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Come Home, America
Note from The Nation: This article is excerpted from William Greider's new book, Come Home, America. Copyright © 2009 by William Greider. Permission granted by Rodale Inc.
As Franklin Roosevelt understood, Americans will postpone immediate
gratification and endure hard sacrifices--if they must--so long as they
are convinced the future can be better than the past. But we face a far
more difficult problem at our moment in history. What do you promise
people who have been told they can have anything they want, who are
repeatedly congratulated for living in the best of all possible
circumstances? How do you tell them "the good times," as we have known
them, are not coming back? Americans need a new vision that helps them
deal with reality, a promising story of the future that helps them let
go of the past.
The political order mistakenly accepts these life-limiting trade-offs as normal, as necessary to achieve "good times." At earlier periods of our history, the sacrifices demanded by the engine of American capitalism were widely tolerated because the nation was young and underdeveloped. The engine promised to generate higher levels of abundance, and it did. But what is the justification now, when the nation is already quite rich and the engine keeps demanding larger chunks of our lives?
What families, even those who are prosperous, typically lose in the exchange are the small grace notes of everyday life, like the ritual of having a daily dinner with everyone present. The more substantial thing we sacrifice is time to experience the joys and mysteries of nurturing the children, the small pleasures of idle curiosity, of learning to craft things by one's own hand, and the satisfactions of friendships and social cooperation.
These are made to seem trivial alongside wealth accumulation, but many people know they have given up something more important and mourn the loss. Some decide they will make up for it later in life, after they are financially stable. Still others dream of dropping out of the system. If we could somehow add up all the private pain and loss caused by the pursuit of unbounded material prosperity, the result might look like a major political grievance of our time.
More important than all the other losses is that people are also denied another great intangible--the dignity of self-directed lives. At work, at home and in the public sphere, most people lack the right to exercise much of a voice in the decisions governing their daily lives. Most people (not all) are subject to a system of command and control over their destinies. They know the risks of ignoring the orders from above. Not surprisingly, many citizens are resigned to this condition and accept subservience as "the way things are," and their lives are smaller as a result. Many find it hard to imagine that these confinements could be lessened, even substantially removed, if economic organizations were informed by democratic principles.
What's needed in American life is a redefinition of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Given the nation's great wealth, the ancient threats of scarcity and deprivation have been eliminated. Yet people remain yoked to economic demands despite wanting something more from life--freedom to explore the mysteries and bring forth all that is within them. Collectively, Americans need to take a deep breath and reconsider what it means to be rich.
The challenge, as John Maynard Keynes wrote long ago, is how "to live wisely and agreeably and well" once desperation and deprivation are no longer the driving forces of our existence. As the British economist predicted, the old economic problems of scarcity and survival have been solved, at least for developed nations. People should put aside the old fears, Keynes suggested, and learn how to enjoy life. Free of want and worry, we face a new challenge: to discover what it means to be truly human.
That wondrous pursuit is what I recommend as the alternative to our old definition of progress. In the years ahead, Americans will suffer unavoidable losses of familiar pleasures and be compelled to alter some deeply ingrained habits of material consumption. These painful adjustments can be endured if the people are confident the country is progressing toward a more fulfilling transformation. The essential trade-off could be expressed on a bumper sticker: Smaller Cars for Larger Lives.
To accomplish this sweeping change, people need power--more power to say what they think without getting fired and to make choices that are more in line with their values and aspirations. They need more security--which would give them the self-confidence to explore new options without dooming their families to poverty. People need more philosophical space--the room to decide what "success" is in their own terms and to make their own "mistakes."
We should start thinking of living larger lives as a fundamental human right and begin throwing off the confinements imposed on us by the old order. Since scarcity has been vanquished, the collateral suffering manufactured by the economic system should also be declared unnecessary--even immoral--in a healthy and wealthy society. A minority of Americans, people blessed with special talents, wealth or status, may already enjoy this level of freedom. But as rich people can attest, wealth does not exempt one from the human struggle, the search to find one's groove in life, to draw forth one's unique purpose and strengths. That treasure cannot be bought. It has to be earned.
Government can do many things, but it cannot transform the society. Only the people can accomplish that. They change the fabric of society gradually and in unannounced ways with their behavior and creativity, guided roughly by their enduring moral values. If government set out to impose transformed values on the rest of us, the results would be oppressive and wrong. During the last generation, the coarsening pressures of the market system did a lot of damage to our society, but they did not succeed in stripping Americans of what they believe. Most people still know the difference between right and wrong, and despite the obstacles, they struggle to live accordingly.
What government can do is construct the rules, legal premises and supportive platform that enable people to pursue social transformation more aggressively. Our inventive popular culture--the marvel of the world--does this in freewheeling ways. With a little help and less interference from Washington, Americans can similarly reinvent the society. An era of innovation and random experimentation would draw upon this same spirit, the life force of Americans, the people who are practical and idealistic.
