This seems to me such a dark time in America, with a darkness that is only growing. At every turn, the forces of conservatism, inequality and oligarchy are racking up victories, with little or no or only the most pale and weak-kneed opposition from the more "liberal" or socially progressive voices in our political structure. Though some see rays of hope in such accomplishments as the increasing acceptance of the right of homosexuals to enter into marriage, I see this as only a very small drop in the bucket when we consider the larger problems of stagnant wages for the many and ever-expanding fortunes for the few, the increasing dominance of the wealthy elite and large corporations in many areas of our life. Even the supposedly ultra-liberal cable news network MSNBC runs the self-congratulatory and pro-fracking advertisements of the carbon fuel industry, and the supposedly liberal New York Times increasingly caters to the Wall Street-financial services crowd that now dominates New York City as well as the American economy.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the largest international body of climate scientists in the world, released a new report on March 31st detailing how the climate is already changing with catastrophic effect, and how the dangers and crises now occurring will only be magnified if the world is unwilling to take action. As an educator, I see the trend toward increasingly standardized and regulated education only gaining strength, as influential figures from the President on down seem to be abandoning the ideals of liberal arts education in favor of increasingly vocational, job skills oriented education. When people are no longer allowed to think freely and openly, to freely explore the riches of cultural heritage and to freely experiment with ideas and activities that are freed from the stifling grip of monetary evaluation, but when the education system only trains the bulk of people to perform the tasks and functions deemed valuable by the high priests of the high-tech companies and the corporate economy, an economy organized around the maximization of corporate profits and stock market dividends, not the fulfillment of human needs, I shudder to think of the cold, heartless, fearful, high-tech prison of a society that we are building for ourselves, digital brick by dividend brick. Profits will increase but human freedom and happiness? I doubt it.
I am starting to reach the conclusion that others before me have, a conclusion that I have always resisted; the feeling that there may be no hope for saving America from its drift and decline. I actually sympathize to some extent with the right-wingers and Tea Partiers who range and rant about our country going wrong; I agree that our society is sick, but I disagree with them about the nature of the malady and the treatment to be administered. Many on the right seem to think that the root of the problem is Big Bad Government; I disagree completely. I would grant that our government can do stupid things, that some policies, regulations and programs may be misguided and counterproductive, but that calls for fixing and improving the policies, regulations and programs, not abolishing them all in favor of an unregulated libertarian utopia. I think that vision, if ever achieved, would only result in a dog-eat-dog, every-gun-for-himself, zero compassion dystopia. I see the problem lying in the power of large corporate business interests to manipulate everything to their advantage, without caring enough about the suffering of the poor or the desecration of the planet. If corporations were able to function as good public citizens and be effective stewards of society and the environment, I would be all in favor of total free market capitalism, but I do not see that being the case at all.
Without pressure from the government with its pesky rules, regulations, policies and taxation, many companies and wealthy individuals would do nothing for the benefit of others or of the world in general, but only seek to further enrich themselves and increase their plunder and power. That's what happened in such periods of economic "freedom" as the "robber baron" era of the late 1800s, in the Roaring Twenties, and in our recent period of financial deregulation and financial collapse. You may have noticed that since the bleakest days of the 2008 downturn, the stock market has recovered, big banks and financial companies are running up great profits, but many people are now working for lower wages than before the crash, many others cannot find work at all, and many people have lost their homes and had their lives ruined. In this case, the government functioned effectively to rescue the financial elite, but not the rest of us. What I conclude from that is not that we need to abolish the government, but need to radically reform it to make it more responsive to human needs. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's ruling in the McCutcheon case this week will only make our politicians more dependent on big-money, fat-cat donors, so the situation is not likely to improve anytime soon.
I do see a ray of hope in my little corner of the Pagan world. Recent communications with a number of Norse Pagans in America have again demonstrated that I am not alone in wishing to develop a new form of American Asatru that would be politically progressive, environmentally concerned, anti-racist, anti-military, and pro-social justice. I think there are enough of us to do it. So, please do get in touch with me if you are on this wavelength. Send me a message to this blog including your email address, and note that you do NOT want this published on the blog. I will contact you off-blog and we can start networking, sharing ideas and planning. This may be a dark time, but we can do our best to be a source of light and vision, love for the earth and caring for humanity--ALL humanity and ALL the earth. A universal Paganism based in Norse traditions but not limited to them. If this resonates with you, please communicate with me.
Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Small-minded, mean and corporate.... Is this our future?
Recently I read an interesting essay on the state of modern poetry in the July, 2013 issue of the fine magazine Harper's . The article is called "Poetry Slam, Or, the decline of American verse," by Mark Edmundon,a professor of English at the University of Virgina. Edmundson makes a case that there is an artfully disguised emptiness at the heart of much American poetry written in recent decades. The poems are beautifully crafted, with many fine turns of phrase, arresting images, and a strong sense of personal voice. These poetical confections tell us many small and even telling things about the author's personal experiences, physical surroundings, childhood memories and state of mind. All very well-done! But they have little to say about any larger issues, about life in general, the state of the world, political and social issues. They may mention a little about such things, but full-force meditations on collective situations and social conditions that go beyond tightly-focused reflections on small, personal things are discouraged. What wins awards and garners fellowships, grants, book publications and academic employment are, basically, well-crafted poems about nothing, or if not quite about nothing, about the most small, personal and apolitical subject matter as possible. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld designed his television comedy "Seinfeld" to be "a show about nothing." Well, it may be that the poets of today have him beat.
I am not a scholar of literature able to assess Professor Edmundson's claims, but this article does help me understand why the teen-aged Me who loved reading poets like William Blake, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens found it hard to get into more recent poetry. I always assumed it was my fault, that I simply wasn't educated enough in the exquisite pleasures of poetry that delights in tiny details and eschews grand messages and meanings. However, the article made me reflect on something else, which is whether the kind of smallness of vision and narrowing of human concern that Edmundson finds in modern American poetry might be a more generalized condition afflicting our society and culture in general. I think there is something here.
Take our political leaders. Once we had Presidents like FDR and Lyndon Johnson who pushed large, far-reaching government programs to address the needs of suffering populations, raise up the underprivileged, transform our society and combat social injustice. The New Deal. Social Security insurance to support the elderly. WPA (Works Progress Administration) to put the unemployed to work doing things for the good of our society. Rural electrification. Food stamps to feed the hungry. Medicaid and Medicare to help the poor and elderly cope with medical costs. Head Start to help pre-K kids in poor neighborhoods get mental and social stimulation that is so critical in early years. Pell Grants and student loans making college education more accessible. The Fulbright Fellowship program to help Americans study, teach and live abroad. The Peace Corps. Even a staunch, conservative Republican like Eisenhower believed in using government power and government financing to build a national highway system. JFK followed with the space program that gave us so much inspiration as well as a bevy of great new technology that paved the way for things like satellite communications and cell phones. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency that has done so much to clean up our land, air and water, even if much more remains to be done.
Since the mid-1970s, though, the political imagination as well as the political will have faltered and atrophied. Reagan preached that "government was the problem, not the solution," and set the nation on a political course toward disabling and dismantling many of the programs set up by his predecessors. It is ultra-conservatives in Reagan's Republican Party who have led the way backwards here, with the most recent examples being the Republican-dominated House of Representatives calling for cuts in Food Stamp benefits,even as recent reports show that child poverty and hunger is rising due to economic stagnation and unemployment, and the Republican-appointed conservative majority on the Supreme Court, just this week, putting new limits on programs designed to combat discrimination against African-Americans and other ethnic and racial minorities.
