment, the welfare of society, the fairness of our institutions, and so on—not at all. Their goal has been, since the late sixteenth century, to get into that upper 1%. When Sinclair Lewis published Babbitt in 1922, a biting satire of the hustling way of life, the reaction to the book on the part of Americans was not to smirk at George Babbitt, but to speculate on how they might become George Babbitt. There really are limits to the argument that a small cabal of the wealthy and powerful “did this” to us—the rape theory of American history, one might call it. It’s more likely that the process was one of consensual sex. It is hardly an accident that Mr. Reagan won the election in 1980 by one of the biggest landslides in American history, or that every year, when polls are taken of the “who’s-your-favorite-president” variety, Mr. Reagan comes out on top or close to it. Consider also the unrelenting popularity—for decades now—of a book such as Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. If Alan Greenspan was her protégé, so are we all; we all swim in the stagnant pool of her ideological pathology.
3. Like Occupy Wall Street, the film insists that we must “take back” the American Dream. Like OWS, it never seems to grasp the fact that rather than recovering or restoring the A.D., we need to abolish it. The A.D. is part of the American frontier mentality, coupled with the mythology of extreme individualism, and is in fact based on the idea of infinity: there can and should be no end to economic and technological expansion. Unfortunately for that hopelessly neurotic vision, we are fast running out of resources; the planet cannot support the A.D. extended to every American, let alone every person on the planet. In fact, it was once calculated that for everyone on the planet to have a “modest” middle-class American life, we would need the resources of six Earths. This is why socialism, or spreading the A.D. around more fairly, is not an adequate response to capitalism, because it too is based on the notions of “growth” and “progress,” and those notions are fast becoming obsolete. The real shift required is not to (let’s say) a Scandanavian-style economy, but to a steady-state one: no growth, and not profit-oriented. And if the left hates this, as I’m sure they do: well hard cheese, folks, because in thirty to forty years we are going to be forced into this, when petroleum runs out and the dream of unlimited energy turns into the nightmare of scarcity. To socialists and capitalists alike, to Paul Krugman and Robert Reich and every other so-called liberal, I can only say this: permanent growth means permanent crisis. It’s time to start equating this type of growth with cancer.
4. Which means to me that significant historical change will come to America as “capitalism hits the fan,” to quote Richard Wolff, and it will obviously involve more than just the United States. Heist puts a lot of stock in Occupy Wall Street and grass-roots organizing, which gives it (in my view) a rather dated flavor. OWS was a colossal flop; it didn’t amount to much of anything, when the dust settled; it just came and went, like yet one more American fad, and the question we have to ask is Why? Again, I refer you to the comment of John Steinbeck, and the discussion in 2(b), above; but beyond that, let me make two crucial points here:
First, when Robert Crandall argues that the ideology of every man for himself is the antithesis of civilization, we need to recognize—again—that extreme individualism is literally the core of American civilization, and thus that we never really constituted much of a civilization. We do not operate out of a moral center, in the U.S.; “more” is hardly a reasonable philosophy of life, and that is pretty much what we’ve been about. Don’t kid yourself: Miles Davis and Melville and J.D. Salinger and Thomas Cole arose in spite of the American way of life, not because of it, and Georges Clemenceau was on the mark when he commented that America was “the only nation that went from barbarism to decadence without the intervening phase of civilization.” I mean, let’s call a spade a spade here: Heist’s idea of change, as with OWS’ idea, is purely economic in nature; it’s not really about a truly different kind of culture. Nor can we expect such a shift, after four hundred years of doing just one thing. Over and over again, I heard OWS tell us that we needed to cut the pie up in a fairer way. Not once did I hear them say that the problem was the pie itself; that it was, in the final analysis, rotten.
Second, the movie tells us that Americans have the drive and initiative to change things, to “take back” our country (whatever that means), and to challenge the power elite. I’m not sure Frances and Don are living on the same planet I am, if I can level with you here. Even a casual observation of Americans, and of American behavior, will tell you that we have no such drive and initiative—we seem exhausted, spiritually spent—and truth be told, we are not very bright, as a people. I remember marching against the invasion of Iraq in DC in 2003, and noticing how many of the signs were misspelled. Friends tell me of conversations they had with the OWS folks, and how out of it these people were—with beliefs such as “all we need to do is switch to solar energy, and our problems will be solved” (one example among many). A good friend of mine, a prominent journalist, gave a talk at OWS in DC on U.S. foreign policy last October, and all of fifty people showed up (only two of whom were under sixty, by the way); the majority weren’t interested and had no time for serious intellectual analysis. The number of books that have appeared over the past decade, providing massive statistical evidence of the sheer ignorance and stupidity of the American public, has been quite impressive (Just How Stupid Are We?, Idiot America, etc. etc.); and if you look around at young people today—our supposed future—they can’t read. Their lives are comprised of cell phones and Twitter and Facebook. I am frequently in Mexico City, and I can’t tell you how often I’ve had conversations with taxi drivers about history, literature, and philosophy—all initiated by them. Try having similar discussions with a taxi driver in New York, see how far you get. Or just go out into the street of any American city, and ask the first person you run into how many justices there are on the Supreme Court, or what nation we seceded from in 1776, or where Europe is, or if they can define “retrograde” or “trachea.” If that doesn’t wake you up, my friends, nothing will. Bottom line: we are a collection of dummies, and dummies cannot “take back the country” any more than they can discuss the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. If Americans don’t actually have fried rice inside their heads, they are doing an excellent job of imitating people who do; and with that level of cranial impairment, there will be no reversal of the disastrous downhill slide in which we are now engaged.
