Madam, – Dr Gareth P Keeley’s letter (August 17th) did more to highlight the utter intellectual poverty and ignorance of climate change “sceptics” than any action by what he refers to as the “climate change lobby” could hope.
First, he makes the classic argument that an unusual number of cold snaps and record snowfalls constitute “evidence” that global warming is a sham.
Of course if he was actually familiar with climatological science, he’d know that global warming causes an increase in extreme weather events – whether heat waves, cold snaps or hurricanes – which is exactly what we’re seeing now.(The country of Peru is experiencing unusually low temperatures. The city of Arequipa in the Andes mountains enduring a severe low of -17 C the cold is too much for the region's Alpaca herds. Pregnant Alpacas are losing their babies and young Alpacas are dying. Some 10 per cent of the regions 40,000 Alpacas are affected.- CNN website).
An unusually cold winter in Texas coupled with an unusually hot summer in Russia is evidence for not against climate change.
As to China and India being less “obsequious to the bullying tactics of global warming alarmists”. Here he is simply wrong. The Chinese government and military have publicly asserted that climate change poses a direct threat to China’s long-term strategic interests. China currently has the largest (and fastest-growing) “green” technology sector in the world, spurred on by government investment and other incentives, as well as foreign direct investment.
By contrast the most recent US failure to pass solid climate legislation has seen Deutsche Bank and other investors abandon billions of dollars worth of planned investment in “green” jobs and infrastructure in the US in favour of projects in India, China and Europe.
A PLANNING application for the new national children’s hospital on the Mater site in central Dublin is to be lodged later this month.The development team behind the new hospital confirmed yesterday that it was pushing forward with the project, despite renewed criticism in recent weeks from retired heart surgeon Maurice Neligan and other leading doctors.A spokesman for the National Paediatric Hospital Board said a detailed planning application for the project would be lodged in the week beginning August 16th, at which time detailed information on the plans would be provided.The Department of Health said the project was “advancing to schedule” under the direction of the hospital board.A detailed design brief had been finalised and the board was preparing to submit planning documents.August 2010LETTERS TO IRISH TIMES 19.AUG.2010Madam, – I am a Mater-trained doctor, currently practising as an orthopaedic surgeon in Waterford Regional and Kilcreene Orthopaedic hospitals. As a trainee, I made many trips to Eccles Street, negotiating the traffic and parking problems. As a consultant surgeon, I frequently refer children to Dublin for specialised paediatric care. For parents, the thought of the impending trip to Dublin, compounds the anxiety already felt regarding their sick child. I am also the father of a 10-year-old girl, diagnosed with cancer three years ago. Hence, I have made many trips to Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Crumlin, to witness firsthand what it is like to sit “on the other side of the fence”, so to speak.
My overwhelming concern regarding the location of the proposed hospital relates to access for patients and parents. How could one possibly be expected to use public transport with one’s weak, nauseated child?
In fact, avoidance of the public is recommended in light of the infection risk for the immuno-suppressed child on treatment. Parents, therefore, will be forced to negotiate their way through the traffic of Dublin, trying to find this city-centre site. I can only image the distress and anxiety that will be inflicted unnecessarily on patients and parents.
I think it is an absolute disgrace that the Mater site is even being considered as the location of the proposed hospital. Doctors and parents need to insist that our elected politicians reverse this decision immediately. – Yours, etc,
IAN PETER KELLY,
Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon,
Waterford Regional Hospital
Kilcreene Orthopaedic Hospital,
Kilkenny.
Madam, – We, the undersigned, like Maurice Neligan (HEALTHplus, July 27th) have had the privilege of spending most of our professional lives caring for sick children. Between us we have worked in all three Dublin children’s and maternity hospitals, in Irish regional and county hospitals and in many leading paediatric hospitals in North America, Australia and the UK.
