Notwithstanding the possibility that my thoughts here will be dismissed as yet another absurd Alex Jones conspiracy theory, I am once again going to sound the alarm bell. I believe to a large extent; complacency is behind the scary state of being America is in.
How else would you explain the fact that someone as brazenly corrupt as Donald Trump could become president of the most powerful nation on the planet? Are we condemned as George Santayana said?
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
I’m sure that most countries are equally as guilty as the U.S. when it comes to denying their past history or the truth of their dastardly & immoral acts, they committed in acquiring, maintaining, & expanding their empires. However, I’m an American citizen & therefore responsible for the good things the U.S. has done as well as the immoral things we have done. And as my hero, Noam Chomsky points out, we can do something about what’s going on in America at a local level, a state level, & a federal level so yeah, we can pass moral/ethical judgments on foreign governments, but we can’t affect their government’s policies/actions, so we should do what we can to change our government’s policies/practices.
And yes, this is grossly oversimplifying but to a huge extent, Trump slimed his way into the presidency because far too many of us supposedly intelligent Leftists were asleep at the wheel. We laughed whenever someone suggested Trump had a real chance of winning.
Yep! We on the “progressive” side in most matters, have been the stupid ones. We have underestimated, ignored, dismissed, & forgotten just what our enemies are capable of. Again, our damn complacency & that applies to our intellectual complacency as well.
A case in point, “Smart phones.” I must tip my hat to whatever advertising agency came up with that one, it’s been a phenomenal success. I bet you that many, if not most people who own a smart phone actually believe it makes them smarter. Seems almost primitive like some indigenous peoples who have their magical beliefs in trees, animals, forces of nature that empower them just by being near them.
Unequivocally, “Smart phones” do not make us smarter, they’re a convenience, not a necessity! They are the descendants of the old, 10-key, adding machines, then the pocket calculators, and then personal computers. And basically, their primary value is the fact that they can make calculations far faster than humans can. People seem to mistake speed for quality.
You may have heard the story that when Einstein was in grammar school, his teachers often thought he was intellectually-challenged. This is the trending term for the field I & my wife worked in for most of our careers, Special Education.
Einstein’s teachers thought because he was so slow to respond when a teacher called on him because his mind was deep in reflection upon other possible answers to the teacher’s question. In other words, we respect the “quick-witted,” & dismiss those who are slow to answer i.e., those thinkers who know that quality is far more important than how quickly you can produce an answer.
I have witnessed our slow decay if you like, over the course of my life i.e., we learned the multiplication tables by 4th grade, I believe and up to 12 X 12? And over the years, they stopped teaching students how to multiply so now kids are allowed to use pocket calculators in the classroom.
I have also noted that teenagers can no longer count your change back to you when you make a purchase. McDonald’s employees for example, can’t operate the standard cash register. So, McDonald’s cash register tells them how much money to return to the customer.
Around 1992 when I was a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, I learned that the average high school graduate’s reading level was at an 8th grade level. This isn’t meant to lay all the blame on the teachers, the students, the system, but to highlight the fact that our public education standards have been declining for decades. The students, the educational bureaucracy, the parents, & society in general share in the responsibility for our decline.
Yet on the other hand, we’re told that all is saved, we have “Smart phones.” How do we account for this miracle? Could it be that the Emperor has No Clothes? Yes, the naked truth is that it’s an illusion that smart phones are making us smarter. In fact, it’s a dangerous delusion because with the white supremacists, fascists, & Trump zombies amongst us, free thought along with free speech may become a thing of the past because people are so busy playing games, taking “selfies,” checking the “likes” etc. on their phones that the fascists are infiltrating our society at an alarming rate.
We need intelligent, informed, passionate & empathetic people to unify & organize, so please put away that Smart phone & read one of Chomsky’s books or books by Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Chris Hedges, etc. Here’s a few more examples of how Smart phones are actually making us stupider.
You’ve probably heard the old maxim, “Use it or lose it”in terms of your muscles, well the same applies to our mental muscles. The proliferation of “Smart phones” over the past 35 years has corresponded with a decline in reading, especially the reading of the Classics & important non-fiction authors.