One important condition government can provide is the platform of "essential needs" that will give everyone more security and therefore more confidence to explore new and different choices. We could dust off Roosevelt's "second Bill of Rights" and address its unmet goals. FDR recognized in early 1944 that Americans were weary of the sacrifices imposed by World War II and so he announced a broadly conceived promise. After the war is won, he said, the country must construct a new set of meaningful "rights" for all, everything from health and education to work with remunerative wages. His vision of the future became the postwar political agenda of the Democrats, and in large measure the promises were kept. I think Barack Obama may eventually face a similar necessity to spell out the vision of what a transformed America can become on the other side of the ditch we are in. Some goals are already well understood. The thick backlog of legislative proposals that have been repeatedly blocked by powerful interests during the last generation should be revisited in order to establish concrete rights and protections for families and children, workers and employees. The extensive family-centered social systems in Europe suggest opportunities for US reforms. Reversing national economic policy on work and wages is, likewise, a necessary step toward healing the society. If government constructs a rising floor under wage incomes, starting from the bottom up, people at every level will be liberated to pursue creative social invention. In the face of deep recession and rising unemployment, there is not much anyone can do at present to boost wages. But government can make this promise for the future. When the economy recovers and unemployment declines, the minimum-wage floor will rise in step, and other work-improvement rules will kick in. Congress can enact the laws in advance and time their effective date to economic conditions.
Beyond these essential steps, there are taller mountains to climb. We can envision loftier goals that require social imagination and then practical testing before gaining broad agreement and implementation. This is where we get to dream a little. Can we imagine, for instance, a country that is virtually without poor children? A nation in which every child grows up entitled to explore life's possibilities, free to go anywhere in this diverse country and feel at home? Can we imagine an economic system that is not organized on the principle of command and control, on the few giving orders to the many? Can we envision an economy designed to serve the society, rather than the other way around? Some will say this is an idle daydream. I say it is our birthright, our inherited privilege. We are Americans. We get to think larger thoughts about our country and ourselves. Daydreams are a seedbed for the possible. We can argue later about how to achieve them.
To encourage people to free up their imaginations, I add a radical proposition: instead of asking what will be good for the economy, government should start by asking what will be good for our people and society. Instead of thinking first about how to help businesses flourish, ask what people need in order to flourish in American life. Essentially, I am suggesting a reversal of the usual process employed by the system. In its efforts to take care of business, the social question is often never asked. Here are three big ideas--favorite daydreams of mine--to illustrate what it means to put the people first.
First, every American who is willing and able ought to have the right to a job that pays a livable wage. If the private sector will not provide these jobs, then the public sector should be the employer of last resort. Franklin Roosevelt described the goal--the practical equivalent of full employment--in his "second Bill of Rights," and the public has overwhelmingly endorsed the principle ever since. In recent decades, the economy has drifted even further from the promise, creating in its place a broad labor market of the underclass--temporary jobs paying unlivable wages and often filled by undocumented immigrants. Guaranteed public jobs paying more than the minimum wage would permanently and automatically stabilize the economy, swelling the ranks of public workers in recessions and shrinking them when private jobs become more abundant. Instead of punishing the working poor most severely in downturns, as the system does now, the government would redistribute the costs of recession so that all taxpayers would share the burden as a public obligation.
The social consequences of a change like this could be profound: it would be a direct assault on the poverty and hopelessness of inner-city precincts and decaying rural towns where the same pathologies ravage families and young people without regard to race or ethnicity. Real jobs would mean that reliable incomes would flow into those communities, providing a concrete basis for economic development and neighborhood restoration as well as the redemption of damaged lives, especially the prospects for young people.
Obviously, permanent public employment--jobs for all who need them--would be enormously expensive, but the fulfillment of large goals can begin with smaller steps. The government might set some guidelines, then sponsor 100 or 200 projects sited around the country and invite impoverished communities to compete for those in their area. What work needs to be done? What skills and equipment are required? People can answer those local questions for themselves. Some initial efforts will fail, but the country will learn from the mistakes and from the successes.
The second idea is that everyone who works, whether in the front office or on the assembly line, deserves to "own their work"--that is, the right to exercise personal responsibility for what they do and enjoy mutual respect and the capacity to contribute and collaborate in important decision-making within the firm. These elements of individual voice and status are critical to satisfaction in one's work, but democratic qualities are largely missing from American workplaces. When most people go to work, they submit to a master-servant relationship in which a few people determine everyone else's behavior and most employees are denied a voice in the matter and have no right to object or criticize. These confinements are especially strict for lower-wage workers but often extend far up the occupational ladder to include middle managers and professionals.
Breaking free of this rigid top-down system and liberating workers to enjoy the freedom (and responsibility) of being human would represent a profound change for our society, a great leap forward in our social development as a people. As it happens, the shift to more cooperative and respectful workplaces can also yield economic gain for the nation. As numerous academic studies have shown and outstanding companies already understand, collaborative relationships between top management and the workforce are more productive and profitable. Instead of being ruled by fierce conflicts, the different elements within these companies share information constantly and steadily improve by learning from their mistakes. The profits are shared because the workers are also the owners.
