Let’s face it. Most of the Islamic world is not interested in democracy. The Muslims interested in colonizing Ground Zero with an extravagant mosque are apparently interested in the kind of “useful” democracy that gets them what they think their money can buy.
At least they are not interested in the kind of democracy I and Jefferson are interested in.
To follow up on the Bloombergian assault on authentic, organic, peoples’ democracy, we must respond to this billionaire plutocrats’ recent ass-kissing event at the annual Ramadan Iftar dinner at the Gracie Mansion residence.
Bloomberg pontificated, as reported by Huffington Post:
“But if we say that a mosque and community center should not be built near the perimeter of the World Trade Center site, we would compromise our commitment to fighting terror with freedom.
We would undercut the values and principles that so many heroes died protecting. We would feed the false impressions that some Americans have about Muslims. We would send a signal around the world that Muslim Americans may be equal in the eyes of the law, but separate in the eyes of their countrymen. And we would hand a valuable propaganda tool to terrorist recruiters, who spread the fallacy that America is at war with Islam.
Islam did not attack the World Trade Center -- Al-Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American. Today we are not at war with Islam -- we are at war with Al-Qaeda and other extremists who hate freedom.”
Bloomberg is so out of touch with reality he seems to have forgotten that our knee-jerk response was not to “fight terror with freedom” but with the US Marines invading Iraq. Oddly, now it seems all those soldiers who died in Iraq were fighting for religious freedom. It’s not now convenient to continue to claim they died fighting for democracy.
Now Bloomberg directly attacks his “countrymen.” Bloomberg ‘worries’ about whether terrorists think America is at war with Islam. He ought to be worrying how the American political class is at war with America. The billionaire crowd doesn’t have to worry about terrorists. They have to worry about both the middle class and the growing class of unemployed, demoralized and disenfranchised Americans.
Bloomberg and his ilk would worry about the the ‘third-worldization’ of America except that they really don’t care. Their interest is in destroying the working class, unions and any semblance of a people’s democracy. They want cheap labor, obsessive consumers and easily accessible cannon fodder for their wars of empire. Otherwise they just want you and me to shut up and get in line at the unemployment office. Or, see your local recruiter. I’m sure we will need more cannon fodder soon in Afghanistan.
Bloomberg fails to see that terrorists already do believe America is at war with Islam. We could turn the Whitehouse over to the Cordoba crowd and the terrorists would still believe we are at war with Islam.
The soldiers fallen in Iraq and now Afghanistan presumably were there primarily fighting for democracy. They weren’t fighting for religious freedom in those countries. As far as the Iraqi and Afghani peoples were concerned they had religious freedom. In fact they, for the most part, believe our kind of “democracy,” Liberal Democratic empire building “democracy,” is a threat to their religious-cultural practices. Except for the wealthy Muslims in America who are a part of the international New Political Class, American culture in general is considered a threat to Islamic culture.
Bloomberg seems to be accusing his fellow countrymen of hating freedom. He forgets that the democracy that these anti-Mosque protesters are practicing and defending is the basis for religious freedom.
Bloomberg continues:
"I know that many in this room are disturbed and dispirited by the debate. But it is worth keeping some perspective on the matter. The first colonial settlers came to these shores seeking religious liberty and the founding fathers wrote a constitution that guaranteed it. They made sure that in this country the government would not be permitted to choose between religions or favor one over another."
Why, pray tell,should the people “in this room [be] disturbed and dispirited by the debate.” I’ll tell you why? Because they, including Bloomberg, don’t get and don’t respect the virtual sacredness of democracy. That’s why democratic debate disturbs and dispirits them.
And by the way, the settlers that Bloomberg refers to ran from monarchy first of all. If they had had a democracy they could have practiced their religion. The founding fathers in a democratic process wrote the Constitution that “guarantees” religious freedom. But religious freedom doesn’t mean legal and political license to do whatever the hell you want to do and you think your wealth gives you the right to do.
I wonder if it’s true that as wealth and power increase, IQ and human empathy, not to mention compassion, decrease. Bloomberg is evidence for the thesis.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
A MOSQUE AT GROUND ZERO: Abstract universal rights and tolerance vs the core American value of a Community’s Right to Democratic Self-determination
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may have finally spoken a few words of wisdom. She asserted that “any controversy surrounding the proposed mosque at Ground Zero should be regarded as a local issue.”
If you follow my writings, it will be no surprise that I concur wholeheartedly.
This is not to deny that there are national feelings regarding the issue. Obviously, there are. These should be taken into serious consideration. But given that the usual suspects are espousing the primacy of “universal human rights,” religious rights and pure tolerance over and above the primacy of community, local autonomy and the right to democratic self-determination, I must agree with Pelosi. The decision is to do “what is right” with the interests of the community as primary. The integrity of community is the root and core of American spiritual identity.
For me, solving this issue is not simply a way to defuse the matter and prevent a national religious conflict as it is undoubtedly for Obama & Co. It is a way to assert the primacy of democracy. The present dilemma points to the impotence of big, centralized government and professional politicians in solving most of the nation’s ills. The country is too big and too diverse for the managerial Liberals to administer one-dimensional bureaucratic-legalistic solutions to issues of communal, ethical and political import.
The Liberal apologists for the mass nation-state, both Republican and Democrat needless to say, want to preserve the “unity” which is really based on a national somnambulism and false value system by asserting not only “rights” but also Law and the US Constitution as the criterion for a solution. Bloomberg and Obama “have both expressed support for the right of developers to construct the religious center near where the World Trade Center stood.” Note they said “developers” and not the putative Muslim religious “community.”
Obama said explicitly, "As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country."... "That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances…..This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable." Obama continued, as reported in the Huffington Post, that although Ground Zero is “hallowed ground” the “proper way to honor it was to apply American values and our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect towards those who are different from us – and that way of life, that quintessentially American creed, stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on that September morning, and who continue to plot against us today.”
Obama, however, diminishes the value of this "hallowed ground" by failing to see that Ground Zero is a sacred site, for Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular, whose spiritual value is at least as great as the Muslim interest in their Mosque. A looming Muslim mosque throws a shadow on that hallowed ground. If it were possible to always separate the authentic Muslims from the terrorists it might be different. If it were possible to take all people at their word, it might be different. But that is not the case in an age of absolute warfare in the form of terrorism.
Again according to Huffington Post reporting, and along lines similar to that taken by Obama, “NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent who has been a strong supporter of the mosque, welcomed Obama’s words as a “clarion defense of the freedom of religion.” Bloomberg had the temerity to reduce the outcry of the people to mere "popular sentiment." Such popular sentiment he forgets is the lifeblood of democracy. Sentiment is not mere 'sentimentality.' It is felt value of that which is sacred, constitutive of identity and worth dying for.
Entering the highly charged election-year debate, Obama surely knew that his words would not only make headlines but be heard by Muslims worldwide. The president has made it a point to reach out to the global Muslim community and ambassadors and officials from numerous Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.“ It seems Obama, coloring this controversy as an indisputable and incontrovertible 'religious freedom' issue, has failed to take into account the value of the democracy for which thousands of American soldiers are dying.
The gist of this pro-Mosque rhetoric is summed up by Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee when said that even if the mosque is built America will not come to an end. Dean called for a compromise without really being remotely clear what that looked like. Yet the clue to his real interest is in this “so what” attitude. Dean like Obama and the big business barons are interested only in “American unity” meaning American quietism, passive acceptance of centralist rule from Washington, the belief in the big stick of “universal human rights” and the resolutional power of “pure tolerance.” For what purpose: stable business conditions for globalist development.
The fact is, however, America is not unified, should not be unified and has not entered into a golden era of harmonious post-partisanism, any more than its revolutionary history has come to an end despite the ideological writings of such as Francis Fukuyama. The centralist Liberals(neo-Liberals,managerial Liberals) are interested in one thing primarily: American unity. But what this means is not any real diversified unity based especially in vibrant robust organic communities where true social individuality may be spawned. Obama’s abstract, lock-step “unity” is the homogenized unity of the mass nation-state where citizens are self-alienated individuals being stripped of cultural and political substance of their own making. They are being denied educationally the intellectual substance and voice which would render their opinions as important and incisive as those of Obama, Bloomberg , Dean and the rest of the super-community of New Class political professionals.
Washington's Liberal Democratic “freedom” is the kind that imposes any and every condition that furthers the economic and political interests of big money, governmental power and corporatism while strangling the freedom of democratic choice. Obama's freedom excludes the concrete freedom of cultural self-determination and democratic choice, that is, the political freedom which is the real “American Creed” and “core value” that make America what it is historically and in principal--not to mention theoretically from the standpoint of the “neo-populist Federalism” which I have been advocating in this blog journal.
Obama’s “unity” imposes an abstract equality upon our citizens and peoples in the interest of leveling out the real, concrete differences that are the source and cause of the populist politics that are surfacing as we speak and may yet help save our democracy, community and authentic federalism in America. Liberal Democratic equality really means that no one has the right to determine values that are primary, exclusive and self-determinative. Liberal equality legally forces the tolerance of any value or way of life no matter how much it compromises our way of life and no matter whether we democratically reject that way of life and other values.
Let the people of New York City decide this issue. And this does not mean, as Bloomberg pontificates, “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.” Bloomberg accentuates his position finally with: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.” However, if such religious freedom displaces and devalues democracy, then we are setting are self up for a kind of superiority of religious relativism which law and the military will not in the end be able to control.
Yes, so when, the ideology of constitutional or universal human “rights” and “freedom” doesn’t work, clobber the people with “laws” of private property, suspect ‘local laws and ordinances’ and bring in the bureaucrats, lawyers and local sell-outs who want to profit from the “Muslim community” trucking in millions of dollars to NYC.
