LIKE
MOST AMERICAN intellectuals, I instinctively trust and respect
librarians. They are, after all, the priestesses and priests of
Knowledge, a realm I hold infinitely more sacred than any edifice of
Abrahamic rites whether Jewish, Christian or Islamic.
Even now, after 72 years learning the cynicism we in the 99 Percent soon discover is the chief prerequisite of emotional survival here in the Slave World the late Thomas Wolfe so aptly described as “this most weary unbright cinder,” Knowledge remains my Light-Bringer. Its grail-quest is my only act of faith, its amelioration of ignorance my only act of true contrition. I enter libraries with a secret silent genuflection of the mind as fervent as the overt gesture of obeisance devout Catholics make when they approach their altars.
The only other locales I ever regarded with comparable awe are the long forgotten but eerily potent shrines of vanquished cultures one sometimes discovers in remnants of the American wilderness. These places, their ancient holiness preserved by isolation, are sanctuaries not just of Knowledge but of forbidden divinities and the uniquely sustainable alternatives for living they yet represent, their never-printed texts preserved in the ancient Mother Tongue of our collective unconscious – the lost but vital glimpses of past and future I sometimes blessedly encountered in the years before physical disability combined with our nation's new dystopian locked-gate exclusiveness to banish me from Nature's own biblioteka: the back country I so loved to explore, usually under the guise of fishing or hunting.
I freely admit it; not just people but books and – yes – dogs and ravens and even trees and troutly waters and abandoned roads and standing stones sometimes speak to me. In the City I was always loquaciously a-prowl for new ideas, new songs, new sensations, new intensities of love, new depths of human connection. But in the country I was silent, capable of extended motionlessness, ever alert to the messages of the environment, ever receptive to the soft barely discernible heartbeat of the forest, ever a-listen for the seductive voices of the river, which are so like women talking fondly in some adjacent room. That is the sort of man I am, a person for whom Knowledge is life itself, for whom the worst most terrifying aspect of death is that it is the end of Knowledge.
Hence I approach librarians not just as my potential friends but as fellow conspirators in the resistance against censorship and the induced ignorance that fosters our imprisonment in Moron Nation. Only twice in my life have librarians disappointed me. One these disappointments was a sadly comical demonstration of ignorance by an employee of the Bellingham Public Library: when I asked why there was nothing by Tacitus in the BPL card catalogue, the librarian responded by asking me if this classical Roman was a “current author” and if his works were “current books.” The other disappointment was far worse, an astonishing act of anti-Knowledge treachery by one or more politically motivated librarians in New York City, about which I'll elaborate in a moment.
But I never regarded either of those dismal episodes to be anything more than anomalies. Save in Bellingham (where the city's librarians were also infamous for serving the secret police by compiling lists of who borrowed which books), librarians have always my natural allies. Sometimes, by providing vital information, librarians have been my saviors as well – especially in Manhattan. Hence when I saw Melissa Gira Grant's “Occupy Wall Street Librarians Strike Back,” I read it knowing I would learn something very important, as indeed I did, for the text detailed an atrocity about which I had hitherto seen only the most fragmentary reports: how New York City – allegedly the cultural epicenter of the Western World – maliciously destroyed the 5000-volume free library assembled by Occupy Wall Street.
Obviously this newest assault on our right to know was ordered because someone (again) adjudged Knowledge to be “dangerous,” an intolerable source of radical agitation. It hardly matters who gave the order or whether it was given at City Hall, at Gracie Mansion or in some clandestine enclave of the Homeland Security Department's secret police; the salient fact of this story is the wanton destruction of the books, which by its undeniable truth is now proven to be an official policy of governance in the United States.
If this sort of action evokes a troubling deja vu – as surely it might – be assured your mind is not playing tricks; the deliberate trashing of libraries is nothing new. But libricide – that is the proper term for it – is not just a Nazi German outrage. It was also popular in Pinochet's Chile, which makes its appearance on Wall Street hardly a surprise given the Central Intelligence Agency's Nazi, Chilean and New York City Police Department connections. Thus the following comment:
Anyone who questions the need for a People's Library – not just in NYC (which allegedly has the finest "public" library in the U.S. and one of the best in the world), but everywhere else throughout our ever-more-oppressed nation – should go to my blog for a glimpse of the significant radical history maliciously suppressed by the New York City Public Library itself.
