Notes to a Young Progressive

Hola mi Gente,
I plan to rest this weekend.

Nationalism

I call him a patriot who rebukes his country for its sins and does not excuse them.
 -- Frederick Douglas

Many years ago, George Orwell wrote a prescient essay on the differences between nationalism and patriotism Orwell’s Notes onNationalism, has as much relevance today as it did when it was written right before the lead up to WWII as nationalistic fervor fed the flames of Nazism and fascism.

Too many people confuse nationalism for patriotism. When I listen to the nationalistic fervor stoked by the likes of Trump and Hillary, for example, it is concerning because theirs is an appeal to fear to a white demographic feeling betrayed -- a population looking for any excuse to explode. The successful Trump/ GOP’s campaign strategy is to create “the other” as different and unpatriotic. It’s been a one-note effort mostly because U.S. conservatives apparently do not know any other strategy.

Another reason political elites use this tactic because it works: tar and feather a candidate by coming up with the scary face of a black killer. At one time that face was the face of Willie Horton. Today, it is any black kid with a hood. Dismiss people who dare question the wisdom of our current foreign policies as “unpatriotic.” Paint the opposition as effeminate and ineffectual and deride them for having the courage to speak out against wars that kill tens of thousands of innocent women and children. And this is just the Democrats.

And it continues to work. It is working partly because the failures of decades of lunatic neoliberal economic policies have created global financial meltdowns and eroded the middle class.

Orwell defined patriotism as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people.” I have no argument with this definition

According to Orwell, nationalism is the tendency of identifying oneself with a single nation or an idea, and “placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” In other words, nationalism doesn’t have to be based on an allegiance to a particular nation. This same fanaticism can be applied to any “ism”: neo-conservatism and fundamentalism of any kind (religious or otherwise), for example. Whether it’s based on a country or an “ism,” nationalism always contains that dangerous combination of blind fanaticism and a lack of concern for reality.

In nationalism, thoughts “always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations… Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.” Moreover, its self-deception leads to catastrophic miscalculations based on delusions rather than facts. Orwell stated, foretelling the mental state of democrats today:

“Political and military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”

But to really appreciate Orwell and understand how he had our current foreign policy down pat, you only need to read this:

“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral color when committed by ‘our’ side.… The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

It was Georges Santayana who said “… those who refuse to remember the past, are condemned to relive it.”

Any of this sounds familiar?

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

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The People in the Bubble

Hola Everybody,
Consider supporting my writing work by donating whatever you can here. Your generosity will be very much appreciated.

Mini Lesson of the Day: White Supremacy is the normalizing of racial superiority in a society that permits white people to be individuals while people of color are collectively held as outsiders.

Today… we take a glimpse behind the veil. Just a little. 

Orphans of the Bubble

Once as a child my class was taken on a school trip. One morning, we all boarded the yellow school bus and headed to the Aquarium. I was fascinated by the menacing shark with the predatory smile. But even as a child, I understood that the shark lived in a world of its own, with its own reality.

Gringos¹ are a lot like that old shark -- they’re unable to experience the world outside the glass. It’s as if the United States is a gigantic terrarium, an immense biosphere or bubble which has cut it off from the rest of the world. How else can we explain the characterization of a center-right, pro-corporate, pro-war presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, as a “progressive”? Only in the insular bubble of contemporary life in the U.S. could a neoliberal candidate be deemed progressive in any sense of the word. This is a person who used racist tropes such as lazy black women and subhuman black and brown children to help pass legislation that threw poor people under the bus and incited the mass incarceration of mostly Blacks and Latinx.

It seems to me that the only explanation for gap between reality and America’s perception of it comes from the film, The Truman Show. The plot of the movie revolves around the affable but naïve protagonist who goes about his daily activities without being aware that he is, in fact, in a gigantic reality show. His hometown is actually a set for a TV show and from birth, he has been manipulated and controlled by the producer and the director. The gullibility of the UStian public would be better understood if we were all living on a stage set in a town called Liberty and threatened by a roving hoard called Evil Black Super-predators.

We’re all being conned.