This reorganization of employment and ownership cannot be commanded from afar, because it requires everyone--workers and bosses--to change, to put aside old hostilities and begin trusting in more open communication. That change is very difficult for people to achieve in any setting. Government can encourage the pursuit, however, by setting out some incentives and loose guidelines for reforming work. One of the most promising routes to change is the employee stock ownership plan that invests everyone as co-owners with the same economic incentive--sharing the returns from self-improvement. Some 11,000 companies--mostly smaller businesses--are organized this way, and workers accumulate capital savings in addition to their pensions. Employee-owned companies, however, must also make internal reforms to establish mutual accountability and honest communication if they want to gain the full benefits of having worker-owners. The concept may seem alien to many, but its core assumptions are very American: a practical belief that equality and liberty can be present in our daily lives.
The third idea is that to lead the way for social values, the economy needs a new, reform-minded business organization--call it a social corporation--that competes with old-line corporations adhering to their narrower values that enforce the supremacy of profit over society. The social corporations could be chartered by government and given certain benefits. To pursue a different set of values, they may need some protections in their infancy and perhaps modest start-up subsidies, and exemptions from the usual rules, but most of them would be independent and privately owned. They would produce needed goods or services that the private sector won't provide and sell them at a price most people could afford. They might, for instance, fulfill the market for very cheap computers and other high-tech devices that are stripped of the bells and whistles that run up the prices. The social corporation would be a working model for how the social imperatives--environmental values and equitable relations with workers and communities--can be integrated into firms and efficient production processes. Business lore and economic dogma say this is impossible. Social corporations would set out to prove them wrong. The purpose of this competition is not to replace orthodox companies but to put real market pressures on them to change. Creating social enterprises, including nonprofit cooperatives, can liberate us from the political vetoes business interests exert over promising new ideas.
Another crucial objective is to limit the size of business organizations, including social corporations, in line with E.F. Schumacher's famous dictum "Small is beautiful." The bloated scale of America's leading corporations has become a major impediment to innovation and experimental reforms, not to mention a corrupting influence in politics. Americans are learning anew from the financial crisis why it is a mistake to let private firms concentrate more and more power under one management. The failure of megabanks that the government helped create threatens our general well-being, and then government bails them out with taxpayer money because they are "too big to fail." Revived antitrust laws could simply prohibit the concentration of economic power as a threat to social values as well as to healthy competition.
Economic power must be dispersed in this broad nation, especially in banking and finance. We need many more financial intermediaries to allocate capital and credit and demonstrate more respect for society's needs. That includes regional banks, which are naturally closer to the customers. It means supporting and protecting the small and adventurous financial firms founded on commitments to social responsibility. They put capital into companies that have embraced environmental concerns, have equitable dealings with workers and communities and practice high-road behavior. On many fronts one can see the gradual advance of "social responsibility" in US capitalism. The pace is too slow to attract much political respect, but the current crumbling of the old order will clear the way for more dramatic progress.
These ideas may seem distant from the usual chatter of policy thinkers, but they offer alternatives to an economic system that has abused rather than served American life. I know a lot of smart people across the country who are pursuing these ideas in different ways--they constitute the beginnings of formations of citizens that can disrupt inert politics and overcome the timidity of incumbent politicians. These agitators are engaging in action for the long run, and the fainthearted need not apply.
47 Comments so far
Show AllIn the words of the song:
The day's so short, and the night's so long;
Why do you work so hard, to get what you don't even want?
I winced at that comment a bit myself, since I think the romantic notion of American Exceptionalism is one of our biggest problems. It is why the corporate media is able to convince so many people that we have the greatest health care system when we manifestly have the worst. And it is why we think it is normal that we have more foreign military bases than there are actual foreign countries.
Still, that sentiment reflects where tens of millions of Americans are emotionally. And the biggest problem that progressives have is that they don't know how to emotionally ground arguments. If Americans actually grew up and accepted something like the kind of world view Greider is advocating for, they would no longer accept the Empire--they would demand its retraction.
Speaking as a former bitter and angry ex-soldier, I can tell you that it is a real kick in the teeth to realize that your nation is not what you have been taught it is, but instead something like the complete and evil opposite. Rhetoric like Greider's is trying to articulate a positive national vision that can be pushed for and worked on collectively. Clearly not all of it resonates with you (or with me, for that matter) but it is likely to resonate with many people who might otherwise be teetering on the brink of despair. Being an "American" is cognitively hardwired into the synapses of millions of people's self-image. If you want those people to accept that very dark reality of what being an American has meant and continues to meet, it does not hurt to give them a stirring alternative like Greider has.
Briggs Seekins
briggsseekins.wordpress.com
But if we cannot move beyond our exceptional sense of self as stopping point, some other group, seeing how unexceptional we have then become and seeing the opportunity beyond that point in time, will.
Life moves on with that which can move and has a innate guarantee in it's code of just that.
Awesome post estebandido!
"scarcity" has not been vanquished because scarcity is not just a material experience, it is a psychic experience. The thing we need psychically most has been missing through our journey of materialism and greed. The thing within missing and driving us to find it without. Until we realize the inner world and what is scarce in that landscape, we will have no control or understanding of the outer. No change will ever come about and instead we will search for what is missing in a world bloated and oozing with what we think we need to fill the void. Here we will choke on the too much that offers so little for our starving soul. Come home indeed.