Professors at our top, Ivy league universities like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. have been lamenting the fact that most of their incoming freshmen students are woefully unprepared i.e., they’ve either never heard of let alone can tell you anything about Plato, Aristotle, the Enlightenment, etc.
Today’s youth are techno-wizards when it comes to accessing platforms, apps, etc. on their phones & computers but don’t ask them to write a cogent paragraph or a well-reasoned essay on current events. Critical or analytical thinking skills have become an anachronism.
In short, people are becoming ever more vulnerable to “fake news” stories & we are morphing into a nation of functioning illiterates. Do you remember Zuckerberg’s promises when Facebook came on the scene? These tools of the New Age created in the Silicon Valley were going to bring people together & greatly enhance communication between us.
Instead, we are living in a society that hasn’t been this polarized & filled with hate, fear, & violence since the Civil War. And Facebook bears a huge amount of responsibility for this ugly reality because it purposely chose the algorithms of fake stories, blatant propaganda against Hillary Clinton & pro-Trump, etc. because they push peoples’ emotional buttons & users stay on these fake posts longer & the advertisers pay Facebook more money the longer people stay on these bile-filled, fascist propaganda pieces.
And Facebook’s selling of their user’s personal data to Cambridge Analytica played a major role in Trump’s stealing of the 2016 election. The more you dumb your users down & the 24/7 spreading of all this negativity, erodes our intellectual self-defense & something like 70% of the American public get their news from Facebook & the other “social media” platforms.
We are literally witnessing the age-old strategy of Divide & Conquer and no, this isn’t a great conspiracy, it’s simply a matter of the greedy, corporate cockroaches making as great a profit as possible and we all lose in the big picture.
Next on my list of Dangerous Illusions are our mythical “Smart bombs.” The Pentagon & our presidents from George H.W. Bush onward assured us that these “Smart bombs” would greatly reduce the number of innocents killed if we used them & that our military leaders always strove to not kill innocents in our war campaigns
Quite frankly, they were & are liars in this regard and have consistently underreported or flat out lied about the numbers of innocents killed in our Smart bomb attacks over the past 30 years. (Note how often they lied about body counts in Vietnam) Why do you think the Pentagon required reporters to be embedded with select military units ever since the Gulf War?
Furthermore, have you reflected on the Pentagon’s use of “Depleted Uranium” weapons from 1990 on?
Depleted uranium (DU) weapons were first used during the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. The Pentagon estimated that between 315 and 350 tons of DU were fired during the first Gulf War. During the 2003 invasion and current occupation of Iraq, U.S. and British troops have reportedly used more than five times as many DU bombs and shells as the total number used during the 1991 war….
…. Dr. Doug Rokke, on the other hand, former director of the U.S. Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, is very willing to talk about the effects of DU. Rokke was involved in the “clean up” of 34 Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles hit by friendly fire during the 1991 Gulf War. Today he suffers from the ill effects of DU in his body.
Rokke told American Free Press that the Pentagon uses DU weapons because they are the most effective at killing and destroying everything they hit. The highest level of the U.S. and British governments have “totally disregarded the consequences” of the use of DU weapons, Rokke said.
The first Gulf War was the largest friendly fire incident in the history of American warfare, Rokke says. “The majority of the casualties were the result of friendly fire,” he told AFP.
DU is used in many forms of ammunition as an armor penetrator because of its extreme weight and density. The uranium used in these missiles and bombs is a by-product of the nuclear enrichment process. Experts say the Department of Energy has 100 million tons of DU and using it in weapons saves the government money on the cost of its disposal.
Rather than disposing of the radioactive waste, it is shaped into penetrator rods used in the billions of rounds being fired in Iraq and Afghanistan . The radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons industry has, in effect, been forcibly exported and spread in the environments of Iraq, Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere.
https://www.wagingpeace.org/the-real-dirty-bombs-depleted-uranium/
Mull this over for a few moments if you will, not only have our “smart bombs” killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in our wars over the past 30 years, more Americans were killed by “friendly fire” in the Gulf War than by our enemy. How smart is that?
