Speaking Out Against the Status Quo

First of all, Ben, well done on that sleepwalking dog video. You've managed to sift through the mostly worthless sludge of youtube and found yourself a regular nugget of gold. Congratulations. I hear gold is the only thing that's still worth anything these days. Needless to say, you are probably sitting at your desk by candlelight, stacking up gold Krugerrands like some kind of apartheid-loving Scrooge McDuck.

Well, there's a joke that worked out better in my head. Anyway, the point was that I see now how disastrous it is for me to abandon the blog. [Unwarranted cheap shot warning]. Kyle starts writing like he knows about politics and Ben manages to turn things miraculously around to himself. (I know, I know...and Zach manages to not be heard from. For a week. I get it).

Before I forget, while Ben was busy watching the Jonas Brothers video blog on youtube (I just started a demand for something that doesn't exist), I was busy ignoring my magazines. But today I picked up this week's copy of The Nation, and as usual, I wasn't disappointed. Check out Barney Frank's frankly-titled (couldn't help myself) letter in The Nation this week, "Cut the Military Budget," which is about, well...I don't want to spoil the surprise. But he lays out an excellent case that I think all Americans--especially those who call themselves fiscal conservatives--ought to at least give consideration to. Of course, it's hard to get people to seriously consider an idea that they have been so thoroughly conditioned to resist: a reduction of the military-industrial complex. (I know, some of you are going to say, "Let's face it--our very lives are at stake here!" To which I say: poor fool, do you not see that it is the so-called security that catalyzes the threats against us? But then this turns into a whole debate about whether national security is about the proverbial bottom line of results versus the honorable way of doing things and honoring our ideals and principles in our practice, and I think Jack Bauer has pretty much answered that question [to your satisfaction] already).

Anyway...how I despise myself for using that as a transition...ANYWAY, we've delved--well, Ben and Kyle delved as I took a mental vacation--into the philosophical underpinnings of the two-party system. For those of you who missed last week or are just joining us (I love that I write as if a fourth, much less fifth person were reading this blog), I think we can all agree to the short version: the two parties suck, the two-party system sucks, and we really need to get out and vote. (Or maybe I made up the part about getting out to vote...did you guys touch on that? My use of the parentheses is extensive so far. Not a good sign. Sentence fragments apparently good, however. You. Vote.)

But voting, even if we all voted, can only change so much. The question that ultimately interests me, at the end of most days, is why do things continue to persist the way that they are? It is much more complicated than the number of people who choose to vote or not vote. Why do we continue to live in such conditions, with such hypocrisy in power, with so little input or control over the way our resources, our principles, and our name--America--are used abroad? Why do most of us do little more than sit home and grumble about the state of things when in Iceland, the government was ousted by people banging on drums, and when in Russia--Vladimir Putin's repressive Russia--thousands took to the streets to protest the government's handling of the crisis? There were one or two small demonstrations here, but Americans on the whole, as usual, seemed happy to say nothing and stay at home. Are we simply more patient than Europeans? Are we so tired from working too hard for too little just to stay afloat that we simply don't have the energy for civic engagement? Or is it that we believe that the market truly is self-perpetuating, moving ever forward, impossible to stop? Or do we believe in the magic of Obama?

(Note to Paul Shanklin, Rush Limbaugh, and Chip Saltsman: I'm calling him potentially magic as an economist, not as an African-American. Oh, and by the way, this is why Wikipedia is great: they have a whole page devoted to the "Barack the Magic Negro" scandal. Including this tidbit: 'On December 31, 2008, during their New Year's Eve broadcast, the Fox News Channel allowed the viewer submitted text message "Happy New Year and let's hope the Magic Negro does a good job" to be displayed in the news ticker on the bottom of the screen. Fox News later apologized for allowing the message to be aired.' Classic. All I can say is: clearly, that text message came from Rupert Murdoch. Thank you, Wikipedia. I may be coming around on you yet).

But to get back to the question: why does the status quo of social inequality persist? I tend to think the answer--as I usually do--is somewhat more complicated than it may appear.

