DARK AGES AMERICA

The Vancouver Connection

2012-01-19T22:00:00.003-05:00

So there's this great guy based in Vancouver, Justin Ritchie, who runs a website called Extraenvironmentalist, and these folks did an interview with me a few weeks ago that just got put into a podcast. It's kind of long, but I think they did an excellent job of editing it:

http://www.extraenvironmentalist.com/episode-34-america-failed/

For those of you in the Vancouver area, please note that I'm going to be up there March 18-19, doing some lectures. I think one is going to be at the People's Co-op Bookstore (1391 Commercial Dr.) the evening of March 18; then another (although I might wind up giving the same lecture, I'm not sure) at the U of British Columbia at around noon on March 19, Woodward Hall, Room 1.

From there I'm going to drop down to San Francisco, March 21-22, although I haven't yet worked out the bookstore scene there. In any case, I'll do another post ca. March 1st, giving my travel details, so those of you within striking distance can attend these events, if you want.

Enjoy...mb

Entrevista con Gandhi

2012-01-17T10:07:00.003-05:00

Relax, amigos; it wasn't an interview with the Mahatma, who died when I was a kid. No, Gandhi also refers to a major bookstore in Mexico, and they interviewed me at the Feria Internacional de Libros in Guadalajara on November 26 of last year. The video just got posted online a few days ago; it's fairly short. I was also relieved that they didn't show my shoes and socks, since that occasioned such a firestorm of criticism when I posted the link for the TV Azteca video (below). As for my T-shirt (also the subject of some discussion last time), it says: "Nadar Te Da Vida"--swimming gives you life. Clearly, good advice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_oTAS0OSR8

Interview on TV Azteca

2012-01-05T23:02:00.002-05:00

OK, amigos: for all you hispanohablantes out there, here is the interview I did with Sabina Berman (no relation) on TV Azteca. Azteca taped it in Guadalajara on November 27, and it aired on Mexican television last night. Disfrutala!

http://www.tvazteca.com/capitulos/shalala/88195/el-pensador-morris-berman

The Only Life There Is

2011-12-23T20:05:00.002-05:00

As 2011 draws to a close, here's a little something to reflect on, in terms of a group purpose for all you NMIs and Wafers.

Remember that 1990 Kevin Costner film, "Dances With Wolves"? In it, the Sioux holy man, Kicking Bird, says to Costner (whose Sioux name is Dances With Wolves), "The path that matters most is the path of a true human being." I know everyone here, in their own way, is struggling to follow that path; and I'm hoping that collectively, we've created some sort of refuge here, to support each other in doing that. The context, as we all know, doesn't make it easy: not just having a president who has no problem signing into law a bill that makes it possible for him to snatch up anyone he doesn't like and throw him or her into a black hole forever; but having a populace who couldn't care less about that, or about anything, really, except the next dollar and the next electronic toy. Rejecting mainstream American values in favor of those of a true human being is not easy in these times; but as all of you know, What else is there? For those of us here, this is the only life there is.

May the Great Spirit bless you all.

mb

The Poetry of Kurt Vonnegut

2011-12-11T18:17:00.003-05:00

A few years back, when he was still alive (obviously), Kurt Vonnegut published the following poem in the New Yorker, a tribute to his lifelong friend Joseph Heller. Here it is:

JOE HELLER

True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, "Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel 'Catch-22'
has earned in its entire history?"
And Joe said, "I've got something he can never have."
And I said, "What on earth could that be, Joe?"
And Joe said, "The knowledge that I've got enough."
Not bad! Rest in peace!

Interview With Suzi Weissman

2011-12-10T00:56:00.004-05:00

This was a short interview held yesterday (Dec. 9) with KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Pacifica Radio. The program is called "Beneath the Surface," and the part that features yours truly begins about 43 minutes into the show. Link as follows:

http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/index.php

Go to Friday, December 9, 2011, 5:00 p.m., and click on 'play'.

Response to Douglas Dowd's Review of WAF

2011-12-06T14:18:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends:

Counter Punch just (today, Dec. 6) published a review of Why America Failed by Douglas Dowd, a man I actually admire greatly, and one of America's leading economists. While I appreciated the review, I was greatly concerned about his misunderstanding and mischaracterization of ch. 4 of the book, the chapter on the Civil War. It seems to me he missed the nuance of the argument; a nuance that Amazon reviewers of the book, for example, did not fail to grasp. In any case, I just sent the following letter to Alexander Cockburn, the editor of Counter Punch, asking if he would run it in response, so that CP readers would have my side of the story. As follows:

I very much appreciate Professor Dowd taking the time and trouble to write a lengthy review of my most recent book, a review that is quite comprehensive. But I do want to respond to it, since I have a serious concern over what I feel is a misunderstanding of chapter 4. I make it explicit in that chapter that I do not condone slavery, that I don't regard it as a small thing in American history, and that the Civil War had to be fought to end it. But, following Eugene Genovese's work (which I regard as quite masterly), there is another side to the South besides that, and which the North never wanted to appreciate (to this day). This was the only political formation in US history that was opposed to laissez-faire capitalism and its accompanying way of life, that was in the alternative tradition of Thoreau et al., but that also had capability of being more than just exhortatory. That slavery was entangled, in the South, with a relaxed way of life is, as I note, part of the maddening paradox of the whole thing: that the worst of the South, and the best of the South, were not separable in practice. But they are separable at least in theory, which is very significant, to my mind; because one can and should, as Genovese does, rescue the South from being seen in a monolithic and one-dimensional way.

A familiar problem in this regard is the danger of what is known as "Whig history”: the belief that the people of the past should have had our present wisdom and insight, and recognized that things were supposedly moving toward our present enlightened state. Although, as I state, slavery was rather an anomaly by 1860, it wasn't totally so, on a world scale. Lots of societies had abolished slavery, but many hadn't; and the slow, noncapitalist way of life, in one form or another, was—as C. Vann Woodward pointed out—the world norm at that time (Northern American and Northern Europe being the obvious exceptions). Southerners were steeped in the Bible, which approves of slavery at a number of points; slavery was also enshrined in the Constitution. The fact is that very few individuals are able to live outside their time, including those of us today. Still, as I explicitly say, the Civil War had to be fought to get rid of slavery (although some historians claim it would have petered out soon enough without the war; I tend to doubt it, myself).

It also seems to me that an important aspect of chapter 4 is its discussion of the Northern destruction of the South as fitting into the pattern/narrative of Americans always needing an enemy, and as always regarding that enemy as “savages”--whether Native Americans, Mexicans, Southerners, or Vietnamese. The “scorched earth” policy of the North has been the norm, “shock and awe” in Iraq only being its latest manifestation. I would argue that it is crucial for Americans to start making these connections.

In a word, I believe the argument of chapter 4 is a fairly nuanced one, and I feel sad--and worried--that Professor Dowd missed this, that he was able to see my analysis in only one way, and to see the South through a very stereotypical lens. When all is said and done, nuance and paradox are not the same thing as “contradiction.”

--Morris Berman

Interview with Bob McChesney

2011-12-04T17:27:00.001-05:00

This is a call-up show that Bob runs out of WILL-AM, local NPR station in Champaign-Urbana: "Media Matters". It aired today (Dec. 4).

http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/show/december-4th-2011/

La longue durée

2011-12-03T16:52:00.003-05:00

La longue durée is an expression used by the Annales School of French historians to indicate an approach that gives priority to long-term historical structures over short-term events. The phrase was coined by Fernand Braudel in an article he published in 1958. Basically, the Annales historians held that the short-term time-scale is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist, whereas la longue durée concentrates on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures. Thus beneath the twists and turns of any economic system, wrote Braudel, which can seem like major changes to the people living through them, lie "old attitudes of thought and action, resistant frameworks dying hard, at times against all logic." An important derivative of the Annales research is the work of the World Systems Analysis school, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Christopher Chase-Dunn, which similarly focuses on long-term structures: capitalism, in particular.

The “arc” of capitalism, according to WSA, is about 600 years long, from 1500 to 2100. It is our particular (mis)fortune to be living through the beginning of the end, the disintegration of capitalism as a world system. It was mostly commercial capital in the sixteenth century, evolving into industrial capital in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then moving on to financial capital—money created by money itself, and by speculation in currency—in the twentieth and twenty-first. In dialectical fashion, it will be the very success of the system that eventually does it in.

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time the medieval world began to come apart and be replaced by the modern one. In the classic study of the period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga depicted the time as one of depression and cultural exhaustion—like our own age, not much fun to live through. One reason for this is that the world is literally perched over an abyss (brilliantly depicted at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest). What is on deck, so to speak, is largely unknown, and to have to hover over the unknown for a long time is, to put it colloquially, a bit of a drag. The same thing was true at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire as well (on the ruins of which the feudal system slowly arose).

I was musing on all of this stuff last week when I happened to run across a remarkable essay by Naomi Klein, “Capitalism vs. the Climate” (The Nation, 28 November 2011). In what appears to be something of a radical shift for her, she chastises the Left for not understanding what the Right does correctly perceive: that the whole climate change debate is a serious threat to capitalism. The Left, she says, wants to soft-pedal the implications; it wants to say that environmental protection is compatible with economic growth, that it is not a threat to capital or labor. It wants to get everyone to buy a hybrid car, for example (which I have personally compared to diet cheesecake), or use more efficient light bulbs, or recycle, as if these things were adequate to the crisis at hand. But the Right is not fooled: it sees Green as a Trojan horse for Red, the attempt “to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.” It believes—correctly—that the politics of global warming is inevitably an attack on the American Dream, on the whole capitalist structure. Thus Larry Bell, in Climate of Corruption, argues that environmental politics is essentially about “transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth distribution”; and British blogger James Delinpole notes that “Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, [and] regulation.”

What Naomi is saying to the Left, in effect, is: Why fight it? These nervous nellies on the Right are—right! Those of us on the Left can’t keep talking about compatibility of limits-to-growth and unrestrained greed, or claiming that climate action is “just one issue on a laundry list of worthy causes vying for progressive attention,” or urging everyone to buy a Prius. Folks like Thomas Friedman or Al Gore, who “assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying ‘green’ products and creating clever markets in pollution”—corporate green capitalism, in a word—are simply living in denial. “The real solutions to the climate crisis,” she writes, “are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate power.”

In one of the essays in A Question of Values (“conspiracy vs. Conspiracy in American History”), I lay out some of the “unconscious programs” buried in the American psyche from our earliest days, programs that account for most of our so-called conscious behavior. These include the notion of an endless frontier—a world without limits—and the ideal of extreme individualism—you do not need, and should not need, anyone’s help to “make it” in the world. Combined, the two of these provide a formula for enormous capitalist power and inevitable capitalist collapse (hence, the dialectical dimension of it all). Of this, Naomi writes:

“The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in dominance over nature but in respect for natural cycles of renewal—and acutely sensitive to natural limits....These are profoundly challenging revelations for all of us raised on Enlightenment ideals of progress.” (This is exactly what I argued in The Reenchantment of the World; nice to see it all coming around again.) “Real climate solutions,” she continues, “are ones that steer [government] interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.” Hence, she concludes, the powers that be have reason to be afraid, and to deny the data on global warming, for what is really required at this point is the end of the free-market ideology. And, I would add, the end of the arc of capitalism referred to above. It’s going to be (is) a colossal fight, not only because the powers that be want to hang on to their power, but because the arc and all its ramifications have given their class Meaning with a capital M for 500+ years. This is what the OWS protesters need to tell the 1%: Your lives are a mistake. This is what “a new civilizational paradigm” finally means.

Naomi then provides us with a list of six changes that must occur for this new paradigm to come into being, including Reining in Corporations, Ending the Cult of Shopping, and Taxing the Rich and Filthy. I found myself writing “good luck” in the margins of much of this discussion. These things are not going to happen (think Wal-Mart on Black Friday), and what we probably need instead is a series of major conferences on why they won’t happen. Although the answer is already embedded in her essay: vested interests, in both the economic and psychological sense, have every reason to maintain the status quo. After all, no one wants to have to admit that their lives are a mistake.

In terms of recommendations, then, the essay is rather weak. But it offers something very important by way of analysis, and also by implication: Everything is related to everything else. Psychology, the economy, the environmental crisis, our daily mode of living, the dumbing down of America, the pathetic fetish over cell phones and electronic gadgets, the crushing debt of student loans, the inanities (and popularity) of Ann Coulter and Ayn Rand, the farce of electoral politics, the box office sales of violent movies, the epidemics of depression and obesity—these are ultimately not separate spheres of human or natural activity. They are interconnected, and this means that things will not get fixed piecemeal. “New civilizational paradigm” means it’s all or nothing; there really is no in-between, no diet cheesecake to be had. As Naomi says, it’s not about single “issues” anymore.

What then, can we expect, as the arc of capitalism comes to a close? This is where Naomi shifts from unlikely recommendations to hard-nosed reality:

“The corporate quest for scarce resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land in Africa will continue to be grabbed to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations. Drought and famine will continue to be used as a pretext to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt. We will attempt to transcend peak oil and gas by using increasingly risky technologies to extract the last drops, turning ever larger swaths of our globe into sacrifice zones. We will fortress our borders and intervene in foreign conflicts over resources, or start those conflicts ourselves. ‘Free-market climate solutions,’ as they are called, will be a magnet for speculation, fraud and crony capitalism, as we are already seeing with carbon trading and the use of forests as carbon offsets. And as climate change begins to affect not just the poor but the wealthy as well, we will increasingly look for techno-fixes to turn down the temperature, with massive and unknowable risks.

“As the world warms, the reigning ideology that tells us it’s everyone for themselves, that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature, will take us to a very cold place indeed.”

To put it bluntly, the scale of change required cannot happen without a massive implosion of the system. This was true at the end of the Roman Empire, at the end of the Middle Ages, and it is true today. In the case of the Roman Empire, as I discuss in The Twilight of American Culture, there was the emergence of monastic orders that began to preserve the treasures of Graeco-Roman civilization. My question in that book was: Can something similar happen today? Naomi writes:

“The only wild card is whether some countervailing popular movement will step up to provide a viable alternative to this grim future. That means not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—this time, embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance and cooperation rather than hierarchy.” She believes that the OWS movement embodies this; that they have taken “aim at the underlying values of rampant greed and individualism that created the economic crisis, while embodying...radically different ways to treat one another and relate to the natural world.”

Is this true? Three things to consider at this pt:

1. I personally haven’t been down (actually, up) to Zuccotti Park, but most of what I see on the Web, including very favorable reportage of OWS, seems to suggest that the goal is a more equitable American Dream, not the abolition of the American Dream. The desire is that the pie be cut up more fairly. I don’t have the impression that the protesters are saying that the pie, tout court, is rotten. But I could be wrong.

2. The Annales historians, along with the World Systems Analysis folks, have been accused of projecting an image of “history without people.” In other words, these schools tend to see individuals as somewhat irrelevant to the historical process, which they analyze in terms of “historical forces.” There is some truth to this, but “historical forces” can become a bit mystical. Just as it is forces that motivate people, so it is people that enact or manifest those forces. I mean, someone has to do something for history to occur, and at least the OWS crowd is doing just that. My own prediction is that the protest movement will probably melt into a kind of permanent teach-in, where Americans can go to learn about a “new civilizational paradigm,” if that is indeed being taught, and if there are a sufficient number of people interested in learning about it. This is basically the “new monastic option” I talk about in the Twilight book, and it reinforces the history of the marginalized alternative tradition discussed in Why America Failed. Innocuous, perhaps...but in the fullness of time, maybe not. After all, as the system collapses, alternatives are going to become increasingly attractive; and just as 2008 is not the last crash we are going to live through, so OWS is not the last protest movement we are going to witness. The two sides go hand in hand, and ultimately—I’m talking thirty to fifty years, but maybe less—the weight of the arc of capitalism will be too onerous to sustain itself. In la longue durée, one is far smarter betting on the alternative worldview than on capitalism.

3. That being said (ceci dit, in French), the WSA folks are probably right in their argument that historically speaking, effective revolt tends to emerge from the periphery rather than the core. The core countries are the ones that dominate the globe with their power, economy, and ideology. They are crumbling from within, again because of the very pursuit of that power etc.; but it remains very hard to confront them directly—they’ve got the guns, and the police and military are not likely to defect. Thus WSA claims that the most effective counterattack is at the edges of the empire, not at the center of it. Mexico, for example, has no clout vs. the US because it is too close; 80% of its manufactured goods are sold to the US market. But resistance to the World Bank and the IMF is rife at greater geographical distances: Ecuador, for example, or Bolivia. According to the core-periphery argument, we should be expecting protest movements to emerge in places like these, where sympathy for the US is not exactly great. Some of it might come in the form of terrorism; that’s what 9/11 was all about, after all. (“If you terrorize other people, eventually they are going to terrorize you back.”—Rev. Jeremiah Wright) But some of it might just consist of pursuing the alternative, the new civilizational paradigm; just living in a different way, along the lines Naomi Klein suggests. And as the old way of life dies, a new way of life comes into being.

(c)Morris Berman, 2011

Interview With Tom Kiely

2011-11-17T18:57:00.002-05:00

OK gang, here's another one: I did this two days ago (Nov. 15) with Tom Kiely, the host of a show called the INN World Radio Report. He's based in Austin. As follows:

http://innradio.com/INN_Radio_2011-11-15_Morris_Berman.mp3

There's a bit of (inevitable) overlap with the other interviews, I believe, but it may not be too bad if you've got a glass of Scotch in hand while you listen. OK, a bottle of Scotch, maybe.

The Seattle Lecture

2011-11-15T14:47:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends:

Here is the link for the talk I gave at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Nov. 4, as recorded by TVW:

http://www.tvw.org/media/mediaplayer.cfm?evid=2011110059

The same lecture was recorded by C-SPAN at Barnes & Noble Westwood in LA on Nov. 8, and will eventually run on BookTV; but I have no idea when that will occur.

I also want to bring your attention to the following upcoming events, for those of you in striking distance (so to speak). I'll also post links for these later on, if I have them:

Nov. 19, 5:00 p.m. est: firedoglake.com, online
Dec. 2, 5:00 p.m. pst: Suzi Weissman, KPFK, Los Angeles
Dec. 4, 1:00 p.m. cst: Robert McChesney, WILL, Urbana IL

Thank you all again for your support, and--enjoy!

mb

Interview With Thom Hartmann

2011-11-08T13:04:00.003-05:00

This interview, which Thom did with me on 7 November 2011, is in two parts, and can be found at the following links:

Conversations with Great Minds with Morris Berman, Part 1. Why America Failed
Conversations with Great Minds with Morris Berman, Part 2. Why America Failed

Third Interview with Ken Rose

2011-11-05T03:20:00.001-04:00

Go to www.pantedmonkey.org and scroll down to 10/31/11. Enjoy!

Berman Speaks; Millions Riot

2011-10-25T16:38:00.002-04:00

In the wake of a 40-minute interview with Morris Berman on KPFT-FM in Houston last night, riots broke out in a number of cities across the country. In New York, OWS protesters flooded the offices of several major banks, hauling off the CEOs and shipping them out to The Hague, where they now await trials before the World Court for financial war crimes. The NYPD assisted enthusiastically in this effort, pepper spraying the bank officials before beating them senseless, while yelling, "We are servants of the people, not the ruling class." Meanwhile, protesters in Zuccotti Park unveiled a number of interesting banners, including the following:

-LLOYD BLANKFEIN'S HEAD LOOKS LIKE KIM KARDASHIAN'S ASS
-IF U OWN A CELL PHONE URA JACKASS
-VIVA ZAPATA
-RIDDLEY WALKER WAS RIGHT
-LOOK WHAT THEY DID TO MY BRAIN, MA
-PROCOL HARUM FOR PRESIDENT
-STAGE DELI, WE LOVE U
-MOST AMERICANS HAVE GROUND CHUCK IN THEIR HEADS

For those of you who missed this earth-shaking broadcast, here is the link:

HTTP://archive.kpft.org/mp3/kpft_111024_190009monitor.mp3

Please note that the Revolution will not be televised.

Thank you and good night.

My Schedule, and Other Stuff

2011-10-20T19:15:00.005-04:00

OK you all, time for an update on what's going on with WAF and related material.

First, before I forget: my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, has been out of print for a while due to a publisher's miscalculation, sad to say. They didn't order enough books, sold out what they had (at least that's encouraging), and then had to order more from the printer...which is taking a whole lotta time. Anyway, for those of you wanting to read it, I'm hoping it will be once again listed as Available on Amazon before too long. Stay tuned.

And speaking of Available on Amazon: WAF now is, I'm happy to say. Somebody already took the trouble to write a rather hilarious review, in fact. So those of you who got in on the freebie offer or pre-ordered the book during the past month, should be getting your copy in the mail soon enough. Everybody else, please order one for the kitchen, one for the bathroom, and maybe one for the foyer. In addition, if the spirit moves you, and you can spare a minute, I would be forever in your debt if you could write a review on Amazon. I'm expecting to get murdered in the mainline hardcopy press, so a few good online reviews might help offset the damage. Thank you!

Moving right along...let me list my speaking/traveling/radio etc. schedule for the next month, so those of you within striking distance, who want to attend or tune in, can do so. As follows:

Oct. 31, 12 noon pdt: Ken Rose, KOWS, Occidental CA
Nov. 4, 7:00 p.m. pdt: Elliott Bay Books, Seattle
Nov. 7, 10:30 a.m. pst: Alex Jones Show, Los Angeles
Nov. 7, 4:30 p.m. pst: Thom Hartmann, Los Angeles
Nov. 8, 7:00 p.m. pst: Barnes & Noble Westwood, Los Angeles
Nov. 19, 5:00 p.m. est: firedoglake.com, online
Dec. 2, 5:00 p.m. pst: Suzi Weissman, KPFK, Los Angeles
Dec. 4, 1:00 p.m. cst: Robert McChesney, WILL, Urbana IL

That's it for now. There may be a few additions down the road; I'll keep you posted. In the meantime: Thank you all for your interest and support; it means a lot.

Why America Failed: An Overview

2011-10-18T11:58:00.002-04:00

I got the idea for the book from a number of sources, but one of the most important was a book published in 2004 called Freedom Just Around the Corner, by Walter McDougall at the University of Pennsylvania, a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. I want to stress that McDougall is a very centrist historian; there is nothing left-wing or radical about him. But in the opening pages of his book he says that what most characterizes America, going back to the late sixteenth century, is hustling. American English, he writes, has more than 200 synonyms or related expressions for the word ‘swindle’, and when two Americans get together, they pretty much understand that the other person has an angle or agenda and is trying to promote it. We are a people relentlessly on the make, we are all encouraged to develop “The Brand Called You” and market it. It reminds me of the comment made by the comedian Chris Rock, that in the United States, when you are talking to someone, you are actually talking to that person’s agent.

We Americans don’t realize what a strange, and indeed perverse, way that is to live, because if everyone is doing it, it just becomes normal. But Paul Fussell, in his book Class, has a very low opinion of this supposedly normal way of life: “In the United States,” he writes, “everything is coated with a fine layer of fraud.” I suspect most Americans experience the truth of this on some level, and I think it is why we always rate low on international happiness polls: very few of our relationships are real, including our relationship to our work, and consequently our lives are pretty empty. We attempt to fill that emptiness with cars and houses and computers and cell phones, but in the end, it doesn’t work. As one of Jimmy Carter’s advisers put it thirty-two years ago, the United States is “a goal-oriented society without goals.” “More” is not a real goal; it has no actual content.

The original title of Why America Failed was Capitalism and Its Discontents. My publisher was afraid that that sounded too academic, and insisted that I change it. Probably a good decision; I don’t know. But Capitalism and Its Discontents does reflect the thesis of the book: that although there was always an alternative tradition to hustling, with one exception America never took it, and instead it marginalized those alternative voices. The exception was the antebellum South, which raises real questions as to the origins of the Civil War, which were not about slavery as a moral issue, no matter how much we like to believe that. As Robin Blackburn writes in his recent book, The American Crucible, antislavery ideas were far more about notions of progress than about ones of racial equality. That’s a whole other discussion, however, and I have it out in the book for an entire chapter. But the main narrative here is that from Captain John Smith and the Puritan divines through Thoreau and Emerson to Lewis Mumford and Vance Packard and John Kenneth Galbraith to Jimmy Carter, this tradition of capitalism’s discontents never really stood a chance. It never amounted to anything more than spiritual exhortation. Reaganomics, also known as greedism, was not born in 1981; more like 1584. The result is that for more than four centuries now, America has had one value system, and it is finally showing itself to be extremely lopsided and self-destructive. Our political and cultural system never let fresh air in; it squelched the alternatives as quaint or feeble-minded. Appearances to the contrary, this is what “democracy” always meant in America—the freedom to become rich. This ideology is so powerful that we don’t even recognize it as such, but it certainly explains why socialism was never able to gain a foothold here, because the ideology has been the same for rich and poor alike. As John Steinbeck once remarked, in the United States the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” In any event, the result is that we are now in a situation of irreversible collapse. The American Dream, as the Cornell University economist Douglas Dowd wrote thirty-seven years ago, is a twisted one. We treat Bill Gates as some kind of national hero, when the truth is that any system that allows one person to accumulate $50 billion, and leaves fully two-thirds of its population living from paycheck to paycheck (assuming they can even find a job, that is), is pretty sick. As many of us know—from Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times to the Wall Street protesters—in terms of collective wealth, the top 1% of the country owns more than the bottom 90%. This puts our social inequality on a par with Egypt and Tunisia, in fact.

Consider the fact that every religion, and every civilization worth the name, has as its central tenet the notion that you are, in fact, your brother’s keeper. But the ‘hustling’ way of life enshrines just the opposite: it says that virtue consists of personal success in an opportunistic environment, and that if you can screw the other guy on your way to the top, more power to you. “Looking Out for No. 1” is what really needs to be on the American dollar. As Jerry Seinfeld’s lawyer in the final episode of the series tells him: “You don’t have to help anybody; that’s what this country’s all about!” The problem is that if you live by the dollar, you die by the dollar. That’s what’s going on today. In fact, perhaps the really interesting question is not why we are finally coming apart, which strikes me as being more or less obvious, but how we managed to stay together for this long. Competition cannot be the glue of a society, because by definition it’s an anti-glue. Thus David Ehrenfeld, Professor of Biology at Rutgers University, recently wrote: “A society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.” There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.” Frankly, if I could summarize the argument of Why America Failed in a single phrase, this would be it. Unless the Wall Street protests manage to turn things around in a fundamental way, “They eat each other” is going to be our epitaph.

Of course, establishment journals and newspapers are going to dismiss Why America Failed as the ravings of the political Left—that is, if they review it at all. Of this, I have no doubt. Unless you are singing in the chorus, you don’t get to have a voice. As Chris Hedges repeatedly points out, any writer who formulates a critique of the U.S. that goes down to the root of things has been marginalized, rendered invisible. America has very little appetite for self-examination, as our history shows. But there is a good bit of irony in this, in that the line of analysis developed in my book has some very distinguished antecedents, going back way before myself or Walter McDougall. These antecedents include three of the greatest historians that America has ever produced.

1. Richard Hofstadter, in The American Political Tradition (1948), says that America was a market-oriented society from birth; that it never went through a feudal period; and the result is that all of the country has been united in a common political tradition that is fiercely capitalistic and individualistic. “A democracy of cupidity,” he once called the United States. “America doesn’t have ideologies,” he added; “rather, it is one.”

2. C. Vann Woodward, in an essay written in 1953, refers to the “Ironic contrast between our noble purposes and our sordid results,” and adds that “economic systems, whatever their age, their respectability, or their apparent stability, are transitory, and any nation which elects to stand or fall upon one ephemeral institution has already determined its fate.” A seer, that guy was.

3. Finally, Louis Hartz, in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), developed the idea of “fragment societies,” ones that, like ours, were founded on fragments of European ones, and that take their entire character from just one of those fragments. America, he says, was founded by the English middle class, a class that possessed a liberal, aggressive, entrepreneurial spirit characteristic of the bourgeoisie. America, he writes, was never really a society at all, but merely the embodiment of a fragment, a specific interest that from the first dominated the entire political landscape. What does the phrase “We the People” really mean, after all? The business of America, as Calvin Coolidge famously put it, is business. In the history of the United States, nothing much else has really mattered, and that chicken is finally coming home to roost. If you can’t or won’t understand your own narrative, then there is no way you can change it, and there exists very little evidence today that we will. “Americans never learn,” wrote Gore Vidal a few decades ago; “it’s part of our charm.”

©Morris Berman, 2011

Energy vs. Analysis

2011-10-12T04:21:00.002-04:00

Dear DAA65:

If you've been following the discussion on this blog, the essay below will not contain very much new information; and I agree that we've probably worked over Steve Jobs ad nauseam, and should probably let the poor bugger rest in peace. However, I wanted to collect my thoughts in a more coherent form, so as to present what I feel is a generally ignored slant on the Wall St. protests. Or at least, I can't find any mention of this thesis anywhere, which is hardly surprising. The idea of a Stage 1 and Stage 2 of protest movements, and the possibility that the "screen culture" and the social media promote the first and then undercut the second, is to me an intriguing possibility, and I'm thinking it may even be correct. But that it would not be raised in the media (whether virtual or hard copy) should hardly come as a shock, given the enormous "religious" pull of technology as a supposed panacea in American history--as dear to the Left as it is to the Right. Anyway, I offer this reorganization of my previous scribblings as food for thought. As follows:

Like most folks reading this, I want the Wall St. protests to succeed, though at this point I'm not exactly clear as to what that would look like. Minimally, the arrest and trials (preferably at the World Court in The Hague) of numerous CEOs for financial terrorism; confiscation of the wealth of the top 1% and the redistribution of it among the rest of us; immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan; reduction of the Pentagon budget by 90%; massive reparations, plus heartfelt apologies, to Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, and several other countries, for the horror we visited upon them through the CIA and our foreign policy; and so on. In terms of what needs to be done in order to turn America around, these are admittedly very small steps—baby steps, really—but one has to begin somewhere, after all. However, this is to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, as far as Occupy Wall Street goes, anything might happen. Historically speaking, demonstrations that seemed tame suddenly caught fire, as in the case of, say, the Russian Revolution. So it’s hard to predict the outcome of these protests in any definitive way.

That being said, I confess it doesn't seem likely that these protests can reverse 400 years of a culture based on “hustling,” as I call it in my most recent book, Why America Failed, or the post-Civil War consolidation of corporate America. Which brings to mind a quote from Lincoln: we must "disenthrall" ourselves, he said. Are we now clutching at straws, and getting all enthralled? Look at the enthrallment over Obama in 2008, and how he turned out to be the very opposite of what he said he was. (Basically, a George Bush who can speak English.) I hear Michael Moore saying how these protests will sweep the country, and I think: but you thought Obama was going to sweep the country. Maybe it's time to look at our tendency toward enthrallment, and figure out why “sweeping” is not very likely.

A friend of mine, a journalist, was down at the Washington, DC, protests a few days ago and gave a talk about formulating a new foreign policy for the United States. Only 50 people attended, he told me, and of those only two were under 60 years of age. This for me is an ominous sign. Where can these protests wind up, if they are only about euphoria and youthful energy, and if a sober analysis of American history and our situation today is not a factor in the current uprising?

So much is made of the role of the “social media” in these types of uprisings; I remain skeptical on a number of grounds. I mean, Facebook didn’t play much of a role that I know of in Paris during 1789; and where is the Egyptian “revolution” now? But it goes much deeper than this. Even if we credit the social media with being able to mobilize youthful energy, this is only Stage 1 of any successful protest. Stage 2 is really being able to know and analyze what this country is about, or what a new US foreign policy might consist of; and on this score, the very things that made Stage 1 possible now ironically serve to make Stage 2 extremely difficult, if not impossible. For it is because of these media, and the cumulative impact of television and the Internet in our lives, that young Americans are literally unable to think. They don't know what the difference is between information and knowledge, nor do they really understand what an argument is; and thanks to the new telecommunications technologies, they now have the attention span of a gnat. Printed books take time; they are designed for thinking and reflection, whereas screens are designed for scanning, for bouncing around, for “Whassup, dude?” And if these folks should happen to attend a lecture, they typically sit there and check their e-mail or text-message their friends. In such a context, Stage 2 of the protest is not likely to come about.

All this current worship of Steve Jobs is a symptom of massive cultural dysfunction and decay, in my view; but not just mine. There is by now a large literature on the damage caused by the Net, Google, Facebook, and so on, even detailing the negative impact they have on synaptic connections in the human brain (cf. Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, Christine Rosen, et al.). Nevertheless, I think we are still a long way from really grasping the incredible damage wrought on ourselves, and our culture, by the googlification of American society; from understanding that Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg have been little more than cultural undertakers.

This is something I deal with in Chapter 3 of Why America Failed, devoted to the history of American technology. One can of course argue that there are good and bad technologies, or good and bad uses of technology; this is the conventional wisdom on the subject. But the truth is that technology is never neutral, never value-free: as Marshall McLuhan (among others) argued decades ago, any particular technology carries a value system with it, and introduced into a culture it will change the nature of that culture quite profoundly. In short order, thanks to Jobs & Co., we've gone from a literate culture that had a human depth, and a sense of self, to a screen culture that has neither. All that remains is the flickering image of the moment—not exactly the stuff of revolution, or even serious protest. Really, what could be more congenial to the American corporate state? If I could get myself appointed Dictator of America (benevolent, of course), my first order of business would be to require that (a) everyone own a cell phone, and be using it almost constantly; (b) everyone be signed up on Facebook and Twitter; and (c) everyone be taking Prozac or Zoloft on a daily basis. I would reign in perpetuity, no doubt about it.

©Morris Berman, 2011

Dumping the American Dream

2011-10-06T19:42:00.005-04:00

Many years ago, as an undergraduate at Cornell, I heard about a radical economics professor, Douglas Dowd, who stood out from the pack and gave riveting courses. As a mathematics major, I didn't have much time for social science classes, so I had to miss Prof. Dowd's teaching. I really regret it now, but lately I've been trying to make up for lost time by dipping into his work. The Twisted Dream, published in 1974, is a history of US capitalism since 1776, and makes for fascinating reading.

At one point Dowd quotes from Thorstein Veblen's The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), that "history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation." Dowd goes on to talk about the destruction of the environment and of our cities, stating that "growth for its own sake, production for its own sake, consumption for its own sake, and power for the sake of continuing the rest--these are the drives that have shaped the modern world, whose leader is presently the United States." He continues:

"We can seek to live at peace with our environment, our fellow human beings, and ourselves in an urban and industrial civilization. We can, but not so long as the bulk of Americans continue to strive for profit and power and an overflowing cornucopia of increasingly contrived and expensive consumer goods--strive as donkeys strive for carrots fixed beyond their noses. The bulk of Americans cannot achieve what they seek.

"The time has come to take thought, to reflect on what the genuine needs and pleasures of life are, and to find some symmetry between our ends and our means. Those ends are not mysterious, or the province of a few: we wish ourselves and our loved ones to eat well, to be comfortably clothed and housed, to learn through education what we can become and do, to be healthy, to enjoy nature and the works of the species; to have control over our lives. Each of these ends moves away from us, not closer, with each passing year. We count as our treasures what we have been socialized to count as treasures, though they defile our lives and make robots of us all: the automobile, the TV, the encapsulated suburban existence, the gleaming high buildings, the ever-rising GNP, 'fast' food. [To which we might add: the terrible legacy of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg--"heroes" only in an upside-down world.] We are moving in the wrong direction for human beings."

Nothing like telling it like it is, and I hope that the protesters on Wall St. and elsewhere understand that the proper goal for their movement is not extending the American Dream, but putting it to rest. As for Prof. Dowd: he is 92 years old and lives in Italy. Until very recently he was teaching classes on a p/t basis at the University of Modena. A truly great American figure, who understands what it means to live a genuine life.