No, there must be a referendum on this issue and let the people speak. Yes, let’s debate the issue and let’s let democracy prevail. But let the people’s democracy decide, not the bought-and-paid-for institutionalized government that serves the interests of big business. Let the people work out this dangerously sticky issue of cultural, religious and political conflict as truly American political practice would have it. If not, what’s next, sending it to the Supreme Court? That would be the most ridiculous of political fiascos, not to mention power plays that the bureaucratic centralist elitists might pull off since sending the Florida results of the Bush-Gore election to the Supreme Court for final “decision.”
No let’s not let the people speak. Let us unequivocally demand that the people speak, debate, think, criticize and act according to their popular will and purpose. Yes, the people could be wrong. But why should we think the professional politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats and technocrats cannot be wrong. This issue is not a matter of scientific, legal or managerial specialization that the “experts” can objectively resolve. This matter is precisely a question of values, feelings, purposes of community sanctity and real political/democratic choice. This matter is preeminently about the “sentiments” that Bloomberg derides and ridicules in his dry, smug dismissal of the voice and community integrity of the people.
Nationally, let us let all communities independently decide how they wish to live their lives, what values are paramount within different communities and who stands authentically for the future of the American polity. Let us not be trumped by legalist trickery, the power of globalist interests and manipulations of mass communications attempting to shape a “unified” consciousness of a slavishly “useful America,” an America whose citizens impotently succumb to group-think and are willing to accept the selling out of America, the fighting of meaningless wars and the demagoguery of a self-serving political class whose “values” are tucked away in secret Swiss bank accounts alongside their Muslim New Class compatriots.
If you follow my writings, it will be no surprise that I concur wholeheartedly.
This is not to deny that there are national feelings regarding the issue. Obviously, there are. These should be taken into serious consideration. But given that the usual suspects are espousing the primacy of “universal human rights,” religious rights and pure tolerance over and above the primacy of community, local autonomy and the right to democratic self-determination, I must agree with Pelosi. The decision is to do “what is right” with the interests of the community as primary. The integrity of community is the root and core of American spiritual identity.
For me, solving this issue is not simply a way to defuse the matter and prevent a national religious conflict as it is undoubtedly for Obama & Co. It is a way to assert the primacy of democracy. The present dilemma points to the impotence of big, centralized government and professional politicians in solving most of the nation’s ills. The country is too big and too diverse for the managerial Liberals to administer one-dimensional bureaucratic-legalistic solutions to issues of communal, ethical and political import.
The Liberal apologists for the mass nation-state, both Republican and Democrat needless to say, want to preserve the “unity” which is really based on a national somnambulism and false value system by asserting not only “rights” but also Law and the US Constitution as the criterion for a solution. Bloomberg and Obama “have both expressed support for the right of developers to construct the religious center near where the World Trade Center stood.” Note they said “developers” and not the putative Muslim religious “community.”
Obama said explicitly, "As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country."... "That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances…..This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable." Obama continued, as reported in the Huffington Post, that although Ground Zero is “hallowed ground” the “proper way to honor it was to apply American values and our capacity to show not merely tolerance, but respect towards those who are different from us – and that way of life, that quintessentially American creed, stands in stark contrast to the nihilism of those who attacked us on that September morning, and who continue to plot against us today.”
Obama, however, diminishes the value of this "hallowed ground" by failing to see that Ground Zero is a sacred site, for Americans in general and New Yorkers in particular, whose spiritual value is at least as great as the Muslim interest in their Mosque. A looming Muslim mosque throws a shadow on that hallowed ground. If it were possible to always separate the authentic Muslims from the terrorists it might be different. If it were possible to take all people at their word, it might be different. But that is not the case in an age of absolute warfare in the form of terrorism.
Again according to Huffington Post reporting, and along lines similar to that taken by Obama, “NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent who has been a strong supporter of the mosque, welcomed Obama’s words as a “clarion defense of the freedom of religion.” Bloomberg had the temerity to reduce the outcry of the people to mere "popular sentiment." Such popular sentiment he forgets is the lifeblood of democracy. Sentiment is not mere 'sentimentality.' It is felt value of that which is sacred, constitutive of identity and worth dying for.
Entering the highly charged election-year debate, Obama surely knew that his words would not only make headlines but be heard by Muslims worldwide. The president has made it a point to reach out to the global Muslim community and ambassadors and officials from numerous Muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.“ It seems Obama, coloring this controversy as an indisputable and incontrovertible 'religious freedom' issue, has failed to take into account the value of the democracy for which thousands of American soldiers are dying.
The gist of this pro-Mosque rhetoric is summed up by Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee when said that even if the mosque is built America will not come to an end. Dean called for a compromise without really being remotely clear what that looked like. Yet the clue to his real interest is in this “so what” attitude. Dean like Obama and the big business barons are interested only in “American unity” meaning American quietism, passive acceptance of centralist rule from Washington, the belief in the big stick of “universal human rights” and the resolutional power of “pure tolerance.” For what purpose: stable business conditions for globalist development.
The fact is, however, America is not unified, should not be unified and has not entered into a golden era of harmonious post-partisanism, any more than its revolutionary history has come to an end despite the ideological writings of such as Francis Fukuyama. The centralist Liberals(neo-Liberals,managerial Liberals) are interested in one thing primarily: American unity. But what this means is not any real diversified unity based especially in vibrant robust organic communities where true social individuality may be spawned. Obama’s abstract, lock-step “unity” is the homogenized unity of the mass nation-state where citizens are self-alienated individuals being stripped of cultural and political substance of their own making. They are being denied educationally the intellectual substance and voice which would render their opinions as important and incisive as those of Obama, Bloomberg , Dean and the rest of the super-community of New Class political professionals.
Washington's Liberal Democratic “freedom” is the kind that imposes any and every condition that furthers the economic and political interests of big money, governmental power and corporatism while strangling the freedom of democratic choice. Obama's freedom excludes the concrete freedom of cultural self-determination and democratic choice, that is, the political freedom which is the real “American Creed” and “core value” that make America what it is historically and in principal--not to mention theoretically from the standpoint of the “neo-populist Federalism” which I have been advocating in this blog journal.
Obama’s “unity” imposes an abstract equality upon our citizens and peoples in the interest of leveling out the real, concrete differences that are the source and cause of the populist politics that are surfacing as we speak and may yet help save our democracy, community and authentic federalism in America. Liberal Democratic equality really means that no one has the right to determine values that are primary, exclusive and self-determinative. Liberal equality legally forces the tolerance of any value or way of life no matter how much it compromises our way of life and no matter whether we democratically reject that way of life and other values.
Let the people of New York City decide this issue. And this does not mean, as Bloomberg pontificates, “the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.” Bloomberg accentuates his position finally with: “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable.” However, if such religious freedom displaces and devalues democracy, then we are setting are self up for a kind of superiority of religious relativism which law and the military will not in the end be able to control.
Yes, so when, the ideology of constitutional or universal human “rights” and “freedom” doesn’t work, clobber the people with “laws” of private property, suspect ‘local laws and ordinances’ and bring in the bureaucrats, lawyers and local sell-outs who want to profit from the “Muslim community” trucking in millions of dollars to NYC.
No, there must be a referendum on this issue and let the people speak. Yes, let’s debate the issue and let’s let democracy prevail. But let the people’s democracy decide, not the bought-and-paid-for institutionalized government that serves the interests of big business. Let the people work out this dangerously sticky issue of cultural, religious and political conflict as truly American political practice would have it. If not, what’s next, sending it to the Supreme Court? That would be the most ridiculous of political fiascos, not to mention power plays that the bureaucratic centralist elitists might pull off since sending the Florida results of the Bush-Gore election to the Supreme Court for final “decision.”
No let’s not let the people speak. Let us unequivocally demand that the people speak, debate, think, criticize and act according to their popular will and purpose. Yes, the people could be wrong. But why should we think the professional politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats and technocrats cannot be wrong. This issue is not a matter of scientific, legal or managerial specialization that the “experts” can objectively resolve. This matter is precisely a question of values, feelings, purposes of community sanctity and real political/democratic choice. This matter is preeminently about the “sentiments” that Bloomberg derides and ridicules in his dry, smug dismissal of the voice and community integrity of the people.
Nationally, let us let all communities independently decide how they wish to live their lives, what values are paramount within different communities and who stands authentically for the future of the American polity. Let us not be trumped by legalist trickery, the power of globalist interests and manipulations of mass communications attempting to shape a “unified” consciousness of a slavishly “useful America,” an America whose citizens impotently succumb to group-think and are willing to accept the selling out of America, the fighting of meaningless wars and the demagoguery of a self-serving political class whose “values” are tucked away in secret Swiss bank accounts alongside their Muslim New Class compatriots.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
FOUR VIGNETTES: Cultural Psychology at Work
• It’s not news that the corporate leviathan now has its sights firmly fixed on consciousness itself. It’s your consciousness that the monster is selling you. It “helps” direct and fix it firmly, usually with considerable emotion, to the commodity of your choice. Or should I say the ‘fantasy’ of your choice. Your attention becomes convincingly fixed on the thing that gives your mind an imagined context within which to continue to feel comfortable, entertained and, of course, wholly oblivious. Witness the house around the corner from mine: a shrine to the Buffalo Sabres. Flags, posters, signs, altars with figurines, logos, hockey sticks. And it’s all outside in the yard and on the porch. They want everyone to see it, feel it, know it and hopefully join in the fun, the passion… the oblivion. ………………….
