Escapism is dead. Americans killed it.

The headline from the Toledo Blade read:

“After Las Vegas, Escapism is Gone”

The final paragraph purports to describe what many Americans are feeling after this latest gun-toting massacre:

“We mourn, also, our lost innocence and the impossibility of escaping foreign terror, domestic terror, or politics, even for an hour or two. There is no respite and no haven. There is no longer any place safe and apart where we can escape the cares and troubles of this world.”

Well, folks, if escapism is dead, Americans killed it.

And what are those troubles and cares that Americans wish to escape, anyway?

Maybe it’s that they work 50-60 hours a week or more; or are forced to work 2-3 jobs just to live; or the specter of being laid off from a job you’ve had for most of your adult life – and just before you planned to retire.

Maybe it’s the ridiculous cost of child care.

Maybe it’s the ridiculous cost of health care.

Maybe it’s that they still haven’t recovered from the financial meltdown of 2008, and wonder if their lives will ever be the same.

I suspect, however, that far too many Americans place the blame for their problems elsewhere.

They blame their problems on the powerless.

African-Americans represent 13 to 14 percent of the U.S. population. Yet somehow small groups of largely peaceful black protesters, who are simply asking that bad cops stop murdering innocent people in their communities, are a problem so big that we need militarized police.

The police are NOT judge, jury and executioner. The vast majority of African-Americans who have been murdered by bad cops in the last several years did not commit a crime at all, and even those who did (selling cigarettes on a street corner, for example) were unarmed. Yet Dylan Roof, a white man who murdered black people in a church in South Carolina, gets politely hauled away in handcuffs and taken to Burger King before going to jail.

In a recent conversation with the mother of one of my long-time friends, the first thing she mentioned as a solution to our “problems” was more policing. We cannot police our way out of extreme income inequality, homelessness and gun violence. And one of the reasons for that is that they are all connected. You only need look at the countries which are ranked as the happiest – and, ironically, the best for business – that are practically the opposite of the U.S. in how they approach policing to see that more and militarized policing is a recipe for disaster.

There are 3 million Muslims in the United States – a tiny 1 percent of the population. They are represented in the U.S. Congress in about the same number. They also represent the same percentage of the gun violence in this country. Yet somehow millions of Americans believe that Islamic terrorism is a huge problem in the U.S. and that Sharia Law will soon be imposed by 1 percent of the population.

Donald Trump tells us that Mexican “rapists and murderers” are streaming over our southern border. But according to Business Insider, Mexican immigrants contribute 4 percent to the GDP. Yet somehow the tiny percentage of illegal immigrants that commit crimes is a problem large enough to cripple the U.S. economy by making many in the Latino communities in the U.S. live in fear of deportation, regardless of their immigration status.

Donald Trump and the Congress want to cut programs for the poor such as Food Stamps. Meanwhile, in 2015 hedge funds lost money, but 25 hedge fund managers still took home 11.62 billion; and according to Forbes.com, 100 billion of the Federal budget goes to corporate subsidies. But when Food Stamps are cut, not only do individuals and families suffer, but the small businesses that they frequent suffer too.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the first entity that was secured in Baghdad was the Ministry of Oil; in a ravaged Baghdad in the aftermath, it remains untouched today. If the U.S. can’t own up to it, the rest of the world understands that the Iraq war is a war for oil. Yet according to the U.S. Department of Energy, America is now a net exporter of refined petroleum products. If one of your “troubles” is that your son or daughter is over in the Middle East as part of our military, maybe you need to ask yourself why that troubles you.

A country that projects violence all over the world can’t expect to escape the consequences. Of course, you can go on believing that somehow the United States, the richest country in the history of the world and possessed of the most powerful military ever known to mankind, is the victim; or that you are the victim of terrible circumstances brought on by your powerless fellow citizens. You’re welcome to, but don’t be surprised when absolutely nothing changes or improves; and you go on feeling insecure, anxious and unsafe. The easiest prediction I ever made was that Donald Trump could never make America great again; because he and his minions in Congress want you to believe that all your problems are caused by powerless people.