(c)Morris Berman, 2011

Letter to the New Yorker

2011-10-02T21:45:00.002-04:00

Dear DAA-ers,

Below is the full text of a letter I'm about to submit to the New Yorker. Given the size allotted to the letters they print, I'm going to have to reduce it by about 50%; but no reason not to post the pre-cut version here, for you to read. As follows:

As a long-time subscriber to the magazine, I found the issue of September 12, 2011 one of the funnier ones I’ve had the pleasure of reading. First we have an essay by Adam Gopnik, arguing that “declinist” theories of history are misguided and/or illusory (“Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat”); then one by George Packer documenting the very real decline of the United States (“Coming Apart”). Packer even writes that after 9/11, “the deeper problem lay in an ongoing decline that was greater than any single event or policy.” But besides taking pot-shots at easy targets such as Oswald Spengler, Niall Ferguson, and Thomas Friedman/Michael Mandelbaum, Gopnik’s argument strikes me as being rather glib and superficial, and mistaken on a number of key points. I’ll cite only three:

1. The notion that for “declinist” historians, the catastrophe never quite arrives. Gopnik makes no mention of Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, or Jared Diamond’s Collapse, but it is common knowledge that history is a graveyard of empires and civilizations, and decline and fall is the one thing we can be absolutely sure of. “American exceptionalism” won’t save us now; in fact, it is a major factor in our decline.

2. This mistaken premise leads Gopnik to assert that the most recent declinist book (whatever it is) has to explain why the previous ones were wrong. But in fact, it’s not like predicting that the world will end on such-and-such a date; rather, being large-scale processes, declines take their time. They do not occur on, say, August 4, A.D. 476, at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. In addition, declinist works that discuss or focus on contemporary America include, inter alia, Andrew Hacker, The End of the American Era (1970); George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (1987); and my own trilogy (The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America, and Why America Failed), for which I certainly did not feel any need to “explain why the previous declinist books were wrong.” They weren’t wrong at all; rather, they can be seen to form one more-or-less continuous argument that the American empire is coming to a close.

3. Gopnik asserts that ever since Spengler, historians have found it necessary to show that the errors contributing to the decline were “part of some big, hitherto invisible pattern of decline.” The “saner” idea, he argues, is that “things were good and now they’re bad, and that they could get either better or worse, depending on what happens next.” Whose definition of sanity? The fact is that the writing of history does consist in finding or mapping patterns; and instead of citing Karl Popper’s “proof” against historicism, Gopnik would have done better to have referred to E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, which made short (and embarrassing) work of Popper’s so-called proof. Indeed, the belief that “history is just one damn thing after another” (Toynbee’s contemptuous characterization of his critics) is about as outworn as the Great Man theory of history.

There is, of course, the question of why Gopnik wants to refute declinism, which I suspect has a lot to do with not wanting to face the very real decline George Packer talks about. Garrison Keillor once wrote that “We have this ability in Lake Wobegon to look reality right in the eye and deny it.” Gopnik’s essay is a good example of this, it seems to me. The author may not be a declinist, but he is, quite clearly, a denialist.

The Wall Street Protests

2011-09-30T22:11:00.003-04:00

It began on September 17, and has now run for thirteen days. There are, perhaps, only a couple of hundred of them, but young people especially have shown up to protest the greed and corruption endemic to the American economy, epitomized by Wall Street financiers. The regular news media gave them almost no coverage; the NYPD overreacted with predictable violence. Many got arrested and hauled away, but the protest continues. Unions have pledged their support, and the movement is now spreading to other cities across the nation. Finally, it would seem, someone is standing up and saying No. Even more, “Go fuck yourself.”

I agree with Chris Hedges when he says that these folks are the best of society; I also think the crowd at Goldman Sachs and their ilk are the worst: bloodsuckers and leeches, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I hope the protest grows from 200 to 2 million, and affects every city in the land. I hope it succeeds…but this is where I start to have certain problems. What is, in fact, the goal? What would success look like in this case? It’s not altogether clear; and beyond a desire to have an economy not run by vampires, by a gangster elite, the protesters’ message is rather muddy.

On one level, it would be great if the protesters could put it on their signs, and say it directly to the American public: socialism; we want a socialist economy. It’s not exactly the way to win friends and influence people in the U.S., and I’m not sure that is what they really want anyway. But there’s at least this, that they want a fairer society, one that does not have a huge gulf between the top 1% and the rest of us. Some form of redistribution of wealth, that presumably would resurrect aspects of the New Deal that the GOP has striven to destroy since Ronald Reagan (and actually, before). After all, we have millions now thrown out of their homes, millions with no prospect of a job, millions living in tent cities and on bread lines, millions without any health insurance, and so on. Re-instigating things such as the Glass-Steagall Act of 1934, real union strength, collective bargaining, workers’ benefits—all of this would be to the good, and I’m assuming that this is on the protesters’ agenda.

The problem is that we did have all this once, and to be sure, it was a much fairer and healthier society; but it was still capitalism. This, as most historians will tell you, was FDR’s historic role: he wanted to save capitalism, and he did. In the end, the mental framework, that of a society and way of life based on greed, was still the same. It was just that with the New Deal there were some constraints in place, and it is those that were unraveled in the ensuing decades. But as I argue in Why America Failed, greed has been the touchstone of the American experiment since 1584, since the earliest colonization of the continent (for its resources); it didn’t suddenly emerge 400 years later with Ronald Reagan and Gordon Gekko. Asked, on one occasion, what it was that the working man wanted, labor leader Samuel Gompers was quite explicit: “More.” Socialism doesn’t envision a different type of system; it envisions the same system with the goodies spread around more evenly.

That some labor unions have indicated their support for the protesters is therefore not surprising. Nor am I condemning them: in the face of Reaganism and Gekkoism run riot, fighting against a 1%-99% split in the wealth is obviously necessary. But when the dust settles, it will still be the United States, with the 400-year-old ideology of the United States; even if we could get the New Deal back, the slogan would still be More. Even so-called progressives think the American Dream is where it’s at. They see no problem with “growth” at all. They just want to extend its benefits to everyone. But suppose—radical thought—that the American Dream was the problem, not the solution? Unfortunately, the ideology of the Dream, of an endless frontier, casts a long shadow over all of us, so that grasping this possibility is quite difficult even for the most intelligent Americans.

Case in point: an article in the 10 October 2011 edition of The Nation by Robert Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel entitled “Can a Movement Save the American Dream?” The authors rightly describe how the very rich have screwed the rest of us out of the A.D., and argue that we need to restore it—redistribute wealth and benefits so that every American can live it. But again, there is no recognition that this Dream is conceptually grounded in the notion of a world without limits; that it is the core of what America is and has always been about; and that it is (as a result) the rock upon which we are now foundering. In spite of the identification (or excoriation) of this ideological pathology by a rather long list of eminent historians, including David Potter, Louis Hartz, C. Vann Woodward, Richard Hofstadter, William Appleman Williams, and Jackson Lears, “progressives” just don’t get it, any more than neoliberals do. Writing in the New Republic nearly twenty years ago, Lears stated that “myths of progress continue to mesmerize intellectuals at all points on the political spectrum, from The Nation to the National Review.” Thus Williams repeatedly pointed out that the Dream was based on a program of endless economic expansion, which eventually made imperialism, and thus the suffering of millions, inevitable. Cornell University economist Douglas Dowd made his own opinion of our way of life explicit in a book he published in 1974: The Twisted Dream. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson argued many years ago, there is a great difference between the “ethics of maxima” and the “ethics of optima,” and the U.S. is definitely addicted to the former: “growth”. A more accurate word for it might be “cancer.” In recent times, only Jimmy Carter had the courage to tell the American people that this was the vision of those who were spiritually empty, and his audience wasted no time in voting him out of office in favor of a man who told them they could and should have it all; that the A.D. was Life Itself.

So I don’t really know what the protesters’ goals are, and I’m not sure they do either, beyond shipping Lloyd Blankfein out to Antarctica, to live among the penguins. The problem is that historically speaking, protest against the system is not really against the system as such. We like to talk in terms of a multicultural society, but women, blacks, Hispanics, union leaders, you name it: they all really share the same vision. The goal is to get my group a bigger cut of the pie; it’s not to suggest that the pie is rotten. The environmental movement excepted, there is very little thinking in America about getting beyond “growth” and “progress,” beyond a purely materialist-consumerist society, and this certainly applies to the poor as well. As John Steinbeck famously remarked, in the U.S. the poor regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

One protest leader who did understand the spiritual dimension lacking in all this was Martin Luther King. The story might be apocryphal, but one black colleague of mine told me that just before he died, King said to Harry Belafonte that he sometimes had the uneasy feeling that his activism was only serving to “herd people into a burning church.” Sure, he was saying: we might be able to get black people a larger share of the pie, of the American Dream; but the pie is an inferno, a hellish way of life.

Are the protesters saying that?

(c)Morris Berman, 2011

Jonathan Swift Revisited

2011-09-28T18:32:00.002-04:00

Readers of this blog may remember a post I did a while ago entitled “Fork in the Road,” briefly referring to the deleterious effects of screens on the brain. The bulk of the article, however, dealt with the effects of anti-depressant drugs, as discussed by Marcia Angell in two essays in the New York Review of Books that pulled no punches on the subject. One thing that particularly impressed me was the impact of the “better living through chemistry” model of mental health on our children. During 1987-2007, the stats of mental disability among children multiplied by a factor of 35, such that mental illness is now the leading cause of disability among this segment of the population. Cruising the Net, one finds numerous studies regarding the effects of Prozac on infants derived from mothers taking the drug during pregnancy, or while breastfeeding: autism, heart defects, poor feeding, insomnia. Not the greatest way to come into the world, it would seem.

Even beyond this is the fact that a certain percentage of American preschoolers—and I was not able to determine what that figure currently is—are on anti-depressant drugs. I find the idea of a three-year-old on Zoloft absolutely chilling, in a Brave New World kind of way. This has got to be a terrible mistake; it’s got to be a way of destroying an infant’s self, so that dependency and psychological disorientation become the “normal” way of being in the world, for these poor kids. Research has suggested this in the case of adults: that the use of anti-psychotic drugs is associated with atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, and that after only a few weeks of drug use the brain begins to function in a different way. How much more powerful and long-lasting must these effects be in the case of toddlers?

The real motivation for getting very young children hooked on these meds is, of course, money: the use of such drugs from a very early age pretty much guarantees Big Pharma an endless supply of customers. It is not, à la Jonathan Swift (“A Modest Proposal”), that there is some kind of plot out there to destroy our children, wreck their intellectual and emotional functioning from age two or even earlier. But if that is the result, does it matter? If the percentage of the under-four age group on anti-depressants continues to grow, then it might be said that deliberately or not, we are eating our children alive. The jury is still out on all this, but the indications are certainly not encouraging.

When it comes to screens, however, so dramatically represented in American society by things such as Facebook and Twitter, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt: these are killers. As Sherry Turkle shows in her most recent book, Alone Together, the much-touted idea of “virtual community” proved to be a fraud. What we really have is increased alienation and depression. All of these social media and accompanying devices peddle a phony intimacy, because if you are at home alone with a screen, that’s where you actually are. Let’s take a look at some of the evidence.

In 1998 a research team at Carnegie Mellon University published an empirical study entitled “Internet Paradox,” demonstrating that within the first year or two online, people were experiencing less social engagement and poorer psychological well-being. The researchers also found that a greater use of the Internet was associated with less family communication, a reduction in local social circles, and an increase in loneliness, as well as higher rates of depression. The authors of the study concluded by suggesting that by using the Net, people were “substituting poorer quality social relationships for better relationships, that is, substituting weak ties for strong ones,” with consequent negative effects. One thinks of Mark Zuckerberg, poor rich asshole, destroying the one real friendship he had (with Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin), so that he could acquire a million meaningless ones.

A more recent study, conducted at the University of Michigan for the period 1979-2009, revealed a 48% decrease in empathy among college students during this time, and a 34% decrease in the ability to see things from another person’s perspective. Most of these declines, it turns out, occurred over the past decade, and the general interpretation is that this is related to the isolation involved in the use of personal technology and popular social networking sites that have become so much a part of student life. The study suggested that this was not surprising “in a world filled with rampant technology revolving around personal needs and self-expression.” But it is also the nature of the technology that is at issue, because the Internet and other electronic media are based on speed and distraction, on rapidly shifting attention. It turns out that the higher emotions, such as empathy and compassion, emerge from neural processes that are inherently slow. Various studies have shown that the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience such emotions, or see things from the perspective of others. In a word, these technologies may be undermining our moral sense. At the very least, it becomes hard to argue that they are promoting community.

It also seems to be the case that the use of screens is creating a different type of human being, partly as a result of the neural rewiring of the brain that these devices engender. Much of the evidence for this argument has been collected and expanded upon by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Marshall McLuhan had argued that the brain takes on the characteristics of the technology it uses, and we now see this in the cultural shift from print media to screens. For the Internet’s emphasis (and of course, that of Facebook and Twitter) is on searching and skimming, not on genuine reading or contemplation. As a result, given what we now know about the relative plasticity of the brain, the ability to reflect or to grasp the nuance of a situation is pushed to the margins. The Net, he says, is literally rerouting the pathways in our brains, making our thought processes increasingly shallow. It breaks up the content of a text into searchable chunks, and surrounds it with other content. This is why a page online is very different from a page of print. The concentration and attention factor are high for the latter, low for the former. Then there are the various links, which encourage us not to devote our attention to any single thing but rather to jump from item to item. Our attachment to any single item is thus provisional and fragmented. The Net and its related technologies thus constitute an “ecosystem of interruption technologies.”

Print, on the other hand, has (or should I say had?) a quality of calm attentiveness. “The quiet was part of the meaning,” as the poet Wallace Stevens once put it. When a printed text is transferred to an electronic device, says Carr, it turns into something like a website; the calm attentiveness disappears. Instead, the Net & Co. deliver repetitive, intense, and addictive stimuli, promoting very superficial understanding. Basically, you don’t really read on a screen; it’s a different kind of activity: browsing, scanning, keyword spotting, and so on. And the better you get at this, the less able you are to think deeply or creatively. We are, Carr concludes (quoting the playwright Richard Foreman), turning into “pancake people”—spread wide and thin. Facebook and Twitter are turning out such folks by the IHOP-load.

The lack of interest in printed material, and the corresponding upswing in interest in screens is, of course, especially pronounced among the young. In 2009 the average American teenager was sending or receiving 2,272 text messages a month(!). Meanwhile, the amount of time the average American between twenty-five and thirty-four years of age devoted to reading print in 2008 was forty-nine minutes a week. As Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University cogently puts it, “the digital world may be the greatest threat yet to the endangered reading brain as it has developed over the past five thousand years.” Collectively, adds author Christine Rosen, this is the endpoint of the tragedy we are now witnessing:

“Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civilization, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.”

There is little room in this world, Carr points out, for “the pensive stillness of deep reading or the fuzzy indirection of contemplation.” In such a world, he goes on to say, “Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.” The cultural impact follows upon the individual one, then: what we are witnessing is the replacement of a complex inner diversity with a new kind of self, one devoid of any sense of cultural inheritance. Screens are generating the emptiest people in the history of the world, and as in The Matrix, there is no way for these folks to get outside themselves and perceive this. This is the “frenzy” of technological society famously referred to by Martin Heidegger. In the pathological climate of “techno-social Darwinism,” as Rosen calls it, there is no time for stillness. All of these brave new people lack the ability to be alone with their thoughts, or to appreciate the importance of silence. I have found that even the brightest people don’t get it, have no idea what George Steiner meant when he called modernity “the systematic suppression of silence.” Silence, after all, is the source of all self-knowledge, and of much creativity as well. But it is hardly valued by societies that confuse creativity with productivity, and incessant noise with aliveness. As a result, we don’t notice that fundamental aspects of being human are disappearing. During his time at Yale, William Deresiewicz asked his students what place solitude had in their lives. In response, they seemed to be puzzled that anyone would want to be alone. “Young people today,” he concluded, “seem to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, [and] can’t imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology…seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude.” The world of creativity, of imagination, of depth of the self, is closing down.

The similarity of all this to toddlers on anti-depressants is thrown into stark relief when you realize that the corporate goal is to hook children as early as possible. Last month, Rullingnet Corp. (based in Canada) launched Vinci, a 7” touch-screen tablet for the under-four age group. It is the first tablet designed for babies as young as one week old—the product of a technological mindset that one can only call “creepy,” in my opinion, although the company’s tag line is, ironically enough, “Inspire the genius.” “We are just leveraging their curiosity,” says the inventor of the device. (Notice how a word from corporate finance gets imported into the world of child-rearing. It was leveraging that brought on the crash of 2008.) In fact, a recent study conducted by Parenting magazine and BlogHer found that 29% of Generation-X moms say their children were onto laptops by age two, and the figure rises to 34% for moms of Generation-Y. In the first month of its release, Rullingnet sold 600 Vincis.

In chapter 3 of Why America Failed I argue that technology has always functioned as America’s hidden religion, and that if you deprive Americans of their gadgets, they become depressed or enraged. What can one say when many users of Apple’s iPhone refer to it as “the Jesus phone”? This is not an accident. Technology in America has been associated with unlimited progress and therefore with utopia, with redemption, and when we are now giving touch-screens to one-week-old babies we are imprinting them in the same way that, say, a baptism might. But the reality of Facebook, Twitter, Vinci and the like is a story of false redemption. As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, what is omitted from public discussion today is the fact that almost every technological “advance” in recent years has deepened the “continuing decomposition and crumbling of social bonds and communal cohesion.” It goes way beyond the dumbing down of the culture, in other words (horrific as that is); it also involves increasing human disconnectedness, social atomization, rudeness, incivility. One effect of spending most of your time in a virtual world is that of “absent presence”: you treat the world as a mere backdrop, and devalue those around you. These are the hallmarks of a superficial, narcissistic society, one which possesses no inherent meaning, and whose Twittered citizens don’t as well. With techno-imprinting going on now at age one week, I think we can expect that things can only get worse. For there is no getting around it: eating our children alive means we are eating our society alive as well.

©Morris Berman, 2011

Zucker-Punched

2011-09-27T16:54:00.001-04:00

(Partial disclaimer: in some cases my publicist didn’t say exactly what I have her saying, so I hope both she, and the reader, will allow me a bit of poetic license here. I do think I’ve preserved the spirit of our exchange, however. She’s just trying to drag me into the 22nd century, whereas I retain a certain fondness for the late 17th.)

OK, gather round, you DAA-ers; time to give you the low-down on publicity for WAF. It seems that Wiley, my publisher, finally came to the realization that in order to make money, you’ve got to spend it. Since Western Europe figured this out around A.D. 1500, I had hoped anxiously from the beginning that they would be onto the fundamentals of capitalism more quickly. No such luck (perhaps a bad case of cultural lag, hard to say). I kept sending them messages on the subject, reviewing the work of Ricardo, Smith, J.S. Mill, and Karl Marx for them, discussing the theory of surplus value, adding in Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and the like, but they seemed to be clinging to the theory of clinging: if we hang on to our money, we’ll be OK. So they kept squeezing quarters till the eagles screamed. But finally—it may have been the winter storms in New Jersey, or the flooding that subsequently occurred there, or maybe a stray lightning bolt—they woke up one morning and said, “Let’s give the poor shmuck (i.e., me) a publicist.” When I heard that they had actually hired someone, and were even going to pay her—i.e., actual money; this was not a barter in New Jersey corn or whatever—I had to lie down for a couple of hours just to recover from the shock. Maybe there is a god, I thought; maybe he likes my books. (I was heavily sedated at the time.)

Anyway, that’s Step 1 in this strange adventure. Step 2: my new publicist says to me: what’s really crucial these days are the social media. Things such as magazines, reviews, bookstore presentations, radio and TV interviews—all of that has shrunk in influence, been marginalized. Americans don’t really read that much anymore (as you’ve documented in your previous books); instead, they Twitter and Facebook, so that’s where you’ve gotta be.

Me: But if they don’t read any more, aren’t they the wrong audience for us? I mean, let’s say you take stuff off my blog and put it on Twit and FB (since I’m not going to Twit or Face myself, because I have no interest in those social media, which I think should really be called anti-social media, and think they were designed for addicted, narcissistic morons whose main interest in life revolves around stuff like the fotos Kim Kardashian posted of her psoriasis, not to mention her rear end). Those folks aren’t going to run out and read WAF; no way! For one thing, it has polysyllabic words in it, not to mention—gasp—concepts. And then these media reduce one’s attention span to that of a gnat. It’s not merely that these people don’t read books anymore; they can’t.

Publicist: Not so fast, shmendrick. For better or worse, most Americans now get their information from the web, and this even includes a few intellectuals. The social media reach millions; there’s no such thing now as book promotion without them. We need the folks who are reading your book to be out there talking about it, and one place we can be sure to find them is online. In short, adapt or die, boychik.

Me: But what about the bookstores? Isn’t anyone going to show up to hear me at bookstores?

Publicist (shaking her ahead, in the sense of ‘What a yokel’): You’ll be lucky if you pull in 5 people in Seattle and 10 in LA. Don’t forget your famous appearance in downtown Philly in 2006: 3 people showed up for your talk, and one of them fell asleep during it. The bookstore also had you billed as “Dean of Optometry at UC Fullerton,” or something like that. It can’t get much worse than that, can it?

Me: Yeah, that was indeed a humbling moment, I have to admit. So your idea is that for the next two months I post various rants and raves on any subject I want, including Twit and FB and Kim’s behind, and then you feed these things into Twit and FB, in the hope that someone who reads it will also want to read WAF? Shit, I’d rather chew on razor blades. As far as I’m concerned, Twit and FB are further examples of the collapse of American culture, of our national decline. As someone recently said, screen people are “pancake people”—all breadth and no depth.

Publicist: Perhaps, but it still makes for good PR. Even anti-PR is good PR.

Me: Were you aware that a Canadian company just released a computer tablet for toddlers, designed for babies as young as one week old? It’s not enough that we are killing our infants with Prozac and Zoloft; now we are also going to do them in with screens and touch pads.

Publicist: That’s good! Write about that! Tell your blogfolks (all 65 of them; what a huge following you’ve managed to accumulate!) that the US and Canada, through meds and hi-tech, are deliberately trying to kill our children. I mean, even if it isn’t an actual conspiracy, it seems like they’re doing a good job of it, no? You remember that essay by Jonathan Swift, right? About how Ireland should start cooking and eating its children? Well, do a new post and call it “Jonathan Swift Revisited.” That’ll get the pancakes all a-Twittering.

Me: (Heavy sigh)

Publicist: Frankly, I’m a believer in Bermanism: any culture that is designing computer screens for one-week old babies, and feeding anti-depressants to toddlers, has no future at all. What could be more obvious? When they grow up, they won’t even know what a book is, fer chrissakes.

Me: Jesus…Well, this seems like a fool’s errand, but you’re the publicist, what can I say.

Publicist: You got that right. Now get busy, shmuck. And don’t forget to give your readers the crucial contact info:

Facebook: Whyamericafailed

Twitter: @Yamericafailed

The WAF Dust Jacket

2011-09-16T12:52:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

The text below constitutes the dust jacket of my forthcoming book, Why America Failed. It is already posted on Amazon, but I thought I would post it on this blog as well, fyi. Scheduled release date for book is Nov. 1, but I think it will be in Wiley's NJ warehouse on Oct. 17. Anyway, here goes:

From the Inside Flap

During the final century of the Roman Empire, it was common for emperors to deny that their civilization was in decline. Only with the perspective of history can we see that the emperors were wrong, that the empire was failing, and that the Roman people were unwilling or unable to change their way of life before it was too late. The same, says Morris Berman, is true of twenty-first century America. The nation and its empire are in decline and nothing can be done to reverse their course. How did this come to be?

In Why America Failed, Berman examines the development of American culture from the earliest colonies to the present, shows that the seeds of the nation's "hustler" culture were sown from the very beginning, and reveals how the very tools that enabled the country's expansion have become the instruments of its demise.

At the center of Berman's argument is his assertion that hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others have been powerful forces in American culture since the Pilgrims landed. He shows that even before the American Revolution, naked self-interest had replaced the common good as the primary social value in the colonies and that the creative power and destructive force of this idea gained irresistible momentum in the decades following the ratification of the Constitution. As invention proliferated and industry expanded, railroads, steamships, and telegraph wires quickened the frenetic pace of progress—or, as Berman calls it, the illusion of progress. An explosion of manufacturing whetted the nation's ravenous appetite for goods of all kinds and gave the hustling life its purpose—to acquire as many objects as possible prior to death.

The reign of Wall Street and the 2008 financial meltdown are certainly the most visible examples today of the negative consequences of the pursuit of affluence. Berman, however, sees the manipulations of Goldman Sachs and others not as some kind of aberration, but as the logical endpoint of the hustler culture. The fact that Goldman and its ilk continue to thrive in the wake of the disaster they wrought simply proves that it is already too late: America is incapable of changing direction.

Many readers will take exception to much of Why America Failed—beginning, perhaps, with its title. But many more will read this provocative and insightful book and join Berman in making a long, hard reassessment of the nation, its goals, and its future.

From the Back Cover
Praise for Why America Failed

"Morris Berman is one of our most prescient and important social and cultural critics. He marries a laser-like intelligence with a deep moral core. His writing is as lucid and crisp as it is insightful. His newest book, Why America Failed, rips open the dark and dying carcass of empire. His analysis is sobering and often depressing. But the truth at this stage in the game is depressing, very depressing. Those who refuse to face this truth because it is unpleasant, because it does not inspire happy thoughts or offer false hope, are in flight from the real. The collective retreat into self-delusion has transformed huge swaths of the American populace into a peculiar species of adult-children who live in aPeter Pan world of make believe where reality is never permitted to be an impediment to desire. It is too bad Berman, who sees and writes about all this with a stunning clarity, lives in Mexico.It gets lonely up here."

—Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class and Empire of Illusion

"Morris Berman's masterpiece is a brutally honest, wonderfully crafted,exceptionally well-documented treatise on how America was spawned, several hundred years ago, to devour its offspring—financially, socially, and technologically. Why America Failed shines a harsh, unavoidable light upon the cunning business mindset at the core of America's creation, expansion, and devolution. Berman describes with stunning clarity how and why the 'hustler' mentality, upon which our country was predicated, eviscerated alternative moral or social doctrines, and thus incorporated the seeds of our self-destruction from its very inception. This book is as uncomfortable to read as it is impossible to miss."

—Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage and Other People's Money

"Morris Berman noticed that it's not morning in America anymore. His message may wake up the millions who are oversleeping while the late-day storm cloudsgather over this land."

—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency

"As the decline of America's empire becomes both starker and gradually evident, nothing is more important than accessible analyses of the causes of that decline. Far too few such works exist because of the taboos against writing them. All the more welcome then is Morris Berman's clear, bluntly but cogently written work. Sensitive to the contradictions of U.S. history and how they are now playing themselves out in a changed world, this book will challenge and provoke in all the best senses of those words. Genuinely important to read and to think about."

—Richard D. Wolff, Emeritus Professor of Economics,University of Massachusetts Amherst

Freebies

2011-09-08T11:19:00.004-04:00

Dear Friends at the DAA65:

We are now going to switch to the WAF50. My publisher, Wiley, wants to do a promo for my new book, Why America Failed. In a word, the first 50 of you writing in to my editor and requesting a free copy, will get one. Not too shabby, eh? Here's the address (you'll need to do the at and the dot correctly, obviously):

enelson*at*wiley dot com

And you folks keep saying I never do anything for you...

mb

Time for a New Post

2011-08-11T13:03:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

We seem to have run out of space on the last post, hitting 201 messages, with me inanely going on about my undying love for Barbara Ann Nowak, so I figured it was time for a new one. Unfortunately, I'm plumb out of ideas rt now; my mind is like a wind tunnel (think George W. Bush, or perhaps Barbara Ann Nowak). So all I can do is give you my speaking schedule, at least what I know at the present time, and you can make plans to charter a huge jet and fly to Seattle and/or LA. Here's the info:

Nov. 4, Seattle: Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave, on Capitol Hill between Pike and Pine, 7 or 7:30 pm.

Nov. 8, LA: Barnes & Noble, Westside Pavilion, 10850 West Pico Blvd., 7 pm.

I'll be speaking about my new book, "Why America Failed," the 3rd (and last) in my American Empire series.

Hope to see you all there...

mb

Fork in the Road

2011-07-03T12:24:00.002-04:00

There is a theory that the real cause of the collapse of Rome was purely chemical: the Romans manufactured their utensils from lead, the lead slowly leaked into their food through repeated use, and from there the lead entered the bloodstream and finally the brain, which thus deteriorated over time. Most historians don’t put much stock in this, correctly seeing it as one-dimensional and purely material in nature, and dismissive of the social and economic factors (along with Rome’s “imperial overstretch”) that clearly did the ancient empire in. But one wonders if there may be some truth to the theory, even if only a small one. Maybe it was a factor in the overall drama, part of the synergistic forces that led to the empire’s decline. It’s an interesting thought.

I was thinking about this in the context of mounting evidence that in a mechanical-material way, Americans may also be destroying their brains. It now turns out that constant cell phone use may be a cause of tumors in the brain, although the evidence is not definitive at this point. More definitive is the neurological fallout from the use of screens—TV, Internet, e-books, text messaging—along with the phenomenon of multitasking that typically accompanies this. Here the pile-up of data is quite large, collected in articles that have appeared over the last decade in journals such as Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the New Atlantis, and discussed at length in Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows. (In particular see studies by Walter Kirn, Christine Rosen, and Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University.) Persistent staring into screens, it turns out, changes the brain, and not in positive directions. Constant screen use seems to have an effect similar to constant marijuana use. It should thus not be too much of a surprise that concomitant with the so-called information revolution has been a dumbing down of the American population, although obviously there are other factors involved (the commodification of education, e.g.). But unlike the Roman fork, which is highly debatable, this material factor is quite certain.

Equally interesting (or horrific, in my view) is what appears to have happened to the American brain as a result of the shift in psychiatry from therapy to drugs. Three comprehensive and very well documented studies have just appeared, arguing that the model of mental illness being caused by brain chemistry is full of holes: The Emperor’s New Drugs, by Irving Kirsch (psychologist at the University of Hull in England); Anatomy of an Epidemic, by Robert Whitaker (author of a 2001 study of the history of the treatment of mental illness); and Unhinged, by Daniel Carlat (a Boston psychiatrist). All three of these men are highly respected in their fields, and their conclusions, along with a discussion of the bible of psychiatry, the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, about to go into its fifth edition), are presented in two recent articles by Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books. The overall picture is quite grim.

First, the stats: between 1987 and 2007, the number of those so disabled by mental disorders that they qualified for Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance increased 2.5 times, so that 1 out of 76 Americans now falls into this category (what an amazing statistic). For children, the increase is 35 times during the same time period, and mental illness is now the leading cause of disability among this population. A survey of American adults conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health, 2001-3, found that 46% of them met the criteria of the American Psychiatric Association for being mentally ill at some point in their lives. Ten percent of Americans over the age of six now take antidepressants, and I read elsewhere that in terms of the global market (i.e. in dollars, in sales), American consumption of these drugs amounts to 2/3 of the entire world’s—this for a country that has less than 5% of the planetary population. Even so, as Ethan Watters documents in Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, “the virus is us: As we introduce Americanized ways of treating mental illnesses, we are in fact spreading the diseases.”

As Ms. Angell points out, much of this spread (at home and abroad) has been economically driven, because once you say that mental illness is the result of an imbalance in brain chemistry, then the obvious “solution” is a pill that will rebalance the brain; and Eli Lilly, Pfizer and the rest are right there to market Prozac, Zoloft, Risperdal, and etc., and make fortunes from the lot. These companies, she writes, “through various forms of marketing, both legal and illegal, and what many people would describe as bribery—have come to determine what constitutes a mental illness and how the disorders should be diagnosed and treated.” But the brain chemistry argument, as all three of her authors point out, involves a great leap in logic. It was found that psychoactive drugs affect neurotransmitter levels in the brain, and from this it was concluded that “the cause of mental illness is an abnormality in the brain’s concentration of these chemicals that is specifically countered by the use of the appropriate drug.” As Daniel Carlat notes, by the same logic one could argue that the cause of all pain is a deficiency of opiates, or that headaches are caused by having too little aspirin in one’s system. The logic, in short, is upside down; and as far as the empirical evidence goes—there is none. Decades of research have demonstrated that neurotransmitter function is normal in people with mental illness before treatment. (One has to wonder about the whole cholesterol industry as well. I read one study that indicated that half of Americans who have heart attacks also have low cholesterol. But that’s another story.)

This type of research tends not to make it into the public eye, however, because negative results on drug efficiency “often languish unseen within the FDA….This practice greatly biases the medical literature, medical education, and treatment decisions.” Positive studies by drug companies get extensively publicized; negative ones get suppressed. And there is a lot of evidence to show that it is the drugs that cause the mental illness. Schizophrenia and depression used to be episodic, interspersed with long periods of normalcy. Now, they are chronic and lifelong. The results of long-term use of psychoactive drugs, says Steve Hyman (a former director of the NIMH and former provost of Harvard), are “substantial and long-lasting alterations in neural function.” The brain begins to function in a different way, in other words, even after only a few weeks of drug use. Complex chain reactions ensue, ones that require additional drugs to combat the side effects of the original drugs. One researcher, Nancy Andreasen, has published evidence that the use of antipsychotic drugs is associated with shrinkage of the brain—atrophy of the prefrontal cortex. (This did make it into the public domain, specifically the New York Times, 15 September 2008.)

Angell’s discussion of the DSM is equally chilling. It turns out that a lot of the decisions regarding what to include as a mental illness have been arbitrary, even whimsical. George Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote in 1984 that the book represented “a bold series of choices based on guess, taste, prejudice, and hope.” In fact, there are no citations of scientific studies in the DSM to support its decisions--! The actual “science” of the book is thus dubious. Coming back to the economic factor, it turns out that drug companies lavish huge attention and largesse on psychiatrists—gifts, free samples, meals, plane tickets to conferences, and jobs as consultants and speakers. Of the 170contributors to the current version of the book, the DSM-IV-TR, 95 of them have financial ties to drug companies, including all of the contributors to the sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia. What these folks do is expand diagnostic boundaries or create new diagnoses, new “illnesses,” which meshes pretty well with the financial goals of the companies who employ them. David Kupfer, the head of the task force currently working on the fifth edition of the DSM, was (prior to his appointment in this capacity) a consultant for Eli Lilly, Forest Pharmaceuticals, Solvay/Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, and Servier and Lundbeck. What a shock, that the already large list of mental disorders will be even larger in the new edition. So much for “science.”

Apparently, then, we have our own leaden forks, to the extent that lead may have attacked the Roman nervous system. It’s the result of a number of factors, including the American worship of technology, the search for simple (and individualistic) answers, and a lust for profits that is so huge that Lilly and all the rest couldn’t care less as to whether they are harming the American public. Nor is it very likely that any of the literature on cell phone cancer, neurological damage from screen usage, iatrogenic mental illness (i.e. illness that is doctor-generated, or Big Pharma-generated), will make any difference at all. For the fork in the road occurred decades ago, in psychiatry as well as telecommunications, and a reversal of any of this seems virtually impossible at this point. And as the American brain goes, so goes the empire. I can't help wondering if any of this will make it into the history books, on our decline and fall.

At Last, The Poems

2011-06-05T08:18:00.008-04:00

Dear Friends:

It took more than two years, but my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, has finally rolled off the press. You can order it direct from the publisher at cervenabarvapress.com; it should also get posted on Amazon before too long. Here is the description from the back cover, in any case:

Counting Blessings is an expression of gratitude for a life lived away from the madding crowd. This poetry collection was penned about a year after Berman moved to a small town in Mexico. With the frenzy of American life receding into the background, he was able to sink into the stillness of his new surroundings, allowing long-dormant creative energies to surface. In addition to Counting Blessings, he also wrote a novel and a collection of essays questioning the values of American society, roughly during the same time.

As it turns out, only a few of these poems are about life in Mexico per se. For the most part, Mexico provided the backdrop, the peaceful context in which the author’s unconscious processes were free to roam over the inner landscape, explore its contours and fine details. What emerged were vibrant memories of childhood and adolescence, of times lived abroad, of people who have come and gone. These lyrical poems capture the extraordinary essence of ordinary lived experience, and in doing so represent the true content of our lives, the simple core of what makes us human.

The poet Paul Christensen wrote of this work:

“The[se] poems are a kind of sketch pad for how one regains a life little by little from a culture that had wrapped its tentacles about you and squeezed out your breath. There is the slow process of putting oneself back together again, far from the screeching music of the television, the hard sell of the radio, the hysterical momentum of consumption as a stay against loneliness. All that abates as the exile sits in his [courtyard] with a good book, a quiet heart. The reader who pores over these memories and observations will feel the ache to slip away to one’s own courtyard in a foreign country, to sit and let the mind idle over its thoughts, to float back to the quiet and calm and, as Berman says, to count one’s blessings.”

