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Cut the 'Nonsense' for a Decent Society
"When things fail, then it's time to ask questions, fix the problems and redesign the system so it works for everyone. That's the challenge of the day."
-- Muhammad Yunus, creator of micro-credit and the Grameen Bank, (9/3/09)
A Reuters news story of September 6 starts: "President Barack Obama's drive to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system has created opportunities and risks for key members of both political parties ..."
For key members of both political parties? What about the rest of us? What politicians risk in healthcare reform is their campaign contributions and their affluent life styles. What thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans risk in not changing the system is their health, their homes, possibly their lives.
In response to my columns, I receive comments (mostly anonymous) detailing how the threats of socialism, liberalism, national debt, or godlessness are far more dire than a few irresponsible losers reaping the consequences of their own folly and weakness. I hear from some who parse freedom as the liberty to profit from the needs or misfortunes of others, some who assert that we must get rid of government and taxes, and some who just tell me to STFU.
This summer a new "Army Experience Center" (costing $13 million) was opened in Philadelphia to communicate the Army's "mission, values, resources and career opportunities." It provides teens the chance to be killers using "high-action simulators" (http://www.thearmyexperience.com/ ; http://www.army.mil/-news/2008/09/02/12072-army-experience-center-opens-... )
Presently the Obama administration is considering escalating an eight-year-old war in Afghanistan that many people are calling a "quagmire" or "another Vietnam." Robert Fisk, in "Everyone Seems to Be Agreeing with Bin Laden These Days" (http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/19 ) bluntly calls Afghanistan a failure based on a "logic of nonsense"
Indeed, one or another logic of nonsense underlies most of our present failures in war, health care, the economy, foreign relations and global ecosystems. A major nonsense is that we can fix problems and redesign systems by spending money and resources for war and technologies for killing and controlling humans we have deemed undesirable.
But the most pervasive nonsense is in our public discourse: accusations, rants and taunts about how bad the other guys are - how stupid/ deluded/ crafty/ lying they are, how our facts are better than their facts, how they are blind, greedy, irresponsible, racists, brainwashed, vicious, depraved, etc, while we are clear-sighted, generous, responsible, unbiased, reasonable, honest, etc. At all levels from letters to the editor and town hall meetings to national media, the emphasis is on discrediting, marginalizing, humiliating, even brutalizing those we disagree with or disapprove of.
We entertain ourselves and our children with fictions of unspeakable violence, and spend more money on ways to kill and injure people than on saving lives and helping people, and assume that the realities propagated by TV programming are all there is to the real world.
We've forestalled friendly open relations with others and suppressed accommodation, compromise, or working together for practical goals. We've pretty much destroyed solidarity, consensus, collegiality, or shared values. We've built walls of distrust and suspicion, planted thickets of thorny but largely irrelevant arguments to keep us from making things work better for everyone.
For a decent society, we need civil discourse among competent, compassionate, moral, reasonable citizens who are confident that they can work with their neighbors. We need leaders we can respect, and respectful conversations on issues that matter.
One of the best times of this century was just after we had elected Obama, and we were proud that we had come together and elected a president who shared our goals, our questions and our hopes for fixing the problems we face.
But today Obama, Congress and the media seem to be caught up in logics of nonsense propagated by private sector. I see this as a systemic instability in public discourse and decision-making introduced by the private, for-profit sector: money. When money is the only measure of goodness or success, then money becomes the only source of respect or self-respect, and only the wealthy are worthy. We've seen this in our foreign policy, our for-profit wars, and, of course, the health care debate. The private sector tends to define success by their own bottom line and executive compensation, not by the common good, and is not controlled by public scrutiny of spending nor answerable to voters in elections.
I believe we're better than we give ourselves credit for. I hope so, because it's up to us. The private sector won't do it; our President and Congress can't do it. We-the-People must somehow rebuild the social capital of honest communication and consensus, restore our self-respect and our respect for others, find common ground and common resources, and the confidence that we can make things work.
24 Comments so far
Show AllThe knuckle-dragger philosophy is that individual gain trumps any action proposed for the common good, and (as a corollary) all government or regulation is bad. This life outlook reigns supreme in the U.S. as nowhere else, and the folks who espouse this philosophy are spending boatloads of money to make sure nothing happens to get in their way as they lead us to self-destruction.
"This life outlook reigns supreme in the U.S. as nowhere else......"
Wrong.
It permeates through business classes everywhere, and most of all people who thrive on acquiring material wealth as a symbol of superiority.
Love
Zero
Ah, yes...A "christian country" so easily rolls off the tongue of most while carrying rocket launchers in their back pockets and hypocrisy in their hearts.
What would Geezus do? War without end, rape the poor, feed the rich, praise the robber barons. Ya can't have it both ways. Well, I guess maybe you can if your are in the top 1% because they are bulletproof.
No, they're not bulletproof. It's just that nobody's shooting them yet.
