Joseph Marohl

Limited as my skills in small talk are, one of the hardest challenges people routinely face me with is one most people find easy: “How was your day?” “What’s going on in your life now?” “Tell me about what you’ve been up to.”

The problem is that, as a college instructor, I lead an eventful but fairly repetitive life. For me, the news is papers to grade, committee meetings to attend, and lectures to prepare. Then repeat.

And a community college faculty’s salary, after rent, utilities, debts, and groceries, leaves little left over for those wild nights on the Sunset Strip I sometimes like to imagine for myself.

My life is boring.

The year before he died, Nobel-prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky published his essay “In Praise of Boredom,” to which Andrew Sullivan’s blog recently drew my attention.

In this essay, composed as a commencement address, Brodsky recommends,

“When hit by boredom, let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is: The sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.”

My first thought is, Is this generalization true? It seems to be so to me, based, unscientifically, on my own life, which contains not only lulls but a wide range of other “things unpleasant.”

My second thought is, from the vantage of our present crises, Wouldn’t it be better, then, just to let the economy, the system, the government, the environment, the whole infrastructure of the nation and the world simply to fail? Won’t the rebound be a lot quicker if we simply give up on padding the fall?

Even if bottoming out is good for the individual soul, a further question is whether the same will work for societies. About this I have some doubts, but, on the whole, most aspects of the economy, system, government, etc., strike me as hopelessly corrupt, and perhaps (perhaps!) starting from scratch could not be much worse than what we have.

The macrocosms of the natural world and the long stretch of human history seem at least as resilient as the microcosm of the individual soul. Of course, when governments and environments bottom out, the situation is generally known as a cataclysm—and the benefits of cataclysm, evolutionarily sound though they are, might be a difficult sell right now.

But back to boredom, relatively benign in the face of cataclysm.

Brodsky continues: “The idea here is to exact a full look at the worst. The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor.”

Now this is the pessimistic embrace of the worst I admire in Russian writers. Despite a persistent but usually negligible sentimental streak, I am the Anti-Pollyanna. With Bertrand Russell, I say, “The secret to a happy life is to face the fact that the world is horrible.” On the whole my mindset has made me more contented than my hopeful, positive-thinking, and can-do acquaintances.

But what Brodsky touches on here is the spiritual quality of boredom—the zen of the doldrums—the perception of the vastness of time as a pure concept—the existential insight that there are just too many diems to carpe.

He goes on to say, “Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. For boredom speaks the language of time, and it teaches you the most valuable lesson of your life: the lesson of your utter insignificance.”

My utter insignificance. Here we are along with the Latin satirist Juvenal—and his Enlightenment admirers who meditated on the “vanity of human wishes”—long before Dr. Norman Vincent Peale added Enthusiasm to the trinity of virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.

The idea that, in the huge scheme of things, my individual actions are futile and, with apologies to It’s a Wonderful Life, my existence of no importance whatsoever, and that, as a system of personal faith, cause-and-effect is fallible, if not outright fallacious, is invigorating and weirdly reassuring.

Perhaps, after all, we do children a disservice by constantly assuring them of their special-ness, affirming their self-confidence, stoking their ambitions, and enumerating their entitlements. Given a couple of decades of such hype administered through mass entertainments, assertiveness training, doting adults, glimmering (though touched-up) role models, and catchy jingles, no wonder that, as we mature, even after we shed ourselves of belief in the tooth fairy, Santa, and perhaps even God, it’s such a stunning shock to us to face our own mediocrity.

The hard truth is that nothing new stays new—and taking nothing away from the pleasures of newness, it is unreasonable to expect the new car smell or whatever to last long, much less permeate every moment of our lives. How wonderful, then, that life offers us boredom as a corrective to our unreasonably high expectations.

Again, I find myself musing on my dog, Tom Ripley, as my guru and mentor. How many hours of the day does he stay cooped up in my one-bedroom apartment, doing nothing, occasionally sniffing the dusty corners of rooms, rubbing his back against the furniture, and cuddling up next to my leg to look out the window at the March winds blowing through tree limbs? Yet a more generally cheerful creature I have never met.

He doesn’t buy a new outfit every week. He doesn’t watch TV, much less complain about there being nothing on. He has no career path whatsoever, no vacation plans, no ambitions beyond his daily kibble and hopes of frequent contacts with other sentient beings, canine or other. Clocks and calendars mean nothing to him. The Sunset Strip means nothing to him.

