American Dignity on Fourth of July

SUBHEAD: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Independence Day address may provide some perspective on today.

By David Remnick on 1 July 2017 for the New Yorker -
(http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/american-dignity-on-the-fourth-of-july)


Image above: Derived from a painting of Frederick Douglass in 1852 when he was a young man. From (https://www.pinterest.com/explore/frederick-douglass-autobiography/).

Frederick Douglass’s Independence Day address from 1852 may provide some perspective on today.

More than three-quarters of a century after the delegates of the Second Continental Congress voted to quit the Kingdom of Great Britain and declared that “all men are created equal,” Frederick Douglass stepped up to the lectern at Corinthian Hall, in Rochester, New York, and, in an Independence Day address to the Ladies of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, made manifest the darkest ironies embedded in American history and in the national self-regard. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass asked:

I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

The dissection of American reality, in all its complexity, is essential to political progress, and yet it rarely goes unpunished. One reason that the Republican right and its attendant media loathed Barack Obama is that his public rhetoric, while far more buoyant with post-civil-rights-era uplift than Douglass’s, was also an affront to reactionary pieties.

Even as Obama tried to win votes, he did not paper over the duality of the American condition: its idealism and its injustices; its heroism in the fight against Fascism and its bloody misadventures before and after.

His idea of a patriotic song was “America the Beautiful”—not in its sentimental ballpark versions but the way that Ray Charles sang it, as a blues, capturing the “fullness of the American experience, the view from the bottom as well as the top.”

Donald Trump, who, in fairness, has noted that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job,” represents an entirely different tradition. He has no interest in the wholeness of reality.

He descends from the lineage of the Know-Nothings, the doomsayers and the fabulists, the nativists and the hucksters. The thematic shift from Obama to Trump has been from “lifting as we climb” to “raising the drawbridge and bolting the door.”

Trump may operate a twenty-first-century Twitter machine, but he is still a frontier-era drummer peddling snake oil, juniper tar, and Dr. Tabler’s Buckeye Pile Cure for profit from the back of a dusty wagon.

As a candidate, Trump told his followers that he would fulfill “every dream you ever dreamed for your country.” But he is a plutocrat. His loyalty is to the interests of the plutocracy.

Trump’s vows of solidarity with the struggling working class, with the victims of globalization and deindustrialization, are a fraud. He made coal miners a symbol of his campaign, but he has always held them in contempt.

To him, they are luckless schmoes who fail to possess his ineffable talents. “The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son,” Trump once told Playboy. “If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination—or whatever—to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it.’ ”

Trump is hardly the first bad President in American history—he has not had adequate time to eclipse, in deed, the very worst—but when has any politician done so much, so quickly, to demean his office, his country, and even the language in which he attempts to speak?

Every day, Trump wakes up and erodes the dignity of the Presidency a little more. He tells a lie. He tells another. He trolls Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He trolls the press, bellowing “enemy of the people” and “fake news!” He shoves aside a Balkan head of state. He summons his Cabinet members to have them swear fealty to his awesomeness. He leers at an Irish journalist.

Last Thursday, he tweeted at Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, of MSNBC:

“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came . . . to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

The President’s misogyny and his indecency are well established. When is it time to question his mental stability?

The atmosphere of debasement and indignity in the White House, it appears, is contagious. Trump’s family and the aides who hastened to serve him have learned to imitate his grossest reflexes, and to hell with the contradictions.

Melania Trump, whose “cause” is cyber-bullying, defends the poisoned tweet at Brzezinski. His righteously feminist daughter Ivanka stays mum. After the recent special election in Georgia, Kellyanne Conway, the counsellor to the President, tweeted, “Laughing my #Ossoff.” The wit! The valor! Verily, the return of Camelot!

Trump began his national ascendancy by hoisting the racist banner of birtherism. Since then, as candidate and as President, he has found countless ways to pollute the national atmosphere. If someone suggests a lie that is useful to him, he will happily pass it along or endorse it. This habit is not without purpose or cumulative effect.

Even if Trump fails in his most ambitious policy initiatives, whether it is liberating the wealthy from their tax obligations or liberating the poor from their health care, he has already begun to foster a public sphere in which, as Hannah Arendt put it in her treatise on totalitarian states, millions come to believe that “everything was possible and that nothing was true.”

Frederick Douglass ended his Independence Day jeremiad in Rochester with steadfast optimism (“I do not despair of this country”). Read his closing lines, and what despair you might feel when listening to a President who abets ignorance, isolation, and cynicism is eased, at least somewhat.

The “mental darkness” of earlier times is done, Douglass reminded his audience. “Intelligence is penetrating the darkest corners of the globe.”

There is yet hope for the “great principles” of the Declaration of Independence and “the genius of American Institutions.” There was reason for optimism then, as there is now. Donald Trump is not forever. Sometimes it just seems that way.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: The American Unraveling 7/29/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Birthday Card 7/4/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Happy Independence Day! 7/4/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Halfway There 7/1/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Rocket's Red Glare? 7/1/09
Island Breath: American patriotism's failure 7/4/08
Island Breath: July 4th Plantation Days 7/4/08
Island Breath: Thinking about July Fourth 7/4/07

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American Dream's last gasp

SUBHEAD: Many think of the federal government as anything more than a vast mechanism operated by rich crooks.

By John Michael Greer on 2 Novemner 2016 for the Archdruid Report -
(thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-last-gasp-of-american-dream.html)


Image above: The RNC third night is abizarre evening filled with fourth-rate public figures who speak on the theme is “Make America First Again”. From (https://newrepublic.com/minutes/135353/crowd-rnc-greedy-red-meat).

Just at the moment, many of my readers—and of course a great many others as well—are paying close attention to which of the two most detested people in American public life will put a hand on a Bible in January, and preside thereafter over the next four years of this nation’s accelerating decline and fall.

That focus is understandable, and not just because both parties have trotted out the shopworn claim that this election, like every other one in living memory, is the most important in our lifetimes. For a change, there are actual issues involved.

Barring any of the incidents that could throw the election into the House of Representatives, we’ll know by this time next week whether the bipartisan consensus that’s been welded firmly in place in American politics since the election of George W. Bush will stay intact for the next four years.

That consensus, for those of my readers who haven’t been paying attention, supports massive giveaways to big corporations and the already affluent, punitive austerity for the poor, malign neglect for the nation’s infrastructure, the destruction of the American working class through federal subsidies for automation and offshoring and tacit acceptance of mass illegal immigration as a means of driving down wages, and a monomaniacally confrontational foreign policy obsessed with the domination of the Middle East by raw military force.

Those are the policies that George W. Bush and Barack Obama pursued through four presidential terms, and they’re the policies that Hillary Clinton has supported throughout her political career.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has been arguing against several core elements of that consensus since the beginning of his run for office. Specifically, he’s calling for a reversal of federal policies that support offshoring of jobs, the enforcement of US immigration law, and a less rigidly confrontational stance toward Russia over the war in Syria.

It’s been popular all through the current campaign for Clinton’s supporters to insist that nobody actually cares about these issues, and that Trump’s supporters must by definition be motivated by hateful values instead, but that rhetorical gimmick has been a standard thoughstopper on the left for many years now, and it simply won’t wash.

The reason why Trump was able to sweep aside the other GOP candidates, and has a shot at winning next week’s election despite the unanimous opposition of this nation’s political class, is that he’s the first presidential candidate in a generation to admit that the issues just mentioned actually matter.

That was a ticket to the nomination, in turn, because outside the bicoastal echo chamber of the affluent, the US economy has been in freefall for years. I suspect that a great many financially comfortable people in today’s America have no idea just how bad things have gotten here in the flyover states.