Actor Samuel L. Jackson was quoted as saying, after yet another mass shooting a few years ago: "Some people don't value life enough." True. But if that's the case, how is it that America has so many more of these people, far more per capita than any country we would want to be compared with?

Maybe the problem is that too many Americans think that these mass murderers are simply lone-wolves, and that all these problems are individual problems.

Maybe the problem is a country trying to escape problems of their own making, foreign and domestic.

Maybe it’s time you started fighting for a world where escapism isn’t necessary.

References

After Las Vegas, escapism is gone - The Blade. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.toledoblade.com/Editorials/2017/10/04/Escapism-is-gone.html

US Crude Oil Production Surpasses Net Imports | Department of Energy. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://energy.gov/maps/us-crude-oil-production-surpasses-net-imports

Why the war in Iraq was fought for Big Oil - CNN. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/index.html

Bandow, D. (2012, August 20). Where to cut the federal budget? Start by killing corporate welfare. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/dougbandow/2012/08/20/where-to-cut-the-federal-budget-start-by-killing-corporate-welfare/#74cd771b6d7f

For Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers, a Difficult 2014 Still Paid Well - The New York Times. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/business/dealbook/top-25-hedge-fund-managers-took-bad-14-all-the-way-to-the-bank.html

"Agitprop" and Black Lives Matter

The police are not judge, jury and executioner. Peaceful protest is a Constitutionally-protected right. When Black Lives Matter protests the extrajudicial killing of black people, they are protesting the murder of someone who either did not commit a crime at all, or at most committed a misdemeanor certainly not punishable by death, which of course takes us back to the first part of the statement; the job of the police is to apprehend someone whom they “suspect” of committing a crime, and then if necessary it is up to a judge and or jury to decide if this is the case.

This is part of my response when someone asks for my opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Part of the Black Lives Matter “mission” is: “Rooted in the experiences of black people in this country who actively resist our de-humanization, Black Lives Matter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of black people by police and vigilantes” (blacklivesmatter.com). This sounds to me like a reasonable response to the violence committed against innocent black people in this country, and to the institutionalized racism that is at the root of the problem. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Black Lives Matter is portrayed in the media. Just this week a police chief in Wisconsin stated that Black Lives Matter was going to join with ISIS to take down America (Suen, 2015). Also recently, a Fox News Host compared Black Lives Matter to the Nazis (Suen, 2015).

These types of statements align with what Jacques Ellul called “Propaganda of Agitation” (Ellul, 1965), or what is now known as “agitprop.” Ellul pinpoints hate as the epicenter of agitprop; “Hate is generally its most profitable resource; hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one’s misfortunes  and sins to ‘another’; propaganda of agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery, provided they are not too powerful”(Ellul, 1965). It’s hard to imagine a less powerful group in society than one that represents just 13% of the population, have just 1/12^th the wealth of the majority white population (Luhby, 2015), and are descendants of slaves. In this seemingly endless election cycle we have seen Donald Trump engage in agitprop to successfully rally his “troops” by targeting Mexican, Latin American and Muslim immigrants as the source of so much White-American misery; again all comparatively powerless groups.

I have yet to see a positive portrayal of Black Lives Matter in the mainstream media. A comparison of response to Black Lives Matter peaceful protest to that of a riot at a nearly all-white college after a pumpkin festival (Lennard, 2014) tells us an awful lot about race relations, the treatment of black people in this country, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

References

Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The formation of men's attitudes. New York: Knopf.