So let me conclude with my original point. As the above discussion would indicate, Heist is a film that gets you going. It contains much to admire, and (in my opinion) much to criticize; but that’s a good thing, as I’m sure Frances and Don would agree. Somehow, the movie needs to get wider exposure than a six-day run in some dilapidated repertory cinema in Berkeley, California. Frances and Don are courageous folks, and they have done this culture a great service. Whether the culture can appreciate that remains to be seen.
©Morris Berman, 2012
July 12, 2012
150
Dear Wafers and Others:
Yes, we've made it to 150 posts, a milestone of sorts. Actually, my reason for starting a new post is that the system gets funny after 200 messages, and starts filing the overrun in another place. (I really don't know how these things work, I confess.) Message 201 was from Mike Alan, about Dmitry Orlov's recent discussion of psychotic denial of the American collapse on the part of Americans. I suspect this phenomenon is familiar to most of you out there, who have tried to talk to your fellow country(wo)men about WAF or related subjects. Having a discussion with an American is typically scary or depressing or both, as most of you know. While I'm not sure that all 311 million of our fellow country(wo)men are psychotic, I am convinced that at least 99.9% of them have a puree of steamed vegetables inside their heads; which would produce the same result, I'm guessing. In any case, I'm hoping Mike Alan will read this and re-send his message, but this time to this new post.
Lemmings Awake! - The latest in my trendy T-shirt series (any three for $19.95, plus s&h).
-mb
Yes, we've made it to 150 posts, a milestone of sorts. Actually, my reason for starting a new post is that the system gets funny after 200 messages, and starts filing the overrun in another place. (I really don't know how these things work, I confess.) Message 201 was from Mike Alan, about Dmitry Orlov's recent discussion of psychotic denial of the American collapse on the part of Americans. I suspect this phenomenon is familiar to most of you out there, who have tried to talk to your fellow country(wo)men about WAF or related subjects. Having a discussion with an American is typically scary or depressing or both, as most of you know. While I'm not sure that all 311 million of our fellow country(wo)men are psychotic, I am convinced that at least 99.9% of them have a puree of steamed vegetables inside their heads; which would produce the same result, I'm guessing. In any case, I'm hoping Mike Alan will read this and re-send his message, but this time to this new post.
Lemmings Awake! - The latest in my trendy T-shirt series (any three for $19.95, plus s&h).
-mb
June 27, 2012
In a Nutshell
-----Original
Message-----
From: Mr. X
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:16 AM
To: mauricio@morrisberman.com
Subject: Thank you
From: Mr. X
Sent: Wednesday, June 27, 2012 10:16 AM
To: mauricio@morrisberman.com
Subject: Thank you
|
Mr. Berman,
In the last few
weeks I've read The Twilight of
American Culture and the first half of Dark Ages America, and I feel compelled to write and thank you.
I'm 56 years old,
and for most of my life I've been haunted by the sense that, between the
world I grew up in and the world I ended up in, something went terribly
wrong. Don't misunderstand - I'm not a nut. I'm a management consultant
working with large arts organizations around issues of strategy and
innovation, and pretty successful at it by the standards of an economically
oriented world. But I have been haunted (it's the only word that works) by a
bone deep sense that something very fundamental went amiss in my lifetime.
Your work has helped me to understand the source of my disquiet.
I think there must
be millions like me facing a terrible choice. On one hand we can face the
triumph in our time of a global consumer culture, and the soul sickness it
creates and depends on, and live with the misery that nothing we can do can
turn that historic tide. On the other, we can indulge in the delusion that if
we just recycle enough, or embrace our inner child, or save the white tigers,
or indulge in any number of anodynes, that we can change the world and redeem
our species.
It's really a
choice of miseries - the misery of seeing a terrible truth, or the misery of
denial. I have envied people who could do the latter, and tried to myself,
but with no success. Your work has helped me realize that, for me anyway, the
misery of denial is the greater of the two. Thank you.
|
Dear Mr. X,
Yeah, that
does summarize the choice, n'est-ce pas? A few things to check out, after you
finish DAA:
1. The
sequel, Why America Failed.
2. The 1st
half of A Question of Values.
3. My
essay, buried somewhere in the archives of my blog (late 2011?), called
"La longue duree."