Ever since the "American Way of Life" began declining in the 1970's, we have faced the increasing reality of that decline with denial. In fact, we rewarded politicians to the extent that they continued encouraging denial of the situation. There is no rhetoric coming from President Obama to indicate that the American way of life has become at all negotiable. If we are not at all to be encouraged by our leaders to see smaller as being beautiful, and begin a new era of government accountability, our resource wars will continue, and our banks will be encouraged to start work on the next financial bubble.
I am afraid Americans will have to suffer far more than they are now before a new collective paradigm takes root.
Yes and President Obama's comments "we will not apologize for our way of life" takes on special and daunting meaning in reflection. Apologize? More like weep in understanding that we will be forgiven and finally live as we forgo our way of death.
Yes! As Mr. Greider says, "First, every American who is willing and able ought to have the right to a job that pays a livable wage. If the private sector will not provide these jobs, then the public sector should be the employer of last resort."
How can we pursue happiness if we worry about how to put food on the table and a roof over our head. Employment as a right is implied in 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'!
Mr. Greider suggests "social corporations could be chartered by government and given certain benefits...they may need some protections in their infancy and perhaps modest start-up subsidies, and exemptions from the usual rules, but most of them would be independent and privately owned."
Were Mr. Greider's ideas adopted, 'dying young' would not have had to become my retirement plan as I struggle to build a new social corporation, DoughNation Services LLC in Portland, OR - and in fact a new industry, donation services.
Mr. Greider outlines excellent guidelines to correct our misguided course. To these I would remind us of Ben Franklin's excellent motto 'do well by doing good'.
More than ever in our nation's history, 'doing well by doing good' is the right medicine to heal the desperate ills of our nation.
I hope we wake up.
Kim Breas
Founder, DoughNation Services LLC
www.doughnationservices.com
'Do well by doing good!'
Thanks for your input Kim, from a fellow Oregonian. :)
"The longest journey that anyone ever undertakes is the journey 'within themselves'. America has never accepted that.
Materialism has proved to be dissatisfying.
The quest for "God" even more than dissatisfying, and has caused more innocent bloodshed than any 'nationalism' in all of history.
The quest for power is as fleeting and most often tied, at least lately, with the two previously mentioned; and if one were to ask all of the other "powerful people" history has produced, they did not live as long as they expected in order to enjoy the 'power' they acquired.
The approval of your fellow human beings is another dissatisfying quest, even the approval of your relatives will often ended in disappointment.
America represented a dream that many wished to participate in, and few have enjoyed 'success'. Americans are conflicting people, on one hand they love to love themselves, and will over look the most atrocious behavior if it was 'done for America'.............on the other they refuse to accept the same behavior in other nations.
The ancient truth that 'you will never find outside of yourself, that which is not within you from the begining'...............applies to America as much as any individual, because America is made up of many individuals----
Every mistake that America has made should have been a lesson which would be a blessing had they learned from the mistake; instead it may be that America's true blessing will have been the 'negative example' they have striven to exemplify----to the entire world----and are succeeding quite well.
I learned from those; who had learned from those; who had survived terrible upheaval and destruction at the hands of the Americans;
That life begins with the struggle of birth itself, and is hard and dangerous; that if you seek your own happiness you will be disappointed; that if you are weak you will suffer; that if you demand love you will never have it; that if you are greedy you will never find enough; that if you expect peace without a struggle you will always have to fight; that truth is only for those brave enough to face it; that true joy in life can only be found by those who do not fear to be alone; that you only truly 'live' when you are no longer afraid to die.
America has never learned that lesson----------"Native America" as a "people" have------and we can say that we are the only 'people' who have survived contact with the Americans--------- and ----we will live forever.
Can the Americans say the same?
Good Luck America, you really need it.
"That life begins with the struggle of birth itself, and is hard and dangerous; that if you seek your own happiness you will be disappointed; that if you are weak you will suffer; that if you demand love you will never have it; that if you are greedy you will never find enough; that if you expect peace without a struggle you will always have to fight; that truth is only for those brave enough to face it; that true joy in life can only be found by those who do not fear to be alone; that you only truly 'live' when you are no longer afraid to die."
That was very well said. To empathize with a quote is perhaps not the same as truly understanding it and comes nowhere near actually practicing it, but nonetheless it was beautifully written.
In regards to the article -- The problem in America above all is APATHY. Most people frankly just don't care at all about the rest of the world or problems beyond their own backyard, and for the vast majority the 'rest of the world' is what they see every night on television. As a current university student I am impressed by the political awareness and the ... interest in world affairs that swept even the privileged youth of the nation during the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, at least relatively speaking. From what I see around me now, this is utterly lacking. Take away the ipods and celebrity gossip, the iphones and the television, and perhaps then people will "suffer" enough to care.
So... Good Luck America? Maybe. But if all America is is consumerism and consumption and ignorance, and if "luck" means regaining the ability to own six cars or a mansion or the victorious reaffirmation of the American lifestyle, then I would have to say "Good Riddance" instead.