Lennard, N. (2014, October 20). The great pumpkin riot is a white riot worth taking seriously. Retrieved from https://news.vice.com/article/the-great-pumpkin-riot-is-a-white-riot-worth-taking-seriously

Luhby, T. (2015, February 18). Whites have 12 times the wealth of blacks, 10 times that of Hispanics. Retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2015/02/18/news/economy/wealth-blacks-whites-hispanics/

Beauty and Ugliness

No matter how hard I have tried, for years I could never find myself in complete accord with the feeling of disgust Jean-Paul Sartre creates for his character Antoine Roquentin in his 1938 novel, Nausea. Simply reading the text left me underwhelmed; then some close-reading of portions of the work still didn’t resonant in the manner one would hope for. It was only after transcribing the entire book that I started to get a whiff of Roquentin’s condition; lamentations on his relationship with “Anny,” a long-lost love, were rife with remonstration, regret and finally, mutual rejection, and were potentially, for the susceptible at least, cause for the uncritical mind to view the attempts at reconciliation as repulsive. Not for me, however. And Roquentin’s final encounter with ‘the self-taught man,’ an uneasy acquaintance throughout, wherein the autodidact is caught making untoward advances at teenaged boys and is subsequently banished from his beloved library, had me riding along with the protagonist in a maelstrom of pity, compassion and revulsion. But I didn’t feel the need to reach for the Pepto-Bismol. I chalked it all up to the notion that I needed to experience the queasy existential moments ‘in-situation,’ as Sartre might put it.

Pretty much every day since Republicans were handed control of the entirety of congress has for me been like adding pieces to a Jenga stack of socio-political atrocities, each one worse than the last, and each one with the potential to bring the whole thing crashing down. Racist policing, climate change denial, obstruction of reproductive choice for woman; all of it and much more a toxic soup of incomprehensible dimension.  If the thought of imminent human extinction due to anthropogenic climate disruption isn’t disconcerting enough, reading about Fox News and their concoction of non-Muslim ‘no-go zones’ in Paris and Birmingham would surely send some of us over the edge. I pondered Sartre and Roquentin and their nausea.

Then I went to the movies…

My wife and I had wanted to see ‘Birdman’ mostly to witness the resurrection of Michael Keaton. Because we see very few ‘mainstream’ American films, we are largely unaccustomed to being subjected to gorge-crippling movie trailers. All three film previews paraded in front of us before the feature, including the empire propaganda tool ‘American Sniper,’ were likely the wet dream of many a gun-toting, blood-lusting, cadmium-blooded patriot; but to my eyes it was pure filth and a not at all subtle reminder of this nation’s precipitous decline. However, it was ‘Birdman’ itself that provided the cultural body-blow. In one of the most important scenes in the film, three of the main characters, for approximately 3 minutes of screen time, discuss what took place in a scene from the play they are rehearsing covered in fake blood from a gun shot blast to the head.

We discussed the picture on our walk home; mostly marveled at some of the performances, a few musings about potential Oscar nominations. Then we skirted around the ‘meaning’ of the film, until I finally blurted out, ‘I feel the director was holding a mirror up to our sick society with characters walking around covered in blood!’ The rest of the walk home I felt a profound uneasiness and, indeed, a bit of nausea.

Then I went on a car ride…

I don’t spend much time in cars; my wife and I don’t own one, so this was a bit of an event for us, occasioned primarily because we had left our hometown and were visiting family in a place where it is difficult to get around efficiently without a vehicle – the suburbs of Seattle. As we were chauffeured around I was reminded of a George Carlin quote: ‘Have you looked around at this country lately? It’s one big shopping mall!’ Amidst all this incredible natural beauty, and in and around Seattle there is a lot of it, our culture had managed to make it all ugly, with our cathedrals of material abundance. I was witnessing a terminal ugliness, I felt; there was no escape from it, and no end to it. Enormous signs and enormous putrid-looking buildings advertising our gluttony. We have traded beauty for ugliness, I thought. I felt even more sick than I had after the movie violence – and now I think I know why.

