The natural refusal to believe one’s sense expands into the way people will “not talk” about political matters that are unprecedented or have dire consequences. For example, as Eric Larsen points out, the Supreme Court intervention in the 2000 election is not supposed to be considered the “equivalent of a coup/installation of a junta” (176). We are not supposed to think that the Bush administration knew 9/11 was going to happen. Because of this willingness to limit the euphemisms, phrases, or words with which we describe events that have transpired, we bring on the police state which we live in now. We allow the government and corporations to regulate our language, which consequentially leads to limiting thinking, and continue to live in this American police state by failing to notice just how limiting we are in the discussion of our problems.
While campaign speeches, polls, grassroots organizing, marches on Washington have been held to discuss our problems, the premise with which they have been ordained has been for the unimportant instead of for the “truly important matters” (Larsen 178) Erik Larsen rightfully mentions in A Nation Gone Blind that “political issues of true, obvious, and immediate importance are those that have to do with the life and death, survival or destruction, of entire peoples or nations” while the “political issues of less obvious or immediate importance are those that have to do with the individual or with groups of individuals smaller than the national (178). Even more important is that the speeches, polls, organizing, and marches have been held on the same precepts of belief, attitude, and feeling that proved detrimental to the anti-war movement in the 1970s and led to “a vacuum with which the Right filled with no hesitation” (178). The failure of the anti-war movement to see where it was headed led to liberal intellectuals becoming defeated by simplification and led into the climate of deceit which liberal intellectuals operate under today.
Liberal intellectuals continue to lose to conservative intellectuals by lying to themselves about the culture they live in and suffer the consequences of the immediate post-Vietnam era in politics. Back in the 1980s, Democrats and left-wing intellectuals began to agree with cultural conservatives on the “negative effects” of popular culture (Goldberg 10-11). The liberal intellectuals started a pattern of focusing on “violence and bigotry” and chose to stick up very little for youth culture. The effect of this trend, which began in the 1980s, can be seen when a Republican like George W. Bush welcomes U2’s Bono to a debt relief meeting or rock star Ozzy Osbourne, to a White House dinner while liberal intellectuals avoid these cultural situations. Liberal intellectuals failed to realize that willingness to meet in public with pop icons allowed Bush to come off as a “regular guy” and connect with people especially the younger generations. If liberal intellectuals ever expect to recover, they must put “thought in a place of importance equal to that of feeling and belief,” in the same way that the Republicans have in the past decades (Larsen 258). (Fortunately for liberal intellectuals, Barack Obama’s candidacy may have taken care of this problem by making it unnecessary for public appearances with celebrities because Obama is a celebrity that can connect with younger generations on his own.)
The loss of importance of thought brought on by the anti-war movement and liberal intellectuals has contributed to the disappearing of complexities. Consumer Americans have been brought to the “point of perfection” where they can no longer see beyond the surface of things (Larsen 182). Society has molded Americans through simplification into meek consumers who feel think is “discouraged and unrewarded while impulse and desire---throughout the system of consumerism---is encouraged and putatively rewarded (Larsen 181). When a majority of a nation is brought to this point where they no longer can see what truly exists before them or what is, ideas become secondary and looks and appearances in situations like elections become far more important rendering politics and elections inconsequential to restoration of power in the hands of the American people.
To piece together Larsen’s ideas on the “Age of Simplification and Deceit” which so magnificently frames the situation in America, “if citizens do nothing beyond the voluptuary or consumptive with their rights (beyond the bestial, that is as Hamlet would put it), then they may indeed lose both rights and republic” (212). In a nation where more and more people do not exercise their inalienable rights to vote, read, pay attention to news televised and not televised, and think, people have succumbed to “lies about being alive” bringing on a delicate situation which warrants the question of, to paraphrase Larsen, “How does a non-empirical citizen population go about criticizing a leader who is non-empirical” (Larsen 195)? When considering the fact that Bush was elected for looks, mannerisms, and/or appearance by many people, how does a non-empirical society know they have elected a non-empiricist government? How can they even tell the difference between leaders who are empiricists and who are non-empiricists?
Empiricism is the essence of knowledge, and without it, Americans are powerless against an oppressive corporate government. Since the citizenry has been shocked and duped into submitting to ideas dictated by government, corporations, and media, they have been unable to educate themselves to change making a revolt or a taking back of America nearly impossible.
Impossibility has allowed forces in America to transform this democracy into one that has symptoms of fascism which are transforming this nation and rolling back freedoms at an alarming rate. Yet, despite the transformation, this nation “still look[s] normal” to Americans. “Most things still look regular and familiar and things don’t look unreal, so nothing’s alarming” (Larsen 195). When knowledge tends to be towards dealing with the familiar which ignores the unfamiliar, people do not possess the capability to change the system or structure keeping them down or suppressing their life even if democracy were to present them with a situation to gain power or flat out grant citizens power.
The reality of the situation is that there is a small sliver of possibility any government leader will wake the American people up and convince them to have faith and imagination in their future. The electoral system and government along with the corporations and media are too despotic for people to really choose a leader that will show them the light and rid them of all the woes they have been experiencing. The policy change threat is not there (although with the housing, food, energy, and dollar crisis more and more threats are manifesting themselves and pushing people to act). So long as change rests on policy change opportunities instead of policy change threats, Americans will continue to limit the discussion and let words mandate the terms for change or no change at all.
Should Americans wake up and demand that they be fully integrated into society in a context and with a way of thinking that requires government to listen, Americans should carry out that demand by doing the following: adopt broad discussions of the wider world in political associations, volunteer organizations, and activist groups in communities, develop worker-cooperatives for social and economic stability, and convince government to incorporate individuals into civil society through more entitlement programs in the same way that Japan and Europe offer secure employment, health benefits, housing, etc (Derber 125). Derber proclaims that civil society can do this by developing “strong obligations to the larger “us”” that “will override the perennial, very human preoccupation with the self”, a preoccupation that creates an involvement in politics out of threat and interest thereby determining that if that threat or interest ever disappears involvement will drop off. (125) In this system that government and corporations with the help of media have developed where they dictate the terms of political participation, create disenfranchisement and shock in the minds of Americans, and dictate how humans think, Americans must adopt a revolutionary mode of thinking before Americans can ever experience a nation where faith in the body politic is sometimes rewarded.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Derber, Charles. The Wilding of America: Money, Mayhem, and the New American Dream. New York: Worth Publishers, 2004.
Eliasoph, Nina. Avoiding Politics: How Americans produce apathy in everyday life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Goldberg, Danny. Dispatches from the culture war. New York: Hyperion,2003.
Larsen, Erik. A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit. Emeryville, CA: Avalon Publishing, 2006
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