Actually the problem is the illusion of Apathy. One mask we have all potentially and rightly learned to don. But the person who can see beyond the veil sees the vitality of each and every one of us waiting for recognition, that is the savior we are waiting for, and that is the savior each and every one of us can be. Remove your mask, and see finally that we all have one and we can all remove one.
The ancient truth that 'you will never find outside of yourself, that which is not within you from the beginning'....
This whole post was very excellent thanks NativeSon. We all originated in birth here on planet earth so I am a original daughter. Nice to meet you :). Birth is our origin and I hope we are reborn out of this dying time soon (find our 'sipapu' soon.)
Let the journey have it's heuristic beginning , were we are all like children exploring life as classroom and learning those crucial lessons of truth through experience.
To survive and thrive we must all choose to enter our personal canoe on the river of destiny and creation to arrive through surrender at the white wall where we will shed our old skins and begin as human again.
Fine. Dandy. Great. More wonderful words of wisdom from the elite. Another book.
Big problem. These ideas in in direct conflict with American interests (the ones who have the big bank accounts, the political power, and own the (literally) biggest guns.)
They will never cede any of these things without (again, literally) a fight.
We can't "Come Home" because as history shows, we are home.
We turned from what we thought we were, the worlds policeman, to the worlds biggest gang of violent hoodlums and shakedown artists.
At this point, the best we can do now, is to bring our Armies Home, stop blowing-up the world, taking other's treasures, and destroying other people's lands and cultures.
Its gonna take a hell of a lot more than written platitudes to make that happen.
If that happens, then maybe, maybe, we can become what we thought we were all along--a nation of democratic, caring, intelligent, and innovative people.
But first, I'm afraid there's come serious business to do in the streets.
You clearly have the right idea about what America needs to do as a country, but your cynacism is utterly useless, even counter-productive. Because this writer has a book coming out, that means he is somehow an elitist who should not be listened to? That sentiment sounds distinctly tinged by the green of envy.
Are you further saying that books are useless and do not change people's consciousness? That's just not true--the history of human society shows otherwsie again and again. The written word is a vital means of communication and communication is exactly what is needed to bring about the sort of heightened awareness our survival is going to depend upon. What, exactly, do you think is going to get people into the streets if not a change of consciousness. Do you really think the great masses of infantalized Americans are going to be motivated to grow up by simply shouting at them from a top a soap box? If we are going to expect them to get off their asses and pick up the hard work of opposing our corrupt, vicious corporate elite, then for christ sake, we had better strike some notes of hope--not just promise them a bloody fight in the streets, but offer some sort of vision of a better future.
Briggs Seekins
briggseekins.wordpress.com
Oregoncharles
"Government can do many things, but it cannot transform the society."
Government, with its vast media enablers, very well can transform society. This is one of the silliest things I've ever heard from Grieder.
"Government can do many things, but it cannot transform the society."
When I got to this sentence, I knew I was reading pure unadulterated BS. I don't know what planet this guy is living on, but he needs to get a grip. Apparently, he is deep in denial - or never heard of 'fascism' and what it can do to ANY country where the greedy monstrous deranged few get control of the media. He never heard of brainwashing either, I guess, because his rant to this point was all about personal idealism, instead of collective reality.
Government IS society - the society chosen by those who know what they want (even if they are psychopaths) and commit to getting it, no matter what. We have seen such people throughout history - Hitler, Hiro Hito (the god that didn't stand trial for war crimes either), Mao, Pol Pot, Mussolini - the list is endless. The deranged are driven - and they get what they want, at least for a while. They want to rule, more than anything else in life - and that's why they succeed in taking over society, and creating the kind of government that will follow their deranged model. Fascism - corporatism - is what replaced 'organized religion' - although that corrupted form still exists in some parts of the world yet today. But no matter what you call it, it is MILITARISM, pure and simple. Rule by terror - the way it's always done, when the few succeed in intimidating the many. Since Goebbels' time, the masses have been 'converted' by 'mass media' - and his rule still holds true today. He knew how to manipulate ordinary people into serving his ideology. Just like every other scam-artist. But it was the same in Roman times as well, even before Constantine melded military terrorism with religious terrorism.
These people are willing to kill and die for their ideology. Are you? Not very likely, is it. So there is your answer - and this whole article is BS.
Die, monster, die.
Sometimes I wonder if we Americans really know who we are. One of my professors once told us that sometimes when people don't have a sense of their own identity, they'll cover up by trying to play superhero and adventures. Maybe we Americans just don't have a stable identity to comfortably identify ourselves. Maybe the fact that we have been nothing more than a nation of immigrants is what brings forth the urge to rely on wars and "free" trade along with marginalizing other nations to artificially elevate itself with hatred and ignorance alongside which would be unimaginable in any other nation. As my 7th grade teacher once told me when she tried to cheer me up from feeling like I lost in life, "If you're nothing without it, then you're nothing with it." Maybe our denial of facing the cold hard truth that those "good days" aren't coming back or were, worse, a mere illusion to begin with is what more of us need to have the courage to face. Even our parents and grandparents will tell us that they did not necessarily see "the good old days" in their times. This and other denials in life I eventually stood up to and to tell you the truth, yes it hurts at first but slowly I felt emancipated from living in denial mode even if I kind of felt lonely. Maybe that's what is needed to recover our nation's identity. Sorry if I sound a bit too abstract here.