Not too long ago, the con was called the “Axis of Evil.” UStians believed, as they often do when instructed on the Television Machine by their elected leaders, almost every scary reason cooked up by the likes of Bush, Cheney, and the NY Times. The rest of the world laughed. Their amateurish attempts at mass deception contained awkward truths that were surprisingly childish for a group that had access to the most massive propaganda machine the world has ever known. But they only had to utter their latest lie to be cheered by their subjects. “We’re number 1!” we cheered as we were led to the slaughterhouse.

As a former con man, I can appreciate a good scam. I know how hard it is to pull off the Big Con. Rationalizing a war can’t be easy and takes a lot of skillful finessing and this one was complicated. There was the bait (“the terrorist”), then the switch (weapons of mass destruction), then another switch (kill the despot, make the world safer), and yet another (regime change).

Whew! That’s a whole stack of lying right there!

But these amateurs failed and they failed miserably. If you going to pull off the Big Con, the lie must be simple and it must repeated -- often. These idiots, already having proven their incompetence in matters economic (and almost everything else), fumbled, and their build up to the Iraqi invasion broke every rule in the con man’s game. Bush and his handlers fell into the trap of elaborating, backtracking, and adding on. Instead of the Big Con, simple and effective, their lies grew more and more elaborate and complicated. The result being that instead of one good reason to go to war, piles of bad reasons were offered, which gave the skeptics in other countries the opportunity to unmask the fables.

Today, the con is an economic one. I mean, it is true that almost all cons are motivated by economic gain, and this one was no different. Simply put, trillions were paid out to the very same con men who almost took down the world’s economy. In fact, according the governments’ own accounting, the total cost of the bailout was $22 trillion! Now, don’t hate, this is one of the greatest cons in the history of con games. Imagine that you and I robbed a bank and, after getting caught, not only do we avoid serving time, but we are rewarded for our efforts. I have to admit of harboring at least some measure of resentment regarding this particular con. Every time I got caught, I was sent to jail or prison and often had serve sentences measured in years.

Today, both presidential candidates are pro-corporate shills, with one being a billionaire who has fleeced the country he now wants to lead of hundreds of millions of dollars, and the other a life-long politician who fought to make it possible for the wealthy to fleece the US public. They are good friends, by the way. Adding insult to injury, both claim to be for the “little guy,” meaning you and I. But, as real estate mistress, Leona Helmsley, complained when she got caught with her hand the cookie jar, “Only the little people pay taxes.”

If you think all of this is too obvious, please note that UStians deep-throated the whole thing… all of it. You might also say this is old news and in our attention-deficit society, and you are probably correct. But I mention all this because, like bad porn, the construction of UStian social policy has a very predictable progression. One summer it was that Obama was going to kill granny with is death panels. This summer Mexican immigrants were the new “terrists.” The weapons of mass destruction this year are brown people who come here to spread their infections and “drop” litters of future cop-killing, sex-crazed, drug-addicted sociopaths. On the other side, the Bernie Sander’s campaign, which looked to slightly alter spending to create true universal healthcare, invest in education, and fix our infrastructure, became Hillary’sRed Scare opportunity. Everybody in the corporate press went into full attack mode against the Sanders people. In fact, people were being paid to troll the comments sections of pro-Sanders op-eds! I kid you not. 

But if one looks past the bubble even a little, you become aware that the hype about immigration is really today’s version of the Iraqi invasion, which, by the way, hasn’t been paid for.

And this is how it’s been for decades. Today, it all falls under the idiocratic opiate, the lesser of two evils. People, people who call themselves progressives, in fact, are justifying their advocacy for a right-wing, pro-fracking, pro-mass incarceration, pro-war candidate by continually bleating the mantra, “Lesser of two evils, lesser of two evils, lesser of two evils… ” and browbeating those who refuse to fall in step. So, we will most likely get eight years of Hillary and I don’t think we can afford it. For the most part, people in the United States can’t see past the bubble and it will be our undoing.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

1. I don’t like using the term “Americans” to denote people in the United States. Hence I will use UStians or gringos. For Spanish speakers, gringo refers to someone from the United States, particularly a person who is a White American.

White Blindness

Hola mi Gente,

Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, who has never supported the $15 per hour wage movement, used one the movement’s biggest victories as a photo op. No shame whatsoever. 

* * *

Blindness

Just because a man lacks the use of his eyes doesn't mean he lacks vision.