The recovery of the last eight years has only benefited the upper 20% or so by income of the population; the rest have been left to get by on declining real wages, while simultaneously having to face skyrocketing rents driven by federal policies that prop up the real estate market, and stunning increases in medical costs driven by Obama’s embarrassingly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.”

It’s no accident that death rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are soaring just now among working class white people.

These are my neighbors, the people I talk with in laundromats and lodge meetings, and they’re being driven to the wall.

Most of the time, affluent liberals who are quick to emote about the sufferings of poor children in conveniently distant corners of the Third World like to brush aside the issues I’ve just raised as irrelevancies.

I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve heard people insist that the American working class hasn’t been destroyed, that its destruction doesn’t matter, or that it was the fault of the working classes themselves. I’ve occasionally heard people attempt to claim all three of these things at once.

On those occasions when the mainstream left deigns to recognize the situation I’ve sketched out, it’s usually in the terms Hillary Clinton used in her infamous “basket of deplorables” speech, in which she admitted that there were people who hadn’t benefited from the recovery and “we need to do something for them.” That the people in question might deserve to have a voice in what’s done for them, or to them, is not part of the vocabulary of the affluent American left.

That’s why, if you pay a visit to the town where I live, you’ll find Trump signs all over the place—and you’ll find the highest concentration of them in the poor neighborhood just south of my home, a bleak rundown zone where there’s a church every few blocks and an abandoned house every few doors, and where the people tipping back beers on a porch of a summer evening rarely all have the same skin color.

They know exactly what they need, and what tens of thousands of other economically devastated American communities need: enough full-time jobs at decent wages to give them the chance to lift their families out of poverty.

They understand that need, and discuss it in detail among themselves, with a clarity you’ll rarely find in the media. (It’s a source of wry amusement to me that the best coverage of the situation on the ground here in the flyover states appeared, not in any of America’s newspapers of record, nor in any of its allegedly serious magazines, but in a raucous NSFW online humor magazine.)

What’s more, the working class people who point to a lack of jobs as the cause of middle America’s economic collapse are dead right.

The reason why those tens of thousands of American communities are economically devastated is that too few people have enough income to support the small businesses and local economies that used to thrive there.

The money that used to keep main streets bustling across the United States, the wages that used to be handed out on Friday afternoons to millions of Americans who’d spent the previous week putting in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, have been siphoned off to inflate the profits of a handful of huge corporations to absurd levels and cater to the kleptocratic feeding frenzy that’s made multimillion-dollar bonuses a matter of course at the top of the corporate food chain.

It really is as simple as that.

The Trump voters in the neighborhood south of my home may not have a handle on all the details, but they know that their survival depends on getting some of that money flowing back into paychecks to be spent in their community.

It’s an open question whether they’re going to get that if Donald Trump wins the election, and a great many of his supporters know this perfectly well. It’s as certain as anything can be, though, that they’re not going to get it from Hillary Clinton.

The economic policy she’s touted in her speeches, to the extent that this isn’t just the sort of campaign rhetoric that will pass its pull date the moment the last vote is counted, focuses on improving opportunities for the middle class—the people, in other words, who have already reaped the lion’s share of those economic benefits that didn’t go straight into the pockets of the rich.

To the working classes, she offers nothing but a repetition of the same empty slogans and disposable promises.

What’s more, they know this, and another round of empty slogans and disposable promises isn’t going to change that.

Nor, it probably needs to be said, is it going to be changed by another round of media handwaving designed to make Donald Trump look bad in the eyes of affluent liberals.

I’ve noted with some amusement the various news stories on the highbrow end of the media noting, in tones variously baffled and horrified, that when you show Trump supporters videos designed to make them less enthusiastic about their candidate, they double down.

Any number of canned theories have been floated to explain why that happens, but none that I’ve heard have dealt with the obvious explanations.

To begin with, it’s not as though that habit is only found on Trump’s side of the fence.

In recent weeks, as one Wikileaks email dump after another has forced an assortment of stories about Clinton’s arrogant and corrupt behavior into the news, her followers have doubled down just as enthusiastically as Trump’s; those of my readers who are familiar with the psychology of previous investment will likely notice that emotional investment is just as subject to this law as the financial kind.

For that matter, supporters of both candidates are quite sensibly aware that this election is meant to choose a public official rather than a plaster saint, and recognize that a genuine scoundrel who will take the right stands on the issues that matter to them is a better choice than a squeaky-clean innocent who won’t, even if such an animal could actually be found in the grubby ecosystem of contemporary American politics.

That said, there’s another factor that probably plays an even larger role, which is that when working class Americans get told by slickly groomed talking heads in suits that something they believe is wrong, their default assumption is that the talking heads are lying.

Working class Americans, after all, have very good reason for making this their default assumption. Over and over again, that’s the way things have turned out.

The talking heads insisted that handing over tax dollars to various corporate welfare queens would bring jobs back to American communities; the corporations in question pocketed the tax dollars and walked away.

The talking heads insisted that if working class people went to college at their own expense and got retrained in new skills, that would bring jobs back to American communities; the academic industry profited mightily but the jobs never showed up, leaving tens of millions of people buried so deeply under student loan debt that most of them will never recover financially.

The talking heads insisted that this or that or the other political candidate would bring jobs back to American communities by pursuing exactly the same policies that got rid of the jobs in the first place—essentially the same claim that the Clinton campaign is making now—and we know how that turned out.

For that matter, trust in talking heads generally is at an all-time low out here in flyover country.

Consider the way that herbal medicine—“God’s medicine” is the usual phrase these days—has become the go-to option for a huge and growing number of devout rural Christians.

There are plenty of reasons why that should be happening, but surely one of the most crucial is the cascading loss of faith in the slickly groomed talking heads that sell modern medicine to consumers.

Herbs may not be as effective as modern pharmaceuticals in treating major illnesses, to be sure, but they generally don’t have the ghastly side effects that so many pharmaceuticals will give you.

Furthermore, and just as crucially, nobody ever bankrupted their family and ended up on the street because of the high price of herbs.

It used to be, not all that long ago, that the sort of people we’re discussing trusted implicitly in American society and its institutions.

They were just as prone as any urban sophisticate to distrust this or that politician or businessperson or cultural figure, to be sure; back in the days when local caucuses and county conventions of the two main political parties still counted for something, you could be sure of hearing raucous debates about a galaxy of personalities and issues.

Next to nobody, though, doubted that the basic structures of American society were not merely sound, but superior to all others.

You won’t find that certainty in flyover country these days.

Where you hear such claims made at all, they’re phrased in the kind of angry and defensive terms that lets everyone know that the speaker is trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t entirely believe any more, or in the kind of elegaic tones that hearken back to an earlier time when things still seemed to work—when the phrase “the American Dream” still stood for a reality that many people had experienced and many more could expect to achieve for themselves and their children.

Very few people out here think of the federal government as anything more than a vast mechanism operated by rich crooks for their own benefit, at the expense of everyone else.

What’s more, the same cynical attitude is spreading to embrace the other institutions of American society, and—lethally—the ideals from which those institutions get whatever legitimacy they still hold in the eyes of the people.

Those of my readers who were around in the late 1980s and early 1990s have seen this movie before, though it came with Cyrillic subtitles that time around.

By 1985 or so, it had become painfully obvious to most citizens of the Soviet Union that the grand promises of Marxism would not be kept and the glorious future for which their grandparents and great-grandparents had fought and labored was never going to arrive.

Glowing articles in Pravda and Izvestia insisted that everything was just fine in the Worker’s Paradise; annual five-year plans presupposed that economic conditions would get steadily better while, for most people, economic conditions got steadily worse.

Vast May Day parades showed off the Soviet Union’s military might, Soyuz spacecraft circled the globe to show off its technological prowess, and tame intellectuals comfortably situated in the more affluent districts of Moscow and Leningrad, looking forward to their next vacation at their favorite Black Sea resort, chattered in print about the good life under socialism, while millions of ordinary Soviet citizens trudged through a bleak round of long lines, product shortages, and system-wide dysfunction.

