It’s
The Culture, Stupid! Burying Slogans And Honoring The Dead
By Gary Corseri
06 November, 2006
Dissidentvoice.org
“As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to
anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.”
“There is no virtue
[in] America. That commerce which preside[d over] the birth and education
of these states has [fitted] their inhabitants for the chain and …
the only condition they sincerely desire is that it may be a golden
one.”
-- Alexander Hamilton
Way back in the halcyon days
of 1992, before 9/11, Clinton’s elfin spinmeister-campaign-manager
James Carville, infamously hung a sign at the future president’s
headquarters: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
The message was -- Stay on
message.
The Dems’ message this
year is equally as simple and simplistic. It amounts to a real-estate
mantra: location, location, location. Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.
Chanting that slogan, millions of people will follow the Dems into the
next Slough of Despond. A large part of me hopes they succeed. An even
larger part hopes they open their eyes before they sink too deep.
We have, in fact, been sinking
for a long time -- since Hamilton’s day and before.
What led the 24-year old
genius to decry so lugubriously the character of his fellow patriots
and anti-monarchists? They were nearing the end of their epic struggle
against the British super-power, and already the seeds of discontent
were rankling these nascent Americans.
It was an age of giants,
and Hamilton was one of the supernal. Short of stature, he impressed
his peers with oratorical, argumentative and rhetorical skills that
conjured Cicero and Demosthenes. He was Washington’s chief aide,
helped him write letters (!), win military and diplomatic battles. He
was to establish the young nation’s fiscal policies and sound
credit without which the United States would have foundered upon the
rocks of insolvency. No one ever thought more about the meaning of establishing
a new Republic in North America. No one expressed himself on that subject
with greater thought and care. No one tried more earnestly to find the
pivot between the extremes of despotism and anarchy. And, no one met
a more tragic end.
The “West Indian bastard”
understood, as few Americans have, a basic flaw in our character: while
we sing or prattle about liberty and freedom, it is the “golden
chain” by which we are hanged -- and often, by which we hang ourselves.
It is the golden chain of “commerce” -- expansion, exploitation,
conquest. These are the cultural values of a nation that grew wealthy
on slave labor, rum running and genocide -- values for which Americans
have killed and died for generations. Because they are our cultural
values, and not our professed political values, they are so thoroughly
ingrained they elude self-examination. Cultural values subsume political
and economic values. Political Science and Economics are among the soft
sciences taught in our universities. They are reducible to formulae,
and they may be studied, elaborated, contravened. Cultural values are
imbibed with Mother’s milk. They are the sea in which we swim.
They appear irrefutable.
We look around at the many
problems that plague our fragile planet and we want hard and fast “political”
solutions. We seize upon slogans: “54-40 or Fight”; “Remember
the Alamo”; “The War to End All Wars”; “The
War to Save Democracy”; “Godless Communism”; “Weapons
of Mass Destruction”; “the Domino Effect”; “With
Us or with the Terrorists”; “War on Terror.”
Peggy Noonan established
her reputation, wrote books and earned millions on the basis of five
words: “A thousand points of light.” David Frum accomplished
the same hat trick even more succinctly: “Axis of Evil.”
Having beaten the dead horse of “Stay the Course,” the Administration
will now replace it with “Benchmarks,” leaving the hapless
Tony Snow to explain the difference. He might say, “Cut and Run”
is always bad; “Stay the Course” used to be good, but is
now passé; “Benchmarks” is good until we find a better
speechwriter.
And the hoi polloi may be
pulleyed along. For my part, as a cultural critic, I hope someone --
someone in the news media perhaps (but it is too much to hope) -- someone
may say that he would rather cut and run from stupidity and brutality
than embrace an idiot policy of staying the course or the equally asinine
policy of benchmarks.
We are as likely to get such
clear thinking and such forthright expression as we are likely to win
the War on Terror. Principally, because our culture no longer leverages
clear thinking or forthright expression, we are deluged with inanities,
constant noise, and distractions. Our establishment poets and literati
are too busy shmoozing for grants and sucking up for sinecures to trouble
themselves with the mundane affairs of working people, the unemployed,
the disaffected, lost or forgotten. Our students do not learn the basics
of logic; only an ethereum master the art of critical thinking. They
are instead inculcated with values from Day One: Salute the flag, obey
authority -- the boss, the government -- get regimented -- for future
employment, consumption patterns, the army, police or Homeland Security.
Inculcation: from inculcare: to grind under the heel.
This election season we will
hear the drumbeat again: Get out and vote; if you don’t vote,
you can’t complain. Vote for me, trust me. My opponent is a scumbag.
My Black opponent sleeps with white women (or really wants to). In your
heart, you know he’s right. I will not send American boys to do
the fighting Asian boys should do. And on and on the noisome music plays
ad nauseum.
We will buy the myths again
because we have been inculcated, heeled under, by those myths: the myth
of a free country, a democracy beholden to the people, the myth of a
responsive leadership, an informed electorate. Amazingly, a people whose
students barely rank in the top 20 of industrialized nations’
test scores, will presume that it has the God-given wisdom to rule the
world, and the authority to terrorize the world with its weapons of
mass destruction. We will smell each other’s acrid fear and we
will tell each other we are the best people in the world, and “they”
hate us for our freedoms. While we titillate each other over the behavior
of sexual miscreants in high places, we shall grant carte blanche to
the weaponization of space, the water boarding of “enemy combatants,”
the nullification of the Kyoto Protocols, dispensing with habeas corpus
and reinterpreting the Geneva Accords. We may do so grudgingly and above
the protests of some brave and/or foolish souls. We shall do so because
the preservation of our cultural values is our first and foremost consideration.