Briefly,
the way out is thru. We can't reverse this corporate-consumerist tide. Nothing
can. It has to play out to its full self-destruction. But while this is going
on, there are independent alternatives that are sprouting (including, in the
US, secessionist movements), experiments in nonprofit and steady-state types of
economy, that will become increasingly attractive as the colossus we live in
cracks up. This is 30-40 yrs away, but they are, I believe, a viable
future--simply because we shall have no other choice than decentralization and
eco-sustainability (accompanied by significant austerity). We are fast
approaching a world of limits, in short.
Folks on
my blog thought I was kidding re: my enthusiasm for a Palin presidency (for
example); but the fact is that Obama's destruction of the US has been ad hoc
and desultory. With a full-fledged nut like Palin or Bachmann in the White
House, the whole process would be greatly accelerated. The notion that the ills
of the US might be cured via the ballot box is quite mad, in my view. Hence,
might as well have a Herman Cain or Rick Perry at the helm, to get the job over
with. Romney will move in this direction, of course, but as in the case of the
late Roman Empire, better to have a completely mindless buffoon in charge. In
the meantime, there are only two options for the aware American (all 453 of
them) that I can see: emigrate (my solution, in part), or take the NMI option
outlined in the Twilight book (the
other part of my solution).
Hope this
helps. Thanks for writing.
Mb
June 24, 2012
Higher Education in America
Andrew Delbanco, who teaches American Studies at Columbia, recently wrote a book on the sorry state of higher education in America: College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, in which he maps the distance between Is and Ought in the U.S. college system. The college experience, he writes, should be a formative one, in which students are "deterred from sheer self-interest toward a life of enlarged sympathy and civic responsibility." Reviewing the book in the June 10th NYTBR, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, adds that Delbanco believes that college should be a time for them "to see things from another's point of view and to develop a sense of ethical responsibility...[to turn] the soul away from selfish concerns and toward community." "At the core of the college idea," writes Delbanco, is the notion that "to serve others is to serve oneself."
Something like that may have existed in America at one time, but if so, that era is long gone--as most analysts of our educational system clearly recognize. A study of American college students conducted by the University of Michigan over 1979-2009 revealed a 40% drop in empathy during that time period, along with a fundamental inability to grasp another person's point of view. Another study--the source of which escapes me at the moment--recorded that while in 1965, something like 75% of college freshmen stated that they were in college to develop a workable philosophy of life, by 1985-1990 75% of them said they were there to get rich.
Along with the collapse of empathy is the collapse of learning tout court. In Academically Adrift, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after two years of college, 45% of American students haven’t learned anything, and after four years, 36% haven’t. Most students, they discovered, define college as a social, not an academic or intellectual, experience; half the students in their study said they hadn’t taken a single course in the previous semester that required more than 20 pages of writing, and a third said they hadn’t taken a course requiring more than 40 pages of reading. A Marist poll released on 4 July 2011 (appropriately enough) showed that 69% of Americans in the under-30 age group are unaware that the U.S. declared its independence in 1776.
All of this, of course, is central to the decline of the United States that I have documented in my own work. After all, you can't have much of a future if this is what American youth has come to. There are many reasons for this catastrophe, but to my mind the major one is the conversion of education into a business, and the university into a corporation. Once the corporate-consumer model of education took hold, all those previous ideals described by Delbanco went up in smoke. Interviewed by the NYTBR in the May 27th issue, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust identified Clark Kerr's (in)famous study of 1963, The Uses of the University, as "the best book she had read about academia." In response, Jeff Zorn, who teaches English at Santa Clara University, commented (NYTBR, June 17th) that Kerr's book
"welcomed the very developments that have made American higher education so generally lame: the denigration of teaching; the loss of a center, academically and spiritually: the selling out to Big Business, Big Government, Big Foundations...[and] the redefinition of liberal education...to a vocational major."
Kerr, he concludes, sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and president Faust doesn't seem to notice (or, perhaps, to mind). As Slavoj Zizek recently put it, we now live in "a new socioeconomic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticized technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy." I'm not sure how "new" all this is; we were always, as I have argued, a nation of hustlers; but imported into education, the results are quite obvious. It's hardly an accident that the class of 2012 is out to make money (in point of fact, they can't even find a job), doesn't give a damn about anybody else, and knows virtually nothing; or that (according to a Newsweek poll of 2011) 73% of Americans can’t give the official version of why we fought the Cold War, and 44% are unable to define the Bill of Rights. Indeed, how many even care about our now-shredded Bill of Rights, courtesy of Mr. Obama? Awareness of (for example) the National Defense Authorization Act, with its provision for "indefinite detention," is practically nonexistent, and I'm guessing that less than 2% of American college graduates know what habeas corpus is (make that, was).
Finally, let's not talk of "repairing" the system; under the corporate-consumer model, it can only get worse. Real education--Bildung, in the German sense of the term--can get no traction in the technocorporate state, which is not exactly a breeding ground for creative, independent thought. It can only be pursued by misfits, by the marginalized, by the very few who still think that learning for learning's sake, and the sake of the larger community, is a meaningful ideal. In the America of today, there aren't too many of those around.