We, like him, believe that placing the national paediatric hospital on the geographically constrained Mater site in Dublin’s city centre is not in the best interest of the sick children of Ireland. – Yours, etc,
Dr FIN BREATNACH, paediatric oncologist, Prof KARINA BUTLER, infectious diseases paediatrician, Dr GERRY CANNY, respiratory paediatrician. Dr BILL CASEY, paediatric anaesthetist, Dr COLETTE CORCORAN, public health medicine, Mr FRANK DOWLING, spinal and orthopaedic surgeon, Dr DESMOND DUFF, paediatric cardiologist, Prof RAYMOND FITZGERALD, paediatric surgeon, Mr ESMOND FOGARTY, orthopaedic surgeon, Prof EDWARD GUINEY, paediatric surgeon, Dr SINEAD HARTE, paediatric anaesthetist, Dr ROISIN HAYES, paediatric radiologist, Dr ROISIN HEALY, paediatric emergency medicine, Dr JERRY KELLEHER, paediatric radiologist, Dr PEADAR MACMANAIS, ophthalmologist, Mr ANDREW MAGUIRE, ENT surgeon, Mr DAVID MOORE, orthopaedic surgeon, Mr JACQUES NOEL, orthopaedic surgeon, Dr PAMELA O’CONNOR, paediatrician and neonatologist, Prof BARRY O’DONNELL, paediatric surgeon, past president RCSI, Prof NIALL O’DONOHUE, FTCD, emeritus professor of paediatrics, TCD, Dr EITHNE PHELAN, paediatric radiologist, Mr FERGAL QUINN, paediatric surgeon, Dr MARY WALDRON, paediatric nephrologist.
JOE BAGEANT author of Deer Hunting with Jesus and soon to be released Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir
Hope is for little kids and tooth fairiesPictures by Andrew L Paciorek
Preliminary letter to Joe from his friend BrentB:
Reading you is like drinking those bottles full of clear liquids the night before a colonoscopy. The next day I survive the test and am told that I do not have colon cancer -- yet. Still, I am getting the test in spite of the fact that I know that my pack a day cigarette habit coupled with 12 fancy beers a day is probably gonna kill me first. I've been working for a very large corporation for the last 20 years as a print advertising designer. I am on the Endangered Species list at 58. I have been playing the consumer game for the past 45 years. I've known that the whole thing was a lie since I was 13 -- before that I lived in a world that was so monochromatic that when I heard the Beatles I thought that heaven had come to earth.
I wanted to tell you my whole story, but have decided to spare you that. I have one simple question: seeing what you see, knowing what you know, what are your recommendations for how to proceed? Because I am seeing that just drinking hard enough to not think about it is no way to live. Or is it? When the best hopes being offered are simply the offerings of another corporate lackey, how does one live?
Do trips to Mexico help?
I realize as I write this that you are not pretending to be a self-help guru for baby boomers with a guilt complex. Still, I cannot help but hope that you have some thoughts for a one-time proud hippie (I marched against the war in Vietnam in Detroit in 1968 and again against the war in Iraq in 2003) who longs to extricate himself from the accumulated bullshit of years of consumerism.
I write letters to congressmen and senators and get form letter responses -- personalized, no less. So I would like you to write me back, tell me you read what I wrote, that you got this e-mail. That's all. I will be satisfied.
Yours in hopelessness,
Brad
------
Brad,
Yeah, we are on the endangered species list all right. But the rest of America, and maybe even mankind, is not far behind. Not that it's any consolation, of course. I have to smile at your mention of the Beatles being like heaven coming to earth. Me too!
In reply to your query, all I can do is tell you my experience. I don't know shit really. Certainly not the answers to other people's questions, especially those of such a serious nature. However, I do know my own experience. Sort of. So all I can do is share that.
You ask if "trips to Mexico help?" Because Mexico is my home for the time being, (I spend most of my time here now, and have obtained legal residency status) and only go back to the US when necessary, I'm not sure if "trip" is the right word. I rather feel that the world is my home now. Consequently, I do not know if "help" is the right word either. I no longer have any geographical goals, per se, other than I seem to be a better person in some locales than in others. I hope I am not running, because at this age running, physically or metaphorically, takes too much effort. I'd rather walk, with periodic rest stops -- such as this one in Mexico.
It took me over fifty years to figure out there is no running away, or finding some perfect life. We just exchange one set of problems for another. I ran away to the US Navy to escape a small redneck town. I ran away to the West Coast to become a hippie. I ran to homestead in Idaho on an Indian reservation, I later ran back into the straight world, mostly out of fear for financial security. And when it became personally undeniable that America had become a lonely totalistic empire, whose heart is a bank vault, and that I would not survive its enforced loneliness, masked by gunpoint cheer and state authorized messages of "hope," and loudspeakers above the workhouse extolling the "work ethic," well, it was either be somewhere else or die inside. Get a different set of problems. Some nights even sickness or hunger looked acceptable, compared to the screaming, yet silent anxiety I was experiencing. I swear it was fucking unbearable. By 2005, I was in Central America for I did not know how long.
