A juxtaposition of two stories is revealing of our sad American moment. The first involves Iraq. Fallujah, the city for which Americans fought and died (and largely destroyed) in the Iraq War is now in the hands of Al Qaeda. Let’s recall that before the US invaded Iraq in 2003, Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq.
The second story involves the desperate struggle for unemployment benefits by ordinary Americans–benefits that Congress allowed to expire in the name of fiscal austerity.
Naturally, the Pentagon has been rewarded for its failed policies with a huge budget in 2014. Meanwhile, Congress continues to dither about renewing unemployment benefits to workers desperate for help.
Congress can’t spare a dime for ordinary people even as they empty our national purse for the Pentagon and defense contractors.
Isn’t this an illustration of the American moment? For shame, America.
My wife and I always watch “A Christmas Carol” around this time, the classic version with Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge. Before his redemption, Scrooge is the ultimate miser, a mean-spirited soul who refuses to give to charity since he’s already paying taxes to support prisons and workhouses. For his fellow man Scrooge has no concern, arguing that those who can’t support themselves had best die “to decrease the surplus population.”
By all accounts, including his own, Scrooge is a successful man of business, always keeping a positive balance on his ledger sheet, even if he has to pinch pennies to do so. Generous he is not; you might say he passes nickels around as if they were manhole covers.
His partner Jacob Marley, dead for seven years, restores Scrooge’s humanity with the help of three spirits. Perhaps Marley has the best line when he screams at Scrooge: “Business! Mankind was my business!” The Spirit of Christmas Present also has a powerful scene in which he reveals two slack-eyed and wretched children under his robe, “want” and “ignorance,” and tells Scrooge to be beware of both but especially of ignorance.
So, in this season of generosity of spirit, how are we doing in the USA? Does the skinflint Scrooge rule, or does the redeemed one? Well, just one factoid. Unemployment benefits are due to run out for 1.3 million Americans on December 28th. What are the options for those in want of a job? Are there no prisons, no workhouses? Perhaps they had best die to decrease the surplus population.
Extending unemployment benefits for another year would cost roughly $25 billion. A penurious America can’t afford that, right? But the USA can afford $633 billion for the new Pentagon budget and its “overseas contingency operations” (a great euphemism for war). We’ll spend roughly as much money on these “contingency ops” ($81 billion) as we will on federal funding of education. So much for the Spirit of Christmas Present and his warning about the price of ignorance
Heck, we can even afford $355 billion over the next ten years to modernize America’s nuclear arsenal (this money is separate from the budget for the Pentagon). At the same time, more of the unemployed will see their benefits cut. According to an article at Counterpunch, “Another 1.9 million who were projected to continue benefits in 2014 will also now lose them. Emergency benefits that up to now included extended benefits from 40-73 weeks, will now revert back to only 26 weeks. This occurs at a time when 4.1 million workers are considered long term unemployed, jobless for more than 26 weeks. Knocking millions off of benefits will likely result in 2014 in even more millions of workers leaving the labor force, which will technically also reduce the unemployment rate.”
That’s one way to reduce the official unemployment rate: Leave the unemployed so disillusioned with their plight that they give up looking for jobs. When the “long-term” unemployed stop looking, the government stops counting them. Did I hear someone bark “Humbug”?
The more our country follows the benighted Scrooge — the more ungenerous we are to the unemployed even as we ladle out benefits to the rich and powerful — the more we should fear a visit from that most horrifying ghost of all: The Spirit of Christmas Future.
Memorial to the innocents killed at Sandy Hook elementary. Photo by author.
W.J. Astore
Back in July, my wife and I visited the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy in Stockbridge, Mass. At the shrine, there’s a simple, moving, memorial to the Sandy Hook children (see photo above).
Rarely has the Biblical phrase, “Jesus wept,” been sadder or more appropriate. Christ said to suffer the children to come unto me, for they are the kingdom of heaven. How have we as a society lost this message?