Then crisis hit, and the great-great-grandchildren of the people who surged to the barricades during the Russian Revolution shrugged, and let the Soviet Union unravel in a matter of days.

I suspect we’re much closer to a similar cascade of events here in the United States than most people realize. My fellow peak oil blogger Dmitry Orlov pointed out a decade or so back, in a series of much-reprinted blog posts and his book Reinventing Collapse, that the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States were far less important than their similarities, and that a Soviet-style collapse was a real possibility here—a possibility for which most Americans are far less well prepared than their Russian equivalents in the early 1990s.

His arguments have become even more compelling as the years have passed, and the United States has become mired ever more deeply in a mire of institutional dysfunction and politico-economic kleptocracy all but indistinguishable from the one that eventually swallowed its erstwhile rival.

Point by point, the parallels stand out.

• We’ve got the news articles insisting, in tones by turns glowing and shrill, that things have never been better in the United States and anyone who says otherwise is just plain wrong.
   
• We’ve got the economic pronouncements predicated on continuing growth at a time when the only things growing in the US economy are its total debt load and the number of people who are permanently unemployed.
  
• We’ve got the overblown displays of military might and technological prowess, reminiscent of nothing so much as the macho posturing of balding middle-aged former athletes who are trying to pretend that they haven’t lost it.
  
• We’ve got the tame intellectuals comfortably situated in the more affluent suburban districts around Boston, New York, Washington, and San Francisco, looking forward to their next vacation in whatever the currently fashionable spot might happen to be, babbling on the internet about the good life under predatory cybercapitalism.

Meanwhile millions of Americans trudge through a bleak round of layoffs, wage cuts, part-time jobs at minimal pay, and system-wide dysfunction.

The crisis hasn’t hit yet, but those members of the political class who think that the people who used to be rock-solid American patriots will turn out en masse to keep today’s apparatchiks secure in their comfortable lifestyles have, as the saying goes, another think coming.

 Nor is it irrelevant that most of the enlisted personnel in the armed forces, who are the US government’s ultimate bulwark against popular unrest, come from the very classes that have lost faith most drastically in the American system.

The one significant difference between the Soviet case and the American one at this stage of the game is that Soviet citizens had no choice but to accept the leaders the Communist Party of the USSR foisted off on them, from Brezhnev to Andropov to Chernenko to Gorbachev, until the system collapsed of its own weight.

American citizens, on the other hand, do at least potentially have a choice.

Elections in the United States have been riddled with fraud for most of two centuries, but since both parties are generally up to their eyeballs in voter fraud to a roughly equal degree, fraud mostly swings close elections.

 It’s still possible for a sufficiently popular candidate to overwhelm the graveyard vote, the crooked voting machines, and the other crass realities of American elections by sheer force of numbers.

That way, an outsider unburdened with the echo-chamber thinking of a dysfunctional elite might just be able to elbow his way into the White House. Will that happen this time? No one knows.

If George W. Bush was our Leonid Brezhnev, as I’d suggest, and Barack Obama is our Yuri Andropov, Hillary Clinton is running for the position of Konstantin Chernenko; her running mate Tim Kaine, in turn, is waiting in the wings as a suitably idealistic and clueless Mikhail Gorbachev, under whom the whole shebang can promptly go to bits.

While I don’t seriously expect the trajectory of the United States to parallel that of the Soviet Union anything like as precisely as this satiric metaphor would suggest, the basic pattern of cascading dysfunction ending in political collapse is quite a common thing in history, and a galaxy of parallels suggests that the same thing could very easily happen here within the next decade or so.

The serene conviction among the political class and their affluent hangers-on that nothing of the sort could possibly take place is just another factor making it more likely.

It’s by no means certain that a Trump presidency will stop that from happening, and jolt the United States far enough out of its current death spiral to make it possible to salvage something from the American experiment.

Even among Trump’s most diehard supporters, it’s common to find people who cheerfully admit that Trump might not change things enough to matter; it’s just that when times are desperate enough—and out here in the flyover states, they are—a leap in the dark is preferable to the guaranteed continuation of the unendurable.

Thus the grassroots movement that propelled Trump to the Republican nomination in the teeth of the GOP establishment, and has brought him to within a couple of aces of the White House in the teeth of the entire US political class, might best be understood as the last gasp of the American dream.

Whether he wins or loses next week, this country is moving into the darkness of an uncharted night—and it’s not out of place to wonder, much as Hamlet did, what dreams may come in that darkness.

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Forced patriotism usually backfires

SUBHEAD: Florida Orange County Public Schools are forcing students to stand during national anthem.

By Andy Campbell on 16 September 2106 for Huffington Post -
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-forces-students-to-stand-during-national-anthem_us_57dc4832e4b0071a6e0765b3)


Image above: Defiant: NFL San Francisco 49ers teammates Colin Kaepernick (r) and Eric Reid (l) kneel during national anthem last week. From (http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2016/09/14/kayte-christensen-is-it-kaepernicks-method-or-message/).

Florida’s Orange County Public Schools announced this week that their students must have parental permission if they want to kneel during the national anthem at football games.

The move comes after students in at least one school district in the state reportedly knelt in solidarity with 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest against social injustice in America.

District officials told WSBTV that they were following state law regarding the pledge of allegiance, a strict and controversial statute that requires unadulterated participation in patriotic gestures.
The statute reads, in part:

Each district school board may adopt rules to require, in all of the schools of the district, programs of a patriotic nature to encourage greater respect for the government of the United States and its national anthem and flag ... When the national anthem is played, students and all civilians shall stand at attention, men removing the headdress, except when such headdress is worn for religious purposes ... Upon written request by his or her parent, the student must be excused from reciting the [pledge of allegiance], including standing and placing the right hand over his or her heart. When the pledge is given, unexcused students must show full respect to the flag by standing at attention

Other school districts are punishing students who don’t follow state law. In Collier County, one principal is telling students that they’ll be sent home if they don’t stand during the anthem during sporting events, WFLA reports.

“You will stand and you will stay quiet,” Lely High School Principal Ryan Nemeth announced. “If you don’t, you are going to be sent home and you’re not going to have a refund of your ticket price.”

 Of course, such statutes fly in the face of Kaepernick’s protest (and the right to protest in general), but they’re also less lenient than in other states.

In Washington state, for example, students have the right to choose if they want to take part in the pledge:

[Schools] shall cause appropriate flag exercises to be held in each classroom at the beginning of the school day, and in every school at the opening of all school assemblies, at which exercises those pupils so desiring shall recite the following salute to the flag.

The debate over how much freedom students have rages on in Florida. State lawmakers introducing a bill in February argued that too many disclaimers were being posted notifying students of their right to opt out of the pledge via parental permission.

The bill would have put that disclaimer into student handbooks rather than conspicuous places on campus, though it would later die.

Forcing students to stand at all may be unconstitutional. In fact, previous decisions in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have found that the portion of Florida law requiring students to “stand at attention” violated the First Amendment.

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A pleasant lull

SUBHEAD: We’d rather crash and burn than change anything about our behavior, or even our perception.


By James Kunstler on 5 September 2016 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-pleasant-lull/)


Image above: Illustration of a classic backyard American holiday barbecue. From (https://rogerwilkersonblog.wordpress.com/tag/cookout/page/2/).

A pleasant lull lies over the land where today fewer people labor honestly — and some labor gruelingly for too little — while a matrix of rackets sustains the illusion that our living arrangements have a future.

Is Quarterback Colin Kaepernick on the minds of the millions moiling around their backyard barbeques?