Meanwhile, ten of the poems are available via audio link, from a reading I did in Berkeley in 2009: go to www.juliollosa.com, click on my name on the left hand side of the page, and then on "Audio Interviews"; and then scroll down and click on "Poetry Reading at Moe's Books."

Rainbow Pie

2011-05-14T00:31:00.003-04:00

Given how much we had in common, it’s perhaps a bit odd that Joe Bageant (1946-2011) and I never met (although I think we did correspond at one point). He even wound up living in Mexico a good part of the time. But the real connection between us is the congruence of perception regarding the United States. Joe came from unlikely roots to have formulated the political viewpoint that he did: working-class, right-wing, anti-intellectual, flag-waving, small-town Virginia. A “leftneck,” someone dubbed him; it’s not a bad description.

There aren’t too many leftnecks in the United States; of that, we can be sure. This
was the source of Joe’s frustration: extreme isolation. Because he realized that the U.S. was the greatest snow job of all time. He likened the place to a hologram, in which everyone in the country was trapped inside, with no knowledge that the world (U.S. included) was not what U.S. government propaganda, or just everyday cultural propaganda, said it was. He watched his kinfolk and neighbors vote repeatedly against their own interests, and there was little he could do about it. The similarity between his last book, Rainbow Pie, and my forthcoming Why America Failed, is in fact quite startling. True, I’m analytical where Joe is homey, and my historical perspective is that of 400 years rather than just the twentieth century; but Joe’s way of addressing the issues is gritty, and right on the money. One can only hope that his book gets the posthumous attention it deserves.

Joe’s focus was his own class: the white underclass of America, 60 million strong. “Generally unable to read at a functional level,” he writes,

“they are easily manipulated by corporate-political interests to vote against advances in health and education, and even more easily mustered in support of any proposed military conflict….Low skilled, and with little understanding of the world beyond either what is presented to them by kitschy and simplistic television, movie, and other media entertainments…the future of the white underclass not only looks grim, but permanent.”

On the positive side, however, these folks lived in what can be called the last genuine community in the U.S.:

“One neighbor cut hair; another mended shoes. From birth to the grave, you needed neighbors and they needed you. I was very lucky to have seen that culture…[and I learned] how our [present] degraded concepts of community and work have contributed to the development of physical and cultural loneliness in America. Not to mention the destruction of a sense of the common good, the economy, and the the natural world.”

“Damn few of us,” he concludes, “grasp how the loss of traditional aesthetic and foundational values…are connected with so much American tragedy.”

One of Joe’s descriptions of that vanished world reminds me of a very moving poem by Gary Snyder, “Axe Handles”. Joe writes of his father:

“All his life he had made his own world with his hands, and fixed it the same way. I’d watched him and [Uncle] Nelson make hickory axe-handles, hoe handles, and oaken mallets, and watched them smooth out the hickory and oak wood by scraping the handles with large shards of broken glass, a practice that went back to pre-sandpaper colonial times. They were quiet and thoughtful as they worked—with their long, patient strokes, handle in lap, pulling the glass along the contours—in what I don’t think it would be exaggerating to call a metaphysical, reflective space…. Pap had learned it from his father, and Nelson had learned it from Pap, and by watching, I learned it from them.”

All of this, he continues, got replaced by the world of chasing money, and by jobs that have no inherent meaning. We no longer have any sense of who we are as a people, he asserts; the “American exhortation to ‘follow opportunity’ is birth-to-grave and relentless.” Meanwhile, with millions unemployed (nearly 20%, in fact), we now have a government “that sends police to break up the tent camps and car camps of homeless unemployed citizens who once belonged to the middle class.” And yet—no one complains! America, Joe tells us,

“doesn’t like whiners. A whiner or a cynic is about the worst thing you can be here in the land of gunpoint optimism. Foreigners often remark on the upbeat American personality. I assure them that our American corpocracy has its ways of pistol-whipping or sedating its human assets into the appropriate level of cheerfulness.”

Yet some refuse to take it, and like Timothy McVeigh, come up with a pathological reaction to a pathological situation—in his case, the Murrah Center bombing in Oklahoma City. For McVeigh understood that whatever democracy we once had

“has been subverted by corporations and bought politicians…[he] believed that America had become a corporate-backed police state consisting of only two classes—the elites and the rest of us—regardless of the party in power. If he was paranoid, he certainly was not alone…. [For] no matter how you connect the dots, or which dots you choose to connect, it comes out the same: our parents’ lives were displaced; our own have been anxious and uncertain; and our children’s are sure to be less certain than ours.”

Nevertheless, the fear that some elites have, that the poor and the working class might eventually figure out where their true political interests reside, is an unfounded one:

“We dumb working folk were clubbed into submission long ago, and now require only…a 24/7 mind-numbing spectacle of titties, tabloid TV, and terrorist dramas. Throw in a couple of new flavors of XXL edible thongs, and you’ve got a nation of drowsing hippos who will never notice that our country has been looted, or even that we have become homeless ourselves….And besides, there’s always bourbon.”

One would think that the widening gap between rich and poor would inflame these folks, right? No such luck, because both classes refuse to acknowledge it. The reigning dogma is that there are no classes or masses, just 310 million individuals, “Marlboro Man types in charge of their own destinies.” Meanwhile, at least 67% of Americans are counting on Social Security for their entire retirement income, and by 2008, the top 1% of Americans earned as much as the bottom 45%. According to the CIA’s World Factbook, in 2009 the U.S. ranked 46th in infant mortality rates (behind Cuba, among other countries), and more than 40 million citizens suffer food scarcity or hunger. “The combination of our poorly educated workforce,” Joe observes,

“and ruthless demagogic oligarchy are not a nationwide problem: they are a national tragedy. It’s one that’s getting worse and is not likely ever to be fixed. The Empire is collapsing inward upon its working base. The oligarchs have skipped town with the national treasury; many have multiple homes in other countries. The inherent natural resources upon which America was initially built by laboring men and women have been squandered….When empires die, they die broke.”

That’s the domestic situation. As for Americans’ awareness of what their government is doing overseas—forget it. We are, he writes, the “Republic of Amnesia.” Couple this historical amnesia with our abysmal public educational system and our daily “engorgement on cheap spectacle, and you get a citizenry whose level of world and social comprehension is somewhere between a garden toad’s and a bonobo chimp’s.”

Meanwhile, we live out a “homogenized national story line.” Corporations own the media, and they employ writers to do our dreaming for us. And the dream they produce is strictly about wealth, and why we as Americans are particularly entitled to it, with no reference to its historical costs—such as the money spent on meaningless wars. In fact, “historical memory has been shaped to serve the ends of empire.” As for the American Dream, this is simply “one of maximum material wealth and ownership of goods and commodities, and the ‘freedom’ to pursue those things until you drop dead.” But the questions won’t go away: “If we are so rich, why do I feel so insecure? If we are so united in our goodness and purpose, why am I so lonely?” Why indeed.

Joe knew what he was talking about, and knew it intimately; which meant he understood that there was no reversing the situation, no saving America at the eleventh hour. He made his own exit, from cancer, on March 26th of this year.

A great American. R.I.P.

©Morris Berman, 2011

Deepening the Self-Destruction

2011-04-11T16:33:00.003-04:00

We are at a point in American history where, to paraphrase Blake, Bad is Good. This is why I’m rooting for a Palin presidency: if anyone can deepen our self-destruction, it’s Sarah. Meanwhile, two articles just appeared documenting the process even further, so I’d like to share them with you. The first is by my hero and yours, Chris Hedges: “Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System,” which he posted yesterday on truthdig.com. The second is by Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” which you can find at vanityfair.com.

To start w/Chris, then: He points out that the American educational system “celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state.”

[What we have in this country by now, of course, are nearly 310 million stunted human products. Not exactly the best raw material for turning the system around, I’m guessing.]

Talking about the NYC school system, Chris goes on: “In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals [without principles, one might note] and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs.” The problem, he says, is that “To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence.” [Sound like any country you know of?]

But there’s more: “The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business.” And they know that “moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness.” For “Once justice perishes…life loses all meaning.” As Hannah Arendt put it, “The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

“Unconscious civilizations,” Chris concludes, “become totalitarian wastelands.”

Of course, with 310 million nobodies (stunted human products), what other future is there for the US? Rhetorical question. Let’s turn to Joe Stiglitz.

The data: the upper 1% of the American population is now taking in nearly 25% of the nation’s entire income every year. In terms of wealth, they control 40% of it. Over the past decade, their incomes rose by 18%; those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. All growth in recent decades, and more, has gone to this upper 1%. “In terms of income equality,” he tells us, “America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride.” Joe goes on:

“The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards ‘performance bonuses’ that they felt compelled to change the name to ‘retention bonuses’ (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance)…. Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul.”

“With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent,” writes Stiglitz (and in some locations, twice that); “with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job and not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from ‘food insecurity’)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted ‘trickling down’ from the top 1 percent to everyone else.”

An additional problem here, he says, is that while “Trickle-down economics may be a chimera…trickle-down behaviorism is very real.” In other words, the rest of the country wishes to live like the top 1%, but they can’t; so they live beyond their means.

With this, it seems to me, we come to the crucial point. Joe writes that “Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is…the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important.” But frankly, except as an abstraction, I find this dubious. Americans may pay lip service to these ideals, but if, as Joe says, the goal of our fellow-countrymen is to live like the top 1%, then there is no getting around the fact that they have no larger vision than making a lot of money. ("In the United States," wrote John Steinbeck, "the poor consider themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires.") They are not enraged that they live in a system in which one person, Bill Gates, can accumulate $50 billion--not at all. Rather, they just want to accumulate $50 billion themselves. Which brings us back to Chris’ notion of a system that turns out “stunted human products,” Arendt’s “nobodies…who refuse to be persons.” Dummies, in a word; moral and intellectual dummies. The goal of these 310 million nobodies is hardly fair play or a more equitable distribution of wealth or a sense of community (let alone, community); no, it’s getting a larger cut of the pie, period. The vision is empty, and the people are empty. And thus, so is the American future.

Stiglitz was, of course, paraphrasing the Gettysburg Address with his title. Lincoln’s concluding words were: “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Tomorrow is the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, and obviously a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. So perhaps we need to complete Joe’s thought, and paraphrase Lincoln’s conclusion a bit differently (pardon the verbiage—or “verbage,” as Sarah Palin calls it): “government of the stunted human products, by the stunted human products, for the stunted human products; which thus cannot help but perish from the earth.”

(c)Morris Berman, 2011

No Exit

2011-04-02T22:08:00.007-04:00

“Under the Republicans, man exploits man. With the Democrats, just the opposite is true.”
—American bumper sticker

So let’s hunker down, now, and have a serious discussion as to exactly where the United States is heading these days.

It wasn’t that popular, the idea of American decline, when I published The Twilight of American Culture eleven years ago. Now, I seem to find discussions of it everywhere. In his last column for the New York Times, for example ("Losing Our Way," March 26), Bob Herbert wrote:

“So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home….Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us into an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone….When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely….Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush….The richest 10% of Americans received an unconscionable 100% of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007….In 2009, the richest 5% claimed 63.5% of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80%, collectively held just 12.8%.”

Herbert goes on to cite the March 25 NYT article by David Kocieniewski, on how General Electric reported profits of $14.2 billion in 2010, and not only paid no taxes on this, but actually claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. And it turns out (here’s a shocker) that its CEO, Jeffrey Inmelt, was appointed head of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness by Mr. Obama(!), to make sure that the fox will continue to guard the hen house.

Meanwhile, on the street level, the American public is so dumb that it is literally breathtaking. I had collected some of the stats in the Twilight book and also in Dark Ages America; since then, chronicling the collapse of the American mind has become something of a national pastime, way beyond the mild banter of Jay Leno’s street interviews. For example, Newsweek recently gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test (“How Dumb Are We?,” Newsweek, March 20), and it turned out that 29% couldn’t name the vice president; 73% couldn’t say why we fought the Cold War (official version, that is); 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights; and 6% were not able to circle Independence Day on a calendar. Another study, conducted two years ago by the European Journal of Communication, turned up the fact that 42% of Americans were not able to identify the Taliban (by comparison, only 25% of the Brits couldn’t do it). Newsweek’s summary of all this is not exactly any great intellectual breakthrough, either: “The country’s future is imperiled by our ignorance.” No shit, Sherlock.

About a week after the Newsweek article, Ray Williams did a piece for Psychology Today that listed a large number of poll results of this sort, including the fact that 77% of Oklahoma public school students don’t know who George Washington was (not kidding, folks), or who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But the most telling bit of evidence, for me, were the elementary errors of English made by the author of the article himself. His title—Are Americans getting “dumber?”—fails to put the question mark where it belongs (outside the quote mark); and he writes that “Morris Berman…decries the need to preserve what was best in American culture.” But this indicates that Mr. Williams doesn’t know what “decries” actually means, namely, “publicly denounces.” In fact, I “decried” nothing of the sort; instead, I encouraged Americans to do the work of cultural preservation. (If I was decrying anything, it was our cultural collapse.) So here we have an essay whose purpose it is to show how intellectually challenged we are, which itself contains two major English-language errors. Mr. Williams, it turns out, is co-founder of something called Success IQ University.

As I argued in Twilight, severe income inequality and widespread stupidity were crucial factors in the decline of Rome, and the same applies to the decline of our own empire. And other factors, of course, can be added to this list. But the interesting thing about social analyses of this sort, i.e. diagnoses of our civilizational collapse—and this is something I have pointed out again and again, in articles and lectures and interviews—is the obsessive habit of American optimism that befuddles our ability to draw the obvious conclusion. One author after another will weigh in with massive data on our political, social, economic, and cultural disintegration, and then at the eleventh hour pull a rabbit out of a hat and assure us that with the application of enough effort and right attitudes, we can turn this situation around. Rutgers historian David Greenberg, in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review (“No Exit,” March 20), says of the genre of American social criticism, “Practically every example of that genre, no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book.”

It’s not hard to find examples of this, and Greenberg scores Walter Lippmann, Allan Bloom, Al Gore, Upton Sinclair, Eric Schlosser, Robert Putnam, and Daniel Boorstin as obvious examples. “Even those social critics who acknowledge the difficulty of [implementing] their solutions,” he writes, “cannot help offering up the equally quixotic hope that people will somehow rise up spontaneously against the diagnosed ills.” The authors use words like “should” and “must,” as though voluntarism and some inner decision (in the U.S., it’s always a personal solution, i.e. a nonsolution) are what we need to alter centuries-old structures of politics/economics/society/culture. Schlosser, for example (Fast Food Nation), calls on Congress to “fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power” (rotsa ruck with that, amigo). Boorstin (The Image) says that “each of us must disenchant himself…must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside.” (This was in 1961; fifty years later, we might conclude that Americans didn’t quite manage to follow his suggestions.) Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) documents the collapse of social life in America in exhaustive detail and then says that we all must “resolve to become reconnected with our friends and neighbors.” (This could well be the best example of brain damage among Harvard sociologists ever recorded.)

As Professor Greenberg tells us, H.L. Mencken knew a lot better than these pundits. The “imbecility” of the masses, Mencken wrote (in his attack on Lippmann), cannot be cured “by spreading enlightenment.” Just ain’t gonna happen, he said, and added that it was part of the national temperament to insist that every problem had to have a solution, when the truth is that very often—it doesn’t.

As a final example of this national blindness, consider Chris Hedges’ essay, “The Collapse of Globalization,” which was posted on truthdig.com on March 27. Now as most of you know, I adore Chris; I love everything he writes, and regard him as one of the most clear-sighted and courageous journalists left in this country. But the essay has the same problem limned by Greenberg, that of piling up huge amounts of evidence showing in no uncertain terms that the nation is going down the tubes, and then insisting that this can be reversed by an act of will. Since most of you are familiar with the evidence for national collapse (or if not, can access the essay on truthdig), let me focus on the unwarranted optimism:

“We must embrace [writes Hedges], and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem…. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.”

Uh…who, exactly, is “we”? The sixty million white underclass folks who regularly vote against their own interests? (On this see Joe Bageant’s brilliant memoir, Rainbow Pie.) The 44% of the American public who don’t know what the Bill of Rights is? The 77% of the Oklahoma public school students who can’t identify George Washington? The overwhelming majority of the population that is being economically squeezed half to death, and can only think in terms of how to individually get out from between a rock and a hard place? And in such a context, what does “must” mean, really? I mean, none of this is going to happen, as all of us know. As for Chris, he is a very bright fellow; he has to know that this call to colors is hand-wringing, wishful thinking—nothing more. As he himself points out, all of our “liberal” institutions (press, universities, organized labor, Democratic Party) refuse to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy of the sacredness of the market, and this permits the corporations to continue their assault on us. Their propaganda, he says, constitutes a “steady barrage of illusions,” which is impervious to truth; and “those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.”

Chris, of course, is among those heretics, and his voice—which I in fact cherish—makes no difference at all, in terms of the way power is arranged and money distributed. Thus it bothers me when he writes that we have to “awake from our collective self-delusion,” because “we” are going to do no such thing; or when he (correctly) points out that “dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth.” Because he is apparently unwilling to bite the bullet here, and to say, with Professor Greenberg: No Exit. In doing so, he shows that he himself prefers absurd hope to truth. For the truth is now manifest, and Chris simply cannot be unaware of it: we shall not embrace a radical new ethic of simplicity (which was something of a fad in the seventies); we shall not rebuild radical socialist movements (which historically were pretty feeble to begin with); and we shall certainly not vanquish corporate capitalism. What could be more obvious? Americans have neither the will nor the interest nor the intellectual/emotional resources to accomplish any of these things; and if anything radical does occur within the next decade or so, we can be sure that it will come from the political right. Indeed, as Chris himself has pointed out on a number of occasions, this latter trend is already underway. To live in truth at this point means to understand that all of the healthy options for the United States were foreclosed long ago. Utopian impulses are fine, but only when there is some possibility of their being realized.

Which means, of course, that I have to stick to my guns here and not start pulling a rabbit out of the hat at the eleventh hour either. Rest assured: I’m not going to. There is no rabbit, and the hat is falling apart at the seams. All I can suggest—and this to the tiniest fraction of the population—is that if you are going to remain in the U.S., to tough it out and live among the ruins, as it were, one thing you can do is stay awake. Read Hedges and Nader and Chomsky. Read Walter Hixson and Sacvan Bercovitch and William Appleman Williams. Stay in touch with truthdig, alternet, commondreams, and the rest of the websites that offer serious political analysis instead of mainstream b.s. Form study groups—and not just virtual ones. Because the choice is not whether or not the country is going to die: it is, don’t be deluded on that score. All I’m suggesting is that ignorance is not bliss, and that it’s better to die with your eyes open and your boots on, than to be part of the huge mass of lemmings slowly drifting toward the abyss.

© Morris Berman, 2011

The Novel, At Last

2011-03-16T00:05:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends:

Destiny is finally available on Amazon (plug in "morris berman destiny" and it'll come up on the screen). It's been a long haul, starting nearly four years ago in a little cottage in Turkey, on the Aegean coast. And while it ain't Tolstoy, it is, I think, an enjoyable read, and I'm quite happy with the result.

Some background, then (normally I don't give people the gory details, but since I'm mostly talking to the DAA55 here, I guess I will). The theme--Is it possible to change one's destiny as an act of will?--is one that's been with me for decades now. I've been particularly fascinated by movies that involve the protagonist going back in time, say 20 years or so, and trying to "fix" something in the past so that the present will turn out differently. Anyway, I was visiting some Turkish friends in 2007, not far from Izmir, and staying in a cottage 20 feet from the Aegean sea. I was mindlessly writing in my journal one day, and then suddenly, without a word of warning, began to write the first novella, which is the major part of the book. I don't know where this came from; it just sort of fell out. Most of it got written over the next 9 days, and then the rest of the book was completed within the next 2-3 months.

I subsequently showed it to my agent at the time, who was bowled over. Indeed, she compared the stories to those of J.M. Coetzee, who won the Nobel for lit. in
2003. "This has a real page-turning quality," she told me; "I think I can sell it." I told her I was encouraged by all this, although I would hold off on writing my Nobel acceptance speech just for the present moment ("I stand before you today humbled by this honor you have chosen to bestow on me," etc.). Which proved to be a wise decision. Soon after this, my former agent had something of a career crisis, deciding she wanted to do other things instead of agenting, and more or less left the field. I was without an agent for about 2-3 years, during which time I sent a synopsis of the book (see below) to a number of publishers. None of them asked to see the manuscript as a result; they basically felt they could not make a commercial success of it, which I think was probably a correct assessment. In fact, my present agent read it and told me it was "too quiet" for an American audience--again, a correct evaluation, since it involves inner process, or existential psychology, and that is pretty foreign to the American psyche. So after about a year of getting nowhere, I decided to take the route I did with A Question of Values, my essay collection, and self-publish it on Amazon. My guess is that about 50 people will read it (well, maybe 35; you guys all know how prone I am to exaggeration), but this is another case of the activity being the reward. I can't toss off fiction in the same way I can nonfiction, and it took me several drafts to get it "right." At the end of the day, however, it feels like it was worth it. I'm hoping y'all will enjoy it, in any case.

As of this moment, only a picture of the book is posted on Amazon, but eventually, they are going to put the following text online as well: the synopsis of the book. As follows:

Who among us has never wondered whether our lives could be completely different? What exactly would we change, if we could? From the poetry of Robert Frost to the blockbuster cinema of Back to the Future, the notion of “what if?” holds an almost obsessive fascination over us. Are we shaped by fate, or by conscious choice?

Destiny is a series of three interrelated novellas that revolve around a single theme: Is it possible, as an act of will, for an individual to change what appears to be his or her fate? Can one deliberately modify the ingrained patterns of one’s life, and thereby alter its course? In the case of each of these tales, the central character undertakes to do this, and in each case the outcome is radically different.

The path of the protagonist of the first story, “La Vita Nuova,” is an occult one, involving meditation, parallel universes, time travel, and a training in Sufi out-of-body experiences. Jason Green, a rather timid librarian in New York City, finally gets the life he thought he wanted, but it comes with a catch, one he cannot seem to resolve.

In the second story, “The Observer,” Irene Davis is a talented artist who has spent her life keeping everyone at a distance. She wakes up on her fortieth birthday to discover that she is single, friendless, and devoid of any real meaning in her life. In the course of working with a therapist she begins to explore the possibilities for turning this around.

The final story, “The Seven Deadly Sins,” revolves around the life of a high school social science teacher, George Crystal, who unexpectedly writes a best seller and subsequently retires to a small village in England. From this vantage point, he decides to “purify” his life by working through the Seven Deadly Sins–Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, and Lust–one by one. After some initial success, the project starts to go awry, and then takes an unexpected turn when George falls in love with another American expatriate.

The fact that there are three separate, and fundamentally different, answers to the central question of the book finally lends it a philosophical or existential dimension, one that propels the reader to reflect on his or her own destiny, and what the possibilities are for having the life we really want.

Playing TAPs

2011-03-01T09:46:00.002-05:00

One thing I’ve noticed about “progressive” or left-wing analyses of American politics is an absence of any critique of the people who inhabit this great nation of ours. The government is always fair game, but there is some sort of mystique about The American People (TAP). Uttering this phrase, writes Fareed Zakaria, is tantamount to announcing a divine visitation; anything has the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical, all-knowing entity. Thus Noam Chomsky, for example, believes that there is a “democracy gap” between this (potentially) enlightened population and its evil masters; that popular consent has been “manufactured”; and that if we (= who, exactly?) could only remove the wool that is covering their eyes, they would reject the government and institute some form of democratic socialism. In a more generally populist vein, Michael Moore seems to believe something similar: Americans are inherently decent and rational, they’ve just been led astray. And yet evidence for a “democracy gap” is quite shaky. True, Americans finally turned against the war in Iraq (if they even think about it anymore), but this happened only when it was clear that we were losing; in the beginning, they were all on board. And polls that claim to show, for example, that we want socialized medicine are extremely misleading, because polling results typically depend on how the question is phrased. “Should everyone be entitled to health insurance?” The answer will be (has been) an overwhelming Yes. “Would you be willing to be taxed for it?” Well No, not really. “Do you believe in socialized medicine?” “Arrgh! Socialism! Get thee behind me, satan!” Etc.

Personally, I suspect there are limits to the “manufactured consent” argument, because I believe that TAP really do want, in Janice Joplin’s words, a Mercedes Benz, and that this is their vision of the good life. In my forthcoming book, Why America Failed, I quote from George Walden’s aptly titled study, God Won’t Save America: Psychosis of a Nation: “The peculiarities of nations, good and bad, tend to reflect the temperaments and qualities of their peoples. As Plato remarked, where else would they have come from?” When my editor saw this, he wrote in the margin: “This is the turning point of the book.”

Locating the problem within the “soul” (such as it is) of TAP is of course not very popular among so-called progressives, because once that reality is admitted, it becomes clear that there is no fabulous future, socialist or populist or genuinely democratic, awaiting us. If it were merely a question of eliminating Reagan or Bush Jr. or Obama in favor of a truly humane regime, then we could retain our optimism—freedom is “just around the corner,” as the historian Walter McDougall once put it. But if the problem is 310 million people sitting around dreaming of the day they’ll have a Mercedes Benz, then you can kiss the optimistic vision goodbye: TAP are getting the government they actually want. The “wool” covering their eyes proved to be—their eyes!

As a result, even the most penetrating critiques of The American Way of Life omit any examination of TAP or play it down. William Appleman Williams, for example, does say at one point that in the nineteenth century, merchants, farmers, and artisans were all on board with the American imperial-expansionist program; but he doesn’t really develop the theme, because he still (1961) had some hope for a democratic socialist state. The best one can find on the subject are a few desultory remarks, such as are tucked away in the pages of Sheldon Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. This is an extremely important book, because it examines the nuts and bolts of how “The Matrix” arose, and how it operates; but for the most part, Wolin’s focus is on the elites, the ruling class, as the critical factor. However, if we gather his remarks about TAP all in one place, a more comprehensive (deeper and disturbing) picture of our situation takes shape as a result. I’ll list them in the order that they appear in the book; you see what you think.

►(Quoting from George Kennan, 1947): “The fact of the matter is that there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down….If confidence and security were to disappear, don’t think that he would not be waiting to take their place.”

►(On Iraq): “…to support a war…that bears responsibility for the deaths of thousands of innocents, reduced to rubble a nation which had done us no harm, and burdened coming generations with a shameful and costly legacy—without generating massive revulsion and resistance.”

►“The lesson of Hobbes and Tocqueville can be boiled down to a brief but chilling dictum: concentrated power, whether of a Leviathan, a benevolent despotism, or a superpower, is impossible without the support of a complicitous citizenry that willingly signs on to the covenant, or acquiesces, or clicks the ‘mute button’.”

►(On Iraq): “Does innocence mean not being implicated in wrongdoing such as torture of prisoners or the ‘collateral damage’ to hapless civilians? And is it that the citizens are innocent but not their leaders?...As citizens are we collaborationists? To collaborate is to cooperate; to be complicit is to be an accomplice.”

►(On the Bush “election” of 2000): “…an illegitimate president took office amidst scarcely a ripple of discontent.”

►“While 83 percent of Americans believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus, only 28 percent admit to a belief in evolution.”

►“What is democracy doing bearing the stigma of empire?....recall that the American citizenry has a long history of being complicit in the country’s imperial ventures. The imperial impulse is not a tic afflicting only the few….Foreign observers, such as Tocqueville [1831], were struck by the appearance of a new kind of citizen: mobile, adventurous, highly competitive, and often brutal.”

►(Quoting Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council): “In a general election, the candidate with the most hopeful message is going to win it. Most people in the U.S. want to be rich, they want to get ahead, and that’s why an opportunity-oriented message works.”

►“For their part American citizens are expected to support the project of imposing democracy [on the rest of the world] while remaining in denial of their own complicity in ravaging foreign populations and economies.”

►(On Iraq): “Fault is attributed exclusively to the White House, never to the citizenry for its unthinking support of the venture. If, by luck, the war had been won as quickly as the administration assumed…it would be, would ‘democracy’ have even blinked? Not only did the citizens endorse the president’s war by reelecting him; in 2000 that same citizenry watched supinely as the Bush team defied the electorate and achieved a political coup….Much as one is justified in blaming Bush and his coterie, one also needs to figure in the culpability, complicity, and apathy of the citizenry.”

►(On Iraq): “…there was the political loss of nerve among Democrats, the press, and the punditry, a failure so profound as to call into question the health of the political system as a whole. That failure extended to all but a minority of the citizenry; the vast majority waved an occasional flag and then, when possible, heeded the advice of their leader to ‘fly, consume, spend’.”

►“In 2006, two years after the lie of Saddam’s WMDs had been exposed, the percentage of Americans who continued to believe that there were such weapons in Iraq increased from 35 to 50, and a near majority believed in links between Saddam and al Qaeda, lack of evidence notwithstanding.”

This is all I could find in a book of 300 pages, but these quotes are enough to suggest that Wolin understands that there are limits to blaming the ruling class. TAP aren’t very far from the elites in terms of values or world view, as it turns out.

At the conclusion of the book, Wolin tries to suggest what it would take to get our democracy back. This kind of optimistic prediction is obligatory in today’s market: TAP wants to hear a solution, even if none exists. Hence after demonstrating, in extenso, that we are totally screwed, the author will conclude his or her discussion by pulling a rabbit out of a hat at the eleventh hour. To his credit, Wolin does this only half-heartedly; he’s far too smart to believe that we can turn our situation around. Thus he says that the recovery of democracy depends first and foremost upon TAP changing themselves, “sloughing off their political passivity and, instead, acquiring some of the characteristics of a demos. That means creating themselves, coming-into-being by virtue of their own actions.” How this miracle is going to occur is of course never spelled out, and in fact two pages later Wolin writes:
“While the project of reinvigorating democracy may strike the reader as utopian, it requires an accompanying, even more utopian project: to encourage and nurture a counterelite of democratic public servants.” He didn’t quite write “when pigs fly” at the end of the book, but the implication is clearly there.

So there we have it: TAP exposed as complicitous in all these events, and in the actions of corporate and military elites. There is no “democracy gap,” in a word; the elites and TAP have essentially the same vision, and decency and rationality don’t figure big in it. Both have acted to create the America that we live in, the America that is now dying—by our own hand. And thus, as Wolin is reluctantly forced to admit, any talk of fundamental change, of a different sort of nation, is little more than fantasy.

©Morris Berman, 2011

(More) Cranial Rectitis

2011-02-19T21:44:00.002-05:00

So, here I am, reading the NYTBR for Feb. 6, a review of the book Hot, by Mark Hertsgaard. This author apparently deflates the notion that saving ourselves from global warming is a matter of some combination of cash and technology. No, the real issue, he says, is "social context." Politics and culture, he argues, may trump wealth and tech. Example: Louisiana. Efforts to prepare for future hurricanes have been crippled by the state's "continuing reluctance--even after Katrina--to acknowledge the reality of global warming for fear that might harm oil and gas production, and an abhorrence of taxes and public planning as somehow socialistic."

There really is no end to Cranial Rectitis in America; it seems to be infinite. Wen Stephenson, who wrote the review, says that Hertsgaard's book "makes me wonder if there isn't more hope for the Sahel than for the vulnerable South and Southwest of the United States. After all, why prepare for something--much less try to halt it--if you refuse to believe it's happening?"

But Hertsgaard's "solution" is the usual type of voluntarist nonsolution: what we need, apparently, is "an honest, urgent, grown-up national conversation--beginning in Washington." Um...duh?! When was the last time we had a "grown-up national conversation" in Washington? Every time I check the newspapers, it seems more like the antics of children than anything else. Mr. Obama, deluded in the extreme, thinks technology will save us, so he wastes his time talking to Steve Jobs and (that great human being) Mark Zuckerberg. Gosh, I can't wait to learn what exciting new plan they have in store for us. Meanwhile Hillary, as we've seen, flies off to Mexico to trumpet a nonsolution for the drug wars that everyone in Mexico knows won't work (because it hasn't now for years), then returns to DC to give an absurd "in this country we protect freedom of dissent" speech as her security team hauls off and beats up a silent protester in the audience (a guy who worked for the CIA for 27 yrs, but what the heck). (An event that went unreported in the major newspapers, BTW.) And the GOP is trying to get the economy to fail so they can blame national misery on Obama come November of next year. Why act like adults and try to help Americans when you can just act out like cranky children? Oh I tell you, I can't wait for the upcoming grown-up national conversation that will be held in DC on global warming and eco-disaster! I just have to get a ticket for that (non)event, so I can sit in the front row and take notes, absorb all the wisdom and hard-hitting plans for change that will swing into action as soon as the grown-up conversation is over.

Not to be too cynical (ha!), but I think that a massive study conducted by the NIH on the average amount of chicken fat located in the heads of these "grown-ups" in DC would be a much more worthwhile enterprise.

But let's move on. So much excitement recently over how Facebook recently precipitated the "revolution" (what revolution?) in Egypt. A thesis easily rebutted, as Malcolm Gladwell has done, but never mind. A few pages after the Hertsgaard review we find a review of The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. "What if the liberating potential of the Internet also contains the seeds of depoliticization and thus dedemocratization?," he asks. Morozov shows that more often than not, the Internet constricts or abolishes freedom. He points out how confused Hillary Clinton is, who, in a speech in 2005, called the Internet "an instrument of enormous danger"; but then last year, glorified it as a way "to advance democracy and human rights." (What a whack job this woman is. You, the reader, could do a better job as secretary of state than this clown in pants suits.) This belief, that the Net can be a force only for positive political change in repressive societies, Morozov calls "digital Orientalism."

Street protests in the wake of the last Iranian election is a good example of this, he points out. Oh the excitement, that "the revolution will be Twittered," as political blogger Andrew Sullivan proclaimed. Lee Siegel, author of the review of Morozov's book, cites this as a classic example of "Two decades of inane patter about the magical powers of a technology of mere convenience" ("inane," BTW, is a code word for Cranial Rectitis). He goes on:

"The Iranian protests against what the protesters believed was a corrupt election were brutally crushed because, as Morozov unsentimentally says, 'many Iranians found the elections to be fair.' The elements of a successful revolution--the complicity of the military, of a powerful political class, of an almost universally discontented population--simply weren't there. But the Internet boosters [people who typically know shit about history, in short], from journalists to officials in the State Department, succumbed, Morozov says, to 'the pressure to forget the context and start with what the Internet allows.' These people think only in terms of the Internet and are 'deaf to the social, cultural, and political subtleties and indeterminacies' of a given situation.

"What was broadcast on Twitter and elsewhere was repression of the revolution. The Iranian regime used the Web to identify photographs of protesters; to find out their personal information and whereabouts (through Facebook, naturally [nota bene]); to distribute propagandistic videos; and to text the population into counterrevolutionary paranoia." In 2007, a State Department official named Jared Cohen waxed eloquently as to how the Net was a place where Iranian youth could "say anything they want as they operate free from the grips of the police-state apparatus." Siegel comments: "Thanks to the exciting new technology, many of those freely texting Iranian youths are in prison or dead." As for Cohen, he is now working for Google as director of "Google Ideas." (How glorious.)

Morozov also documents how Mexican drug lords use social networking sites to gather info about their victims, and how Russian neofascist groups use the Net to fix the positions of minorities so as to organize pogroms. Meanwhile, both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative, which is a pledge (writes Morozov) "to behave in accordance with the laws and standards covering the right to freedom of expression and privacy embedded in internationally recognized documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." Siegel concludes: "The Internet is creating an egalitarian antidemocracy in which the strongest inhumanity tramples on the most eloquent rationality and decency."

It's so great, then, that the president regards a "faster Internet" as a key to solving our social and economic problems. What insight, what maturity. Clearly, the "grown-up national conversation" has already begun.