• Mayor Bloomberg of NYC would have your “opinion” reduced to “popular sentiment.” In the recent melee over whether a Muslim mosque should be permitted to be built within spitting distance of “ground zero” Bloomberg handily dismissed the public outcry as “popular sentiment.” So in one fell swoop Bloomberg would denigrate the very foundation of democracy and dismiss it as emotionality, affected impulse or the thoughtless, biased ranting of “the people.” Although the “public sphere and space” continues to be retaken by the people over and over again throughout the country and world, plutocrats such as Bloomberg will use their ubiquity in the media to disparage and denigrate the roots and lifeblood of democracy—the people expressing their opinions and discussing the merits thereof. But for the likes of Bloomberg, the peoples’ opinions have no merit. They are mere sentiment. The people are sentimental, too emotional and not to be taken seriously. Yes, they may be humored, fooled, manipulated and used. But having no substance, no meaningful nor valuable force other than the irrational explosiveness which must be contained, sublimated and/or re-interpreted such that their historical roots and political power may be diffused if not annihilated. …………………
• Why is it that Bruce Fisher, in his otherwise excellent cover story for ARTVOICE[July 29-Aug. 4] entitled “Fishing for Salvation,” gives Ralph Wilson a pass on receiving public funds for a private enterprise. Fisher claims the Bills are a “unique public enterprise”! Does that go for the equally large number of taxpayers who could find no way to care less about the Bills, football, crazed fans and a brutal sporting event. And will it still remain so unique when the Bills inevitably leave town for more profitable parts? And did the people ever get any part of those profits in this unique public enterprise. It’s quite fascinating how objective judgment and an interest in law and justice quickly fade into shoddy thinking and effectively ideological rationalization, when our addictive dependence upon “the corporation” for our culture and “entertainment is faced with the prospect of going it alone without Big Daddy to provide us with spectacle and the monster athletes to give us an identity and sense of belonging if not purposefulness. What, pray tell, ever happened to the love of the game as the game? Why do we need professional, over grown specialists in athletic mayhem to allow us to enjoy ourselves? Wouldn’t local clubs of authentic sport enthusiasts be as interesting as multi-million dollar adolescents squeezing out every buck they can from this unnecessary business? Go Bills! Go somewhere else and let us return to genuine community! …………………….
• The proliferation of stand-up comedy over the last few decades in America—not to mention the plethora of not-funny Hollywood movies—testifies to our need for comic relief. At its best such stand-up is high art and a truth-teller of great proportions. But the misuse of laughter is another matter. I recently heard a retired woman on NPR telling her story of living on an unlivable Social Security Income. Her sad if not pathetic saga was frequently punctuated with “pleasant” laughter, accepting if not resigned laughter. It wasn’t forced and yet it wasn’t genuinely spontaneous, from the gut. It was the effete, exhausted, demoralized affective punctuations of a defeated being. Along a similar vein on “60 Minutes” I saw a story about a squad of Marines given the hopeless and thankless task of establishing an outpost in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan. The soldiers filmed their project. The post was to be near a small village where the young men were suspected of being at least Taliban sympathizers. The Taliban militias had a documented, established presence in the area. On the video the soldiers “joked” about having to build a post—not only with insufficient materials and supplies—but in hostile territory surrounded by mountains, the high ground of which was every insurgents wet dream. The soldiers were clearly scared but “joking” about how as they spoke there were hostiles watching them waiting for their moment to strike—and it would be soon. All of the soldiers’ commentary were expressed as if there situation were “funny.” It wasn’t. Within hours of the filming the Taliban attacked and wiped out most of the squad. Not so funny. The father of one of the dead soldiers had received messages from his son regarding their “suicide mission.” He wasn’t laughing. The point of this is that the soldiers who were in a hopelessly dehumanized situation, which of course they kept themselves in, discussed it in the mode of supposed humor. They joked, laughed, found it strangely, darkly funny. What else could they do? And what else could the woman on social security do besides laugh. Her situation was as lethal as the soldiers. But all they could do was laugh and joke. There was no truth in this humor—unless of course we see it for what it is: a desperate plea for help to do it differently, to find a way to take control of our lives—in short to find a way to again be political beings. As every good comedian knows not everything is funny, not everything should be laughed off.
• Mayor Bloomberg of NYC would have your “opinion” reduced to “popular sentiment.” In the recent melee over whether a Muslim mosque should be permitted to be built within spitting distance of “ground zero” Bloomberg handily dismissed the public outcry as “popular sentiment.” So in one fell swoop Bloomberg would denigrate the very foundation of democracy and dismiss it as emotionality, affected impulse or the thoughtless, biased ranting of “the people.” Although the “public sphere and space” continues to be retaken by the people over and over again throughout the country and world, plutocrats such as Bloomberg will use their ubiquity in the media to disparage and denigrate the roots and lifeblood of democracy—the people expressing their opinions and discussing the merits thereof. But for the likes of Bloomberg, the peoples’ opinions have no merit. They are mere sentiment. The people are sentimental, too emotional and not to be taken seriously. Yes, they may be humored, fooled, manipulated and used. But having no substance, no meaningful nor valuable force other than the irrational explosiveness which must be contained, sublimated and/or re-interpreted such that their historical roots and political power may be diffused if not annihilated. …………………
• Why is it that Bruce Fisher, in his otherwise excellent cover story for ARTVOICE[July 29-Aug. 4] entitled “Fishing for Salvation,” gives Ralph Wilson a pass on receiving public funds for a private enterprise. Fisher claims the Bills are a “unique public enterprise”! Does that go for the equally large number of taxpayers who could find no way to care less about the Bills, football, crazed fans and a brutal sporting event. And will it still remain so unique when the Bills inevitably leave town for more profitable parts? And did the people ever get any part of those profits in this unique public enterprise. It’s quite fascinating how objective judgment and an interest in law and justice quickly fade into shoddy thinking and effectively ideological rationalization, when our addictive dependence upon “the corporation” for our culture and “entertainment is faced with the prospect of going it alone without Big Daddy to provide us with spectacle and the monster athletes to give us an identity and sense of belonging if not purposefulness. What, pray tell, ever happened to the love of the game as the game? Why do we need professional, over grown specialists in athletic mayhem to allow us to enjoy ourselves? Wouldn’t local clubs of authentic sport enthusiasts be as interesting as multi-million dollar adolescents squeezing out every buck they can from this unnecessary business? Go Bills! Go somewhere else and let us return to genuine community! …………………….
• The proliferation of stand-up comedy over the last few decades in America—not to mention the plethora of not-funny Hollywood movies—testifies to our need for comic relief. At its best such stand-up is high art and a truth-teller of great proportions. But the misuse of laughter is another matter. I recently heard a retired woman on NPR telling her story of living on an unlivable Social Security Income. Her sad if not pathetic saga was frequently punctuated with “pleasant” laughter, accepting if not resigned laughter. It wasn’t forced and yet it wasn’t genuinely spontaneous, from the gut. It was the effete, exhausted, demoralized affective punctuations of a defeated being. Along a similar vein on “60 Minutes” I saw a story about a squad of Marines given the hopeless and thankless task of establishing an outpost in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan. The soldiers filmed their project. The post was to be near a small village where the young men were suspected of being at least Taliban sympathizers. The Taliban militias had a documented, established presence in the area. On the video the soldiers “joked” about having to build a post—not only with insufficient materials and supplies—but in hostile territory surrounded by mountains, the high ground of which was every insurgents wet dream. The soldiers were clearly scared but “joking” about how as they spoke there were hostiles watching them waiting for their moment to strike—and it would be soon. All of the soldiers’ commentary were expressed as if there situation were “funny.” It wasn’t. Within hours of the filming the Taliban attacked and wiped out most of the squad. Not so funny. The father of one of the dead soldiers had received messages from his son regarding their “suicide mission.” He wasn’t laughing. The point of this is that the soldiers who were in a hopelessly dehumanized situation, which of course they kept themselves in, discussed it in the mode of supposed humor. They joked, laughed, found it strangely, darkly funny. What else could they do? And what else could the woman on social security do besides laugh. Her situation was as lethal as the soldiers. But all they could do was laugh and joke. There was no truth in this humor—unless of course we see it for what it is: a desperate plea for help to do it differently, to find a way to take control of our lives—in short to find a way to again be political beings. As every good comedian knows not everything is funny, not everything should be laughed off.
Monday, July 19, 2010
The Pseudo-politics of Character Assassination and Disinformation Drones On at Niagara Times
Today over at Niagara Times blog, good ol’ Hobbes, blog administrator and editorialist extraordinaire, paid me the dubious honor of being the exclusive subject of his day’s labor. He begins by rationalizing why he censored me from his web site. Poor ol’ Hobbes, whomever he/she/it/that may be, seems a tad bit defensive. Hobbes’ claim that I was never able “to articulate [my] thoughts into a clear, concise manner” really means I refused to think in the very small box within which his mind moves. My words were “white noise” to him because he wasn’t capable of thinking through a single new political idea. He Hobbes detests authentic democratic discourse. It’s not good for business.
Then the most gross distortions, misrepresentations and misreadings begin. Well, actually they begin in the title of his post, “Castellani Compares Hobbes to Hitler, Christ.” I did no such thing. What I did do was draw two analogies. The first compared the NCCC Administration’s attempts to destroy the Faculty Association while dragging the integrity of the college down with it, to Hitler’s attempt to destroy the Jews despite its ill effects on his beloved Fatherland. The second suggested that Hobbes moralistic, pseudo-political diatribes present himself as the sinless savior of Niagara County while he portrays almost everyone else as traitors to the cause. He is light years from Jesus and obviously closer to Judas if not Hitler in his betrayal of public democratic dialogue not to mention the pursuit of truth.
If you are curious why Hobbes lists a slew of my sentences in his blog, wonder no further. It’s to make sure that you don’t read my piece entitled, “Niagara Times Politico and County Bureaucrats Assault Education at NCCC”[Thursday, July 15, 2010]. He loves to take arguments out of context and put them to his own use as they do on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and that ilk.
If Hobbes were serious about “reigning in exorbitant, taxpayer- subsidized salaries” he would spend a little time criticizing the exorbitant salaries of the Administrators at NCCC starting with Dr. Klyczek. He would also criticize the use of millions in tax monies to subsidize business in Niagara County. But for Hobbes it’s socialism for the capitalists and capitalism for the poor.