(c)Morris Berman, 2012
Something like that may have existed in America at one time, but if so, that era is long gone--as most analysts of our educational system clearly recognize. A study of American college students conducted by the University of Michigan over 1979-2009 revealed a 40% drop in empathy during that time period, along with a fundamental inability to grasp another person's point of view. Another study--the source of which escapes me at the moment--recorded that while in 1965, something like 75% of college freshmen stated that they were in college to develop a workable philosophy of life, by 1985-1990 75% of them said they were there to get rich.
Along with the collapse of empathy is the collapse of learning tout court. In Academically Adrift, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after two years of college, 45% of American students haven’t learned anything, and after four years, 36% haven’t. Most students, they discovered, define college as a social, not an academic or intellectual, experience; half the students in their study said they hadn’t taken a single course in the previous semester that required more than 20 pages of writing, and a third said they hadn’t taken a course requiring more than 40 pages of reading. A Marist poll released on 4 July 2011 (appropriately enough) showed that 69% of Americans in the under-30 age group are unaware that the U.S. declared its independence in 1776.
All of this, of course, is central to the decline of the United States that I have documented in my own work. After all, you can't have much of a future if this is what American youth has come to. There are many reasons for this catastrophe, but to my mind the major one is the conversion of education into a business, and the university into a corporation. Once the corporate-consumer model of education took hold, all those previous ideals described by Delbanco went up in smoke. Interviewed by the NYTBR in the May 27th issue, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust identified Clark Kerr's (in)famous study of 1963, The Uses of the University, as "the best book she had read about academia." In response, Jeff Zorn, who teaches English at Santa Clara University, commented (NYTBR, June 17th) that Kerr's book
"welcomed the very developments that have made American higher education so generally lame: the denigration of teaching; the loss of a center, academically and spiritually: the selling out to Big Business, Big Government, Big Foundations...[and] the redefinition of liberal education...to a vocational major."
Kerr, he concludes, sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, and president Faust doesn't seem to notice (or, perhaps, to mind). As Slavoj Zizek recently put it, we now live in "a new socioeconomic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticized technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy." I'm not sure how "new" all this is; we were always, as I have argued, a nation of hustlers; but imported into education, the results are quite obvious. It's hardly an accident that the class of 2012 is out to make money (in point of fact, they can't even find a job), doesn't give a damn about anybody else, and knows virtually nothing; or that (according to a Newsweek poll of 2011) 73% of Americans can’t give the official version of why we fought the Cold War, and 44% are unable to define the Bill of Rights. Indeed, how many even care about our now-shredded Bill of Rights, courtesy of Mr. Obama? Awareness of (for example) the National Defense Authorization Act, with its provision for "indefinite detention," is practically nonexistent, and I'm guessing that less than 2% of American college graduates know what habeas corpus is (make that, was).
Finally, let's not talk of "repairing" the system; under the corporate-consumer model, it can only get worse. Real education--Bildung, in the German sense of the term--can get no traction in the technocorporate state, which is not exactly a breeding ground for creative, independent thought. It can only be pursued by misfits, by the marginalized, by the very few who still think that learning for learning's sake, and the sake of the larger community, is a meaningful ideal. In the America of today, there aren't too many of those around.
(c)Morris Berman, 2012
June 20, 2012
The Rain in Spain
Dear Friends:
As some of you know, I just returned from 2-3 weeks in Spain, where I went to promote the Spanish translation of Why America Failed--translated there as Las raices del fracaso americano (The roots of the american failure). This included interviews with a number of newspapers, and also a video interview in Madrid with an outfit called periodista digital (the digital reporter). For some odd reason, they insisted that I do it in English, and that my publisher/editor/translator, Eduardo Rabasa, provide a running translation of what I was saying. So it comes off a bit uneven, but the interviewer did manage to ask questions that went to the heart of the matter. Hence, a decent job overall, if rather brief (which could be good, of course). For readers of this blog, or of WAF, this material may be a bit redundant, but I offer it up as another take on the whole issue of why the US is slowly sliding into the sea (along with Spain, which foolishly chose to follow the American socioeconomic model--a guaranteed recipe for disaster). Apparently, this interview is also running on YouTube; but the link I have for it is as follows:
http://www.periodistadigital.com/ocio-y-cultura/libros/2012/06/14/morris-berman-sexto-piso-raices-del-fracaso-americano-crepusculo-cultura.shtml
As some of you know, I just returned from 2-3 weeks in Spain, where I went to promote the Spanish translation of Why America Failed--translated there as Las raices del fracaso americano (The roots of the american failure). This included interviews with a number of newspapers, and also a video interview in Madrid with an outfit called periodista digital (the digital reporter). For some odd reason, they insisted that I do it in English, and that my publisher/editor/translator, Eduardo Rabasa, provide a running translation of what I was saying. So it comes off a bit uneven, but the interviewer did manage to ask questions that went to the heart of the matter. Hence, a decent job overall, if rather brief (which could be good, of course). For readers of this blog, or of WAF, this material may be a bit redundant, but I offer it up as another take on the whole issue of why the US is slowly sliding into the sea (along with Spain, which foolishly chose to follow the American socioeconomic model--a guaranteed recipe for disaster). Apparently, this interview is also running on YouTube; but the link I have for it is as follows:
http://www.periodistadigital.com/ocio-y-cultura/libros/2012/06/14/morris-berman-sexto-piso-raices-del-fracaso-americano-crepusculo-cultura.shtml
May 09, 2012
Slouching Towards Nuremberg
Strange things are happening in the United States these
days, and every day seems to bring additional scary news. The similarity to the erosion of civil
liberties in Germany during the 1930s is a bit too close for comfort. Many will
regard this statement as hyperbole, and, to some extent, it is. But let’s take
a close look at what is going on before we dismiss the comparison out of hand.
