It has been quite a turn of events for me of late, watching the world turned upside down in this country. Values that I thought were imperishable are now dismissed or thrown away into the dustbin of history. The right to collective bargaining is one of these, yet it is cast aside by such merchants of death as the governor of Wisconsin, the state famous for the Progressive Movement. When I consider what is happening, I associate to the world of Dickens, the Industrial Revolution, the plight of the poor, and child labor (may I have another bowl of porridge, please); the consequences of capitalism run amuck. All systems contain within themselves the very end of the system itself. The rise of capitalism and religion are inextricably intertwined, for if you did good works (making a buck) as a Calvinist, let us say, you would go on to heaven. The moral equation was that making money made you elevated and part of the select. You and I are born into such systems. The real task as a human being as I see it is to free yourself of all these rings of the onion that encapsulate each one of us — religious, familial, economic, et al.
My next door neighbor praises capitalism as almost if not the equal of her Catholicism, both misfortunate miscomprehensions of the real world. After seeing Dances with Wolves, my wife was touched by the plight of the American Indian. Sharing that with her business-driven ex-father-in-law, he shared his bloated bromide that if the Indian was not smart enough to invent the locomotive then he had to face the consequences. Survival of the fittest — not ethically the best — was in his smug and smarmy response. This unadulterated belief in a system goes far in explaining the meanness of spirit in this country, at least. Our present day politics clearly is contaminated by this intransigence, this hard and harsh way of seeing the less fortunate, the poor, the very earth we trod as not fit for the “better” inhabitants. As of this date not one of the stock traders responsible for the 2008 market collapse is under indictment.The American mind is as dull as our sensitivities.
You cannot escape it. The human animal loves constructs, religious and economic ways of viewing the world and like a good lemming will follow it to and over the cliff. The spread of Islam, the Inquisition, the conquering of the Americas and the enslavement of the indigenous populations, the almost eradication of the Aborigines in Australia, the gruesome and destructive Leninist rule of Communism in Russia, the Great Famine in Ireland, all of these set forth from imperial, ideological and religious motivations. Ideology is the bane of mankind, for it allows for no compromise. The color gray is forever banned. Man is one of the lower animals a reasonable close reading of history will tell you. It goes a far way to explain the rise of a Father Coughlin and a Glenn Beck. The rejection of intelligence brings about the malicious malarkey of a Palin and Bachmann. Parties have now morphed into ideologies. The contamination of the free press or media is rife. Fox News becomes Fox Views, an arm of the conservative right, “fair and balanced” as its sleazy slogan. We are living in a period in which newer shibboleths are being created, newer fears, a period in which causes and ideas are accepted as superior to real human beings and their lives, a period in which social cruelty is viewed as necessarily pragmatic, to wit, cut classes in art as they are electives and not as rigorously required in an industralized society such as physics and mathematics. We view the human mind as a muscle which it is not and art and its varied expressions as superfluous. The Philistines now rule.
We are a society in decline, reminiscent so much of the attenutated last years of the Roman Empire, overextended in its provinces, inflation running rampant, social and sexual excess, the decay emanating from political and social rot. Answers, especially political ones, are offered up as if chiseled from stone; reflective thinking cast aside as effete; reasonableness has fled; and the very human ability of denial has taken front and center, for in this human defense mechanism the unemployed and the poor, the disenfranchised in this very affluent country can be dispensed with from mind which allows the dealing with abstractions and generalizations to hold sway. We reify capitalism as if it is deity.
The corruptive thing about human beings is that they abstract humanity itself and fall into ideas and causes as the “real” reality. We dispense with social justice for at this time it is not the kind of abstraction that counts — such as the budget, the debt ceiling, big government, abortion and the environment (or as O’Reilly recently and famously said, that we should leave it to god, not scientists, to take care of, only he can control or master it. Galileo wouldn’t stand a chance with this religious relic.) Here is the effect of his religious “education,” or shall we say conditioning. Project and blame it on outside forces, as the Greeks projected themselves on to the stars and constellations, giving their deities very real human flaws. The abyssmal tasteless “tastemaker,” Donald Trump, brings to bear his capitalistic bloated self and advocates birther rubbish about Obama’s birth, making him rise in the Republican polls as a possible candidate in 2012. It says so much about the system, the advocates of the system, its leaders (I don’t need a leader. Do you?) and the American people, in part, who swallow this nonsense and believe it to be right, correct, truly American. It also explains how Trump brings to the table all the attributes of a businessman, a man who is famous for making deals, and an absolute asshole. Decades ago before we completely deteriorated he would have been laughed off the stage; we only had Nixon and HUAC to deal with.
So what is to be done? I answer for myself. At this moment one of my fantasy options is to flee this country and settle in another corrupt society, for it will be no better; however, it will give me some succor to know that the hypocrisies of this democracy will be avoided. Nothing worse than the hypocrisy of a democracy, for it has the insufferable taste of self-righteousness. Even a hospital patient has the right to a change of linen. In the years left to me I want to view America as an ex-pat, for that makes the rot even sharper for an American expatriate. For me America is a wallowing dinosaur in a tar pit. Too heavy to get out, too trapped to do anything else but sink. If you say this is un-American, there you go again. I am me, born to this planet and not a sucker for any government or nation state. Spend your surplus capital defending that abstraction. I have a life to live.