Nature blesses animals with no need for boredom. We civilized humans, however, need boredom as a sort of reality check—a purgative to our inflated sense of self.

Life is precious, though often routine, seldom dramatic (even more seldom dramatic “in a good way”), hardly ever epic or even truly tragic (in the strict classical sense).

Life is more typically light comedy—but mostly, unsurprisingly, it’s just slice-of-life.

Let’s face it: there’s probably a good reason more sentences end in periods and question marks than in exclamation points.

“As music to your ears, this, of course, may not count,” Brodsky states; “yet the sense of futility, of the limited significance of even your best, most ardent actions, is better than the illusion of their consequences and the attendant self-aggrandizement.”

What’s new? Not much. Nice, isn’t it?

Mandy Hyndman

Most people have heard Aesop’s fable concerning the grasshopper and the ant. For those who haven’t, here is a summary: Grasshopper wants to sit back and enjoy the beautiful summer weather while Ant slaves away preparing for the cruel winter. When winter finally comes and Ant is safe, warm, and well-fed, Grasshopper is freezing and starving so, naturally, he asks Ant for help. In the original version Grasshopper is turned away and learns a valuable lesson about hard work and preparation, in the sugar-coated version Ant takes pity and gives him food and shelter.

This fable is often used by critics of the US welfare system. They claim that welfare recipients sit back and cash in on the sweat of hard-working Americans. Whether one agrees or disagrees, the fable is fitting to illustrate that point (should that be the point one is trying to make) it seems to me , however, to be more fitting for a different situation.

Americans are trained to be consumers. This is not a requirement, but a nearly unavoidable way of life. We build houses for families of two or three that are large enough to comfortably shelter dozens of people. We furnish these houses with a flat-screen television in every room, state-of-the-art fitness machinery that does an excellent job of collecting dust, in-ground pools, video gaming devices, gadgets that peel fruit and vegetables, systems that heat or cool on command, italian leather sofas, designer hypo-allergenic carpeting, dish-washers, intercom systems, humidifiers and de-humidifiers, vcr/dvd combos, home theater systems, and microwaves.   All of these things perform funcions that we would otherwise have to do ourselves.   Some of us even pay someone to come in and clean it all.  On top of this, it’s ALL disposable!

There is no praise for the family who plants its own fruit and vegetables, insulates its home with recycled cans or garbage, collects rainwater for bathing and drinking, refuses to own a television, recycles, composts, educates itself, i.e. self-sustaining.  Self-sustaining = Bad in our society.   If you make things for yourself and take care of them you are an outcast.   I remember a girl in my class in elementary school whose family only allowed her to watch public television or read books.  Her mother handmade most of her clothes.  She was brilliant, so much so that she was reading Homer while we were reading Seuss,  and  she was ridiculed mercilessly.  These things which should be a way of life for everyone are considered odd and anti-social.   If we aren’t buying we aren’t patriotic.  If we don’t swallow whatever garbage the media-machine wants to shove down our throats every day, we’re dangerous.    But these people, these dangerous, self-sustaining, educated people are the new Ant.

Currently the world in which we live is a cesspool of Grasshoppers.  Unlike Aesop’s fabled insect, today’s Grasshopper works his butt off.  Some even work 12 hours a day seven days a week in places like factories, department stores, hospitals, and schools.  They are rewarded with the almighty dollar at the end of each week (and probably some form of cancer) and with that dollar they march (by “march” I mean “drive Hummers”) straight to the carbon-copy consumer wonderlands situated conveniently near each and every residential area in America.  There you can find Target, Kohl’s, Best Buy, Home Depot, Borders, Ikea, Starbuck’s,  Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, TGIFriday’s….on and on.  The epicenter of Corporateland, a new country, a new world order.  The hive of the Grasshopper.

And where is the Ant in all of this?  Behind the scenes growing gardens, making clothes, buying hybrid cars or riding bicycles, recycling, researching, telling the truth, educating their children to be responsible, self-sustaining people, doing things because they’re right rather than profitable.   They’re saving the world quietly, but consistently.  They’re making sure that there will still be a world left once the winter has come and the Grasshoppers have surveyed the wasteland in their path.  They are the last hope of a civilization bent on total self-destruction, and I’m with them.  We either need to make being an Ant our new way of life or we, our children, and our grandchildren will probably be the last Grasshoppers to squander our summers away saying “Someone else will take care of this mess.”

