* by public domain
* An Introduction by Way of Overview
While the unintentional sedative of the brutal outburst in Arizona still acts as a soporific, nonetheless, just below the surface, social fury percolates in America like at no time since the 1930's. Arguably, the previous sentence could have finished, accurately, with the unqualified assertion, "like never before."
Unfortunately, from the perspective of anyone hoping to participate in facilitating a better world, nothing--and this means literally not one substantial social force in evidence--provides incisive leadership or direction to this upsurge of grassroots anger. The reason for this missing strategic vision is clear to anybody who thinks about the matter: class consciousness is more or less utterly absent from the scene. Neither strategic dissection nor tactics that recognize the leading role of class conflict play any sort of prominent role in popular understanding.
This
should surprise no one, of course.
Two of three of the institutional expressions of social guidance, here
in the 'land of the free and the home of the brave,' have all along taken a powder
about matters of the class war.
This has all played out more like a series of summary executions without notice than like a formal sentence, with the ax at the end; it has all transpired without due process other than rigged gigs in capital's courts. It has all taken place without resistance other than the 'slipped-the-meds' outbursts that, on the one hand, show up with lurid regularity on the telly, and, on the other hand, leap up like 'tea-party' ministrations that prepare for a fascist fantasy coup.
The first 'no-show' among the big three aspects of popular instruction, and the most obvious because it is the most visible, is the corporate media. Rather than even evincing a pretense of 'comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable,' the established and capitalized organs of communication uniformly combine facile nonsense with surface half-truths and completely moronic conclusions in their clearly articulated, and advertiser supported, 'blah-blah-blah.'
As "Dead Prez" intones in its brilliant riff for "Propaganda," we are "telling lies to our children, telling lies to our children, telling lies to our babies, only truth will set them free." The only truths that have been appearing in these mediated formats are the insults that Sarah Palin trades with Rachel Maddow, and so on and so forth.
The second 'empty-suit' in the social steering mechanism, especially in a place like Georgia's Sahara of the Bozart, is the misnamed 'education system.' The capacity to analyze is totally absent from the rubric that presently holds sway; what does dominate the 'airwaves' in the classroom consists of a brutal mixture of bourgeois propaganda and petty bourgeois 'dream-on' foolishness. Again, Dead Prez sums up aptly: "They schools don't educate, and they teach the children lies."
"Why haven't you learned anything?" a White administrator whines at the beginning of the track. A sober follow-up summarizes, "Man, this whole school system is a joke; the same people who run the prison system control the education system and the whole social system."
The final piece of this community capacitation puzzle, the organized religion nexus, is the only one of the triad that, at some bare minimum, begins to approach any semblance of consistent positive impact. Even the Baptists acknowledge the need to do something about 'the widows and orphans,' to reach out to the homeless and the imprisoned, as directed by their honestly revolutionary first icon, the man from Nazareth.
Nevertheless, this message component has been adequately enough attenuated to make its social impact at best a surface palliative. "What would Jesus do?" He would cast the money changers from the Temple. As Frederick Douglass so clearly recognized, however, the clerics and the denominational authorities have completely cast their lots with the banksters and the imperialists.
Of course, only the likes of this poor and struggling scribe, who writes and reaches out today, are stating such points with anything akin to forthrightness. Thus, the fog of misunderstanding competes with the miasma of often willful ignorance.
*Mortgage Meltdowns in the Scheme of Plutocratic Predominance by proprietary
*Mortgage Meltdowns in the Scheme of Plutocratic Predominance
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