Howard's Beginning

Yes, readers, I think I will have Madame post twice in a row or something, assuming she returns in fine fettle.


Madame in Absentia:

Hedges’ words become prophetic once again: The apparent candidates for the 2012 presidential election will be between the vacuous systems managers that Ivy League connections typically serve up.

Yes, you are so very right.  We have PERMITTED others to do our thinking for us.  We have become distracted.  We have given into spectacle and illusion.  When excessive (or excessively simplistic) ideas are promoted by our few friends who are zealots of one unexamined view or another (rather than seemingly apathetic), we have not only said little to nothing (or worse, let them think we agreed!), but have changed the subject to sports or some other spectacle.  We have rewarded those who promote falsehoods and innuendo.  We have given a pass to ideas instead of examining them, or making their adherents truly defend all their holes.  In our frustration with changes, we have let ourselves be twisted by ideologues who bypass our reason and play to our emotions.  EVEN WHEN THINGS WORSEN, we don’t “question the premises” or shake our heads and say “wait a minute, what you’ve told us doesn’t jive with what happened,” but instead listen to them further twist us emotionally.

We have willingly let ourselves become low (relevant) information citizens.  

And this is how cultures decay: when the people’s character becomes diseased or deficient. 

Of course, it doesn’t help that the mass media is largely corporate controlled, and it frames how things are conveyed.  The true masters wield what they want—including mass confusion, constantly changing focus, and disinformation and contradiction—to continue their inverted totalitarianism.  The anesthetized citizenry largely don’t realize it—or care when they do.  Citizens United has merely made the process infinitely easier.

Betsy Myers.  In addition to the fine points you have illustrated she makes, there is also the disturbing aspect that many people THINK they know (and know ALL) the relevant views—and sources and histories of those views—of the “other side.”  They then ridicule and dismiss.  So certain are they in their own “infallible” beliefs that they twist or even invent the opponent their fervor requires.  I listen to the self-proclaimed radio stations of the “Left” and “Right.”  Each “side” often has things to bring up worth considering.  But when you have a daily stated view for example, on one radio show, that “they’re wrong, we’re right, end of story, the arguments cannot be broken,” it ends rational discussion and furthers polarization.  I keep saying this over and over, but WHO DOES THAT REALLY SERVE?  I think when Americans answer THAT, then perhaps they will be on the way toward getting out of this morass.

Your historical mini-treatise on the HS movement illustrates the very real, and ever growing disconnection, with the way we have “done” education.  When more and more people not only want more options, but are profoundly dissatisfied with things, we get change. 

“Moving in the same direction, for different reasons.”

Madame, there’s your platinum slogan (for many things). 

Returning directly to Hedges: “Moral autonomy is what the corporate state, with all its coded attacks on liberal institutions and ‘leftist’ professors, have really set out to destroy.”  Manipulation is what is idealized.  “The manipulative character has superb organizational skills yet is unable to have authentic human experiences.  He or she is an emotional cripple and driven by an overvalued realism.”  These systems managers are “exclusively trained to sustained the corporate structure, which why our elites wasted mind-blowing amounts of our money on corporations like Goldman Sachs and AIG” (Professor’s Note: and diverted our attention--“nationalizing!” “socialism!”—onto the relatively small amounts sent to the auto industry).  (112)

These systems managers, large and small, swirl around in cults of “activity” and “efficiency” that are far worse than meaningless.  Hedges names some of the big names: “Lawrence Summers, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Gethner, AIG’s Edward Liddy, and Goldman Sach’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein, along with most of ruling class, have used corporate money and power to determine the narrow parameters of the debate in our classrooms, on the airwaves, and in the halls of Congress—while looting the country.  Many of these men appear to be so morally and intellectually stunted that they are incapable of acknowledging their responsibility for our decline.” (113)

Hedges goes on: “‘It is especially difficult to fight against it,’ warned Adorno, ‘because those manipulative people, who actually are incapable of true experience, for that very reason manifest an unresponsiveness that associates them with certain mentally ill or psychotic characters, namely schizoids.’” (113)  Just like the sociopathic tendencies of corporations and their operators.

“Our power elite has a blind belief in the decaying political and financial system that has nurtured, enriched, and empowered it.  But the elite cannot solve our problems.  It has been trained only to find solutions, such as paying out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out banks and financial firms, to sustain a dead system.  The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age.” (113)  Because the humanities “aren’t important”!

And so bankers extract wealth from the both the struggling public and the treasury.  All while the education system fails to achieve even its corporate state function—to turn out compliant and trained workers to become cogs.  “Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist.  They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained.  The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies.  Once it is dead, they will be helpless.  Don’t expect them to save us.  They don’t know how.  They do not even know how to ask the questions.  And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless and as self-deluded as the rest of us.” (114)

A good indication of both the utterly, selfishly corrupt nature of the financial elite and their inability to do anything else but serve themselves and their disastrous short-term views, is how, not even a few years after taking us and the rest of the world to the brink of financial ruin, they went right back to their greedy, self-serving ways.  Any other age but this numbed and illusioned one would call them criminal sociopaths, nothing more.  That we would think there could be any other outcome shows how irrational and deluded WE have become.  And that they do so with mostly utter impunity shows where the real power truly is.  We, their serfs and slaves, serve them out of ignorance, fear, or desperation and resignation.  It is not rational.  But it won’t change unless we awaken, then awaken our fellows, then create the change. 

Because if this is in reality a plutocracy where the rich control we the people’s creature (government), we need a reminder that so few (the 1%) can’t really control the rest of us without our consent:

“There is a basic weakness in governments—however massive their armies, however wealthy their treasuries, however they control the information given to the public—because their power depends on the obedience of citizens, of soldiers, of civil servants, of journalists and writers and teachers and artists.  When those people begin to suspect they have been deceived, and when they withdraw their support, the government loses its legitimacy, and its power.  People everywhere understand with supreme clarity that the world is run by the rich.”


“You never know what spark is going to really result in a conflagration…You have to do things, do things; you have to light that match, light that match, not knowing how often it’s going to sputter and go out and at what point it’s going to take hold.”


Thank you, Howard Zinn, for throwing down the challenge to the plutocracy before you left this world.  The challenge of fashioning a world of equal dignity, of peace, of decency.  Perhaps inside this gray and bleak landscape, that world awaits!