Personally, I found that the problems I encountered every day in places like Belize (and now Mexico) somehow suited my own innate sensibilities better. I had no expectations really. Which is good because both paces would have been extremely disappointing if I had. Mainly I just wanted to give up any "advantage" I supposedly had as a citizen of the "greatest nation on earth," which was, as I said, quite literally, killing me, much as it seems to be killing you.
Beyond that, I wanted to spend the remaining 10 or 15 percent of my life doing stuff with human beings, face-to-face, asshole to belly button -- babies being born, people dying, getting drunk, worshiping their gods, experiencing joy. And I wanted to do so without any mediation by soul killing American corporate culture. I did not want "security" as Americans and Europeans perceive it, and still don't. The only way to do that is to intentionally stay pretty broke. Money is a rigged game -- you cannot win by trying to buy security. Oh, you can have the illusion of it, but the price is your soul. The entire world architecture of money, beyond basic sustenance, is a horribly corrupted -- especially since the advent of the "virtual world economy," a paper and digital racket that sucks away the people's hard earned wealth before they ever see it.
Well, I say, fuck their offerings. And screw childish "hope." Hope is for little kids and tooth fairies. The world we awaken to each morning is the only real thing there is. And if we are spiritually, morally and philosophically intact, and humble enough to feel it and love it each day, we don't need to hope some unseen force or bunch of politicos, or an "economy" or so-called leaders are gonna make it better for us. The orchids outside my doorway are blooming and my wife still loves me after all these years. A real gypsy taught me a song yesterday and Easter is in the air in Mexico. I guess that as a burned out old hippie and a writer, I cannot imagine anything else to hope for.
I truly do understand what you are saying about consumerism. I lived it too. I still have a house full of stuff in Virginia that is the biggest bane on my life. Tons of stuff -- old paintings, family documents, guitars, stuff my kids made while growing up, art and artifacts gathered from around the world in the course of a life, file cabinets full of articles I wrote for magazines and newspapers over the past 40 years. My wife and I are paralyzed over what to do with the stuff. She retires in a year or so and so still lives up there in the middle of it all. When I am there, we sip wine and savor the memories connected with acquiring those things together, the 18th Century drawings we bought together at Covent Garden in London, the love we felt in Venice. And when I am in Mexico, I understand that the freedom of my austere life here is of greater value than any of those things. Which does not keep me from missing them from time to time. But in my heart I know that, for the most part, I have beaten American consumerism (though I'll always be a sucker for good imported booze). The other thing I know for sure is that the only way for a man to "extricate himself from the accumulated bullshit" is to extricate himself. Walk away. There is no plan one can make to do so while living in the belly of the beast. The beast of American capitalism will not let you, but will encourage the belief that you can. As my webmaster Ken, who left America over a decade ago say, "The only way to do it is to just get up and do it."
Also, I believe it can still be done while remaining in America, once one rises above the "learned helplessness" that comes with being a captive of the empire. But it still entails giving up most of what you know, and more importantly, what the society around you believes is reality. It means becoming a renunciate. Giving up everything in a society that believes the very things that are destroying it are necessities. No car, no processed foods, no cell phone, few clothes, little or no technology, no media entertainments, refusal to own investments, no more than five or six hundred square feet of living space, dedicated hours each day for reflection on the little things one does to maintain one's self, such as cooking or bathing, or gardening -- but especially renunciation of technology. Technology not only carries the disease, but is its most virulent aberrator of human consciousness. In fact, even at its best, it colonizes and mutates human consciousness, just as this laptop stands between you and me, distorting our communication as much as it facilitates it. Is an exchange of digital packets between two human beings, each isolated at the end of a cybernetic node, really human communication? Of course not. (Yes, I know how much shit I'm going to get for that statement.)
Anyway, I try to limit myself to owning only one piece of high technology -- this laptop. I don't own a camera phone, or a cell phone (much to the ire of publishers, friends and some family members). To my shame, I do have a television in my little casita. I missed my wife so much at first, that I bought it just so I'd have distraction in the lonely evenings, which of course, did not work. It was a stupid American thing, an ignorant knee-jerk consumer reflex, as if the voice of Larry King were going to substitute for the words "I love you" when night falls. I'm learning all the time to beware of what is available around us.