I'm sorry to say, but it seems to me that Ms. Arnold is preaching to the choir. There is nothing that the citizens of the U.S. would rather have than the "social capital of honest communication and consensus, and the restoration of our self-respect."
It may behoove her to send a personal copy of this to all the greedy health insurance companies, banks, and above all the greedy members of Congress who think it's ok to take money from corporations to do their bidding instead of honoring their obligation to represent the CITIZENS who elected them!!!!!
Well put Caroline.
Nonsense prevails because the public is no longer represented in government. I agree with you completely however I don't see how we can introduce the public interest back into government. In this day and age our corpocracy has high jacked our media, our government and even our education system to the point that the average American doesn't know what to do to be heard. Electing Obama didn't work as he has so far shown that he is anything but anti-corporate.
At the end of the day we are left blaming each other much to the delight of our corporate masters.
Breaking up media conglomerates might help.
The Rodney King of politics. Why don't we all kiss and make friends. We can have some pajama parties and share some honest communication.
Reality is, unsavory people hold the levers of power in this country and I suspect things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. The time for right action is now. We are past the point of flowery calls for open communication and consensus. We had consensus on the bank bailouts. We had consensus on universal healthcare. What happened?
I wonder if she was out on the streets of Pittsburgh with her cello for the G20?
"Can't we all just get along?"...children. I hate this kind of simple minded Church talk, it's to be blunt extremely condescending BS! Unfortunately, the facts are the human race is filled with predators and scavengers by the super tanker load and it's the reason we need laws to protect us from them. The problem begins though when the predators and their allies gain power as they did 8 yrs. ago. They then turn the world of law on it's head and turn these criminals loose on the rest of society and call it Liberty.
After 4,000 years, we still worship the golden calf.
Caroline Arnold understands that change is up to us. It all boils down the the basis of all religions, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This is the bottom line.
"I painted them all, from the old gossips waiting to confess their barrel fulls of candle droppings to the breathless fellow at the alter foot, fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there, with the little children round him in a row of admiration, half for his beard, half for the white-hot anger of his victim's son, shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm and crossing himself because of Christ with the other, whose sad face on the cross sees only this after the passion of a thousand years."----Robert Browning in FRA LIPPO LIPPI
The basis of most religions is NOT "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It is more a matter of thinking "we have the ultimate truth and the rest of you will burn in hell forever."
Most religions, like most politicians, are sadistic, manipulating, and avaricious.
Bring America Back !!!!
***Caroline Arnold does not have to be a Repubby, even though working for Sen John Glenn, and certainly her locale would make her intimate with the Massacre at Kent State, and she refers to the pride she felt when "we" elected Obama.
**But the Society she pretty ably describes here is most assuredly a "Sick Society"===one which professes freedoms and democracy, yet acts to repress its own peoples and to make criminal war on innocent sovereign foreign nations.
**So to get us from a manifestly Sick Society to a 'Decent Society', we the people are supposed to 'stop the nonsense'.
She admits Obama and our congress just cant manage to do it.
**Congrats to Arnold if she probably did vote Democratic, but what she is saying puts us somewhere back at the Demmy Convention when Rep Dennis Kucinich screamed 4 times at the top of his Voice: WAKE UP AMERICA !!! WAKE UP AMERICA!
Arnold: "We entertain ourselves and our children with fictions of unspeakable violence...and assume that the realities propagated by TV programming are all there is to the real world."
I got a kick out of realizing that the movie 'Surrogates', which includes scenes of people dying by 'brain melt', is rated PG-13, while Michael Moore's new film 'Capitalism' is rated R, probably because of some of the language used by an older American being turned out of his home (lost to a predatory loan).
Brain melt: OK
Foul language while losing your home: NOT OK
Welcome to America. We protect our children here... from foul language.
i wonder who it was that originally observed:
"AMERICA is the world's most highly entertained Society and the least Informed".
i have become more and more convinced of it - not just from an observation of the general social mores - but from knowing or meeting people - americans - who , strange as it may seem , despite being in rather high positions at work such as supervisory, management, accounting, etc...."decision makers" in other words:
when slightly challenged about what they PREFER to pay attention to - such as "what's on tv" -
almost invariably say:
"i can't really get into those documentaries or these nature research or these science stuff....but i really like the last year's ...."
so and so Detective thriller, american idol copy because "it was better than the last",.........
i guess this IS what america is - SHALLOW ...as i was once, long ago, forwarned by others who had life experiences and occasion to live in , travel to and then compare societies....before "confronting" what it really was.
it IS a largely SHALLOW society....a word definition i had forgotten - told to me 2 decades ago.
after long observation -- i am now convinced. what I was told IS true.