In terms of the historical record for Germany, legal
discrimination against Jews certainly existed before the Nuremberg Laws of
1935, and grew steadily over time. There was always a feeling in the Jewish
community—most of whom regarded themselves as Germans, after all—that “OK,
that’s the worst of it.” Hence, the decision to stay. Then came the next set of
restrictions, and again the response: “This is as far as it will go.” It was
like the classic experiment of turning up the heat on frogs placed in warm
water. Gradually, they get boiled to death, because the increase of heat is
incremental. It was only toward the end
of the thirties that the choice began to look like: jump or die. Finally, it
became simply, die.
In 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional
Civil Service banned “non-Aryans” from the civil service.
In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German
citizenship and prohibited marriage between Jews and “Aryans.” They also prohibited sexual intercourse
between Jews and “Aryans,” and the employment of “Aryan” females under
forty-five years of age as domestic workers in Jewish households. In addition,
Jews could not work as lawyers, doctors, or journalists; could not use state
hospitals; and could not be educated by the state past the age of fourteen.
They could not enter public parks, libraries, or beaches, and could not receive
winnings from the national lottery.
In 1938, Jews with first names that were not
characteristically Jewish had to adopt the middle name Sara (if female) or
David (if male). Passports of German Jews were stamped with a “J”.
In 1939, Jews living in German-occupied Poland had to wear
the yellow star. This was extended to all Jews living within Nazi-controlled
areas in 1941.
By way of comparison, one thing that makes me particularly
nervous is what has been called the “conspiracy of silence.” Almost nobody
spoke up in Germany as this process was unfolding, and the American public has
been similarly silent about the events documented below. Indeed, I would
venture to say that 98% of the American public (maybe more) is unaware of events
such as these, or of the passage of repressive legislation, and that they wouldn’t
care even if they did know about it. (“Hey, I ain’t no Ay-rab!”) The classic
quote that has come down to us is from Martin Niemoeller, a German pastor and
theologian who wound up in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps (he
was liberated by the Allies in 1945). It goes something like this:
“First they came
for the communists, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then
they came for the trade unionists, but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a
trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn't speak out because I
wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me,
but by that time there was no one left to speak out.”
but by that time there was no one left to speak out.”
It is no accident
that Chris Hedges entitled a recent article “First They Come for the Muslims”
(see below, Item IV). God forbid
something like that might happen in the U.S., but the signs of a gradual slide
towards Nuremberg, and concomitant citizen apathy, are very much present in the
current political milieu. Let’s have a look at what has been going on in the
decade since 9/11. I’m going to discuss the following topics:
I. The creation
of a political climate in which the police are out of control, arbitrarily free
to intimidate anyone for virtually anything
II. The
persecution of whistleblowers, protesters, and dissenters
III. The dramatic
expansion of the surveillance of American citizens on the part of the National
Security Agency (NSA)
IV. The
corruption of the judicial system by means of show trials of Muslim activists
V. The
construction of political detention centers, also known as Communication
Management Units (CMU’s)
VI. The shredding
of the Bill of Rights by means of the National Defense Authorization Act
VII. Future
scenarios: The “disappearing” of intellectual critics of the U.S. government?
I. The creation of a political climate in which
the police are out of control, arbitrarily free to intimidate anyone for
virtually anything
The evidence for
this is perforce anecdotal, but events such as the ones discussed below are
getting to be so common that we have to keep in mind that when you have accumulated
enough anecdotes, the result is called “data.”
-In June 2011 the
sheriff of Nelson County, North Dakota, called in a Predator B drone from the
local Air Force base to capture three men who had stolen some cows. Once the
unmanned aircraft located the suspects, police rushed in to make the first
known arrests of U.S. citizens with the help of a Predator spy drone. It turns
out that predator drones are frequently used for domestic investigations all
over the U.S.—by the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and by state and
local law enforcement officials.
-In July 2011 police in a small town in Georgia
shut down a lemonade stand being run by three girls, ages 10-14, who were
trying to save up for a trip to a local water park. The police said that they
didn’t know what was in the lemonade; and in addition, that the girls needed a
business license, a peddler’s permit, and a food permit in order to run the
stand. The permits, by the way, cost $50 a day.
-In January 2012 the
library system of Charlton, Massachusetts, called the police to collect some
overdue books charged to Hailey Benoit—a five-year-old girl.