As I reported in my blog last year, The East Village Other published a fully detailed extra covering the riot, but by 1983 the extra had been removed from NYCPL archives by city librarians – obviously cut from the microfiche files and the film then professionally re-spliced.
No doubt the censorship was imposed because the 1967 incident was a genuine police riot – an outrage in which the cops launched an unprovoked attack (note my photos in the above link) on a group of musicians who had obtained an NYC troubadour permit for their outdoor performance.
Also – because the cops initially admitted their attack was triggered by two or three complaints from the Lower East Side's small but disproportionately influential community of Ukrainian immigrants – the incident raised an enormously embarrassing question. How was it a few complaints from a notoriously fascistic, adamantly theocratic (Eastern Orthodox) minority had nullified, for several hours on 30 May 1967, not just a city-issued permit, but the rights guaranteed by the New York State and United States constitutions?
The question was especially relevant since a substantial number of those immigrants had allegedly fled the Soviet Union to escape war crimes charges for their collaboration with the Nazis and were said to be under the sponsorship and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency. Then as now, the answer might have revealed disturbing details about the relationship between the NYPD and the CIA, itself already infamous as a haven for Nazi war criminals.
Though at first it appeared Ruling Class Media would adequately report the details of this atrocity – note for example my photo in Newsweek – the reportage quickly deteriorated back into oppressive conformity with the cops-as-heroes/hippies-as-demons motif that characterized all "mainstream" coverage of the Countercultural rebellion in any and all of its forms – anti-war, feminist, back-to-the-land, new music, alternative press, alternative spirituality etc. – with EVO's unprecedented extra the sole documentation of what actually obtained that dreadful day in Tompkins Square.
The extra's deliberate destruction by the city's librarians – another act reminiscent of "the worst regimes imaginable" – is therefore not just a ruinous loss, but a damning example of how "public" libraries can be co-opted to serve the will of the One Percent. Hence it might be revealing to know how many of the destroyed People's Library books had already been "disappeared" from NYCPL, whether catalogued (but never available for circulation) or deleted entirely.
Obviously, the Ruling Class intends to keep our minds imprisoned in Moron Nation – the 21st Century's artificially induced equivalent of the ignorance that paralyzed the peasants of pre-Revolutionary Russia – even as our bodies are herded ever closer to de jure enslavement.
***
Apparently it is this unspeakable purpose – the imposition of ignorance so paralytic it cannot be overcome even by collective effort and so bottomless it cannot ever be escaped – that has clandestinely motivated much of the domestic policy inflicted on us by the One Percent since the end of World War II.
First was the demonization of intellectuals – psycholinguistic warfare that made “intellectual” synonymous with “subversive” and even “traitor.” This brainwashing – or, more accurately, “brain-warping” – was cleverly sandwiched within the purges of Communists and socialists that began literally hours after the Japanese surrender.
For people too young to remember those years, one fact should suffice as portraiture: throughout the 1950s, my younger half-siblings and I were sternly instructed never to reveal to anyone our household included a substantial library, our father's lifetime collection of books. Even then, possession of Knowledge – unless of course one was part of the Ruling Class – was already a de facto crime: just ask the hundreds of thousands of classroom “brains” who were jeered, beaten, raped, and otherwise bullied into feigned stupidity. The public elementary schools and junior highs were bad enough, but public high schools – in which vicious children had grown sufficiently large and strong to inflict severe and sometimes fatal wounds – were realms of genuine horror, a topic to which we shall return.
Meanwhile the quality of public education deteriorated steadily, a decline so obvious it was triggering school-reform controversies even before the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik I in the fall of 1957 and thus forever claimed for Communism the title “First into Space.”
Though post-Sputnik panic brought about momentary improvements in public education under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the rebellions of the 1960s once more frightened the One Percent with the power of Knowledge to inspire and agitate, and by the end of the decade, the deliberately induced decline in educational quality was again evident. The conservatives, especially the more overtly fascist John Birchers, loudly blamed “Communists” and “Com-symps,” but the outcry – as always – merely functioned to conceal how capitalism was transforming public education to serve its long-range goal of reducing the United States to its United Estates – eventually a realm of the corporate equivalent of antebellum plantations, literally a nation of slaves. The real villains were of course the One Percent, their malevolent Ayn Rand influence clandestinely applied at every level, a do-not-dare-tell-it truth recognized at least subconsciously by any reasonably perceptive reporter who was assigned to cover public education during those years.