I also think its shallow by design. PBS and other reasoned news-media and reportage outlets have been under attack in America for decades, its a shadow of its corresponding outlet in Britian, for example. If you watch FOX there's a recurrent message: numbers, esp. statistics, are BAD, body language is GOOD. Ya see, ya can FAKE statistics, but you CAN'T fake good Americans with your eyes, they are too smart for that! They have a built-in lie detector. (reminds me of the Nazi posters of the 1930s, showing Jews as crooked, creeping slinkers with permanent sneers on their faces: here's how you recognize a Jew!).
I've seen Bill O'Reilly and enablers work for an hour or more to convince their viewers that the WAY somebody said something was significant, more significant than WHAT THEY SAID. Think about that message, for a second. MORE SIGNIFICANT THAN WHAT THEY SAID?? It basically asks the viewer to DISCARD what was said, the context and MEAT of a conversation, in favor of the packaging. During the run up to the Iraq War, Bill and Company repeatedly had decorated generals on talking in measured tones about the advisability of bombing the cr*p out of Iraqi civilians, and for 'fair and balanced' coverage a BEARDED professor from L.A. who looked like he'd just come off the commune. It turned out, the professor had some good arguments and connected with some of Bills audience, so of course he was dropped. I saw a Dennis Miller episode where the rights argument was taken by the head of an economics department, and the lefts position was taken by an ACTRESS (who turned out to be pretty good, but still!!) The media WAS the message. No other message required or desired.
If you aren't going to wade through statistics and aren't going to tax your brain digesting what you are being told, you are going to end up SHALLOW, literally taking your pundits at FACE-VALUE. And thats exactly what has happened to too many Americans.
great comment. I live in New York City. I can count on my left hand the number of americans I have met who can think of anything to say beyond what they saw on tv the night before. It is truly shocking.
Whether we're talking about the wars or the financial crisis, until politics is removed from the debates, politics will continue to poison everything it touches. The creeps blaming socialism have been conditioned into thinking that playing politics somehow inflates their macho-egotistical behavior. Same thing with war. Their excuse is "war on terror" which is an oxymoron to say the least. You can't win a war on terror as war creates terror. Perhaps somewhere down the road, more people will stop allowing politics to poison everything and then society will be less unhappy and insecure for a change. This could be wishful thinking though.
Buddha was right, all life is suffering. Evolution has given us a dubious gift: the instinct for self-preservation. It is this alone that prevents us from ending our suffering.
That instinct keeps us alive, but the really big evil in Pandora's box is hope. Without hope, we off ourselves and end it. With hope, we remains alive to suffer and to elicit the laughter of the gods and the rich, who love watching their clueless, wormy fellow men squirm under their depredations.
Pandora's box is usually misinterpreted. The box contained everything evil except for the one good thing which was hope? Nonsense! The box was full of the sources of pain of which hope alone was left to live in each individual heart.
Hope is the confusion of the desirability of a thing with its probably.---Schopenhauer
Hope is the desire for a circumstance in which we have no agency. I do not hope to drive my car, I just do it. I hope that I will not be struck by lightening.---Derrick Jensen
Anyone who is still proud of voting for Obama is not paying attention. He is very much part of the problem because he (and the vast majority of people in this nation) still believes, or pretends to believe, that the people of this nation are somehow SUPERIOR to all the other people on this planet and that this nation is ordained to dominate, especially through military viciousness and indifference.
his rhetoric - as of those leaders surroudning him - opponents or not - shows this mentality as "alive and kicking".
what obama and americans that think that way DO NOT seem to GET is--- the world DOESN'T think so.
Health Care? it is the LAUGHING STOCK of other advanced countries..they express disbelief at how BACKWARD the usa is :
does that FIT IN with obama's or american's notions about "superiority?"
CHINA Doesn't think the USA is DEPENDABLE...and WORRIES it can't even PAY UP....and certainly isn't frightened of any threats or lectures from the USA ...on the contrary -- Geithner, obama and company go to Beijing practically on their bended knees asking for "another chance"......
"superiority?"
RUSSIA knows it holds the cards on Energy Wars....what's the USA REALLY going to do ? THREATEN russia with invasion and "sanctions?" and offer EUROPE WHAT exactly in place of ENERGY DETACHED from europe?
"superiority?"
the only superiority the USA has is in its QUANTITY and MASSIVE KILLING ARSENAL that it can't even deploy without threatening ITS OWN EXISTENCE from collective retaliation by countries that have had ENOUOGH of this "american superiority" nonsense. ..that and the SUPEREFFICIENCY of america's CORPORATE FASCIST POLICE STATE .
that is where it is {superior} at.
oh - and a citizenry SUPERIOR at being the "most entertained and the least informed" EVEN compared , in the latter subject, to MANY people elsehwere in MUCH POORER countries.
it is SO DISCREDITED all over the globe. EVEN the USA's "humanitarian" missions - of sending SOLDIERS to Flood regions LIKE vietnam and the philippines are MET WITH SUSPICION EVEN by the devastated populations.
that's how DISCREDITED the USA has become.
"superiority?"
OBAMA and americans need to WAKE UP.