(c) Morris Berman, 2011

A Farce Called Hillary

2011-02-11T18:49:00.002-05:00

I had forgotten that Hillary was scheduled to make an appearance in town the last week of January, even though a friend of mine had mentioned it to me. So, fool that I was, I drove into the town center, planning to withdraw some pesos from the ATM connected to my bank. I parked, walked about a hundred yards, and suddenly was surrounded by a fleet of SUVs, black and gray, and Mexican army regulars sporting machine guns. WTF? “What is all this?,” I asked a news vendor. “Hillary,” he sort of grunted. “She needs all these cars?” I asked him. He gave me a half smile. You poor dumb gringo, he seemed to be saying.

It was quite a show, and the worst possible one to put on in a Latin American country. But this is how the American Empire makes its appearance, namely with a display of violence and arrogance. Look how mighty we are, is the message—designed to endear us to any of our southern neighbors. I recall a few years ago William Lederer, the author of The Ugly American (1958), was interviewed by phone at his rural home in Vermont (he is now 99 years old), and told the reporter that absolutely nothing had changed since he described the stupidity of American “diplomacy” and the moronic behavior of the diplomatic corps. “It’s as if I had never written the book,” he remarked.

Hillary proceeded to give a talk that was both boring and vapid. I support President Calderón, she said. We have to fight the drug lords, and that’s what he has been doing. We need more of the same, until the cartels are destroyed. This is the only solution, she told her audience—a “solution,” BTW, that Calderón has been pursuing for more than four years now, and the result has been the death of tens of thousands of people and what seems like an actual increase in drug trafficking. What was the definition of insanity, once again?

“What pomposity!” a Mexican friend remarked to me the next day. “She said nothing she couldn’t have communicated in a diplomatic cable, or in a statement to the press in Washington. And we’ve heard it all before, after all; why did she have to come here to say it? This was about appearances, nada más.” Here are a few things Hillary did not say, which I and perhaps a small handful of Americans (and a large percentage of the Mexican population, I suspect) would like to have heard:

1. The American demand for drugs is the inevitable result of a virulent form of cowboy capitalism that we practice in the United States, and which has turned our society into a war of all against all. In addition, the American Dream has not worked out, and Americans are now leading empty lives. Actually, they always were, but now they are more or less aware of it. The same could be said of me, sadly enough, although my drug of choice is power. I can’t get enough of it.

2. In a US diplomatic memo that appeared in Wikileaks recently, dating from 2009, the official who drew up the report concluded that Calderón’s intelligence-gathering services were not very competent; haphazard and ineffectual, in fact.

3. As has been widely reported, in a few Mexican states some of the police are in cahoots with the drug dealers.

4. Also in a few cases, the drug cartels apparently provide services for the local population that neither the local or federal governments seem willing to bother with: schools, hospitals, pensions for widows, taking care of the poor, and the like. In short, they enjoy popular support, due to some of their more benevolent behavior. More on this can be found in William Finnegan’s article, “Silver or Lead,” which appeared in The New Yorker, issue of 31 May 2010.

5. There is a widespread belief down here that your own president may be leading a double life. Apparently, a lot of Mexicans believe he is “comprado”—bought—i.e., in the pay of the drug lords. I’m not saying this is true; I have no idea whether it is, and I certainly hope it’s not. But obviously, if it is true, the whole war on drugs is a sham. Which it is anyway.

6. As Carlos Fuentes and many others have pointed out, the only solution is not to do more of the same—which would be a colossal waste of time—but to legalize the stuff. After all, after the repeal of Prohibition (1933) crime dropped off significantly in the United States, because there was no longer a payoff in trafficking in (former) contraband material.

7. However, there are probably business interests in both countries that would oppose such a move. I trust I don’t have to spell this out.

8. I myself am little more than a pawn in a game of international chess. My real purpose in coming down here is to polish my career portfolio, and prepare for the Democratic nomination of 2016; in fact, possibly 2012, since Mr. Obama has been as about effective a leader as Millard Fillmore. The truth is that I care about myself and my career; beyond Mexico serving as a market for our consumer goods, and as a source of cheap labor for the United States, I don’t give two shits about the place. I suspect you all know this.

9. I appreciate, however, the fact that Mexicans are cynical about the whole drug and crime situation, and that they are savvy: they know that nothing will be done about it, in the end. As for my own countrymen, “savvy” isn’t quite the word; “clueless” is closer to the mark. Even if they did understand what was going on down here, they wouldn’t give a damn anyway. They don’t really care about much of anything beyond their own immediate situation—like me, if the truth be told.

10. Morris Berman lives in this town, as it turns out, and he can tell you that I’m so full of shit I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. When my husband was president he got the UN to maintain sanctions against Iraq, which led to the death of 500,000 Iraqi children from starvation and malnutrition. To this, I made no objection at all. In addition, for my presidential campaign of 2008 I hired Mark Penn as my campaign manager, the man who heads a PR firm (Burson-Marsteller) that served as adviser to the junta in Argentina, and which, at the request of the Argentine military, organized a campaign against human rights organizations. I’m also not bothered by the fact that he represented Blackwater Worldwide, the military contractor blamed for numerous civilian deaths in Iraq. I say this so you know who it is that stands before you; who I am.

11. What I really need to do is resign my position as secretary of state, and enroll in a 12-step program to get me off my addiction to power and bullshit. I may look impressive, but the truth is that I’m a walking tragedy. I’m no more a force for good in the world than is the American Empire, whose agenda I serve. Rather than being a force, I am a farce—a fact that haunts me every waking day of my life.

12. I shouldn’t have come here, and I apologize for wasting your time.

___________________

Clearly, it would have been a marvelous speech. As for me, I never did get to the bank.

©Morris Berman, 2011

100

2011-02-06T12:07:00.003-05:00

Well, gang, whoda thunk it? This is the 100th post! I don't have anything particular to say on this occasion, but I wanted to mark the milestone. Nearly 5 yrs ago, when I was cruelly forced into doing this, I figured I would attract 3 or 4 contributors, that the blog wd last abt 3 or 4 mos., end of story. And here we are, with no less than 42 correspondents, and almost 5 yrs to our credit. Sometimes I think: Maybe I shd change the format, and just report bowling scores of various leagues around the country. Or perhaps post the average GPA's at all of the community colleges in the US, month by month. But then it's so much fun documenting our collapse, and depressing each other w/stories of life in the US, that I figure we shd just limp merrily along, doing what we do best. So a salute, then, to all of us, and I'm hoping u can join Sarah and myself north of the Arctic Circle for our nuptials, shortly after her election in 2012. It's lookin' good, no doubt abt it...xoxo, mb

The Structuralists

2011-01-29T23:49:00.003-05:00

[Once again, let me apologize to those of you who bought a copy of A Question of Values. The following essay is included in that collection, but is posted here online for the first time.]

Limbo is our Way of Life.

–William Appleman Williams

The word "structuralism" is commonly associated with a group of French intellectuals who were prominent in the sixties and seventies, and whose work, which was based on linguistics, came to dominate the human sciences for a good many years. Indeed, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Louis Althusser constituted a veritable galaxy of talent. Although one can find numerous academic texts explaining what structuralism is, the philosophy (or mode of analysis) can be summarized as follows:

1. Every system, whether it be a novel or a civilization, has a structure, i.e. is characterized by deep underlying patterns.
2. That structure is more significant than the individual elements of the system, and in fact determines the position or role of the elements in the system.
3. In any system, continuity is much more common than change, and that continuity follows the "map" provided by the deep underlying patterns.
4. Structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface phenomena, or appearances (cf. the distinction between light and shadows in Plato's Parable of the Cave).

Understood in this way, it seems fair to assert that structuralism is not the exclusive property of the French. For example, although structural analysis is not typical of U.S. intellectual circles, a few American scholars have nevertheless used it in their research to great effect. I am thinking of four writers in particular, whose work, when integrated into a comprehensive whole, provides a radically different picture of the United States than the one commonly held: the land of freedom and opportunity. It is not likely that many Americans would be able to tolerate this alternative structuralist view of American history, although they needn't worry, inasmuch as anything even mildly resembling it remains very far removed from public discussion. Thus for most Americans, Vietnam was an unfortunate "mistake"; Iraq is part of the effort to "spread democracy" (but now in the process of being reclassified as a mistake); September 11th was the result of enemies who are "evil" or "insane"; and the economic crash of October 2008 was the product of individual greed, the work of a few (perhaps even quite a few) "bad apples". None of these sorts of events (which could, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely) are seen as being endemic to the system, to the American Way of Life; as following inevitably from its underlying structure. That would, needless to say, be a wake-up call of the first magnitude.

The four scholars I have in mind probably never met, and for the most part (not entirely) were ignorant of each others' work. These are the historians William Appleman Williams (d. 1990) and Joyce Appleby (Professor Emerita, UCLA); the philosopher Albert Borgmann (U of Montana); and the Chilean-born writer and journalist Ariel Dorfman (who has lived and worked in the United States for several decades now). Ostensibly, they don't have all that much in common, having directed their attention to very diverse topics. But as indicated above, when you put them together you get a picture of the United States that forms a coherent whole, one that most Americans would find very disturbing to contemplate. As the saying goes, they don't teach this sort of thing in school.

To begin with Williams, then: 2009 marked the fiftieth anniversary of his most famous work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In this book, Williams argues that the expansionist or imperial tendencies of the United States were present from its earliest days. American political leaders, he writes, believed that the doors to economic expansion had to be open in order to secure U.S. democratic institutions. They couldn't imagine the American people living within the limits of their own resources. And the American people, he goes on to say, were thoroughly on board with this program. Whether we are talking about farmers or workers or the middle class, they all shared an ideology of informal imperialism. Empire, in a word, was seen as essential to the good life. In particular, the Founding Fathers regarded territorial expansion as key to keeping American society from congealing into a European class system. But there was a price to be paid for all of this, and it was not a small one. For what the frontier did, according to Williams, was take us away from what was essential–a fair and just society, organized along the lines of democratic socialism. Instead, there was a collective (if unconscious, I would add) decision to run away from this, and thus to run away from (real) life. In The Contours of American History (1961), Williams puts it this way:

Americans...have the chance to create the first truly
democratic socialism in the world. That opportunity
is the only real frontier available to Americans in the
second half of the twentieth century. If they...acted
upon the...intelligence and morality and courage
that it would take to explore and develop that frontier,
then they would finally have broken the chains of their
own past. Otherwise, they would ultimately fall victims
to a nostalgia for their childhood.

I shall return to this theme of childhood in a moment. For now, let us be clear about the conundrum that Williams identified: the choice between individual capital accumulation, or obsession with private property, and a more equitable capital distribution, or concern for the collective well-being of the nation. Williams traced this fundamental conflict back to England's Glorious Revolution (1688), by which time it was clearly understood that expansion was the only way to reconcile these opposing ways of life. In the American context, it took the form of an addiction to the frontier as utopia. As a result, there really was no positive vision of commonwealth. In the nineteenth century, says Williams, the focus was on expansion, pure and simple, at the cost of social and personal values. To put it bluntly, Americans have always relied on expansion to escape from domestic problems, and resorted to violence and aggression when this failed. Williams was fond of quoting James Madison on the subject: "Extend the sphere and you have made it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens."

According to Williams, then, the United States was caught in a kind of balancing act, in which outward movement–territorial conquest, market expansion, or war–became the default solution to all of its domestic ills. Empire would reconcile avarice and morality. You defuse demands for a redistribution of wealth by opening up "surplus social space." "We have been playing hide-and-seek for two centuries," he wrote in 1976; "limbo is our Way of Life."

Still, it is not clear what Americans are running from; it is probably deeper than democratic socialism, and at one point Williams argues that we are afraid of our own violence. Whatever this dark presence is, it has to run very deep, because as Williams shows, anything that stood in the way of expansion--Native Americans, the Confederacy, the Soviet Union, and finally the Third World--was regarded as "evil," unnatural, beyond redemption. Looking inward, looking at ourselves, was never a serious option, and examining the structures that underlay its behavior was never America's forte.

Before we can ascertain what Americans are running from, however, it will be necessary to get some idea of how they wound up in a state of internal conflict and competition in the first place. On the surface, it seems almost as though aggression, narcissism, and imperialism are literally woven into the country's DNA; as though, in the United States, life and greed are synonymous. The shift from a European-based sense of commonwealth to a me-first free-for-all dates primarily from the 1790s.* Until that time, according to Joyce Appleby, the idea of a greater good and a system of reciprocal obligations still carried some weight, and the word "virtue" was defined as a commitment to those things. Under the impact of the ideas of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment, however, this began to change. The new Newtonian-based philosophy held that societies were collections of individuals ("atoms"), and that the pursuit of profit on the part of each of these entities combined–i.e. the collective result of individual self-interest–would be the prosperity of the whole. "Virtue," in other words, had by 1800 come to mean personal success in an opportunistic environment; looking out for Number One.

The result was that the glue that had held colonial life together began to disintegrate, for individual greed is basically an antiglue. Historically speaking, according to Gordon Wood, this constituted a complete transformation in human social relations, amounting to a very new type of society. One might even call it an antisociety. Contemplating these developments in the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush was forced to conclude that the nation "would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness." The reality of contemporary America would undoubtedly shock Dr. Rush, were he to return from the grave, but it probably would not surprise him.

(As an aside I offer the following anecdote: a friend of mine who happens to be the dean of a major medical school in the United States read Appleby's work some time ago and was very impressed with it. But he discovered that whenever he tried to discuss her thesis with members of the faculty, their eyes would glaze over within thirty seconds and they would change the subject. I believe this attests to the massive brainwashing prevalent in the United States, such that even the nation's most intelligent citizens literally cannot tolerate even a casual examination of the country's structural premises.)

In any case, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890; there was no more unclaimed land to be had. Having stolen half of Mexico in 1848, the United States really couldn't now lay claim to the rest of that country, so it began looking farther afield for new conquests. Thus, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the formulation of the Open Door Policy in 1899, which asserted the importance of overseas economic expansion. Yet the real frontier of the so-called Progressive Era was internal, which is to say, technological--a conception that has lasted down to the present day. For this development we need to move on to the third figure on our list, Albert Borgmann, whose Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) takes the work of William Appleman Williams to the next level.

In some ways, Borgmann was anticipated by the historian David Potter, who recognized (in People of Plenty, 1954) that Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis," while correct, didn't have to be conceived of in strictly geographical terms. The psychic frontier in the United States, he said, is based on the interaction between technology and the environment, and hence the promised expansion is without limit. This had actually been made explicit by the first presidential scientific adviser, Vannevar Bush, in his definitive essay of 1945: Science the Endless Frontier. But the basic structural mechanism–expansion as a way of mitigating domestic conflict–was in place long before Potter or Bush arrived on the scene. "Commodity expansion," to coin a phrase, was merely the old structure of Manifest Destiny mapped onto a different field; and as Borgmann demonstrates, it "works" even better. For there isn't, and there will not be, an end to the gizmos and gadgets the consumer society can crank out. Where there are now ten varieties of razor blades, there will be twenty tomorrow, and fifty a year from now--all "new and improved," with advertising serving to convince us that all of this junk is essential to our lives. From Milton Friedman to Condoleezza Rice, drowning in crap is regarded as "freedom," with virtually no dissent on the subject from the American people.

Here is a definition of democracy provided by a former American ambassador to Brazil (1961-62), Lincoln Gordon, in his book A New Deal for Latin America:

True democracy...is the regime of continuous social
revolution. I use the word revolution to mean a
process of structural change in society—an alteration
in the pattern of social class, in the social mobility
of individuals and their children, in the educational
structure, in methods of production, standards of living,
and the distribution of income, and in attitudes toward
relationships among individuals, business and other
private organizations, and the State.

Sounds pretty good, right? A far cry from the stagnant, class-based society of medieval Europe, to be sure. But what it amounts to in practice–if we leave aside the reference to distribution of income, which strikes an odd note here–is the society Joyce Appleby described and Benjamin Rush decried: an endless jockeying for position and power. And what fuels this social mobility, as Borgmann recognized, is constant invention and innovation, so that the lower class believes it can acquire the goods and lifestyle of the middle class, and the middle class believes it can acquire the same of the upper class. In Dark Ages America I wrote:

The privileges of the ruling class are exercised in
consonance with popular goals. Rich and poor both
want the same things, and in this way commodities
...are the stabilizing factors of technological societies.
Social inequality favors the advancement of the reign
of technology, in other words, because it presents a
ladder of what can be attained through technology.
This results in an equilibrium that can be maintained
only by the production of more and more commodities.
The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to
catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains
without substance, a realm from which the crucial
dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.

In reality, this "escalator" of social mobility is an illusion. Very little wealth "trickles down," and the statistics are quite clear on this point: the vast majority of the population never escape from the class into which they were born. But the combination of techno-economic expansion, and stories of the "self-made man," are sufficient to keep the lid on the conflict and hostility that are generated by endless competition. Meanwhile, our lives are filled with toys as substitutes for friendship, community, craftsmanship, quality, an equitable distribution of wealth, and an enlightened citizenry as opposed to a large collection of child-consumers who have literally no idea as to what genuine political debate is about. "Growth" is all...but to what end? This is the question that almost never gets asked.

The matter of children and their toys brings us to the fourth author, Ariel Dorfman, who formulated the concept of "soft power" long before Joseph Nye of Harvard University coined the phrase. What Dorfman asked was this: What makes American culture so popular, worldwide? Why is everyone attracted to its omnipresent symbols--Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, blue jeans, American sitcoms, and the like? What a paradox, that so many nations despise the United States while the citizens of those nations are literally addicted to American television programs. What, in short, is America's secret?

Dorfman is a Marxist, yet he surprised himself when he realized the decidedly non-Marxist answer to this question: "The way in which American mass culture reaches out to people may touch upon mechanisms embedded in our innermost being." In a word, the appeal is archetypal, transhistorical, and transcultural. For human beings are biologically programmed to respond to anything tinged with childhood. We seek to protect our young; we have tender feelings toward them. Mickey Mouse effectively joins power and infantilization, as does virtually all of American culture. That culture broadcasts a message of rejuvenation, a fountain of eternal youth, and (says Dorfman) "the possibility of conserving some form of innocence as one grows up." Whereas previously the U.S. Army was the means of exerting influence, the mass media now becomes a "peaceful" way of extending the American frontier. In fact, it is far superior to "hard power," because it enables Americans to retain an image of themselves as innocent, and to not have to recognize that this is just another version of imperial expansion. "America was able to project a universal category–childhood–onto alien cultures that were subjected politically and economically, and to seek in them infantile echoes, the yearning for redemption, innocence, and eternal life that, to one degree or another, are part of the constitution of all human beings." But when the American is shorn of adult faculties, adds Dorfman, and "handed solutions that suckle and comfort him...what is left is a babe, a dwindled, decreased human being."

The recent remarks of third-party candidate Ralph Nader, who could never manage to garner more than a tiny fraction of the vote, are quite relevant in this regard: the new generation of Americans, he said, “have little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity." But the problem goes way beyond toys as a political substitute. It is all part of remaining a child, and of renewing or "reinventing" oneself through the latest electronic gadget or new consumer product that rolls off the assembly line. (One could include New Age gurus and philosophies in this list as well.) And even beyond this, the notion is that all of the world can be renewed by turning it into one huge market place, or toy store. What else, after all, is life about–for a child?

This, then, is the heart of "soft power," that empire and childhood are linked by an endless succession of new toys; a world in which every day is Christmas, and in which the neurosis of the United States becomes the power of the United States, as every last human being on the planet is sucked into this vortex. The American empire, in reality, is an Empire of Children.

We are now, I believe, in a position to answer the question of what all of this frenetic activity is designed to hide; what Americans are running away from. Toward the end of his life Williams wrote: "America is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." This is a haunting, if enigmatic, sentence. What truth, after all? Possibly, an example of what not to do. For the truth here is an emptiness at the center, to which is added a desire to never grow up. It should be obvious by now that the American definition of "progress" is little more than a joke, and that running away from the responsibilities of adulthood–including the construction of a society not based on endless consumption, competition, and expansion–could be the single greatest thread in American history. That there is a possible alternative history, and a very different type of progress, characterized (for example) by marginal figures such as Lewis Mumford or the late Jane Jacobs, is something Americans don't wish to contemplate, for alternatives to the life of running faster to get nowhere scare them. No, the expansion game, and the life of limbo, as Williams puts it, will continue until we hit a wall, and the game cannot be played any longer (although I suspect we shall be able to limp along with "crisis management" for two or three more decades). This game, of self-destruction and the destruction of others, will continue until there is no place for America to go except to the graveyard of failed empires. And as Williams suggested, violence is very likely part of the equation.

In the meantime, much of the world, ironically enough, will go on taking the United States as a model for development, ignoring the bankruptcy of this way of life. The sadness of it all was captured by Richard Easterlin in his incisive study, Growth Triumphant: "In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity." Once expansion fails, however, the jig will be up. Whether Americans will finally address the thing they've been hiding from all these years is another question altogether.

The widespread emulation of this model is thus a peculiarly depressing aspect of the whole drama. I wrote this article in Mexico City, and being late for a meeting with a friend, shut my notebook and grabbed a taxi to get to my rendezvous on time. The driver, a young man of about twenty-five years of age, stared into the screen of his cell phone or blackberry while weaving through traffic. As I glanced over his shoulder, I saw that he was looking at cartoons, of the kind I watched on television when I was seven years old. Finally, nervous that he was going to plow into the truck in front of us, I asked him whether watching a screen while driving wasn't just a little bit dangerous. "Oh no," he told me, never taking his eyes off the screen; "not a problem." Meanwhile, he overshot my destination, had to consult the map I had with me, and wound up charging me twice as much as the ride would normally cost. I wasn’t in the mood to get into a long argument with him in Spanish about it, so I paid the fare and wished him buen día. But I couldn't help thinking what a jackass this kid was, and, at the same time, that what was in his head regarding the components of a meaningful life was probably not very different from what was in the head of the president of any Mexican or American or (for that matter) Indian university or corporation. Clearly, the psychology of expand-and-hide spreads like cancer: "growth" über Alles.

We see, then, the picture of the United States that emerges when we look at it structurally. Put Williams, Appleby, Borgmann, and Dorfman together, and it is as though you are looking at America with X-ray eyes. "Freedom" and "Opportunity" are not what stand out, on this view. Rather, the X-ray vision reveals something much closer to disease, what has been called an "ideological pathology." Living in limbo, as Williams told us over and over again, cannot be prolonged indefinitely. Yet the real tragedy, in my view, is not one of American diplomacy but of willful ignorance. Is it likely, when the system finally unravels and the empire is a feeble shadow of its former self, that we (or the hegemon that replaces us) will have learned anything at all?

*This is not quite true. Walter McDougall, in Freedom Just Around the Corner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), says we were a nation of hustlers (his word) from the get-go; and Richard Bushman documents this for eighteenth-century Connecticut in From Puritan to Yankee (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970).

References

Keith Berwick, review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1963, pp. 144-46.

Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, "War Without End," The Village Voice, 5 November 1991, p. 75.

Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes, trans. Clark Hansen (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

Greg Grandin, "Off Dead Center," The Nation, 1 July 2009.

Chris Hedges, "Nader Was Right," posted on http://www.truthdig.com/, 10 August 2009.

William Fletcher Thompson, Jr., review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 1962-63, pp. 139-40.

Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” lecture to the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893; reprinted in numerous anthologies and available at http://www.historians.org/pubs/archives/Turnerthesis.htm

Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).

The Lure of Other Worlds

2011-01-11T18:56:00.003-05:00

[Apologies to those of you who have already read this in A Question of Values. Sad to say, not everyone has bought the book (yet), so I thought I’d post this for the bookless among us.]

The essence of man is desire.

–Spinoza

At one time or another, all of us ponder the notion of happiness–what it consists of, and how to achieve it. This is my own small contribution to this great question.

Let me start with two vignettes from Proust, in this case from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs–“In the shadow of young girls in bloom”–the second volume of In Search of Lost Time (and rendered in English as Within a Budding Grove). The vignettes are but a few pages apart. Marcel has just seen the gaggle of the young girls in bloom, and there was one in particular who gave him a “smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from the centre of that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this little tribe, an inaccessible, unknown world wherein the idea of what I was could certainly never penetrate or find a place.” He goes on:

"From the depths of what universe did she discern me?
It would have been as difficult for me to say as, when
certain distinguishing features in a neighbouring planet
are made visible thanks to the telescope, it is to conclude
therefrom that human beings inhabit it, and that they can
see us, and to guess what ideas the sight of us can have
aroused in their minds."

This wonder over who she is, writes Proust, leads Marcel to think:

"And it was consequently her whole life that filled me
with desire; a sorrowful desire because I felt that it
was not to be fulfilled, but an exhilarating one because,
what had hitherto been my life having ceased of a
sudden to be my whole life, being no more now than
a small part of the space stretching out before me
which I was burning to cover and which was
composed of the lives of these girls, it offered me that
prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself,
which is happiness."

So happiness is the possibility of entering another world, or another culture, which will lead to a multiplication of oneself–an extension to greater realms. Two pages later, Marcel ruminates on the role of the imagination in this process:

"To strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce
them to their own dimensions, that is to say to
nothing....We need imagination, awakened by
the uncertainty of being unable to attain its object,
to create a goal which hides the other goal from us,
and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of
penetrating another life, prevents us from recognising
that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from
restricting it to its own range."

By comparison, Proust imagines sitting before a plate of fish, and says that between us and the enjoyment of the flesh of that fish we need a certain intervention. We imagine sitting by the water with the rod in our hand, and see “the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing...the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure.” The imagination thus moves in to replace the actual sensual experience (whether of savoring a woman or a fish). This, he seems to suggest, is the Other World that we wish to enter, that offers happiness–the enlargement of oneself.

I remember an ad that was popular in the 1960s–it could have been for aftershave, for all I know–showing an elegantly dressed man sitting at a table surrounded by classic Japanese wood-and-paper screens (shoji), on which was a Go set. The caption read something like: “He is at home in worlds most people don’t even know exist.” And I remember, as a young adult, identifying with that man, wanting to be him, wanting familiarity with unknown worlds–probably because I understood that this would extend my own world, and thus make me happier.

The notion that the imaginary does not substitute for the sensual, but is somehow fused with it, is a major motif in the work of the great Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965). In Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Ken Ito explores this in detail, showing how Tanizaki is able to create shimmering visions of other worlds–including the world of his childhood–which transcend the ordinary. As he puts it, “Tanizaki’s other worlds are realms limned by culturally determined erotic longing, where men find sensual and aesthetic satisfactions unavailable in the given world of modernizing Japan.”

In fact, in his early work, the West was the other world, the other culture, that Tanizaki found fascinating, and sought to enter. A bit later, he reversed himself, and made the lost traditional world of Japan, a world that was rapidly succumbing to modernization (i.e., Americanization), the culture that was alluring. After the War, Tanizaki came to a more integrated position, and broadened out to an examination of “the desire that underlies cultural aspiration” in general. He became, in short, both a brilliant psychologist and a brilliant storyteller, in a single stroke.

Tanizaki’s novels, says Ito, “brim with characters who labor to realize visions of sexual and cultural fulfillment in the exterior world.” Naomi, for example, is the story of a westernized Japanese woman who is the obsession of Joji, a Japanese man who cannot really distinguish between his yearning for her and his yearning for the West–at least, the West as it existed then in the popular Japanese imagination (powerful, sensual, and replete with all kinds of exotic possibilities). Similarly, in his description of his childhood, Tanizaki evokes “an ‘other world’ that transcends the ordinary,” a world of mystery, in which “sampling just a bit of squid, salty and slick, can be a revelation; the way to a noodle shop can lead through a scene straight out of a Hiroshige print; and a restaurant’s garden can take on the hazy luminosity of a ‘dream world’.” Treated in this way, even one’s own childhood can be exotic. As one Japanese writer put it, in a commentary on Tanizaki, “exoticism is an attempt to find something lacking within the self in an object or person that is foreign, strange, or distant. It can thus be defined as an outwardly projected act of self-recovery.”

(My own encounter with the fusion of sexuality and otherness occurred with my second sexual partner–I was lucky, I guess–who was half Native American. The sensation was something along the lines of, “Where have I been all my life?” For this went way beyond “getting laid”; it was an entrée into a world the existence of which I previously had no idea. Its dimensions seemed gigantic; I suddenly realized that Mystery was not just a concept, and that understood properly, the whole world could be experienced as erotic. Sad to say, that relationship didn’t last very long, and it was more than ten years before it happened to me again. C’est la vie.)

This definition of exoticism has a lot in common with Georges Batailles’ definition of eroticism, which he characterizes as a process where “man is everlastingly in search of an object outside himself but this object answers the innerness of the desire.” Of course, the real question is whether it does answer the innerness of desire. The French psychologist, Jacques Lacan (1901-81), believed it didn’t. For Lacan, these other worlds that we are reaching for, and the desire that impels us, are purely illusory. Lacan argued that the transference that occurs in the analytic situation is really to the knowledge that the patient thinks his or her analyst possesses. The analyst is the sujet supposé savoir, the subject who is supposedly in the know. But what Lacan occasionally hinted at, and what he actually demonstrated in his own life–in his consummate capacity as a charlatan–was that there was no hidden knowledge, no other world. As in the case of The Wizard of Oz, in which the various characters believe themselves to be incomplete (lacking a heart, a brain, etc.) and go off in search of the Wizard, who is supposedly going to make them whole, the journey ends when the “Wizard” turns out to be a nobody. He is just some little bald guy behind a screen, fiddling with levers and pulleys. The knowledge, the other world, was totally in the mind of the desirers. True fulfillment, true self-recovery, consists in grasping that the journey was completely unnecessary. Unfortunately, as Lacan well knew, very few people are willing to recognize this. For then the game would be up, and one would be faced with a very different, and much less dazzling, version of reality.

(I recall a joke in which a young American adventurer learns of some guru in the Himalayas who supposedly knows what life really is. He crosses the Atlantic, hitchhikes through Europe and Asia, climbs the Himalayas, and finally corners the guru, meditating in his cave. “Oh Swami!” he cries, “please tell me what life really is!” The guru, in an authoritative, high-pitched voice, points his finger toward the heavens and declares, “Life is a waterfall.” The young lad stares at him for a moment and finally says, with some anger, “That’s it? Life is a waterfall? I came all this way to hear that ‘life is a waterfall’?” The guru looks at him, a bit puzzled, and then says: “It isn’t?”)

What, then, would be this less dazzling version of reality, and how does it relate to the theme of other worlds? One pioneer in this area–one might well call him the grandfather of body work–was F.M. Alexander (1869-1955), an Australian actor who immigrated to England in 1904 and subsequently developed a technique of mind-body integration that bears his name. He had some very famous students, including Aldous Huxley, who immortalized him as a seer and visionary (as “James Miller”) in his novel, Eyeless in Gaza. Alexander was also in search of other worlds, and an expanded self, but in his hands (literally) these things took on a whole new meaning. For according to Alexander, it is precisely the refusal to indulge in desire, and to inhibit it instead, that opens up a new possibility. In his work with his clients, he sought to disrupt the well-worn grooves of habit and replace them with spontaneity. While not strictly ascetic, the lure here is that a much fuller life awaits one who does not act on impulse, but instead renounces it. This involves crossing a kind of watershed, of the kind I discuss in the final chapter of my book Coming to Our Senses, “The Two Faces of Creativity.” I call these Creativity II and Creativity III, the first being allied to the tormented genius theory, fueled by drama and conflict–Van Gogh, let’s say, or Sylvia Plath. The second is illustrated by the medieval craft tradition, or by much Eastern art, in which the work emerges out of serenity rather than emotional extremes. I point out that it is very hard for us westerners to get to Cr. III because the impulsive, passionate nature of Cr. II makes it seem so alive; and until you reach the other shore, the feeling is one of meaninglessness, loss of purpose. Those who study things such as the Alexander Technique, or emptiness meditation, eventually find themselves face to face with this “dark night of the soul.”

In The Compassionate Presence, Stephen Schwartz talks in similar terms, ones which are reminiscent of my discussion of creativity. The first type, he says, is ego-driven and conflict-based; it prods us into acting, doing. We remain ignorant of the awareness “that there is another kind of impetus besides the motivation of ‘should’ and ‘must’.” This other impetus arises out of trust, not pressure, whereas “ego suggests that no challenge will exist when we stop pushing our life into the ground.” However, if we let go of the old ways before we are ready for the new, Schwartz goes on to say, “a certain kind of forward-directed activity seems to cease.” The ego sees the resulting deflation as “proof” of its theory, that drivenness is the key to life.

“We find ourselves for a while in a kind of paralysis,” writes Schwartz. “This can feel like a barren place,” a place of no hope. It’s a half-way place. “We find ourselves [there] because a specific kind of certainty does not yet exist in full consciousness.” But eventually, another kind of impulse arises, one that is not the result of pushing and doubt. Proust (let alone the Buddha) would say that very few of us get there. In Tolstoy’s famous story of Ivan Ilych, the central character–Everyman, in a word–realizes only on his deathbed that his entire life was a waste of time.

This is where Alexander is relevant, for his teaching was designed to help people work through this “dark night of the soul” on a bodily level. It means putting yourself in physical postures that seem wrong only because you’ve been doing what’s wrong all your life. As in the case of Wilhelm Reich, the idea is to return to a “natural” body, one without tension, without the coercive ego structure of pushing and doubt. “If it feels wrong, leave it wrong,” Alexander used to tell his students. The entire process of the Alexander Technique is counterintuitive. In this case, the other world is an inner rather than an outer world, and as already noted, it is attained not through desire but through its inhibition. This has obvious connections with Buddhism or Taoism, and the classical Chinese notion of wu wei, or not-doing. The promise is that of a richer existence, a happiness borne not out of the multiplication of self, but out of the holding back of the self. As someone once said, Zen is the practice of manifesting oneself as emptiness. The paradox is that renunciation creates a sensation of fullness, of limitless horizons.

Similar conclusions were reached independently by the Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski (1902-80), who pioneered something called the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Dabrowski saw depression and anxiety as necessary for real growth, disintegrative processes that he regarded as positive because they were developmental. Crises, in other words, cause us to review ourselves, possibly redo ourselves, and to make new worlds as a result. One has to weather the darkness, which is not conceived of in negative terms. (Not easy!)

I have repeated this cycle of drivenness/surrender a number of times in my life, most recently in the wake of surgery that left me confined to my house for a few weeks. My doctor told me the following were off limits: spicy foods, fats, sugar, salt, soda pop, tobacco, coffee, too much food in general, sex, exercise, and driving anywhere. After three weeks of this, I was pretty much a basket case. It was as though all my “friends” had suddenly deserted me. I had no interest in doing any work; indeed, it felt like nothing would ever turn me on again. Finally, as Dabrowski says, one has no choice (in lieu of spiraling downward) but to trust the process, give it a positive “spin”. In time, with a little luck (or maybe it’s divine intervention, who knows), the outlines of the farther shore emerge, and one lives to write, and love, again.

Second Interview with Ken Rose

2011-01-02T23:44:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

Ken runs a show on KOWS-FM in Occidental, CA, called "What Now," and interviewed me last May. After my smash run on Broadway, he could hardly decline to have me again, so here's the info (interview is abt 1 hr long):

Go to www.pantedmonkey.org, scroll down to 12-27-10, and click on my name. Lean back, pull up a stiff glass of Scotch, and enjoy (or not).

-mb

Thoughts for the End of the Year

2010-12-30T20:35:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends (aka DAA42)-

As the year comes to a close, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about the past 4.5 yrs (when, under severe pressure from agent and editor, I agreed to start this blog) and the next few. I'm glad, in retrospect, that I knuckled under to pressure from these folks, as the evolution of this blog has taught me a lot; and it's been great getting to know you guys, if only virtually. It took a while to shake out, as I recently explained: the self-advertising and the severely neurotic have (thank god) departed for greener pastures, and what is left is a group of thoughtful people who want to reflect on what's happening to the US and where we are collectively going. Art, Dave, Susan, Tim, Joe, El Juero, Mike (et al.)--thank you for being there, and for contributing as much as you have.

I suspect the next 2-3 years are going to be quite fateful for the US, and not in a good way. I very much doubt there is anything substantive any of us can do to derail America from its destructive, self-defeating course. But we can attend to our souls a bit; at least there's that. With that in mind, here is a quote from Marilynne Robinson's recent book, Absence of Mind. She writes of

"...that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer so diligently....I am hungry, I am comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent into particularity in every statement of this kind, Being itself made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being, may only startle in the dark of the night, when the intuition comes that there is no proportion [i.e., relationship] between the great given of existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which it is inevitably forced [Heidegger: thrown]...The soul [is simply] a name for an aspect of deep experience...."