I applaud his refusal to stand for the national anthem, though not for the reasons he stated. Rather, because I’m sick of vulgar symbolism in a dark moment of a fraying culture that demands more than cheap talk and lame gestures.

In case you’re wondering, the reason we’re subject to all these repetitions of The Star Spangled Banner is not for love-of-country but something quite the opposite: the fear that its promises are empty.

Ever wonder why every public official in the land has to wear a flag lapel pin? Should it be necessary for the president of the US to signal his devotion to duty?

Wouldn’t we normally just assume this to be the case?

No, it signals the widespread and generalized anxiety that the national condition is dire and that we don’t have the confidence or the clarity to face the challenges of the time. President Obama might as well wear a crucifix or a bulb of garlic in his lapel.

In this presidential election year especially, Labor Day serves as a sort of collective deep breath before the plunge into a season of political anguish. The number of potential voters disgusted with the choice between two clueless monsters of egotism must be epic.

If WalMart held a sale on bullshit filters, they might stand a chance of turning a Q3 profit. Otherwise, expect economic performance to be increasingly frightening even if The New York Times and CNN continue to spin out tales of unicorns jumping rainbows.

Events, not personalities, are going to demonstrate where things are at in the late-stage techno-industrial crack-up at hand. The shamans at the Federal Reserve have exhausted their repertoire of incantations for levitating the financial markets and, more ominously, the value of the US dollar.

The prankish god they serve has arranged things so that the very faith needed to sustain their illusory influence will run down the drain as November 8 creeps closer. They must be getting awfully nervous down at the Eccles Building.

The sudden bankruptcy of South Korea’s Hanjin Shipping Company ought to send shivers down the scaly spines of globalism’s cheerleaders. Fragility is everywhere in this unraveling network of gigantic, far-flung promises and obligations.

The former middle class of America has lost its ability to absorb anymore smart phones or Kardashian brand Pure Glitz hairspray©. They’re pacing grooves in the faux hardwood floors of their McHomes through reams of unpayable bills trying to stave off the re-po squad while Grandma slips into a diabetic coma.

These are the good folks who supposedly comprise 70 percent of the so-called economy, a.k.a. “consumers.” You can stick a fork in them — and maybe we’ll hear a few reports of that on Tuesday when the holiday barbeques smolder their last.

More concerning, though, are the conditions of the banks. When their true insolvency is revealed — which may coincide with the height of the election season — look out below.

The bankruptcy of one measly shipping company will look like a zit on the ass of a diving blue whale as countless trade operations seize up for lack of confidence that they will ever be paid. Then what?

Then we are forced to pay attention to the actual dynamics now at work in the world. Or be driven crazy by our refusal to get with the program. I tend to think we’ll opt for the latter.

We’re too unused to reality. We’d rather crash and burn than change anything about our behavior, or even our perception.

Both Trump and Hillary are perfect avatars for this date with a hard landing. The disorder both of them are capable of inducing will be a spectacle for the ages.

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Deep State Death Spiral

SUBHEAD: The nation is wallowing self-piteously in a fetid trough of denial and adolescent rage/magical thinking.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 26 May 2015 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay15/surplus-repression5-15.html)


Image above: Adolescent dream - Captain America -  battered but still heroic in his fight against evil. From (http://bigbmh.deviantart.com/art/Captain-America-Fan-Poster-216119404).

If you type Deep State into the custom search window in the right sidebar, the search results fill 10 pages. I think it is fair to say I have long had a deep interest in the Deep State.

The Deep State is generally assumed to be monolithic: of one mind, so to speak, unified in worldview, strategy and goals.

In my view, this is an over-simplification of a constantly shifting battleground of paradigms and power between a number of factions and alliances within the Deep State. Disagreements are not publicized, of course, but they become apparent years or decades after the conflict was resolved, usually by one faction consolidating the Deep State's group-think around their worldview and strategy.

History suggests that this low-intensity conflict within the ruling Elite is generally a healthy characteristic of leadership in good times. As times grow more troubled, however, the unity of the ruling Elite fractures into irreconcilable political disunity, which becomes a proximate cause of the dissolution of the Empire if it continues.

I recently proposed the idea that Wall Street now poses a strategic threat to national security and thus to the Deep State itself: Who Gets Thrown Under the Bus in the Next Financial Crisis? (March 3, 2014)

Many consider it "impossible" that Wall Street could possibly lose its political grip on the nation's throat, but I suggest that Wall Street has over-reached, and is now teetering at the top of the S-Curve, i.e. it has reached Peak Wall Street.

Have We Reached Peak Wall Street?

Consider what the extremes of Wall Street/Federal Reserve predation, parasitism, avarice and power have done to the nation, and then ask if other factions within the Deep State are blind to the destructive consequences.

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

Frequent contributor B.C. recently submitted two working papers from the Deep State network that suggested rampant financialization was harming the real economy. This is powerful evidence that the corrosive consequences of financialization on the stability of the real economy is filtering into the group-think hive of the Deep State Network:

Why does financial sector growth crowd out real economic growth? (Bank for International Settlements) After studying how financial development affects aggregate productivity growth, we concluded that the level of financial development is good only up to a point, after which it becomes a drag on growth, and that a fast-growing financial sector is detrimental to aggregate productivity growth.

Rethinking Financial Deepening: Stability and Growth in Emerging Markets (International Monetary Fund)

Here is a sketch of The Deep State Network, which includes not only the nodes of centralized power but of the institutions that feed and support the Deep State's decisions and policies. These include Ivy League and federally funded research universities, the Mainstream Media, think-tanks, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and the spectrum of institutions that influence the public's ability to frame and contextualize events, i.e. the institutions of propaganda.

A recent interview with Deep State scholar Peter Dale Scott made me wonder if the increasingly repressive policies of the visible state are also being recognized as destabilizing and therefore a threat to the entire American Imperial Project.

Scott's key phrase is surplus repression, which I interpret to mean repression that exceeds the practical needs of the Deep State to maintain public order.

We can anticipate the Deep State fracturing over the question of how much repression is enough: those who believe there is no upper limit on the effectiveness of repression, and those who understand that at some point, unlimited policing and financial repression will unleash a social destabilization that will threaten the integrity of the Empire and the Deep State itself.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

The American Deep State: An Interview with Peter Dale Scott

Peter Phillips: We’re really happy to have you here. I’ve just finished reading your book, The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy In your new book you talk about the egalitarian mindset culture of America. We believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, open government, transparency. And then you say also that there’s a dark side, or a deep side inside America that’s repressive, that is looking to be able to detain people without warrants, warrantless wire tapping and all of that – there’s a repressive side. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you frame this understanding of this culture of repression?

Peter Dale Scott: Actually, I think there’s always been a deep state in America and there have been times when it has been very repressive. We’re in a period of, you might say, surplus repression – repression that doesn’t serve anyone’s interests, not even the interests of the ruling class. (emphasis by CHS)

But it’s not in its essence repressive; it’s just repressive when it wants to be. I think a lot of the trouble we’re in now, actually is – and I say this in my book – that in the 1970s the deep state – the bankers, the lawyers, the people in foundations, all kinds of people – were really quite terrified at the forces in America calling for revolution – the African-Americans, but also, equally and perhaps ultimately even more, the anti-war movement because if you had a successful anti-war movement that would mean America would have to get out of the business of war. And that was, I think, an intolerable thought for them.

I think the Deep State was terrified of more than the anti-war movement--it was terrified of the counter-culture, which threatened the entire status quo of mindless consumerism and obedience to authority.

The Counterculture, which included the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement and the birth/expansion of the feminist movement, Eastern spirituality in the U.S., back-to-the-land self-sufficiency, rock music as a cultural force, the nonviolent anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement, experimentation with communal living and drugs, Futurist concepts, and a widespread expansion of freedom of self-expression and experimentation. Many observers believe this era also launched a Fourth Awakening as evangelical denominations expanded and "Jesus freaks" found religious inspiration outside mainline churches.