Children are our innocents; they are also our future. Yet far too many of them are mistreated–even murdered.
The Sandy Hook children are martyrs to an American society that is saturated in violence. A society that claims to put its trust in God even as it resolutely ignores His teachings.
We have to do a better job of protecting our children from our all-too-violent tendencies. As a friend put it, we need to do better than to hope our children are safe. We need to knowthat they are safe.
We need to know because the agony of more lost innocents is too much to bear.
If you’re in education, you’ve heard the acronym STEM. It stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. As a country, the USA is behind in STEM, so there are lots of calls (and lots of federal money available) for improvements in STEM. Usually the stated agenda is competitiveness. If the US wants to compete with China, Japan, Europe, India, and other economies, our students must do better in science and math, else our economy will atrophy.
Here’s a sample rationale that can stand in for hundreds of others: “International comparisons place the U.S. in the middle of the [STEM] pack globally,” said Debbie Myers, general manager of Discovery Communications. And for corporate managers like Myers, that’s not good enough when competition in the global market is both endless and the means to the end, the end being profit.
I’m all for STEM. I got my BS in mechanical engineering and worked as an engineer in the Air Force. I love science and got my master’s and Ph.D. in the history of science and technology. I love science fiction and movies/documentaries that explore the natural world around us.
And that’s one thing that bugs me about all this emphasis on STEM. It’s not about curiosity and fun; it’s not even about creativity. STEM is almost always pushed in the US in terms of market competitiveness. STEM, in other words, is just another commodity tied to profit in the marketplace.
My other bugaboo is our educational establishment’s focus on STEM to the exclusion of the humanities. At the same time as the humanities are undervalued, STEM is reduced to a set of skills as mediated and measured by standardized tests. Can you solve that equation? Can you calculate that coefficient of friction? Can you troubleshoot that server? Results, man. Give me results.
Sir Peter Medawar, a great medical researcher and a fine writer on science, spoke of scientific discovery as an act of creation akin to poetry and other so-called liberal arts. Nowadays, we simply don’t hear such views being aired in US discourse. STEM as an act of creation? As a joyful pursuit? Bah, humbug. Give me results. Give me market share. Make me Number One.
If we as a nation want to encourage STEM, we should be focusing not on rubrics and metrics and scores. We should instead be focusing on the joy of learning about nature and the natural world. How we model it, manipulate it, understand it, and honor it by preserving it. STEM, in other words, must be infused with, not divorced from, the humanities. Why? Because STEM is a human pursuit.
As we pursue STEM, we should also honor our human past, a past in which we’ve learned a lot about ethics, morality, and humane values. The problem is that STEM education in the US is often present- and future-focused, with little time for the past.
In American society, those with respect for old ways and traditional values are often dismissed as Luddites or tolerated as quaint misfits (like the Amish). After all, Luddites aren’t competitive. And Amish quilts and buggies won’t return America to preeminence in science and technology. The US as a nation has nothing to gain from them. Right?
Here’s the problem. We connect STEM to material prosperity. We dismiss those who question all this feverish attention to STEM as anti-science or hopelessly old-fashioned. But there’s a lot we can from the humanities about ourselves and our world.
To cite just one example: Consider this passage from Jacob Burckhardt, a great historian writing during the industrial revolution of the late 19th-century:
material wealth and refinement of living conditions are no guarantee against barbarism. The social classes that have benefited from this kind of progress are often, under a veneer of luxury, crude and vulgar in the extreme, and those whom it has left untouched even more so. Besides, progress brings with it the exploitation and exhaustion of the earth’s surface, as well as the increase and consequent proletarianization of the urban population, in short, everything that leads inevitably to decline, to the condition in which the world casts about for ‘refreshment’ from the yet untapped powers of Nature, that is, for a new ‘primitiveness’ – or barbarism.”
What a party-pooper he was, right? Most of what the US defines as STEM is about “material wealth” and “refinement of living conditions,” the very definition of “progress,” at least for those out to make a buck off of it.