To all of you, a happy and soulful 2011.

--mb

Could This Country Be More Full of Hot Prunes?

2010-12-27T16:35:00.000-05:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/22/bill-maher-christmas-message_n_800216.html

The Straight Poop

2010-12-20T20:03:00.003-05:00

The following is from John Cassidy's Nov. 29 article in The New Yorker, "What Good Is Wall Street?" The subtitle is: "Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless" (Duh!).

"A clear implication of [Lord Adair Turner's] argument is that many people in the City [London] and on Wall Street are the financial equivalent of slumlords or toll collectors in pin-striped suits. If they retired to their beach houses en masse, the rest of the economy would be fine, or perhaps even healthier." [Turner is the chairman of Britain's top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority; he recently published an article entitled "What Do Banks Do?"]

"Last year, while many people were facing pay freezes or worse, the average pay of employees at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase's investment bank jumped 27%, to more than $340,000. This figure includes modestly paid workers at reception desks and mail rooms, and it thus understates what senior bankers earn. At Goldman...nearly a thousand employees received bonuses of at least $1 million in 2009. Not surprisingly, Wall Street has become the preferred destination for the bright young people who used to want to start up their own companies, work for NASA, or join the Peace Corps. At Harvard this spring, about a third of the seniors with secure jobs were heading to work in finance. Ben Friedman, a professor of economics at Harvard, recently wrote an article lamenting 'the direction of such a large fraction of our most-skilled, best-educated, and most highly motivated young citizens to the financial sector.'"

"Paul Woolley...has set up an institute at the London School of Economics called the Woolley Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality. 'Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it's just a utility, like sewage [excellent comparison] or gas?...'It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.'" [Woolley had a career as an investment banker.]

"Rather than seeking the most productive outlet for the money that depositors and investors entrust to them, [banks] may follow trends and surf bubbles. These activities shift capital into projects that have little or no long-term value, such as speculative real-estate developments in the swamps of Florida. Rather than acting in their customers' best interests, financial institutions may peddle opaque investment products, like collateralized debt obligations. Privy to superior information, banks can charge hefty fees and drive up their own profits at the expense of clients who are induced to take on risks they don't fully understand--a form of rent seeking."

"The insidious culture that allowed Wall Street firms to peddle securities of dubious value to pension funds and charitable endowments remains largely in place."

"Perhaps the most shocking thing about recent events was not how rapidly the big Wall Street firms got into trouble but how quickly they returned to profitability and lavished big rewards on themselves. Last year, Goldman Sachs paid more than $16 billion in compensation, and Morgan Stanley paid out more than $14 billion. Neither came up with any spectacular new investments or produced anything of tangible value."

"During the credit boom of 2005 to 2007, profits and pay reached unprecedented highs. It is now evident that the bankers were being rewarded largely for taking on unacknowledged risks: after the subprime market collapsed, bank shareholders and taxpayers were left to pick up the losses. From an economy-wide perspective, this experience suggests that at least some of the profits that Wall Street bankers claim to generate, and that they use to justify their big pay packages, are illusory."

"On Wall Street and elsewhere in corporate America, insiders generally learn quickly how to game new systems and turn them to their advantage."

"There is...a blog, The Epicurean Dealmaker, written by an anonymous investment banker...In March, 2008, when some analysts were suggesting that the demise of Bear Stearns would lead to a change of attitudes on Wall Street, [the author] wrote: 'I, for one, think these bankers will be even more motivated to rape and pillage the financial system in order to rebuild their ill-gotten gains.' Seven months later, on the eve of the bank bailout, [he] opined, 'Let hundreds of banks fail. Let tens of thousands of financial workers lose their jobs and their personal wealth....The financial sector has had a really, really good run for a lot of years. It is time to pay the piper, and I, for one, have little interest in using my taxpayer dollars to cushion the blow.'"

"In September, 2009, addressing the popular anger about bankers' pay, [he] wrote [to his colleagues in the banking industry]: 'You mean to tell me your work as a ___ is worth more to society than a firefighter? An elementary school teacher? A combat infantryman in Afghanistan? [bad example!] A priest? Good luck with that.'"

"In the first nine months of 2010, the big six banks cleared more than $35 billion in profits."

"Despite all the criticism that President Obama has received lately from Wall Street, the Administration has largely left the great money-making machine intact. [Gee, there's a shock.] A couple of years ago, firms such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs faced the danger that the government would break them up, drive them out of some of their most lucrative business lines--such as dealing in derivatives--or force them to maintain so much capital that their profits would be greatly diminished. 'None of these things materialized,' [Robert] Altman [the chairman of Evercore] noted. 'Reforms and changes came in, but they did not have a transformative effect."

"Even after all that has happened, there is a tendency in Congress and the White House to defer to Wall Street...."

The NYT review of "All the Devils Are Here," by McLean and Nocera (Nov. 21), concludes: "What about the future? The next crisis probably won't be a housing bubble or an Internet craze, because those are fresh in our collective memory. But in some other corner of the economy, easy money is almost certainly beginning to feed hubris and greed. So the chances are, the devils will be coming back again."

Death Throes

2010-12-08T13:40:00.001-05:00

Collapse is now a given; the pundits are busy working out the details. Check this out for chickens-coming-home-to-roost dept.:

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175327/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_taking_down_america/

Papering Over the Void

2010-12-04T08:12:00.003-05:00

Law professor Ronald Dworkin has a short note in the current (9 December 2010) issue of the New York Review of Books on the midterm election of November. Marveling at the American voters’ ability to self-destruct by handing the GOP a landslide victory, he points out that their real dissatisfaction with the government—articulated most energetically by the Tea Party folks—is the feeling that they are losing the country, and they are desperate to take it back. “All their lives,” he writes,

“they have assumed that their country is [sic] the most powerful, most prosperous, most democratic, economically and culturally the most influential—altogether the most envied and wonderful country in the world. They are coming slowly and painfully to realize that that is no longer true; they are angry and they want someone to blame.”

“Our requests and demands are more and more ignored in foreign capitals,” he goes on; “our vaunted military power suddenly seems inept: we are unable to win any war anywhere.”

All this was very interesting for me to read. In The Twilight of American Culture I argued that we were in a state of collapse and had no real future as a nation—a provocative, perhaps even aggressive notion at the time. Ten years later, this argument is, at least among American intellectuals, no longer that controversial. Indeed, it’s becoming a truism, and Dworkin represents nearly mainstream thinking on the subject. I just found it satisfying to see it in print, with no editorializing about it: the US is finished, and that’s just the way it is. History did not work out in our favor; what could be more obvious? Let’s call a spade a spade, and not try to put a positive spin on it, for chrissakes.

If this is now being articulated clearly among the intellectual class, it is nevertheless being felt subjectively by a great majority of American citizens, as Dworkin points out. Although objectively speaking, they cannot reverse the decline, they nevertheless are pissed as hell about it, and are lashing out in a futile attempt to reverse history. It’s a purely emotional reaction, without an ounce of intelligent reflection behind it; but then the latter has never been America’s strong suit.

Just coincidentally, while I was reading that issue of the NYRB, I was also reading the work of the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani (or as the Japanese would write it, Nishitani Keiji). Nishitani wrote a book in 1949 called Nihirizumu (Nihilism), which was subsequently translated into English as The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. In the postwar period, Nishitani was concerned about what he regarded as the emptiness of Japanese culture, and regarded the various manifestations of the latter as “mere shadows floating over the void.” Nishitani, who died in 1990, was of the Kyoto School, a city associated with medieval Japan and the world of craft, meditation, and religious traditions. The “centering” of the latter was giving way to the commercial chaos of Tokyo, the world of Sony and Mitsubishi and the economic frenzy of modern Japanese life. Nishitani felt Japan’s only hope was to recover its traditions (of course the Japanese paid no attention to this, and are now in a major economic tailspin); he did not feel that either the American or Soviet model could solve the problem at the core. He wrote:

“Today non-European powers like the United States and the Soviet Union are coming to the fore; in any event, they are the players who have stepped on to the stage of history to open up a new era. But neither ‘Americanism’ nor ‘communism’ is capable of overcoming the nihilism that the best thinkers of Europe confronted with anxiety, the abyss of nihility [sic] that opened up in the spiritual depths of the self and the world. For the time being they are managing to keep the abyss covered over, but eventually they will have to face it.”

As we all know, the USSR had to face it in 1989-90; the Leninism and Stalinism of the previous seventy-odd years were, in Nishitani’s words, “mere shadows floating over the void.” America, for various reasons, had a more impressive run: about 400 years, I would say, of doing something very similar, if with a different ideology. Its crackup began around 1971, and has proceeded in a much slower manner than that of the Soviet Union. But there is no papering it over any longer, as both Dworkin and the Tea Party understand (if in rather different ways). The hollowness that haunted us from the beginning is now terrifyingly present; the Void, like Mephistopheles, has come to collect its due. As in the case of the USSR, there is no stuffing it this time around, and Mr. Obama has proven to be representative of our emptiness, not a remedy for it. He’s nothing more than a logo, a guy who is all dressed up with no place to go.

So now Russia has become a kind of wasteland, governed by crony capitalism and KGB-style autocracy. Our own wasteland will probably take the form of crony capitalism and American Idol vapidity. Orwell in the one case, Huxley in the other, might be another way of putting it. But there is finally no hiding from the reality of all this. “The wasteland grows,” proclaimed Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra; “woe to whomever conceals wastelands!” Wise words, sure to be ignored by the American public and government alike.

©Morris Berman, 2010

FYI: Truthdig Review of "Question of Values"

2010-11-26T09:03:00.001-05:00

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/america_the_material_20101126/

Taking It Up a Notch

2010-11-23T14:32:00.002-05:00

Journalist Ted Rall recently published a remarkable book, The Anti-American Manifesto. It is not remarkable for its all-too-familiar argument that the US is a violent nation, by now almost totally dysfunctional and in the hands of a plutocracy. Anyone familiar with my work, or (much more likely) that of Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Chalmers Johnson et al. will not be shocked by this argument. What distinguishes Rall’s work is the explicit call for violent overthrow of the American government as the only serious way of addressing our situation. It is, thus, a courageous book; he worries that he could wind up in jail, or at the very least see his career destroyed, which is hardly a far-fetched scenario (informal censorship is very powerful in the US). But he is committed to putting the case before the American people (or more realistically, a tiny fraction thereof), that there is simply no reforming the system; that it is simply beyond repair, and needs to be replaced by something completely different.

Rall’s documentation of how violent we are and have been, and of our present decay and corruption, is quite elaborate, and certainly worth reading even if you already know the score. Thus on pp. 72-81 he compiles a table of wars the United States has been involved in over the period 1798-2007. It’s quite breathtaking, and would seem to confirm the argument I’ve made elsewhere that the country derives its identity via opposition, i.e. the creation and pursuit of enemies. (Cf. Walter Hixson’s thesis that war is at the center of American identity, as he presents it in The Myth of American Diplomacy.) The data of our dysfunction are supplied more or less randomly throughout the text: Americans live shorter lives than the citizens of almost every other developed country, ranking 42nd in terms of life expectancy; the top 10% of wage earners receive nearly 50% of all national income, and hold 80% of the nation’s wealth; a murder is committed every 31 minutes in the United States, and a rape every 5.8 minutes; more than 47 million of us live in poverty (with the definition of the term very conservatively drawn); more than 3% of the adult population is in jail, on probation, or on parole (actually, 1 out of every 31 people--!); 1 out of 5 of us is unemployed, with little prospect of altering our situation for years to come; the national debt is off the charts (see the previous post on this blog); and so on. His first conclusion, that we are in a state of advanced collapse, is by now a truism, though most of the country is in denial about this, or just simply blind to it.

Rall’s second conclusion is that there is no real political left to speak of, in the sense that it is, at best, a collection of wimps. Radical groups spend time selling newspapers on college campuses; organizations such as Democracy Now! or Common Dreams threaten no one, as the US government well knows. American college students do not call for replacing that government with something better, and if you go to the website of the CPUSA (American Communist Party), it says that it is not, and never was, “a supporter of violent revolution”—“as though impotence was something to brag about,” Rall wryly remarks. As for Michael Moore, an “agent non-provocateur,” “the best the official Left has to offer,” Rall regards the man as little more than a joke. Moore declares that the system is “fundamentally corrupt and undemocratic,” but keeps on rooting for Obama to rectify the situation. When one interviewer asked Moore, apropos of his film Capitalism: A Love Story, “Short of revolution, what can people do?”, Moore lamely replied that the purpose of the film was to open the audience to new ideas. He never questioned the interviewer’s premise, writes Rall, that a solution should fall short of revolution. “He thinks he’s dangerous,” Rall comments sarcastically.

This brings him to his third, and major, conclusion, that we must forsake the pseudo-left, start amassing an arsenal, and take over the government by means of violent uprising. This is how history works, he tells us, and of course he’s right (Gandhi excepted, I suppose). The problem I have with this, and which haunts the book, is the inability to say, precisely, who “we” is. This is the Achilles heel in the whole argument, an argument that Rall himself undercuts quite decisively at various points. For “we” seems to be basically, “the good guys”—folks like Rall, or the ones he calls “people of good will.” His definitions are as follows:

We: “Hard-working, underpaid, put upon, thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people”

They (i.e., the enemy): “Reactionary, stupid, overpaid, greedy, shortsighted, exploitative, power-mad, abusive politicians and corporate executives.”

And this is where things fall apart, because the stats don’t bear Rall out. By and large, Americans are not thoughtful and freedom-loving; instead, they are reactionary, stupid, greedy, shortsighted, and given a chance would like to be corporate executives raking in $50 million a year. They don’t vote for Nader or Kucinich; 99% of the electorate just wants the American Way of Life, which is stupid, greedy, shortsighted, etc., to continue. There is no interest in rebellion here: as Rall himself notes, the public collectively shrugged after the Supreme Court stole the election for the GOP in 2000, and didn’t care all that much that no WMD’s were found in Iraq three years later. Contrary to all common sense, 91% of Americans regard themselves as middle class (this from a 2008 Pew Charitable Trust poll). Americans, says Rall, believe that they are better than everyone else and so deserving of more than anyone else, and this is their religion—what he calls “the Cult of the Asshole.” So in 2009 CNN found that 50% approve of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding—torture apparently being an effective way to ensure the continuation of our Asshole way of life. Rall writes that “we” have to educate people about what is wrong with the country, and teach them how to think—“propaganda comes first,” he says—but adds that “the ability to absorb it intelligently is required before propaganda can become effective.” Meanwhile, he admits that a large fraction of the American public is illiterate, and that (CBS News poll, 2004) 55% of Americans don’t believe that man evolved (actually, I think it’s closer to 67%). “How does one reason [with them]?”, he rightly asks. Hence, “The number of truly independent-minded Americans willing and able to commit to what can and should and must be done at this time is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent.”

Then what, Mr. Rall, are we talking about? There is an endless call in this book for the reader to “stand up and act.” Again, who is We? And what is it We should do? We and whose army? A revolution requires having the military on your side, or at least remaining neutral during the uprising, and the American military is generally conservative and committed to following the government’s orders. Rall’s prescription for action is that “we” form cells and cadres—talk to a friend, spread the word, develop a decentralized revolutionary network. Meanwhile, he again undercuts his argument by observing that it is the right wing in this country that is armed and ready to take action, not the (nonexistent) left. Anger, he admits, exists on the political right; the rest of the populace is docile. It is the right that is opening camps in rural areas, accumulating weapons, training new recruits, etc. They are, he points out, preparing for war, exchanging information about these weapons and stockpiles and discussing various strategies. Rush Limbaugh, it turns out, has actually endorsed such activity, whereas there is no influential figure on the left crazy enough to publicly endorse a similar left-wing mobilization. Nor is there any popular interest in it; that strikes me as being too obvious to warrant comment.

Rall’s description of the state of disintegration and decay of the United States is right on the money. Given the stupidity and docility of the American public that he himself documents, the most likely scenario is further disintegration and decay, until, like Rome or England, we drift away to nothing. That process is, in fact, well underway. And yet, Rall persists in the fantasy that American rage will boil over into left-wing revolution; that the segment of the population that is “in the know” will obtain guns and learn how to use them; that they will take out “the idiotic, incompetent, greedy, evil, and stupid people who are ruining our lives,” even if they have to work with racist skinheads in Idaho to accomplish their goals (which Rall says might be necessary). “Unless you choose to lay down and die,” he tells the reader, “there is no other choice.” Don’t worry, he concludes: millions will be with you.

Where these millions are going to come from, of course, is not clear, for this “Rall Call” ultimately has no basis in reality, and this by the author’s own admission. The author is honest in recognizing that there can be no substantive social change in this country short of revolution; and that no matter whom we elect, no matter how many books Noam Chomsky publishes or movies Michael Moore makes, none of it redistributes power, none of it makes any difference for how business and government are actually conducted. His strange, even bizarre, error is to think that this sad and stupefied population will somehow transform itself from sheep into (left-wing) wolves. When pigs fly, is the only thing I can say in response.

©Morris Berman, 2010

The Age of Austerity

2010-11-16T09:44:00.004-05:00

The current issue of Foreign Affairs has a remarkably sobering article by Roger Altman and Richard Haass entitled "American Profligacy and American Power" that seems, if I read it correctly, to spell out the death knell of the United States. In a word, they argue that we are going broke. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, they point out, will reduce federal revenue by more than $2 trillion over ten years. This, and federal spending, make the Bush years the period of "the largest fiscal erosion in American history." (Note that Haass, who is President of the Council on Foreign Relations, was Director of Policy Planning at the State Dept. during 2001-3.)

It gets worse. The deficit for fiscal year 2009 was $1.6 trillion, or nearly 12% of the GDP--the largest in US history. The federal debt itself went from 35% of the GDP in 2000 to 62% of it in 2010. Given the corresponding rise in interest rates on all this, annual interest expense will begin to dwarf all domestic discretionary spending (including infrastructure, education, energy, and agriculture), requiring the Treasury to borrow $5 trillion annually to finance it. "Yet the real outlook for deficits and debt," the authors write, "is much worse than these forecasts." In fact, "The post-2020 fiscal outlook is downright apocalyptic." The Congressional Budget Office projects that official federal debt, excluding government-sponsored enterprises, could hit 110% of the GDP by 2025 and 180% by 2035. China is the biggest lender--i.e. purchaser of our debt--but it and the other lenders "have no strategic reason to continue holding US dollars." True, they would suffer losses if the dollar fell, but the consequences would be much worse for us.

The authors make it clear that US politicians have the choice of being proactive, moving to soften this scary trajectory to the extent that they can; or--more likely--fail to act, in which case the solution to the US out of control will be "a solution imposed on the United States by global capital markets." Things may be calm today (really?! I had the opposite impression), write Altman and Haass, but this "will not last in the face of the United States' disastrous financial outlook." Whether we act or don't act, in other words, there is no escaping a rather bleak fate. The only issue is the intensity of that fate, its degree of darkness. Either we attempt to manage our "transition into austerity," they say, or we don't; but either way, austerity is our future. We can expect smaller budgets, with major cuts in entitlements and domestic discretionary spending. The American citizen is going to suffer, and in a major way.

So far, so good; I mean, bad. But in terms of really understanding what has happened to us, it's at this point that the authors drift into a kind of doublespeak, while being oblivious to it. Consider the following two paragraphs:

"A related cost of the United States' debt has even greater consequences [than the transition to austerity]: the diminished appeal of the American model of market-based capitalism. Foreign policy is carried out as much by a country's image as it is by its deeds. And the example of a thriving economy and high living standards based on such capitalism was a powerful instrument of American power, especially during the Cold War, when the American model was competing with Soviet-style communism around the world.

"Now, however, the competition comes from Chinese-style authoritarianism: a top-heavy political system married to a directed and hybrid form of capitalism. The recent stellar performance of China's economy in the midst of Western economic troubles has enhanced the appeal of its system. Reinforcing this trend is the reality that the US approach (one associated with a system of little oversight and regulation) is widely seen as risk-prone and discredited after the recent financial crisis. If the United States is unable to address its own debt crisis and a solution is forced on it, then the appeal of democracy and market-based capitalism will take a further blow."

So the authors don't say that there is something fundamentally wrong with our (sham) democracy and market-based capitalism, of which our massive debt crisis is the proof. No, it's rather, in their eyes, that the fact that we somehow went off the rails will tarnish the reputation of this way of life. There is a failure to grasp that the American Way of Life, the dream of unlimited economic expansion, was a mistake and an illusion even in the heyday of its supposed success. We were never living in reality; we thought infinity was a reasonable goal. We also defined the good life purely in terms of money, of material accumulation--really, our only value--and this, more than any other single factor (in my view), has brought us to our knees.

And of course, the American public went along with all this, and with the notion that any form of socialism was evil. Indeed, it regarded any kind of social safety net as equivalent to communism, and regarded those who saw it differently as traitors. But in fact, the Soviet Union was hardly the only alternative model around; and here the authors make their second big mistake, for they put Europe into the same category as the US, and say that America's fate will be Europe's as well. But as Steven Hill shows in his book Europe's Promise, the European socioeconomic model--Scandanavia's in particular--is very different from America's, and Europe is doing fairly well with it. Thus the authors fail to connect the disintegration of our way of life with the inherent nature of that way of life, and in classic Cold War style, seem to believe it's either us or the Reds. As I have said over and over again on this blog, it's not just the man in the street who has been brainwashed. The "best and the brightest," to borrow an old phrase from David Halberstam, don't really understand the base-line problem of America, what America finally is, and that it did itself in by being precisely what it is. ("Character is destiny"--Heraclitus) The brightest, in short, are not really very bright at all (an argument most recently made, for US foreign policy, at least, by Derek Leebaert in Magic and Mayhem).

In a word, the authors seem to be blaming Bush Jr. for our no-exit situation, when the groundwork was laid with James Madison ("Extend the sphere," he wrote, and "you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens." In other words, any demands for a more equitable type of economy could be defused by opening up "surplus social space.") Historian Walter McDougall (Freedom Just Around the Corner) locates it nearly 200 years earlier, describing a commercial hustling mentality on the American continent that can be dated to the late sixteenth century. And because Altman and Haass have no understanding of the dialectical nature of history, and seem to believe that "a system of little oversight and regulation" is a recent phenomenon, they treat our current economic failure--basically, our collapse as a nation--not as the consequence of our very "success" (which turned around and bit us in the ass), but as something that descended accidentally, as it were--practically came out of nowhere; as a big surprise. The point, as the historian William Appleman Williams repeatedly made, is that we could have had a different type of nation, a social democratic one; but we made choices early on that precluded that, and then sit around wondering why we're screwed.

But we can nevertheless give credit where credit is due. Altman and Haass make no attempt to pull a rabbit out of a hat at the eleventh hour, as so many other pundits do; to paint a rosy picture that the American public is always so desperate to have. No: it's pretty obvious we are doomed, on a downhill slide of increasing suffering and austerity with only some type of "crisis management" possibly acting as a modifying influence. Nor do they think that we shall act in a proactive, intelligent way. Rather, circumstances will force us into austerity against our will, they suggest, and it will not be a pretty picture.

Kurt Vonnegut summed it up pretty well, some years ago: "There's a shit storm coming." Get out your umbrella.

A Question of Values

2010-10-28T11:38:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends:

For those of you who have suffered thru my various postings for 4.5 years, you now have an opportunity to relive your suffering in paperback form. Yes, it's finally available on Amazon, the collection of essays known as A Question of Values. As Amazon hasn't posted the description of the book just yet, let me do that now:

"A Question of Values is Morris Berman's seventh book of cultural history and social criticism, and his first book of essays, which were written during
2007-10. Timely and uncompromising, they range across four principal topics: American culture and politics; the human existential condition; a close look at the nature of "progress"; and some thoughts on where Western civilization, in general, is headed. These articles pull no punches regarding our current situation, and represent some of Berman's finest writing to date. He challenges his readers to rethink the accepted mainstream system of values, and argues that in the end, our problems are as ethical in nature as they are political. In the context of a value system that is rapidly turning against us, Berman's message is simple: change or die."

Christmas is almost upon us, so this would make an excellent stocking-stuffer; and if you send it to your mainstream, centrist friends, an excellent garbage can stuffer as well! (These folks need to be harassed, as I'm sure most of you will agree. Watch them read the book and chew on rugs, or beat their heads vigorously against the wall, just to relieve the ensuing tension.)

As some of you know, no publisher wanted to touch the book (this more for commercial than ideological reasons, although in the US the two tend to run together), so I am grateful to Amazon and their CreateSpace department for making self-publishing a possibility. They did a beautiful job with this, imo.

BTW, for you hispanohablantes out there, the Spanish translation of the book is being published in Mexico City by Sexto Piso, and should be out in February or March at the lastest: Cuestion de valores. Disfrutanlo!

In other news: my volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, is in the page proof stage and should be available (I'm hoping) sometime next month; the publisher is Cervena Barva Press. And, mirabile dictu, I'm in the process of signing a contract for the third volume of my American Empire series, entitled Capitalism and Its Discontents. (Some publishers do have cojones, I'm happy to report.) This should hit the bookstores by summer of 2011, if all goes well. I'm still struggling to get my novel, Destiny, published; I'll keep you posted on that one.

Thank you all for your support; it's been quite a ride, and I'm grateful to all of you for joining me.

-mb

Super Sad Love Story

2010-10-25T09:10:00.004-04:00

Maybe there really is a zeitgeist floating around. Some time ago, I posted an article on this website entitled “How Chic Was My Progress,” depicting an end-of-empire scenario in which everything was going to hell in a basket, but nobody was that concerned because they had some state-of-the-art laptop or cellphone into which they could stare or talk, thereby feeling that all was right with the world. At the same time that I was writing this, give or take, the Russian-American author Gary Shteyngart was putting the finishing touches on his spectacular novel, Super Sad True Love Story, in which precisely that scenario plays out in the United States. In his version, Americans are on their digital screen device—“apparat” (umlauts over the a’s)—24/7, except when they are sleeping. Relationships of any kind, whether with a book or another human being, are pretty much passé; the screen, along with mass consumerism, has become a total world. In many ways, SSTLS reads like the fictionalized version of my last two books, The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Ages America. I knocked it off in two days, but it was an eerie read.

My own vision of the collapse of America is based on the Roman Empire model, which is one of slow disintegration. Sure, there are “nodes” that punctuate the process, such as 9/11 or the crash of 2008, but all in all one day is pretty much like the next, another step on a downhill slide. Not so for Shteyngart. Given his Russian background, he sees the U.S. following the Soviet pattern, in which a long period of decay issues out into a period of outright collapse, with the economy/society/culture imploding almost overnight. In SSTLS, the dollar is basically worthless, with the Chinese yuan becoming the de facto currency of the country. China effectively owns the United States, in this scenario, as Americans scramble just to survive (cafés have names like “Povertea,” and grocery stores sport signs saying “We accept only yuan sorry”). The government has tried everything—“privatization, deprivatization, savings stimulus, spending stimulus, regulation, deregulation, pegged currency, floating currency, controlled currency, uncontrolled currency, more tariffs, less tariffs”—and the net result is zero. The nation “is no longer critically relevant to the world economy. The rest of the globe is strong enough to decouple from us. We, our country, our city, our infrastructure, are in a state of freefall.” Meanwhile the U.S. is, of course, engaged in another phony war, this time with Venezuela; except that in this case, it is clearly losing, as Venezuelan warships make their way up the Potomac. Human relationships are completely commercial, with Americans constantly using their apparati to calculate the “fuckability” of potential partners. If the novel is an absorbing read, it is also a bleak one, as the citizenry finally tries to escape to Canada or return to the land from which they originally emigrated. The most depressing aspect of the book is that much of what the author describes is already with us; the endgame feels like it’s only fifteen to twenty years away.

A few additional quotes might provide a more vivid portrait. The central character, Lenny Abramov (Shteyngart’s obvious alter ego), is returning to New York from Rome, where he spent a year escaping the United States. He is doing something unusual for an American: reading a book (Chekhov, appropriately enough). People on the plane are staring at him; the young man next to him says, “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.” Abramov records in his diary: “As the passengers returned to their flickering displays, I took out my apparat and began to thump it loudly with my finger to show how much I loved all things digital, while sneaking nervous glances at the throbbing cavern around me, the wine-dulled business travelers lost to their own electronic lives.” Lenny reflects on the life of one of his friends, Noah, now a trendy broadcaster of meaningless information, but prior to that someone who actually thought about things. “His personal decline,” Lenny writes in his diary, “paralleled that of our culture and state. Before the publishing industry folded, he had published a novel, one of the last that you could actually go out and buy in a Media store.” (Books are now popularly referred to as “doorstops,” inasmuch as that is seen as the only thing they are good for.) Sitting with Noah and a few other “Media” friends in a bar, Lenny and his mates talk about the latest disaster in the Venezuelan war (being managed by a Cheney-like character named Rubenstein, the Secretary of State); the near-collapse of a major credit bank (subsequently bailed out by the Fed); their shrinking stock portfolios; and “the fact that, like most Americans, we would probably lose our jobs soon and be thrown out onto the streets to die.”

A bit later, Noah has Lenny on his TV program, trying to get him to say whether he is sleeping with Eunice, the Korean-American girl he’s been dating. “I know we’re living in Rubenstein’s America,” says Lenny. “But doesn’t that just make us even more responsible for each other’s fates? I mean, what if Eunice and I just said ‘no’ to all this…What if we just went home and read books to each other?” Noah responds:

“Oh God…You just halved my viewer load. You’re killing me here, Abramov…Okay, folks we’re streaming live here in Rubenstein’s America, zero hour for our economy, zero hour for our military might, zero hour for everything that used to make us proud to be ourselves, and Lenny Abramov won’t tell us if he fucked this tiny Asian chick.” As it turns out, the American infrastructure is heading toward zero hour as well. Part of the Williamsburg Bridge collapses, and the government’s response is to put up a sign that says “Together We’ll Repare [sic] This Bridge”.

Looking around the streets of New York, Lenny’s impression is similar to my own, when I last visited the city in May 2010 (see “An American Diary”):

“And the looks on the faces of my countrymen—passive heads bent, arms at their trousers, everyone guilty of not being their best, of not earning their daily bread, the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans, even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.” As one of Eunice’s Korean friends writes her in a text message, “This country is so stupid. Only spoiled white people could let something so good get so bad.” After things collapse in earnest—officially labeled The Rupture—a taxi driver says to Lenny, “now I see what our government is. Nothing inside! Like wood. You break it open, nothing.” (This parallels my experience of being in Berlin during the time that the Wall came down, and seeing tables set up near the Brandenburg Gate, where small-time entrepreneurs were selling Soviet artefacts, such as commissars' hats and hammer-and-sickle pins, now devoid of any real energy. One can easily imagine such a scenario for American flag pins and iPads.)

Finally, the ether grid breaks down, and the electronic devices to which Americans are enslaved fail to work. This leads to suicides, with people writing departing notes “about how they couldn’t see a future without their apparati.” For one thing, it becomes impossible to buy anything. But the corporations are ready, as always, to capitalize on whatever is going on, The Rupture included. Signs go up in New York with messages such as “Tourism NYC: Are YOU Rupture-Ready?” and “New York Cit-ay Edge: Do U Have What It Takes 2 Survive?” Chic to the end; what can one say? Lenny does, however, manage to escape some of this cultural holocaust, spending time reading—from books—to his girlfriend. “Because we can’t connect to our apparati,” he writes in his diary, “we’re learning to turn to each other.” Lying with her in bed, he thinks, “I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn’t that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?” (He’s not exactly representative of the rest of the country, needless to say.) Eunice, who is fifteen years younger than Lenny, tells him: “I never really learned how to read texts. Just to scan them for info.” He replies: “People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age…How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear?” Eunice eventually gets a job selling wristbands featuring “avant-garde representations of decapitated Buddhas and the words RUPTURE NYC” for two thousand yuan a pop.

Meanwhile, the government-corporate plan is to rebuild New York as a kind of “Lifestyle Hub” for the elite, the very wealthy, while the rest of the nation will be carved up by a group of foreign sovereign wealth funds. China may “get” New Jersey, for example, but apparently Norway and Saudi Arabia are interested as well. Order will be maintained by a private security company, playing the role of the former National Guard. And with this, the curtain falls.

Ezra Pound once remarked that artists were the “antennae” of the human race, but that the “bullet-headed majority” would never learn to trust them. We shall, of course, ignore Gary Shteyngart; that goes without saying. Which is a great pity: I have yet to find a more canny, intuitive, and yet, oddly enough, entertaining, description of America’s final days.

(c) Morris Berman, 2010

Tongue in Chic

2010-09-20T17:30:00.001-04:00

I’m in with the in crowd
I go where the in crowd goes
I’m in with the in crowd
And I know what the in crowd knows.

–Dobie Gray, “The In Crowd”

For many years now, I have been fascinated by the human desire to be “cool,” to be perceived by others as in the know, “hipper” than all the rest. I recall one fellow-student in my dormitory, during my first year at university, writing an essay on the subject for a class in English or sociology. This was in the early years of the sixties, when the work of Vance Packard (The Status Seekers, The Pyramid Climbers, etc.) was very much in the air. In any case, this student interpreted the actions of everyone on campus–students, staff, faculty, administration–as attempts to demonstrate that one was more sophisticated than everyone else. He wasn’t far off, as it turns out: a student guide to American universities subsequently described the ambience of the place as that of “one-upsmanship.”

I was impressed by the analysis of this student’s essay because it corresponded to my own experience. Thinking back, it seems to me that virtually every conversation I had or witnessed during those years had as its subtext the desire to impress. Not much of a basis for friendship, of course, and it is not surprising that I never returned to the place, never attended a class reunion, and never kept in touch with anyone from that era.

But it would be wrong to assume that university is where all of this begins. The phenomenon of cliques and in-groups dates at least from high school, which sets the template for all our future relationships. I remember one extremely intelligent student, Roger S., deciding to run for class president one year. There was a school assembly at which each of the candidates had five minutes to present their “platform.” After a series of morons in suits talked about how they would institute free coke machines or whatever, Roger got up, dressed in everyday clothing–definitely uncool–and quietly told his audience, “I’m not here to impress you. I don’t intend to dress up for you. I have no free gifts to offer you. I’m just going to give you honest student government and a real opportunity for you to participate in it.” Roger was the epitome of unchic and was consequently slaughtered at the polls, end of story. (Well, not quite: Roger went on to become Chief of Cardiology at one of the largest medical schools in the country. As for the guy giving out free Coca-Cola, he has long since disappeared from the historical record.)

In a sense, we remain in high school all our lives. This is pathetic, but it finally is what politics, and our social lives, are all about. I recall the wife of a famous psychiatrist–a guru, really–telling me that if she had friends over for dinner, the next week all of the women who had been at her house adopted her style of dress and cuisine. If she then changed these, they followed accordingly. It was as though they believed in a contagion theory of chicness: if they copied her, some of the “glow” would rub off on them. Absurd, yes, but this desire for chicness is no small force in human psychology or history. It’s the norm, not the exception.

The truth is that trying to be cool is a behavior that dates from the Paleolithic. When Paleolithic skeletons are dug up from roughly 35,000 years ago, and are found wearing jewelry–beads, pendants, necklaces–what else can this indicate but an attempt to say one is special–in fact, better than others? The same goes for “special” grave sites for the elite. Personal adornment and special graveyards are about status differentiation–Vance Packard in the Stone Age, one might say. All the evidence points to a new type of personality organization around that time, which made possible culture as we know it, and which also included the need to feel superior to others–in particular, wanting to be seen as superior to others. After all, being cool is something that has to be publicly agreed upon; it is essentially other-defined. Which means it is as insubstantial as gossamer; who or what is cool can change in the twinkling of an eye. But human beings pursue it as if their lives depended on it. In fact, very few human beings manage to escape the lure of superiority. When you meet Zen masters who are proud of their humility (an experience I’ve actually had), you know, as André Malraux once observed, that “there really is no such thing as a grown-up person.”

Chasing status may be puerile, said John Adams, but it nevertheless seems to be hard-wired. In his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America (1787), he said that history makes it quite clear that man is driven by vanity, by a desire for social distinction. “We may call this desire for distinction childish and silly,” wrote Adams, “but we cannot alter the nature of man.”