However, let us give credit to all who deserve it. Democrats have often followed along on this road of regression, such as Clinton's collaboration with congressional Republicans in "ending welfare as we know it" in the 1990s, possibly contributing to the alarming rise in child poverty and hunger today, and Obama advancing a health care reform plan largely based on Republican ideas put forward by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and the GOP-related Heritage Foundation conservative think-tank in the 1990s. Despite some positive features of the Affordable Care Act, it is very corporate-oriented in that it provides millions of new customers to health insurance companies and lets these corporations set the prices and scoop up the profits, rather than taking the non-corporate option that many would have preferred, a single-payer, government operated program, which could have been established simply by expanding Medicare or Medicaid to make them universal programs, thereby cutting out the corporate middleman, granting the government more control over health costs, and recycling any cost savings into more public health care, not million dollar dividends to corporate CEOs. Giving people who previously had NO health care coverage some kind of health insurance is good, indeed something to celebrate, but putting this under the control of profit-oriented corporations is troubling, as it could mean huge profits for them and huge costs for the taxpayer, if government is forced to subsidize the private companies providing this expanded health care-- shades of our recent mortgage and banking crises! Sadly, this is typical of how things are done in a time when no one seems to believe that good public, government programs are worth fighting for. Once again, the score is Public--Zero; Corporations--Victory. That is to say, the only BIG political vision of the last 30 years has been a negative, regressive one, centered on stripping down government programs and capabilities and handing them over to profit-seeking corporations. Military and punishment-related programs are in a sense the exception, as these areas have continued to be expanded, but even here, much is being handed over to private corporations, as we see with privately-run, for-profit prisons and billion dollar contracts to military contractors and high-tech companies developing such things as drones and surveillance software.
Even when our supposedly liberal leaders like Clinton and Obama try to chart a positive, progressive direction for our country nowadays, they are scared to call for any new public funding, but try to do it in a pro-corporate, quasi-conservative way, through such means as tax-cuts and partnerships with private companies. The latter showed its inherent foolishness when the economy started collapsing in 2007-08 due to government financing of mortgage companies via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the "public-private" housing partnerships. Similarly, when the banking industry, supposedly the crown jewel of modern free-market capitalism began collapsing, the government stepped in to prop up the banks, while failing to provide the same assistance for average people losing their jobs and homes in the financial meltdown. Everything is tilted toward private greed and corporate benefit, in the hopes that the free market will always work out in the end, and that our corporate masters will smile on us and provide a few crumbs of service to the general public. How different from FDR taking on the banking industry and declaring that he WELCOMED their hatred, because he knew he had to stand up against corporate business interests for the sake of the public. Even the word "public" has been expunged from much political discourse, as have the words "citizen" and "poor." Instead we speak in corporate terms of "the job market," "the housing market," and "the consumer," with nary a word for the very poor and underprivileged.
Our vision of society and government has grown small, narrow, and mean, and corporate-centered rather than public-oriented. Programs that help the poor, the hungry and the disadvantaged are increasingly dismantled, as they do not serve corporate interests. There is no great profit to be made in helping the poor, in giving the homeless a home, in protecting the environment from pollution, or in teaching children to have a larger view of life. The main vision in politics today is a technocratic one, resting on the untested, unproven and uncritically accepted assumption that if we simply use better technological means, provided of course by our kindly corporate masters, we will automatically reach better social ends. This overlooks who will own the technology and derive the profits from it, who gets to use the technology and how, who is it used against and how, who and what will be left out, who and what will be discarded, and what will be damaged or destroyed in the natural environment as well as the social one. This is not a public vision of making things better for everyone. This is a cold, corporate-oriented vision of society and government organized for maximum corporate profit, with a few pennies donated to charity here and there for the sake of appeasing a shallow and not very well-developed sense of conscience. Better still if the corporate charity can be used in a public relations campaign to make people feel all the better about purchasing the products produced by the corporation, without asking why the social problem addressed by the charity is so persistent in the first place.