-Also in January
2012, a young couple was arrested in Baltimore for asking a police woman
directions to highway I-95. They spent the night in jail.
-In April 2012 the
Supreme Court ruled that jail authorities may strip search people arrested for
minor offenses before they are jailed while awaiting a hearing. Individuals
have been strip searched for offenses such as biking with an inaudible bell,
walking a dog without a leash, and driving with a noisy muffler. The sexual
humiliation involved in these searches, writes Naomi Wolf, is clearly a way of
keeping the masses in line, politically docile. How long, she asks, before
saying anything controversial online or on the phone (see Item III, below) will
result in the “guilty” party facing arrest and sexual humiliation? I think we need to pause a moment before we
summarily dismiss this as paranoia.
II. The persecution of whistleblowers, protesters,
and dissenters
This has been
going on throughout the past decade, first under President Bush, and then more
aggressively under President Obama. According
to the New Yorker, “the Obama
Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness.”
To which the New York Times added:
“In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous
president in pursuing leak prosecutions.” In the famous case of Bradley
Manning, who revealed government documents to Wikileaks, Mr. Obama publicly
declared him guilty before he went to trial or was convicted of a crime. The
overall result is that the government has basically criminalized public
servants who speak out to expose waste or corruption or unethical behavior.
Whistleblowing and dissent have, in themselves, become criminal activities.
-Since 2006 the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who made a documentary about the
U.S. occupation of Iraq, has been detained and questioned at airports more than
forty times. Government agents confiscate her computer and notebooks without a
warrant. She is hardly an isolated case. With no oversight or legal framework for
its activities, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out
individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them at the airport when
they return to the U.S. from an international trip, and then seizes their
laptops, cameras, cellphones, notebooks, and credit card receipts.
-William Binney,
an intelligence official who worked for the NSA for nearly forty years,
resigned in October 2001 when massive domestic spying became the norm. Binney
and several other NSA officials reported their concerns about this to Congress and
the Department of Defense. In 2006, he
exposed the NSA practice of installing secret monitoring rooms in major U.S.
telecommunications facilities. Finally,
in 2007, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house with guns drawn, pointed
their weapons at his head, and interrogated him at length. Three other ex-NSA
employees were raided the same day.
- You
can now go to jail in the United States simply for speaking. In July 2011,
environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for
his repeated declaration that environmental protection required civil—i.e.,
nonviolent—disobedience. One wonders if the same judge, Dee Benson, would have
also put Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi in jail, had he been around during their
lifetimes.
-In March 2012
the president signed H.R. 347, the so-called trespass bill, into law, which
allows the government to jail anyone protesting near someone with Secret
Service protection for up to ten years. This makes it quite easy for the
government to criminalize protest per se, because the exclusion zones defined
by the law have no clear boundaries. In fact, they can be as large as the law
wants them to be; which means that the free speech zone is a moving target.
III. The dramatic expansion of the surveillance of
American citizens on the part of the National Security Agency (NSA)
-On 19 July 2010 the
Washington Post reported that 854,000
people work for the National Security Agency in thirty-three building complexes
amounting to 17 million square feet of space, in the DC Metro and suburban
area. Every day, collection systems at the NSA intercept and store 1.7 billion
emails and phone calls of American citizens, in what amounts to a vast domestic
spy system. Writing in the New Yorker
on 23 May 2011, Jane Mayer reported that the NSA has three times the budget of
the CIA, and has the capacity to download, every six hours, electronic
communications equivalent to the entire contents of the Library of Congress.
They also developed a program called Thin Thread that enables computers to scan
the material for key words, and they collect the billing records and the dialed
phone numbers of everyone in the country. In violation of communications laws,
ATT, Verizon, and BellSouth have opened their electronic records to the government.
At the height of its insanity, the Stasi in
East Germany was spying on 1 out of 7 citizens. The U.S. is now spying on 7 out
of 7.
-To make the
surveillance of American citizens even more comprehensive (assuming that is
even possible), the NSA is currently building the biggest-ever data complex in Bluffdale,
Utah, as part of a secret surveillance program code-named “Stellar Wind.” The
center, scheduled for completion in 2013, will be twice as large as the U.S.
Capitol, and contain 100,000 square feet of computer space, at a cost of $2
billion. In addition, the NSA has
established listening posts throughout the country as part of this
operation. All in all, there are now
1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related
to counterterrorism and homeland security in about 10,000 locations across the
U.S. The goal is to store and review the e-mails, phone calls, online shopping
lists, and virtually every bit of information about every single American.
Everything you do, from traveling to buying groceries, will be displayed on a
graph. William Binney (see above, Item II) has stated that we are about two
millimeters away “from a turnkey totalitarian state.”
IV. The corruption of the judicial system by means
of show trials of Muslim activists
This was
discussed at length by Chris Hedges on truthdig, 16 April 2012. That very week,
Tarek Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced to 17½ years in prison. He was
convicted of conspiring to kill American soldiers in Iraq and giving material
support to al-Qaeda. No proof of these charges was provided. What seems to have
been the more relevant issue is that Mehanna had spoken out against U.S.
foreign policy, and had refused to become a government informant.