Joseph Marohl

On Sean Hannity’s Wednesday radio program, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) called for an “orderly revolution” to offset the “economic Marxism” of the Obama administration, in particular citing Thomas Jefferson’s much quoted call for a periodic revolution to keep one generation of Americans from being enslaved to the laws and constitutions of previous generations.

For a while now, for a couple of decades anyway, conservatives in the Republican Party have co-opted the terms “rebel” and “revolution”—words that still resonate positively with a good number of Americans. So pundits can remember Ronald Reagan as a “rebel,” and nobody raises an eyebrow.

One more sign of the debasement of the American English language, Bachmann’s call and similar calls promote turning back to the same business models and social roles we have followed into hell thus far and ignore that Obama’s “recovery” plans so far have done little that would please Marx (the real one, not the one that lives in the right wing’s imagination) except, perhaps, throw a few bones to programs that benefit the poor and needy. Those bones, apparently, are tantamount to all out “Marxism” to those whose notion of helping the poor and needy is to help the rich and grasping—so it’s no wonder that they might imagine “revolution” in terms of preserving the status quo.

Of course, these wannabe revolutionaries have had little to say about the previous administration’s eight years of assaults on human rights and the U.S. economy. And, for a while now, I have given up my dream of George W. Bush and his arrogant gang’s ever being brought to trial for any of a number of crimes against the nation, its Constitution, its laws, its reputation in the world, its security, its defense, and its wealth, certainly not from the Republicans and not from the Democrats, Bush’s willing accomplices from the beginning. That dream was mere fantasy.

Year by year, I am convinced of George Orwell’s acuity in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he claims that dying metaphors (among which “orderly revolution” must surely be listed), verbal padding, and hype effectively empty language of its content, leaving us with catch words and catch phrases incapable of holding any meaning whatsoever. So what becomes important about a word like “revolution” is not so much what it means as how attractive it sounds—and, used thus, it may be appropriated not only by those who promote change and progress but also by those who promote the obstruction of change and progress.

In summarizing these “swindles and perversions,” Orwell decries writing and speech that “consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.” Copy-and-paste language results in copy-and-paste intellects. Familiar word combinations please the ear and may even excite emotions, but they fail to draw fine distinctions or clarify exactly what the speaker means to say. As a teacher of writing, I am often impressed with how effortlessly some people can fill five typewritten pages with clichés and jingoism without ever saying anything in particular.

Such use of language hides rather than reveals. It abstracts rather than depicts.

Again, Orwell: “In our time [Orwell was writing in 1946], political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

Of course, Orwell, a supporter of labor and non-totalitarian socialist change (while strongly opposing fascism and Soviet communism), is better known for his novel Nineteen Eighty-four, in which governmental “newspeak” proposes that “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”

I’m repeatedly reminded that we now live in a world which newspeak has swept clean of definition and meaning. Just yesterday I watched a movie rated “R” for “pervasive language.” In previous posts, I’ve mentioned my consternation at debaters of abstinence-only education, both pro and con, declaring their concerns that children today may be learning that “sex is OK.” What the hell does that mean? When I ask students to explain the precise qualities they most admire in their friends, most of them respond with identical phrasing: “My friends are there for me.” Well, OK then, that explains a lot, thanks.

When I express concern that they are not expressing themselves clearly, students often reply, “But you know what I mean.” Not exactly—and, besides, clear communication is more than the rhythmic accumulation of platitudes and tropes—and the burden of clarification and definition belongs primarily to writers and speakers, not readers and listeners.

I propose that “orderly revolutionaries” like Bachmann and Hannity and even Obama and Clinton are, while indeed interested in change to varying degrees, principally involved in preserving “order,” equivalent in their minds to making minimal and perhaps merely nominal changes to the status quo. Now, I am not opposed to order—not at all—but neither am I convinced that it is synonymous with stagnation and obscurantism.

Those in power still want us to swallow the “trickle-down” theory of economy, under a new name. They are appalled and frankly scared of reports of widespread malcontent and anger—for them, it’s “class warfare” only when the underdogs fight back.

