A Debate that Wasn't

I watched the last half of the Trump/Biden “debate” and, of course, the reactions of pundits that followed. The Trump plan was obvious: stay away from policy questions and fill the space with so many accusations that Biden will lose his concentration in his attempt to refute the barrage of falsehoods and fabricated, denigrating claims.

I remembered occasions when so much stimulation was coming at me at once that I could no longer coolly gather and coordinate my thoughts. That’s what happened to Joe Biden. That phenomenon isn’t age specific.

On critical questions posed by the moderators, Biden made coherent policy statements. Trump, meanwhile, avoided the questions, for instance, of childcare policy, border control specifics and—most telling of all—whether he would honour the will of the people in the next presidential election, filling his allotted time with “You are the worst president in the history of the USA” and other meaningless and unsupported accusations.  

The “You’re weak and I’m strong” theme was implicit in Trump’s strategy, supported by, of course, claims rich in chutzpah and devoid of evidence, “If I’d been president, Russia would never have attacked Ukraine,” for instance.

What supporters of Trump undoubtedly saw was their man beating the s**t out of the enemy’s man. The parallels to the rise of Mussolini, Hitler, and more recently, Putin, are obvious to students of history. (Take a few minutes to ponder a short film by Yale University’s Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley at https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=youtube+fascism&mid=A7ACBFBB9835BB9E13C6A7ACBFBB9835BB9E13C6&FORM=VIRE)

In Hitler’s rise, the enemies created through propaganda were Communism, Jews, disabled and mentally challenged individuals (the Minderwertiger, those of minimum worth) and LGBTQ+ persons. Gradually, Trump and the “Oligarchy” of wealthy and powerful Americans that support him have been able to convince a massive number of what were soft-core conservatives into the belief that their neighbours who are the “Woke,” the “Leftists” are plotting to harm them, destroy the nation.

Fascism needs enemies; how else can it cast itself as people’s only protection?

It's not surprising that here in Canada, consideration of Justin Trudeau’s Prime Ministership should be reopened after many witnessed the humiliation of Joe Biden. We, too, seem to have learned that nothing succeeds as well in an election campaign as the humiliation of opposing parties’ leaders. We, too, are in danger of abandoning our ethical, moral guidelines for crass expediency and a need to be with “the winners.”  

Democracy takes work; let’s all make sure we’re engaged in its protection. 

(Feel free to copy and share with credit to G.G. Epp. Reply if you wish to gg.epp41@gmail.com) 

 

Empire of Illusion - a review

Window sticker: I get along with God just fine; It's his fan club I can't stand.

Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009

ISBN 978-0-307-39846-8

203 pages.

In the 8th Century BC, writing during a golden age of Israel, the prophet Hosea issued a warning that all was not well. The New English Bible records it thus:

Hear the word of the Lord, O Israel;
for the Lord has a charge to bring against the people of the land:
There is no good faith or mutual trust,
no knowledge of God in the land,
oaths are imposed and broken, they kill and rob;
there is nothing but adultery and licence,
one deed of blood after another.
Therefore the land shall be dried up . . ..

Readers familiar with the style and message of the prophets may be reminded of Hosea and his fellows when they read Empire of Illusion. Chris Hedges portrays—often in lurid detail—the signs of decay in American culture and sounds the siren of warning: America is on skids, headed for disaster.

Empire of Illusion begins with an analysis of the changes that Hedges sees in the themes dominating professional wrestling. There was a time when audiences responded to images of a Russian being pummelled and defeated by a heroic figure. Now, “the idea of permanent personalities and permanent values has evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood (10).” This theme re-echoes in TV and movies, shows like American Idol or Survivor where the nation watches as one victim after another is “voted off the island” until only one remains. An illiterate society is seduced by the fantasy, each cheering spectator dreaming of him/herself in the place of the victor, oblivious to the sham of such a perverted scenario.