These types of
trials have been going on since 9/11. In them, federal lawyers are allowed to
prosecute people on “evidence” that the defendants are not allowed to see. Stephen
Downs, a lawyer who has defended Muslim activists since 2006, has documented
the phony charges used to label these people as terrorists and then put them
behind bars, typically for long stretches of time. He told Hedges: “People who
have committed no crime are taken into custody, isolated without adequate
recourse to legal advice, railroaded with fake or contrived charges, and
‘disappeared’ into prisons designed to isolate them.” Basically, they are
condemned before they have committed a crime, in a process that Downs calls “pre-emptive
prosecution.”
Downs discovered
all this in 2006, when Yassin Aref, the imam of a mosque in Albany, New York,
was entrapped in a government sting operation. What then happened, he told
Hedges, was that the government “put together a case that was just one lie
piled on top of another lie, and when you pointed it out to them they didn’t
care. They didn’t refute it. They knew it was a lie....But the facts are
irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people.” Essentially, he
went on, the government lawyers “must know they’re prosecuting people before a
crime has been committed based on what they think the defendant might do in the
future.” These are, in other words, kangaroo courts.
The bottom line,
of course, is that if you destroy the judicial system, then finally nobody is safe.
The government could wind up railroading anyone they don’t like, and I very
much doubt that this possibility is far-fetched. First they came for the Muslims...
V. The construction of political detention
centers, also known as Communication Management Units (CMU’s)
Where do the
suspected Muslim terrorists go? It turns out that the government is using
secret prison facilities to house inmates accused of non-violent activities,
i.e. of allegedly being tied to terrorist groups. As it turns out, these are
not just Muslim groups; the CMU’s are also being used to house environmental
activists. The first CMU was built in 2006 in Terre Haute, Indiana; in 2008 a
second facility was constructed in Marion, Illinois. Restrictions on contact
with the outside world are quite severe—for example, having all phone calls
monitored and limited to fifteen minutes per week. Among the so-called
terrorists housed in these units are the following:
-Rafil Dhafir, an
Iraqi-born oncologist from Syracuse, New York, who created a charity called
Help the Needy to provide food and medicine to the people of Iraq who had been
suffering from U.S. economic sanctions. He was sentenced to twenty-two years in
prison for violating those sanctions. (I cite some of these in Dark Ages America; they include a ban on
the importation of medicine and toilet paper.)
-Daniel McGowan,
an environmental activist who committed two acts of arson to protest logging in
the Pacific Northwest, was sentenced to seven years. He was not convicted of any terrorist crime or
being affiliated with any terrorist group, although the government claimed that
he was a member of the Earth Liberation Front, which they regard as a domestic
terrorist organization. One thing that
did not help was his public visibility, both through media appearances and his
website.
-Andrew
Stepanian, recently released—the first prisoner ever to be released from a CMU.
He spent three years in jail, which included six and a half months at the
Marion facility, for trying to shut down an animal testing laboratory. He was
then put under house arrest in New York. In fact, he was not accused of any
violent crime or property destruction.
What
distinguishes the CMU’s from other jails is that they are political prisons.
All of the defendants are incarcerated there for what appear to be ideological
reasons. Meanwhile, the definition of “terrorist” continues to grow (see below,
Item VI); it won’t necessarily stop with Muslims or environmental rights
activists. Significantly, the word
“ecoterrorism” was coined by corporations in the early 1980s. The CMU’s even contain
antiwar tax protesters. In general, the legal wall separating “terrorist” from
“dissident” is starting to break down, if, indeed, it hasn’t already.
VI. The shredding of the Bill of Rights by means
of the National Defense Authorization Act
The NDAA, also
known as the “indefinite detention bill,”
was signed into law by President Obama on 31 December 2011. It has no
temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by Mr. Obama or any future
president to military detain U.S. citizens. As in pre-Magna Carta days, you can simply be
swept up and put away forever—disappeared—with no explanation of why, no right
to call a lawyer or anybody else, and no right to a trial. You can actually be tortured to death, if the
government decides it is in the national interest. The NDAA is probably the
greatest rollback of civil liberties in the history of the United States. Under
the Act, literally anyone can be described as a “belligerent,” or as they are
now called, “covered person.” The president claimed that he signed the bill
only to provide funding for American troops, and that he had been reluctant to
sign it because it included American citizens. This b.s. was subsequently
exposed by one of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Carl Levin, who revealed that it
was Mr. Obama himself who insisted that the indefinite detention clause include
U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, the White
House had been conducting a misinformation campaign to secure this incredible
dictatorial power while portraying the president as some type of reluctant
absolute ruler. It is also important to note that there was virtually no
coverage of this issue on the part of the mainstream media. In effect, as Naomi
Wolf has written, the U.S. “is sleepwalking into become a police state.” The
New American website posted the following comment on the new law:
“The universe of
potential ‘covered persons’ includes every citizen of the United States of
America. Any American could one day find himself or herself branded a
‘belligerent’ and thus subject to the complete confiscation of his or her
constitutional civil liberties and nearly never-ending incarceration in a
military prison.”