“…I understand absolutely why America is so violent. It’s because your wallpaper is so ugly.” ~ Oscar Wilde

“In a doubtful case, a nation decides, not without painful conflicts, how much it will sacrifice to its sentimental needs.” ~George Santayana

If we can agree that Santayana did not mean to trivialize the immortal quest for beauty as ‘sentimental needs,’ what sacrifices are we willing to make to reclaim the beauty that feeds our souls? To answer this query with requisite heft, perhaps we should examine the forces that put this ugliness in place. Some of my like-minded leftist friends continually decry the material abundance and consumptive practices that have poisoned our society. A few of them also are intrigued by or even promote the use of force to protect theirs and others’ property. Yet force protects the very ugliness they condemn! Our tax dollars fund the use of force to protect this way of life, this ugliness. One of the best recent examples of this is given in Jerry Mander’s 2012 book, The Capitalism Papers. Around that time the Chinese had proposed shrinking the exportation of rare earth minerals, a resource of which they possess approximately 90% of the world’s share. As Mander puts it, “The American government’s response was not to send the commerce secretary for diplomatic negotiations; it was instead to threaten military action, by way of the Defense secretary and the Sixth Fleet.” It was further revealed that this action was at the behest of corporations such as Apple Computer, which has a vested interest in the continuing cheap availability of rare earth minerals – and the cheap labor that happens to be located in the same country. Millions of Americans struggling to survive are subsidizing, through their tax dollars, the protection of the corporations’ ability to continue to exploit human and natural resources all over the world. Of course, many of those same Americans are complicit in this ongoing ecocide, by purchasing products at those ugly shopping malls and strip malls. Meanwhile, it is no coincidence that violence is increasing in our suburbs (McWhirter & Fields, 2012). I thought about my first trip to Paris; and the experience of seeing those majestic old apartment houses when I emerged from the Gare du Nord. Compared to that, how could anyone find any beauty in the American urban/suburban landscape?

“Beauty can be important in a person’s life. And people beguiled by the beautiful are less dangerous to others than those obsessed by the thought of supremacy.” ~Wallace Shawn

The cello is the dream. The gun and the person wielding it are the destroyers of the dream. Those who would deny us beauty, whether politicians, business leaders, or even religious leaders, are protected both by wielding force and their ability to convince people that there are no alternatives to this way of life. This ‘disimagination machine,’ as Henry Giroux aptly describes it, can be seen in every segment of society: the commodification and vocationalization of education; the destruction of labor unions; and the inculcated belief that consumption is one’s only civic duty; the glorification of sports and the sanctification of business gurus; all these have conspired to render entire generations completely lacking in imagination and critical thinking skills. Yet, those who can only chase money are fearful of those who are beguiled by beauty, because of our ability to tickle the minds of others. And, as any good leftist knows, there are alternatives; and there are signs that some of the most vulnerable in our society, and some who are not as vulnerable but are careening headlong into new socio-economic realities, are beginning to see through the ugliness and are searching in the darkness trying to reclaim beauty. The electrician who has had his hours at work drastically reduced finds that he has time to pursue one of his true passions: woodworking. The career computer engineer who can find only occasional contract work decides to make the sacrifices necessary to start a spiritual healing practice. When one considers that most of the jobs created in this so-called economic ‘recovery’ are low-wage with no benefits (Lowrey, 2014), more and more Americans are coming to the realization that under-employment and long-term unemployment is the new normal. Psychologists may find themselves with an increased workload because of this; but perhaps the creative communities should be filling that void as well. Still, millions of Americans must work two or three jobs just to survive, leaving them with no time or the wherewithal to pursue the beautiful. And of course that means if they are surrounded by the ugliness, they truly cannot escape it! What can give their lives meaning? Economic alternatives such as a universal living wage would be an excellent place to start. Another more radical alternative is what could be called ‘Reclaiming the Office Parks.’ When I was doing temporary work in the suburbs of Portland I noticed that the office park parking lots adjacent to my place of employment were ½ to 2/3 empty, no matter the time of day; that’s a lot of unused office space; something one would think would be a sign of capitalism’s collapse. Regardless, what better use of this land than to have thousands of Americans reclaim it as farmland; even one quarter of an acre would allow someone to truly pull themselves up by the bootstraps; and it just might return some of the beauty our souls cry out for.