And what of our culture? Certainly here, the imagination can soar, greater things can be envisioned for our society, new forms of social, political and economic organization can be experimented with? Plenty of room for big ideas and bold questions, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. No. In the sixties, Bob Dylan sang for civil rights, the Beatles proposed that "all you need is love" and many artists questioned the social order, our foreign war of that time (Vietnam), women's rights, racial equality, and more. Now our culture invites us to immerse ourselves in the fragmented, titillating, and often narcissistic digital diarrhea of Facebook and Twitter, idiotic video games, moronic reality TV shows, 24/7 celebrity gossip, and action films with bigger and bigger explosions and special effects, where what passes for witty discourse are the one-liner catch-phrases of one-dimensional "Good Guys" and "Bad Guys." Even when we get stories that purportedly express a sense of anxiety about a future of environmental devastation and social breakdown, which could be a staring point for considering how to get off our current trajectory and seek some different and better collective tomorrow, the less than novel, not terribly original solution offered in such entertainments typically involves nothing more than heroic violence against disposable Others. There's a lot of buzzing and flashing going on, a lot of distraction at an increasingly high rate of speed, but not much depth or meaning. In fact, one of the few offerings on American television that can make some claim to a serious attempt to provide depth and meaning, the PBS News Hour, is under pressure from the corporate-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to change its format, which has for many years featured in-depth reporting and interviews, to make it more "contemporary" and "exciting." God only knows what the News Hour will be like should people like Bill Gates get their hands on it. Sadly, considering the lack of support for anything PUBLIC in our society, such as the PUBLIC Broadcasting Service, it is entirely possible that sooner rather than later, we will no longer have a public broadcasting service, just corporate broadcasting services, corporate news and entertainment, that will generate not depth and meaning, but titillation, distraction and profit.
"Welcome to (GBS) Gates Broadcasting Service and the Google News Hour, available in 4-D supersonic splendor on all digital devices including the I-Shit digital toilet. You, as the consumer, and nothing but a consumer, have the right to consume all that you are willing to pay for. We, your corporate masters, regret to inform you that such items as clean air and water, healthy food, personal privacy, open public space, decent wages, job security, and social justice are not available for download at this time. May we suggest the following personal entertainment options..."
So, O Bard of the Corporate Age, go ahead and write your poems about your personal little topics like your grandmother's rheumatic ankles and the angst your felt about dieting when you were 13, or how the stars looked when you were still in the womb and had not yet tasted Kentucky Fried Chicken! Large corporations love it when we are personal and obscure and narcissistic. It doesn't challenge the social or economic order in any way, and it might even provide useful material for future marketing campaigns! And you, the Poet, can get a nice, secure position teaching the young the fine points of saying nothing.
It is funny, I must say, that many of our public figures today love to rhapsodize about all the great progress happening now and in the future. The underlying assumption is that technology is going to take care of everything. Oh yes, I still remember the wonderful technology of times past. No doubt future technology will be used just as wisely as it was at Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Lots of bright people designed the atom bomb. Lots of first-rate technology, and such wonderful business efficiency, went into the Nazi death-camps. Excuse me if I withhold my applause for the techno-utopia that is supposedly just around the corner. The future I see is small, mean and corporate-owned. Sometimes the only hope I can see is that things will get so bad that people will wake up, rise up and demand something different, something better, something fairer and more humane, as people did in the past with the anti-slavery movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and so on. It would be nice if our poets and artists could offer us some new insights, new visions, new questions, but for the most part, all we get are well-crafted distractions that avoid larger, more-than-merely-personal issues, whether the craftsmen are academic poets or Hollywood hacks.
We are in very bad shape.
I am not a scholar of literature able to assess Professor Edmundson's claims, but this article does help me understand why the teen-aged Me who loved reading poets like William Blake, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath and Wallace Stevens found it hard to get into more recent poetry. I always assumed it was my fault, that I simply wasn't educated enough in the exquisite pleasures of poetry that delights in tiny details and eschews grand messages and meanings. However, the article made me reflect on something else, which is whether the kind of smallness of vision and narrowing of human concern that Edmundson finds in modern American poetry might be a more generalized condition afflicting our society and culture in general. I think there is something here.
Take our political leaders. Once we had Presidents like FDR and Lyndon Johnson who pushed large, far-reaching government programs to address the needs of suffering populations, raise up the underprivileged, transform our society and combat social injustice. The New Deal. Social Security insurance to support the elderly. WPA (Works Progress Administration) to put the unemployed to work doing things for the good of our society. Rural electrification. Food stamps to feed the hungry. Medicaid and Medicare to help the poor and elderly cope with medical costs. Head Start to help pre-K kids in poor neighborhoods get mental and social stimulation that is so critical in early years. Pell Grants and student loans making college education more accessible. The Fulbright Fellowship program to help Americans study, teach and live abroad. The Peace Corps. Even a staunch, conservative Republican like Eisenhower believed in using government power and government financing to build a national highway system. JFK followed with the space program that gave us so much inspiration as well as a bevy of great new technology that paved the way for things like satellite communications and cell phones. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency that has done so much to clean up our land, air and water, even if much more remains to be done.