Regarding writing congressmen, I never bother. It's just part maintaining the appearance of democracy. Everybody writes their congressmen on both sides of an intractable, polarized and deadlocked system dedicated to preserving iron fisted capitalism, no matter what happens. No matter how the vote on a piece of legislation goes down. I have absolutely no faith in the American political system. Or ultimately, in any political system for that matter. Ain't no saviors of the people up there on Capitol Hill. Just powerful men and women who don't have a clue but have plenty of ambition and ego and avenues to feed both -- with a few exceptions like Dennis Kucinich.
I am convinced we all have to find our own way, and find it alone, most likely at great cost -- that great cost being the loss of all that we thought we knew about the world. I am coming to understand that as Americans, we were born into a powerfully induced mass illusion. An infantile consciousness of "I-want-I want," which drives the machinery of war, waste and profits, and which colonizes our minds and souls from birth like a progressive disease. I say "coming to understand," because, as an American I can never truly understand. My consciousness and neurosystem are far too mutated to ever understand. But I find great relief in the effort.
And also pain. Some nights I drink, and cry inside for both the world as I have known it -- youth tasted so good -- and for the kingdom of mankind that might have been, but really never could have been. Because the kingdom is truly within each of us, never in the clamorous throng.
But in the morning the roosters crow, and wood smoke stirs in the air, and this village wakes up, and does all those ancient things decent people do in so much of the rest of the world. Old women sweep the street in front of their doorways, men uncomplainingly go in search of a day's labor, and young mothers nurse babies in the courtyards, full knowing that what they see around them is all there will ever be for them, and that the Virgin of Guadeloupe blesses each morning. Just as their mothers and grandmothers knew it. Already they are tired for the world. But not joyless.
And neither am I.
Lately, I've had a spate of emails saying how bleak and hopeless some of my writing has become, in the estimation of many readers. This comes not so much as criticism, but as observation. I am no longer taken aback by it. To me, it's simply a kind of reporting on the world as best I can.
Others ask me the best way to escape America to Belize or Mexico. How to plan a breakout from the empire to these places as I have described them. Once in a while I reply, even though I know better. Each person's conditioning and perceptions are different. And surely their experience would be different, were they to do what I have done. That's a given. In the end, all I can tell you is that you will have to act according to your own inner lights then be willing to live with the results. And even then, I'm not sure that's true. But it seems true at this day and hour, in this little stone courtyard on a hillside under a spring sky.
Podemos ver el mundo con ojos de fría y un corazón caliente.
In art and labor,
Joe
Understanding America's Class SystemHonk If You Love CaviarBy Joe Bageant
August 18, 2010 How about them political elites, huh? Five million bucks for Chelsea Clinton's wedding, 15K just to rent the air-conditioned shitters -- huge chrome and glass babies with hot water and everything. No gas masks and waxy little squares of toilet paper for those guys.
Yes, it looks big time from the cheap seats. But the truth is that when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
Moneywise, Washington's political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class. This gives the political class something to aim for. To that end, they have adopted the ruling elite's behaviors, tastes and lifestyles, with an eye on becoming members. Moreover, it is a molting process that begins with the right university and connections, and culminates in flying off to Washington with the rest of your generation's most privileged and ambitious young moths.
They make enough dough to at least fake it until they make it. Fifty-one of the 100 members of the US Senate are at the very least millionaires -- probably more than that, since multi-million million dollar residences and estates are exempt from the official tally. For instance in the House, Nancy Pelosi's net worth is either $13 million, or $92 million, depending upon who is counting. Why they bother to shave such large numbers is a mystery. Thirteen million, ninety two million, the difference is not gonna change our opinion of Nancy. Our opinion being that the broad is loaded. More than loaded. The comparatively poor members of Congress, like Barney Frank, are near millionaires. His publicly declared net worth is $976,000. For the life of me, I cannot see how they get by.
Along with the habits, the political class adopts the ruling class's social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken. OK, so it may be very hard to disprove that at the moment, but we must maintain at least some egalitarian semblance here. Anyway, as a group, the political elites think, look and act alike, and act toward their own interests. That makes them a class.
Screw the proles, just count the money
This political class stands between all of us down here and the tiny minority in the ruling class waaaaaay up there, wherever the hell up there is. No use to squint. You can't see it from where we are. That comes in mighty handy in denying the existence of a ruling class.