Savvy politicians are trying to co-opt some of the rage percolating in our culture with calls to revolution, all to pursue their own political ends—which are (guess what?) to sustain and perpetuate the powers that be.

So, to paraphrase Bachmann and others, let’s have a revolution that manages to change nothing, except perhaps the removal of the modicum of anemic “hope” poor and otherwise disempowered voters had in electing Barack Obama as President in the first place—a “hope” that the Obama administration has already watered down and sugared up to suit the sensitive palates of AIG, Chrysler, GM, Bank of America, and hedge-fund billionaires.

Allison Bricker

Loyal readers, the disdain for the Constitution and attempt to link my support of Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) to the likes of  abortion clinic bomber, Eric Rudolph angered me greatly. Thus I offer for your review “The Smoking Argus Daily Information Analysis Center” report entitled “The Modern Tyranny Movement”. If it were not such an egregious tactic as to attempt to scare law enforcement into believing that those who support the Constitution or display the Gadsden flag, view police as “the enemy” then perhaps this report would be entirely tongue in cheek. However, this government’s attempt to suggest that we wish to incite violence is wholly unacceptable, and thus we the people demand a formal public apology.

So until we get that apology please enjoy and help spread the S.M.I.A.C  counter-report based upon the Missouri Information Analysis Center’s disgraceful document.

Click icon to open or “right-click” and select “Save Link As…” to save PDF locally.

Kelly

Yesterday, Joe, one of our beloved contributors here at The Smoking Argus, stated his quest for “The” American dream.  Joe’s exploration into exactly what is behind this commonly used phrase seemed to lead to more commonly used phrases such as: success and wealth, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, affordable home ownership, and opportunities for all.  And though these are all great achievements, and aside from the fact that inequality will always exist within such achievements, “The” American dream is actually much simpler than any accomplishment.

I must say that it took me some time to figure this out and reach my conclusion on this topic.  Initially, my thoughts were that “The” American dream was nothing more than a marketing tool of the matrix, or the ultimate notch on the bedpost in the game of life.  Something like, if you’ve followed the instructions carefully and in order, then in turn you will be the proud owner of  “The” American dream; graduate from high school, go on to college, land a good paying job, marriage, home ownership, children (with whom you instill “The” American dream).  It becomes cyclical, until of course your teenage daughter gets knocked up at the age of 16, or your husband or wife leaves you for a better version of said American dream.

I’ll admit my cynicism.  So, yes, initially my reaction was along the lines of “Joe, you fool, this dream you speak of with such wonderment is what the puppet-masters have used as a way to keep the machine going.”

But that changed this morning when I read, what seemed to be an unrelated post at Dandelion Salad, 5 Reasons Why Americans Won’t Resist.  And while I am in agreement with most of what the author, Mickey Z, has to say, reason #4 as true as it may be, struck me as a tad unreasonable.

4. We feel too damn privileged to risk prison (or worse). The average Gaza resident doesn’t have the luxury of wondering if their resistance could result in arrest and thus perhaps ruin their reputation. The average American? Well, that’s a different story. I can’t defy insane laws designed to squash protest. I might get arrested and that means close proximity to all those scary criminals and it also means hurting my chances of landing a good job and maybe even losing all my respectable friends. I mean, I’m an activist and all but that’s asking way too much. Who do you think I am, Mandela?

Thankfully, going to prison is an avoidable act for most people.  Making the choice to not resist in a particular way in order to avoid prison is fairly rational, particularly for me as I do have children that are my responsibility to take care of.   Despite the resistance that is boiling inside of me, that fact of the matter is, it would do no good at this time to act out the life of a Gaza resident.  In this fight, Americans will have to know what it is they’re fighting for, and if you’ve spoken much to “average Americans”, then you know that they are not at that point just yet.

But, among many reasons as to why “average Americans” are not ready or prepared for such a resistance, there is one reason that stands above all.  The American people cannot fathom a life of instability.  We have no clue what actual resistance looks like in the way that the people of Gaza do.  We have been privileged with the luxury of not having to dream of missiles being launched into our schools and hospitals.  And I’m quite certain that if we were living the life of a Gaza resident, our avoid-prison-meter would come down dramatically.

