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
September 16, 2011
September 08, 2011
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...
mb
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...
mb
August 11, 2011
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
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
July 03, 2011
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.
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.
June 05, 2011
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."
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."
May 14, 2011
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
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
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