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HADASHI SAYS: "OUR REAL ENEMY", IS US GETTING D(N)UMB?
Yesterday I visited the blog of a good friend of mine and attempted to post a comment on the page dedicated to energy topics. You are familiar with my views on oil prices. The "moderator" evidently disagreed and chose to omit the posting.
This good friend of mine is an MBA, a graduate of one of the more distinguished American business schools. Mind you, he is highly intelligent, and that is my despair. To read his comments on the business world, it is evident that he is "dyed in the wool."
Conventionally educated Americans have been schooled to practice self-censorship, lending credence to the assertion that promotion of "conspiracy theory" is a counter-intel operation of such "think tanks" as the Stanford Research Institute, to impose "double think" upon the American population.
"I don't go there" is the mantra of "conservative" Americans who wish to remain members of society in good standing, regardless of the self-inflicted injuries they invite.
American optimism is a charming cultural phenomenon, until one remembers that it is almost invariably coupled with naivete. How does one explain to a well-meaning people that affectations of goodness are the cloak of an unspeakable evil which they can hardly imagine exists, as they can find no outward evidence of it among themselves?
"No man is a prophet in his own country" goes the old adage, tried and true. As an adolescent, I was accused of being my "own worst enemy." It is bitter vindication when I know now with certainty that I had already begun seeing through the glass darkly at a tender age and could identify the real enemies.
We have indeed met the enemy, but he is not I.
Best...
Hadashi
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I second that. Nowhere in the world I have met such "nice" people as in the US. Only - until it comes to knowledge of real History - and perhaps Geography...
50% of Americans aged 18-25 cannot find New York on a map! And a little over 10% can't even locate the US!! Think about...
The myth of the self-made man is American culture's own special heart of darkness, helping to explain both its infectious optimism and ruthless greed.
The idea holds enough truth and seductiveness to make it easy to forget its delusional dangers. To reprise Marx's famous formulation, individuals, like humankind, do make their own personal history, but not under conditions they choose. But in America, we choose to ignore the caveat about conditions at our peril.
The myth, or belief, that people are solely what they make of themselves is useful to keep in mind while reading two ongoing series: the New York Times' on class and the Wall Street Journal's on social mobility. Both focus attention on a truth about American society that runs counter to most people's deep-seated beliefs: There is less social mobility in the United States now than in the '80s (and less then than in the '70s) and less mobility than in many other industrial countries, including Canada, Finland, Sweden and Germany.
(snip)
While the real income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell from 1980 to 2002, the income of the top 0.1 percent--making $1.6 million or more--went up two and a half times in real terms before taxes. With the help of the Bush tax cuts, the gap between the super-rich and everyone else grew even larger.
(snip)
Indeed, a poll in 2000 indicated that 39 percent of Americans thought they were either in the wealthiest one percent or would be "soon." The Times poll was slightly less exuberant: 11 percent thought it was very likely they would become wealthy, another 34 percent somewhat likely....
The Educational System Was Designed to Keep Us Uneducated and Docile
It's no secret that the US educational system doesn't do a very good job. Like clockwork, studies show that America's schoolkids lag behind their peers in pretty much every industrialized nation. We hear shocking statistics about the percentage of high-school seniors who can't find the US on an unmarked map of the world or who don't know who Abraham Lincoln was.
(snip)
...the Rockefeller Education Board - which funded the creation of numerous public schools - issued a statement which read in part:
In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.
At the same time, William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, wrote:
Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
In that same book, The Philosophy of Education , Harris also revealed:
The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places.... It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
Several years later, President Woodrow Wilson would echo these sentiments in a speech to businessmen:
We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks....
Another article along with some interesting figures from SF GATE by Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist from October 6, 2004:
...Most Americans, in other words, have no idea what the hell a Halliburton is. Or a Karl Rove. Or a Donny "Shriveled Soul" Rumsfeld. Or a Lockheed Martin. Or a Carlysle Group. Or have any idea that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Or that WMDs were never found. Or that President Bush has taken more vacation time than any president in U.S. history. Or that Jesus thinks Dubya is "sort of a dink." Or where Iraq is on a map.
Fact is, in the past decade, TV-news ratings -- cable and network, combined -- has shrunk to a fraction of its former numbers. Newspaper subscriptions have been either flat or dropping for just about as long. Newsmagazines, radio, historical nonfiction: flat or dropping fast. Even the Internet, that vast teeming customizable firestorm of news and info streaming in from all over the planet, even the awesome Net draws far more people to its porn and gossip and shopping departments than any e-news joint could ever wet dream.
Is this unfair? Does it sound elitist and biased? It's not. There have been studies. And reports. And alarming indicators of all kinds telling us time and again that, for example, fully 50 percent of eligible Americans don't even bother to vote (a 15 percent drop since 1964), and many have no idea who's on the Supreme Court or what Congress does, and many can't even point to France on a globe.
Voter turnout, comparatively, in Italy, Spain, the U.K., or Germany? Anywhere from 75 to 92 percent, every time. The sad fact is, the United States ranks 139th out of 172 countries in voter turnout. Wave that flag proudly, baby.
You've seen the headlines. Alarming numbers of American high school students can't even identify the current vice president, much less name a half dozen presidents from history. Far too many citizens can't name the capital of their own home state or recognize their own senators, much less discern how Bush's environmental policy is poisoning their water or how Ashcroft wants to scan their email and tap their phones and suck the pith from their souls. A whopping 49 percent of Americans aged 18-25 can't find New York on a map, and 11 percent can't even locate the United States. Now that's patriotism.
(snip)
And the Establishment, it only smiles knowingly, and nods, and says there there now. It'll be all right. Just go back to sleep.
Wake up, dear friends! It's highest time!
Do you hear me? Can you read and OVERstand the "real signs"? Hello, calling 911, can you hear me???
War on Error, Part 911911911:"America: We Don't Have to Care!" Far Sight 3
