IN THE WRITER’S WORLD | Great American Snow Job

28Aug08

The War Against Culture and Ourselves
by Perry Brass

I think it was the book – Jerome Corsi’s new smear against Barack Obama – Obama Nation, with all of its cheap innuendos, that pulled the whole thing into focus for me.

Corsi had previously published Unfit For Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry which put a new verb into American English: to be “swiftboated,” which means to be kicked in the groin by lies with enough cut-throat energy behind them to knock over the truth. Obama Nation is a catalog of lies, half truths, rumors as truths, “common-sense” bullshit, and All American No-Nothingism. But then at this point you can go quite far on that because the truth behind what’s going on in America is too awful for our sound-bite media to deal with. It’s a war, simple enough: a war against culture, if you consider culture to be the depth of experience, history, and humanity standing behind human interactions and experiences as both shadow and mirror.

Culture is the real thing, without the phony Coke fizz.

A current truth: at the moment, point-one-percent of the American population (1% of the top 1%) now controls 47% of the stock market. That means this tiny group of men and women control 47% of the financial holdings of the United States, giving us an economic inequality once found in places like Brazil. Some might say, “OK, Nothing new. Money’s never been circulated equally. That’s just Capitalism 101.”

But it does work differently. Because what’s been happening since the Reagan snow job of the 1980s is not a normal movement of capitalism but a historic global aggression of accumulating wealth. The snow job has become one vast, rolling snow ball unprecedented in human history. We are working toward one big business, and anything that stands in the way of that business will be destroyed. I’ve been writing about this in my books for two decades.

The business is now a rolling system of capital and credit: you cannot exist outside it, because the government and the credit systems are one and the same. Bush’s jumping in to save Wall Street is hardly a hiccup. But more upsetting is that anything that does not serve as a mere diversion from the opposition-less continuity of the system will be starved off the map. Everything, in other words, either serves to uphold the media-banking-credit machine, or is just crunched in its wake.

Obama will certainly not be the feared Wicked Witch of the West of Socialism. But that he has a chance of upsetting the applecart of constant war the right is using as its sideshow to relieve (and release) the resentment and open hostility caused by so much inequality, is too bothersome: it won’t be allowed.

Obama is a fresh face in an old war; McCain is business as usual, and that business now runs the country. War has become an extremely lucrative part of our global business. This government has spent more on “outside” contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than all of America’s earlier conflicts combined. You can’t get into a better business now than being a government contractor; for every one soldier we pay on the ground, we pay four contracted workers, some of them making $150,000 a year doing overseas what would pay little more than minimum wage here at home.

This makes the old days of the $1000 hammer billed to NASA look like peanuts.

But wait. I’ve just told a bad one. There are better businesses, because the war(s) could, with some stroke of bad luck, be settled tomorrow—fat chance! But you could get into the privatization of prisons (now Texas’ fastest growing industry); the privatization of public schooling; or the privatization of what was once “public health,” which means the extremely lucrative “McHospital” and “McNursing Home” markets.

And, while the rank-and-file of Americans are being worked to death*, something else has been happening; the country is becoming exceptionally dumber and more passive. It’s no longer a rumor whispered by “old farts” like myself, that the “culture thing” that allows you to think for yourself, that used to be guarded from the unwashed masses, is no longer a threat to the newly washed masses who regard Target as a “cultural experience.”

New wonderful stat: 66% of all college students are now majoring in business. They are being tooled into management, and not questioning the situation. They no longer question the fact that they can’t afford to live in this country without a “salaried job.” Forget the old assembly lines and the idea of “skilled labor.” Skilled labor is in China, where it means working for $4 an hour. This has been accomplished by a neat, slight-of-hand watering down of public education (by the end of Reagan’s second term, I understood that the term “public” could only be used in conjunction with “toilet.” Public parks, education, health—all the important institutions in the egalitarianization of the country, were now reduced to that), which has been besieged, ostensibly, by weak p.c.ism on the left (they took out some copies of Huckleberry Finn from school libraries because Twain uses the word “nigger” a lot), and strong Christian fundamentalism on the right**.

But p.c.ism and the Christian right are, again, mere sideshows, rather like America’s Got Talent, a television program with 18 million viewers a week (more than either national political convention could get). That 1% of 1% is working hard for that great American mirage of libertarian “choice” that preaches: “Why should you pay for public education, or public culture, or public anything (including toilets), if you don’t use them?”

It’s this “Why worry?” attitude that has brought education, health, housing, the arts, and culture (high and low) down to their knees, in a pathetic begging position, until the public itself (a.k.a. the American people) is forced to look for any kind of support (a.k.a. “charity”) from the people now bleeding them. You cannot fart without a corporate sponsor. Or, as I have longed joked: Christ’s appearance at the Marriage at Cana would now be sponsored by Starfish Tuna.

To get back to the current battle in the long-time war, Corsi (who, with a poli-sci PhD from Harvard, wants to be known as Dr. Corsi) will try to do to Obama what he did to John Kerry: turn a once decorated war hero and person of conscience (remember that word “conscience”?) into a war coward, liar, and pâté-guzzling effete “snob.” He will turn Barack Obama into a drug-popping, fiscally promiscuous, anti-white, anti-Christian, foaming-at-the-mouth socialist and closet pagan-Moslem. But he couldn’t do it without a whole lot of help. He will do about 200 interviews for the book that will be rammed down the public’s throat by groups like Clear Channel Media, which controls about half the billboards in America, hundreds of radio stations (Clear Channel literally invented right wing, drive-hour talk radio), and several publishing companies, with links to Threshold Press and its various publicists***.

I feel that America is now in a no-win situation, in a real war we can’t talk about or even name. This saddens me. If 18 million people can watch wannabe stars be insulted every week, why can’t we name this war?

_____

*We now work harder than any nation on earth, that is, those lucky enough to have actual jobs: we no longer have real unemployment stats; they are basically make-believes depending on how you number the true employed vs. the barely surviving.

**I met a sixth grade science teacher on a train recently. She teaches in Tarrytown, 30 miles from Manhattan. She told me, “I have to watch every word I say in class. I can’t even infer that one biological structure comes from another without some parent sending a note to the principal the next day, complaining that I am spreading anti-religious messages through my class.”

***Obama Nation is currently #8 on the Amazon bestseller list. Not bad, although Danielle Steele often starts higher—this book will not be read so much as yakked about, mostly by Corsi himself.

image: “Mindless” by Pippo Lionni

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