Hobbes doesn’t criticize those who support the politics of his social class. He only criticizes those who wish to restore equity to a Liberal Democracy in severe political, economic, social and ecological crisis. He criticizes anyone whose political ideas go beyond trying to win tax breaks for business and eliminate any regulation of the same.
What becomes clear to me now, however, is that Hobbes probably censored me for one of two reasons. Firstly, it could be that he just can’t stand critical, creative political thought or, secondly, he just can’t read. He misunderstood two of my analogies and totally distorted the context of my argument and the issues at hand. But maybe he doesn’t do that intentionally or self-consciously. Maybe he just doesn’t read well. And if he doesn’t read well, just what kind of thinking could one expect from the ol’ Republican hit man.
Whichever it is, it doesn’t bode well for Hobbes. He’s either an elitist, authoritarian party-politics power mongerer or he’s kind of illiterate.
So please read Hobbes’ character assassination piece on me but then, please, also read my article. Then let’s collect some tuition money and send Hobbes back to school.
If democracy stands any chance to establish an authentic discourse of the people in a legitimate public sphere, the demagogic witch hunting of the likes of Hobbes, the lunatic fringe right wing in this country and the Neo-conservative and even moderate Republican elitists can’t be permitted to go unchallenged.
Lastly, we need to note one tactic that the rich and powerful use repeatedly against the poor, public servants and unions. The tactic is to manipulate anyone who believes they deserve better than the capitalist types are willing to let them have, or have the opportunity to achieve, into comparing themselves with the poorest. The psychological intent is to make you feel guilty and ashamed that you believe you deserve better. It’s pseudo-Christian elevation of the humble and self-sacrificing to which he tries to get you to emulate and thus accept whatever the “bosses” want to give you, usually the crumbs off their table.
Such moralism doesn’t work, at least not with me. Hobbes’ type of demagoguery wants to dumb you down, humiliate you and impoverish the will to self-determination. Hobbes is a Stalinist at heart. He’s dangerous and a light should be kept on his efforts to turn the public sphere into a realm of political violence, obstruction and obscuration.
Then the most gross distortions, misrepresentations and misreadings begin. Well, actually they begin in the title of his post, “Castellani Compares Hobbes to Hitler, Christ.” I did no such thing. What I did do was draw two analogies. The first compared the NCCC Administration’s attempts to destroy the Faculty Association while dragging the integrity of the college down with it, to Hitler’s attempt to destroy the Jews despite its ill effects on his beloved Fatherland. The second suggested that Hobbes moralistic, pseudo-political diatribes present himself as the sinless savior of Niagara County while he portrays almost everyone else as traitors to the cause. He is light years from Jesus and obviously closer to Judas if not Hitler in his betrayal of public democratic dialogue not to mention the pursuit of truth.
If you are curious why Hobbes lists a slew of my sentences in his blog, wonder no further. It’s to make sure that you don’t read my piece entitled, “Niagara Times Politico and County Bureaucrats Assault Education at NCCC”[Thursday, July 15, 2010]. He loves to take arguments out of context and put them to his own use as they do on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and that ilk.
If Hobbes were serious about “reigning in exorbitant, taxpayer- subsidized salaries” he would spend a little time criticizing the exorbitant salaries of the Administrators at NCCC starting with Dr. Klyczek. He would also criticize the use of millions in tax monies to subsidize business in Niagara County. But for Hobbes it’s socialism for the capitalists and capitalism for the poor.
Hobbes doesn’t criticize those who support the politics of his social class. He only criticizes those who wish to restore equity to a Liberal Democracy in severe political, economic, social and ecological crisis. He criticizes anyone whose political ideas go beyond trying to win tax breaks for business and eliminate any regulation of the same.
What becomes clear to me now, however, is that Hobbes probably censored me for one of two reasons. Firstly, it could be that he just can’t stand critical, creative political thought or, secondly, he just can’t read. He misunderstood two of my analogies and totally distorted the context of my argument and the issues at hand. But maybe he doesn’t do that intentionally or self-consciously. Maybe he just doesn’t read well. And if he doesn’t read well, just what kind of thinking could one expect from the ol’ Republican hit man.
Whichever it is, it doesn’t bode well for Hobbes. He’s either an elitist, authoritarian party-politics power mongerer or he’s kind of illiterate.
So please read Hobbes’ character assassination piece on me but then, please, also read my article. Then let’s collect some tuition money and send Hobbes back to school.
If democracy stands any chance to establish an authentic discourse of the people in a legitimate public sphere, the demagogic witch hunting of the likes of Hobbes, the lunatic fringe right wing in this country and the Neo-conservative and even moderate Republican elitists can’t be permitted to go unchallenged.
Lastly, we need to note one tactic that the rich and powerful use repeatedly against the poor, public servants and unions. The tactic is to manipulate anyone who believes they deserve better than the capitalist types are willing to let them have, or have the opportunity to achieve, into comparing themselves with the poorest. The psychological intent is to make you feel guilty and ashamed that you believe you deserve better. It’s pseudo-Christian elevation of the humble and self-sacrificing to which he tries to get you to emulate and thus accept whatever the “bosses” want to give you, usually the crumbs off their table.
Such moralism doesn’t work, at least not with me. Hobbes’ type of demagoguery wants to dumb you down, humiliate you and impoverish the will to self-determination. Hobbes is a Stalinist at heart. He’s dangerous and a light should be kept on his efforts to turn the public sphere into a realm of political violence, obstruction and obscuration.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Niagara Times Politico and County Bureaucrats Assault Education at NCCC
The demagogic pseudo-political hitman over at the Niagara Times blogspot who calls himself “Hobbes,” is once again finding an excuse to assault the integrity of the NCCC Faculty Association. The issue is a shortfall in operational funds due to NYS cutbacks. The issue is not the pending contract for the faculty. The Faculty Association is not holding up funding by the county. The Association is not the problem in the negotiations with the college Administration. The problem is an administration that continues to insult and assault the faculty and the community by breaking the Taylor Law, lying about negotiations and doing its best to divide and conquer the faculty in order to destroy the Association, if not the very right to "associate." The truth of the matter is that the Administration does not really even believe in the right to associate and legally defend one’s own interests. While the Administration and its Board of Trustees supporters attack the faculty endlessly and mercilessly, they fail to see they are destroying the atmosphere of healthy learning at the college and the morale of all who work at the college.
The faculty has bent over backwards to accommodate the Administration but the Administration doesn’t really wish to settle. They aim to take over control of educational functions from the faculty in the name of saving money. The administration does not care about the quality of education let alone conditions for quality education. If the Board of Trustees was not behind the “union-busting” tactics of Klyczek and Co., they would have intervened four years ago and settled.
It is the Administration and the Board of Trustees who waste the County’s money paying expensive lawyers to stonewall every attempt by the faculty association to reach reasonable agreement. It is a hapless legislature that continually acts to throw the baby out with the bathwater and otherwise is usually penny wise and pound foolish. NCCC is the best economic asset in Niagara County. It’s the best available first two years of college education in Western NY.
When these ignoramuses will ever learn to stop playing self-destructive politics, it is hard to tell. Probably never. Hobbes continues his rabid, toxic and violent disinformation by, for example, making it appear that the only issue separating the Association and the Administration is the faculty’s wish to hang onto “cosmetic plastic surgery.” This is so ludicrous it's almost embarrassing. Most if not all of the faculty have no problem dropping this “benefit.” Hobbes, however, wants to make it look like the faculty has the top of the line health care package. We don’t even have dental care. The Faculty Association agreed to a health package over a year ago that would have saved the County over a million dollars and the Administration refused. They must think if they reduce the Faculty to a minimal wage and an inadequate health care package that they will save the County more in the long run. What else can explain their deceptive practices and otherwise irrational negotiation tactics. They have an ulterior motive and they aim to carry it out even if the County goes bankrupt doing it. This is kind of like Hitler wanting to kill the Jews and extend his war to the entire world even though he would inevitably destroy Germany while trying to do it.
Hobbes seems to be insulted by the faculty Newsletter. Yes, free speech does insult Hobbes. That’s why he denied me free speech on his blog. He’s afraid of honest, open, public dialogue in which everyone declares who they are and we all know who’s talking. We don’t know who Hobbes is but we know who he speaks for. And it’s not for the people. Justice doesn’t seen to apply to the faculty, only to Hobbes' business and political friends. Hobbes belittles the faculty’s attempt to fight for what is just for itself. He says we are “insulting to every group in history who has actually had to fight injustice.” For his information we fight for justice and against injustice everyday in the classroom while he's at home making up lies in order to win more political power for Niagara County Republicans and the rich business crowd.
Hobbes wants you to think we are taking food out of the mouths of the poor. How about those tax breaks for all your business friends like the illegal multi- million dollar give away to the coal burning plant. Hobbes is paid by the Republican Party in Niagara County not only to gain political and economic control for his big business friends but also to suppress every possibility of true democracy and meaningful quality education. Hobbes has already written about what he thinks the community college is good for: job training to supply ready-made laborers for all his business buddies. As far as critical literacy and political knowledge for these same people, he could care less. The more ignorant the people are the more his type can control them and pay them slave wages.
Everyone wants a good education and good teachers. But they don’t want to pay for it. I was working my way through graduate school to earn a Ph.D. for many years making nothing except survival stipends. I deserve everything I make and more. Hobbes and his ilk could care less about the people unless his big business friends can use them to make more money.
Klyczek and Co.. ought to spend more time working on quality education at NCCC rather than wasting untold hours trying to build more buildings and figure out ways to divide and pit the faculty against themselves in hopes of destroying our right to associate. Such elitist administrative bureaucrats and their henchman such as Hobbes, who fears to show his face in public, are the death knell for Niagara County, the community college and the public sphere. We need to start worrying about something more than "money" if we are going to put Niagara County and WNY back on a strong political and economic footing. The basis of such power is an educated and autonomous public. Hobbes would take that away from us.