Even now, after 72 years learning the cynicism we in the 99 Percent soon discover is the chief prerequisite of emotional survival here in the Slave World the late Thomas Wolfe so aptly described as “this most weary unbright cinder,” Knowledge remains my Light-Bringer. Its grail-quest is my only act of faith, its amelioration of ignorance my only act of true contrition. I enter libraries with a secret silent genuflection of the mind as fervent as the overt gesture of obeisance devout Catholics make when they approach their altars.
The only other locales I ever regarded with comparable awe are the long forgotten but eerily potent shrines of vanquished cultures one sometimes discovers in remnants of the American wilderness. These places, their ancient holiness preserved by isolation, are sanctuaries not just of Knowledge but of forbidden divinities and the uniquely sustainable alternatives for living they yet represent, their never-printed texts preserved in the ancient Mother Tongue of our collective unconscious – the lost but vital glimpses of past and future I sometimes blessedly encountered in the years before physical disability combined with our nation's new dystopian locked-gate exclusiveness to banish me from Nature's own biblioteka: the back country I so loved to explore, usually under the guise of fishing or hunting.
I freely admit it; not just people but books and – yes – dogs and ravens and even trees and troutly waters and abandoned roads and standing stones sometimes speak to me. In the City I was always loquaciously a-prowl for new ideas, new songs, new sensations, new intensities of love, new depths of human connection. But in the country I was silent, capable of extended motionlessness, ever alert to the messages of the environment, ever receptive to the soft barely discernible heartbeat of the forest, ever a-listen for the seductive voices of the river, which are so like women talking fondly in some adjacent room. That is the sort of man I am, a person for whom Knowledge is life itself, for whom the worst most terrifying aspect of death is that it is the end of Knowledge.
Hence I approach librarians not just as my potential friends but as fellow conspirators in the resistance against censorship and the induced ignorance that fosters our imprisonment in Moron Nation. Only twice in my life have librarians disappointed me. One these disappointments was a sadly comical demonstration of ignorance by an employee of the Bellingham Public Library: when I asked why there was nothing by Tacitus in the BPL card catalogue, the librarian responded by asking me if this classical Roman was a “current author” and if his works were “current books.” The other disappointment was far worse, an astonishing act of anti-Knowledge treachery by one or more politically motivated librarians in New York City, about which I'll elaborate in a moment.
But I never regarded either of those dismal episodes to be anything more than anomalies. Save in Bellingham (where the city's librarians were also infamous for serving the secret police by compiling lists of who borrowed which books), librarians have always my natural allies. Sometimes, by providing vital information, librarians have been my saviors as well – especially in Manhattan. Hence when I saw Melissa Gira Grant's “Occupy Wall Street Librarians Strike Back,” I read it knowing I would learn something very important, as indeed I did, for the text detailed an atrocity about which I had hitherto seen only the most fragmentary reports: how New York City – allegedly the cultural epicenter of the Western World – maliciously destroyed the 5000-volume free library assembled by Occupy Wall Street.
Obviously this newest assault on our right to know was ordered because someone (again) adjudged Knowledge to be “dangerous,” an intolerable source of radical agitation. It hardly matters who gave the order or whether it was given at City Hall, at Gracie Mansion or in some clandestine enclave of the Homeland Security Department's secret police; the salient fact of this story is the wanton destruction of the books, which by its undeniable truth is now proven to be an official policy of governance in the United States.
If this sort of action evokes a troubling deja vu – as surely it might – be assured your mind is not playing tricks; the deliberate trashing of libraries is nothing new. But libricide – that is the proper term for it – is not just a Nazi German outrage. It was also popular in Pinochet's Chile, which makes its appearance on Wall Street hardly a surprise given the Central Intelligence Agency's Nazi, Chilean and New York City Police Department connections. Thus the following comment:
Anyone who questions the need for a People's Library – not just in NYC (which allegedly has the finest "public" library in the U.S. and one of the best in the world), but everywhere else throughout our ever-more-oppressed nation – should go to my blog for a glimpse of the significant radical history maliciously suppressed by the New York City Public Library itself.
As I reported in my blog last year, The East Village Other published a fully detailed extra covering the riot, but by 1983 the extra had been removed from NYCPL archives by city librarians – obviously cut from the microfiche files and the film then professionally re-spliced.