Since the mid-1970s, though, the political imagination as well as the political will have faltered and atrophied. Reagan preached that "government was the problem, not the solution," and set the nation on a political course toward disabling and dismantling many of the programs set up by his predecessors. It is ultra-conservatives in Reagan's Republican Party who have led the way backwards here, with the most recent examples being the Republican-dominated House of Representatives calling for cuts in Food Stamp benefits,even as recent reports show that child poverty and hunger is rising due to economic stagnation and unemployment, and the Republican-appointed conservative majority on the Supreme Court, just this week, putting new limits on programs designed to combat discrimination against African-Americans and other ethnic and racial minorities.
However, let us give credit to all who deserve it. Democrats have often followed along on this road of regression, such as Clinton's collaboration with congressional Republicans in "ending welfare as we know it" in the 1990s, possibly contributing to the alarming rise in child poverty and hunger today, and Obama advancing a health care reform plan largely based on Republican ideas put forward by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and the GOP-related Heritage Foundation conservative think-tank in the 1990s. Despite some positive features of the Affordable Care Act, it is very corporate-oriented in that it provides millions of new customers to health insurance companies and lets these corporations set the prices and scoop up the profits, rather than taking the non-corporate option that many would have preferred, a single-payer, government operated program, which could have been established simply by expanding Medicare or Medicaid to make them universal programs, thereby cutting out the corporate middleman, granting the government more control over health costs, and recycling any cost savings into more public health care, not million dollar dividends to corporate CEOs. Giving people who previously had NO health care coverage some kind of health insurance is good, indeed something to celebrate, but putting this under the control of profit-oriented corporations is troubling, as it could mean huge profits for them and huge costs for the taxpayer, if government is forced to subsidize the private companies providing this expanded health care-- shades of our recent mortgage and banking crises! Sadly, this is typical of how things are done in a time when no one seems to believe that good public, government programs are worth fighting for. Once again, the score is Public--Zero; Corporations--Victory. That is to say, the only BIG political vision of the last 30 years has been a negative, regressive one, centered on stripping down government programs and capabilities and handing them over to profit-seeking corporations. Military and punishment-related programs are in a sense the exception, as these areas have continued to be expanded, but even here, much is being handed over to private corporations, as we see with privately-run, for-profit prisons and billion dollar contracts to military contractors and high-tech companies developing such things as drones and surveillance software.
Even when our supposedly liberal leaders like Clinton and Obama try to chart a positive, progressive direction for our country nowadays, they are scared to call for any new public funding, but try to do it in a pro-corporate, quasi-conservative way, through such means as tax-cuts and partnerships with private companies. The latter showed its inherent foolishness when the economy started collapsing in 2007-08 due to government financing of mortgage companies via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the "public-private" housing partnerships. Similarly, when the banking industry, supposedly the crown jewel of modern free-market capitalism began collapsing, the government stepped in to prop up the banks, while failing to provide the same assistance for average people losing their jobs and homes in the financial meltdown. Everything is tilted toward private greed and corporate benefit, in the hopes that the free market will always work out in the end, and that our corporate masters will smile on us and provide a few crumbs of service to the general public. How different from FDR taking on the banking industry and declaring that he WELCOMED their hatred, because he knew he had to stand up against corporate business interests for the sake of the public. Even the word "public" has been expunged from much political discourse, as have the words "citizen" and "poor." Instead we speak in corporate terms of "the job market," "the housing market," and "the consumer," with nary a word for the very poor and underprivileged.