Is there plenty of reason at this moment within the United States to be resisting?  Absolutely.  From the Federal Reserve to the Obama Administration, to the actors in Congress, the whole thing is rotten to the core.  But rest assured, liberty is gaining momentum.  And resistance will gain momentum as more Americans see their once stable lives being chipped away; which leads me to my answer to Joe’s quest for “The” American dream.  At it’s very root, above wealth and beyond happiness, is the want and need for stability.  And when that begins to dissipate, as it is, and likely will continue, “The” true American dream will have disappeared.

Jeff Lewis

I remember having had discussions with lots of folks about the plight of the American Indians at the time of the release of the Academy Award winning film, Dances with Wolves, back in 1990. The film ignited a new round of reflection regarding the systematic atrocities perpetrated by whites and their governments in both American hemispheres, as they proceeded to destroy entire civilizations of indigenous humans from the landscape of the Americas.

People would often wax, “Imagine what it must have been like to wake up and find that everything you had grown up knowing was undergoing inexorable change from forces beyond your immediate ability to control.” That is how I felt after I read the feature article in the current issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, The Big Takeover, written by Matt Taibbi.

The article reviews the recent history of how this country and the world came to the precipice of the current economic meltdown facing us all. The author, Matt Taibbi, chronicles step by step the key events beginning in 1998 that caused the present financial calamity. It was as though I was reading an account written by an author who is a cross between George Orwell and Lewis Carrol.

Highlights include an explanation of the range of the new acronyms that have sprung up in our banking/securities litany;

• AIGFP–American International Group Financial Products, the most culpable entity in the catastrophe.

• CDO–Collateraled Debt Obligation. “A box full of diced up assets.”

• CDS–Credit Default Swap. Sold as a bet on the outcome, like an insurance policy. In seven years it racked up $500 billion in sales.

• OTS–Office of Thrift Supervision. A small agency set up to regulate “thrifts (formerly S&Ls) that regulated AIG.

• CFMA–Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Created by former Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) that basically said credit default swaps were not gaming and not a security and therefore were unregulated.

An ongoing dynamic in the financial arena is the constant change of their vernacular that creates a language of its own. A language that is too esoteric for common English speaking folk. The author points out that slaves were not permitted to learn to read. Allowing such skills meant that they could become literate and consequentially more informed and powerful, concepts antithetical to subjugation.

As you read accounts of the machinations of this elite cadre of players, you develop a keener insight into their unworldly mind set. Nothing has brought that notion more to light than the bonus controversy that has erupted, in Richter Scale dimensions, upon the American public learning of the bonus structure of AIG and those targeted to receive bonuses of over $1 million minimum per person. Increments of hundreds of millions and billions of dollars are near impossible for the average citizen to grasp, but one million is a number they can relate to, if for no other reason than the popular TV shows touting million dollar payouts to winners. Deal or no deal, it is plain to see that AIG got a sweet deal.

The outrage is justifiably exacerbated by the fact that the recipients are the very individuals that brought AIG to its knees while their compensation has come from the U.S. taxpayers themselves; easily an example of “insult to injury.” This supposed “Bailout” is nothing more than rich bankers bailing out rich bankers with the taxpayers credit card, according to the author.

The “coup de gras” of the article is the revelation of the seemingly unbridled power of the Federal Reserve. According to Taibbi, the Federal Reserve has already loaned out $3.7 trillion and extended credit for investment guarantees amounting to $5.7 trillion! As of this writing, AIG’s total indebtedness is still not known.

When inquiries were made to the FED from Congressman Alan Grayson (FL), about where the money is going, to whom, and in what amounts, he was stonewalled. The Fed cited an act passed in 1950, “The Accounting Auditing Act”, which states the Fed cannot be audited by Congress or anyone else. In conjunction with the FEDERAL RESERVE, the Department of Treasury has yet to reveal exactly where all the TARP funds have gone, nor have they released any scorecards on the health of the nation’s banks. A widely held view is that people in Hank Paulson’s rolodex were the first to receive payments, but smaller, regional banks have sat on the sidelines, waiting for their phone calls and applications to be responded to that were submitted last fall.

I, for one, am concerned that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and President Obama’s Chief Financial Advisor, Larry Summers, are being compromised by their prior associations with these financial renegades that seemingly have brought the world to the doorsteps of total economic collapse.