Burckhardt was warning us that “progress” tied to STEM had its drawbacks, to include the exhaustion of the earth’s resources as well as the exploitation of human labor. Divorced from ethics and morality, STEM was likely to lead to “primitiveness,” a new barbarism.
Tragically, Burckhardt was right. Consider the industrialized mass murder of two world wars. Consider the “scientific” mass murder committed by the Nazis. (By the way, the Nazis were great at STEM, valuing it highly.)
In a democracy, STEM divorced from the humanities is not “competitive,” unless your idea of competition is barbaric. Disconnected from humane values, a narrow education in STEM will serve mainly to widen the gap between the 1% and the rest of us while continuing to stretch the earth’s resources to the breaking point.
Education in STEM, in short, is not enough. But you won’t learn that by listening to corporate CEOs or presidents prattle on about competitiveness.
For that wisdom, you need to study the humanities.
It’s Joe Bageant week at The Contrary Perspective. Bageant is best know for writing Deer Hunting with Jesus, but his second (and sadly his last) book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, is equally good. Bageant, a self-confessed “redneck,” worked his way into the middle class as an editor. But he never forgot his roots in Appalachia and the subsistence farming of his Scots-Irish family. Bageant had a brutally honest and unadorned way of speaking and writing, and also a great affection and respect for traditional communal values in America.
The theme of Rainbow Pie is loss: the loss of down homey (even homely) values and their replacement by a “monstrous fetish of commodities, their acquisition and their production through an insane scale of work and round-the-clock commerce and busyness” in America (Rainbow Pie, 68-69).
Joe Bageant in Belize
Here is an extended selection from Rainbow Pie, pp. 69-70. I for one have never read a better description of what ails us as a country:
Is it at all possible to regain a meaningful, positive, and satisfying expression of character while working in such a monolithic, non-human scale of “production”? Anybody else feel like America is just one big workhouse, with time off to shit, shower, and shop? Or is it just me? Must our jobs necessarily be the most important thing in our lives?
Yeah, yeah, I know, them ain’t jobs. In America we don’t have jobs–we have careers. I’ve read the national script, and am quite aware that all those human assets writing computer code and advertising copy, or staring at screen monitors in the “human services” industry, are “performing meaningful and important work in a positive workplace environment.” “Performing?” Is this brain surgery? Or a stage act? If we are performing, then for whom? Exactly who is watching?
Proof abounds of the unending joy and importance of work and production in our wealth-based economy. Just read the job-recruitment ads. Or ask any of the people clinging fearfully by their fingernails to those four remaining jobs in America. But is a job–hopefully, a good one–and workplace striving really everything? Most of us would say, “Well, of course not.” But in a nation that now sends police to break up tent camps and car camps of homeless unemployed citizens who once belonged to the middle class, it might very well be everything …
But you won’t hear anyone complaining. America 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 appropriate levels of cheerfulness.
Rainbow Pie is a searing memoir on the loss of community in the U.S. and its replacement by commodities. Bageant shows how we came to embrace the lurid appeals of Pottersville at the expense of the humble values of Bedford Falls. The result: it’s no longer a wonderful life.
As a college professor, I’m in the education business, a word that repels me but which nowadays is undeniably true. One of the marketing slogans where I teach is “A degree is measured by its success in the workplace.” In other words, if a college degree leads to a decent salary in the “workplace,” it’s worth it, but if the “workplace” does not reward you with a position with good pay and benefits, your degree is without merit.
Education in America has become just another business. It’s increasingly monetized and corporatized. Hence it’s unsurprising that educational results are measured increasingly by standardized tests developed by corporations. If education is reducible to standardized metrics, you can run it and control it just like a business. Professors become providers, students become consumers, and education becomes a commodity which is marketed and sold to consumers. Administrators are the middle managers who ultimately answer to corporate-dominated boards. “Success” for an administrator is measured mainly by money: funding drives, corporate donations, endowments, and similar issues related to budget and “the bottom line.”