Moreover, using depleted uranium in our bombs & weapons exposes not only the innocents in these wars but also our own troops to the deadly, cancerous effects of the radiation. Remember Agent Orange in Vietnam & how long the Pentagon denied having used it? Gee, I wonder why one generation after another of terrorists keep on coming after us? Could you ignore the slaughter of your family & friends who were innocents & not want to seek revenge?
You see, our permanent state of war is because of the unbridled, corporate greed of our “Defense industry,” which used to be more honestly called the War Department. And as long as there are valuable natural resources anywhere in the world, we want to steal it & just because these resources happen to be in other countries, doesn’t matter.
Our Pentagon’s public relations machine just goes to work on the American public to convince them that these countries pose a threat to us & we’re invading them because we want to promote peace & democracy—talk about Orwellian.
Why do you think we have something like 900 military bases around the globe? I believe Russia has around three or four military bases & they’re on their border. China has a couple bases & likewise, they’re on their borders. The U.S. spends more on our military than the next dozen or so nations combined & below us in terms of military power i.e., France, Germany, the U.K., Russia, China, etc.
Tell me why it is that we are so paranoid & feel that we’re always vulnerable to attack when we have such an awesome & terrifying arsenal of jets, nuclear submarines, battleships, nuclear bombs, etc.? Could it be a massive PR campaign of propaganda created to keep us terrified, so we’ll keep paying our taxes which pay for the military-industrial-congressional complex?
Yep, George “Dubya,” the Coward from Crawford, Texas proved what a “compassionate conservative” he was by stirring the hornet’s nest in Iraq which lo & behold was about oil, never mind the fact that our oil just happened to belong to Iraq. We need to also ignore the fact that the terrorist response to our unprovoked “Shock & Awe” campaign in Iraq gradually spread throughout the Middle East.
In addition, Georgie aka Alfred E. Newman gave Osama bin Laden the perfect gift he was wishing for i.e., proof that the U.S. was waging a war against Muslims, so they now had a holy duty to defend their religion against the “Great Satan.” If we withdrew from every nation we’ve invaded & occupied in the Middle East today, the passionate hate we’ve instilled in millions of our victims, might take 50 years to calm down? Maybe there’s little to no hope of ever extinguishing their hatred for us? Did you notice Joe Biden’s recent act of generosity when he gave the Pentagon something like $80 billion more than they asked for in regard to the Pentagon “budget” for the coming year?
Yep! Good ol’ Joe, our Democratic savior from all things Trump. He also sold billions military planes to Saudi Arabia though he swore he wouldn’t in his presidential campaign. And we should just ignore Joe’s promise to not allow any more drilling in the Alaskan artic. If democrats would take 15 minutes to review Joe’s tenure in the Senate, it’d be clear who Joe loves—the corporate cockroaches, not the 99% of us who are living in a constant state of stress & worrying about how to make their mortgage payments, pay for their health care, not be killed by the COVID virus variations, etc.
Following this further, we now have to not only worry about the White Supremacists, but we absolutely must wake-up to the reality of the threats the “Christian” evangelists, fundamentalists, Dominionists, etc. pose to our democracy.
From practically the moment they, the Pilgrims, stepped out of their boats, they proclaimed their thanks for having come to a place of religious freedom, and immediately went to work on subjecting all of us to their “truths,” and their religion.
This subject has worried me greatly for over 40 years or better. And I basically dissected the classic, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” by Richard Hofstadter, making copious notes in the blank pages. In brief, Mr. Hofstadter does a masterful historian’s review & explanation of this tragic phenomenon i.e., anti-intellectualism from the beginning of our history to the recent past.
This can not be overstated, these pseudo- “Christians” are every bit as serious about their children’s education as they are about abortion. Well, politicians, especially presidential candidates know all too well how critically important it is to woo the far right, “Christians,” because they’re very vocal & not shy about telling us how we should live & believe. And they’re extremely well organized.
Mike Pence was clearly chosen by Trump’s puppet masters to assuage the faux “Christians.” He posed no threat to the GOP or was he likely to piss-off the little tyrant who often threw tantrums. And those unholy Christians were salivating at the thought of Trump kicking the bucket & one of their own stepping into the driver’s seat.