And those values, again, are ingrained in our particularly nasty form
of “commerce”: expansion, exploitation, conquest. (At their
wits’ end, as usual, the Bush Administration, has been sounding
the cymbal of commerce more clashingly of late. Forget Iraq, they implore;
look at how well the economy is doing!)
Inspired by this “funny
season” of electioneering, here are some hard truths from a self-confessed
cynic that most inculcated Americans will not like to hear:
* It is a hoax and a slander
that men have died to give me the right to vote. They died in service
to the State, often compelled to serve out of fear of heterodoxy or
the shame of standing apart. They have fought as often as not for misunderstood
or barely understood concepts, cheered on with slogans and anodynes.
They did not fight for me or my choices because they could not possibly
prophesy what choices I would have or desire.
* The Empire had to perpetuate
the myth of a “market-place of ideas” while simultaneously
demonizing ideas generated by the Counterculture of the 60s and 70s
-- intellectually the most serious internal threat to State power since
the Progressive movement of the 30s. The Counterculture’s “Peace,
Love and Rock and Roll” were cannibalized, caricatured, commercialized,
eviscerated, packaged and sold back to its naïve, youthful adherents
until they lost meaning and flavor. The Summer of Love of 1968 is the
obverse of the Winter of our Discontent of 2006.
* The State invariably inflates
and conflates its enemies so the populace will surrender its safeguards
and liberties to the overweening authority of the State. Marijuana was
conflated with heroin, condemned as a “threshhold drug.”
Our War on Terror would not exist if the War on Drugs (i.e., Drug Victims)
had not preceded it. The War on Drugs was our threshold war. (I suppose
chocolate chip cookies are threshold niblets on the road to obesity.
But, so far as I know, no one has locked up the Keebler Elves.)
* Whoever controls the information
controls the imagination, George Orwell wrote. I’ll add my arpeggio
to the Master: whoever fashions the definitions controls the processes
of thought; those who promulgate their ideologies and brook no countervalence,
circumscribe the boundaries of thought.
* Those who decry the loudest
about the dangers of the “slippery slope” are themselves
greasing the highways to catastrophe. The Bush Administration and its
Congressional cohorts call for more torture to prevent attacks. Will
we extract fingernails to prevent bombing? How far will we go? If waterboarding
is now de jure, can the Iron Maiden be far behind? The Strappado?
* This is a disgusting world
we are modeling, a world of excess, slave and slave-master of the kind
Hamilton and Paine deplored. (Paine: “As I would not be a slave,
so I would not be a slave-master.”) The U.S., far from the well-intentioned
naif among cutthroats -- as it has so often portrayed itself -- wisecracking,
ironic, but basically good, fair-minded John Wayne, Clint Eastwood,
Harrison Ford, et. al. -- has been a major architect for centuries.
We can no longer afford our ignorance, myopia and stupidity. It is no
longer “My country, right or wrong,” but “My planet,
right or wrong.” And if it is wrong, we had best figure out how
to fix it. Love of country is fine, but it is fatuous love if it subverts
love of planet. After all, the planet was bequeathed to us by “Nature’s
God”; our countries are man-imagined entities.
* A world in which tens of
millions of children die each year because of lack of clean drinking
water, sufficient food and adequate health care is an obscene world
of horrid imbalance. It is an over-populated world in which the wealthy
and powerful encourage the underclasses to over-produce themselves,
thus driving down wages and adding to the misery index of the masses.
The slaves are driven by their religious taskmasters to keep stoking
the system of their oppression. Thus, while our industries and technologies
and financial institutions globalize, the world’s citizens have
less and less to bring to the table -- concretely and metaphorically.
The middle class is hollowed out, made more insecure, while the evil
is externalized, placed on the shoulders of the Other. The Earth shrinks
and the power of the State expands into our living rooms, bedrooms,
hearts and minds.
* Whatever the celebrated
philanthropy of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Oprah, et. al, a world in
which billionaires coexist with a billion starving people, mostly women
and children -- is obscene.
* The old need continual
reaffirmation of the status quo from which they’ve profited. The
new generation needs to constantly re-evaluate, learn what values may
be properly and prudently reaffirmed, spurn those that entrench it and
diminish the human spirit.
“We are in the first
day of creation,” Thoreau wrote. And, “Only that day dawns
to which we are awake.” Have we merely the blind courage to follow
idiot, corrupt, maniacal leaders, or have we the earned courage to challenge
the stale bromides of Rumsfeldian antiques, to forge a framework for
a new millennium of peace, hope, prosperity, equality, mutual respect
and shared power?
Let us build on the worthy
foundations of the past; or, finding them wanting, like the ancients,
build city upon city, stratum upon stratum, until we get it right. Our
present and future are not compassed in slogans, sound bytes, or political
poppycock. Our past is not a shrine to be worshipped thoughtlessly;
it is a textbook to be studied and critiqued.
Gary Corseri has taught in
public schools and prisons in the U.S., and at US and Japanese universities.
His work has appeared at Dissident Voice, Palestine Chronicle, TeleSurtv.net,
CounterPunch, CommonDreams, The New York Times, Village Voice, Uruknet,
City Lights Review, Atlanta-PBS, WorldProutAssembly and 200 other websites
and publications. His books include: Manifestations (edited); Holy Grail,
Holy Grail; and A Fine Excess. He can be contacted at: [email protected].
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