As usual, Joe Bageant knew the score. And he knew how to express it in pungent prose:
Now that education has been reduced to just another industry, a series of stratified job-training mills, ranging from the truck-driving schools to the state universities, our nation is no longer capable of creating a truly educated citizenry. Education is not supposed to be an industry. Its proper use is not to serve industries, either by cranking out feckless little mid-management robots or through industry-purchased research chasing after a better hard-on drug. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live responsible lives that create and enhance their democratic culture. This cannot be merely by generating and accumulating mountains of information or facts without cultural, artistic, philosophical, and human context or priority.
Consider the harsh reality of Bageant’s statement: America “is no longer capable of creating a truly educated citizenry.” It’s impossible to deny this statement, especially when institutions of higher learning use the “workplace” as the measure of success for their degree programs.
Education today is disconnected from democracy. It’s disconnected from producing an educated citizenry with critical thinking skills. Rather, it’s connected to consumption; indeed, education is just another ephemeral consumable in a world of goods. It’s valued only for its monetary fungibility, i.e. how much money can I make with this degree? Alternatively, from a provider’s perspective, how much money can I make from offering these degrees?
Increasingly, there’s only one true degree offered by American colleges and universities: the business degree. Such is the uniformity of market-driven ideology applied to education.
Say what you will of “diversity” in higher education as measured by differences in age, gender, skin color, sexual orientation, and all the rest. Such diversity doesn’t matter much when all these “diverse” students are striving for the same thing: a fungible degree that’s translatable into money, money, money.
Show me the money!
Update (12/4): When you treat students as consumers, there’s a tendency to buy the idea that “the customer is always right.” In other words, don’t offend the customer with disturbing ideas, such as the legacy of structural racism in society. Better to ignore such topics, especially when the “customer” complains about being offended by the ideas the professor (whoops — I meant the provider) introduces in class. See this story from Slate for more details.
Today’s Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities
W.J. Astore
It’s Black Friday: shop ’til you drop! I watch my share of TV (mainly sports), and this week I’ve been subjected to a bumper crop of commercials showing me that my happiness–even my life–depends on buying more and more stuff. People on these commercials experience paroxysms of pleasure when they save a few dollars on sweaters or shoes or electronic gizmos (probably all made in China). Thank goodness I stopped watching morning “news” shows and other infotainment, which simply reinforce the drive to consume like gormless zombies.
Speaking of zombies, my favorite scene from the “Walking Dead” series came in Season 1 when our intrepid heroes are hiding in a department store among the racks of merchandise as hordes of zombies press against the doors, fighting desperately to gain access so they can consume some choice brains. What a telling visual metaphor for brainless consumption!
As usual, Joe Bageant knew the score. If you haven’t read his work, I strongly urge you to read “Deer Hunting with Jesus” or “Waltzing at the Doomsday Ball.” From the latter:
In effect, the economic superstate generates a superhologram that offers only one channel–the shopping channel–and one sanctioned collective national experience in which every aspect is monetized and reduced to a consumer transaction. The economy becomes our life, our religion, and we are transfigured in its observance. In the absence of the sacred, buying becomes a spiritual act conducted by satellites in outer space via bank transfers. All things are purchasable and, indeed, access to anything of value is through purchase–even mood and consciousness, through psychopharmacology, to suppress our anxiety or enhance sexual performance, or cyberspace linkups to porn, palaver, and purchasing opportunities. But, most of all, the hologram generates and guides us.
Through advertising and marketing, the hologram combs the fields of instinct and human desire, arranging our wants and fears in the direction of commodities or institutions. No longer are advertising and marketing merely propaganda, which is all but dead. Digitally mediated brain experience now works far below the crude propaganda zone of influence, deep in the swamps of the limbic brain, reengineering and reshaping the realms of subjective human experience…
Now, as walking advertisements for Nike and the Gap or Jenny Craig, and living by the grace of our Visa cards, we have become the artificial collective product of our corporately “administrated” modern state economy. Which makes us property of the government.