Well for many readers you probably are too abstract. To me you make perfect sense and have hit the nail right on the head. Of course new thought which can help us to new action would seem totally alien and abstract. But if it feels right to you, that is you finding your comfortable identity. Going home to self so to say. Each and everyone of us must make that journey in the end, for the beginning. ;-) Loved this post Jennifer.
Hi Leea, thank you. My thoughts occurred to me over various experiences in my life time. To name a few, consoling one of my neighbors who was a returning soldier finding himself abused by his own army wife just because he opposed the war in Iraq, consoling a sweetheart friend of mine who needed a home away from her own just to stay away from her abusive husband, or even witnessing a former coworker of mine who with his wife giving up their own home and ended up living out in the rural 50 miles west of the St Louis suburbs after he and his wife were unemployed long enough and couldn't find another job no matter their efforts. When I wrote this earlier, my remembering all these sad moments of watching the dearest struggling to get back home only to realize that they couldn't go back home made me weep and probably clouded my judgment as well. On the first two examples I mentioned, I told them that they were welcome to stay in my home. The man returning from Iraq regained his courage and eventually divorced his wife and even won his case as his now ex-wife was found guilty of domestic abuse as there was evidence and witnesses to prove that. As for my friend, her husband is in jail for attempting to assault an officer and yet she doesn't feel like going back home all too often. Sometimes, she and I try to overcome each others' sorrows and unhappiness. Her family and my family are planning to step in and help as well since she plans to divorce him but feels that her life is over. Hopefully, she will find a better man in her life and a home she can call home.
Americans need a new vision that helps them deal with reality, a promising story of the future that helps them let go of the past.
Best of luck. We already have the example of the political arc from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. Eventually, Americans are going to become real fed up, sick and tired, of the depression, the recession, the wars, the debt, the constant, nagging fear that they may wind up homeless or in some tent city, like the people they see on tv news or hear about who used to be middle class and are now down and out in the USA. Obysmal tries this; Obysmal tries that. Nothing works. Obysmal tries to explain but it's all just too complicated. The rich get richer. Iraq and Afghanistan grind on and on. You talk to a Democratic politician and he or she whips out the calculator, the abacus and the slide rule and attempts to figure what to do that requires as little courage or common sense as possible and won't cost them the next election. Meanwhile, George Wanker Bush recedes quickly from our collective memory and the Republicans cough up some bobble head from cloud cuckoo land who tells the people that he or she is the antidote to all the bad news, all the fear. I have a secret plan to end the wars and restore America to the glory that is rightfully ours. That's what Nixon did to Humphrey and Reagan did to Carter. It could easily work again. Americans DO NOT like dealing with reality.
Amerika, Amerika, God took his grace from thee!!!!!!
Come Home? Don't you mean Chase Home? As in Chase Home Finance? When the only way to get and keep a home is to sign away years of high payments, and to successfully make them without a single miss, you get what we have...
"The very emphasis of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill, makes it certain that we are descended from an endlessly long chain of generations of murderers, whose love of murder was in their blood as it is perhaps also in ours." Sigmund Freud
The author spins a competent cautionary tale. But the impact of the message is greatly reduced by his style.
His argument that Americans have got to stop thinking of themselves as special and blessed is greatly weakened in the first paragraph when the author charms his US readers by making them feel special and blessed.
"Americans will postpone immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices--if they must--so long as they are convinced the future can be better than the past."
Americans will... Americans think... Americans have... This is an American writer trying to create a generalized "American" who has a special and very admirable character. Though this mythological "American" - as affable as he is - also has flaws. (no kidding)
Likewise, when the author writes: "But we face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history" he is suggesting that this moment - this era - belongs to America. This is an extremely self-centered example of magical thinking - the kind that has lead America to where it is now.
Left to their own devices, the flat-earth fixed creation illiterate obese melanin deficient majority will shit their own nest, fuck their own children, and decorate themselves with the body parts and entrails of their neighbors. The rest is pure fantasy. Mr. Greider is talking to an America that doesn't exist and never did except in our fake history books and our July 4 speeches. He might want to reminisce with Kevin Phillips about his "Southern Strategy" that swept then entire white population under it's spell and reflected the true soul of this debased country.
In '68, with the greatest distribution of wealth in 6000 years of human history, with the end of poverty FOREVER in this country in sight, with lifetime stable employment on the horizon; 49 States (87% White Majority population) overwhelmingly elected RMN to, "put the filthy fucking niggers, the filthy fucking cunts, and those long haired god damned anti-war protesters in their fucking place." That's a quote from NY to Lost Angels and all points in between. I was there. And he did, and now we're here.
No turning back, no changing course, America wanted Exclusion no matter the price and this psychotic society will auger into the deck at terminal velocity - and they'll kill anyone who tries to prevent it.
Best of luck on the next book Bill.
Peece.