No doubt the censorship was imposed because the 1967 incident was a genuine police riot – an outrage in which the cops launched an unprovoked attack (note my photos in the above link) on a group of musicians who had obtained an NYC troubadour permit for their outdoor performance.
Also – because the cops initially admitted their attack was triggered by two or three complaints from the Lower East Side's small but disproportionately influential community of Ukrainian immigrants – the incident raised an enormously embarrassing question. How was it a few complaints from a notoriously fascistic, adamantly theocratic (Eastern Orthodox) minority had nullified, for several hours on 30 May 1967, not just a city-issued permit, but the rights guaranteed by the New York State and United States constitutions?
The question was especially relevant since a substantial number of those immigrants had allegedly fled the Soviet Union to escape war crimes charges for their collaboration with the Nazis and were said to be under the sponsorship and protection of the Central Intelligence Agency. Then as now, the answer might have revealed disturbing details about the relationship between the NYPD and the CIA, itself already infamous as a haven for Nazi war criminals.
Though at first it appeared Ruling Class Media would adequately report the details of this atrocity – note for example my photo in Newsweek – the reportage quickly deteriorated back into oppressive conformity with the cops-as-heroes/hippies-as-demons motif that characterized all "mainstream" coverage of the Countercultural rebellion in any and all of its forms – anti-war, feminist, back-to-the-land, new music, alternative press, alternative spirituality etc. – with EVO's unprecedented extra the sole documentation of what actually obtained that dreadful day in Tompkins Square.
The extra's deliberate destruction by the city's librarians – another act reminiscent of "the worst regimes imaginable" – is therefore not just a ruinous loss, but a damning example of how "public" libraries can be co-opted to serve the will of the One Percent. Hence it might be revealing to know how many of the destroyed People's Library books had already been "disappeared" from NYCPL, whether catalogued (but never available for circulation) or deleted entirely.
Obviously, the Ruling Class intends to keep our minds imprisoned in Moron Nation – the 21st Century's artificially induced equivalent of the ignorance that paralyzed the peasants of pre-Revolutionary Russia – even as our bodies are herded ever closer to de jure enslavement.
***
Apparently it is this unspeakable purpose – the imposition of ignorance so paralytic it cannot be overcome even by collective effort and so bottomless it cannot ever be escaped – that has clandestinely motivated much of the domestic policy inflicted on us by the One Percent since the end of World War II.
First was the demonization of intellectuals – psycholinguistic warfare that made “intellectual” synonymous with “subversive” and even “traitor.” This brainwashing – or, more accurately, “brain-warping” – was cleverly sandwiched within the purges of Communists and socialists that began literally hours after the Japanese surrender.
For people too young to remember those years, one fact should suffice as portraiture: throughout the 1950s, my younger half-siblings and I were sternly instructed never to reveal to anyone our household included a substantial library, our father's lifetime collection of books. Even then, possession of Knowledge – unless of course one was part of the Ruling Class – was already a de facto crime: just ask the hundreds of thousands of classroom “brains” who were jeered, beaten, raped, and otherwise bullied into feigned stupidity. The public elementary schools and junior highs were bad enough, but public high schools – in which vicious children had grown sufficiently large and strong to inflict severe and sometimes fatal wounds – were realms of genuine horror, a topic to which we shall return.
Meanwhile the quality of public education deteriorated steadily, a decline so obvious it was triggering school-reform controversies even before the Soviet Union orbited Sputnik I in the fall of 1957 and thus forever claimed for Communism the title “First into Space.”
Though post-Sputnik panic brought about momentary improvements in public education under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the rebellions of the 1960s once more frightened the One Percent with the power of Knowledge to inspire and agitate, and by the end of the decade, the deliberately induced decline in educational quality was again evident. The conservatives, especially the more overtly fascist John Birchers, loudly blamed “Communists” and “Com-symps,” but the outcry – as always – merely functioned to conceal how capitalism was transforming public education to serve its long-range goal of reducing the United States to its United Estates – eventually a realm of the corporate equivalent of antebellum plantations, literally a nation of slaves. The real villains were of course the One Percent, their malevolent Ayn Rand influence clandestinely applied at every level, a do-not-dare-tell-it truth recognized at least subconsciously by any reasonably perceptive reporter who was assigned to cover public education during those years.
