Code Blue

Madame M,

We may be about there, although radical evil has not arrived in force yet.

May I suggest with the highest recommendation that our readers read (again and again) the post Madame has made on education on her blog? Brilliant! We need those teachers, and we need those coaches Madame mentions there as well.

Ability to choose a system (or school) in line with our passions? Sounds like what the Germans do with their testing for school past 5th grade. It’s not that the different schools don’t have all the same subjects, it’s just that the children get a lot MORE of whatever they show they have a passion for.

Yes, we have only to look around and see what Hedges is describing. “Black Friday.” How manipulated we are. To shop. Pressure for stores to open earlier and earlier. Waiting in lines for hours or days. For marketing ploys (small numbers available of the advertised “hot” items, themselves often just hyped up “latest” things, but it gets the consumers in the stores to buy other things in the mania). To push and shove for a chance (nowhere near a certainty) at an item, or even to use pepper spray to get a “competitive advantage” in the holy grail quest for “bargains” that, upon reflection, are often a bargain neither in price nor in effort invested. Staying up late, shopping into the wee hours. Going until exhausted. To step over a dying man’s body, and never to even ask what’s wrong, let alone seek help or offer help (Good Samaritans seem nowhere to be found in the Land of Rampant Consumerism). That’s what we’ve become? Where buying/shopping is one of our favorite pastimes and most intensely dedicated activities? The record numbers, the overwhelming crowds for shopping, THAT’S what we get motivated for? Consumerist slaves and shallow serfs too many of us have become; with mindless obeisance to the retail gods we give control to.

All with eyes completely shut “to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.” The “Occupy” movement continues to lack critical mass of numbers, support, and effort. It’s a bit obvious where a lot of Americans’ energies are, isn’t it? Guess W knew the public better than I thought when he said, after the terrorist attacks and the resulting recession of the time, “Go shopping.”

And women, this is how you are using your greatly increased societal influence? At least two-thirds of the shoppers are women. Even the men present are often on errands FOR women in their lives or accompanying women keen to shop.

How far we are from Blue Laws, the laws that used to exist to help protect family and relationships time, Sunday worship and time for spiritual reflection, and quiet time and regeneration before the new work week—a time to be unplugged from the maniacal pace this society usually manifests. Families also had time to learn from each other, to bond, to be in touch with what is important in life.

And before all those people who weren’t out shopping pat themselves on the back, what were they doing all weekend? Watching sports? Playing video games? Constructing super-elaborate holiday displays? Well, nothing wrong with any of that (actually, a certain amount may be good for us), but when the country is decaying before our very eyes, are those things really how we should spend our precious time? In more escapism, denial, delusion, spectacle?

Yes, those shrugs, or worse, those condemnations of the “flickers of resistance.” Protest of the realities of the economic feudalism we live under draws too much irritation, apathy, or denial from those who delude themselves that they are and always will be exempt from its realities. That because THEY have a job, or money, or little debt, that those in the opposite of those situations must be at fault, must want to only complain and not WORK.

Returning to Hedges (our ever present awakening force) we read him say that “corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective.” From there it is a short path to “lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick,” and a lack of realization or holding accountable the society that produces them in such numbers. (92)

How interesting and prescient that Hedges draws a bead on the corruption and self-muting of Berkeley, as he records undergrad Chris Hebdon telling us that while there is some protest of issues of remote interest, there was at the time of the book none about “globalization, corporatization, or, heaven forbid, the commercialization of Berkeley. Too many students and professors are distracted, specialized, atomized, and timid. They follow trends, prestige, and money, and so rarely act outside the box.” Diversity is even manipulated into fragmenting and “segmenting the powerful sea of students into diverse but disarmed droplets. Disconnection prevails. In the absence of cohesion, one really wonders how such smart kids could be struck so, in the muting sense of the term, dumb.” (93)

“The corporate hierarchy that has corrupted higher education is on display at Berkeley.” All students are expected to enter the elite. "Corporations have cut deals with universities to be sole providers of goods and services and to shut out competitors. Coca-Cola, for example, has monopoly rights at Berkley, including control of what drinks and food are sold at football games. Corporations such as Cingular and Allstate blanket California Memorial Stadium with their logos and signs. Berkeley negotiated a deal with British Petroleum for $500 million. BP gets access to the university’s researchers and technological capacity, built by decades of public investment, to investigate biofuels at a new Energy Biosciences Institute. BP can shut down another research center and move into a publicly subsidized one. BP will receive intellectual property rights, which it can use for profit, on scientific breakthroughs expected to come out of the joint project.” (93-94)

As is well known, the corporate state moved swiftly to take the fire away, to sweep out and intimidate protesters at Berkeley. The story has a familiar ring by now: trumped up “concerns” about “safety,” “hygiene,” “open space,” “free passage,” and other artificialities.

How ironic that the 1960s site of radical protest has become an engine of the seemingly all-powerful corporate machine. Apparently, the only “transcendent values” permitted to be transmitted are the vacuous pseudo-ones served up by corporate state.

Adorno and Niemoller must be spinning in their graves. All their desperate work, and we still didn’t listen and infuse…

Well, Madame, I have attempted to move us to page 94 at least. You are right, there is so much about this chapter worthy of comment! No wonder our progress is slow (measured? Sounds better!). :)