The only “greed” in Niagara County is the greed on the part of the likes of Hobbes and selfish business people who are greedy for power, the control of knowledge and information. They are greedy to continue to carry out their plan to reduce democratic practices to the blathering of professional politicians who could care less about “the people.” They are greedy to obey only those laws that benefit their elitist social class and the administrative bureaucrats who carry out their dirty work in stopping what really benefits the people.
Yes, let’s make what’s really happening at NCCC public. Not Hobbes' vicious distortion of facts and truth, nor his selective dissemination of slanted “facts” that make him and his buddies look like Jesus Christ while making everyone else look like Judas. These tactics should be transparent to anyone with any brains whatsoever. Let’s make public how the administration get’s egregiously large pay increases and the faculty is denigrated and maligned for wanting a 3% increase. How about the 30% increase of Klyczek who is pushing his way toward the $200,000 a year club. The rest of the administration whose size, by the way, continues to grow disproportionate to their usefulness and our need for them, are also receiving excessive pay increases. Why favor the administration? Because then there are more bureaucrats to try to control the freedom and will of the faculty to truly educate and do what’s right for the students.
Niagara County is on the brink of losing more than a few dollars to pay the faculty a fair wage. It is on the brink of succumbing to the authoritarian anti-democratic elitists who are turning education and the public sphere into the private property of the rich and powerful and their bureaucratic hitmen, deceitful lawyers and professional politicans who have no respect for the law.
Pay those people who still care about truth and justice in Niagara County a fair wage and stop playing venomous "politics" with the future of education in Niagara County.
The faculty has bent over backwards to accommodate the Administration but the Administration doesn’t really wish to settle. They aim to take over control of educational functions from the faculty in the name of saving money. The administration does not care about the quality of education let alone conditions for quality education. If the Board of Trustees was not behind the “union-busting” tactics of Klyczek and Co., they would have intervened four years ago and settled.
It is the Administration and the Board of Trustees who waste the County’s money paying expensive lawyers to stonewall every attempt by the faculty association to reach reasonable agreement. It is a hapless legislature that continually acts to throw the baby out with the bathwater and otherwise is usually penny wise and pound foolish. NCCC is the best economic asset in Niagara County. It’s the best available first two years of college education in Western NY.
When these ignoramuses will ever learn to stop playing self-destructive politics, it is hard to tell. Probably never. Hobbes continues his rabid, toxic and violent disinformation by, for example, making it appear that the only issue separating the Association and the Administration is the faculty’s wish to hang onto “cosmetic plastic surgery.” This is so ludicrous it's almost embarrassing. Most if not all of the faculty have no problem dropping this “benefit.” Hobbes, however, wants to make it look like the faculty has the top of the line health care package. We don’t even have dental care. The Faculty Association agreed to a health package over a year ago that would have saved the County over a million dollars and the Administration refused. They must think if they reduce the Faculty to a minimal wage and an inadequate health care package that they will save the County more in the long run. What else can explain their deceptive practices and otherwise irrational negotiation tactics. They have an ulterior motive and they aim to carry it out even if the County goes bankrupt doing it. This is kind of like Hitler wanting to kill the Jews and extend his war to the entire world even though he would inevitably destroy Germany while trying to do it.
Hobbes seems to be insulted by the faculty Newsletter. Yes, free speech does insult Hobbes. That’s why he denied me free speech on his blog. He’s afraid of honest, open, public dialogue in which everyone declares who they are and we all know who’s talking. We don’t know who Hobbes is but we know who he speaks for. And it’s not for the people. Justice doesn’t seen to apply to the faculty, only to Hobbes' business and political friends. Hobbes belittles the faculty’s attempt to fight for what is just for itself. He says we are “insulting to every group in history who has actually had to fight injustice.” For his information we fight for justice and against injustice everyday in the classroom while he's at home making up lies in order to win more political power for Niagara County Republicans and the rich business crowd.
Hobbes wants you to think we are taking food out of the mouths of the poor. How about those tax breaks for all your business friends like the illegal multi- million dollar give away to the coal burning plant. Hobbes is paid by the Republican Party in Niagara County not only to gain political and economic control for his big business friends but also to suppress every possibility of true democracy and meaningful quality education. Hobbes has already written about what he thinks the community college is good for: job training to supply ready-made laborers for all his business buddies. As far as critical literacy and political knowledge for these same people, he could care less. The more ignorant the people are the more his type can control them and pay them slave wages.
Everyone wants a good education and good teachers. But they don’t want to pay for it. I was working my way through graduate school to earn a Ph.D. for many years making nothing except survival stipends. I deserve everything I make and more. Hobbes and his ilk could care less about the people unless his big business friends can use them to make more money.
Klyczek and Co.. ought to spend more time working on quality education at NCCC rather than wasting untold hours trying to build more buildings and figure out ways to divide and pit the faculty against themselves in hopes of destroying our right to associate. Such elitist administrative bureaucrats and their henchman such as Hobbes, who fears to show his face in public, are the death knell for Niagara County, the community college and the public sphere. We need to start worrying about something more than "money" if we are going to put Niagara County and WNY back on a strong political and economic footing. The basis of such power is an educated and autonomous public. Hobbes would take that away from us.
The only “greed” in Niagara County is the greed on the part of the likes of Hobbes and selfish business people who are greedy for power, the control of knowledge and information. They are greedy to continue to carry out their plan to reduce democratic practices to the blathering of professional politicians who could care less about “the people.” They are greedy to obey only those laws that benefit their elitist social class and the administrative bureaucrats who carry out their dirty work in stopping what really benefits the people.
Yes, let’s make what’s really happening at NCCC public. Not Hobbes' vicious distortion of facts and truth, nor his selective dissemination of slanted “facts” that make him and his buddies look like Jesus Christ while making everyone else look like Judas. These tactics should be transparent to anyone with any brains whatsoever. Let’s make public how the administration get’s egregiously large pay increases and the faculty is denigrated and maligned for wanting a 3% increase. How about the 30% increase of Klyczek who is pushing his way toward the $200,000 a year club. The rest of the administration whose size, by the way, continues to grow disproportionate to their usefulness and our need for them, are also receiving excessive pay increases. Why favor the administration? Because then there are more bureaucrats to try to control the freedom and will of the faculty to truly educate and do what’s right for the students.
Niagara County is on the brink of losing more than a few dollars to pay the faculty a fair wage. It is on the brink of succumbing to the authoritarian anti-democratic elitists who are turning education and the public sphere into the private property of the rich and powerful and their bureaucratic hitmen, deceitful lawyers and professional politicans who have no respect for the law.
Pay those people who still care about truth and justice in Niagara County a fair wage and stop playing venomous "politics" with the future of education in Niagara County.
Friday, July 09, 2010
Everybody's talkin' at me, can't hear a word they're sayin'....
… only the echoes of my mind," as the theme song of Midnight Cowboy declared. Such may well be the status of contemporary political discourse and for good reason. Witness the flakey demagoguery of the three musketeers of mediatized mindlessness: Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman. If I were to add a fourth it would be, hands down, Michael Steele. On any given night one or another of the major media outlets will feature some inanity from at least one of these headline catchers. They may well, frighteningly enough, believe that what they say is valid and true. More frightening is that far too few will question the il-logic, assumptions, purposes and motivations behind their polemics.
Explaining such irrationality-- that is, of the sophistic manipulativeness of these would-be national leaders and our susceptibility to their polemics-- need not be too perplexing. The atomization of individuality in our “mass democracy,” precludes our realizing any effective, intelligent, critical involvement in an authentically self-determining political life. We are are reduced to "participation" via the passive gaze. Whether hypnotically conforming with nods of approval or disapproving with rants of vile abuse or simply indifferently enjoying the show, in effect our "involvement" is nothing more potent than a mere gaze. We are unable to fulfill that necessary integral role of supplying the crucial criticism of determinative judgments and decisions which provide essential feedback constituting the internal control mechanism required by any sustainable, self-correcting society.
Locked out of democratic participation in economic planning, investment and production, sequestered behind the invisible walls of contemporary class structure, the post-modern “individual” is relegated to carrying out the functions of consumer and client of the mass culture industry. From the far side of the invisible social class wall, profit and power guide, though unsuccessfully, the choices and actions of the denizens of globalized economy and cultural hegemony.
In the storm of opinion-mongering and pseudo-participation enabled by the global mass media, everyone can play a part yet none are really heard. Everyone gets their turn at the endless political carnival throwing the ball at the “clown” perched above the vat of water, hoping to knock him down such that we can laugh at his foolishness.
So the ditsy discourse drones on. We laugh at or cheer at the protagonists, such as the aforementioned ‘musketeers of mindlessness.’ Meanwhile they prepare their next round of obscurantist distractions and manipulations, advancing their masters' bid for power and a monopoly on wealth. However, no one is really talking in such discourse because no one politically empowered is really listening to the pleas to deal with the crises and move beyond the stock answers or solutions. There is no efficacity of truth or justice. Yet the hordes of our ‘mass democracy’ are once again being herded together, steering huge blocks of votes toward whatever candidate serves the masters of capital, social control and mass cultural imperialism.
The "musketeers" are deployed to appear as if they truly and sincerely know our hearts and minds and we buy into the operative assumption that therefore no critical discussion is really necessary. They are marketed to appear as if they know our minds and what is in our interest. They become our minds and the echoes of our minds. If what they say doesn’t make sense nor provide any new, let alone convincing, solutions to the myriad crises of our Liberal Democracy, we pay no mind. They are us and we are them. All the serious and responsible speaking that needs to be done and heard we still have faith will be taken care of by the professional elites who “represent” us and their experts who assure us that all will be taken care of in the end. Somehow faith in progress still holds water despite all the holes in the rusty bucket of modernist ideology.