***
As I implied above, we cannot discuss the origins of Moron Nation without discussing bullying, a manifest hellishness I encountered in every public school I attended.
It was especially prevalent in the southern public high school where I endured ninth and tenth grades. Throughout my freshman year and into the first weeks of my sophomore year, I was bullied relentlessly: not only had my “Yankee” origins taught me to “talk funny”; I was also smallish and slender, dyslexically clumsy and dark-haired enough to be suspected of being Jewish. But I finally taught my slow-learning tormentors a sufficiently discouraging lesson: attack me, I'll fight you; and even if you win the fight, I will damn well inflict substantial hurt. In eleventh grade I attended school in urban Michigan, where a variety of factors combined to ensure I was not bullied. But familial dysfunction involuntarily returned me to the South for twelfth grade, and though I was in the same semi-rural district where I attended ninth and tenth grades, my enrollment in a newly constructed school apparently nullified my reputation for violent response.
Because the act of writing is so often also an act of vivid recollection, working on this essay brought back the following long-forgotten incident in all its wrenching fear, anguish, rage and mortification:
During class change maybe the first week of that final high-school September, a gang of at least a half-dozen football players attacked me in the hallway, forcibly yanked down my pants and hurled me into an adjacent girls' restroom, a vicious “prank” the purpose of which was to get me caught in pantless trespass by the school authorities and thus branded a pervert. But the hateful scheme failed. I fought my assailants with anything-goes ferocity, inflicting enough pain they were unable to de-pant me completely, and when I was flung through the forbidden door, it was with one leg still trousered. Then – much to my surprise – the girls themselves not only aided my escape but refused to rat me out. When word got around I was again carrying the modified bicycle chain with which I had notoriously avenged myself on a bully two years earlier, the jocks quickly found other targets.
Given the perspective of 55 years and work on several in-depth education stories, I now recognize schoolyard bullying as a central part of U.S. education: it is how we are psychologically prepared to function under capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – whether we are destined to be predators or prey. It is also how we are all taught to behave under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Schoolyard or workplace, the bullies maintain the capitalist order: executive attire, athletic jerseys or badges and uniforms, under capitalism they are all licenses for savagery and sadism, differing only in price and permissiveness. That's why all the official pronouncements against bullying are ultimately nothing more than Big Lies – additional examples of the same sort of propaganda by which this Nation of Falsehood hypocritically denounces the savagery its policies intentionally perpetuate.
Indeed, bullying IS capitalism, the perfect micrososm of its predatory psycho-dynamics. But to connect capitalism and bullying (or to name capitalism as the perpetrator of its many other atrocities) is to commit heresy, to utter a statement so subversive, so taboo, none dare do it publicly: a topic on which Richard D. Wolff has a great deal to say in a new book entitled Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, about which more in a moment.
*****
A Chris Hedges Essay We Should All Read at Least Once
Apropos our slave-pen economy, a month ago Chris Hedges published a provocative essay entitled “The Implosion of Capitalism,” which I bookmarked for recommendation and comment but then set aside as events later dictated. Now though in the aftermath of Memorial Day, which presumably turned our thoughts to the costs inflicted on ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet by capitalism's relentless quest for “growth,” I offer it as an appropriate meditation.
Here, in the hope they will encourage you to read the essay from start to finish, are a few significant lines in which Hedges suggests the direction we must take if our species is to survive:
“Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies...Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.”
*****
Shameless Promotion of What I Hope Will Be a Vital Book
A few paragraphs ago I mentioned Wolff's Occupy the Economy, a chapter of which was printed recently by Truthout. Here is a sample paragraph:
“Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.”
I have not yet read the book, but I surely will. Wolff's potentially widespread public exposure of the taboo against naming capitalism as our adversary – a topic of Outside Agitator's Notebook since its inception in 2009 – is long overdue.
Perhaps now we've at last begun the national discussion that is prerequisite to our liberation.
LB/28 May 2012
-30-
As I implied above, we cannot discuss the origins of Moron Nation without discussing bullying, a manifest hellishness I encountered in every public school I attended.