On the other hand, you do not need to see an egg-sucking dog in action to know what to expect -- or not to expect. The track record of the political class is an open book. As the layer of millionaires buffering the elites who pay for their campaigns, they've done their jobs. They approved the Bush administration's massive tax cut for the rich. They dropped the per-child tax credit for families with incomes less than $20,000. They "reformed" prescription drugs right out of Medicare. They reformed health care into hundreds of billions of increased profits for the insurance industry.
However, the American political class' finest moment came in September 2008 when the financial greed machinery of American investment houses went tits up. The Republican and Democratic parties, major corporations, and manufacturers of US opinion came together in one of the greater bipartisan efforts in modern US history. There was nothing to do, they all agreed, but buy up $700 billion in "toxic asset" investments. "Otherwise," they prophesied, the world would end. Meaning that the ongoing national Ponzi scheme they have always sold to the American people as the US economy, would finally crash.
And in case there were any skeptics out there among the unwashed, the public was reminded just how much they stood to lose -- which was everything. Deep in the boiler room, the Goldman Sachs black bag crew had wired up the "economy" with enough explosive "financial instruments" to take out every working mook's home, or retirement savings, which the medical industry was already sucking up at an alarming rate. Something had to be done before the health care industry got it all, and repo the family ride.
Yessiree, it was gonna be a "systemic collapse," by god, and if you needed proof, just look at the way both George Bush and Barack Obama agreed that some American corporations were too big to let sink, therefore it was time for the public to start bailing out the boat. Meanwhile, the royal economists were unanimous in that this "rescue" was going to require another 10 trillion bucks somewhere down the pike -- a very short pike. So it must all be damned serious and we gotta do this thing. Right folks?
In an unusual display of common sense, the American public said "Bullshit," by margins of three or four to one, depending upon region. That did not bother political and economic elites much. What the fuck do the proles know anyway?
Then, in midstream, the political and economic owning classes switched horses, after realizing there was more gravy for the kingpins in buying up banks and big industries. It was unconstitutional, but what the hell, that's what Supreme Courts are for. The proles mumbled and peered into their TV sets for explanations that never came.
Of course, partisan opposition being what it is these days -- a blood-soaked ditch of snarling hyenas -- Obama's election meant the GOP needed to denounce the new Democratic president for display purposes. Or at least shit in the Oval Office, and then blame him. So most Republicans holding office in 2008 were forced to argue publicly against "troubled asset relief," "stimulus packages," and the huge bailouts. Besides, somebody had to unfurl the motley banner of a "self balancing free market," at least widely enough for the GOP to hide behind in the back room where the real deals are always cut. The place where the weapons companies propose systems, using congressional representatives and generals as sales reps. Where it is understood that, as John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out near the end of his life, when it was safe to tell the truth, "stockholders are just appendages, someone to hold the bag for the corporations, and stocks are just gambling chips for hedge funds and Wall Street," and for the suckers who think they can actually outwit High Frequency Trading -- a.k.a. High Speed Fraud. (Thanks to reader Brent B. for sending me that one).
Ah, but I have digressed. What else is new? The main thing is that the smoke has now cleared, the money is in ruling class coffers, and a spin the bottle game for a few prosecutions is underway to entertain the crowd for the next few years. Public burnings in the national town square of media always draw a crowd.
Bwaaaaaa! Obama won't let us play
Fortunately, for both parties, there is no such thing as an American political memory. That Lindsay Lohan dated fellow rehab client, snowboarder Riley Giles, yes, that can be remembered. That the Republicans signed off on similar, if smaller giveaways under Pappy Bush and Clinton -- well, that may as well be ancient Egyptian history. So is the fact that the both parties forced banks to make high rate home loans to people who people who did not qualify, because the inflated home values during the expanding bubble would make billions for big investors who knew when to get out. Should they stay too long at the fair and go bust, they would set up the howl of "too big to fail." The administration, which has no more a clue to what makes the economy tick, would then rush them pallets of money. That's what a banker calls a win-win situation: when the banker holds both ends of a winning deal.