Do you think I may be exaggerating or unnecessarily alarmist? Really? How many times over the decades have we been assured that Roe v. Wade could never be overturned? I believe it’s in serious peril like the very fabric of what we thought was our Democracy.
Check it out for yourself, I could be wrong? I know this is cliché, maybe corny, but I sincerely believe that knowledge is power, but we should seek that knowledge that empowers people, not helps to enslave them. These wolves in sheep’s clothing, calling themselves “Christians,” have very selectively forgotten somehow, the Sermon on the Mount?
And if you can look in a mirror & call yourself a good Christian & believe Trump was a wonderful president, sorry my friend, you obviously need some serious counseling? This reminds me of how I never cease to be amazed as I grow older & come across these wolves. And even though I pretty much rejected the “Christian” values of a church I was attending around the age of 14 or 15, & organized Christianity in general, I often feel that I’m far more Christian than many, if not most of those I have met claimed to be.
In a nutshell, these people want to turn every school in America from pre-school to graduate school, into a “Charter school.” Not that far removed from how the Taliban run their indoctrination program i.e., teach primarily their religion & the basics of reading, writing, & arithmetic and of course a good daily dose of hate our enemies!
In brief, both are authoritarians & by definition, that’s against our key beliefs as Americans i.e., freedom of thought, speech, the press, etc. Whether we’re speaking of Islamic extremists or Christian extremists, societies that allow such hateful propaganda to go unchallenged, are turning a blind-eye to the violence that is simmering below the surface of their society.
Continuing on in terms of dangerous illusions, can you explain to me why we keep adding to our nuclear arsenals? I was in my 20s I believe when I heard that we had enough nuclear bombs/weapons to blow the world up over 25 times!
Pause for a moment if you will & let that soak in. You have to be Donald Trump crazy or certifiable to think this a good thing. I have no idea of how many times over we can now obliterate our planet & at times, I feel like what’s the point of even trying to get through to people on subjects like this.
Of course, our Smartphones, video games, obsession with sports, corporate propaganda, etc. are all contributing to our dumbing down & I often despair that it’s all just too formidable i.e., what’s the point of even trying to fight against all these destructive forces seemingly Hell bent on bringing on the wet dream of the “Christian” fundamentalists.
Nonetheless, some little flicker of hope still burns within me & I don’t really have the option of throwing in the towel. And even though I’ve never had the chance to meet Noam Chomsky in person, I have developed a friendship with him via email over the past 16 years or so & he helps remind me & the world of the progress we have made in fighting back against what I refer to as the corporate cockroaches.
Notwithstanding, Chomsky has been somewhat of a broken record for the past several years in terms of his focus on what he considers the two most pernicious threats facing humanity, a nuclear exchange between two or more nations & climate change (destruction). Yet given what I just shared regarding our attention spans, the predominance of the so-called “social media,” and several other key factors, you might be able to understand my doom & gloom worries/obsession.
Perhaps I have been living with my own dangerous illusion all these years in thinking that if we can just educate/inform enough people in time, we can at least slow down this madness & our seemingly unalterable path over the edge & into the abyss of extinction?
Noam & other great intellects point out that the Internet is a powerful tool & it can be used in positive as well as negative ways but from what I’ve seen, people mostly use the Internet & their toys derived from it i.e., smart phones, to amuse & distract themselves.
Above all else, Chomsky emphasizes that sooner or later, we’ll get through this COVID pandemic, but we won’t survive the global warming & resultant climate destruction we’re experiencing if we don’t get really serious about it & really quick!
As citizens of the wealthiest & militarily most powerful nation on the planet, we have perfected the art of denial & we enjoy an endless stream of distractions, so we don’t have to face the horrific world events that are a fact of life
whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. And if we stand a chance of surviving, like in 12 step programs & life in general, half the battle is in acknowledging there is a problem. My self-appointed job is to inform others of the problems we are beset by.
Therefore, I am going to end this essay by sharing some critical knowledge on climate denial in America & like most other serious issues that we face, money, or rather the love of wealth above health & all else is the culprit hiding in the shadows like the corporate cockroaches who have infested our highest levels of government & the business world.