The present-day citizen-- unable to make a difference politically as an individual, essentially locked out of the party machines, lacking revolutionary possibilities and, most importantly, ignorant of the power and potential of populist or communitarian alternatives-- falls ever more deeply into the anesthetized, apolitical nihilism of the collectivized and politically contained "individual." The only seemingly empowering choice appears to be the average ordinary everydayness of bare existence. Purposeless life marks time amidst the well-trained herd while we wait for happy hour or the latest exciting cultural fix to take away our anxious meaninglessness and helplessness.
In short, in the face of such powerlessness we may as well hear only the echoes of our own minds, if in fact these are our own echoes. Making sense of today's discourse for most is impossible and what sense can be made will not rationally mediate new directions in politics. The irrationality serves its own purpose: namely, to prevent the people from having their own autonomously determined purpose.
Explaining such irrationality-- that is, of the sophistic manipulativeness of these would-be national leaders and our susceptibility to their polemics-- need not be too perplexing. The atomization of individuality in our “mass democracy,” precludes our realizing any effective, intelligent, critical involvement in an authentically self-determining political life. We are are reduced to "participation" via the passive gaze. Whether hypnotically conforming with nods of approval or disapproving with rants of vile abuse or simply indifferently enjoying the show, in effect our "involvement" is nothing more potent than a mere gaze. We are unable to fulfill that necessary integral role of supplying the crucial criticism of determinative judgments and decisions which provide essential feedback constituting the internal control mechanism required by any sustainable, self-correcting society.
Locked out of democratic participation in economic planning, investment and production, sequestered behind the invisible walls of contemporary class structure, the post-modern “individual” is relegated to carrying out the functions of consumer and client of the mass culture industry. From the far side of the invisible social class wall, profit and power guide, though unsuccessfully, the choices and actions of the denizens of globalized economy and cultural hegemony.
In the storm of opinion-mongering and pseudo-participation enabled by the global mass media, everyone can play a part yet none are really heard. Everyone gets their turn at the endless political carnival throwing the ball at the “clown” perched above the vat of water, hoping to knock him down such that we can laugh at his foolishness.
So the ditsy discourse drones on. We laugh at or cheer at the protagonists, such as the aforementioned ‘musketeers of mindlessness.’ Meanwhile they prepare their next round of obscurantist distractions and manipulations, advancing their masters' bid for power and a monopoly on wealth. However, no one is really talking in such discourse because no one politically empowered is really listening to the pleas to deal with the crises and move beyond the stock answers or solutions. There is no efficacity of truth or justice. Yet the hordes of our ‘mass democracy’ are once again being herded together, steering huge blocks of votes toward whatever candidate serves the masters of capital, social control and mass cultural imperialism.
The "musketeers" are deployed to appear as if they truly and sincerely know our hearts and minds and we buy into the operative assumption that therefore no critical discussion is really necessary. They are marketed to appear as if they know our minds and what is in our interest. They become our minds and the echoes of our minds. If what they say doesn’t make sense nor provide any new, let alone convincing, solutions to the myriad crises of our Liberal Democracy, we pay no mind. They are us and we are them. All the serious and responsible speaking that needs to be done and heard we still have faith will be taken care of by the professional elites who “represent” us and their experts who assure us that all will be taken care of in the end. Somehow faith in progress still holds water despite all the holes in the rusty bucket of modernist ideology.
The present-day citizen-- unable to make a difference politically as an individual, essentially locked out of the party machines, lacking revolutionary possibilities and, most importantly, ignorant of the power and potential of populist or communitarian alternatives-- falls ever more deeply into the anesthetized, apolitical nihilism of the collectivized and politically contained "individual." The only seemingly empowering choice appears to be the average ordinary everydayness of bare existence. Purposeless life marks time amidst the well-trained herd while we wait for happy hour or the latest exciting cultural fix to take away our anxious meaninglessness and helplessness.
In short, in the face of such powerlessness we may as well hear only the echoes of our own minds, if in fact these are our own echoes. Making sense of today's discourse for most is impossible and what sense can be made will not rationally mediate new directions in politics. The irrationality serves its own purpose: namely, to prevent the people from having their own autonomously determined purpose.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
DE-INSTITUTIONALIZING MASS EDUCATION AND CONSTITUTING ORGANIC COMMUNITIES AND CULTURES OF LEARNING
While it is good and appropriate if not necessary to direct our voices and actions toward getting big government to provide “universal quality education,” it is equally required that the people return to the “classroom.” What I mean here is that unless we turn to ourselves at a local level and create a vital vision for the particular quality and content of education that each community and/or culture desires for itself, big government is unlikely to provide the kind of education the people need.
The Secretary of Education, with Obama’s blessings, may institute higher formal standards, bureaucratic reforms in administration, testing requirements, teacher qualifications, length of school year, even reducing the number of pupils in the classroom. However, until each community re-appropriates ownership of and entitlement to a relevant quality education available in each community and orchestrated by each community, we will in effect be trying to get the tail to wag the dog.
It is time that the need and desire for the greatest of educations be a genuine expression of that “people’s populism” that has been wrongly exploited for over a century in America by various pseudo-populists, even and especially Obama himself. It is time that the presidential call for better education be made the mere echo of the people’s own political call for the autonomous re-constitution and control of their own spiritual and intellectual self-formation. This call must be understood however to be not simply a request or appeal for quality universal education but a demand for quality universal education. Universality does not mean the same dumbed-down, standardized training in passivity, uniformity and useable skills, whether intellectual or manual for all equally. In the first place, this is a demand that big government get its hands off the stranglehold it has on local life and culture and, for openers, release significant tax monies to the people for use in their own locally controlled education rather than for such things as a militarized economy geared for meaningless and/or unnecessary wars.
Formal changes of educational law and practices as recently proposed by Obama will ultimately not get us what we want and need in order to make a real difference in communities. What we need are new cultures of learning initiated from the grass roots of America. Changes from atop the bureaucratic educational hierarchy, and sanctioned by the Washington political class, have historically done little to advance the quality of education in America. Reforms such as raising standards, for example, have been shown not to correlate with achievement. The other kinds of changes from above also have not made and will not make a difference in the quality and substance of local cultures of learning even if national educational statistics make it look, as they have in the past, that we are making “progress.” We are not making progress. We need to administer our own education and take it out of the hands of the Ministers of Education who are jaundiced by their own social class’s economic and political interests -- interests which essentially preclude the will, understanding and action necessary for the popular education revolution that we need.
Just as with the ongoing fight for democracy, so also with the fight for education, dramatic change must start at home. We have all heard the phrase “All politics is local politics.” So also, all democracy and all education is local democracy and education. This does not mean to invoke a project of involutional inbreeding and turning away from the understanding of the world and our part in it. It means to awaken ourselves to the fact that the alienated power in Washington will respond to and respect only those willing to live their most sacred values authentically and autonomously. In short they will respond when we are listening and doing for ourselves. They will respond when we withdraw our lifeblood from their veins, a lifeblood that takes not only the form of our egregiously squandered tax money but the form of a false consciousness that is manipulated into legitimating their continued misrepresentation and patronization of the communities, cultures and values of a heterogeneous populaition. Such consciousness must wake up from this delusion and realize that “what can be done at home must be done at home.” This is the principle of subsidiarity. It means that all social tasks should be performed as nearly as possible by those whom they directly affect at a local level and that centralized authority of “big government” should be reduced to playing only a subsidiary role coordinating and expediting cooperation among local communities.
This re-appropriation of culturally, and therefore educationally, self-constitutive behavior is even much more than the old notion that we aren’t really alive until we find something we are willing to die for. This may be true and we may in the end need to be willing to die for local cultural autonomy, political freedom, self-determination and identity. But such willingness to die is predicated first and foremost on how passionately and compassionately we are willing to live fully and robustly for what we love, desire, believe and create in our daily lives. Politically, this is the profundity of a radically new democratic and multi-cultural populism, in short, the simplicity of the self-realized abundance of autonomous and self-determining local life. Its heart is self-education for local power, knowledge and the will to be heard. It is the cultural rebirth of local sovereignty. Today its signs are everywhere as local communities and regions struggle to be heard, not only in America but internationally.
What we must understand first is whether we really hear ourselves and are struggling to hear and respond to ourselves. Until as much attention is turned toward a vision of the kind of life we want to lead and away from the project of a globalized culture, a one-dimensional Americanized world where one size fits all, then education will always be made prêt a porte by the purveyors of conformist pedagogy.
Achieving education for a new political, economic, cultural and spiritual intelligence is in effect to democratize intelligence, creativity and social participation. It creates the autonomy and power needed to begin dismantling big government, decentralizing big government and returning both democracy and education for democracy to the people. Social intelligence is not fixed in the genes no matter how much the Regents of the intelligence bureaucracy at Princeton, not to mention our own ‘street mythologies,’ would have us believe it.
Social intelligence, the democratized intelligence of communities, evolves when communities educate and form themselves to achieve the highest quality of life that they love and cherish in mutual trust. The individual is only as intelligent as the wisdom his community allows. Unless of course one strives for the specialized skills of the new globalized cosmopolitan Man who really has no qualities nor content but is fully useable by the technocracy, bureaucracy, military or financialized business world of transnational capital.
To appreciate how alienated we are from our own power of self-determination, we must ask ourselves some simple questions: when was the last time, if ever, that you sat in on a local School Board meeting let alone, let’s say, a history or social science class in the local High School to experience what and how the students are learning. When have we last thoroughly checked out the text books our children use and asked if they are worth using. Do we even know enough to make that judgement. When was the last time you took a course at the local community college or university to expand your intellectual horizon. When was the last time you tried to address local government regarding issues of any sort in the community. When was the last time you got into a substantive debate with your neighbor about the quality and content of local education, the values and laws of your community, the latest issue in state politics. When was the last time you chose to write a letter to the editor in the local papers or participate regularly on a political blog or started one of your own. When was the last time you questioned how we can continue to do the same things and expect new results whether in education, politics, spirituality, cultural self-expression or especially the love life of your own families and friends. How can we change Washington and America when the roots of such change are not planted firmly in our own hearts and minds. How can we require educational change when we are not changing educationally.