Our vision of society and government has grown small, narrow, and mean, and corporate-centered rather than public-oriented. Programs that help the poor, the hungry and the disadvantaged are increasingly dismantled, as they do not serve corporate interests. There is no great profit to be made in helping the poor, in giving the homeless a home, in protecting the environment from pollution, or in teaching children to have a larger view of life. The main vision in politics today is a technocratic one, resting on the untested, unproven and uncritically accepted assumption that if we simply use better technological means, provided of course by our kindly corporate masters, we will automatically reach better social ends. This overlooks who will own the technology and derive the profits from it, who gets to use the technology and how, who is it used against and how, who and what will be left out, who and what will be discarded, and what will be damaged or destroyed in the natural environment as well as the social one. This is not a public vision of making things better for everyone. This is a cold, corporate-oriented vision of society and government organized for maximum corporate profit, with a few pennies donated to charity here and there for the sake of appeasing a shallow and not very well-developed sense of conscience. Better still if the corporate charity can be used in a public relations campaign to make people feel all the better about purchasing the products produced by the corporation, without asking why the social problem addressed by the charity is so persistent in the first place.
And what of our culture? Certainly here, the imagination can soar, greater things can be envisioned for our society, new forms of social, political and economic organization can be experimented with? Plenty of room for big ideas and bold questions, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha. No. In the sixties, Bob Dylan sang for civil rights, the Beatles proposed that "all you need is love" and many artists questioned the social order, our foreign war of that time (Vietnam), women's rights, racial equality, and more. Now our culture invites us to immerse ourselves in the fragmented, titillating, and often narcissistic digital diarrhea of Facebook and Twitter, idiotic video games, moronic reality TV shows, 24/7 celebrity gossip, and action films with bigger and bigger explosions and special effects, where what passes for witty discourse are the one-liner catch-phrases of one-dimensional "Good Guys" and "Bad Guys." Even when we get stories that purportedly express a sense of anxiety about a future of environmental devastation and social breakdown, which could be a staring point for considering how to get off our current trajectory and seek some different and better collective tomorrow, the less than novel, not terribly original solution offered in such entertainments typically involves nothing more than heroic violence against disposable Others. There's a lot of buzzing and flashing going on, a lot of distraction at an increasingly high rate of speed, but not much depth or meaning. In fact, one of the few offerings on American television that can make some claim to a serious attempt to provide depth and meaning, the PBS News Hour, is under pressure from the corporate-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to change its format, which has for many years featured in-depth reporting and interviews, to make it more "contemporary" and "exciting." God only knows what the News Hour will be like should people like Bill Gates get their hands on it. Sadly, considering the lack of support for anything PUBLIC in our society, such as the PUBLIC Broadcasting Service, it is entirely possible that sooner rather than later, we will no longer have a public broadcasting service, just corporate broadcasting services, corporate news and entertainment, that will generate not depth and meaning, but titillation, distraction and profit.
"Welcome to (GBS) Gates Broadcasting Service and the Google News Hour, available in 4-D supersonic splendor on all digital devices including the I-Shit digital toilet. You, as the consumer, and nothing but a consumer, have the right to consume all that you are willing to pay for. We, your corporate masters, regret to inform you that such items as clean air and water, healthy food, personal privacy, open public space, decent wages, job security, and social justice are not available for download at this time. May we suggest the following personal entertainment options..."
So, O Bard of the Corporate Age, go ahead and write your poems about your personal little topics like your grandmother's rheumatic ankles and the angst your felt about dieting when you were 13, or how the stars looked when you were still in the womb and had not yet tasted Kentucky Fried Chicken! Large corporations love it when we are personal and obscure and narcissistic. It doesn't challenge the social or economic order in any way, and it might even provide useful material for future marketing campaigns! And you, the Poet, can get a nice, secure position teaching the young the fine points of saying nothing.