P.S. The Roosevelt Legacy was a mistake, the mistake was fully understood when White Male America realized that the Legacy would require them to give up Male Supremacy, Gender Slavery, Constant War, and feral Oligarchy. When they saw it, they experienced profound panic and responded with hysterical violence. It took them a decade to reverse course and another 20 years to retreat back to their feral roots where they are comfortable. RIP.
luckylefty,
I have read a number of your hyper-cynical rants posted on Commondreams. I am curious what turned you so extremely hateful, bitter and blinded by race.
Why do you sign off with the word "Peace"? I do not see anything peaceful in your thoughts to words. In fact, your words seem unhinged and self-destructive.
Luckylefty, there are tens-of-millions of citizens in this nation - from every possible ethnicity and social background - working to build communities and a country worth living in. For instance, here in Alaska, our family works in conservation of natural resources and the preservation of wilderness. Annually, my wife and I travel to Zimbabwe and donate our time, efforts and money to the people of that desperate land. Further, my wife's family in Tacoma, Washington started the organization "Hearts For Zambia" which cares for and raises AIDS orphans.
Sir, I highly recommend you read Nelson Mandela's book, "The Long Walk To Freedom". Perhaps, with Mandela's words, you might learn where peace begins.
Yet our new president says he'll "... never apologize to anyone for how Americans live."
It's apparently no integrated concern of Obama's --Greider please note -- that relative to the ecosystems that sponsor human existence, huge numbers of Americans now live, and their economic system is teaching the rest of the world to live, like a stampeding herd of blood engorged, host killing vampires.
Much as I want to honor anybody's progressive idealism, especially a longtime fighter's like Greider, I think he's increasingly going sentimental, and definitely has gone so, here.
Focusing on talk of noble Ends, to the exclusion of talk about commensurate Means, cuts no mustard especially in America The Present.
This is not the FDR era, Bill.
The judgment capacities [the mass-cognition state] of most Americans, to say nothing of the country's establishment politics, are far more democratically degraded and locked-down than anything known in the past.
While it's clear enough what our society's humane Goals should be -- and you Mr. Greider re-state them very eloquently -- it remains that present spokespersons for the progressive community still lack any clear or convincing exegetics about Means for achieving them.
Let's make no mistake about this: The human creature hasn't changed much with respect to politics and revolution. The mass of average people, even if inclined to be rational and do Good, still need sane, inspiring, articulate, and morally courageous leadership -- of some kind -- to get a rotten polity off dead center.
Maybe it's time for otherwise-good folks like you [and Nader,and Hightower, and Kucinich, etc., et al) to use what national visibility and power you have, to help a few Jefferson-caliber leaders come-up into prominence.
I see no hope for anything really changing (except for the worse), unless progressives have better spokespersons/organizers. And while I'm not personally up to that task, I know damn well that there are others who are.
Yes, Greider becomes the worst of liars, hypocrites and criminals to our time lost in the wilderness of hypocrisy and illusion when he himself keeps supporting the person with the broken compass leading us astray.
Excellent point.
William Greider in "Come Home, America" and David Korten in "Agenda for a New Economy" define the pillars of this coming age of socialist democracy, while Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in "Multitude" define the five thousand year long wave that will finally crash over Empire.
Obama has the choice of either being the first leader of the new revolutionary age beyond Empire, or merely the last paid help of the dying, ruling-elite Empire.
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Obama? I think he will not be alone in success or failure. We truly miss the point in believing the blessing or curse will only befall upon the viral elite, or the pseudo leaders of our human family.
You have to admire Bill Greider, as I long have done. He knows a lot, and he thinks.
I'm all in favor of democracy in the workplace, but I have also long thought it to be putting the cart before the horse. It's as if social thinkers have given up on the idea of democracy for the entire society and settled for the more limited goal.
If ever a time demonstrated the aching need for democracy in general, this is it. Whatever the people want, we're not getting it. Whatever we don't want the nation to do, it's doing, and vice versa, from war to single payer.
Never mind the fading of the dreams, what we need is a government that follows our instructions or it doesn't get paid. The government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. All these lousy decisions flow directly and obviously from the recognized fact that they were made by fewer than all of us. Thus there is only one fix: Let us all decide!
Putting the voxbox in every dwelling would make a wonderful employment project. We could then put an end to all this nonsense.
Yep there we go, that is one step closer to home!
Priceless!
We must stop placing so much importance on who is in charge and on the material things and mindless nonsense fed to us day in and day out, for we are becoming nothing but cattle lined up at the troughs.
We must decide individually what is important to us on a basic scale and then eventually the whole country will change.
It really is a simple solution; the people do not realize how much power they have! The working class will starve the beast and the only way to kill the beast is to stop feeding it.
I am afraid that as simple as a solution this may be, it will not be done without bloodshed.
Or, if the beast be us, it is one way to become a balance of beauty and beast.
Are you saying things were good Red, but now they are bad?
Can't argue with one word here.
:)
Redtide,
"If you want universal peace, sustainability, equality and affluence, the unique solution is a planned economy in a class-free world." Are your thoughts to words based in peace, sustainability and equality, Redtide? Your sentiments seem based in self-righteous anger, vengeance and retribution. Peace, economic sustainability and cultural equality require extraordinary patience and virtue. Don't you have to be the person you want others to become? And, while I agree that imperial-style capitalism is deeply flawed and often causes needless suffering, do you really understand the social and economic disaster that was Leninist-Stalinist Communism? Sir, have you ever traveled to a Third or Fourth World country?