The spiritual and community leaders who are not the mouthpieces of Washington, Wall Steet, Hollywood’s commercialized culture or religions institutionalized spirituality must not only speak truth to power but wisdom to the people in the provinces. She must not only funnel protest toward the professionalized leaders but pull the people back to the neighborhoods, schools and lost souls of local life.
The return to meaningful or effective local power involves the retrieval of lost cultural and historical possibilities. We find this in our pain, our confusion and our lost pasts. Such return is moreover the re-constitution of multi-cultural values and new cultural practices themselves not yet foreseen. It is not a matter whether such values and practices are universalizable across all cultures. It is a matter of whether the particular values and practices can sustain democratic communities, that is free multiplicities of communities living and creating as they see fit. It is a move into the future by recovering the past, a past in which we find the spirit of lost selves and re-create and re-invent their spirit today at home for a sustainable joy, freedom, peace and love.
Several years ago, at the end of the Million Man March on Washington, Louis Farrakahn, leader of the Black Muslims, issued a call I didn’t expect him to make. Having mobilized a million men of color to Washington to ask what it means to be a black man in America and to empower a decimated ethnic group, I expected Mr. Farrakhan to make a play for national power and possibly even prepare the way for a run for the Presidency. But in fact what he asked this inspired throng of supporters to do was not mobilize further for monolithic mass action but to go home and build their communities. In his own way he was asking them to do what the Black Panthers had been doing in the Sixties before they were infected with the self-defeating idea that they were social revolutionaries who might even take national power for themselves. Originally these “panthers” were, wisely enough, community organizers, supporters, creators and builders. Presumably they saw the strength and power of local well-being, consciousness, co-operation, pride and purposefulness. Until they lost sight of what real populist power is capable of today when understood in terms of the primacy of community and local culture.
The revolution in education begins when we realize that it is preceded by proper political action. This is not action from the standpoint of a totalized national consciousness aiming to transform the whole on the basis of a vision of absolute universal uniformity. It begins when we recover the populist consciousness which realizes its power lay in the protest against outside control of local affairs, values, identities, practices and purposes.
The age of the mass collectivization of the people, whether of the communist or liberal kind, is over. The center of the artificially homogenized nation-state of mass robotized pseudo-individuals does not hold. America is too large for its government to presume to legislate for all the particular peoples, communities, traditions and cultures across this great land. American government is overly confident if it continues believing it can bureaucratically manage opposition and control and constitute the cultural existence of vastly diverse communities of people.
The democratic experiment is beginning again in a new way in the name of the only practicable democracy, that of relatively small communities directly participating democratically to govern themselves and create their own lives. American education should play a part in imparting such democratic values if there is to be any real thread internally connecting the particularities of geographically, culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse peoples.
The Secretary of Education, with Obama’s blessings, may institute higher formal standards, bureaucratic reforms in administration, testing requirements, teacher qualifications, length of school year, even reducing the number of pupils in the classroom. However, until each community re-appropriates ownership of and entitlement to a relevant quality education available in each community and orchestrated by each community, we will in effect be trying to get the tail to wag the dog.
It is time that the need and desire for the greatest of educations be a genuine expression of that “people’s populism” that has been wrongly exploited for over a century in America by various pseudo-populists, even and especially Obama himself. It is time that the presidential call for better education be made the mere echo of the people’s own political call for the autonomous re-constitution and control of their own spiritual and intellectual self-formation. This call must be understood however to be not simply a request or appeal for quality universal education but a demand for quality universal education. Universality does not mean the same dumbed-down, standardized training in passivity, uniformity and useable skills, whether intellectual or manual for all equally. In the first place, this is a demand that big government get its hands off the stranglehold it has on local life and culture and, for openers, release significant tax monies to the people for use in their own locally controlled education rather than for such things as a militarized economy geared for meaningless and/or unnecessary wars.
Formal changes of educational law and practices as recently proposed by Obama will ultimately not get us what we want and need in order to make a real difference in communities. What we need are new cultures of learning initiated from the grass roots of America. Changes from atop the bureaucratic educational hierarchy, and sanctioned by the Washington political class, have historically done little to advance the quality of education in America. Reforms such as raising standards, for example, have been shown not to correlate with achievement. The other kinds of changes from above also have not made and will not make a difference in the quality and substance of local cultures of learning even if national educational statistics make it look, as they have in the past, that we are making “progress.” We are not making progress. We need to administer our own education and take it out of the hands of the Ministers of Education who are jaundiced by their own social class’s economic and political interests -- interests which essentially preclude the will, understanding and action necessary for the popular education revolution that we need.
Just as with the ongoing fight for democracy, so also with the fight for education, dramatic change must start at home. We have all heard the phrase “All politics is local politics.” So also, all democracy and all education is local democracy and education. This does not mean to invoke a project of involutional inbreeding and turning away from the understanding of the world and our part in it. It means to awaken ourselves to the fact that the alienated power in Washington will respond to and respect only those willing to live their most sacred values authentically and autonomously. In short they will respond when we are listening and doing for ourselves. They will respond when we withdraw our lifeblood from their veins, a lifeblood that takes not only the form of our egregiously squandered tax money but the form of a false consciousness that is manipulated into legitimating their continued misrepresentation and patronization of the communities, cultures and values of a heterogeneous populaition. Such consciousness must wake up from this delusion and realize that “what can be done at home must be done at home.” This is the principle of subsidiarity. It means that all social tasks should be performed as nearly as possible by those whom they directly affect at a local level and that centralized authority of “big government” should be reduced to playing only a subsidiary role coordinating and expediting cooperation among local communities.
This re-appropriation of culturally, and therefore educationally, self-constitutive behavior is even much more than the old notion that we aren’t really alive until we find something we are willing to die for. This may be true and we may in the end need to be willing to die for local cultural autonomy, political freedom, self-determination and identity. But such willingness to die is predicated first and foremost on how passionately and compassionately we are willing to live fully and robustly for what we love, desire, believe and create in our daily lives. Politically, this is the profundity of a radically new democratic and multi-cultural populism, in short, the simplicity of the self-realized abundance of autonomous and self-determining local life. Its heart is self-education for local power, knowledge and the will to be heard. It is the cultural rebirth of local sovereignty. Today its signs are everywhere as local communities and regions struggle to be heard, not only in America but internationally.
What we must understand first is whether we really hear ourselves and are struggling to hear and respond to ourselves. Until as much attention is turned toward a vision of the kind of life we want to lead and away from the project of a globalized culture, a one-dimensional Americanized world where one size fits all, then education will always be made prêt a porte by the purveyors of conformist pedagogy.
Achieving education for a new political, economic, cultural and spiritual intelligence is in effect to democratize intelligence, creativity and social participation. It creates the autonomy and power needed to begin dismantling big government, decentralizing big government and returning both democracy and education for democracy to the people. Social intelligence is not fixed in the genes no matter how much the Regents of the intelligence bureaucracy at Princeton, not to mention our own ‘street mythologies,’ would have us believe it.
Social intelligence, the democratized intelligence of communities, evolves when communities educate and form themselves to achieve the highest quality of life that they love and cherish in mutual trust. The individual is only as intelligent as the wisdom his community allows. Unless of course one strives for the specialized skills of the new globalized cosmopolitan Man who really has no qualities nor content but is fully useable by the technocracy, bureaucracy, military or financialized business world of transnational capital.
To appreciate how alienated we are from our own power of self-determination, we must ask ourselves some simple questions: when was the last time, if ever, that you sat in on a local School Board meeting let alone, let’s say, a history or social science class in the local High School to experience what and how the students are learning. When have we last thoroughly checked out the text books our children use and asked if they are worth using. Do we even know enough to make that judgement. When was the last time you took a course at the local community college or university to expand your intellectual horizon. When was the last time you tried to address local government regarding issues of any sort in the community. When was the last time you got into a substantive debate with your neighbor about the quality and content of local education, the values and laws of your community, the latest issue in state politics. When was the last time you chose to write a letter to the editor in the local papers or participate regularly on a political blog or started one of your own. When was the last time you questioned how we can continue to do the same things and expect new results whether in education, politics, spirituality, cultural self-expression or especially the love life of your own families and friends. How can we change Washington and America when the roots of such change are not planted firmly in our own hearts and minds. How can we require educational change when we are not changing educationally.
The spiritual and community leaders who are not the mouthpieces of Washington, Wall Steet, Hollywood’s commercialized culture or religions institutionalized spirituality must not only speak truth to power but wisdom to the people in the provinces. She must not only funnel protest toward the professionalized leaders but pull the people back to the neighborhoods, schools and lost souls of local life.
The return to meaningful or effective local power involves the retrieval of lost cultural and historical possibilities. We find this in our pain, our confusion and our lost pasts. Such return is moreover the re-constitution of multi-cultural values and new cultural practices themselves not yet foreseen. It is not a matter whether such values and practices are universalizable across all cultures. It is a matter of whether the particular values and practices can sustain democratic communities, that is free multiplicities of communities living and creating as they see fit. It is a move into the future by recovering the past, a past in which we find the spirit of lost selves and re-create and re-invent their spirit today at home for a sustainable joy, freedom, peace and love.
