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.

Pro Publica

There is a common attitude in America, with many echoes elsewhere, to be sure, that I find extremely worrisome and unfortunate. This is an outlook on the world that emphasizes individual rights and interests over all else, and sees any limitation of individual rights for the sake of shared common, public interests as absolutely unacceptable. Those who endorse this point of view may agree with the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously declared, "There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals." This line of thinking is reflected in the modern-day priorities of libertarians and the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, which strongly oppose most government spending on social programs that serve common human needs, like unemployment compensation funds to help the jobless and food stamps (SNAP) to feed the poor. In the most extreme right-wing thinking in the USA, talking of "common human needs" is in itself questionable, for "common" is all too reminiscent of "communism." What makes America great, in this view, is individual effort, not common structures or supports. This perspective is also bound up in the ferocious right-wing opposition to ANY kind of tax increase on wealthier Americans and/or powerful business corporations, which would be the most obvious ways to raise revenue to pay down the national debt and government operating deficit, as well as to provide for additional spending in needed areas like environmental protection and infrastructure repair. Since the individual is much more important than the government or the society, with the corporation often accorded the same respect as an individual person, a view endorsed by the current, conservative-leaning Supreme Court in the USA, taxes on individuals, whether persons or corporations, are seen as infringements on individual rights. By this understanding, individuals and corporations that amass large amounts of lucre should be allowed to keep it all for themselves, with any diminution of their treasure for public purposes viewed as misguided and even immoral infringements on the all-important shibboleth of individual rights.

I would argue that this way of thinking is wrong on multiple levels, from the political to the social to the natural to the spiritual, and actively harming the world that we live in. Let me start by repeating and enlarging upon that last phrase, "the world we live in." We live TOGETHER in a COMMON world. Without that world, and without our togetherness, our commonality, we cannot exist. We do not each possess our own private individual world that we can enjoy without any need for or interaction with others and their separate worlds. It is true that there has been a trend in the last 20-30 years for people with higher incomes to live in so-called "gated communities," which attempt to wall off the privileged few from the threat of the less wealthy and privileged, but their little neighborhood fortresses can provide little protection against more than burglars and door-to-door salesmen. We breathe COMMON air. We drink COMMON water, for even if you buy bottled water, that water ultimately comes from a common source, and were that source to be totally drowned in hazardous chemicals or nuclear waste, all the bottling companies in the world won't be of much use. We drive on COMMON streets and highways. We use COMMON electricity and railroads. We go to COMMON hospitals for care. We rely on COMMON courts and law and police. We speak a COMMON language or languages. We experience COMMON weather; good luck if you think you can purchase private protection to insulate you against raging blizzards, hurricanes, floods or tornadoes. We work in a COMMON economy, with massive disruptions in employment or lending rates or stock value affecting us all, whether directly or indirectly. We are all vulnerable little boats on a great common sea.

Most of the services we need to maintain all these common resources in good working order, from breathable air to drinkable water to drivable streets, to adequate emergency and health care services, to reliable banking and finance systems, depend on the government which depends in turn on taxation. All of these elements are linked together in a chain of absolute interdependence. The willingness of some current-day conservative and libertarian Americans, as well as their fellow travelers in other lands, to break this chain out of an anti-tax, anti-government fixation, supported by a misguided equation that less government equals more "freedom" and "liberty," is not merely regrettable, but actually reprehensible and even, in my opinion, criminal. Drastic cutting of governments budgets, the kind of "austerity" that is wrongly believed to cure societies of oversized governments and budgets and has been brutally imposed at horrendous human cost in European countries like Greece, Spain and Latvia, does not increase "freedom" or "liberty," unless you value the "freedom" to be unemployed, to starve, to lose your home, to have community services like streets, highways, bridges, water treatment plants and sewers fall to ruin, and the "liberty" to commit suicide or emigrate to another country that has hopefully not yet been exposed to the disease of austerity, which is what many Greeks, Spaniards and Latvians have been doing in recent years.