It is funny, I must say, that many of our public figures today love to rhapsodize about all the great progress happening now and in the future. The underlying assumption is that technology is going to take care of everything. Oh yes, I still remember the wonderful technology of times past. No doubt future technology will be used just as wisely as it was at Hiroshima and Auschwitz. Lots of bright people designed the atom bomb. Lots of first-rate technology, and such wonderful business efficiency, went into the Nazi death-camps. Excuse me if I withhold my applause for the techno-utopia that is supposedly just around the corner. The future I see is small, mean and corporate-owned. Sometimes the only hope I can see is that things will get so bad that people will wake up, rise up and demand something different, something better, something fairer and more humane, as people did in the past with the anti-slavery movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and so on. It would be nice if our poets and artists could offer us some new insights, new visions, new questions, but for the most part, all we get are well-crafted distractions that avoid larger, more-than-merely-personal issues, whether the craftsmen are academic poets or Hollywood hacks.
We are in very bad shape.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Our Supremely Disgusting Court
Yesterday (June 28, 2011), the U.S Supreme Court struck down a California law that restricted sales of violent video games to people 18 and over by placing hefty fines on the sale of such items to those under that age. See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/us/28scotus.html . The law was clearly intended to attempt to resist the rising glorification of violence in our society, something that this blogger has often reflected on. The Court found that the principle of "free speech," as manifested in allowing children to play games in which they fantasize perpetrating all manner of ultra-violent acts on an endless series of victims, outweighed the possible ill effects of young people immersing themselves in endless hours of gruesomely violent fantasy play. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia reasoned that there was no tradition in the USA of censoring portrayals of violence. He rejected the proposition that restrictions on video violence were comparable to restrictions on pornography.
I am saddened and disgusted by this turn of events. It is such a pathetic verification of the old criticism of American culture as a twisted world in which violence is valued and sexuality is repressed. Your kid spends his free time in games in which he can kill ten thousand people an hour, hack them to pieces, set them on fire, run them over with tanks? Perfectly fine. Show one woman's naked breast or vagina to a thirteen year old? Criminal act. Backwards priorities, to my thinking. The hippie saying, "Make love, not war," may have originated in America but it never reflected the majority mindset, and still does not today.
Again, I hope that all branches of Paganism will not side with the dominant trend in America toward glorification of violence. We are going down a very dark road, I fear. A culture that values sadism, cruelty and brute force over all else cannot have a very bright future. Worse still, the evolution of our military is toward the use of remote controlled drones that are operated very much like video games.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html. So, the young kids who grow up on violent video games will be perfectly suited to be the conscienceless, long-distance video game soldiers of the future. Perhaps the final result will be for the some video game corporation, say Hyperviolence Inc,,to take over the US military and run it as a subsidiary, feeding the live footage of people being shot or blown up by our brave drones in places like Pakistan and Yemen back into the games for every patriotic citizen to enjoy, the younger the better. Why not do the same with police and security services, and have the whole country under a brave new regime of video violence: pay-per-view law and order.
At least there was good news in New York about gays and lesbians getting the right to marry.
I am saddened and disgusted by this turn of events. It is such a pathetic verification of the old criticism of American culture as a twisted world in which violence is valued and sexuality is repressed. Your kid spends his free time in games in which he can kill ten thousand people an hour, hack them to pieces, set them on fire, run them over with tanks? Perfectly fine. Show one woman's naked breast or vagina to a thirteen year old? Criminal act. Backwards priorities, to my thinking. The hippie saying, "Make love, not war," may have originated in America but it never reflected the majority mindset, and still does not today.
Again, I hope that all branches of Paganism will not side with the dominant trend in America toward glorification of violence. We are going down a very dark road, I fear. A culture that values sadism, cruelty and brute force over all else cannot have a very bright future. Worse still, the evolution of our military is toward the use of remote controlled drones that are operated very much like video games.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html. So, the young kids who grow up on violent video games will be perfectly suited to be the conscienceless, long-distance video game soldiers of the future. Perhaps the final result will be for the some video game corporation, say Hyperviolence Inc,,to take over the US military and run it as a subsidiary, feeding the live footage of people being shot or blown up by our brave drones in places like Pakistan and Yemen back into the games for every patriotic citizen to enjoy, the younger the better. Why not do the same with police and security services, and have the whole country under a brave new regime of video violence: pay-per-view law and order.
At least there was good news in New York about gays and lesbians getting the right to marry.
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