Several years ago, at the end of the Million Man March on Washington, Louis Farrakahn, leader of the Black Muslims, issued a call I didn’t expect him to make. Having mobilized a million men of color to Washington to ask what it means to be a black man in America and to empower a decimated ethnic group, I expected Mr. Farrakhan to make a play for national power and possibly even prepare the way for a run for the Presidency. But in fact what he asked this inspired throng of supporters to do was not mobilize further for monolithic mass action but to go home and build their communities. In his own way he was asking them to do what the Black Panthers had been doing in the Sixties before they were infected with the self-defeating idea that they were social revolutionaries who might even take national power for themselves. Originally these “panthers” were, wisely enough, community organizers, supporters, creators and builders. Presumably they saw the strength and power of local well-being, consciousness, co-operation, pride and purposefulness. Until they lost sight of what real populist power is capable of today when understood in terms of the primacy of community and local culture.
The revolution in education begins when we realize that it is preceded by proper political action. This is not action from the standpoint of a totalized national consciousness aiming to transform the whole on the basis of a vision of absolute universal uniformity. It begins when we recover the populist consciousness which realizes its power lay in the protest against outside control of local affairs, values, identities, practices and purposes.
The age of the mass collectivization of the people, whether of the communist or liberal kind, is over. The center of the artificially homogenized nation-state of mass robotized pseudo-individuals does not hold. America is too large for its government to presume to legislate for all the particular peoples, communities, traditions and cultures across this great land. American government is overly confident if it continues believing it can bureaucratically manage opposition and control and constitute the cultural existence of vastly diverse communities of people.
The democratic experiment is beginning again in a new way in the name of the only practicable democracy, that of relatively small communities directly participating democratically to govern themselves and create their own lives. American education should play a part in imparting such democratic values if there is to be any real thread internally connecting the particularities of geographically, culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse peoples.
Monday, May 24, 2010
RAISING ARIZONA
Buffalo State College journalism and media arts professor, Michael Niman, mercilessly criticizes Arizona’s immigration policy in a recent ARTVOICE editorial. His effort, however, is a practice in Liberal moralism, American human rights ideology and a de facto apology for state centralist control of community values and autonomy. Of course within the axiological horizon of universal human rights ideology, we could expect nothing less. Such ideology presents ‘human rights’ as if they were a universally accepted set of values when in fact they are the particular values of American political culture though hardly universally accepted in America.
Niman’s heart is in the right place. The problem with that kind of heart however is that it presumes to be saving everyone before it can save anyone. But just as the characters of “Raising Arizona,” the movie, would rather steal someone elses “baby” rather than find legal ways to have their own, so also innumerable immigrants of Mexico, despite how sympathetic their plight may be, would rather profit from the work of others rather than deal with their own problems and poverty at home. Rather than face their own political issues, they flee to America to take advantage of our legal laxity, not to mention double standards. Surely, from a moral standpoint, Niman would save the Mexicans but from a political standpoint, he would not save the Arizonians who are as threatened by neglect by Washington as are the Mexicans by their powers that be. Presumably for Niman such “morality” checkmates the exigencies of law and politics, exigencies which have as many and as deep moral ramifications as do the exigencies of the immigrants.
However, even at the level of an interest in universal human prosperity and moral justice, the local political issue takes precedence over the moral imperative of our national human rights ideology. To allow the regional communities of Arizona to be illegally invaded by immigrants disallows them, firstly, to have a say in what constitutes an acceptable way of life for themselves and, secondly, to have a choice in how the moral dilemma ought to be dealt with.
On what basis does the Nation-state or those who speak in its name have the right to make morally motivated legal decisions for communities whose social fabric is being compromised and whose own constitutional rights are being systematically ignored by politically compromised institutions of “justice.”
Arizona’s legislation may in fact be “loony” as Niman purports but at least they are attempting to remain within the parameters of legality locally while they must suffer the illegitimacy of a “Federal” legal imperative that flouts its own Constitutional mandate nationally. Moreover corporate agriculture and other industries would surely throw Arizona to the wolves as long as it keeps that cheap labor flowing. Arizona must protect itself the best it can. Arizona’s social health is a priority for no one but Arizona. Why should it allow itself to be exploited and sacrificed in the interests of illegitimate national laws that in no way any longer represent their best interests? Arizona is joining a long list of states that would take the populist route and force the kind of decentralist reorganization of our pseudo-Federalism that this “nation” cries out for.
In any ethos of abstract equality and human rights ideology every community is subject to charges of racism as soon as it confronts the difficult problems of re-forming and transforming its communities into the concrete, multi-cultural hybrids necessary to preserve the best of the various traditions, customs and languages that now constitute our national polity. However, preserving the remaining integrity of communities in transformation is necessary if communities and the traditions that constitute them are to survive at all. Whereas Arizona errs on the conservative side of defending its own understanding of the limits and conditions of its communities, it acts defensively against the deleterious actions of a state centralist bureaucracy that would continue to homogenize any population that would dare to assert the prerogatives of its communal needs and rights which are knowable and legitimately determinable only from a decentralized or local standpoint. Whereas Arizona’s educational law seems to be a misguided attempt to preserve and defend particularity through teaching what appears to them to be correct history, it is true that they fail to understand that that particularity is a work in progress. However, official American history is as much a micro-history as is any ethnic history or gender history that seeks either to “set the record” straight or posture itself as the one and only correct history.
Niman’s historical review does not, however, justify illegal immigrants transgressing Federal Law. It does not relieve the Federal government from the obligation to enforce it. Whatever ethnic tapestry now constitutes Arizona, this is not a justification to prevent that state from defending itself as the legal polity that it is. Defending such illegal immigration is no more defensible than is the Chinese invasion of Tibet because apparently 1500 years ago what is now Tibet was “part of China.”
The solution to the oppression that Niman speaks of is not the disempowerment and political disenfranchisement of struggling communities opting for populist alternatives to modernist ideology of progress and universal human rights. Such human rights are a particular set of values falsely universalized in the interests of the Political Class benefitting from the powers and privileges of centralized nation-state prerogatives.
The contradictions that Arizona’s legislature has generated are not wholly the fault of Arizonians. They are caught between the Scylla of extremely excessive and illegal immigration and the Charybdis of a nation-state that chooses to accuse it of racism and unconstitutional actions rather than itself deal with the issues, not to mention the mandates of the Constitution itself.
Yes, we do need to “raise Arizona” but not to the expectations of illegal Mexicans compromising local sovereignty; nor to ridicule and condemnation but to the position of an example for other regions seeking populist autonomy to see that, like Arizona, Washington and the Liberal professoriate do not have your interests at heart.
Friday, April 30, 2010
PROSTITUTING THE HUMANITIES
It’s popular sport amongst Humanities faculty these days to have joined ranks with those who find the Humanities suspect and obligated to defend their worth in terms of their contribution to economic productivity. Possibly the question is not why the humanities do or do not have greater economic utility but why the vocational world is ethically bereft if not inhuman. Possibly this is the task before the Humanities that they fear to carry out.
After all if you are not part of the knowledge business that contributes to the bottom line, you are essentially expendable in present day academia. Rather than struggle for a community of learning with a public mission, especially the re-politicization of community itself, the new technocratically conditioned academics would seem to prefer to subordinate the Humanities to the norms of performativity and thus determine the worth of the “liberal arts sensibility” in terms of its potential for sublimation into entrepreneurship.
The “innovative” Humanities, that kind of Humanities discipline worth funding, would be understood as those who study and analyze “what is” in order to identify and evaluate opportunities for improvement thus consciously contributing to “what will be.” In such linear progress from a present of re-workable raw materials to a future of newly profitable productivity, it seems there is little room for any critically reflective relation to traditions and cultures, to memory and history as if creativity and innovation are antithetical to tradition and memory. Whereas the retrospective and innovative are in truth mutually determining, for the new servants of corporate globalization and marketization of knowledge, they seem to be mutually exclusive.
It is one thing to buy into the inevitable globalization and marketization of economic life; it is quite another to presume that cultural change is analogous to the quality of change we see, for example, in “innovative” alterations of the new Volkswagen Beetle. A poet such as T.S.Eliot interprets the Divine Comedy “innovatively” in The Waste Land for its Truth value not as an object lesson in innovative performativity as a mode of corporate entrepreneurship. The new bottom-line Humanists would have our culture and tradition-- or what is left of it in the face of modernist devastation of what cannot be capitalized upon-- made prêt a porte. It would have our cultures change globally with the rapidity and arbitrariness of the fashion industry and with equally uniform universlity. Such “conservation” seems more to embalm the accidental than preserve the essential.
We surely do not proceed tabula rasa in neither cultural nor economic change, and, for example, surely we do not re-write the Constitution every 15 years; however, when Law is politically instrumentalized in the service of trans-national corporate capital it need not be re-written. It need merely be hermeneutically raped in facilitating the interests of corporatization, militarization and the financialization of the economy. The Law itself like the fashion industry can also be re-made prêt a porte thus living up to the virtue of “innovation.”
Whereas the students pursuing knowledge in the productive spheres realize they must compete in the global insurgency of capital and soon after graduating join their “army,” the Humanities student, which should essentially be all students, has not yet realized he must join the resistance against the decimation of culture, tradition, history and memory in order for his knowledge to be truly innovative in the public sphere and not merely exploitable for the purposes of the private sphere. If he does not, he may soon be “innovated” out of his own humanity for a new and more useable ‘replicant’ model that’s easier to reproduce.
Should we revere the Humanities only for providing for a ‘transfer of learning’ which expedites the performative powers of the captains of industry? Should we validate the Humanities only for having been found to provide models for how to practice technically innovative thinking? Are the Humanities now justified merely in having been shown to have similar cognitive skills and processes as in the hard sciences? Is the “innovative thinking” of the Humanities redeemed in the transferability of its kind of learning and inquiry as a utilizable sensibility and set of skills for the technical and productive sciences?
If so, I suggest the Humanities have yet to be understood let alone appreciated especially in their political relevance for cultural self-preservation in the face of globalization and in their human relevance as spiritually of intrinsic worth in the face of entrenched secularist nihilism.
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