As a result, literally anything can be made chic, even garbage. There is a famous scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up in which a band leader goes crazy and smashes his guitar to pieces on the stage. The central character (played by the British actor David Hemmings) leaps onto the stage, seizes the guitar “carcass,” and runs off with it, pursued by the crowd, who is convinced he is in possession of something extremely valuable. He manages to give them the slip, and standing alone in an alley, trying to catch his breath, looks at this broken piece of guitar. What is it? A useless piece of trash, really. He tosses it on the ground and walks away.

Even the anti-chic can be made chic. A Canadian magazine, Adbusters, became somewhat famous for ridiculing the need to be chic. It is now one of the chicest journals around–“underground chic,” as it were. If you are not aware of this publication, you are definitely out of it, and not as good as the people who are aware of it and read it on a regular basis. You are leading a diminished, unchic life.

This brings us to the causes of chic. If it really is as frivolous as it looks, why are we all doing it? Why does all of life finally boil down to high school? Alfred Adler, the psychoanalyst whose major concepts were “superiority complex” and “inferiority complex,” argued that the two were intimately related: the desire to be superior masked a deep sense of inferiority. If I care that much about being chic, it must be because I know, on some level, that I am terribly unchic. And this feeling of being inadequate, which dates from infancy, can finally never be overcome; which means that chicness is infinite: you can never be chic enough. Malraux was right: we never grow up.

Imported into politics, all of this points to the limit of any egalitarian experiment. Status always manages to sneak in through the back door. Somehow, so-called left-wing writers in the United States (Noam Chomsky excepted; he really is the “real thing”), in their arguments for a just society, compete for influence and visibility, for being the important cultural critic. (I know of one case in which a major left-wing guru actually showed up at a lecture hall in a stretch limousine, surrounded by paparazzi.) The apparatchiki of the former Soviet Union all had dachas (villas) near the Black Sea or in the countryside, and got to buy forbidden Western goods at special stores reserved for them alone. In the end, Lao Tzu was right: the only person you want as a leader is the one who is not interested in the job. (Man, that dude was really chic.)

I recall, early on in the Clinton administration, the attempt to institute a program that would have involved holding and loving infants for the first three years of their lives. I don’t think the Clintons were trying to be chic here; I think they were genuinely committed to the fundamental concept of child psychology, that feeling secure and loved as a child means one will be less likely to be aggressive and competitive as an adult. Of course, the whole thing fell out of sight in less than a month, as the news media moved on to the next trendy topic. But it was a utopian project, in any case: if we are going to have to restructure human child-rearing in order to restructure our politics, we are going to be waiting for a very long time. The yogic idea that social transformation is personal transformation multiplied millions of times sounds good in the ashram, but has very little applicability in the outside world.

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” wrote Immanuel Kant, “no straight thing was ever made.” On the individual level, the antidote to chic is probably a good sense of humor. I mean, there really is something hilarious about it all, no? But in social or institutional terms, I don’t see that there is very much that can be done. Although lately, I’ve been working on a movie script, in which a large, dark, unchic force comes out of nowhere and sweeps across the planet, de-chic-ing everything in its path. I think of it as a kind of a reverse horror film. So stay tuned to this station; I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

©Morris Berman, 2010

A New Meaning for Gettysburg

2010-09-03T20:27:00.004-04:00

Dear Friends:

The following essay contains an excerpt from an article that appeared in the the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on August 31, about a casino that is very likely to be built just outside of the Gettysburg battlefield. The essay itself is by Dave Cohen, appearing on the website
peakwatch.typepad.com/decline_of_the_empire on September 1st. You can draw your own conclusions (though I personally think it's hard to argue with Dave's). [My two cents are in brackets, BTW.]

The Meaning Of Gettysburg

Few people outside Pennsylvania know that for a long time now, there have been plans to build a gambling casino 1/2 mile south of the Gettysburg National Military Park.

The Battle of Gettysburg was a turning point in the Civil War, the Union victory in the summer of 1863 that ended General Robert E. Lee's second and most ambitious invasion of the North. Often referred to as the "High Water Mark of the Rebellion", it was the war's bloodiest battle with 51,000 casualties. It also provided President Abraham Lincoln with the setting for his most famous address.

Gettysburg and the surrounding area are as close to Sacred Ground as you can get in America. Yesterday, casino friends and foes testified before the state's Gaming Control Board. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has been covering the story.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010
By Tom Barnes, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
GETTYSBURG -- It's Pro-Casino vs. No-Casino, as advertised.

The state Gaming Control Board is holding an all-day hearing today on whether a $75 million resort hotel casino should be added to the existing Eisenhower hotel and conference center, just south of the southern border of the Gettysburg National Military Park, where thousands of Union and Confederate troops died in early July 1863.

"NO!" shouted Susan Starr Paddock, leader of No Casino Gettysburg, who said a casino so close to "hallowed" Civil War ground would be a national disgrace. She was supported by Nicholas Redding of the Civil War Preservation Trust, who urged the board to "save the hallowed nature of this ground for future citizens and preserve Gettysburg."

"YES!" said David LeVan, owner of a Gettysburg motorcycle dealership and lead developer, along with Penn National Gaming (which would finance and operate the casino), plus several Adams County and Cumberland Township officials (where the casino would be located), who each stand to get $1 million a year from the casinos, to help them add jobs and hold down taxes.

State Rep. Harry Readshaw, D-Carrick, wasn't here today but did have a statement of support that was read. Mr. Readshaw, who has spent the last 13 years restoring the monuments at the Civil War battlefield, said Mr. LeVan "has assisted me in numerous important ways," including an annual fund-raising motorcycle ride from Harrisburg to the Battlefield Harley Davidson dealership in Gettysburg, which Mr. LeVan owns.

The opponents of the casino showed a video in which author David McCullough, filmmaker Ken Burns, actor Sam Waterston, Susan Eisenhower, grandaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower (who lived here after leaving the presidency) and others urged the board to give the second and final resort casino license to one of three other applicants. [Am I reading this correctly? McCullough et al. are not arguing that there should be no casino, but only that the license should be given to someone else??--!] [This is the end of the excerpt from the newspaper.]

It will be impossible to please everybody in this contentious fight—someone must win and someone must lose. I believe there is a novel solution to this dilemma which transcends petty local disputes:

Put this fucking casino right on the battlefield, preferably where the Union men repulsed Pickett's charge, or even better, on the very ground where Lincoln spoke. Whereas in the past Gettysburg has served as a powerful symbol of our desire to be better than we are, of the desire of the United States to rid itself of the moral stain—the evil—of slavery in which one man "owns" another, we now have an opportunity to invest Gettysburg with a new meaning more fitting to the times we live in.

Let this fucking casino be a powerful symbol to future generations of what an open, running, rancid sewer the United States had become by 2010. It is altogether proper that Gettysburg remain an unwavering emblem of who we are, and what we aspire to. Let us resolve today and henceforth to give a New Meaning to Gettysburg.

[Who are we? A sad collection of clowns. What do we aspire to? Money. How much do we care about our heritage? Zip.]

Clowns on Parade

2010-08-25T23:51:00.000-04:00

http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/08/24/dumb-things-americans-believe.html

Spheres of Influence

2010-08-12T23:01:00.003-04:00

Some time ago, I had an opportunity to do a silent five-day retreat at a Benedictine monastery. In the past, I had done long meditation retreats of a Buddhist nature, but I had never done anything in a Christian context before, so I decided I should give it a try.

The monastery, which I’ll call Our Lady of Silence, was located in the back woods of Mexico, in the middle of nowhere. The grounds were incredibly beautiful, dotted with agave and cactus, nopal and mesquite. Burros and sheep wandered across the landscape, which was so quiet you could almost hear the butterflies winging past you. Except for the occasional hum of crickets, the stillness was literally absolute.

This beauty extended to the architecture as well. The new church, cloister, and refectory were built only a few years ago, with a kind of simple, modern design that nevertheless captured the harmony of the Middle Ages, complete with wooden beams and stained glass. Seven monks and a priest constituted the permanent residents; most of them were in their late twenties. At one point, I remember looking across the table at one older monk, with his cropped hair, carefully trimmed beard, and pensive aura, and thinking that I must have seen him before, in some medieval woodcut.

Hours are observed here with great regularity: Matins at 4:30 a.m., Lauds at 6:30, mass at 7, breakfast at 8, Terce at 8:50, lunch at 1:25 p.m., Nones at 2:30, Vespers at 5:30, dinner at 6:45, Compline at 8:10. I went to Vespers every day; the chanting of the monks was so gentle, it was as though they were singing love songs, like the troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

And it was, in fact, like living during that time; really, like living in a kind of glass sphere. No outside news entered the monastery. There was no TV or radio, no newspapers or journals of any kind. I wondered if the monks knew who the current president of Mexico was, let alone of the United States.

I had brought a couple of books of a spiritual nature along with me to read, but other than that, I had decided to follow the monastic example and stay cut off from the outside world: no magazines, history books, transistor radios, or anything of the kind. As a result, the silence, and the empty space, got filled up with the contents of my psyche. Material spontaneously started drifting upward, as it were. Within two hours of arriving at the monastery I had a major breakthrough, unraveling something that I had been emotionally wrestling with for several weeks.

Two other experiences stand out. One was coming into the refectory at dinner and sitting down in front of what looked like a blue corn patty, mixed in with nopal. As I picked up my knife and fork, one of the monks slipped a CD of Ave Maria into the stereo system. The sounds filled the hall; I wavered, suddenly on the verge of tears, not able to eat for two or three minutes. (I later learned that the monks were worried I might be staging a protest against the food. The patty did, in fact, require a large dollop of salsa roja in order to liven it up.)

The second event consisted of “accidentally” locking myself out of my cell at 6:20 in the morning, on the way to the bathroom. My first reaction was: Oh dammit to hell. But then I was grateful that I was dressed and wearing clogs, and carrying a flashlight; it could have been much worse. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to put on my glasses, and I am terribly nearsighted. I also realized that this annoying event was probably not an accident: I had been embroiled in identity issues for three days now, and keys are a symbol of that. Whenever these types of issues arise for me, I typically lose my keys or wallet, or lock myself out of my car, and/or have a dream about these things. I should have known, I thought. In any case, what was there to do, in the near-freezing cold, except climb the hill up to the church and sit through Lauds and the mass? At least, I consoled myself, it was warm in the church.

I had been to mass only once before in my life, Christmas Eve 1973, at the Église St.-Séverin in Paris, a thirteenth-century structure that sits adjacent to the Sorbonne. It had been exquisite; it’s a wonder I didn’t convert to Catholicism right then and there (my complete atheism notwithstanding). The mass at the monastery was also “Parisian,” but in a rather different way: without my glasses, I couldn’t see much beyond blobs of color–an Impressionist mass, as it were. When it was over, I approached one of the monks with my problem, and he immediately got the master key and let me back into my cell.

The day before, I had been rereading one of the books I brought with me, What We May Be, by Piero Ferrucci. Ferrucci is an Italian psychotherapist, a student of Roberto Assagioli, who founded a school and technique known as Psychosynthesis. It has much in common with Jungian analysis, in fact. The section I had been reading deals with beauty:

Music [he writes] has a powerful effect on several bodily
rhythms and functions and on psychological states...neural
networks in the brain may be responsive to harmonic principles
in general. And there is such a factor within us as an “inbuilt
urge to maintain a state of intellectual and aesthetic order
and harmonic balance, essential to mental health.”
But we do not need research to know that the
magnificence of a cathedral’s rose window, the design of
Celtic manuscripts, a flower in full bloom, or the perfect
geometry of a Greek temple does not leave us unaffected.
And the moment we let ourselves be touched by beauty, that
part of us which has been badly bruised or even shattered by
the events of life may begin to be revitalized. At that moment
a true victory takes place–a victory over discouragement, a
positive affirmation against resigning ourselves to the process
of crystallization and death. That victory is also a step forward in
our growth in a very precise and literal sense, for the moment we
fully appreciate beauty we become more than we were. We live
in a moment of pure psychological health. We effortlessly build a
stronghold against the negative pressures that life inevitably brings.
But that is not all, for all stimuli–beautiful or ugly–sink into
the unconscious, where their influence becomes less immediate,
but more powerful and pervasive....
When stimuli of the same kind are repeated a number of
times–as in the case of the 15,000 killings the average American
adolescent has seen on TV*–their effects multiply and come to
generate a real psychological climate in the inner world of the
individual....
We can be[come] exposed to what Assagioli called “psychic
smog”–the prevailing mass of free-floating psychological poisons....

Earlier I referred to the monastery as a kind of glass sphere, hermetically sealed. If it keeps out the news of the modern world, it also keeps out the garbage of that world as well. It is a sphere of harmony, of beauty, designed to bring peace to the soul. As for the modern world, in particular the America of endless violence and “psychic smog,” Ferrucci follows up the above quotation with a reference to a famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch, in which the sixteenth-century artist “depicts the damned of Hell as being enveloped by an opaque crystal ball, impeding all communication with the outside world.”

And this is, very unfortunately, a fair description of the United States. The fact is that Americans live in a kind of hologram, or glass sphere with mirroring on the inside. Literally every thought they have is on the order of a programmed response, dating from the early years of the Republic: “chosen people,” “City on a Hill,” “endless frontier,” “rugged individualism,” and so on. For more than two centuries now, the same slogans and buzzwords have bounced around inside the sphere, mirroring and confirming each other. Contradictory information–represented, for example, by the analysis of that sphere and its mental processes–is never allowed to get through in any significant way. (There are hundreds of examples of this: Noam Chomsky, William Appleman Williams, Chris Hedges, etc. etc. A recent example is Walter Hixson’s The Myth of American Diplomacy, an attack on the sphere so massive in scope, and so fundamental, that only a tiny handful of Americans would be able to read it without having a nervous breakdown. It got very few reviews.) The result is the smog or poison Assagioli talks about: a culture that is not merely stupid (and stupefied), but remarkably violent, all the while celebrating how “superior” it is to all the rest–and certainly, to some medieval throwback in the hinterland of Mexico, right? In fact, when you think about it, American society is no less hermetically sealed than the world of a medieval monastery; only the content is different.

I couldn’t help remembering a film I had seen shortly before coming to the monastery, Crossing Over, about the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its persecution of alien residents, legal as well as illegal. But it proves to be about much more than the daily activities of the ICE. By the end of the film, you realize that you have been watching an X-ray of the American soul, and you are struck dumb by how violent it is, down to its very core. Destructive as well as self-destructive, it reflects a culture in a state of fear, on its last legs, lashing out at helpless victims and imaginary enemies alike. The “toxic cloud” Don DeLillo described many years ago in his brilliant novel, White Noise, now seems to have arrived in full force. This is psychological poison at its worst (or close to it).

I left Our Lady of Silence determined to carry the silence with me into my daily life: gardening, walking, meditating more, whatever. But the key issue, of course, is not my own personal life, but the dichotomy, the problem of the two separate spheres. Very few of us are cut out to live in a monastery, after all, myself included. All beauty aside, it’s not a solution for the modern world. Yet what kind of solution–to anything–is U.S. corporate-commercial culture? That much of the world seeks to emulate it doesn’t change the fact that it amounts to little more than trash, “psychic smog” that is slowly (and sometimes rapidly) killing off its inhabitants (who nevertheless can’t seem to get enough of it). If there is a third sphere, a serious institutional alternative to these two that exists in practice, not just theory, I have yet to see it. And without that, what kind of future do we finally have?

*Written ca. 1980; we can expect that the current number is by now four or five times that amount, especially if we add in input from movies, DVD’s, computer games, and the Internet.

©Morris Berman, 2010

Democracy in America

2010-07-16T13:58:00.007-04:00

Since American democracy is in the process of committing suicide, it might be worthwhile to reflect on the nature of the phenomenon, and the sources of its dialectical death. In 1982 the eminent French scholar, Pierre Manent, published a study of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the two volumes of which came out in 1835/40. Manent's work was subsequently translated into English under the title Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy; Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University contributed a Foreword to it. Mansfield writes:

"Democracy produces a sense of independence in its citizens, a sentiment that each is a whole because he depends on no one else; and the democratic dogma [nota bene] states that every citizen is competent to govern his own life. Hence democracy is not merely, perhaps not primarily, a form of government; or it is [a] form of government that almost denies the need for government. And as a society, democracy is antisocial; it severs individuals from one another by pronouncing each of them equally free. All the traditional relationships are broken or weakened...Above all, democracy does not know where it tends and where it should go."

The blurb on the back cover of the book states that "Pierre Manent's analysis concludes that the growth of state power and the homogenization of society are two primary consequences of equalizing conditions." We are, of course, seeing these consequences 175 years later.

Prof. Mansfield is, as one would expect, a proponent of democracy; most Americans are. Yet one wonders what he thinks of his own critique; the characteristics he identifies don't exactly amount to minor drawbacks in the system. I couldn't help looking at it through the lens of Islamic societies (to the extent that I am able to do such a thing). Quite obviously, I'm not a big fan of Allah's, nor of stoning adulterers to death, nor of intellectual stultification, etc. etc., and I suspect it will be a fairly long time before I put down a cash advance on a condo in Tehran. But their problems don't do anything to improve our own, quite obviously, and it seems to me that their revulsion toward the United States is not all that puzzling, if one considers the following points:

-"each is a whole because he depends on no one else"
-"a form of government that almost denies the need for government"
-"democracy is antisocial; it severs individuals from one another"
-"all the traditional relationships are broken or weakened"
-"democracy does not know...where it should go"

Clearly, with friends like these (Harvey Mansfield), democracy needs no enemies; this is a fairly good description of a "psychological slum," as Philip Slater once called the United States. And speaking of enemies, I couldn't help thinking of the message to the American people delivered by Osama bin Laden on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. I don't have the text in front of me at this moment, but I remember him saying, "You have no Guide, no Helper." He understood that America was a ship without a rudder--something that the two candidates, G.W. Bush and John Kerry, were unable to grasp. They both condemned the address without any substantive comment, to show they were "tough on terrorism"; thereby losing the opportunity to reflect, publicly, on what bin Laden was saying and what had gone wrong with American democracy (which of course wouldn't have gone over well with a basically stupefied electorate--and indeed, one of Tocqueville's major points was that democracy ultimately wouldn't work if the population wasn't too bright).

Mansfield's critique also meshes well with the recent book by Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American, which documents the lives of quiet desperation that Americans lead. Nationwide, 25% of all habitations are single-person dwellings, and the figure for New York City is nearly 50%. In recent years the number of people who said they have not a single person they can confide in has jumped to 33%, if I remember correctly. It's a sad, if honest, book--an obituary, really, for a bold and brilliant experiment that finally didn't work out. For suicide takes place on two levels: the macrolevel, of public institutions and domestic and foreign policy; and the microlevel, i.e. in the hearts and minds of individual citizens.

Finally: I have always been a great admirer of Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-Jewish-British political scientist who spent his life cautioning the West about the dangers of coercive systems such as that of the former Soviet Union. In his famous Oxford University inaugural lecture of 1958, "Two Concepts of Liberty," Berlin defined "negative freedom" as freedom from; it is the freedom to do what the heck you please as long as you don't infringe on anyone else. "Positive freedom," on the other hand, is freedom to; it is the freedom of a directive ideal, one that holds up a vision of the good life (whatever that might be) and encourages--or forces--people to conform to that image. Going back to at least the 17th century, negative freedom is the Anglo-Saxon conception of what it means to be free; and as far as Berlin was concerned (as a good British subject--he became Sir Isaiah the year before his inaugural lecture), that was the only freedom around; the other variety, he believed, was inevitably dangerous. The only problem is, without a positive vision of the good life, the good society, what are we? How could we be anything else except a ship without a rudder? This, to me, is the Achilles heel in the Berlinian edifice, for negative freedom finally affirms nothing--as the example of contemporary America clearly demonstrates. George H.W. Bush, that great intellectual, was fond of using the word "vision" sarcastically; he was proud of the fact that he had none. (What a shock, that his son became an alcoholic and a Christian fundamentalist.) He was a synecdoche for the nation, and ironically, he confirmed what Osama bin Laden said about the U.S. a dozen or so years later.

There is no doubt, of course, that "vision" can get out of hand; this was Isaiah Berlin's whole point. But what Berlin failed to understand was that lack of vision can also get out of hand, as Harvey Mansfield makes abundantly clear. And that has happened in the United States, which accounts for the odd combination in our contemporary political life of hysteria plus inertia. (The working title of my book Dark Ages America was Colossus Adrift.) It also means that there is no way of reversing the trajectory; I mean, where do you start? You can't just assign the country "vision," and think that's going to work (this was in fact the idea of the communitarian movement of the nineties, led by Amitai Etzioni, and it was an embarrassing failure). The dialectical part of this is that the strengths of American democracy are precisely its weaknesses; the whole thing is a package deal. Or to put it another way, the ideology of negative freedom, of no-vision, cannot evolve into anything else but the negative, visionless society that we now have, and the seeds of this were planted a long time ago.

So here we are, wrote T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets, "in the middle way...years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres" (obviously more than deux, in the case of the United States),

"And so each venture
Is...a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating..."

The Four Quartets is about many things, but I believe Eliot's major theme here is the acceptance of death. Wouldn't it make sense, at this point, for America to "resign" with dignity? To come to terms with the dynamics of its collapse, and just accept it? To finally (to quote another famous poet) "go gentle into that good night"? I expect that kind of maturity is completely beyond our grasp; but it would be, at long last, a vision of sorts.

© Morris Berman, 2010

This American Life

2010-07-03T20:27:00.002-04:00

[This is Will Okun's column on CNN, 2 July 2010. He taught high school for nine years on Chicago's West Side. Italics are mine.]

Chicago's longstanding ban on handguns, which the Supreme Court this week ruled as unconstitutional, was a complete failure.

Two years ago, every student in my first-period English class on the West Side of Chicago claimed to have easy access to a handgun -- even the goody-two-shoes Honors student in the front row. When I doubted her, she looked at me as if I were a fool. "I could get you one from my uncle tonight," she informed me with a quizzical look. "He might ask me why I needed it, might not."

Guns were so abundant that there was only, maybe, one big fight a year among the males in our school building because it was understood that the simplest of physical confrontations too quickly could escalate into deadly shootings. "You have to walk away from a lot," observed one former student of mine who has lost several friends and relatives to gun violence. "For instance, dude deserves to be beat and I know I could beat his ass, but then what? No one is just going to take an ass-beating, they're going to want to do something about it."

And he added, "Then you got to worry about him and his guys jumping on you. Or more than likely, he's going to get a gun to show that he's not a punk. That's how a lot of these shootings happen, it's over nothing."

Violence was so omnipresent that when I returned to school a few days after being shot in the arm with a .22 (I'd rather not discuss), a staggering number of students lifted their shirts to show their bullet wounds. "What you going to do?" they seemed to say with a shrug, as if this were everyday life.

In a city where an average of four people are shot every day, the random shooting death a few years ago of an amazing, beautiful person, Alto Brown, a friend of mine, was reduced to a single line in a three-paragraph newspaper story coldly tallying weekend homicides. "Everything happens for a reason," the pastor said at his funeral. "He's now in a better place."

As gangs and their illegal guns held whole communities hostage, it seemed as if the only people prevented from possessing firearms were citizens like Keith Thomas, who was raised on the West Side and now works as a mentor to at-risk youth for an alternatives schools program in Chicago

"I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that more guns are a good thing," said Thomas, who has the scar from a bullet wound on his right wrist. "But I think the Supreme Court made the right decision. I think right now, at this point, the ban is not helping to serve any real purpose."

Thomas does not believe that the court's decision will result in significantly more or less violence, but he does hope that the ruling will force political leaders to seek community improvements beyond just strict gun control.

"It's not enough to just say we need more gun control. That's not what's causing all these problems out here, the guns are the result," he explained. "If we want to stop violence, we need to make real changes. That's a lot harder and requires a lot more money than just saying no guns."

In too many low-income communities of Chicago, the schools are in shambles, quality after-school programs are scarce, well-paying jobs are almost nonexistent, and the family structure is in full crisis. It is an easy notion to disregard, but many of these children are struggling daily to thrive in an environment that fosters failure.

"We have to get them early, before they start getting lost," Thomas said of the youth he advises, get them redirected with organizations like his and other successful mentoring interventions like the Youth Advocates Programs. "Once they start believing there's nothing else, that they have nothing to lose, they're the ones most likely to do the shooting."

After a recent weekend in which 10 people were killed and 60 wounded by gunfire, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley continued to argue the necessity of a citywide gun ban. "Look at all the guns that shot people this weekend. Where did they come from? That is the issue."

But one must ask, truly, is it?

Is There Life After Birth?

2010-06-29T10:26:00.002-04:00

[Some time ago I was asked by the Mexican actor, Diego Luna, to write an analysis of his first film as director, Abel, which won an award at the Sundance Festival and was recently released in Mexico. The essay was subsequently published in a book on the film, also entitled Abel. Text as follows:]

It is generally accepted that the author of any creative work is only half conscious of what he or she is doing. Indeed, without this sort of "vagueness," or indeterminacy, multiple interpretations of a novel, poem, or screenplay--which are the norm--would not be possible. And if the author objects, says, "but that's not what I meant," it isn't completely arrogant for the critic to reply, "no--at least not consciously." So let me put aside any false modesty here and say what I think this strange and remarkable film is "really" about.

Although it is not as popular today as it was forty years ago (give or take), there is a mode of treating psychological disturbances known as "family systems therapy," in which the therapist regards the pathology displayed by an individual as symptomatic of a larger problem--usually, a secret--that is woven into the fabric of the person's familial relationships. Within the family, there is an unspoken agreement that this thing, whatever it is, will never be mentioned. What the supposedly disturbed individual--say, a sixteen-year-old boy--is trying to do when he steals a car and gets caught, is bring attention to the family secret; to flush it out. (In psychological jargon this is called "acting out.") Therapy that focuses only on the adolescent and his criminal activity--makes him the "Identified Patient," so to speak--is missing the boat, on this interpretation. In truth, the kid is a healing agent, trying to expose the rot in the system, if only the family would be willing to stop playing an elaborate game of self-deception. In fact, if the son cleans up his act, stops stealing cars, and starts getting good grades in school, what happens? The fifteen-year-old daughter, previously a paragon of virtue, suddenly shows up pregnant. If she has the baby, gives it up for adoption, stops sleeping around, and manages to work out a healthy adolescent life, the father, amazingly enough, starts to drink. If he then goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and quits drinking, the mother becomes schizophrenic and is committed to a mental institution. Or perhaps hangs herself. You get the idea. The one thing the family does not want to do is address the Big Secret, the pathology that lies underneath the pathology. So like Hegel's zeitgeist, the ghost, the energy, keeps moving from person to person, making it look as though each successive "Identified Patient" is the problem, when it is actually the family dynamic that is the real problem.

In many ways, Abel is a quintessentially Mexican film. As a foreigner who has lived in Mexico for four years now, and has been visiting the place for more than thirty, I have been acutely aware of the juxtaposition of socioeconomic poverty and sensual intensity. In keeping with this, the action of the film takes place in a shabby, rundown area of an unnamed city (in fact, Aguascalientes), and this contrasts sharply with the exquisite photography of the film, which gives the movie an incredible texture, at once tactile and visual. But beyond that, the theme seems universal, for the story can very well be analyzed in terms of family systems therapy. In fact, what came to mind for me when I was watching it was a British tale of family dysfunction written around four hundred years ago--King Lear, by William Shakespeare--and a short story written nearly fifty years ago by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, "Facing the Forests." In all three of these works--the film, the play, the story--the Identified Patient is depressed/autistic (the child in Abel), supposedly mad (the Fool in Lear), or unable to speak (an old Arab who had his tongue cut out). In each case, their particular version of silence is witness to the Big Secret, and represents it metaphorically.

Lear
Interested in flattery, the king commits a fatal error, believing the false declarations of love given to him by his two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, and failing to realize that it is his youngest, Cordelia, who really loves him for who he is. Worse, he disowns her for not flattering him. Meanwhile, the Fool keeps babbling his "nonsense," which is actually insight into what is really going on, if only Lear would listen. Instead, the king eventually goes mad; at that point, the Fool disappears--he is no longer needed. But had Lear come to terms with the Big Secret, confronted the family dynamic, the Fool would not have been needed in the first place, and the insanity never have happened. (Also, there would have been no play!) Unfortunately, as any family systems therapist can tell you, health is the rare exception to the rule, which can be summarized as, "Let the charade continue!"

Facing the Forests
Here, the "family" is Israel/Palestine, and the "therapist" is the author of the story, who is trying to heal his society. Yehoshua's novella is about a graduate student in history who takes a job with the forest service, his assignment being to guard against forest fires. The forest consists of trees planted since 1948 to celebrate the state of Israel, most of them being paid for by American Jews. The family mythology, which is partly true, is one of pioneers in a new land, Holocaust survivors determined to make the Zionist dream a reality. The Big Secret is that in the process of doing that, 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, some deliberately and some as an accidental by-product of war, were forced to flee their homes and their land. In Yehoshua's story (and in reality as well, on more than one occasion), an Arab village was bulldozed to make way for the newly planted forest of pine trees. Flitting between the slender pines, a sort of caretaker and his daughter inhabit the premises, haunt them, one might say, like ghosts. But as I already indicated, the old Arab cannot speak--he was apparently tortured, had his tongue cut out. With a little research, the history student pieces together what happened to the village, and manages to communicate with the old Arab about it through gestures. By this time, however, the Arab has had it, and burns down the forest in revenge. The police arrest him and interrogate him, asking him the same questions over and over again, and the student says to himself: “A foul stench rises from the burnt forest, as though a huge carcass were rotting away all around them. The interrogation gains momentum. A big bore. What did he see, what did he hear, what did he do. It’s insulting, this insistence upon the tangible—as though that were the main point, as though there weren’t some idea involved here.”

But the student remains silent. Neither he nor anybody else is going to say out loud what the main point, the large, intangible idea, is, because to do that would blow the lid on the family mythology. Instead of dealing with its past, and the Big Secret, Israel prefers to symbolically make this old Arab without a voice the Identified Patient. That was in 1963, a mere fifteen years after the War of Independence (or the Catastrophe, if you are talking to an Arab). Nearly fifty years later, and despite a growing literature by a number of very talented revisionist historians, the majority of Israelis (judging from how they have voted in recent elections) still can't seem to fathom the violence and "rebelliousness" of these "wayward" Palestinian "children," who could solve the whole problem of the Middle East if they just "behaved themselves" and stopped acting "irrationally." (I've actually heard Israelis talk in these terms.) Yehoshua was trying to shine some light on the Big Secret, but this is largely taboo in Israeli society, and certainly was in 1963. For the most part, then, the charade continues.

Abel
On to the film. The plot is something like this: Two years ago, Anselmo, the father in this particular family drama, declared he was going to the U.S. to work, and left. His eight-year-old son, Abel, went into a deep depression as a result and had to be hospitalized. Two years later, his doctor believes he is ready to come home, even though he displays the characteristics of an autistic child. So he returns home, and everyone--mother, sister, brother--sort of walks on eggshells around him, as the doctor has indicated that Abel is not to be upset in any way. The problem is that his behavior becomes increasingly erratic, as he seems to think he is the father of the family and to act accordingly. He puts a ring on his mother's finger, and starts sleeping in her bed. He wears his father's clothes. He also "drops" his autism and begins to talk, mostly giving orders to the other members of the family. He signs his sister's report card from school, and checks her homework. Rather creepy, but everyone plays along with it.

Out of the blue, Anselmo comes back home; but before he can re-assert his role as father, Cecilia, Abel's mother, tells the child that this is her cousin. Soon Anselmo is playing along with this farce as well, even though he (rightly) regards the situation as nuts. By chance, the daughter examines the photographs in her father's digital camera, only to discover that he has another wife (or perhaps it is a girlfriend) and a child by her. It turns out he was only in the United States for two months; the rest of the time he was living a completely separate family life some distance away in the town of Saltillo. One night during this time, i.e. the time of Anselmo's return, Abel climbs on top of his mother and pretends he is having sex with her, then pretends to smoke a post-coital cigarette. The next morning he announces to the family that he and Cecilia have had sex, and that she is pregnant. For Anselmo, this is the last straw, and he confronts Abel with the fact that he is his father. Abel spins out of control and deliberately injures himself; in general, all hell breaks loose. Undaunted, Anselmo finds Abel's doctor and signs him back into the hospital in Mexico City. We then see Anselmo in his truck on the road back to Saltillo, abandoning the family once again, and Cecilia visiting Abel in the hospital, where he is emotionally vacant and has returned to his autistic behavior.

What in the world?

If we try to decode this bizarre tale by means of family systems therapy, it seems fairly obvious that the family mythology in this case is that there actually is a family. But the truth, the Big Secret, is that the father has another family, and doesn't really give a damn about this one. He returns momentarily, and claims to be the father of this family, which he is biologically; but the truth is that he has no legitimacy. On some level, Abel knows all this, in the uncanny way that children typically do. And so, in a parody of the family lie, he takes over the function of the father. He is not quite acting; he really seems to believe it. And yet it is a charade, one that has two crucial systemic functions. First, it cancels out the abandonment: if the family now has a father, even if it is Abel himself, then Abel has not been abandoned and in fact feels (and acts) healthy and strong, for his world has been sewn back together. He is alive as the "father," dead as the abandoned son. Second, as the Identified Patient, Abel is unconsciously trying to send a signal to the family that this situation is fucked up beyond belief; in a word, he's trying to repair the mess in some weird sort of way. Yet the family dynamic, as before, is to pretend that nothing is amiss, or more precisely, that it is only Abel that is the problem. The "crazy" behavior of the child is in fact a type of intuitive wisdom, for it is the entire situation that is crazy. Focusing on Abel's apparent insanity, and not willing (or able) to admit that if anyone precipitated this situation it was himself, Anselmo blows the whistle and has Abel sent back to the hospital. And then, asshole that he is, he abandons the boy, and the family, as he did two years before. So this "solution" solves nothing, because the Big Secret, the fact that this family is in no way a family, never gets dealt with. Thus we are back to Square One, with Anselmo having gone AWOL and the kid in the hospital, once again emotionally dead. As in the case of the hypothetical family I described earlier, or the family of King Lear, or the "family" of Israel/Palestine, the temptation to focus on the Identified Patient rather than get to the heart of the matter is too powerful to resist, because getting to the heart of the matter is inevitably terrifying. Not to put too fine a point on it, Abel is nothing less than a work of genius. It is at once a Mexican tragedy, a Shakespearean tragedy, a Middle Eastern tragedy, and a universal tragedy, which can be summarized in the words of the British poet W.H. Auden: "We would rather be ruined than changed." Great stories generally don't have happy endings, what can I tell you.

©Morris Berman, 2010

Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart

2010-06-09T16:29:00.002-04:00

The American Way of Life–which can be basically characterized as the union of technological innovation and economic expansion– has been mythologized or romanticized in various ways, and one of these is in terms of the story of Prometheus, a god of great energy who stole fire from Zeus and passed it on to mankind. It is a powerful image, and one that feeds the notion of American exceptionalism. What Americans tend to forget, however, is that there was a debt involved in this transaction. For Zeus was angry at Prometheus and had him chained to a rock, where an eagle or a vulture would come every day and eat out his liver. Since Prometheus was a god, the liver would regrow during the night, only to be devoured again the next day. Unfortunately for the United States, and contrary to popular belief, the country is not divine, and so its liver is now being devoured without possibility of regeneration. We can thus summarize the story as follows: first hubris, then nemesis–a fair portrait of the rise and fall of the American empire. Hubris incurs the debt; nemesis is the collection agency that comes to get the money back.

A second allegory of the American Way of Life is the story of Dr. Faustus, who made a pact with the devil. “A Faustian bargain,” writes the Canadian author Margaret Atwood in her book Payback, “is one in which you exchange your soul or something equally vital for a lot of glitzy but ultimately worthless short-term junk.” Your soul, in other words, is the debt that has to be paid at the end of the day.

