File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2002/lyotard.0211, message 10


From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: readings on the 11th september
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 22:25:10 -0600


Steve,

Last week I had the uncanny sense of having crossed a threshold.  Never
in my lifetime did I ever expect America to sink so low as the nation
has during this past week. I feel something sinister and cynical is
occurring today within the American republic.

Since I recognize such statements might sound extreme, I want to clarify
what I mean.  It is not just that America has become more conservative
or Republican in spirit.  Rather America is now in the grip of a
fundamentalist ideology.  A minority position has quite visibly assumed
power over the majority and it can be assumed we will make serious
retreats in areas such as the environment, woman's right to choose,
education, civil rights and affirmative action.  It is no longer a
question of rational argument, but rather of some weird belief.

Even though I have usually disagreed with conservatives, I read many
such writers, on occasion, with great interest.  I found the works of
Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich A. Hayek insightful at times
and recognized that any progressive thought that wished to "save the
honor of thinking" was compelled to deal seriously with their arguments.


It should be recognized that Hayek and Friedman both acknowledged that
not all social problems could be resolved through the market alone.
Friedman, for example, went so far as to propose a variation of a
Guaranteed Annual Income program he termed the negative income tax which
actually came close to passage during the Nixon administration.

Of course the other side of conservative thought entailed such things as
Hayek advocating authoritarian institutions and Friedman apologizing for
sweatshops and advising South American dictatorships.  In spite of these
obvious problems, however, at least the earlier conservative movement
attempted to make a rational case for its positions.

More recently, capitalists such as George Soros and some of the
delegates at the recent Davos convention have also argued that free
trade alone cannot overcome the conditions of poverty and hopelessness
that remain the breeding grounds of terrorism.  They have acknowledged
real problems exist in the wake of globalism and have called upon
Nation-States to assume more responsibility for resolving the many
issues the world currently faces.    

What is so depressing about politic life in America today is that even
these fairly conservative positions would be regarded as far to the left
of anything that could now be advocated by either the Democratic or
Republican Party.  In its place is substituted a kind of market
fundamentalism; one that believes free markets already exist in America
(ignoring the huge state support and subsidies large corporations
currently receive) and that the market alone is the only force capable
of solving our problems.  This tends to be coupled with a strong
Christian fundamentalism that openly wishes to create a new theocratic
order.

In the past I have argued that the American presence contradicted Negri
and Hardt's concept of Empire, but now I tend to see the current
American response as symptomatic of what N&H called fundamentalism in
that book. Namely, it is a reaction to an emerging condition in which
America is no longer the sole dominant power.  In short, it is a
desperate attempt to recover lost prestige in the face of the new
emerging paradigm through an exercise of military might alone; triggered
by both fear and xenophobia.

When George W. Bush spoke about "compassionate conservatism" during his
presidential campaign apparently all he meant by this phrase was a
rather vague feeling of abstract good-will towards humanity and not any
real tangible political program.  So far the only concrete proposal he
has actually made is that government should provide federal funding to
religious groups so they can minister to the needs of the poor in place
of the current secular government agencies. Presumably this is in order
to encourage the poor to passively accept their condition through a
renewal of faith and charisma. Marx's opiate of the people mandated
through disproportionate taxation.

It is not that Americans hate the poor.  It is simply that they no
longer exist in America because they don't show up on television. They
have become our contemporary invisibles. They remain politically
unorganized. They don't vote. Contemporary laws and working conditions
have made any kind of unionization difficult to achieve. So they have no
voice and no presence.  

I have read that Wal-Mart closed down all their butcher departments
because one became unionized and that besides the conditions of poor pay
and benefits they offer to employees, they also force them to work extra
hours without pay and falsify overtime records to avoid paying time and
a half.  Currently, Safeway is threatening to close all the stores of
Dominick's, the large Midwest grocery chain, if its employees decide
upon a union to protect their rights as workers. 

This exploitation allows the rest of us to enjoy a comfortable middle
class (or better) existence. After years of dependency fostered by
'ill-conceived, liberal' welfare programs, now at last the poor enjoy
the freedom to become our servants and re-learn their place again.

While the poor are ignored, the interests of the Corporation, Media, and
Government have coalesced into what C. Wright Mills prophetically named
the Power Elite.   This convergence has noticeably decreased the scope
of our national discourse. The middle class becomes more easily
manipulated as it is subjected to the condition of being simultaneously
divided, distracted and distraught.  Michael Moore in his movie "Bowling
for Columbine" has spoken eloquently of this culture of fear and the
various ways it tends to be inherently racist, self-limiting and subject
to enforcing external controls.  

We look for strong leaders and easy answers rather than confront the
grim reality of our current situation.  Certainly the impending war with
Iraq is a good example of this.  The CIA has reported that no link
exists between Hussein and Al Quida, so Bush appoints a special task
force to make the facts fit the theory. The New York Review of Books
(hardly a marginal leftist publication) revealed in a recent story
Irving Kristol and Dick Cheney both wrote position papers back in the
nineties which advocated intervention in Iraq for various geopolitical
reasons such as the control of oil distribution and the protection of
Israel.

So it seems the current war isn't really about terrorism at all as much
as it is about manipulating the America public to buy into a
pre-conceived political agenda fostering special interests that risks
destabilization of the Middle East situation and escalating it to a new
level of crisis.

What is even more frightening is that America is becoming a closed
society led by fundamentalist interests that opposes Empire because it
wishes to maintain its own local brand of hegemony.  This desire has
something antinomian about it.  The attitude seems to be that if America
doesn't triumph the world deserves to fail.  Once James Watt, the
Secretary of the Interior under Reagan, joked that there was no need to
worry about the environment since Jesus was coming back anyway.  This
idea has now become global. 

The tragedy in all of this is that a high road is still possible.
America could strengthen the rule of international relations, utilize
the soft power of diplomacy, work to de-militarize current conditions
and seriously cooperate with other countries to overcome the effects of
poverty, disease and pollution. This would tend to make the world a
safer place and help contain the threat of both terrorism and blowback.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to take place in the near future
because, in order to accomplish these goals, America would need to
become something more like France and less like Mississippi.  The sad
truth is the flag of the Confederacy still flies high over the white
soul of America. We speak of freedom and democracy as we stab the world
in the back.

eric




   

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