Responding to Madame's Gold

Dear Readers:


Let me take the New Year to suggest once again to you that you urge your friends to get this book we are reviewing.  And then urge them to highlight in it, underline in it, write in it, dog ear it, and otherwise make it their own, to be referred to time and again!

I hope you bookmark the posting of Madame’s that I am responding to, and will make it one of the more popular.  It encapsulates the heart of the matter.

And now to you, Dear Madame:

Paragraph 1: Gold

Paragraph 2: Gold

Paragraph 3: Gold

Paragraph 4: Gold

Paragraph 5: Gold

Paragraph 6: Gold.  And I would add that even a casual perusal of the “history,” “literature,” “philosophy,” and “religion” that is allowed shows them either esoteric or largely for entertainment only.  The subversive, questioning, socially important knowledge and cultural ideas are either sublimated (requiring far more digging or discernment than is reasonable for the average person’s background or time to gather information) or absent entirely.  Where are the discussions, the featured documentaries of us and Rome?  Where are the examinations of how this culture spears itself by repeating its own mistakes, let alone those of others?  Where are the examinations of Jesus’s socialistic words?  Who are the Steinbeck’s and Hemingway’s and Dickens’ and Sinclair’s of this generation?  It is not that some of them don’t exist, or that they haven’t produced some works.  But they are marginalized, never allowed into the media-ized consciousness of the population.

Madame, again, kudos to you on your six paragraphs.  You have written in clear and direct language, instead of the too encompassing prose I sometimes fall into.  I had some old friends of mine this week, who I see far too infrequently, discuss these issues.  One, an incredibly smart and insightful MD, said he was so disheartened by how Americans are too easily twisted by emotional hot button issues (spectacle?) into ignoring their true, common interests, that he doesn’t even follow politics or current events much anymore at all.  But the others asked me about the Occupy phenomenon, and wanted to know what THE OBJECTIVE was. 

I replied that I couldn’t speak for such a diverse group, but that it seemed to me that, rather than a platform issue that could be politicized, AWAKENING the population to the reality of their situation seems to be the common goal. Only upon that awakening, when the average man and woman (of all ages and situations) is upset and ready for change, will specifics be truly necessary.  And far better that those specifics come from the consensus of the newly awakened, because then those specifics will happen because they will have power and momentum behind them, precisely because they the awakened will own them.  Sure, the Occupy movement can provide, via persuasion and guidance and pioneering, suggestions, but only when the mass of people make it their own will unstoppable force come into being.

Hedges has pointed out to us, as have a few political scientists, that too many (vast majority?) of the really “successful” capitalists fall into the limiting box of seeing life as an accumulation of money and power.  An insatiable accumulation.   And that colors, badly, nearly everything this culture becomes about.

In education, it is destroying the social-trustee professional, whose origin, as Hedges reminds us, came from the humanities.  “He or she valued collegial organization, learning, and the volunteerism of public service.  The new classes of expert professionals have been trained to focus on narrow, specialized knowledge independent of social ideas or conceptions of the common good.  A doctor, lawyer, or engineer may become wealthy, but the real meaning of their work is that they sustain health, justice, good government, or safety.”  But we don’t get that connection.  “And by absenting themselves from the moral and social questions raised by the humanities, they have opted to serve a corporate structure that has destroyed the culture around them.” (110-111)

In every walk of life, from health, to business, to government, etc., we have the same results of the above production.  “They are petty, timid, and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management.  They see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure.  Their entire focus is numbers, profits, and personal advancement.  They lack a moral and intellectual core.  They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships.  The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets.  The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market—which they slavishly serve.” (111)

A truly astute financial insider had this to say about why he made so much money, and what he thought of those in the oligarchic class who “run” (often into the ground) the investment firms and banks—and the government that is supposed to watch and regulate them:

“The low-hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking.  These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.  All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy ended up only making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades.  God bless America…”

“On the issue of the U.S. Government, I would like to make a modest proposal,” Hedges records him as saying.  “First, I point out the obvious flaws whereby legislation was repeatedly brought forth to Congress over the past eight years, which would have [reined] in the predatory lending practices of now mostly defunct institutions.  These institutions regularly filled the coffers of both parties in return for voting down all of this legislations designed to protect the common citizen.  This is an outrage, YET NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW OR CARE ABOUT IT. (my emphasis added)  Since Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith [sic] passed, I would argue that there has been a dearth of worthy philosophers in this country, at least ones focused on improving government.” (111)

Gentle Reader, do we need a better example of who owns this democracy and this capitalism?  Do we need a better example of how utterly corrupt and wholesale destructive is the idea that corporations are people and money is free speech?  Do we need a better example of how destructive unlimited money has become (and where it comes from)?  Our ruling class—and the laws and expectancies they have seen to are created—are parasites, poison, and disease in the faltering bodies of the republic and the economic system.   We keep deluding ourselves that we will “get better,” when the very things that are making us gravely sick—killing us really—are “not to be touched” (“class warfare!”).  It is primitively medieval: ticks and leeches? Don’t get rid of them, just get used to them, they are necessary evils; do not treat the snake bite with anything but a little water—and let the snake stay in the same room; and a wet rag on the forehead is about all that is needed for the consuming disease that is literally eating the body alive from the inside and destroying the vital organs.   “That raging fever and paralyzing weakness?  Don’t fret over it.  We’ve got something that you’ll really get upset about—what your neighbor is smoking, reading, or cavorting  on.” Grossly graphic, perhaps, but that is what we are doing as a country. 

Want to know what the Romans aren’t fighting about anymore?  Sex, drugs, sports scandals, etc.  Because there aren’t any—Romans, that is.