 -- Steveland Wonder

Some of my readers will recognize the title of today’s essay, which is lifted from Blindness, a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago. The novel was made into a film (click here) that was released a few years ago. Blindness is the story of a city hit by an epidemic of “white blindness” that spares no one. Authorities round up the blind and incarcerate them in an empty mental hospital, where a criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women. The story is a brilliant allegory of the loss of the ability to envision and confusion, and a stunning revelation of the horrors of the modern world. However, while Blindness captures the reader with its commanding rendering of humankind’s worst appetites and weaknesses, it’s also an exposition on humankind’s ultimately indomitable spirit.

Sounds like an election year to me! LOL!

My topic today is difficult to explain, though it is certainly something with which we are all familiar. The difficulty lies in the fact that it’s so obvious. There are, it seems to me, vast swaths of our lives that are missing from our awareness. We share a similar experience with the characters in Blindness: we all suffer from blind spots, literally and figuratively. The difference being that our blindness isn’t caused by an unknown plague, but is due internally to causes deep within our consciousness and externally by a vast media apparatus that manufactures consent. Our failure to experience fully crucial aspects of our reality results in gaps in the beam of awareness that defines our world from moment to moment.

My topic then is how we do not notice. In other words, my topic is about the pieces missing from our awareness – the holes in the fabric of our attention.

I’ve always been fascinated by the physical blind spot. I find it an apt metaphor for our inability to see things as they are in reality. In physiology, the blind spot is the gap in our field of vision that results from the way the eye is constructed. At the back of each eyeball is a point where the optic nerve, which runs to the brain, attaches to the retina. The point lacks the cells that register light coming into the eye. Therefore, at this one point there is a gap in the information transmitted to the brain. The blind spot registers nothing.

Usually, what is missed by one eye is compensated for by overlapping vision in the other. That’s why we don’t notice our blind spots. But when one eye is closed, the blind spot emerges. Seeing the blind spot is fascinating to me because it offered a concrete example of a more psychological parallel. As an example, many adults of alcoholics relate that in their families there were clear “rules.” One being that there is nothing wrong and the other was “Don’t tell anyone.” Families in the grips of addiction are extremely secretive; no one must talk of the monster that lurks in full view. These tacit rules teach us something -- it teaches us to create a psychological blind spot. Moreover, it’s not just families of alcoholics, I sense that there are many things kept hidden in families -- the shameful secrets, the unspoken failures. 

In some ways, this type of blindness is a defense mechanism. Our psyches need protection from the full onslaught of a cruel reality. This form of personal self-deception helps defend us from unnecessary trauma or psychological pain. However, when it becomes a societal pattern it serves to blind us to inequality and social injustice. 

One of the cruelties we inflict upon ourselves as a society is by limiting the boundaries of the possible. In a society in which the media is controlled by perhaps four or five corporations, the national dialog is seen mostly through the prism of capitalism. Anything beneficial to corporations is deemed possible and good, but benefits to the 99% of the population, issues such as free higher education or healthcare as a human right, are seen as ideological nonsense -- or “unicorns and rainbows” as supporters of neoliberal candidate, Hillary Clinton, like to put it.

As I look around these days, I see much in the way of blindness. We all welcome blindness: we don’t want to face the harsh realities of a politics bought and paid for by the power elite, so we turn our attention away and buy things or watch “reality” shows on television. We don’t like the tension of political reality, so we step away and ignore those inner tensions that exist anyway. Unfortunately, those tensions don’t go away, they fester in our bodies and we either try to feed them (obesity) or starve them (anorexia), but try as we might, the plague of blindness persists.

Not all dialogs are pleasant, or even polite. However, dialog we must if we’re going to emerge from our collective blindness. We must awaken to a coherent vision of the kind of society we desire or condemn ourselves to stumble in our blindness as slaves in a society created by those who would rob us of our very humanity.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

The 3,000 Mile Wide Bubble

¡Hola! Everybody…
Today… we take a glimpse behind the veil. Just a little.

* * *

-=[ Orphans of the Bubble ]=-

Once as a child my class was taken on a school trip. One morning, we all boarded the yellow school bus and headed to the Aquarium. I was fascinated by the menacing shark with the predatory smile. But even as a child, I understood that the shark lived in a world of its own, with its own reality.