America has become a nation of fantasizers and wishful thinkers, and the pursuit of knowledge and the skill of acquiring it (literacy) have decayed in direct proportion to the rise of spectacle and illusion. “ . . . endless, mindless diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes entertainment above substance. Intellectual or philosophical ideas require too much effort and work to absorb. Classical theatre, newspapers, and books are pushed to the margins of cultural life, remnants of a bygone, literate age. They are dismissed as inaccessible and elitist unless they provide . . . effortless entertainment. The popularization of culture often ends in its total degradation (43).” Hedges illustrates this point with a lurid tour of the world of pornography, an industry burgeoning as a consequence of the internet and the decay of fixed standards of conduct generally. He’s saying, basically, that the brutalisation of women and the victimization inherent in professional wrestling spectacles are peas and carrots in the same soup.

Of greatest interest to me was the chapter called “The Illusion of Wisdom,” possibly because the classroom has been my life. Hedges makes the linkages among the various prestige colleges in the USA and the political and corporate elites of the nation who are products of these colleges. Education in schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, he says, “focus instead (of teaching critical thinking), through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, AP classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams, and blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers (89).” The decline in education is evident in the growth of training institutions that are career-oriented along with the decline in the study of language, antiquities, history and the arts, for instance. Education as a branch of career planning rather than education as a preparation for living well in a free, functioning and egalitarian society.

Hedges echoes the voices out there that decry the manipulation of the population by the “elites.” Most of us—I guess—were appalled to learn about the details of the corporate greed and bungling resulting in the most recent economic collapse. What is even more appalling is what we’re seeing now: a return to the same corporate/political “business as usual” phenomenon, and so soon after the taxpayers bailed out the privileged. This may be the most blatant sign that the US, particularly, has passed the point of no return. The health reform bill of President Obama now appears to be a lost hope, evidence again that the privileged classes in the US are neither willing nor capable of reinventing themselves. They were never educated for repentance, were taught only how to manage privilege.

Hedges sees little distinction between the two political monoliths in America. Reading his assessment, one could come to the conclusion that the reins of power have been systematically, successfully hijacked by the corporate/political structure. It takes millions to mount a successful run at a senate seat; that effectively cuts out all the riff-raff and ensures that the economy will always remain in the privileged hands of the establishment.

According to Hedges, America is on the verge of turning into a fully-fledged tyranny, and tyranny succeeds best when the peons are illiterate, and to speed them down this slope, nothing works better than the propagation of fantasies, the cult of celebrity, the provision of endless, on-demand entertainment. If necessary, even the news can be turned into entertainment, hence the rise of tabloid journalism.

Empire of Illusion paints a dark picture of the US today. While that nation purports to be a beacon for democracy around the world, it has squandered its abundant resources on colonial forays into places where it doesn’t belong, has created or tolerated injustice to meet corporate goals and finally, built up a culture of celebrity and fantasy while allowing its educational institutions to decay. The warning is timely.

“Because this nation has rejected the waters of Shiloah, which run so softly and gently, therefore the Lord will bring up against it the strong, flooding waters of the Euphrates (Isaiah 8: 6 & 7a).”

Obama and the Culture Wars

Insane Palette

The first chapter in Barack Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, is titled “Values.” In it, Obama convincingly draws the argument that Americans have come to accept by slow degrees a politic surrounding their differences as opposed to their common values. We’ve come to know this divide as the “culture wars,” although that name may be more misleading than enlightening.

Finding values on which North Americans agree is not difficult. Values surrounding individual freedom of speech, movement and religion and the democratic rights we enjoy are generally hold in common by the inductive and the deductive thinkers among us, by the conservatives, liberals and socialists as well as by the Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists. It’s these (and others, of course) that unite us; it’s the hot-button issues like same-sex marriage, abortion laws, stem cell research that divide us so dramatically that it seems like we are a people “at war,” culturally.