I really wanted to quote an extensive selection from a textbook of mine, called School and Society by Tozer, Senese, and Viloas. However, while I am quite sure this blog is reaching an excruciatingly small group of people, I feel certain that some type of mindless computer is humming away day and night, waiting to catch my not-for-profit unauthorized reproduction of overpriced academic texts, so I can be sought out and ruined financially while being raked across the coals of intellectual property. I am torn, because my desire to pass on this wonderful knowledge to others is intertwined with my belief that it ought to be free, and I ought to be free to do so, with all due respect and notwithstanding the authors' need to be compensated for their excellent work. Ultimately, the threat of punishment--the aforementioned coals--will keep me in my place, and the book's text within its cover. Kudos, though, to McGraw Hill for publishing such a subversive and Marxist textbook. It gives me the tiniest shred of faith in textbook publishers. Just the tiniest, though.

(Note to the authors--I say the book is overpriced because I know that many people besides you are profiting much more from the sale of your book. I would have gladly paid you a much higher sum for this knowledge in lecture form and given my money to a university than handed it over to a publisher or a college bookstore, albeit that universities are inherently for-profit institutions as well. But that's another week's discussion).

Let me simply say, moving on, that the book's authors introduced me to Antonio Gramsci, who according to the authors is an important ideological hegemony theorist. To quote the Wikipedia page about Gramsci: "Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting...He claimed that modern intellectuals were not simply talkers, but directors and organisers who helped build society and produce hegemony by means of ideological apparatuses such as education and the media."

I find this position difficult to disagree with. The analysis rings quite true to me: students in all schools, regardless of the school's perceived "performance" based on the narrowly constructed and defined reality of contemporary educational standards, are socialized and "educated" for the better part of their most formative years by the school which is essentially a conservative (as in conserving) institution. People graduate, if they are lucky, from this school system into a world where the media continues to play to the level of intellectual expectation and the bounds of debate set by the educational system. Corporate ownership provides the necessary agenda for deciding what is and what isn't part of the news cycle, and since everything within that is consistent with what we have already been taught is "acceptable" and "democratic" the cycle continues unchallenged.

Both media and schools play by the same rules, offering a white-washed version of events, whether recent or historical, and both focusing, in even their most critical moments, on nothing more harmless than the undesirable outcomes of particular aspects of government programs or policy. Both institutions--the "public" schools and the "free" press--continually fail to develop a truly subversive, intellectually honest critique of the fundamental structures of our society: free-market capitalism; representative "democracy"; the police state; American imperialism; the military-industrial complex; the ever-more-consolidated media; the conflicts that our "intelligence" community has waged almost unnoticed by Americans for decades.

But then, why should I expect differently from media? Why would they offer a critique that would challenge their own worth and undermine their own profitability? And why would schools teach alternative societal structures or an honest examination of our own? We know whose interests they serve.

Something keeps us in our place. Is it fear? Is it ignorance? Is it the constant propaganda of the media? It likely has to do with all of these factors, and more. My real question is, how do we reach out to people? How do we offer people an alternative politics? How do we begin to explain an analysis that, when summarized, is mindlessly marginalized by the opposition as something out of the X-Files? How do you productively suggest that Marxism or socialism are not dirty words to be swept under the rug? How do we show people those things have been made so subtle?

How do we convince people that the self-appointed greatest country in the world, for all its greatness, has many flaws, and that as its people we must hold it to its own highest standard--nay, to its own written standard? Most days, it seems we fall short of those words penned by Thomas Jefferson, about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, though they remain synonymous with our country's very name whether we honor them or not. How do we show people these shortcomings and educate them when even great men like Eisenhower and Kennedy, who held the highest office in the land, and were strong logicians and orators, could not? (See the links below for selections from often-overlooked speeches by Eisenhower and Kennedy--why didn't these make it into my history textbook? Hmm...)

Eisenhower's Farewell Address (Military-industrial complex)

Kennedy's "Secret Societies" speech

So, my question to the group is: as participants in society, as people who think and write and blog about our ideas, and as people who have families and friends, many of whom may not share what could be considered a radical and subversive analysis of American power, how do we present this alternative viewpoint in a way that is actually constructive? How do I sit down at the dinner table, or at my local bar, or in line at the supermarket, or on the subway, and begin a conversation about the incestuous institutional relationships between corporations, corporate-owned media, and government? How do I begin to suggest that, just possibly, this country isn't perfect, and that I'm not a terrorist for saying so?

Literally: I want us to brainstorm ways to begin having this conversation with people. Besides, you know, the whole awkward "So, have you thought much lately about how we are all complicit in the slow and deliberate death of other people and the planet and a variety of other actions contradicting our stated values?"

I want advice. We hope to welcome to the fold this week (as they see fit) Mike Mahoney, Rachel Beatty and Garrett Bunyak. I look forward to hearing from and responding to everybody.