In Greek myth, the titan Prometheus climbed Olympus to steal fire and bestow it upon man, because he loved humanity. During the Enlightenment, the English poet and playwright Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote ‘Prometheus Unbound.’ Shelley equated the ‘divine fire’ with knowledge, and that in the Enlightenment humanity chose to caste off the shackles of the church and seize the fire of knowledge, of learning, indeed of beauty. The elites in today’s world do not want us to have any sense of knowledge or beauty; this should be obvious in seeing the attacks on a well-rounded education and the onslaught of anti-science propaganda, as well as attempts at privatizing cultural entities, and of course convincing people that there only civic duty is consumption, specifically of what the elites have to peddle, which by and large has nothing to do with beauty. It is very easy to convince people to eschew beauty when you advertise plastic trinkets and baubles and addict people to them through the medium of television; beauty becomes even less attractive when it is commodified and made unaffordable. How else to explain that it is cheaper to purchase a chemical-laden McDonald’s hamburger than a single Washington apple? Ugliness is sold by the ugly, those who cannot create, or at least not well enough to make a killing at it. Beauty is the great equalizer; if you can experience it enough you will, literally or figuratively, lay down your arms to embrace it.

Sartre was primarily preoccupied with the absurdity of existence, the banal and the beautiful, particularly as it relates to how he perceived others and their navigation of the world around them; so perhaps he wouldn’t be doing the Technicolor yawn non-stop if he were around today. Santayana, on the other hand, inspires us to keep striving to beguile our fellow man with beauty, even if it’s just convincing them to have a wholesome stack of pancakes from a mom & pop diner instead of the non-food from the corporate chains. More cellos, fewer guns means less Pepto-Bismol for everyone!

References

Lowrey, A. (2014, April 14). Recovery Has Created Far More Low-Wage Jobs Than Better-Paid Ones. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/28/business/economy/recovery-has-created-far-more-low-wage-jobs-than-better-paid-ones.html?_r=0

McWhirter, C., & Fields, G. (2012, December 30). Crime Migrates to the Suburbs - WSJ. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323300404578206873179427496

Behavior influencing attitudes

The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume posited that all perceptions of the human mind are of two distinct kinds: impressions and ideas. He asserted that impressions precede, or are the causes of, our ideas. He offered the example of our impressions of colors, both different colors and shades of the same color, producing independent ideas (or in the present context, attitudes) toward them (Hume, 1740; 1961). The only exception to this order, according to Hume, is the individual who is, after many years and exposure to all different types of colors, confronted with a previously un-experienced shade of blue; Hume believes that the individual’s imagination makes the leap to “fill in the blank” where the missing shade belongs amongst the various hues of gradating blue; thus, our idea of blue has no need for a preceding impression. Of course, the logical extension of this dimension of the theory is that we may subsequently form distinct ideas on this shade of blue through succeeding impressions. Can we apply Hume’s theory to our ideas or attitudes to our fellow human beings? I believe we can.

My parents, though raised in primarily white, middle-class Southern California neighborhoods, were both exposed at an early age to peoples of different race and ethnicity in largely positive fashion. Their embrace of diversity was further cemented when campaigning for Robert Kennedy during his ill-fated run for the presidency in 1968; this was a leader who made many strong, positive impressions upon them, not least being a love and acceptance of all creeds and colors.

When I was a child, our family regularly watched the television program “All in the Family.” My parents continuously showed a dislike for the character Archie Bunker, particularly when he discussed people of color in a negative way, which anyone familiar with the character knows occurred frequently. Because I had already formed a strong attachment bond with my parents, their impressions toward Archie manifested themselves in their behavior which formed my ideas about both Archie and people of color. This was reinforced and distinctions were made whenever the African-American neighbor Lionel appeared on screen; my parents displayed a visible affection for this character, and so did I. Thus, Lionel took his place among the “shades of blue” as a “good guy” first and foremost.  It was around this time that my family formed a bond with our doctor’s family that now spans 38 years. This family had adopted an African-American boy and Vietnamese girl. My exposure to their Vietnamese daughter was new, a shade of blue I had never encountered, but my idea about her had essentially already been formed, and for me she took her place in our lovely human rainbow.

I am grateful for this behaviorally influenced attitude, and shudder to think what my life could be if I had grown up in the next house over.

Reference

Hume, D. (1740; 1961). A treatise of human nature. Garden city, ny: Dolphin books.