Americans are a lot like that old shark -- they don’t see the people outside the glass. It’s as if America is a gigantic terrarium, and immense biosphere or bubble which has cut it off from the rest of the world. How else can we explain the characterization of a center-right, pro-corporate, pro-war president as a “socialist” a “communist” and a bone-the-nose bootleg video-selling Nigerian fascist? Only in the insular bubble of contemporary America could such a conservative president be deemed “radical” in any sense of the word. And I won’t even get into the whole “Iraq as menace” meme, which everyone else dismissed, but which we swallowed whole.

It seems to me that the only explanation for gap between reality and America’s perception of it comes from the film, The Truman Show. The plot of the movie revolves around the affable but naïve protagonist who goes about his daily activities without being aware that he is, in fact, in a gigantic soap opera. His hometown is actually a set for a TV show and from birth, he has been manipulated and controlled by the producer and the director. The gullibility of the American public would be better understood if we were all living on a stage set in a town called Freedom Fries and threatened by a roving hoard called Evil Brown People.

Not too long ago, it was the “Axis of Evil.” Americans believed, as they often do when instructed by their elected leaders the Television Machine, almost every scary reason cooked up by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell. The rest of the world laughed. Their amateurish attempts at mass deception contained awkward truths that were surprisingly childish for a group that had access to the most massive propaganda machine the world has ever known. But they only had to utter their latest lie to be cheered by their subjects and disbelieved by non-Americans everywhere.

As a former con man, I can appreciate a good scam. I know how hard it is to pull off the Big Con. Rationalizing a war can’t be easy and takes a lot of skillful finessing and this one was complicated. There was the bait (“terrist”), then the switch (weapons of mass destruction), then another switch (kill the despot, make the world safer), and yet another (regime change).

Whew! That’s a whole stack of lying right there!

But these amateurs failed and they failed miserably. If you going to pull off the Big Con, the lie must be simple and it must repeated -- often. These neocons, already having proven their incompetence in matters economic (and almost everything else), fumbled, and their build up to the Iraqi invasion broke every rule in the con man’s game. Bush and his handlers fell into the trap of elaborating, backtracking, and adding on. Instead of the Big Con, simple and effective, their lies grew more and more elaborate and complicated. The result being that instead of one good reason to go to war, piles of bad reasons were offered, which gave the skeptics in other countries the opportunity to unmask the fables.

The other option for a good con is to refuse to offer evidence (where there is no evidence, there can be no refutation). Bush offered shit piles of it. He asserted that he had proof of warehouses full of evidence. Of course this evidence consisted of tons of soiled toilet paper and used Kleenex. Once exposed, the smoking gun was really a dribbling water gun. Most embarrassingly, there was the spectacle of Colin Powell, who a year earlier had said that Saddam was not a threat and “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” explain to the security council that a photograph of what looked like a trailer park trailers were actually mobile war germ factories. These trailers he told the world (most of whom were probably pissing in their pants from laughter) were making biological weapons of mass destruction.

Adding insult to injury, he pulled out another photograph of what he said was an Iraqi airplane bearing Saddam’s deadly germs and lethal chemicals. To every non-American in his audience the object looked like the balsa wood model airplane boys glue together and fly in the park. After that came the aluminum tubes for non-existent nuclear factories, forged documents out of Africa, and fables of spies meeting in Viennese cafes. The more Bush and his handlers piled it on, the less the world believed them.

Americans, however, deep-throated the whole smear…

You might say this is old news and in our attention-span-challenged society, you are probably correct. But I mention all this because, like bad porn, the construction of American social policy is predictable. Last summer it was that Obama was going to kill granny, and “drill, baby, drill.” This summer Mexican immigrants are the new “terrists.” The weapons of mass destruction this year are brown people who come here to spread their infections and “drop” litters of future cop-killing, sex-crazed, drug-addicted sociopaths. But if one looks past the bubble even a little, you become aware that the hype about immigration is really today’s version of the Iraqi invasion, which, by the way, we’re still borrowing from the Chinese in order to fund it.

Americans can’t see past the bubble and it will be our undoing.

-- Eddie