It was especially prevalent in the southern public high school where I endured ninth and tenth grades. Throughout my freshman year and into the first weeks of my sophomore year, I was bullied relentlessly: not only had my “Yankee” origins taught me to “talk funny”; I was also smallish and slender, dyslexically clumsy and dark-haired enough to be suspected of being Jewish. But I finally taught my slow-learning tormentors a sufficiently discouraging lesson: attack me, I'll fight you; and even if you win the fight, I will damn well inflict substantial hurt. In eleventh grade I attended school in urban Michigan, where a variety of factors combined to ensure I was not bullied. But familial dysfunction involuntarily returned me to the South for twelfth grade, and though I was in the same semi-rural district where I attended ninth and tenth grades, my enrollment in a newly constructed school apparently nullified my reputation for violent response.
Because the act of writing is so often also an act of vivid recollection, working on this essay brought back the following long-forgotten incident in all its wrenching fear, anguish, rage and mortification:
During class change maybe the first week of that final high-school September, a gang of at least a half-dozen football players attacked me in the hallway, forcibly yanked down my pants and hurled me into an adjacent girls' restroom, a vicious “prank” the purpose of which was to get me caught in pantless trespass by the school authorities and thus branded a pervert. But the hateful scheme failed. I fought my assailants with anything-goes ferocity, inflicting enough pain they were unable to de-pant me completely, and when I was flung through the forbidden door, it was with one leg still trousered. Then – much to my surprise – the girls themselves not only aided my escape but refused to rat me out. When word got around I was again carrying the modified bicycle chain with which I had notoriously avenged myself on a bully two years earlier, the jocks quickly found other targets.
Given the perspective of 55 years and work on several in-depth education stories, I now recognize schoolyard bullying as a central part of U.S. education: it is how we are psychologically prepared to function under capitalism – infinite greed as maximum virtue – whether we are destined to be predators or prey. It is also how we are all taught to behave under capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and genocidal poverty for everyone else. Schoolyard or workplace, the bullies maintain the capitalist order: executive attire, athletic jerseys or badges and uniforms, under capitalism they are all licenses for savagery and sadism, differing only in price and permissiveness. That's why all the official pronouncements against bullying are ultimately nothing more than Big Lies – additional examples of the same sort of propaganda by which this Nation of Falsehood hypocritically denounces the savagery its policies intentionally perpetuate.
Indeed, bullying IS capitalism, the perfect micrososm of its predatory psycho-dynamics. But to connect capitalism and bullying (or to name capitalism as the perpetrator of its many other atrocities) is to commit heresy, to utter a statement so subversive, so taboo, none dare do it publicly: a topic on which Richard D. Wolff has a great deal to say in a new book entitled Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, about which more in a moment.
*****
A Chris Hedges Essay We Should All Read at Least Once
Apropos our slave-pen economy, a month ago Chris Hedges published a provocative essay entitled “The Implosion of Capitalism,” which I bookmarked for recommendation and comment but then set aside as events later dictated. Now though in the aftermath of Memorial Day, which presumably turned our thoughts to the costs inflicted on ourselves, our fellow humans and our planet by capitalism's relentless quest for “growth,” I offer it as an appropriate meditation.
Here, in the hope they will encourage you to read the essay from start to finish, are a few significant lines in which Hedges suggests the direction we must take if our species is to survive:
“Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies...Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels.”
*****
Shameless Promotion of What I Hope Will Be a Vital Book
A few paragraphs ago I mentioned Wolff's Occupy the Economy, a chapter of which was printed recently by Truthout. Here is a sample paragraph:
“Questioning and criticizing capitalism have been taboo, treated by federal authorities, immigration officials, police and most of the public alike as akin to treason. Fear-driven silence has substituted for the necessary, healthy criticism without which all institutions, systems, and traditions harden into dogmas, deteriorate into social rigidities, or worse. Protected from criticism and debate, capitalism in the United States could and has indulged all its darker impulses and tendencies. No public exposure, criticism and movement for change could arise or stand in its way as the system and its effects became ever more unequal, unjust, inefficient and oppressive. Long before the Occupy movement arose to reveal and oppose what U.S. capitalism had become, that capitalism had divided the 1 percent from the 99 percent.”
I have not yet read the book, but I surely will. Wolff's potentially widespread public exposure of the taboo against naming capitalism as our adversary – a topic of Outside Agitator's Notebook since its inception in 2009 – is long overdue.
Perhaps now we've at last begun the national discussion that is prerequisite to our liberation.
LB/28 May 2012
-30-
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