The book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer makes a strong case that this era set the stage for the ultimate technological medium of experimentation and self-expression, the personal computer, which then led irresistibly to the World Wide Web (all the foundational technologies of the Internet were in place by 1969-- The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between UCLA and Stanford Research Institute.)

Which changed the world, of course. Those darn hippies!

The 40-Year Cycle of Cultural Change (July 14, 2011)

The nation is wallowing self-piteously in a fetid trough of denial and adolescent rage/magical thinking now that the nation's bogus, debt-based "prosperity" has crashed and cannot be restored, though the visible state (Federal Reserve and elected officials) keep trying to glue Humpty Dumpty back back together again.

The Deep State has been busy powering up the immense machinery of full spectrum repression to contain the inevitable disarray that will follow the collapse of the nation's bogus, debt-based "prosperity."

Our best hope for a productive outcome is that the cadre of those inside the Deep State Network who grasp the self-defeating nature of repression will gain influence over their repression-obsessed peers.

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Mercenary Sports Militarism

SUBHEAD: Pentagon paid sports franchises to salute troops and “conjure up feelings of patriotism and pride”.

By Mac Slavo on 16 May 2015 for SHTF Plan -
(http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/pentagon-paid-sports-franchises-to-salute-troops-and-conjure-up-feelings-of-patriotism-and-pride_05162015)


Image above: Members of The United States Air Force Band's Singing Sergeants joined singers from the Army, Navy, and Marines to perform with Renee Fleming for telivized singing of the national anthem at Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014. (US Air Force photo released from (http://www.usafband.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123401489).

How far will the establishment go to prop up support for its many wars and make average Americans believe we are overseas fighting for ‘freedom’?

Apparently, flag waving, crowd saluting, veteran tributes and declarations of support for the troops and other nods to the military/guard that take place at the average professional sports game during half time – while crowds eat stadium dogs and drink down beers and look on gloatingly – weren’t spontaneous displays of patriotism.

Instead, they were staged managed military PR events that came with a price tag for taxpayers. Expenditures by the Pentagon and National Guard to buy sponsorship and promotional deals with numerous NFL teams, NASCAR and other sporting arenas have come under scrutiny with some members of Congress:

The Pentagon would have to justify the military necessity of spending millions on sports sponsorships under a measure approved Thursday by the Senate.
[…]
The Pentagon has given millions to professional sports leagues in recent years in exchange for “patriotic tributes.”
[…]
From 2011 to 2013, the cost of the Guard’s NASCAR sponsorships totaled $88 million. Its sponsorship of NASCAR was aimed at building “brand awareness” for the service, according to the Guard. The Guard announced last summer that it was ending its relationship with NASCAR.
[…]
USA TODAY reported last year that the Guard had spent $26.5 million to sponsor NASCAR in 2012 but failed to sign up a single new recruit.

The Guard received about 25,000 recruiting prospects from the program in 2012, with prospects indicating the NASCAR affiliation made them seek more information. But of that group of 25,000, only 20 met the Guard’s qualifications for entry into the service. Not one of them joined.

So the justification is recruitment and awareness, but the deeper effort is the public image of the military itself as an organization.
Besides being wasteful spending, it basically amounts to sleazy, pay-for-play patriotism, giving major sports franchises lucrative incentives to embed military tributes and ceremonies into the game and create a picture in the minds of viewers that of an unwavering force for good.

“The intent of these advertising partnerships is to promote the (National Guard) brand within the thousands of communities in which we serve that results in increased awareness of opportunities the (National Guard) has to offer,” said Brown. (source)

Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), for one, was kind of let down by the ruse of self-promotion:

[…] Flake wrote, “giving taxpayer funds to professional sports teams for activities that are portrayed to the public as paying homage to U.S. military personnel would seem inappropriate.

“Such promotions conjure up feelings of patriotism and pride for most sports fans, and the revelation that these are in fact paid arrangements is disappointing.”

In some cases, sports fans were misled on the source of the recognition. New Yorkers attending MetLife Stadium, for instance, were not made aware that a “hometown heroes segment” was anything but homegrown, and had instead been arranged and paid for by military campaigners.

During the 2012 and 2013 NFL seasons, for example, the New Jersey Army National Guard paid the franchise between $97,000 and $115,000 for a wide range of advertising and promotion, including a video board feature recognizing hometown heroes and 500,000 digital banner impressions inside MetLife Stadium.

A team official who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue said the agreement with the New Jersey National Guard had expired but said the club would continue to honor members of the military. The person also said the team should have been clear that the hometown heroes segment was a paid advertisement for the New Jersey National Guard.

Here’s the war state in full effect – the repetitive calls to salute flag and “honor veterans” – all part of a larger effort to hide decades of war and foreign policy blunders behind uncritical calls to “support the troops” – no matter what.


Vmage above: A Fox News report titled "Paying the NFL to salute our troops?" . From original article and at (https://youtu.be/uZToqNx33Yo).


This topic has gained scrutiny only through the pressure of budgetary constraints, but the real offense comes from the subtle fascism displayed between mega-corporations, high profile sporting events and the military-industrial complex. Under the guise of recruitment, the Department of Defense and the National Guard paid millions of dollars for professional and college sporting teams to become part of the propaganda. The celebrity athletes beloved by crowd could lend credence to the endeavors of the military.

Meshed into this arrangement are taxpayer funds for new sports stadiums, tax breaks and exemptions for the NFL, NASCAR and other major sporting arenas and a routine housing for propaganda of all kinds. The population has been conditioned to feast at this bread and circuses, and bred to become indifferent and ignorant, and ultimately compliant with the war machine and complex larger military-entertainment empire.

And that’s just the way they’d like to keep it.

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Fake NSA Reform

SUBHEAD: Little to celebrate as USA Freedom Act passes House with looming Patriot Act Reauthorization.

By John Queally on 14 May 2015 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/05/14/fake-reform-little-celebrate-usa-freedom-act-passes-house)


Image above: The House of Representatives passed the USA Freedom Act on Wednesday with a 338-88 vote, but experts say that powers of mass surveillance will continue, and even expand, if the bill passes and becomes law. (Image: EFF/flickr/cc).From original article.

With Patriot Act re-authorization looming, end of domestic phone collection program not enough to assuage civil liberty and privacy advocates.

Though the overwhelming and bipartisan passage of the USA Freedom Act in the House of Representatives on Wednesday portends the end of the NSA's mass collection of Americans' private telephone records, civil liberties groups found little else to celebrate as the ultimate passage of the bill, which now heads to the Senate, would re-authorize a number of worrisome programs by extending the life of the controversial Patriot Act.

Following a federal court ruling last week that deemed a provision of the Patriot Act, known as Section 215, as not a sound legal basis for the bulk phone data collection program, H.R. 2048, which passed the House by a vote of 338-88, would put a definitive end to the practice that was first revealed to the American public by documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

However, despite strong objections from critics, the bill reauthorized Section 215 for other uses and would expanded other surveillance mechanisms and powers for government agencies.

See the full roll call of the vote here.

Though some progressive groups found it possible to support the bill for its strong stance against the domestic phone records program, tougher critics said that though they welcome the end of that specific program, the USA Freedom Act's re-authorization of broader Patriot Act powers could not be ignored.

Advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU had offered some initial support to earlier versions of the bill, but both groups ultimately withdrew their backing of the law once it reached its final form. Others were never convinced and said true reform would come only from allowing the Patriot Act, and all its varied authorities, to sunset as scheduled on June 1.