In Bob Dylan’s first major album hit, “Free Wheelin”, he wrote about the murders that took place on the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1962, during the admission of the school’s first black student, James Meredith, in a song titled “Oxford Town.” His last line in the song is, “Somebody better investigate soon.”

Source: RollingStone “The Big Takeover” by Matt Taibi, published March 19th, 2009

Joseph Marohl

I’m thinking about the American dream. I’m not sure what it is.

Frankly, I’m ambivalent about nationalizing dreams at all, as it hints at groupthink and totalitarianism. I have my own dreams, thank you, and I suspect nobody can enjoy my particular kinks and aspirations quite as I do.

But “the American dream” has entered the lexicon, for good or bad. And it is always “THE American dream,” not “An American dream,” or, plural, “American dreams.” So I’m on a little pilgrimage right now, exploring what people think of the American dream.

Needless to say, I haven’t reached a conclusion yet for myself, and don’t hold much hope of reaching one, but here are some of the opinions I have encountered so far on the information superhighway.

Please comment—and add your own points of view on this wonderful but increasingly perplexing phrase:

***

Richard Stuebi:

The catch-phrase “American Dream” was apparently coined in 1931 by James Truslow Adams, who wrote that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement”. It’s worth noting that the original framing of the American Dream was on improved quality of life—upward mobility, based on merit, capitalizing on open opportunity.

However, a few years earlier in 1928, Herbert Hoover uttered a slogan in his Presidential campaign that ultimately became the shorthand phrase to most people for the American Dream: “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” In other words, the American Dream got co-opted from a libertarian notion of vertical mobility to a government-led promise to entitlement of geographic mobility.

[Interesting that the phrase was "co-opted" a good three years before it was "coined."]

Matthew Warshauer:

Traditionally, Americans have sought to realise the American dream of success, fame and wealth through thrift and hard work.

John Hockenberry and Farai Chideya:

Many may wonder that, as a nation, have we so corrupted the fundamental ideals of the American dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we instead find ourselves living through the American nightmare?

[Joe has a question here:  Are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness a dream? or rights?]

American Dream Coalition:

The American Dream Coalition’s mission is to support citizens and organizations that promote the American Dream of freedom, mobility, and affordable homeownership.

Thomas Kochan:

Many American families have not prospered in the new “knowledge economy.” The layoffs, restructurings, and wage and benefit cuts that have followed the short-lived boom of the 1990s threaten our deeply held values of justice, fairness, family, and work. These values—and not those superficial ones political pollsters ask about—are the foundation of the American dream of good jobs, fair pay, and opportunities for all.

Paul Harris:

The American Dream of riches for all is turning into a nightmare of inequality.

Hillary Rodham Clinton:

We can tell voters that we are for renewing and securing the American dream, of a college degree, a home, healthcare, a secure retirement, and the chance to get ahead in a growing economy where rising bottom lines mean rising incomes for all workers.

Mary Connolly:

It is crucial that the banking system modify their way of thinking or the government has to intervene and subsidize mortgage interest rates to allow Americans to essentially afford the true American dream—owning a home.

[Joe’s note: Googling “American dream of,” I find that “home ownership” is the Number 1 object of the preposition—often but not always according to realtors!]

Shirley M. Tilghman:

Universities have played a key role in the American dream of social mobility.

Peter Ames Carlin:

Krstic has spent these last few months balancing her ceremonial duties as Miss Oregon with her job as a dental hygienist, but her imagination has been elsewhere: tracing a vision of sashes and crowns and flowers. The American dream of instant fame, prestige and, perhaps, wealth.

Kelly

If you have been paying attention to the landscape of political media, especially as it pertains to the punditry of  Fox News, then you are aware that over the past few months Glenn Beck has done his damnedest to court those of us who believe in the virtues of freedom.  And though it is refreshing to see  an outlet within the mainstream media who appears to be paying attention, such as Glenn Beck, I remain suspicious…keeping in mind, it is Fox News.

This evening, Beck spoke with Congressman Ron Paul (TX-R) about the MIAC report, as well as the financial state of our country.

Joseph Marohl

On the heels of the news that the loophole allowing fat AIG bonuses was deliberately written into the stimulus bill, with full support of the U.S. Department of Treasury, comes the revelation that at least 13 of the corporations receiving stimulus money courtesy of U.S. taxpayers owe back taxes—that is, they had not paid their fair share towards the public good that they are now benefiting from, not to say (more forthrightly) cynically exploiting.