Meanwhile, elite Republicans still needed a beef with the new black guy on the block who had just kicked their ass and was still very popular at the time. The best they could come up with on the bailouts was that they had been allowed too little input. "Obama won't let us play with him. Bwaaaaaa!" A smokescreen of course, since he was doing exactly what they would have done, handing Republican bankers every bit of money the people had and a helluva lot they didn't have, but could make payments on for the next, oh, 100 years or until the final miserable, smoking collapse, whichever comes first.
In the end though, nobody in Washington disputed the ruling class's right to dictate policy. After all, the political class agreed with the ruling class's major premise: The public does not know shit, never has, never will. Also that it is best not to get the public too riled up, not because the public has any power (power is money in America and the elites have it all now), but because elected officials would have to answer brainless questions from people such as Tea Partiers. Or Ron Paul cultists. Gawd!
Howard, won't you please come home
America has always had a ruling class, and it has always bullshitted the world that it doesn't. But at least the ruling class of the past was interesting and varied, because diverse sorts of Americans were getting rich.
You had Texas wildcatters in the "oil bidness." You had Southern cotton and tobacco aristocrats guzzling bourbon, fondling their stock portfolios and their black maids. You had industrialists and California and Florida real estate hotwires, Boston Brahmins and New York financiers. There was the bootlegginç g inside stock trader Joseph P. Kennedy, not to mention Prescott Bush moving financial assets around for the Nazis during WW II. They were products of varied educations, or in some cases, no education. They came from many regions, back when America still had distinct cultural regions, before it was completely homogenized and stratified for maximum capitalist efficiency.
Whatever they may have been, they were seldom dull. I would love to have known Howard Hughes, a man who could direct a film, and build the largest aircraft ever built, the 200-ton, all-wood Spruce Goose, not to mention the busty Jane Russell's underwire bra. Stop and consider Bill Gates and the other colorless puds of today. Almost makes you miss the robber barons.
Think Tony Hayward gives a shit?
You hear it all the time these days: The top one percent of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 45% of the rest of Americans combined.
I have seldom met an American who thought this is a good thing, and seldom met one who understood how the ruling class got so rich. Simply put, it was through constant cultivation of bigger and more labyrinthine government, creating legal and technical complexities to sluice money nationally and globally in their direction, and to cover their asses in the process. The results are such things as 3,000 page health care bills (defining which corporate elites get which parts of the cake), or the 2,000-page NAFTA and its 9,000 tariff product codes.
Once the public was buried in such a maelstrom of legal paperwork, computer transactions, modeling, etc., it was easy to argue that the world had become so complex that the skills and brains to operate it were extremely rare and those who had them were fucking geniuses. These are people who dwell in such airy realms that we should pay them vast amounts of money and never question their decisions. That's how we got such oblivious duds as Timothy Geithner (who never held a nongovernment related job in his life) running the Treasury, and tens of thousands of the Empire's pud whackers, ranging from petty legal commissars, on up to the Alan Greenspans of this world -- a bumbling arrogant old fart who never had a clue but understood the rules: Look enigmatic and blow whichever administration is in power.
In fact, capitalist natural selection for mediocrity is how British Petroleum got Tony Hayward, who was unfortunate enough to be tossed out of the boat onto the media beaches of public awareness in his briefs. If ever there was a specimen of the slimy corporate salamander, we saw it in sniveling nakedness right there. Reportedly, the salamander will receive $18 million, plus annual pension payments totaling $1 million per year, the possible forfeiture of which makes good news copy to cover BP's ongoing negligence, theft and intimidation. So the public howls and throws eggs at the straw man, who has been making $1.6 million a year and is now sitting on his yacht "trying to get his life back." Does anybody really believe Tony Hayward gives a shit? Oh, there may be some news of BP's demise, its "absorption" by another corporation or something similar to Enron, sold off piecemeal to other massive corporations at a bargain prices, while everyone was watching the saga of the mediocre white collar criminal, Ken Lay. You'd think we'd learn. Corporations do not go away; they just morph along, sucking up generation after generation's money.
The rabble at the gates
You never hear them say it, but neo-conservatives understand that they have a mean streak down inside. They also know if they want to share in the national plunder, they must win hearts and minds. They must look pious and sound right while lying through their teeth and picking our pockets. In other words, they have an astute grasp of American politics and business -- which are the same thing, of course.
Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation's saviors -- morally and intellectually right in all things. As proof, they read more and, allegedly, are more open minded than most conservatives, except when it comes to their daughter dating a redneck named Ernest who lives in a trailer court behind the strip mall. They are certainly among the educated class in a country known for its lousy schools and a dull, sated and unquestioning public. Education and access to education are now our fundamental class delineators. Higher education is now for the privileged. And that privilege, almost regardless of profession or career, is a future that depends on government. Liberal or conservative, it matters little. In fact, this privileged class votes Democratic more predictably than the working class, Hispanics or Blacks.
So when educated liberals look up from their copy of The Nation or the Jon Stewart show, they behold a chilling sight: Beefy mobs waving teabags and demanding tax cuts to help pay for new schools and bridges, Sarah Palin emerging from the ashes of the McCain campaign to become the high priestess of the uncurried tribes, with a Mormon named Glenn Beck exhorting millions of fundamentalists to seize the country. They feel that something has gone terribly wrong with America.
Immediately they conclude that it is the American people's fault through their backwardness, incomprehension and misdirected anger, and that maybe it serves them right for not rallying behind the flying progressive standard. (I've been plenty guilty of this myself over the years, and am now a recovering American liberal, well on my way not to conservatism, but toward a strumpetocracy, government by strumpets. It's a real word, Google it.) Not that the progressive flag was actually flying; American liberals threw down their standard 40 years ago in the rush for comfortable technical, teaching and administrative jobs in government, universities and non-profits. "Ah yes," they wailed, the people have let us down. They are absolutely disgusting!" liberals agreed. And they still agree. Read the comments on Huffington Post or Daily Kos.
Or look at the arrogance of Barack Obama's characterization of American heartlanders "clinging to God and guns." Which we do. However, implicit in his statement was that both God and guns are indicators of an ignorant loser class. When opponents scalded him for his remarks, he justified them by pointing out he had said, "what everybody knows is true." Meaning everybody in his class, the educated liberal class. Hard to believe their predecessors were the point men and women for the Scopes trial, the eight-hour day, unions, anti-McCarthyism, Cesar Chavez, Negro civil rights.
Big dogs eat first
The ruling elite stays in power through the patronage both parties offer their supporters. They hang onto or follow their party's leaders much the same as remoras cling to big sharks, and pilot fish accompany sharks, happy to get the leftovers. Both parties provide their activists and followers with livelihoods, through programs or legislation that just happen to make the rich richer.
One good example is the psychologists, doctors and social workers who initiate the process of getting half the country on anti-depressants or mood stabilizers, a term that should scare the hell out of anyone who grasps the concept of the corporate state. They get their jobs through government funding, or research that defines behaviors as illnesses requiring powerful psychoactive drugs.
One new favorite is ODD, oppositional defiant disorder, in which children act like -- surprise, surprise -- the young assholes that children can sometimes be. Teenage rebellion becomes a psychological disorder. Diagnostic manual symptoms include "often argues with adults," an unheard of behavior of teenagers calling for antipsychotics such as Risperidone. Side effects of Risperidone include a mild speed like buzz, a super erection lasting hours, lactation and suicidal tendencies. Phew!
Big Pharma makes billions more in the name of alleviating the people's suffering. Obviously many millions are indeed suffering, but if that is the case, then American society is suffering. Never will it be asked publicly just what psychic anguish our society is suffering from. Because the answer is capitalist industrial commodity disease, and the psychic pathology of Americaness. That would mean consulting Mr. Marx, who predicted much of it, or Arthur Barsky, who brought the definition up to date.
For Americans, self-examination is not just rare, it is nonexistent, which one source of our pathology. Missing from our national character is love of the common good, and our collective civic responsibility toward one another. But if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Better to medicate the entire nation. To do that, you need big government.
In the process, the already rich get richer and the rest of the middle class commissariat becomes more dependent upon the rich. As conservative editor and writer Angelo M. Codevilla, pointed out in a July 2010 article: "By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty." A third is more than enough to tip the scales at their will.
Keep ‘em dazzled with foot work
Meanwhile, there are the rest of us. That great throng of squawking, family loving folks, professionals and peasants alike, libertarians, patriots, people who worship god and those who loath religion -- people who still believe that hard work is the road to success despite the evidence, people who know differently because they sell used cars or work for the US Post Office -- citizens who rightfully suspect that government taxes merely feed the beast, or who believe, again rightly, that no politician truly represents their interests, and that the government is now in the business of social engineering for economic purposes. Fundamentalist Christians, gays, small businessmen, Hispanic Americans, organic farmers, pro-lifers and abortion supporters, union workers in the North and Southern anti-unionists, school teachers and stump preachers -- we all feel threatened by our government.