You don’t have to
be convicted of terrorism to be rounded up, under this new law; you only have
to be suspected of terrorist activity.
And as Senator Rand Paul pointed out prior to the passage of the bill, the
Department of Justice now has a list of “identifying characteristics” of
terrorists that includes having one or more fingers missing from your hands;
having more than seven days’ worth of food in your house; and having a loaded
weapon on your property—which describes half the households in the United
States. In effect, with the NDAA, if the government, for any reason, doesn’t
like you—for example, if you are simply a critic of the U.S., nothing more—they
can brand you a terrorist and put you away forever, with literally no one
knowing what happened to you.
Note also that
even before the passage of this law, the president had the legal right, even though
it violates the Geneva accords, to designate anyone on the planet an enemy, and
have him or her assassinated. Thus on 30 September 2011, Mr. Obama had two
American citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, assassinated because of
suspected—i.e. not proven—al-Qaeda membership and terrorist activity. Two weeks later, the CIA killed al-Awlaki’s
sixteen-year-old son. The real problem in these cases is not whether these
people were actually guilty of terrorism; it’s that the Constitution says that
no matter how heinous the crime, every American citizen has a right to his or her
day in court. If I remember correctly, it does not say that the president has
the right to rub them out without a trial.
(Just as an
aside, there are, in general, more people under “correctional supervision” in
America than there were in the Russian gulag under Stalin, at its height.
Writing in the New Yorker on 30 January
2012, Adam Gopnik declared: “Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in
human history is a fundamental fact of our country today.”)
VII. Future scenarios: The “disappearing” of
intellectual critics of the U.S. government?
This leads me to
my final point. The distinctive characteristic of American democracy, from
1776, was the protection of the individual and the preservation of individual
rights. That no longer exists. Anyone is a potential terrorist now; anyone can
be persecuted, prosecuted, and in effect, destroyed. Democracy is only possible if dissent is not only permitted,
but also respected. This too is finished. What does this mean for someone such
as myself?, is something I lay awake nights thinking about. I have published
three books, and half a collection of essays, showing where we have gone wrong,
predicting our eventual collapse—indeed, this repression is part of that
collapse—and arguing that the U.S. no longer has a moral compass; that it is
spiritually bankrupt. I run a blog that is anything but polite: it says the
U.S. is finished; that it is basically a corporate plutocracy, run by a
gangster elite; that the American people are basically morons, with little more
than fried rice in their heads; and that anyone with half a brain and the means
to do so should emigrate before it’s too late. I’m not really a threat to the
U.S. government, largely because I am not a political activist and because it’s
not likely that more than 74 people out of 311 million regularly read my blog
(it’s probably more like 24, in fact). But as the definition of terrorism
widens in this country, what is to prevent the creation of a category known as
“intellectual terrorism” from arising, and putting folks like myself in that
category? What is to prevent the government from calling such activity a clear
and present danger to national security? As must be obvious by now, the government
can do anything it wants to now; as in Nazi Germany, we now have a government
of men, not of laws. Indeed, the “laws” are little more than a pretext for
whatever the government wishes to do.
Is the following
scenario completely paranoid? Five or ten years down the line, as I fly into
the DFW Airport en route to giving a lecture somewhere, or simply visiting
friends, I am suddenly surrounded by government agents, whisked off to a
holding cell, and eventually sent to Guantanamo. Nobody knows what happened to
me, and I’m not allowed to phone anyone—not my lawyer, not a friend, and
certainly not Chris Hedges, who is probably being tortured in the adjoining
cell. Two points to remember here, historically speaking:
-When a country
puts laws such as torture or indefinite detention or arbitrary assassination on
the books, sooner or later it will use these legal instruments. They won’t just lie dormant, in other words. As
in the case of technology, once the mechanisms are there, the temptation to
employ them simply becomes too great to resist. That is what is happening
today.
-In a world that
is politically construed along Manichaean lines—which, as I have argued
elsewhere, America has been doing since Day 1—the first line of attack is
against the enemy outside. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about
Protestants or Catholics or al-Qaeda operatives or infidels of any kind, the
first order of business is to go to war with them. But as the British
anthropologist Mary Douglas shows in her book Purity and Danger, or Norman Cohn demonstrates in The Pursuit of the Millennium, if the
war goes on long enough, inevitably the enemy is also seen to be a fifth
column, i.e. within the walls of the body politic itself. They become Huguenots or Marrano Jews or
heretics of whatever stripe, and as in the case of Goya’s famous painting, Saturn Devouring His Son, the country
begins to eat itself alive. Everybody
becomes an enemy; no one is safe any longer. And so I believe that I, and you, really
do have reason to worry.
Somewhere along
the line, God stopped blessing America.
We are not marching to Pretoria; rather, we are slouching towards
Nuremberg. To quote Edward R. Murrow,
Good Night, and Good Luck.
(c)Morris Berman,
2012
References
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