Yes, I am back on my habitual rant against mammoth financial institutions and corporate capitalism, which, no, I neither trust nor believe are indispensable, despite a lifetime of hype over better tomorrows, what’s good for the country, invisible hands, and the privilege of “choice” and individual ownership of property.

And, again no, I tend not to blame the (yes, culpable) federal government for corrupting global capitalism, rather the reverse: for most of the nation’s history, big business and a wealthy elite have used the federal government to their own interests, not the common good.

“A banker,” said Mark Twain, “is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it starts to rain.” I would say “lease” instead of “lend.”  And “wants it back” with interest … and a user fee.

No expert in economics and possibly downright un-American in my distrust of profiteering, I probably have no right whatsoever to complain. OK, OK, I am part of the problem. There, I said it.

And, sure, the pure, spiritualized version of capitalism is indeed lovely, I admit it, where smiling faces exchange much needed goods and services, sprouting from perpetually fruitful cornucopia, based on individual needs—one bright face valuing more what the other bright face values a bit less, permitting a “profit” for both parties. My eyes well up with happy tears.

And it is no less (or more) a fantasy than the pure, spiritualized version of socialism—I concede that, too. Nothing is gained through idealizing or demonizing people or institutions, when the reality is fairly easy to see.

And while I am qualifying a claim that strikes me as just common sense (though it’s hardly common at all), let me also state that I think corporations and capitalism have done much good for the world and its citizens, too … though perhaps more as side effects than as their central mission.

But I would add that the most astounding of those contributions—such as computer, satellite, nuclear, and microwave technologies—have sprung from military (thus government) funding and state university research, which smart capitalists have acquired and effectively marketed back to the citizens whose tax money funded the studies and discoveries in the first place.

Having said all that, here’s my point …

… that capitalism puts power, sometimes immense power, into private hands, creating and perpetuating unnecessary inequalities in a democratic republic, such as ours,

… that power tends naturally to protect its own interests, so once centralized in family dynasties or even modern virtual individuals such as corporations, power and wealth seldom leak out (or trickle down) to the general citizenry and, even then, mainly as means of galvanizing more power to those who already hold the larger portion of it,

… that the powerful tend to exploit the unpowerful, but …

… that the exploitation is almost always couched in terms of altruism and cooperation—so that those without power regard those with power as benefactors, protectors, and, most perniciously, indispensable realities, not acknowledging …

… that wealth and power alike are symbolic—that gold would have no value if, as in Thomas More’s fantasy Utopia, people simply would stop seeing any value in it, and that great armies would have no force if underpaid, underappreciated soldiers, always asked to risk more than they have to gain, would refuse to fight for vague, inconsistent, and ultimately false value claims, masking the interests of the already powerful to retain and enhance that power.

All of this is general and abstract, but the reality is ever present with us. The physical evidence to support this claim is part of the air we breathe daily. And while I am distrustful of revolution and promises of a perfect society, I do think real change still occurs and remains strongly probable for the future—despite there being so much cynical illusion of improvement, as new bosses replace old bosses.  Real change occurs primarily through individuals’ practicing moral consciousness, consideration of the common good, as part of their own self-interest, and cooperation in taking the baby steps needed to make their world a better place for everybody in it.

And I say “their world” on purpose, not in the sense of ownership, but in the sense of responsibility and duty. We are not entirely dependent on the flagrant inequalities that we have come to accept as just the nature of things.

No doubt we do have a strong stake in some of the very institutions that sometimes oppress us (including not only AIG and the corporate structure, in general, but also an often arrogant and self-absorbed federal government), and we should not fool ourselves into thinking that the collapse of giants—even detestable, oppressive giants—does not pose considerable dangers for us little people, too.

But such giants have collapsed before, and the world kept turning.

Allison Bricker

Penn Jillette on half of Penn and Teller sat down with Fox News’ Glenn Beck Thursday evening, March 18th, 2009 to discuss the absolutely ludicrous associations contained within the Missouri Information Analysis Center report on the Modern Militia Movement. As originally editorialized by Allison Bricker earlier in the week, the report attempts to advise law enforcement officers that support for former Presidential candidate Ron Paul could be an indication that the individual is a domestic homegrown radical.

Download full MIAC Report