In America, the 30-year, post-Reagan political trend of not wanting to raise taxes for public services, out of a basic, widespread and in my view sadly misguided rejection of the usefulness of government, has resulted in a terrible crisis at the level of basic infrastructure. Highways, bridges, sewers, railroads, water delivery and many other systems, many of which were first established 50-100 years ago, are in terrible repair. A national engineering association gave America a D+ grade for the state of its infrastructure in 2009. Supposedly, nothing can be done about this because, again, supposedly, "There isn't any money." This despite America having the largest amount of accumulated wealth in the world. The top two percent have seen colossal growth in their income in the last several decades, and major corporations like the oil and gas companies, many of which pay very low or zero taxes due to loopholes in the tax system, have also seen booming profits. Believe me, there IS money, plenty of money. It is just not available for public use, being hoarded by the media-dominating dragons of private and corporate greed.

The basic problem is that there is insufficient determination by our political leaders to DEMAND that the wealthy and the corporations pay their fair share to maintain the systems that we all, even they, depend on. Most politicians are dependent on support from the super-wealthy and the massive corporations and are thus unwilling to ask the really tough questions about private greed versus public need. The right-wing opposition, often funded by the same super-wealthy persons and business interests that strongly supported the finance industry multi-millionaire Mitt Romney, have been able to block any attempt, such as President Obama's very reasonable proposal to create an infrastructure bank to provide funding for infrastructure maintenance and repair. (The Obama administration only got health care reform offering coverage to the tens of millions of previously uninsured in the USA approved by the Congress by creating a new system that guarantees massive profits for health insurance companies, which does not bode well for controlling or reducing health care costs, unfortunately. A fully public plan like single-payer Medicare would have allowed more hope for reducing costs, because we would have cut out the greedy corporate health insurance middleman.)

I believe that if there were more regard and more support for the COMMON good and the PUBLIC sphere, we would all be better off--even the super-wealthy and the ultra-libertarians. I am pretty sure they need clean air, water, and drivable roads too, and unless they really want internet companies like Google and Microsoft to take over public education and turn it into an internet commodity like Facebook,they and we are going to need public schools in the future, including decent buildings for our students and decent wages and benefits for our teachers. The public good, common welfare and government have been devalued and underrated for too long. Whatever abuses and mistakes government may commit, and there are many, it is still the only vehicle we have to ensure good basic services to support the interconnected world that we all live in.

I regret that a fair number of American Pagans seem to have drunk the anti-government, pro-individual rights, libertarian Kool-Aid. I think they are in unacknowledged contradiction of a basic Pagan value: love of and respect for nature. Unbridled private and corporate greed poses a huge threat to our natural environment. A strong government that protects natural resources is the best hope for saving our planet from corporate rape and ravage and massive pollution. I dare say the government fulfills a sacred duty when it protects our rivers, streams, mountains, forests and oceans. In that regard, the government should be seen as sacred by Pagans.

That may seem extreme or insane, to some, but consider this. In any Pagan mythology, there are gods that protect nature and the earth. Thor, for instance, is the protector of the earth, as the son of the earth, in Norse mythology. Well, who plays the part of Thor in protecting the earth in our modern world? Government more than anyone or anything else. I am proud to support various environmental organizations and do my little bit by recycling and driving a low-mileage car to reduce my share of pollution, but any really substantial progress will depend on government regulation of pollution and promotion of less polluting, more renewable and sustainable technologies.

So, to my fellow Pagans, I say, raise a glass to the government! And do not grumble when you pay your taxes. We need government. As little stewards of the earth, we can each play a part, but only a small part. We need government to be the big steward, the bureaucratic Thor, if you like. However, government does not always play this part as it should, so I urge you to occasionally contact your government officials to demand protection of our sacred earth. I believe this is part of our sacred duty as Pagans who embrace the sacredness of the earth and all its splendors.



This can also be noted in Paganism.