And so politics takes on the qualities of a hockey game. It turns itself into a match in which one team on a hot-button issue is pitted against the other. Hockey itself is based on a disagreement between two teams on a trivial matter: the Rockets believe that the little rubber disk should go into the net at the north end of the rink, the Trojans maintain adamantly that it should go into the net at the south end. A competition in which the sides agree would be no fun at all. American politics has turned itself into a hockey game and although the very idea of a party system gives a nod to some division of values, our value differences used to be debated amicably on the sidelines whereas now, they have taken over the core of the game called democracy. So argues Obama.

There are those, of course, who will argue that some hot-button issues of the day are by no means trivial, and I agree. The way we treat embryos as we research the efficacy of stem cells in disease treatment could very well influence how we view the life of the unborn in the future. That’s not trivial. But surely the core value here surrounds the right-to-life principle—a commonly held value—and the way we use embryonic stem cells in research and finally in medical practice is beyond the capability of government, who can render it legal or illegal, but cannot determine in every individual case whether the goals of science and life-preserving medicine in that case are ethical and right.

Same-sex marriage definitely should not have become an election issue. The US constitution declares that every individual has the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” There are two significant aspects to marriage in Christian circles: 1) the community blesses a union, usually of husband and wife, and 2) the state acknowledges that from that day forward, all legal matters pertaining to spousal relationships will apply to this couple (if the documentation is in place and the minister is licensed properly.) Whether or not the Fenderbender Holier-Than-Thou Christian Church members decide to marry gay couples or not is up to them; the attempt to impose a universal legal restriction on the pursuit of happiness of people with a minority sexual orientation is a case of unnecessarily feeding a culture war.

The wish to have government settle our culture wars in Canada is becoming irksome, even if we haven’t sunk to the level of the USA in that regard . . . yet. The Conservative Party is running attack ads on television as I write this, even though there’s no election campaign in progress. Basing their argument on opposition leader Michael Ignatieff's having lived and worked outside the country for many years, they are attempting to exploit a trivial issue to inflame the gullible against the Liberal Party. Meanwhile, our core values—including courtesy, decency and fairness—are being thrown to the dogs in favour of petty partisanship.

We shouldn’t put up with that.

Bush gets it wrong - again

"WASHINGTON, July 27 — The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to eventually total $20 billion at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq.

The proposed package of advanced weaponry for Saudi Arabia, which includes advanced satellite-guided bombs, upgrades to its fighters and new naval vessels, has made Israel and some of its supporters in Congress nervous. Senior officials who described the package on Friday said they believed that the administration had resolved those concerns, in part by promising Israel $30.4 billion in military aid over the next decade, a significant increase over what Israel has received in the past 10 years."

The above article from today's New York Times may make sense to someone. Not to me. The US is basically setting out to arm the whole Middle East in order to counter threats from Iran. It's like a principal of a school handing out pistols to students so they can protect themselves from bullies, and then allaying the teachers' concerns about their safety by giving them kalashnikovs! Hopefully then the principal will feel safer in his office assuming that the "good students" and the teachers together will deal with any aggression on the playground and in the classrooms, and he'll be much safer in his office. Never mind that it cost the entire library and textbook budget to make it happen!

If you disapprove of this action, I suggest that you open the link below(you may have to copy and paste it into the URL window), identify yourself with your email address and write to the US State Department something like: "I strongly oppose the proposed multi-billion dollar sale of arms to the Middle East. Such an action will only serve to encourage another arms race and will raise tensions in the area. Please reconsider."

http://contact-us.state.gov/cgi-bin/state.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php?p_
sid=ZXPbGLHi&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRfYnk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9Jn
Bfcm93X2NudD0xMTEmcF9wcm9kcz0mcF9jYXRzPSZwX3B2PSZwX2N2PSZwX3NlYX
JjaF90eXBlPWFuc3dlcnMuc2VhcmNoX25sJnBfcGFnZT0x