In effect, the American Way of Life has been a Faustian bargain, and this is true both domestically and in the arena of U.S. foreign policy. Alistair Cooke, who used to host a “Letter From America” program on the BBC every week, once said that the essential idea of America was to regard as necessities those things that the rest of the world regarded as luxuries. This attitude manifests itself in the fact that although the United States comprises less than 5% of the world’s population, it consumes 25% of its energy–a situation that was condemned by only one American president, Jimmy Carter, and Americans did not take kindly to him as a result. The dark, or debt side of the notion that life is about unlimited material goods shows up in the data on bankruptcy: whereas 8,600 Americans filed for bankruptcy in 1946, more than 2 million did in 2005. Put another way, in 1946 one in 17,000 Americans declared bankruptcy; in 2005, one in 150 did. By 2006, the total public debt stood at $9 trillion, or 70% of the GDP, and personal bankruptcy filings for 2007 increased 40% over the figure for 2006. Journalist Chris Hedges reports that as of 2009, American consumers were $14 trillion in debt. As for the activity of the U.S. government in this arena, Hedges reports that the Obama administration

"has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to
Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the
bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will
leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. [In addition] Obama has
allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the
continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military
planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next
15 to 20 years."

In fact, the bailout did not stay at $12.8 trillion for very long; it soon turned into $13.3 trillion, then $17.5 trillion, and, at one point, $19 trillion. Meanwhile, we are expanding the war in Afghanistan, a land that has traditionally been called “the graveyard of empires.” But “America’s most dangerous enemies,” writes Hedges, “are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the foundations of our society.”

The best example of these domestic radicals is the Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs, the world’s most powerful global bank. In a 2009 article in Rolling Stone, journalist Matt Taibbi documents how GS played a key role in the crash of 2008, and how it has been doing this repeatedly since the crash of 1929. Their formula, he says, is to position themselves in the middle of a speculative bubble and sell investments they know to be worthless. They then make huge amounts of money, and when the bubble bursts they reposition themselves to begin the process all over again, in a different sector of the economy. In the case of the housing crisis, GS created financial vehicles to package bad mortgages and sell them to insurance companies and pension funds (the failure of which wiped out the savings of millions of older citizens). This created a “mass market for toxic debt.” GS hid these in Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO’s), which turned junk-rated mortgages into AAA-rated investments. They then got companies such as AIG to provide insurance (known as credit default swaps) for the CDO’s, by means of which they were actually betting that homeowners would default. Meanwhile, the government, which at any time is typically staffed with Goldmanites or ex-Goldmanites, was persuaded to change the rules of the banking game so that all of this, if grossly unethical, is technically legal. (Nomi Prins, a former managing director of GS, characterizes this incestuous relationship as “Government Sachs”; Taibbi notes that GS contributed nearly $1 million to the Obama election campaign.)

In the case of the subsequent bailout, says Taibbi, former GS CEO Henry Paulson (G.W. Bush’s last Treasury secretary) took trillions of dollars and funneled them into the pockets of his friends on Wall Street. So Robert Rubin (at GS for 26 years and Clinton’s former Treasury secretary) moved to Citigroup, which then got received $300 billion from Paulson; John Thain, who moved to Merrill Lynch, also got a multibillion-dollar handout; and AIG received $85 billion, which enabled it to repay the $13 billion it owed GS. “Gangster elite” is the appropriate phrase for these people, I would think, although Taibbi himself favors the phrase “vampire squid.” He points out that after playing a key role in four historical bubble catastrophes, helping $5 trillion disappear from the NASDAQ, and pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and American cities, GS paid a total of $14 million in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of 1%.

As a former GS insider, Nomi Prins makes it abundantly clear that her ex-colleagues care absolutely nothing about the country, and everything about their own private wealth and power. They believe, she writes, that their privileged position is their destiny, and regard themselves as being completely “above explaining their actions to the public or expressing anything that might look like contrition or humility.” This proved to be true in April 2010, when the Senate finally dragged some of these executives to a hearing on GS business practices. The list of accusations was quite extensive: you stacked the deck against clients in the market slide of 2007; you set up your company’s own securities to fail, secretly bet against those securities, and never told your buyers what you were doing; you dumped toxic mortgage assets on unwitting clients; etc. Several senators read aloud internal GS documents, in which these men boasted of how they had helped GS profit from the declining housing market, or described the firm’s subprime deals in scatological terms. No matter; the Goldmanites refused to show any regret for their actions, and would not admit that they had behaved irresponsibly or had anything to do with the crash of 2008. A few argued that they were in fact the victims of this financial debacle. In fact, GS behavior continues much as before, as the subsequent Greek economic crisis, in which they played a key role, demonstrates. Meanwhile, as Paul Krugman and several other leading economists have argued, indicators are that our economy is not likely to recover from the crash of 2008 for a very long time (given the historical record on these things), and that we can actually expect worse crises to come, since no significant change of mindset, financial practices, or even personnel has surfaced on Wall Street or in the U.S. government. Indeed, with the possible exception of the millions of unemployed, most Americans seem to believe that the “glitch” is over, that we dodged a bullet, and that we can keep doing what we’ve always been doing without having to “really” pay the subsequent debt.

Somewhat atypical of the American Faustian pattern was our seventh president, Andrew Jackson, whose farewell address of 1837 eerily predicted these kinds of events. In fact, his speech comes off as a pretty good characterization of Goldman Sachs. Jackson’s focus was on the behavior of banks, who (he said) think only of themselves, and never of the community. “These banks may and do operate injuriously upon the habits of business, the pecuniary concerns, and the moral tone of society,” he declared. Their bent for speculation, he warned,

"will foster this eager desire to amass wealth without labor; it will multiply
the number of dependents on bank accommodations and bank favors; the
temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice will become stronger and stronger,
and inevitably lead to corruption which will find its way into your public
councils and destroy, at no distant day, the purity of your Government."

The danger, Jackson went on, is that “the Government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few; and this organized money power, from its secret conclave, would have dictated the choice of your highest officers….The forms of your government might, for a time, have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it.”

“The temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice,” “this organized money power,” “secret conclave”—these are indeed key elements of our Faustian bargain, ones that have, as Chris Hedges asserts, dynamited the foundations of our society. However, I believe we need to put all of this in a larger perspective, a social and even spiritual context, if you will, because it can be argued that these foundations were not all that solid to begin with. The real debt incurred by the United States took place very early in its history, and it involved choosing a way of life that was ultimately not viable and even self-destructive. In that sense, outrage at Goldman Sachs may be misplaced, because from this broader perspective, they were just doing what all good Americans are supposed to be doing—hustling, as the historian Walter McDougall characterizes the American Way of Life. McDougall argues that this way of life can actually be dated from the late sixteenth century; but let me turn to the late eighteenth instead, and follow the analysis of Joyce Appleby in her book Capitalism and a New Social Order.

According to Appleby, the colonial understanding of social organization turned on the concept of virtue. Following the European model, virtue was defined as the capacity of individuals “to rise above private interests and devote themselves to the public good.” Free men realized their human potential in service to the commonwealth, in other words, and this was the dominant definition of virtue in the colonies for much of the eighteenth century. By the 1790s, however, this began to change, and by 1800 it had undergone a complete inversion: virtue now meant the ability to look out for oneself and one’s family, nothing more: personal success in an opportunistic environment.

Appleby locates the source of this change in the impact of the English Industrial Revolution and the French and Scottish Enlightenment. The liberal concept of freedom was individualistic, based on self-interest, and lay at the heart of the new market economy. For Adam Smith, every man was basically a merchant, and a proper society was a commercial one. Through the so-called “invisible hand” of the market, the collective result of individual selfish actions would supposedly result in the greater good.

These ideas fell on receptive ears on the other side of the Atlantic. While the Federalists held on to the classical definition of virtue, the Jeffersonian Republicans were strongly attracted to the notion of laissez-faire. Thus during the 1790s in particular, the new nation began to shed its European ethos; and the organic model of society, which saw virtue in terms of reciprocal rights and obligations, began to dissolve. Literature during this period extolled the search for new commodities, and Thomas Cooper, in Political Arithmetic, wrote that “consumers form the nation.” Competition, not cooperation, would be the order of the day, and Thomas Jefferson was only too happy to distribute Cooper’s work as election campaign material in 1800. With his victory, the communitarian vision of the Federalists, which gave primacy to public over private interest, was eclipsed. The result, wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter, was “a democracy of cupidity.”

But it didn’t have to be this way. Marginalized though it was, America had an alternative tradition, dating from John Winthrop’s sermon on the Arabella in 1630. Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting the part about the “City on a Hill.” What he failed to add was the part that came after that, in which Winthrop told his flock that they would have to be vigilant so as to insure that the “good of the public oversway all private interests.” If it was a maverick tradition (although it may have included President Jackson among its ranks), it was nevertheless a vibrant one. From Emerson and Thoreau to Frederick Law Olmsted and Lewis Mumford to Vance Packard and beyond, the argument of this alternative tradition was that the dominant tradition, the so-called American Way of Life, was flawed and misguided. As opposed to the pursuit of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “outer frontier”–i.e., the geographical or material one–the alternative tradition focused on an “inner frontier” that reflected the values of craft, quality, and community. All this was rejected as “elitism” by the dominant culture, however, and got pretty much repressed very early on. Historian Sidney Mead tells us that as a result there was a loneliness and remorse in the frontier adventure, expressed in sad folks songs and gospel hymns, but that this was “a minor refrain, drowned in the great crashing music of the outward events that mark in history the conquering of a continent and the building of a great nation.” This conquest, he goes on, has been “told and retold until it has overshadowed and suppressed the equally vital, but more somber, story of the inner experience.” In his book How Cities Work, Alex Marshall argues that we could have chosen the community solution over the individual one time and again in every area of American life, but that we almost never did that. The result, he says, is that “we live in one of the loneliest societies on earth.” Indeed, between 1985 and 2004, the number of Americans who said they had no one in whom they could really confide tripled. The U.S. Census for 2000 revealed that 25% of American households consisted of only one person; the figure for New York City was nearly 50%. No other society is as isolated as ours. There is a debt here, in other words, in terms of “shadow” material–material that is now knocking at our door. In his recent book, Come Home, America, William Greider writes that the cost of this tradeoff has been a great loss, such as “the small grace notes of everyday life, like the ritual of having a daily dinner with everyone present.” He goes on:

"The more substantial thing we sacrifice is time to experience the joys
and mysteries of nurturing the children, the small pleasures of idle
curiosity, of learning to craft things by one’s own hand, and the
satisfactions of friendships and social cooperation....If we could
somehow add up all the private pain and loss caused by the pursuit
of unbounded material prosperity, the result might look like a major
political grievance of our time."

And, I would add, a major social and psychological debt. Indeed, it goes way beyond this: the data of ignorance and violence for the United States, for example, are astounding. Nearly 25% of all the prisoners in the world are incarcerated in American prisons, and 24% of the adult population says it is OK to use violence in the pursuit of one’s goals. Two-thirds of the global market in antidepressants are purchased by Americans, and in 2008 164 million prescriptions were written for these drugs. Nearly 60% of the population is sitting around waiting for the “Rapture” and the Second Coming; 45% believe that extra-terrestrials have visited the planet during the past year. Twenty percent think the sun revolves around the earth, and another 9% say they have no idea as to which revolves around which. Eighty-seven percent cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map. The United States ranks thirty-seventh among developed or developing nations in quality of health care. Etc., etc. As New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it just a few months ago, if we wish to talk about American exceptionalism, we should take note of the fact that the number of our prison inmates is exceptional, the quality of our health care is exceptionally bad, the degree of our social inequality is exceptionally acute, and public education has gone into exceptional decline.

The arena of U.S. foreign policy is also a classic study of spiritual debt, of oppressing, torturing, and massacring other peoples until they finally couldn’t take it anymore. What else was 9/11 about, really? Not hard to figure out, if you study the record of our political and military interference in the Middle East. The media suppressed any real coverage of Obama’s disavowed pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, back in 2008, but in fact the man was no fool: “When you terrorize other people,” he declared, “eventually they are going to terrorize you.” This is not rocket science; it’s just Newton’s Third Law of Motion—action and reaction. New York Times reporter Steven Kinzer said much the same thing in his book All the Shah’s Men when he asserted that there is a direct line from what the CIA did to Iran in 1953–overthrowing a democratically elected government and replacing it with a torture regime–to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Even Henry Kissinger understands this, having pointed out, a year before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that “hegemonic empires almost automatically elicit universal resistance, which is why all such claimants have sooner or later exhausted themselves.” I could write a book about it, but inasmuch as I already have, let me pass over the subject of U.S. foreign policy and refer you to the work of the sociologist Robert Bellah, in particular his book The Broken Covenant. Looking around at what constitutes daily life in America–and this in the seventies, when it was significantly better than it is today–Bellah suggested that there was something karmic about it all: “our material success,” he wrote, “is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.” In the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush predicted that the nation “would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness.” The crash of 2008; the subsequent, actual unemployment rate of nearly 20%; the payout, by Wall Street firms, of $18 billion in bonuses in the wake of that crash; the ranks of the former middle class lining up at food banks and soup kitchens—all of this suggests that that day has arrived.

“We will,” writes Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, “emerge from the crisis with a much larger legacy of debt…and more vulnerable to another crisis.” In fact, if you look closely at the 2010-11federal budget, the projected deficit for that fiscal year is nearly 11% of the country’s entire economic output; and by Mr. Obama’s own projections, U.S. deficits will not return to what are generally regarded as sustainable levels over the next decade. It’s not likely that they will ever return to those levels. We are a nation, in short, that cannot and will not get our collective head above water. In his book Reinventing Collapse, Dmitri Orlov writes: “We’re in hospice care. The bailouts can be viewed as ever bigger doses of morphine for a patient that’s not long for this world.” The truth is that in a whole variety of ways—social, cultural, financial, and spiritual—our liver is now being devoured, and Mephistopheles has returned to collect his due. Karma, after all, is about reaping what you sow.

©Morris Berman, 2010

Interview with Ken Rose

2010-05-27T16:08:00.003-04:00

Dear Friends,

Ken Rose has a kind of controversial thought program on KOSW-FM, I think it is, in California, and recently did an interview with me--abt 50 mins. long. You can access it, if you'd like, on his website: www.pantedmonkey.org. Just scroll down to May 24 and then click on my name.

Enjoy...mb

The Cellular World

2010-05-26T16:32:00.002-04:00

I always enjoyed the story of how Ludwig Wittgenstein, after delivering a four-hour lecture to his class in Cambridge on the intricacies of some logical problem, would then go to a movie in town (his favorite genre was the American Western) and sit in the front row, letting the images inundate his overheated brain. Intuitively, it makes sense, the need to turn off the intellect and immerse oneself in fantasy for a while. Now it turns out that it makes scientific sense as well. In her recent book, The Philosophical Baby, psychologist Alison Gopnik notes that magnetic imaging studies show that the occipital cortex, which is very active in the infant brain, lights up in adults while they are watching a movie, while the prefrontal lobe shuts down. In short, there is a reversion (if that is the right word) to pre-critical thinking, which adults often experience as a relief from the “tyranny” of the prefrontal cortex. This latter part of the brain is undeveloped in infants, and doesn’t fully form in most individuals until they are in their twenties. The implication is that imagination precedes rational analysis; to do art, be creative, or imagine hypothetical worlds, one has to play, to tap into that preverbal substrate of the mind.

In his review of Gopnik’s work (New York Review of Books, 11 March 2010), Michael Greenberg talks about how elusive and shadowy the infant’s consciousness really is. Tolstoy wrote that it was but a slight step from a five-year-old boy to a man of fifty, but a huge distance between a newborn and a five-year-old. Greenberg says of the first five years of life:

“Mysterious and otherworldly, infancy and early childhood are surrounded later in life by a curious amnesia, broken by flashes of memory that come upon us unbidden, for the most part, with no coherent or reliable context. With their sensorial, almost cellular evocations, these memories seem to reside more in the body than the mind; yet they are central to our sense of who we are to ourselves.”

Proust immediately comes to mind, of course: the scene with the madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann, where the taste of the cookie suddenly opens the door to a flood of childhood memories, long forgotten but still latent in the body. “Cellular evocations…central to our sense of who we are to ourselves.” If the phrase “human identity” has a meaning, surely this is it. And yet that fundamental cellular identity gets papered over, as it were; as we grow older, we become someone else. But it is not clear that the archaic self ever goes away completely.

In his autobiography, the psychologist Carl Jung tells the story of a man who comes to him for therapy, apparently at the insistence of his wife. The man is dull as a stick: a Swiss high school principal of about sixty years of age, who did everything “right” all his life, and never experienced a moment of ecstasy or imagination. Jung suggests that he keep a record of his dreams, which he does, showing up at the second session with something potentially disturbing. He dreamt that he entered a darkened room, and found a three-year-old infant covered with feces, and crying. What, he asked Dr. Jung, could it mean? Jung decided not to tell him the obvious: that the baby was himself, that it had had the life crushed out of it at an early age, and was now crying out to be heard. Exposing the “shadow” to the light of day, Jung told himself, would precipitate a psychosis in this poor guy; he wouldn’t be able to handle the psychic confrontation. So Jung gave him some sort of neutral explanation, saw the man a few more times, finally pronounced him “cured,” and let him go.

One wonders if the good doctor did the right thing. Is a living death preferable to a psychotic awakening? On the other hand—and I have a feeling Jung would agree with me on this—aren’t we all that man, to some degree? Perhaps not as wigged out, but it may be a question of degree, nothing more. Abandonment of that cellular identity is the abandonment of life itself; the abandonment of the part of ourselves that is in touch with the “miraculous,” as some have called it.

A couple of poems come to mind. One is by Antonio Machado (my translation):

The wind, one clear day, called to my heart
with the sweet smell of jasmine.

“In exchange for this aroma,
I want the scent of all your roses.”
“I have no roses; the flowers
in my garden are gone; they are all dead.”

“Then I’ll take the tears from your fountains,
The yellow leaves and the withered petals.”
And the wind left…My heart bled…
“My soul, what have you done with your poor little garden?”

Who, upon reading this, can’t feel a sense of guilt, a sense of something having been betrayed, and now faintly stirring, knocking on the door of consciousness, asking to be heard, at long last?

The same theme comes up in “Faith Healing,” by the British poet Philip Larkin, which describes a “workshop” being held somewhere in England by a visiting American guru. Undoubtedly, he is something of a charlatan; but even (or especially) charlatans know how to press the right buttons. The women in the workshop line up to be held by him for twenty seconds, to hear him ask, “Now, dear child, What’s wrong,” before he moves on to the next person. Most just come and go, but some start twitching, crying,

…as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone…

What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.

Larkin goes on to compare this moment to the thawing of a frozen landscape, a weeping that spreads slowly through the body—just from the fact of being asked the question, of having someone recognize that there is even a question to be asked. As with Machado, it’s hard not to identify with the emotion that is being pulled out of a deep cellular memory. What is the “poor little garden,” if not the “sense of life lived according to love” sleeping within us, the cellular memory that never really goes away?

There is, of course, in virtually every society, a kind of conspiracy to keep that memory out of conscious awareness. We need to ask why that would be the case; but meanwhile, it’s clear that if it emerges at all, it is by “accident” (the madeleine that triggers a kinesthetic memory, e.g.), or in a therapist’s office, or in a dream (or a poem). If the cellular world is repressed within the individual, it is also repressed within society. Hence, to study human psychology is really to study abnormal psychology, and to study sociology is to really to study a kind of institutionalized insanity; or weirdness, at the very least. But it is hardly an accident that the two go hand in hand. Observing the phenomenon in the United States, the psychiatrist Thomas Lewis remarks that “A good deal of modern American culture is an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.” “Happiness,” he concludes, “is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America’s values.”

A grim assessment, but I doubt there is any way of denying it. Nor is it limited to the United States, of course; if Freud was right, there is no civilization without deep discontent. It just takes a different form in different cultures. And in any case, it is hard to imagine what a society based entirely on cellular memory would be like—although figures such as Rousseau and Nietzsche did their best to sketch it out. True, the results are less than impressive, but one would like to think that more can be done in this direction beyond individual initiative. It is very rare for a society to literally stop, for a moment, and collectively discuss what an authentic way of life might consist of. Indeed, I can barely imagine such a thing, except that it actually happened in France in May/June of 1968, and for those who were privileged enough to have been at the two-month “teach-in” held at the Sorbonne during that time, it was like breathing oxygen. What is man? What is the good life? What are we doing here? And: Why aren’t we asking ourselves these questions all the time?

“Come my friends,” wrote Alfred Lord Tennyson; “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

What a thought.

©Morris Berman, 2010

An American Diary

2010-05-17T07:42:00.003-04:00

This is a record of a trip I made to the United States during April 28-May 16. I was asked to give a lecture at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee campus; after which I spent two weeks in New York visiting friends and just wandering around. The decision to keep a record of the trip was prompted by a minor incident at Immigration at the Dallas Airport, which reminded me of the rudeness of everyday American discourse. Once the diary was begun, the rest followed quite naturally.

April 28: Arrival at Immigration at DFW. The Immigration official directs me to line #38. I walk over to line #38, where an electronic sign announces that this line is for non-US citizens. I return to the official, mention to her that line #38 is for non-US citizens. "I know that, sir," she says coldly, staring at me. Nothing more; no explanation for the obvious contradiction. Just simple, rude noncommunication. For me to reply, "I'm sorry, but I don't understand why you would send a US citizen to a line expressly marked for non-US citizens," would probably have gotten me detained. So I return to line #38, reflecting on how rudeness in everyday interactions in the US is simply coin of the realm.

April 29: Milwaukee.
a) In a coffee shop not far from the university. I get to the front of the line. The barista, a woman of about 20, says nothing and doesn't make eye contact. No "Hello, can I help you?"--nothing. She's almost hostile. I order a cappuccino; when she finally speaks, it's to tell me the price.

b) I get into a taxi. The meter is not running. I point this out to the driver. He mumbles something incoherent. I give him the address where I am going, ask again about the meter. He finally says it's not working. "Well, what are you going to charge me?" I ask. He says $4. I notice a sign inside the taxi that indicates that the maximum charge for a ride is $5. We get to my destination, and I offer him $4 plus a dollar tip. "It's $15," he says. "You said $4," I remind him. "It was farther away than I expected," he says. "I'm sorry," I tell him, "but you can't tell a customer it's $4 before the ride and then $15 after the ride." I put $5 on the handrest next to him and make to leave the cab; he locks the doors. "I'm going to call dispatch," he says. "Why not call the cops?" I reply; "they should be able to sort this out." This calls his bluff, and he lets me go.

c) Now out of the cab, I am approached by a woman standing near the curb, who seems very concerned, and asks me what happened. I tell her; she is very sympathetic. Then she asks me for $1.50.

d) Later in the day, I'm back at the coffee shop. I order orange juice and a muffin. The barista (a different one this time) tells me that in the afternoon they have a promotion: I can take another muffin or pastry for free. I reach for a danish; the guy behind the counter snaps at me, "Don't use your fingers!" Apparently, it doesn't occur to these folks to say to the customer, "Let me get it for you." Once again, the rudeness of “normal” American discourse (I can't really imagine a service person in Europe or Mexico behaving like this).

e) I am staying at a dormitory run by the University of Wisconsin. There are two computers with Internet connection on a desk on the second floor. Near them are posted two signs, in large block capitals: PLEASE KEEP YOUR FEET OFF THE WALL. Why would they need to be telling the residents not to be slobs?

Again, I couldn't help thinking of how all of this--with the possible exception of the taxi incident--is just part of the air we breathe. In order to protect yourself, you have to be on edge, "scanning" all the time, which is an exhausting way to live. Is it a wonder that although Americans comprise less than 5% of the world's population, they consume 67% of the global market in antidepressants?

April 30: Back at the coffee shop for breakfast (apparently I'm a masochist). It consists of a single room, not very large. In the center, some guy is talking loudly on his cell phone, so that everyone has to listen. The narcissism of this is astounding. "What's the margin on that?" he says. "Can you give me a 100% guarantee? What does Ellis say?" Etc. It never ends. I'm there for a half an hour, and when I leave, he's still talking. Nobody, myself included, can tell him to take the conversation outside, because (a) he would probably just tell us to fuck off, and (b) the management of the coffee house would surely not back us up; obnoxious customers are still customers, after all, and cash is king.

May 5: New York. I start talking to my taxi driver, who turns out to be from Senegal. He has lived in the US for 20 years, he tells me. I ask him how he feels about life in the United States. "Well, I've also lived in Europe," he says; "it's very different." "How?" I ask him. "Europeans tend to think about things," he replies. "Americans are basically robots; they just go through the motions, they really don't know what they are doing or why. I think they are sad people." No shit. (I left the cab with a sense of admiration for his honesty. After all, he couldn't have known that I would agree with him; it would be more likely, as an American, that I would take offense at his remarks, perhaps refuse to tip him.)

May 7: I'm on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. A kid of about 16 is sitting with both feet up on the seat, listening to an iPod. Again, I realize there is no way I or anyone can say, "Take your feet off the seat; you're not at home, for God's sake." When his stop approaches, he gets up and rearranges his pants so that they are completely below his ass, with his underpants showing. What to think? He's basically a trashy product of a trashy culture. I refrain from asking him if he's an utter moron.

Later that day, I'm at the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA literature indicates that the use of cell phones is forbidden in the galleries. Of course, I soon see some guy in his twenties talking on a cell phone. I go over to the guard, and nod toward the cell phone user. "Cell phones are not permitted in the museum, right?" I ask him. "Not permitted in the galleries," he says. "This is a gallery," I tell him; "we are in a gallery." I watch him struggling to work this out, as if he is considering for the first time that he is being paid to monitor the galleries, and is in fact in one. Finally, he walks over to the kid and tells him that he can't use his cell phone in the galleries. The kid pays him no attention at all, just keeps on talking. The guard doesn't ask the kid to leave or do anything at all. "I guess you really put the fear of God into him," I tell him. I don't wait for him to process this, as I figure it might be a while. Instead, I think about the Senegalese taxi driver's comment on robots, and how completely under water so much of the American population is. We seem to be turning into caricatures, parodies of ourselves. Marshall McLuhan once said that if a fish could talk, and you asked it what was the most obvious feature of its environment, the very last thing it would say is "water". We simply don’t see our culture for what it is.

May 9: I'm walking to a restaurant with a few friends in Jackson Heights (Queens) when the wind kicks up and something enters my right eye. Perhaps a particle of dust, although it feels like a piece of glass. Tears are pouring down my cheek. Somebody says, "There's a drugstore in that supermarket over there; we can get some Visine." We enter the supermarket, go over to the drug counter. A young woman of about 20 is talking to some guy across the counter. Someone in the group tells her, "We need Visine." She goes off and gets it, hands it to me while still talking to the guy. She makes no eye contact; the only thing she says to any of us (me) is "$6.45" (or something like that). I hand her a $20, she makes change, and in terms of her conversation with the guy, never misses a beat. I pour the drops into my eye; she continues talking. My eye seems to be a bit better, and we leave. Again, the unconsciousness of the whole thing impresses me. This girl would never regard her behavior as rude; probably, most of her customers wouldn't as well. Interactions with the staff of stores now boils down to nothing more than a cash transaction, for both parties; the idea that there once was, or should be, a human dimension to these interactions is off the radar screen.

I also found a sort of zombie-ish quality to greater New York on this trip. At any given moment, something like 25% of the people walking down the street are not mentally present in the environment. Instead, they walk (or rush) down the street with a cell phone pasted to their ear. It gives the city a feeling of a ghost town, as their bodies are present but their minds are 100 or 1000 miles away. Thus the environment is little more than a "receptacle" for their activity; it isn't something people have a real relationship to, any more. This seems like an icon for the culture in general, which is hollow, dying.

Below are some excerpts from Dick Meyer's book, Why We Hate Us, which I believe are relevant to my own experience.

"There is no longer much vibrant, living tradition and community to be born into, to inherit, or to bequeath." There has been "an erosion of socially shared ways of treating others respectfully, the ties that make community possible." "U.S. citizens are isolated because it is unhealthy to risk contact with one's fellow citizens. When bullies are free to act out their aggression and disdain for others--threatening behavior, in other words--road rage, cell phone calls at the top of their lungs, shoving in grocery stores are just a few examples--then others will act to limit their exposure to people. Humans wish to survive. It is healthier to be lonely than to risk contact with a society without decency and without mores."

"Boorishness and vulgarity are sanctified by public culture and thus omnipresent." "The social superego has been silenced or at least muted. Brothers have no keepers. Respectful, polite behavior can't be enforced by external, deliberate action, by vigilant etiquette and spontaneous censorship. It comes from shared boundaries and conventions, and they are disappearing." But "We don't see ourselves as belonging anywhere, in history or in community." As Pope Benedict XVI said, "We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires." "[American] Society is constantly urging us to give in to our impulses. It slowly erodes the maturity of us all."

One cannot be "an admired leader of a corrupt institution, a noble player in a decadent system, or a clean pool in a toxic stream." "Manners die in a vacuum of community...The lack of manners is probably the most constant and unavoidable source of why we hate us...Manners in a culture of narcissism are practically an oxymoron."

"Techno-boors are oblivious to others and to public space in a way that feels menacing and destabilizing. It's like living in a zombie world. A rude zombie world." And it has an addictive quality to it. "People touch their portable devices like rosary beads. They are compelled to check their e-mail when they could be talking to you face-to-face. Parents who roamed their neighborhoods at will when they were little kids now freak out if they can't have instant access to their own children by cell phone." "Wireless technology allows people to hook into the Internet umbilical all over, so coffee shops, airports, parks, and bookstores are populated by laptop hooligans...This kind of behavior also signals an egomaniacal message like 'I'm very, very important. I am more important than you. I must be connected at all times'." This form of technological social obliviousness is "absent presence...when a person is on a cell phone in a store, it seems to be acceptable for that person not to thank or exchange pleasantries with the cashier. Well, that isn't acceptable...'absent presence' and techno-aggression are more pervasive threats to social well-being and...destructive of social capital." "Much of what we hate in everyday life are the things that make us feel alone, invisible, disregarded, or dismissed. That's how we feel when someone is using a Blackberry in the middle of a conversation or talking loudly on a cell phone in a line for a movie."

Meyer concludes with two voluntaristic "projects" to change all this, based on individual initiative; he admits, however, that these projects are not achievable. The above description is, after all, what America is in its essence; it's not going to become a different country.

Choose Your Violence

2010-04-19T15:19:00.002-04:00

I have never worried about violence in Mexico. Of course, I know it exists. Like everyone else, I read the newspapers, and the evidence for widespread, drug-related violence is clear enough. True, the guns for this violence are largely supplied by American arms dealers just north of the border, as President Obama himself omitted when he visited Mexico early in 2009. But leaving that inconvenient fact aside, there is no doubt that there is a lot of crime-related violence in Mexico, not only from drugs but from extortion and kidnapping and sex trafficking as well, and that it casts a long, dark shadow over Mexican life.

And yet, I never feel nervous walking the streets of, say, Mexico City. I have walked around the city at night, many times, by myself, and (call me naïve) I have never felt the need to keep looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, I find that I am typically edgy when I visit the United States, and over the last few months I began to think about why this is the case. Finally, it came to me: yes, Mexican violence is quite real, but it doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the boundaries of gang wars and criminal activity. American violence, on the other hand, is a different kind of creature. It doesn’t have the dramatic flavor of the Al Capone-style violence of the 1920s anymore. Rather, it seems to be woven into the fabric of everyday life. It often feels to me as though the entire society is violent; that random incidents could turn very ugly very fast. Which they often do, in the U.S. (a casual put-down remark leads to someone getting blown away in a drive-by shooting the next day, for example—events that are by now so common they get reported online, but not in the newspapers), and I suspect it is this that makes me nervous, because you never know what’s going to happen. The question is, which of the two types—Mexican or American—is worse?

I had occasion to confront this dilemma in the form of two incidents that occurred in the closing months of last year. In September, I was staying for a week in a part of Mexico City that has always seemed to me to be relatively safe. One evening during that time I had dinner with a friend of mine, and she subsequently dropped me off about a block from my apartment building (the street was temporarily closed to traffic, for some reason). As I walked home, I passed a young man of about twenty-two years of age, who seemed to want something. I stopped for a moment; he looked at me with rather glazed eyes and said, “Que pasó?” (what’s happening?), slurring his speech. He was obviously drunk. I turned away and kept on walking, whereupon he attacked me from behind, striking me in the head and knocking my hat off. My reaction was one I would not have anticipated: I was filled with rage. I wheeled around and advanced on him, inexplicably yelling “déjalo!” (let it go!). Of course, I should have shouted “lárgate!” (get lost!), but “déjalo!” was what came out. However, the words didn’t really matter; it was the body language that stopped him in his tracks. He was aware, as was I, that if he made one false move he was going to have a fight on his hands. We stood there for about twenty seconds, staring at each other. Finally, I felt he got the message. I turned and left; he didn’t follow me.

In the ensuing days, I puzzled over my surprising reaction to this strange encounter. For one thing, I was aware that if it had taken place in the United States, I would have reacted quite differently. Specifically, I would have been very cautious, because I expect Americans to be unpredictable and potentially volatile. (In fact, in a confrontation of this sort, the American assailant could easily have been carrying a gun.) My experience of Mexico, however, is that daily life is not permeated by the kind of free-floating anger and incipient aggression that I find characteristic of American life. Indeed, Mexican behavior in public spaces tends to be polite, if not actually gracious. Hence, when this drunken kid unexpectedly jumped me from behind, my feeling was one of outrage. If I could have put my thought process into words at that moment, it would have been something along the lines of, “How dare you attack me in my adopted country?” For clearly, he had violated my standards of expectation of public behavior in Mexico, and I wasn’t about to let him off lightly.

The second incident occurred on a flight from Mexico to Houston just after Christmas. Once again, the “attack” (not quite the right word) came from behind, but the guy in question was an American. As we took our seats on the plane, I adjusted mine so that it reclined a bit. The man in the seat behind me—white-haired, my age or a bit older (he looked a lot like Colonel Sanders of KFC)—asked me to keep my seat upright, as his legs (he told me) were right up against the back of it. I noticed, however, that he had a briefcase tucked under his calves, which were pushing his legs forward, and I was aware that this violated flight regulations (carry-ons have to be stowed in the overhead bins or under the seat in front of you). However, I decided to give “the Colonel” the benefit of the doubt. He did have rather long legs, and the seat didn’t recline that much anyway. I figured I could live without the luxury of a reclinable seat for what was a relatively short flight.

At some point toward the end of the flight, I must have fallen asleep; and my seat, for some unknown reason, slid back on its own. I was rudely awakened by the guy behind me shoving my seat forward, quite violently, and pitching me into the back of the seat in front of me. “I asked you to keep your seat upright!”, he exclaimed quite vehemently, nearly shouting. I was absolutely stunned by this behavior; I hardly knew what to say. All I could think of was, “If you stored your briefcase where it belonged, there would be enough room for both of us.” Which I told him, and left it at that.

Nevertheless, I was quite angry at being treated so rudely. Is this enough?, I thought to myself. Should I report him to the flight attendant? I mean, he could have just tapped me on the shoulder, or at least checked out what had happened, before going a bit loco. Reacting violently when things don’t go your way is, after all, the behavior of a spoiled child. But in the end, I decided not to pursue it. We were almost in Houston, and I didn’t want to make a scene. It was very different from the confrontation with the drunk in Mexico City, who actually struck me. This was a tantrum, not a physical attack, and I just couldn’t see the wisdom of making a federal case out of it. I decided to write the airlines about it, and leave it at that.

As in the case of the Mexico City event, however, I was subsequently led to think about the implications of what had happened. What occurred to me was the following:

1. There appears to be a level of rage in American society simmering just below the surface, a rage that most other societies—crime and political conflict excepted—don’t seem to possess. For example, some years ago a U.S.-Canadian research team conducted a poll that asked the question, “Do you believe that the use of violence is acceptable in the pursuit of your goals?” While 12% of the Canadians surveyed answered in the affirmative, exactly twice as many, i.e. 24%, of the Americans did.

2. This level of incipient violence is probably inseparable from the ideology of “American exceptionalism,” whereby Americans believe that they are the “chosen people,” entitled to whatever they want whenever they want it. One can call it narcissism or extreme individualism, but it does seem to boil down to a kind of infantilism. This is a people who never grew up, and who will throw a tantrum if they think their “rights” are being violated. The result is aggressiveness and endless competition as a norm; they are raised in a Top Dog/Bottom Dog philosophy, one that says, “I come first and other people don’t count.” I doubt whether many Americans are free of this unconscious programming.