Bageant, from another essay: “The media have colonized our inner lives like a virus. The virus is not going away. The commoditization of our human consciousness is probably the most astounding, most chilling, accomplishment of American culture.”
Amen, Joe. One thing that strikes me from the commercials I’ve seen: the depictions of people as they purchase that commodity they hold so dearly. Their expressions are akin to religious or sexual ecstasy. The message is simple: Here is your god. Here is your loved one. Here is your life. This commodity–buy it–now. Rapture!
In 1936, my dad was nineteen and serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, fighting forest fires in Oregon. Due to a dry summer, 1936 was an especially bad year for fires, and my dad fought a killer one at Bandon-by-the-Sea in Oregon. After a tough fall, he and his fellow CCC boys sat down to a well deserved Thanksgiving Dinner at Camp Brice Creek in Disston, Oregon. My dad was a pack rat who saved everything, so I have the menu from that Thanksgiving Day.
Dad in Oregon (near the Snake River)
So, what were the hungry young men in the CCCs eating 77 years ago?
Puree of Split Pea Soup/Ripe Olives/Hearts of Celery
Roast Oregon Tom Turkey with Cranberry Jelly, Kellogg’s Dressing, and Giblet Gravy
Snowflake Potatoes, Candied Sweet Potatoes, and Creamed Onions
Hot Rolls and Butter
Shrimp Salad
Mince Pie and Pumpkin Pie
Bananas, Apples, and Oranges
Coffee and Cider
Mixed Nuts, Assorted Candy, and Cigars
Now that sounds like a fine Thanksgiving meal. And these men, who put their lives on the line fighting wildfires, truly deserved it.
Wherever you are, I hope readers of The Contrary Perspective are enjoying a fine Thanksgiving meal. And let us give thanks to the men and women of our firefighting corps, who risk everything to keep us safe.
Fear is the mind-killer (From the movie, “Dune”) W.J. Astore
Tom Engelhardt has a stimulating article at TomDispatch on the many monsters stalking us, both real and imagined. The imagined ones we can deal with; the real ones, well, not so much. As Engelhardt notes:
“we’re living in a country that my parents would barely recognize. It has a frozen, riven, shutdown-driven Congress, professionally gerrymandered into incumbency, endlessly lobbied, and seemingly incapable of actually governing. It has a leader whose presidency appears to be imploding before our eyes and whose single accomplishment (according to most pundits), like the website that goes with it, has been unraveling as we watch. Its 1% elections, with their multi-billion dollar campaign seasons and staggering infusions of money from the upper reaches of wealth and corporate life, are less and less anybody’s definition of ‘democratic.’”
We’ve up-armored our country and our nightmares even as we’ve downsized our jobs and our dreams. The worst nightmare of all, Engelhardt notes, is our continued trashing of the planet in a drive for corporate profits tied to fossil fuel extraction and consumption. We may be making our planet a hell-hole, but it’s hell in slow motion. And since our corporate sponsors are telling us to look away, we hardly notice the descent, even as it gets just a little warmer every day …
“However nameless it may be, tell me the truth,” Engelhardt asks: “Doesn’t the direction we’re heading in leave you with the urge to jump out of your skin?”
Yes, it does. Our real fears are not as Hollywood-ready as vampires or zombies or velociraptors, but they’re equally as frightening and immobilizing. Fears like keeping our jobs, paying the rent or mortgage, not getting an illness that may bankrupt us.
Fear is indeed something to fear. “Fear is the only darkness,” as Master Po explains to the young Kwai Chang Caine in “Kung Fu.” “Fear is the mind-killer,” as Frank Herbert wrote in “Dune.” “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave,” explains the doomed replicant in “Blade Runner,” memorably played by Rutger Hauer.