At the same time, in order to keep revolution at bay, and the military in cannon fodder and defense industry in contracts, we have been heavily indoctrinated to believe America leads the world in all things, and that the rest of mankind lives less prosperous, less free lives, coveting our "lifestyle." In short, they are lesser people.
Still though, we have in common that none of us like the idea of a ruling class. We did not from the very beginning. Yet, we no longer take effective action, because it has become impossible to identify what we might do to change anything. Instead, we react to events. That is what the ruling class wants, because if we are reactive, then outcomes can be controlled by controlling the stimuli. Keep 'em dazzled with foot work. So the stimuli keep coming at us faster than we can think. And they are presented as fate, or the result of "fast changing world events," or a banking collapse no one could have predicted -- things to which we must respond immediately. Most of us just give up. Which again, is what the ruling class wants us to do -- become a uniformly pliant mass.
Because the revolutionary destruction of the current economic system, bad as it is, would crash the country's economy even more quickly than the current process of theft, we are not likely to see an outright revolution that overthrows the ruling class. Look at the sorry assed "Tea Party Revolution," which will have to be allied with the GOP (which its backstage leadership has been anyway) in 2012 if it wants to be even a small factor. Media noise about the Tea Party doth not a revolution make, and it certainly does not overthrow the ruling class, who do not mind the wrath of the rabble, so long as it does not get in the way of the money.
And besides, the ruling class holds all the money, not to mention the media that informs the populace as to what is going on in our country. It controls our health care, our banking and retirement funds. It controls our education or lack of education, and it controls the price, quantity and quality of the food we eat. It controls the quality of the air we breathe, and soon, through pollution credits, even the price they will pay for that air. Most importantly, it holds concentrated legal and governmental authority, not to mention the machinery of both parties to grant itself more authority.
In the face of all this stands a very diverse public, which regardless of what some might claim behind a few beers, is not about to take up arms or use force to unseat the ruling class. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don't take such risks. That's not gutlessness. It's common sense.
Therefore, you are left with a rigged game called legislative action. This is an invisible power process, masked by another process called public relations strategy, which feeds it into yet another process called media, that makes "news decisions," as to what you need to hear or see. And there's plenty you don't need to hear. For instance, NPR, the New York Times and thousands of other outlets refuse to use the word torture to describe waterboarding, preferring instead "aggressive interrogation methods," unencumbered interrogation, free interrogation, or similar euphemisms. NPR's justification for sugarcoating US torture is, ""the word torture is loaded with political and social implications."
Ya think?
Truth is a hard road to travel
After decades of hyper-militant consumerism and its attending alienation, and a national consciousness spun from pure capitalist bullshit and mirrors, it is testimony to the American people that they can still see to piss straight, much less recognize any sort of truth whatsoever. Yet, a portion of Americans are beginning to grasp the truth about what has happened to their country -- that it has been bought and paid for by an elite class in a nation that is supposed to be classless. They are beginning to realize that, when it comes to actually governing our country, we are powerless as individuals -- even members of the political class -- and serve the overall will of its true owners. It's been that way so long we've become conditioned to accept it as a natural state, something we cannot change, and do not even know how to question, because, like the atmosphere, it's just there.
The higher truth is something we recognize when we encounter it. We may not have the right words, or all the facts, but we can feel it in our bones. Intuition is the first glimmer in the distance. It goes unsaid that we always have the choice of not looking in truth's direction, or not looking for it at all. Seldom is it a pleasant sight, which is the chief sign that it is truth. Even the best of it arrives to the sound of ominous bells.
I think about that young reader, Brent B., who takes time to email me now and then. Today he wrote, summarizing the only thing of which I am certain:
It's a hard thing to know the truth in this world, it's like something inside of you dies, but sometimes you still have to know it.
Joe Bageant is the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. His newest book, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, deals with America's permanent white underclass, and how it was intentionally created. To be released in September in Australia and October in the United Kingdom.Rainbow Pie is available for preorder from
Amazon-UK and Amazon-Canada. In Australia, the book can be pre-ordered at
Scribe Publications.
"The Millionaire's Music is Pleasant Though he Plays on a Jawbone" Breughel