3. I regret that the U.S.-Canada study was not extended to Mexico, because after visiting Mexico off and on since 1979, and living here since 2006, I cannot imagine a Mexican individual behaving the way the guy on the plane did. As already noted, I experience Mexicans as being courteous or even gracious in public spaces. I can only imagine that most Mexicans would find “Colonel Sanders’” behavior grotesque. In the U.S., on the other hand, it merely falls at the far end of the social-behavioral spectrum. If nearly a quarter of the population thinks violence is acceptable in the pursuit of one’s goals, and if establishing oneself as “Top Dog” is a something of a norm, then “Colonel Sanders’” behavior may not be all that aberrant. For me, a rather unhappy conclusion to come to, and one, as I said, that makes me nervous when I am in the U.S.

So there you have it: two types of violence. South of the border, largely restricted to criminal activity. North of the border, literally part of the air that Americans breathe. Which would you choose?

©Morris Berman, 2010

The Nonentity in the White House

2010-04-01T22:05:00.002-04:00

From Kevin Baker's essay in the April issue of Harper's Magazine, "The Vanishing Liberal":

Baker comments on Obama's West Point speech of 1 December 2009, in which he first said that we have to limit our troop commitment in Afghanistan, because our own priorities come first, and then announced that he was sending 30,000 more troops there. He continues:

"How could this be? It was the question that Obama's most fervent supporters had been asking themselves for months, as their candidate discarded almost every vision of a new America, a new world, that he had described during his campaign. By the time of his West Point speech, health-care 'reform' had already been transformed into yet another scheme to transfer wealth to the richest corporate interests in the country. The stimulus program had been botched, the promised money delayed and diverted from badly needed public projects into unhelpful tax cuts. The banks had been bailed out but not the people, and any significant proposals for repairing our infrastructure, addressing climate change, re-regulating the financial markets, or rebuilding New Orleans were generally acknowledged to be dead letters.

"Now, with the president's decision on Afghanistan, our foreign policy settled back into its familiar pattern of endless war for unknown purposes. To people who had been clamoring for real change in how we work and consume, how we live in the world and with one another, this retreat to the failed policies of the recent past was stunning. No other president in our history had so thoroughly spurned his political base in so short a time....

"The party that claims to represent all progressive interests in this country proceeds with its impervious, self-interested agenda. The administration's stated priorities for the near future are to balance the budget before a deep recession has abated and to commit the nation to a long-running war in a dysfunctional Asian country that we neither understand nor care about--thereby promising to repeat, simultaneously, the two worst mistakes made by liberal presidents in the past seventy-five years. As for the long term, the White House will form a commission bent on cutting 'entitlements,' such as Social Security and Medicare, that are the bedrock of retired Americans' prosperity...

"It is increasingly clear that [Obama] never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated....There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in our politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it."

Translation: Game over, folks!

We're Just Not Very Bright

2010-03-29T10:47:00.002-04:00

Well amigos, y'all need to have a look at Chris Hedges' column at truthdig.com today, on America yearning for Fascism. The disintegration of America continues apace, and the real dummies are not especially the Palin-Beck crowd, but the Democratic establishment and those who support it. As Hedges points out, the forces that are now lining up, and the way they are expressing themselves (gun imagery, targeting of minority groups), follow the classic fascist pattern. How intelligent is Mr. Obama, really? In the wake of the crash of 2008, did he move to rescue the (by now nearly 20%, in real figures) unemployed? Or the millions who were/are losing their homes to bank foreclosures? Nah...start with an $800-billion bank bailout, quickly up it to $12 trillion, and now, apparently (figure estimated by Nomi Prins in It Takes a Pillage), $17.5 trillion. What will that do for the angry Americans who are now searching for scapegoats? Will they target the Bernankes, the Geithners, and the Summerses, who are (stupidly) seeing to it that the cash goes to the rich? Will they go down to Wall Street and rage against Goldman Sachs or AIG? Will they rail against Mr. Obama in the right way--i.e., not as a 'socialist' (what a joke that is), but as the man who delivered 32 million uninsured Americans into the hands of corporate health care? Will they be angry at the president for scuttling the 'public option', which would have by-passed obligatory corporate control of the health-care system? I'm guessing not. And all of this is working together with the Tea Party crowd, really; they and the 'power elite' are doing a synergistic, downward dance, reinforcing each other as they go.

Of course, a lot of our continued spinning out of control is due to the absence of any moral center in this country--as the Right has argued all along. The problem (or one, anyway) with the right-wing argument is that you cannot simultaneously decry the lack of a moral center and exalt corporate market (or even true laissez-faire) capitalism, whose only philosophy is 'more!'. Money is necessary, but it's not a value system; and 'more' certainly isn't. An article by George Packer in the March 15th New Yorker ("Obama's Lost Year") argues that Obama is failing because he has no narrative of where the country ought to go. Nobody knows what he wants, writes Packer; we don't know who he really is. But I would add that Mr. Obama himself doesn't know what he wants, or who he really is. True, he is not the creepy, eerie, near-psychotic hologram that was George W. Bush; but is he all that different? It seems to me he's just a chic version of Nowhere Man. In that sense, however, democracy does work: he is us. We have no values, we have no goals (beyond 'more'), and we certainly don't think a whole lot. I used to point to the .00001% 'Kucinich vote' as the only hope we had, but as you all know, Mr. K has sold out as well.

How could this scenario possibly have a positive outcome? This is precisely how civilizations collapse; this is exactly, Dark Ages America.

C-SPAN BookTV Video, 2006

2010-03-16T12:44:00.002-04:00

Dear Friends,

I did this talk (with Q&A) at the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, VA in May 2006. Apparently, C-SPAN just made its BookTV video archives available online, and the bookstore folks were kind enough to send me the link. As follows:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/189406-1

Enjoy!

-mb

A Month in Xela

2010-03-14T13:55:00.002-04:00

After having lived in Mexico for nearly three years, and still speaking bad Spanish, I decided it was time to do something about this sorry state of affairs. The problem, I realized, was that it was difficult for me to get an "immersion experience" in Mexico: I simply had too many bilingual friends here. I would have to go to a place where there was no escaping the Spanish language, twenty-four hours a day; a place like Guatemala.

I had been to Guatemala two years before, mainly following the tourist route: Antigua, Lago Atitlán, and the villages that surround the lake. Antigua was soaking in language schools, I remembered; but when I consulted the guidebooks on the subject, they all said the same thing: you won't learn Spanish in Antigua. The place is crawling with gringos; you'll just wind up socializing with them and speaking your native tongue. Quetzaltenango--or Xela, as it is popularly known--is where you want to go. Americans don't know about it; it's off the beaten track. So, encouraged by this "tip," I got on the Internet and enrolled in a language school in Xela for four weeks. I flew into Guatemala City two weeks later, and arrived in Xela the next day. (As it turned out, everybody else had apparently read the same guidebooks and had taken the same advice. There were more Americans in Xela than in all of Houston; or so it seemed.)

I don't know what I had expected of the physical environment--something like Antigua, perhaps--but Xela was not it. It soon became clear to me that Antigua was a "showcase" city, the exception rather than the rule. With a population of 200,000, Xela claims to be the second-largest city in Guatemala; yet its infrastructure is completely shot. The streets are riddled with cracks and potholes; sidewalks, when they exist, are typically broken. More often than not, you are walking on dirt or trekking through mud. Riding the buses is not to be undertaken on a full stomach, as they are old and decrepit, and jerk you up and down as though you were in a milkshake machine. The cause of all this is not hard to ascertain: Guatemala is, in effect, ruled by an oligarchy, and a large fraction of the national budget is earmarked for the military (which the country needs like a hole in the head). There is very little left over for roads, bridges, transportation, education, and public health. Truth be told, Guatemala is a lot like the United States, only a bit more strung out.

Of course, the United States has no excuse, whereas after thirty-six years of civil war (1960-96) Guatemala had the stuffing kicked out of it. Nearly half the population is illiterate, and half the country's children suffer from malnutrition. With heavy American support, the Guatemalan military undertook a scorched-earth campaign, complete with U.S.-trained torture and death squads, that destroyed any possibility of social justice. The result? After 626 massacres there were something like 150,000 dead, 100,000 desaparecidos, 1 million persons who had gone into hiding, and 1 million refugees (most of them fleeing to Mexico and the United States). More than 440 indígena pueblos were wiped out, 200,000 children were orphaned, and 40,000 women became widows. The urban population is understandably demoralized and cynical, living in a strange kind of spiritual vacuum. What Gertrude Stein once remarked about Oakland, California, applies to Xela a hundred times over: There is no "there" there.

The odd thing is that this huge void at the center has been filled by a purely consumer culture, one very much based on the U.S. model of the "good life." In fact, Xela comes across as a bad version of a bad American city--Sacramento, Dallas, Little Rock, Indianapolis, etc. "Culture" consists of cell phones and Internet cafés, which are always crowded; there doesn't seem to be much else. Whatever happened to the Maya?, I thought to myself. To an outsider, the whole thing made for a strange sight: elderly indígena women on broken-down buses clutching cell phones, and nine-year-old Mayan girls tottering around on high-heeled shoes. And as in the majority of U.S. cities, the people are basically unfriendly. The staff in stores consists mostly of adolescents, who won't make eye contact and can barely grunt out "para servirle." It is as though what the United States was not able to destroy by means of "hard power," it was now finishing off by means of "soft power"--electronic toys, blockbuster films, Coca-Cola, and neoliberal economics.*

These impressions were largely confirmed by conversations I had with people born and raised in the town. One woman, a social worker in her early forties, agreed with me about American electronic gadgetry being the focus of Xela culture. "It's quite amazing," she told me; "I work with families who go to bed hungry, who literally go without food, so that they can buy and maintain a cell phone. It enables them to say, 'yo soy alguien' (I am somebody), because in truth, they have no other identity or source of self-esteem. It's pretty pathetic, but that’s what Guatemala has come to." (I subsequently learned that Guatemala is No. 1 in Central America in cell phone consumption, and No. 3 in all of Latin America.)

"When did all this start?", I asked her, "and how?"

"I think in the sixties," she replied, "around the time that I was born. The greatest single influence was American television. Those images of the wealthy consumer life had a big impact on the Guatemalan population. Most of us still believe the images are real."

"But what did Guatemalan culture consist of before the CIA overthrew the Arbenz government in 1954, and before the invasion of American TV?", I continued.

She shrugged her shoulders. "I honestly don't know. What you see in Xela today–McDonald’s, Wendy's, shopping malls and all the rest–is all I've ever known. It's who we are now. I don't know who we were before that."

I confess, I found this really chilling. It reminded me of that town in One Hundred Years of Solitude that lost its identity because the inhabitants forgot the names of things.

The language instruction I received in Xela, in any case, was first-rate: one-on-one classes, four to five hours per day, until I felt my head was going to explode. That aspect of my time in Xela was very positive, and in fact I became good friends with the director of the school, who was also a professor of economics at the local university. All of this made the trip very worthwhile. But I couldn't--can't--shake the image of a city without purpose, without meaning, and of a country which, having been largely destroyed by U.S. politics, now seeks to emulate the American economy and American culture, both of which are dying. If the sources of vitality can no longer be found in traditional Mayan culture, then it's not clear where they can be found, or what the future holds for a nation that became a pawn in the Cold War through no fault of its own and was subsequently hung out to dry.

My four weeks in Xela having come to an end, I decided to clear my head by spending a couple of days in Antigua before returning to Mexico. Yes, I thought, it's a tourist trap and a showcase town, but two days of sitting in the central square drinking that exquisite Guatemalan coffee and reading newspapers may be good for the soul. Which proved to be the case. And then, during one of those days, I ran across something that caught me completely off guard: a gallery crammed with Guatemalan art, art that was absolutely dazzling. Oils, acrylics, ceramics, you name it--the colors were truly vibrant.

"Where is all this from?", I asked the curator. "Who did all this?"

"It's all Guatemalan," he told me, "artists from 25 to 80 years of age. From all over the country," he added. A few of them, it turned out, actually lived in Xela.

I stood there and gaped. After four weeks of living in a spiritless environment, I was now confronted by this marvelous concentration of spirit, of art as fine as I had seen in galleries in Mexico City or New York. "Your country wasn't able to destroy us completely," the paintings seemed to be saying. "Not with guns, and not with gadgets. There are still a few of us who know what life is about."

Of course, I wound up buying a small painting and hanging it on the wall of my study back home, along with some photos I took of the Guatemalan countryside. I look at it every day. And if I listen closely, I can still hear it whispering, from time to time, telling me about a life that refuses to be extinguished. It reminds me of a graffito I once saw on a wall in Chiapas, addressed to the ruling class: "Nuestros sueños no caben en sus urnas"–Our dreams do not fit into your ballot boxes. Would that that were true of all of Latin America.

©Morris Berman, 2010

*What I am describing here, however, may not apply to rural Mayan culture, and there is some literature pointing to native resistance to Americanization and consumerism. Anthropologist Robert Hinshaw, who lives in the Mayan village of Tzununá, says that his neighbors are proud of their traditional culture and not interested in having it altered in any significant way--although they all seem to own cell phones(!). Edward Fischer, who lived in Patzún and Tecpán for twenty-eight months during the 1990s, claims that globalization has galvanized a resurgence of Mayan identity politics. His work, however, has been questioned by other anthropologists. The jury, in short, is still out on this matter. See Jack Houston, "Robert Hinshaw," Revue (Guatemala City), Vol. 18 No. 6(August 2009), pp. 18-19 and 106; Edward F. Fischer, Cultural Logics and Global Economics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); and the review of the latter by Charles R. Hale in the Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 59 No. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 296-98.

UWM, May 1st

2010-03-07T00:19:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

Sometimes I get letters from you guys asking where and when I'm next going to be giving a lecture. As you can imagine, that doesn't happen very often. First, I'm terribly shy; and second, I'm about as popular in the US as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (remember him?). But once in a while, I do emerge from my cave. So here's the info: I'm speaking at a conference on "debt," being held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, on May 1st. Actually, it's two days, April 30 and May 1, but I'm speaking there the afternoon of May
1, something like 2 p.m. So if you live in the Midwest, and want to stop by, feel free. (There may be a large contingent with baskets of rotten fruit in attendance, so I probably need all the support I can get. Well, perhaps not.) The title of my talk is "Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart." Cheery and upbeat, as with most of my stuff. By the way, there is a lot of good material on the program, judging by the various titles, so there's more reason to attend than just hearing from moi.

Hasta la vista etc...

When Decline Is Staring You Right in the Face

2010-02-21T10:15:00.003-05:00

Dear Friends,

Sometimes the ongoing collapse of the US is so obvious, you almost have to laugh. The very newspaper that (4 years ago) dismissed my analysis of the end-of-empire as a "tirade" is now substantiating the analysis. The stories on the front page of today's NY Times (Feb. 21), when taken together, form an interesting picture. One article says that millions are unemployed, and that they can forget about finding work for years to come. (The official figure is 10%, but these figures are always doctored, because typically the US Labor Dept. doesn't put folks whose unemployment compensation ran out back on the unemployment rolls. Actual figure is 1 in 5, or about 20%.) The middle class lost its retirement savings and is now lining up at soup kitchens. However, you'll be glad to hear, the stock market is making a modest recovery.

Then there's an article on how the Afghan Army isn't doing squat, and how the US armed forces are actually the ones waging the (oh-so-necessary-to-our-freedom) war over there. Yes, we really need to send 30,000 more troops into that black hole, without a doubt.

Problems with a deadlocked, do-nothing legislature? How's this for a muscular solution: Evan Bayh, who is leaving the Senate in disgust, thinks that a monthly bipartisan Senate luncheon might create a warm, fuzzy feeling among the bitter ideologues and get things rolling once more. Why he hasn't also come up with a plan to reverse the earth's gravitational field is not quite clear.

And as a lovely ps, an article about Amy Bishop, the biology prof. at the U of Alabama who recently (Feb. 12) responded to not getting tenure by gunning down six of her colleagues, killing three. I can't help wondering if she had been on a steady diet of best-selling management books, such as Winning Through Intimidation and The Brand Called You.

America, America!

What if...?

2010-02-17T22:10:00.002-05:00

We are too impressed with the pattern revealed to us...
to remember that for the participants history is a
haphazard affair, apparently aimless, produced by
human beings whose concern is essentially with the
trivial and irrelevant. The historian is always conscious
of destiny. The participants rarely–or mistakenly.

–Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee

There was a time, not too long ago, when historians became interested in what was known as “alternative history.” The idea was to pose a speculative, counterfactual scenario and ask, “What if...?” What if John Kennedy had not gone to Dallas in November of 1963, or had survived the attack? What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, or Germany had been the victor in World War II? What if the USSR had emerged reenergized from the period of “Perestroika,” in a new and partially capitalist form? And so on.

Alternative history had a rather short life span within the history profession (to my knowledge), but it has always been a staple of science fiction. The British novelist Kingsley Amis tried his hand at it in The Alteration (1976), in which he conceived of a world where the Protestant Reformation failed to catch on, and Europe remained Catholic. In this world, as one might imagine, there were severe limits placed on freedom of expression, as well as on scientific research; but the up side was a society not beset by endless technological innovation, an ever-expanding economy, and a hectic pace of life. It was a civilization that moved at a human pace, one that did not confuse “progress” with a fourteen-hour work day and a surfeit of ultimately pointless electronic toys. Such a window onto the past enables us to view the present–the culture that did come to pass–with a much more objective eye. For it may be the case that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, and that the “parallel universe” that got discarded (or rather, that never came to pass) would have been a much better option for those involved, or for their descendants.

One of my favorites in the “alt. history” genre is Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, written in 1955 and by now an underground cult classic. The action takes place in a United States–a northern United States–that lost the Civil War. Instead of being an industrial powerhouse, it became a kind of backwater, drab and impoverished, while it is the South that is vibrant and culturally alive. This is reality in a mirror, as it were; and it reminds me of the comment made to me some years ago by a German friend. “Many Europeans,” he told me, “don’t regard the Northern victory as necessarily a good thing. The preservation of the Union led to a dramatic economic expansion and eventually, to the American Empire, with its destructive ambition of dominating the world. A Southern victory would probably have prevented that.” Of course, the Fascist attempt to dominate the world was much more pernicious, but my friend’s point is nevertheless a valid one, as a host of nations, from Guatemala to Vietnam, can attest to. American history may, in other words, be a positive thing only from an American viewpoint. And in any case, what would have been the ambition of a victorious Confederacy? Probably not imperial, although in Bring the Jubilee the author has it invading Mexico and renaming Mexico City “Leesburg,” after Robert E. Lee(!).

The point is that we tend to take reality as a given. True, there is a certain historical momentum to events that cannot be overlooked. I don’t believe, for example, that the United States would have ultimately been deterred from its imperial trajectory had John Kennedy lived or the Supreme Court not stolen the election for George W. Bush in 2000. In both cases, things were too far gone for any serious changes to have occurred, it seems to me (though granted, Vietnam and Iraq may conceivably been spared the horror we put them through, which would have been no small thing). In a similar vein, the hopes many people (both within and outside of the United States) once placed in Barack Obama have proven to be illusory, as he reveals himself to be little more than Bush with a human face. But continuity is not always the rule; and in his essay “History and Imagination,” the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper makes a good case for alternative history, history “on the cusp”:

At any given moment in history there are real alternatives....
How can we “explain what happened and why” if we only
look at what happened and never consider the alternatives....
It is only if we place ourselves before the alternatives of the
past...only if we live for a moment, as the men of the time
lived, in its still fluid context and among its still unresolved
problems...that we can draw useful lessons from history.

It is not that we can arbitrarily choose a different future; history doesn’t work that way (and who would the “we” be, in any case?). But what alternative history can do is dispel the notion that there is only one right way to live, namely the way we are living now. Not that, for example, a Confederate victory in what some Southerners call “The War for Southern Independence” (or even, “The War of Northern Aggression”) would have necessarily given us a better world–slavery having been the obvious dark aspect of the Southern way of life–but that the destruction of a gracious, slow-moving, community-oriented society in favor of a frantic, commercial one is nothing to crow about. Awareness of this (i.e., beyond the geographical boundaries of the South) could be a departure point for political organizing; and at the very least, it opens the door to a different set of behaviors on the individual level, for what that might be worth.

I trust the reader understands that I am not making some declaration here of “The South Will Rise Again!” I’m just selecting one possible example among many, and one could just as easily discuss the Amish of Pennsylvania as a kind of living alternative history in this vein, or perhaps the Shakers, had they survived. As I said in previous essays, I suspect “choice” will be forced upon us, rather than be something we voluntarily undertake. But the value of alternative history is not merely, as Trevor-Roper says, to explain what happened, but more important, to explain what could have happened. For we are not living in the best of all possible worlds; this much is obvious. But how much more impoverished would our existence be, if we had no concrete images of worlds that might be significantly better?

©Morris Berman, 2010

Is the American Dream Killing You?

2010-02-08T21:23:00.002-05:00

This is the title of a book by a former corporate executive in Washington, DC, Paul Stiles, published in 2005. He finally threw in the towel and left the US, now lives in Spain and the Canary Islands. The book contains lots of "misery data" about life in the United States, but I particularly like it because he shares his own personal experience on why he finally decided to call it quits (actually, start a new, and very different, sort of life). As follows:

Someone, he writes, builds a gigantic house next door; after six months, you and your neighbor haven't even said hello. You walk into your local junior high (where his daughter was a student), and it looks like something out of hell: nose rings, boys showing their underwear, girls with T-shirts that say HO! on them, and others that sport MEGADEATH. Kids with hoods over headphones, with gangsta rap leaking through them: "All flowing past you in the hallways like sea wreckaage, all that is left after the ship goes down."

You then drop your daughter off, after hardly having spoken to her, and drive to work. On the way you see an electronic sign that broadcasts the latest Threat Level from Homeland Security. You reflect on the fact that the nation's capital used to have a crack user as a mayor, and that he later returned, elected to the city council.

Now you are in the CEO's office with the rest of the management team. "You are polite, of course, but...you know too much to respect the man who runs the corporation. You know he is out for himself, that he has formed a small cabal at the top to leverage the entire company for their own personal gain....The CEO makes over five hundred times what the average person in the company makes, but this is normal in America today, where the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily for thirty years, and is now the widest in all the rich democracies, on par with the third world."

After the meeting you walk through the company, acknowledge those you pass by, "but it is nothing but the nod between jousters. Office relationships are like business as a whole: pleasant on the surface, deadly underneath." Nothing makes sense, life's purpose eludes you, you can't trust anyone. The market economy has the power "to run your life, harm your health, fragment your family, dumb down society, destroy the environment, incite global conflict, and displace God himself."

Meanwhile, the incarceration rate has increased nearly 500% in the last 20 years, one-third of all marriages end in ten years or less, the rate of child abuse has tripled in the last 25 years, 65 million Americans suffer from stress, and between 1989 and 2001 credit card debt went from $238 billion to $692 billion and the number of people filing for bankruptcy jumped 125%. Nearly 2/3 of all Americans are overweight; the number of overweight adolescents tripled during 1980-2005. The US leads the industrialized world in child suicide (ages 5-14); the youth suicide rate has doubled since 1950.

We live in a winner-take-all society. "When competition becomes too intense, it separates people. Your society may start making market sense, but it stops making moral sense. You lose your connection to other people, and to anything larger than yourself. This cuts the very bonds that give life meaning. Bonds between the individual and his family, his community, his country, and even his God all erode and break. In short, the more intense the market experience, the more meaningless life will become."

The victims of US corporations, and the philosophy they represent, feel oppressed and exploited by America. This is "why they hate us." "You can understand why those most fervently opposed to living by the Market code--religious fundamentalists--would attack us. And you can understand why they would target the global system of American capitalism, the World Trade Center."

"Far from being an unlimited good, the Market has become the driving force of American decline."

Straight Talk

2010-02-01T16:16:00.001-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kWU-JHetMM&feature=player_embedded

Yes, The New Yorker

2010-01-25T23:18:00.002-05:00

Dear Friends,

I've been subscribing to the New Yorker for years. Sometimes I wonder why. They actually supported the American invasion/destruction of Iraq in 2003; these days, they seem to think we're on the road to economic recovery, that the Obama $12-trillion bailout of the banks (i.e., the rich) makes sense, and that no fundamental restructuring of the U.S. economy (i.e. capitalism) is called for. What can one say. But once in a while, they catch me by surprise, and this happened during the last three issues: Jan. 4, 11, and 18. In a nation of dolts, a few little points of light. Let me be specific.

From the issue of Jan. 4, "Shouts and Murmers" column by Paul Slansky, we learn the following:
1. After watching a tape of his guest Michael Moore singing "the Times They Are A-Changing," Larry King asked him if he wrote the song.
2. A health-care-reform protester brandished a copy of what he called "the U.S.S. Constitution".
3. The mayor of Baltimore [Sheila Dixon, Democrat] was convicted of taking gift cards intended for poor children and using them to buy electronic gadgets for herself.
4. A Missouri legislator [State Rep. Cynthia Davis, Republican] suggested that a food program for low-income children was expendable, because "hunger can be a positive motivator." (You need to google this, folks; her face is really the face of America. I also have the impression she doesn't herself miss too many meals.)

From the issue of Jan. 11, article by John Cassidy, "After the Blowup":
1. Cassidy interviewed Eugene Fama, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, regarding the crash of late 2008. Prof. Fama told Cassidy, "I don't know what a credit bubble means." "We don't know what causes recessions." He added that the mortgage collapse "was a government failure; that was not a failure of the market." Basically, he feels that the market is sound and self-regulating.
2. Then Cassidy went next door to Fama's son-in-law, John Cochrane. Cochrane explained that the cause of the 2008 crash was Obama getting on TV in Sept. of 2008 and announcing that the financial markets were near collapse.
3. He then went one floor upstairs to talk with Raghuram Rajan, one of the few scholars who warned about the coming crash as early as 2005, pointing to deregulation and trading in complex financial products as red flags. Senior Fed officials and prominent economists dismissed this as alarmist, and Larry Summers (now Obama's top economic adviser) said that this kind of talk supported "a wide variety of misguided policy impulses." (Rajan had in fact been the chief economist at the IMF from 2003 to 2006.)

These are good examples of something we've discussed on this blog before: folks with high IQ's being morons. Robert McNamara had a high IQ, and was a complete idiot (something he basically admitted before he died--too bad it took so long, he could have spared us Vietnam); and a war criminal to boot. The same can be said of Dick Cheney. Fama, Cochrane, and Summers are undoubtedly brilliant; they are also little more than buffoons. It's kind of interesting, reading Cassidy's interviews and hearing these educated clowns staring reality in the face and denying it. (Not unrelated to all of this is the Rolling Stone article by Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs; posted 2 July 2009 at rollingstone.com; quintessential reading, amigos).

Moving on to the Jan. 18 issue, an article by Claudia Roth Pierpont called "Found in Translation." This is about contemporary Arabic literature, something Americans couldn't care less about. (Shit, they couldn't care less about American literature, who are we kidding?) In general, as Henry Kissinger once pointed out (and he was one to talk, eh?), Americans aren't interested in non-American points of view. They certainly aren't interested in how they are seen from the outside (see my previous post). But Ms. Pierpont does a good job of taking us into books that deal with the living realities of our "enemies": Alaa Al Aswany's "The Yacoubian Building"; Elias Khoury's "Gate of the Sun"; Ghassan Kanafi's "Palestine's Children"; and a few others of note. They are windows on a rich and complex world, and personally, I look forward to reading them.

And speaking of an impoverished and simplistic world, let me reprint the poem by Campbell McGrath in the Jan. 11 issue, entitled "Shopping for Pomegranates at Wal-Mart on New Year's Day":

Beneath a ten-foot-tall apparition of Frosty the Snowman
with his corncob pipe and jovial, over-eager, button-black eyes,
holding, in my palm, the leathery, wine-colored purse
of a pomegranate, I realize, yet again, that America is a country
about which I understand everything and nothing at all,
that this is life, this ungovernable air
in which the trees rearrange their branches, season after season,
never certain which configuration will bear the optimal yield
of sunlight and water, the enabling balm of nutrients,
that so, too, do Wal-Mart’s ferocious sales managers
relentlessly analyze their end-cap placement, product mix,
and shopper demographics, that this is the culture
in all its earnestness and absurdity, that it never rests,
that each day is an eternity and every night is New Year’s Eve,
a cavalcade of B-list has-beens entirely unknown to me,
needy comedians and country singers in handsome Stetsons,
sitcom stars of every social trope and ethnic denomination,
pugilists and oligarchs, femmes fatales and anointed virgins
throat-slit in offering to the cannibal throng of Times Square.
Who are these people? I grow old. I lie unsleeping
as confetti falls, ash-girdled, robed in sweat and melancholy,
click-shifting from QVC to reality TV, strings of commercials
for breath freshener, debt reconsolidation, a new car
lacking any whisper of style or grace, like a final fetid gasp
from the lips of a dying Henry Ford, potato-faced actors
impersonating real people with real opinions
offered forth with idiot grins in the yellow, herniated studio light,
actual human beings, actual souls bought too cheaply.
That it never ends, O Lord, that it never ends!
That it is relentless, remorseless, and it is on right now.
That one sees it and sees it but sometimes it sees you, too,
cowering in a corner, transfixed by the crawler for the storm alert,
home videos of faces left dazed by the twister, the car bomb,
the war always beginning or already begun, always
the special report, the inside scoop, the hidden camera
revealing the mechanical lives of the sad, inarticulate people
we have come to know as “celebrities.”
Who assigns such value, who chose these craven avatars
if not the miraculous hand of the marketplace,
whose torn cuticles and gaudily painted fingernails resemble nothing
so much as our own? Where does the oracle reveal our truths
more vividly than upon that pixillated spirit glass
unless it is here, in this tabernacle of homely merchandise,
a Copernican model of a money-driven universe
revolving around its golden omphalos, each of us summed
and subtotalled, integers in an equation of need and consumption,
desire and consummation, because Hollywood had it right all along,
the years are a montage of calendar pages and autumn leaves,
sheet music for a nostalgic symphony of which our lives comprise
but single trumpet blasts, single notes in the hullabaloo,
or even less—we are but motes of dust in that atmosphere
shaken by the vibrations of time’s imperious crescendo.
That it never ends, O Lord. That it goes on,
without pause or cessation, without pity or remorse.
That we have willed it into existence, dreamed it into being.
That it is our divine monster, our factotum, our scourge.
That I can imagine nothing more beautiful
than to propitiate such a god upon the seeds of my own heart.

And so there we have it, my friends: X-rays of the American soul. It can only get worse, as (most) readers of this blog well know. Let's hope the New Yorker will be around to document the vacuity, the ignorance, and the continuing descent. If we are going to commit suicide (and we are), might as well do it with our eyes open, don't you think?

To See Ourselves as We Are Seen

2010-01-24T22:56:00.002-05:00

I recall, shortly after the attacks of 9/11, a radio program in the United States that asked for brief statements on the part of journalists and editors from around the world as to how they viewed the events of that day. Most of the respondents, as might be expected, condemned the terrorists for the slaughter of innocents; and rightly so. But I was particularly struck by the response of the editor of some Pakistani newspaper–the name escapes me now–who added to the general condemnation something rather unexpected: “It is important for America to understand the impact that it has on the rest of the world,” he told his American audience. “Too often, it fails to take that into account in trying to assess the reactions of other nations to it.” Of course, his exhortation was completely ignored in the United States; to this day, the vast majority of Americans believe that the attacks of 9/11 emerged from a political vacuum, being nothing more than the actions of men who were “insane” or “evil”. U.S. foreign policy, apparently, had no part to play in these events.

The next Pakistani comment I came across regarding the events of that day was several years later, and of a very different order. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, by the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, can be seen as a pointed fleshing-out of that editor’s remarks. It won’t have any more success in waking up the American people than did that immediate post-9/11 commentary, but the brilliance of this novel certainly makes it worth the effort. Indeed, I was hooked from the opening paragraph, and read the book in one sitting. Written in the form of a monologue delivered, at a café in Lahore, to an American CIA-type (or so it seems) by “Changez,” the narrator, Hamid’s prose has a limpid, natural quality that is both understated and seductive at the same time. Changez tells his silent listener the story of his life to date: as a bright Pakistani student, he won a scholarship to Princeton University, graduated with honors, and went on to a job as an analyst at a prestigious New York-based corporation, “Underwood Samson & Company”. USC is in the business of “valuation,” i.e., estimating the value of a company that another company might want to buy, or of a division of a company that the larger firm might want to liquidate. More often than not, the lives of workers are destroyed by the valuation. In one case, that of a publishing firm in Valparaiso, Chile, the intended goal is to eliminate the trade books section that deals in quality literature, so that the press can market books that have purely commercial value.

In the beginning, Changez is dazzled by his high-paying job, elegant Manhattan apartment, and the prestige derived from moving in corporate circles. He follows the company’s directive to “focus on the fundamentals,” i.e., the cash value of things. The social and political context in which his work is situated is not something that concerns him. All of this, however, starts to change after the attacks of 9/11, the American response to them, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, a Muslim nation that borders his homeland. Ineluctably, Changez is led to grasp the nature of American society as a whole, and in particular, of the American empire. He sees how class-based and xenophobic the society is; how civilian deaths in countries under American attack are regarded as nothing more than “collateral damage”; and how “no country inflicts death so readily upon the inhabitants of other countries, [or] frightens so many people so far away, as America.”

The real turning point comes during his work with the publishing house in Valparaiso. The elderly company chief, Juan-Bautista, reminds him of his maternal grandfather, with whom he was close. Juan-Bautista asks Changez what he knows of books, and the latter finds himself saying that his grand-uncle was a poet, and that books were loved in his family. The problem is that USC’s goal is to evaluate the firm from a strictly financial viewpoint; it couldn’t care less about the world of learning. Sensing Changez’s internal conflict, Juan-Bautista takes him to dinner, and talks to him about the Janissaries, Christian boys captured by the Ottomans and trained to destroy their own civilization, until “they had nothing else to turn to”. Changez gets the point: he himself is a modern-day Janissary, having sided with an empire that thinks nothing of ruining the life of someone like Juan-Bautista for the sake of monetary gain. It becomes impossible for him to keep pretending that his “valuations” are neutral. He finally betrays USC to save the deeper values he was raised with, and which he had never really given up. For Changez sees that the American Dream is not only shallow and illusory, but actually destructive of the deeper values of civilization; and even worse, is by now grounded in violence. Having lost his job and his visa, now back in Lahore, he tells his American audience of one:

"As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared
pain that united you with those who attacked you. You
retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions
of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs
on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was
rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums, not least my
family, now facing war thousands of miles away. Such an
America had to be stopped in the interests not only of the
rest of humanity, but also in your own."

Changez finally leaves the United States and becomes a university lecturer in Pakistan, popular for pulling no punches in his analysis of the American attempt to dominate the world. Eventually, as the title of the book seems to suggest, he is led to act on his beliefs in more radical ways.

With the exception of this final development, which gives the novel its concluding (and ambiguous) twist, it is difficult not to regard the story as autobiographical. Hamid himself is a Pakistani who grew up in Lahore, and subsequently studied at Princeton and Harvard. Although the prose is smooth and low-key, his passion over what the United States is doing in and to the world can hardly be disguised; and there is much here for Americans to learn, if they could only see themselves as others see them. For there is a definite relationship between macrocosm and microcosm: as the U.S. government behaves, so do its citizens, and this is hardly an accident. On a holiday with some Americans in Greece, for example, the narrator says that he found himself “wondering by what quirk of human history my companions–many of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement were they–were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its ruling class.“ Good question, and hardly irrelevant to American imperial designs and U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. Speaking again of the aftermath of 9/11, Changez relates to his listener how New York was suddenly soaking in American flags–on windshields, fluttering from buildings, even stuck on toothpicks: “They all seemed to proclaim: We are America...the mightiest civilization the world has ever known; you have slighted us; beware our wrath.”

That was indeed the mood, all right, and Hamid’s lines remind me of that classic poem by Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in which a traveler in the desert finds the remains of a statue, now reduced to a pedestal, which bears the following words:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

The traveler looks around, and all he can see is an empty landscape of sand
stretching to infinity.

Everything passes; what else is there to say?

©Morris Berman, 2010