Today, our fears run at fever pitch. In movies and on TV, they take the form of zombies, vampires, and other “terrorists” out to destroy us. But in real life, our fears are more mundane, even as we’re distracted from the true vampires and zombies – those among us who mindlessly consume without ever reaching satiation.
How are we kept distracted? Because we’re taught that voracious “monsters” are really superheroes. We inhabit a world turned upside down in which victims (the homeless, the jobless, the desperate) are portrayed as despoilers even as zombie capitalists are celebrated for voraciously munching their way through America’s wealth.
What keeps us in line? Our fear. Fear keeps us in the dark. Fear numbs our minds. Fear slaps us in chains.
Change – if it comes to America – will come when Americans master their fear. But before that, we must recognize the true monsters.
Cheerleaders may support our troops, but media cheerleaders are bad at covering our wars
W.J. Astore
Five years ago, I wrote an article for Nieman Watchdog with the title, “Networks Should Replace Pentagon Cheerleaders with Independent Military Analysts.” Major media networks rely on retired colonels, generals, and admirals to give “unbiased” and “disinterested” commentary on military matters to the wider public. At the same time, many of these same retired military talking heads serve on boards for major defense contractors, a clear conflict of interest, as revealed most tellingly by David Barstow. I argued that media outlets need to develop their own, independent, commentators, ones that are not embedded with (or in bed with) the military and companies that profit from war.
In five years, I’ve witnessed no change to military coverage on TV and cable news. It’s wave-the-flag boosterism, pure and simple. The main problem with such uncritical coverage is that it keeps us in untenable (and unwinnable) wars. Consider the latest announcement from Afghanistan that American troops will remain in that country for another decade. Such an announcement is greeted with collective yawns by the U.S. media, even though a majority of Americans want U.S. troops out of Afghanistan now. After a dozen years of death and waste and corruption, who can blame them?
Critical documentaries have been made about the U.S. military and its wars, but they are consigned largely to leftist fringes and seen by audiences that need little convincing about the peril of war. To name just three, consider watching The Ground Truth (veterans’ perspectives from Iraq), Dirty Wars (based on the Jeremy Scahill book by the same title), and Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars (currently streaming for free online). These documentaries give the lie to the idea that America’s wars are heroic and clean and necessary.
Nevertheless, a pervasive myth is the belief that the U.S. media is “liberal” and “anti-military.” In “Stop Blaming the Press,” journalist David Danelo (in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings from January 2008) recalled a comment made by the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Conway, in September 2006. Lauding Marine reporters, General Conway barked, “Maybe if we could get the rest of the media to do the job like you folks, we might have a chance of winning the war [in Iraq].” Stormy applause greeted this comment.
To his credit, Danelo defended the fairness of most U.S. media coverage, which drew strong dissents in the February 2008 issue of Proceedings. A Navy officer complained that Danelo failed “to level criticism at reporters for not doing their part to ensure victory.” Today’s press, this officer implied, neither supported American troops nor wanted America to succeed in its wars. Another officer, a retired Marine, wrote that “just one negative story” from an American journalist “bolsters our enemies’ confidence and resolve while equally destroying support from the public at home, thus eroding our servicemen’s and women’s resolve on the battlefield.” Refusing to suffer such journalistic “fools,” whose “stories could not have been more harmful than if al Qaeda had written them,” this officer demanded immediate military censorship of media working in-theater. Those journalists who refused to cooperate “would operate at their own risk and without military protection,” this retired Marine concluded ominously.
The idea that critical media coverage provides aid and comfort to the enemy is a commonplace. It serves to muzzle U.S. media watchdogs, ensuring that America will continue to unleash its dogs of wars across the world.
Sadly, the saying “The first casualty in war is truth” has never been more true. When our media coverage of wars is compromised, so too are our wars. And when our wars are fought for ill-conceived notions, so too will our media coverage be ill-conceived and notional.
As long as our nation keeps lying to itself in its wave-the-flag media coverage of war, our nation’s wars will persist.
Bracing Views 