“Congress has an opportunity to reform mass surveillance by letting the Patriot Act expire, and that’s what they should do," said Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future, which has spearheaded a coalition opposed to mass surveillance, the re-authorization of the Patriot Act, and specifically Section 215.

Wednesday's vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act, said Cheng, would actually "expand the scope of surveillance" by the NSA and others. The USA Freedom Act, she said, "is the opposite of reform. It makes absolutely no sense."

Elaborating on the implications of the bill, she continued:

There is literally no reason for the NSA to be surveilling everyone and their mom in order to go after their targets. Why they aren’t satisfied with the US Constitutional limits on search and seizure and getting a warrant to do so is very suspicious. That’s just rogue and illegal behavior and part of selling a culture of fear. We’re demanding to see them build a case to surveil my mom and millions of Internet users around the world before they get one more peek at our private lives.“

Congress is trying to sell the USA Freedom Act to the American people as reform, but what the bill actually does is extend and expand the government’s power to monitor our communications under the PATRIOT Act. Far from reform, the bill will allow the government to invade even more of our private moments than ever by updating their surveillance powers for the devices and communications platforms we use most often these days.”

This is a fake privacy bill. Corrupt members of Congress and their funders in the defense industry are attempting to package up their surveillance-powers wishlist and misleadingly brand it as ‘USA Freedom.’ This is disappointing and offensive, and we will continue to work to kill this bill and any other attempt to legitimize unconstitutional surveillance systems.”

Within the halls of Congress, however, the climb toward meaningful reform in a Republican-controlled session has been a slog, with civil liberties groups hedging their critiques as well as their enthusiasm. As Russell Berman writes at The Atlantic:

The ACLU, for example, is taking no formal position on the bill even though it sent lawmakers a list of areas in which it didn’t go far enough. [A complex bipartisan] dynamic was on display this week when GOP House leaders rejected a bid by a group of younger libertarian members to offer amendments that would have further restricted the NSA. "This is a very delicate issue,” Speaker John Boehner explained to reporters. “I know members would like to offer some amendments, but this is not a place for people to bring out the wrecking ball.”

Broad majorities of House Democrats and Republicans decided on Wednesday that the Freedom Act was good enough as is, increasing pressure on the Senate to accept their compromise. Yet just how significant would the new law be? Lawmakers in Congress have a tendency to hail just about any bill that gets a bipartisan vote as a landmark achievement. Staunch privacy advocates dismiss it for paying lip service to reform while leaving intrusive surveillance programs untouched. The truth on this one lies somewhere in the middle, said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of its Lawfare blog.

“This is a significant reform and rollback of a FISA program,” he told me. But it pales in the context of the extensive collections of NSA surveillance tools and the many, often unrelated provisions of the Patriot Act. Section 215 is, after all, just one section, and the reforms in this bill beyond ending bulk data collection are modest. “This is one, small program,” Wittes said. “It is not the big enchilada, or even one of the big enchiladas of the NSA programs.”

With the bill now heading to the Senate, critics of the House version are still holding out hope that improvements can be made in the upper chamber. As  Mark Jaycox, legislative analyst for EFF, wrote in the immediate wake of Wednesday's vote:

We believe the House missed an opportunity to strengthen the bill in light of the recent Second Circuit decision. We’re urging the Senate to take steps to strengthen the bill. The bill is now sent over to the Senate, where all eyes will be watching. The Senate is expected to take up the USA Freedom Act anytime in the next two weeks, and is likely to vote on it by May 22. The Senate is uniquely positioned to improve the civil liberties protections in the USA Freedom Act by adding additional transparency and oversight provisions, adding stronger limitations on the collection of data on innocent people, and throwing out some of the recently-added provisions to the bill that were included at the behest of the intelligence community.

He added, "2015 can and should be the year for powerful surveillance reform, and we’re urging the Senate to rise to this opportunity."


.

Homeless

SUBHEAD: The USA is going nowhere because it doesn’t like the new place where history wants to take it.

By James Kunstler on 26 May 2014 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/homeless-2/)


Image above: We left Carthage on a nice run of route 66 rolling though the Missouri countryside.  The endpoint this time is was Carterville and very little of the area is active. Most buildings are boarded up or derelict. From (http://66in25.blogspot.com/2012_05_01_archive.html).

H History is moving the furniture around in the house of mankind just about everywhere but the USA. Things have changed, except here, where people come and go through the rooms of state, and everything looks shabbier by the day, and lethargy eats away at the upholstery like an acid fog, and the walls reverberate with meaningless oratory. The USA is going nowhere because it doesn’t like the new place where history wants to take it.

That is, first of all, a place of far less influence on everybody else, in a new era of desperate struggle to remain modern. That fading modern world is the house that America built, the great post World War Two McMansion stuffed with dubious luxuries in a Las Vegas of the collective mind. History’s bank has foreclosed on it and all the nations and people of the world have been told to make new arrangements for daily life. 

The USA wants everybody to stay put and act as if nothing has changed.

Therefore, change will be forced on the USA. It will take the form of things breaking and not getting fixed. Unfortunately, America furnished its part of the house with stapled-together crap designed to look better than it really was. 

We like to keep the blinds drawn now so as not to see it all coming apart. Barack Obama comes and goes like a pliable butler, doing little more than carrying trays of policy that will be consumed like stale tea cakes — while the wallpaper curls, and the boilers fail down in the basement, and veneers delaminate, and little animals scuttle ominously around in the attic.

Everybody I know is distressed by this toxic languor, this sense of being stuck waiting in a place they want desperately to move on from — like the prison of elder-care where so many find themselves hostage to the futility of staving off a certain ending, while all the family resources drain into various bureaucratic black holes. Do we care that the generations to come will have nothing left, nothing at all?

This Memorial Day the usual pieties are noticeably muted. Few politicians dare to utter sanctimonies about our brave soldiers maimed on far-flung battlefields, when so many of them are stuck waiting alone in dark rooms with only their wounds and phantom limbs for company. If regular civilian medicine is a cruel, hopeless, quasi-criminal racket, imagine what medicine for army veterans must be like — all that plus an overlay of profound government ineptitude and institutionalized ass-covering.

Even the idle chatter about American Dreaming has faded out lately, because too much has happened to families and individuals to demonstrate that people need more than dreams and wishes to make things happen. It’s kind of a relief to not have to listen to those inane exhortations anymore, especially the idiotic shrieking that “We’re number one!”

Others have got our number now. They are going their own way whether we like it or not. The Russians and the Chinese. The voters in Europe. The moiling masses of Arabia and its outlands. The generals in Thailand. Too bad the people of Main Street USA don’t want to do anything but sit on their hands waiting for the rafters to tumble down. My guess is that nothing will bestir us until we wake up one morning surrounded by rubble and dust. By then, America will be a salvage operation.

There’s a long and comprehensive To-Do list that has been waiting for us since at least 2008, when the nation received one forceful blow upside its thick head. We refuse to pay attention. First item on the list: restructure the banks. 

Other items: reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act; disassemble the ridiculous “security” edifice under the NSA; upgrade the US electric grid; close down most of our military bases overseas (and some of our bases in the USA); draw up a constitutional amendment re-defining the alleged “personhood” of corporations; fix the passenger railroad system to prepare for the end of Happy Motoring; rebuild Main Street commerce to prepare for the death of WalMart and things like it; outlaw GMO foods and promote local food production; shut down casino gambling.

That’s just my list. What’s yours? And when will you step out of this rotting house into the sunshine?

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The Penn State Conflagration

SUBHEAD: The intersection of America's fake warrior culture of football with the nation's fake morals is instructive. By James Kunstler on 14 November 2011 for Kunstler.com - (http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/11/-the-penn-state.html) Image above: Manufactured phoney football patriotism. From (http://evilforalltime.blogspot.com/2011/09/after-fog-manufactured-patriotism-911.html). The Penn State football sex scandal, and the depraved response of the university community at all levels, tells whatever you need to know about the spiritual condition of this floundering, rudderless, republic and its ignoble culture.

