Category: Society

The Millionaires in Congress Don’t Care About Sending Your Son or Daughter to War

Please save us from flag lapel pins
Please save us from flag lapel pins

W.J. Astore

Yes, I know it’s a harsh claim that Members of Congress don’t care about sending your son or daughter off to war. Partly that’s because more than half of them are millionaires. And if they’re not millionaires now, they will be when they leave office and cash in as lobbyists and similar Beltway bandit jobs.  After all, it’s hard to sympathize with working-class families with sons and daughters in the military when 1) You’re rich (or at least comfortably well-off); and 2) You have no sons or daughters in the military, and never will.

I wrote to one of my senators in PA, Bob Casey, about the need to end our wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere — about the need to bring our troops home rather than continuing to place them in harm’s way for no reason that’s in our national interest. When I wrote, I asked him if he would send any of his four daughters to Afghanistan, or even if he’d urge any of them to serve our country in any capacity in the military. I never heard back from him or his staff, not that I was surprised.

Senator Bob Casey is a Catholic who went to Holy Cross in Massachusetts in the early 1980s. I’m a Catholic who did my ROTC service at Holy Cross in the early 1980s. We may have even crossed paths on campus. But Bob Casey is from a well-connected political family. I’m the son of a firefighter and a homemaker who joined ROTC to help pay for college. Bob Casey and his daughters have never had to think about military service except in the most abstract terms. They might applaud it, but they won’t do it.

The same was true for Mitt Romney and his five sons. Eager to salute the military; not eager to join and serve. Fortunate sons (and daughters), all.

You could say the same for virtually all Members of Congress today.  Almost no military service.  Few sons or daughters in the military, and certainly none in the front lines in combat branches.  Certainly, they’ll praise our troops.  They’ll salute the flag with vigor.  But what they won’t do is to send their loved ones into harm’s way.

Each and every time our Congress or our President sends troops into harm’s way, they should think whether they’d risk their own.  For example, it’s conceivable that President Obama’s oldest daughter, Malia, could join the military in 2015 at the age of seventeen.  (You can join the military at seventeen with parental permission.)  After basic and advanced training, many American teenagers have been sent into combat only to die before they’re out of their teen years.

Can we imagine such a tragic fate befalling the son or daughter of any prominent politician in the United States?  Of course not.  The burden of military service has perhaps never been shared equally in our history, but its inequality has never been more slanted than it is now.  The rich and privileged exempt their offspring from service (or at least from dangerous service), which only emboldens them when they cast their votes for more war.  In doing so, they risk nothing near and dear to them.  Heck, they may even pose as being “tough” and “uncompromising.”

Save me the flag lapel pins of our millionaire politicians and all their posing.  Want to support our troops?  If you’re young enough, quit Congress and enlist in the military.  Or be sure to encourage your own sons and daughters to join and serve in harm’s way.  At least then you can say you’ve made a sacrifice commensurate with those made by so many working-class families across the USA.

Reforming the National Security State (updated)

The World as a Confessional, with the NSA as its Priests
The World as Confessional, with the NSA as its Priests

W.J. Astore

At TomDispatch.com, Tom Engelhardt has an especially fine exposé of the National Security State as a religion with its own priesthood, holy books, dogma, and true believers/followers.

I recommend reading the entire article, but I do want to highlight some implications of his argument.  Like the Catholic Church (and I’m Catholic), the National Security State is hierarchical, conservative, and often anti-democratic.  We, the laity, have little if any say in how the system operates, even as we’re the ones who fill the coffers and collection plates.  We are subject to a militarized (or militant) aristocracy that sees itself as uniquely privileged, the “best and the brightest,” working to keep us safe from the devil of the day.  To question the system and privileges of the powerful is to risk being seen as an apostate.

But the Catholic Church is, at least in theory, dedicated to the cause of peace (though historically sometimes at the point of a sword).  The U.S. National Security State, despite (or rather because of) the evangelicals or true-believers in its midst, is dominated by a church militant and a church triumphant.  This is unsurprising.  Powerful militaries seek military solutions.  Defeats or stalemates like Iraq and Afghanistan are reinterpreted as triumphs (at least for the U.S. military).  If they defy reinterpretation, defeats can always be attributed to Judas-like figures within the body of the American politic, like the anti-war hippies of the Vietnam era (even if the latter looked more like Jesus than Lucifer).

The biggest problem is how the dominance of the National Security State weakens our democratic structures, including our right to privacy.  Consider the penetration and interception of all forms of electronic communication by the NSA and similar “intelligence” agencies.  Like the Catholic Church with its rite of confession, the NSA listens to our “sins” in the name of safeguarding us from harm.  In the bad old days, the Church used its rite of confession to gain access to the secrets of the powerful.  Leave it to the NSA to trump the Church by turning the whole world into a confessional booth.

Such a subversion of privacy doesn’t preserve democracy – it destroys it.  Like the Catholic Church of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the National Security State is choking on its own power and privileges, losing its sense of mission as it wallows in money and sanctimony.

Where is Martin Luther when you need him?  For like the Catholic Church in the 16th century, the U.S. National Security State needs a serious reformation.

Update (1/7): At TomDispatch.com, Nick Turse has a great article today on the growing reach and power of Special Operations Command (SOCOM) within the U.S. military.  It’s a powerful coda to Engelhardt’s article.  Extending the Catholic Church analogy, SOCOM in the U.S. military today is much like the Jesuit Order of the Catholic Church — missionaries of the American military across the world.  And like the Jesuits they see themselves as an elite, as true believers, as holy warriors deserving of secrecy and privilege and power.

As such, they believe they should not be accountable to the laity — meaning us.  Neither do they believe they are accountable to our legal representatives in Congress.  They answer to their Loyola (Admiral McRaven) and ultimately to the Pope (whoever the commander in chief happens to be, as long as he supports them).

The National Security State has truly become the new national religion of America.  We worship at its Pentagon of Power, its huge NSA facilities.  They are America’s true national cathedrals.

Washington Priorities Exposed

BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A DIME DVD
W.J. Astore

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.

Does Scrooge Reign in the USA Today?

Alastair Sim as Scrooge
Alastair Sim as Scrooge

W.J. Astore

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.

The Sandy Hook Martyrs — One Year Later

Memorial to the innocents killed at Sandy Hook elementary. Photo by author.
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 know that they are safe.

We need to know because the agony of more lost innocents is too much to bear.

W.J. Astore

STEM Education Is Not Enough

Sir Peter Medawar
Sir Peter Medawar

W.J. Astore

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.

Everything is a Commodity

rainbow pie

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
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.

W.J. Astore

The Education Business: Money, Money, Money (Updated)

W.J. Astore

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!
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.

On Black Friday, the Hologram Is Revealed

Today's Teresas are driven to ecstasy by commodities
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!

And that’s the true blackness of Black Friday.

Thanksgiving Day, November 26th, 1936

My Dad's Menu from Thanksgiving, 1936
My Dad’s Menu from Thanksgiving, 1936

W.J. Astore

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)
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.

Thanks, Dad.