The U S of AIPACistan.
Yes, imperial style capitalism is deeply flawed, which is putting it politely. Capitalism and democracy do not make good bedfellows, and unless memory fails, Karl Marx said or strongly implied as much in his Manifesto. Of course, as soon as Marx's name is mentioned, or the notion of communism or socialism invoked, far too many Americans become rabid, hate and invective-spewing imbeciles, precisely because their education in this country - largely a poor, anti-intellectual one - favours collossal horseshit and lies about the formation, purpose, meaning, rights, obligations, freedoms, social fabric and state of this country. Add to that the very important point that the United States, like virtually the rest of the entire world, is historically, presently and nastily mired in what Riane Eisler called 'androcracy' - the male-supremacist/ruling ethos underpinning most but not quite all human life on this planet.
Lucky Lefty mentions male supremacy and gender slavery above. To put the two notions together, if I may, yields a very critical idea that perhaps a majority of people know or suspect, not that you would know it from the way people often conduct their lives, and conduct most affairs - from those of state to those of the personal sphere: Men are slaves to being male. I believe they are far more enslaved than are women to being female. There's actually a breath-taking preponderance of scientific, social and cultural evidence to back this assertion.
I suspect a worryingly high percentage of men would think this bullshit, since it is a known fact that men as a class invest significantly far less of their time or interest in gender issues relative to women, and it is also widely accepted, at least among those not in denial, that the masculine defines itself by what it is not - female or gay.
How does this relate to Mr Greider's excerpt and book and ideas? Simply: there is no goddamn 'civilization' of any worth whatsoever in this country or any other as long as androcracy and patriarchy are the exclusive ruling principles of any nation-state or people. There will be no progress, for progressives or regressives or the kind of dreamers who think they can return America to some Archie/Sergeant Rock status quo delusion of what it means to be American or live in America.
In a NY Times theatre review of the play 'Tea and Sympathy', of March 17, 2006 entitled 'Men Will Be Men, But How Is The Question', the reviewer, Ginia Bellafonte at one point discusses the character's dilemma by referring to 'the dangerously limited ways Americans have codified masculinity.' Note every word, for the idea has a profound implication for life in this country as all the (non-existent) money is given to the criminal class running banks, etc.; and despite what many of us in the progressive community fear is just a cosmetic, and perhaps smoke-screen change in Barack Obama - though many of us hope fervently otherwise - it's business as usual in the military and business/corporate dimensions.
The code of masculinity followed has a lot to answer for in the present state of affairs. The United States is militarized and corporatized to an extremely dangerous, psychotic extent, and no amount of bullying and cock-wagging on the part of the mob who insist that this country must maintain the largest military in the Solar System and realize its 'destiny' as a super-corporate super-state changes this fact. And this fact is largely driven by the out-of-control male-supremacist ego. A feminizing influence flowering in American society and culture is about as likely as a flock of pigs heading south for the winter outside my window right now, but a study of the various parameters of the predicament, and a serious examination of the causative factors will reveal that the country insisting for a very long time on defining itself and imposing itself on the world, as opposed to living in it, along androcratic lines, is at the root of the problem. A good deal of the rest of the world is fed up with this country insisting on running around with its drawers around its ankles, showing off the size of its cock and shitting on everyone's carpets at the world's party.
Mr Greider, who rightly views the U.S. military as the greatest threat to the peace and security of the U.S., has an erudite benevolence informing many earnest ideas about HOW TO FIX THE JOINT. I'm sure he also has serious opinions about that disgusting, evil cabal of so-called 'Christians' - the goddamn fundamentalist rabble who are destroying the country and what's left of its tattered reputation abroad. The radical 'Christian' fundamentalists have also to be dealt with on the issue of gender justice, because of course these mind-controlled zombies are hell-bent on keeping long-standing patriarchic and androcratic ideas and institutions in place.
Sioux Rose
BARRY: Interesting post. Much that you relate I place under the banner, "Mars rules." Your insights into the crippled masculinity America touts to the world as if bearing a great need to prove its prowess probably factors into why there is a growth of the porn "industry," an industry that utilizes EXTREMELY detrimental and denigrating images of women. This fear of the DIVINE feminine, this anger at women and its connection in too many men to sexual excitement is terrifying to me. I believe many men would rather kill or go to war, then learn to sit with their feelings or acquire REAL intimacy with a woman. A man may go through all the motions to prove himself a man to other men, but women may know a man's vulnerability as another man (unless they are both gay) cannot. In my mind this is part of the message of Samson in the Bible. It's also shown in living color by the Renaissance painter, Boticelli as Venus towers over the little warrior Mars. When love is missing, a variety of twisted emotions enter to fill the vacuum and these are the psychic rudiments of war, THE product America is and has mostly been selling. It's a tragic farce of epoch proportions leaving so many broken on a variety of levels. I appreciate your honesty in looking at this beast in the mirror.