For nine years, head coach Joe Paterno covered up a grad student's report of having witnessed former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky anally raping a ten-year-old boy in the athletic department's shower room. The grad student, Mike McQueary, didn't bother to call the police. He was later hired as Paterno's defensive coordinator. Two other Penn State administrators were informed about the rape and let the incident slide, after which Sandusky went on to a lively career in serial child homosexual rape. For many years after the witnessed incident, he was permitted regular access to Penn State's gyms, fields, and locker rooms, while cherry-picking victims from his own foundation, Second Mile, for needy children.

The intersection of America's fake warrior culture of football with the nation's fake moral and ethical culture is instructive. It has many levels, like a convoluted freeway intersection of on-ramps, off-ramps, and merge-ramps.

First is the pretense that college football is a character-building endeavor. Rather it's an odious money-grubbing racket that chews up and spits out quasi-professional players who, with rare exceptions, only pretend to be students. It corrupts everyone connected with it. College football is little more than a giant conduit for vacuuming money out of alumni, hawking brand merchandise, and generating TV revenues. At Penn State, the racket sucked in about $70 million a year net profit. All over America, the old land-grant diploma mills pay their coaches million-dollar salaries, while academic adjunct professors can't even get health insurance. At SUNY-Albany, the flagship campus of New York's system, they got rid of the department of foreign languages, but the football team plays on. Meanwhile ordinary students rack up tens of thousands of dollars in unpayable college debt via a related racket in which free-flowing government-backed Sallie Mae loan money prompts colleges to boost tuition rates way beyond inflation rates.

Then there is the merge-ramp between religion and football. Was I the only person revolted by video of the phony "prayer" session held in the Penn State stadium just before Saturday's "big game" with the University of Nebraska? Players from both teams led by Jesus-shouting cheerleaders affected to "pray" for Jerry Sandusky's rape victims, an exercise that was joined and legitimized by the crowd with all the passion of a Nuremberg rally. When that easy little ritual was out of the way they could settle back and enjoy the game's ersatz heroics with a clear conscience, and the tailgate barbeques that followed. A genuine sense of collective shame would have produced a different course of events - for instance cancelling the game, maybe the rest of the season, or perhaps even the entire football program in plain recognition of how foul and corrupt it is. That decision would have been up to the university's board of directors and tells you all you need to know about corporate leadership in America today.

Perhaps even more disgusting than the pre-game prayer show was the rash of demonstrations the night the story broke. These weren't about shame and repentance, just violent displays of sanctimonious "moral" support for an entire system in disgrace. Do you suppose these people could not have endured a night or two of uncomfortable silent reflection. And why didn't the new president, or any other campus executive, make a pubic statement that all the prideful carrying-on was indecent? I wonder how many of the same students will be ground down to dust by the weight of their unpayable college loans.

Equally disgusting was the cable news media's wall-to-wall coverage of the Penn State story, as if there weren't other important events going on in the world - for instance the resignation of two European prime ministers due to a political crisis that could sink the global economic system. CNN turned the Penn State story into an instant reality-TV show, with play-by-play action and spin-o-rama scenario-flogging aimed mainly, it seemed, at how Coach Joe Paterno might manage to wiggle out of culpability in the civil lawsuits that are sure to dog him now until the end of his days.

What the public doesn't know is how soon the sun will be setting on these giant universities in their entirety - football, classrooms, alumni golden circles, and all - as we enter the age of intense energy and capital scarcities. Remember: institutions, just like living organisms, often reach their greatest scale just before they go extinct. Resource constraints would be enough to get the job done, but it's interesting to see how our programming failures and internal moral contradictions have reached the last limits of flamboyant grotesquerie in the same exact moment.

This is a nation with psychological boundary problems in every realm - the family, the school, the government, the corporation, the diocese, the police station, you name it. Meanwhile the so-called fine arts branch of our culture valorizes "transgressive" behavior - as if there were any behavioral boundaries left to cross. Maybe Jerry Sandusky should be sentenced to a one-man show at the Whitney Museum. Then just wait a week or so: we'll get Jeffrey Dahmer, the Musical on Broadway.

Every new day that dawns lately gives further proof that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished.

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Time to take Exception

SUBHEAD: Once you start spouting that your nation is superior to anything that has ever existed, then you are going to start acting like God. Indicative of American Exceptionalists, Mitt Romney's book is entitled No Apologies: The Case for American Greatness By Jon Letman on 12 November 2010 in Clear Sky Press - (http://httpclearskypress.blogspot.com/2010/11/time-to-take-exception.html) On any day of the year, but especially Veteran’s Day, we should be asking ourselves, “why is it that we have so many military veterans?” What is it that we do that produces so many men and women who have served in the military, so often fighting wars far from home?

The reasons are many, but today let’s just focus on one. This huge number — according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, there were 21.9 million military veterans in the United States in 2009 — is, in part, the result of the notion of “American Exceptionalism” — that is, the idea that the United States is somehow special among all nations, past and present. This doctrine assumes that the United States is not just “exceptional,” but that it is superior to all other nations. And this, dear reader, I would argue plays a huge role in why we as a nation are so frequently involved in both peace time and war time military adventures, occupations and outright bullets-flying-wars which, of course, results in lots of war veterans. Here is one simple, very recent example of what I am talking about. Last week, following his victory in the campaign to become Florida’s new GOP senator, Marco Rubio said,

“Americans believe with all their heart, the vast majority of them, and the vast majority of Floridians, that the United States of America is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history. A place without equal in the history of all mankind.”

Wow. Got that? “…simply the single greatest nation in all of human history…a place without equal in the history of all mankind.” Not bad for a country founded 234 years ago. America is simply the greatest nation there has ever been, just ask Marco Rubio

Clearly Marco Rubio believes, or at least wants people to believe, that he thinks not only exceptionally high of the United States, but that this country outshines any other nation that preceded it in thousands of years of human history — Egypt, Rome, Greece, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, China, India, France, England, Russia, Holland, Spain — all of you, step back, if you please. This first spot up front is reserved for us, The United States of America (hold your applause please). As for you other obscure little poor countries — Angola, Nepal, Comoros, Gabon, Tonga, Belize, Kiribati, Djibouti, Vanuatu, Canada and New Zealand — two steps back please, and would you mind not standing in our shadow? We do so admire the way our form darkens the earth. Mind-boggling, I know. Certainly the other 6,570,000,000 who were not lucky enough to be born in God’s gift to the world, must be drooling with envy. If you have ever spent five minutes in the company of someone who happened not to have been born in the greatest nation in human history, you maybe have been impressed, and certainly surprised, at how similar they seemed to yourself, at least in appearance. All the human flaws and charms randomly scattered amongst Americans, it would seem, can be found in all those not from the greatest nation in human history. And yet somehow they are different. They are, after all, not American. This notion of American Exceptionalism, which Mr. Rubio encapsulated so well, is a widely held notion, one we can hear repeated again and again by politicians like Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, former Massachusetts Governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and mama grizzly, half-term Governor and Drill-Baby-Drill squad leader Sarah Palin, to name a few. Of course, when our African Muslim Socialist radical left wing President Barack Obama said of American Exceptionalism: “I believe in American Exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British Exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exptionalism,” he was roundly critized for not lining up in the “America is better that everyone else” camp. George Carlin, who was never known as a great American Exceptionalist warned of such talk. Carlin said:

"Be on the alert for phrases such as Old Glory; Main Street; the stars and stripes; the heartland; all across this great land of ours; from Maine to California; and, of course, on American soil. And don't forget all those freedom-loving people around the world who look to us as a beacon of hope. Those, I assume, would be the ones we haven't bombed lately. And you'd also better be ready to be reminded, over and over, that you live in a country that somehow fancies itself leader of the free world. Got that? Leader of the free world. I don't know when we're going to retire that stupid shit, but personally, I've heard it quite long enough. And what exactly is the free world, anyway? I guess it would depend on what you consider the non-free world. And I can't find a clear definition of that, can you? Where is that? Russia? China? For chrissakes, Russia has a better Mafia than we do now, and China is pirating Lion King DVDs and selling dildos on the Internet. They sound pretty free to me. Here are some jingoistic variations you need to be on the lookout for: The greatest nation on Earth; the greatest nation in the history of the world; and the most powerful nation on the face of the Earth. That last one is usually thrown in just before we bomb a bunch of brown people. Which is every couple of years.”