And like real life cockroaches, when you flip the light switch on, they run for any dark corner or crevice they can find to hide in. I watched a PBS Frontline documentary some time back & it definitely shown a light on this dark & deadly campaign of deceit financed by gas & oil conglomerates & subsidized by us, the taxpayers.
Moreover, like the tobacco industry CEOs who testified before Congress that they had no idea that nicotine was deadly, these cock-sucking cockroaches in the oil or energy sector of our economy knew for decades how deadly the effects of oil exploration, drilling, & transportation are but denied it until it was no longer possible to do so.
Tragically, Americans in particular have a great propensity for a short attention span, laughable ignorance of history, & little desire to inform themselves about mundane subjects like the toxic pollution & death of our water sources, the air we breathe, & the land we live on. In business speak, these are examples of “externalities.” In short, corporate America refuses to take responsibility for the death & destruction they cause as they seek to maximize their profits & the cost of cleaning-up these deadly externalities falls on the taxpaying public. Think of the deadly public water system in Flint, Michigan & how long it’s been allowed to go on & it still hasn’t been resolved. Of course, it’s merely a coincidence that the majority of Flint’s residents are people of color.
A key factor in this tale of woe is the corporate cockroaches use of academic “experts” whom they buy. And as in the lead-up to the world-wide economic crash of 2008 that nearly brought down the entire house of cards, professors of economics with no concern about the financial destruction they were sweeping under the rug for the handsome bribes offered them by Wall St. & the financial sector of America’s economy. I highly recommend the documentary, “Inside Job” should you be curious as to why you lost or came close to losing your home, your job, your life savings, your health insurance, etc.
Speaking of top-notch documentaries on subjects very near & dear to our survival, another such film is, “The Corporation.” I guarantee you that it’ll blow your mind! In fact, after more than three decades of paying attention to these matters, I have coined a phrase, the business of America is Fraud! And yeah, I know that it isn’t just us who practice these dirty & destructive habits but I’m an American & therefore, it is my duty to focus on the wrongs of my own country, not the corruption of other nations i.e., get your own house in order before chastising other states.
Returning to the specifics of climate destruction, the oil & natural gas corporations who bear a very large percentage of the responsibility for, know that they can’t outright deny scientific facts, so they have focused their attention on creating doubt about Climate change & have found a relative handful of “scientists,” who were only too willing to write “expert” papers questioning the validity of the overwhelming majority of the world-wide scientific community. Do you remember Trump’s spokesperson, Kellyanne Conway & her claim that there are “alternate facts?”
Yep! And only in a nation as dumbed-down as America could the spokesman for our president make such a farcical statement with a straight-face. Clearly, a third of our population is so willfully ignorant that Trump got away with four years of outright, blatant & brazen lying & he basically got away with it. Don’t forget to thank the tens of millions of “Christians,” who swoon at the mere sight or voice of Donald of the Duck Dynasty Klan. So much for their moral righteousness!
In conclusion my friends, the corporate cockroaches know only too well & from decades of practice, if all the evidence shows you’re wrong, deny, distract, & attack. It’s worked well for Donald Trump, an absolute moron totally lacking in all the qualities that make us human & therefore the perfect “leader” for the corporate cockroach class.
I don’t know how true it is but when I was a much younger man, it used to be said that cockroaches would be the only ones to survive a nuclear war. So, as Edward R. Murrow used to end his reports, “Good Night & Good Luck!”
—Rob DeLoss, Gold Beach, OR Jan. 16, 2022
P.S. Oops! A “senior moment” I guess? The brilliant & insightful documentary I watched on PBS Frontline a few years back & that was the inspiration for this essay is, “Climate of Doubt,” and may I suggest printing a copy of the transcript of this film so you can really sink your teeth into the meat & potatoes of this deadly serious threat to our survival as a species! https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/climate-of-doubt/
Addendum
I tried searching for the names of the foundations and/or individuals who are funding most of this propaganda campaign of Climate Denial but seems the majority of the money comes from “Dark money” sources. Why are they hiding if they believe so fiercely that global climate destruction is a hoax? So much for the “conviction of their beliefs.”