Carlin saw this talk of American Exceptionalism for what it truly is: a big steaming sack of bullshit. Sarah Palin: pining for the days of a national security policy of "We win and they lose." Mikhail Gorbachev, being a statesman, had a more diplomatic phrase. He called it “winner’s complex,” a disease, he said, which was worse than AIDS. This notion that we don’t merely have an edge in some areas, or perhaps aren’t just better at some things than others, but are, in fact, flat-out, no holds-barred, simply “the single greatest nation in the history of mankind,” isn’t just ludicrous, simple-minded, juvenile and astonishingly laughable, it is dangerous. Absolutely deadly. Because once you start spouting that your nation is superior to anything that exists or has ever existed, then you are going to start acting as though you are a type of God, or at least a Superman, Superwoman, or in America’s case, a Super Power. This will lead to all sorts of foolish and brazen acts, not the least of which will be reckless wars to control resources, countries, and even entire regions, all in support of your self-proclaimed greatness.

Gotta stop that country from getting WMD – call in the Army! Gotta tell that http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/aug/20/20060820-104133-3139r/ we aren’t putting up with any guff – call in the Navy! Gotta get back at that country for knocking down our towers – call in the Air Force! Gotta push those dirty, god-less (fill in the blank) out of this district, call in the Marines! Gotta clear this square of unarmed civilians – call in the private military contract mercenaries! Gotta flush out the bad guys in that impenetrable rugged border region – call in the unmanned Predator Drones! Gotta make sure that country doesn’t attempt to get the same type of weapons we have huge stockpiles of – call in the crippling sanctions!

And on and on and on, the result being, we have a lot of men and women who put on uniforms with American flags stitched just above the heart who are trained to believe that they are defending The Greatest Nation on Earth. This is a big part of the problem. As long as we have politicians leading the charge of “American Exceptionalism” combined with a large electorate which knows virtually nothing about the world beyond its own Super Walmart and Mega Church complex, a population who couldn’t individually or collectively think its way out of a 1-ply square of toilet tissue, you end up with a country where people sit by idle and compliant while its own government, the body supposedly charged with looking out for the country’s best interests, is actually squandering its own human and financial treasure, and the well-being of the nation itself on mindless, self-defeating wars fought far from home and largely out of view and beyond scrutiny. Echoing the bleating of Senator-elect Marco Rubio, Sen. Sam Brownback said, “this is the greatest nation in the history of mankind.” He implores Americans to “look up to see the greatness of America today.” “That greatness is built on goodness. And if we ever lose our goodness, we will surely lose our greatness,” Brownback said, repeating quotes attributed to Eisenhower and, before him, Alexis de Tocqueville. On this Veteran’s Day, a day meant to pay tribute to the men and women who serve this nation, often sacrificing themselves and their families, we should be asking ourselves who all this talk of being “the greatest nation on earth” is serving. Newt Gingrich supremely confident in America's power and ready to project it against other nations. Such chaff may garner a few cheap applause if you are standing in front of a giant American flag at a campaign rally, but it does nothing more than delude ourselves into a cult of self-aggrandizement. Worse still, it sets the stage for a nation frequently, and now seemingly, perpetually at war. It leads to the destruction of other people and places, it cheapens our own value as a society, and it invites deep scorn and hatred as it imperils us as a nation and the soldiers and veterans that we claim to honor. See also: Ea O Ka Aina: It's Armistice Day! 10/11/11 .

It's Armistice Day!

SUBHEAD: Somehow we have turned the remembrance of the horrors of war into a celebration of patriotic nostalgia. Image above: Member of Army recruiting team at a Plainfield High School football game in New Jersey, 11/26/09. From (http://www.flickr.com/photos/8168790@N04/3961446872/). By Juan Wilson on 11 November 2010 - Yesterday my wife, Linda, called me from the elementary school where she works. She was upset because her campus was hosting a celebration of Veteran's Day. Drill teams, speeches, canned country-western styled patriotic music, an assembly, etc. Today I got an email from www.barackobama.com. It was purportedly from Michele.

Juan, Veterans Day provides us with the chance to mark the debt of honor we owe to all those who have worn the uniform of the United States. We remember those who gave their lives beneath our flag, in service of our freedom. And with so many still fighting, we owe special thanks to the courageous families of those who serve. Because when our servicemen and women deploy overseas, their loved ones are left to undertake heroic battles of their own at home. The unique challenges they face in support of men and women in uniform allow us all to enjoy the freedoms of our democracy. Every time I have a chance to meet with these families, I'm struck by their strength and their quiet dignity -- they are truly some of the most selfless, courageous people I've met. And today is also a day to acknowledge the sacrifices these brave men and women make every day, and pray for the safe return of those they love. I've felt their calling personally, and I want to encourage Americans across the country to step up and do more for our military families. Take the time to stay informed about the concerns and activities of the families of service members in your community. Let them know you recognize their struggles and appreciate all they do. You can help by finding out the needs of the military families in your community and volunteering, from working with your local school's PTA to hiring a military spouse. Today and every day, I am moved by the personal sacrifices made by service families. And I'm humbled by the patriotism of those they support -- our soldiers and airmen, our sailors and Marines. Today, if you can, please take a moment to offer your gratitude for the families of the veterans and active service members that you know. Or go online to serve.gov to find out how you can serve military families in your area. Sincerely, Michelle

My response to the email was this.

Aloha Barack & Michele, Somehow we have turned the remembrance of the horrors of war into a celebration of patriotic nostalgia. This is Armistice Day - not Veterans Day. This day was set aside on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month in 1919 after the Great War ended. That nightmare was to be the war that ended all war, remember? Armistice Day was to help us recall of the horrors of war and to cherish peace. It was not to honor wars veterans and embrace patriotism. Once World War Two began, The Great War had to be renamed World War One and once permanent war became the modus operandi of the United States, Armistice Day had to become Veterans Day. My wife works in an elementary school that serves pre-school & kindergarten on our island, Kauai. Yesterday members of a middle-school uniformed rifle drill team performed as an "entertainment" for the younger children. They were just mock rifles, but what is the message? Is this an appropriate educational lesson for young children? It is certainly not a rejection of war. Ironically, the school has a zero-tolerance regulation regarding guns on campus that includes punishment for even pointing a finger at another child and saying "Bang!". America's leaders don't seem have a clue... and that includes you, who represent the best we have to offer. Our country is not fighting for freedom or against terrorism. The result of the wars you are pursuing is destroying personal freedom, encouraging terrorism and dishonoring our soldiers. There is no other explanation to this behavior but our addiction to crude oil to support our unsupportable status quo. It's time to let go. Return to our gardens. Peace to you on Armistice Day... you fools. Juan Wilson - Publisher: www.IslandBreath.org PO Box 949 Hanapepe HI 96716 (808) 335-0733

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Army Recruiting Kindergarteners? 11/10/09 Island Breath: Ban Recruiting those Under 18 2/7/08 Island Breath: Thoughts on Memorial Day 5/28/07 .