If you think the economy is more important than the environment, try holding your breath while counting your money.
The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are bobbing along the same waves as social justice and environmental protection, sold down the river by a nation addicted to growth for the sake of growth (the ideology of a cancer cell). Indeed, it seems very little matters to the typical American beyond economic growth. And for that, most importantly, we need an uninterrupted supply of crude oil. We need the Carter Doctrine — the world’s oil belongs to us — and an unhealthy dose of faux patriotism.
Our lives are imbued with faux patriotism. We are manipulated by the war-loving corporate media and the war-loving politicians that, unsurprisingly, are enriched by war. We support the troops that bring us the baubles we’re convinced we deserve, and we rarely question the real costs of the baubles.
Support the troops. It’s the rallying cry of an entire nation. It’s the slogan pasted on many of the bumpers in the United States.
Supporting the troops is pledging your support for the empire. Supporting the troops supports the occupation of sovereign nations because might makes right. Supporting the troops supports wanton murder of women and children throughout the world. And men, too. Supporting the troops supports obedience at home and oppression abroad. Supporting the troops throws away every ideal on which this country allegedly is founded. Supporting the troops supports the ongoing destruction of the living planet in the name of economic growth. Supporting the troops therefore hastens our extinction in exchange for a few dollars. Supporting the troops means caving in to Woodrow Wilson’s neo-liberal agenda, albeit cloaked as contemporary neo-conservatism (cf. hope and change). Supporting the troops trumpets power as freedom and fascism as democracy.
I’m not suggesting the young people recruited into the military are at fault. Victims of civilization and a lifetime of cultural programming — like me, and perhaps you — they’re looking for job security during a period of economic contraction. The entire process is working great for the oppressors pulling the levers of industry.
Perhaps most importantly, supporting the troops means giving up on resistance. Resistance is all we have, and all we’ve ever had. We say we’re mad as hell and we claim we’re not going to take it anymore. But, sadly, we gave up on resistance of any kind years ago.
We act as if America’s cultural revolution never happened. We act as if we never questioned the dominant paradigm in an empire run amok, as if we never experienced Woodstock and the Summer of Love, bra-burning hippies and war-torn teenagers, Rosa Parks and the Cuyahoga River. We’re right back in the 1950s, swimming in culture’s main stream instead of questioning, resisting, and protesting.
We’ve moved from the unquestioning automatons of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the firebrands of a radical counter-cultural worldview and back again. A generational sea change swept us from post-war “liberators” drunk on early 1950s propaganda to revolutionaries willing to take risks in defense of late 1960s ideals. The revolution gained steam through the 1970s, but lost its way when the U.S. industrial economy hit the speed bump of domestic peak oil. The Carter Doctrine coupled with Ronald Reagan’s soothing pack of lies was the perfect match to our middle-aged comfort, so we abandoned the noble ideals of earlier days for another dose of palliative propaganda. Three decades later, we’ve swallowed so much Soma we couldn’t find a hint of revolution in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
In short, the pillars of social justice and environmental protection rose from the cesspool of ignorance to become shining lights for an entire generation. And then we let them fall back into the swamp. The very notion that others matter — much less that those others are worth fighting for — has been relegated to the dustbin of history.
A line from Eugene Debs, five-time candidate of the Socialist party for U.S. president, comes to mind: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
I don’t harbor any illusions about my freedom. I live in Police State America.
See also:
Questioning Culture: The Long Littleness of Life
Questioning Culture: Shades of Existential Gray
Questioning Culture: When Personal Happiness Brings Suffering to Others
Questioning Culture: American Empire
–Photo: Oil Rig, heatherbuckley/Flickr
I know you’re familiar with Chomsky, but did you know he said the founders of the nation were slave owners who couldn’t have their way in England?
Slavery is our birthright in America and our destiny.
As ignorant slaves we know not the havoc we wreak on the world and in so doing, the karma we seed for ourselves.
“No nation wins a judgment unless it can judge itself. But it achieves this very advantageous position only very late.”
– JW von Goethe
While I empathize with your analysis of the “material road to Hell” we are on, I am not so sure of your remedy. The Golden Rule is “whoever has the gold rules”. We have built an economic system on shattering the cycles of Nature and siphoning off and hoarding its wealth. This is nothing new and, as you mention, been around for millennium. The practical problem is, how do we dismantle this decrepit machinery and replace it with something new without causing mayhem and destruction for the billions of people supported by the system? Quite frankly, we no longer need… Read more »
Dam straight we’re unhappy with the way things are going. Who really wants a violent, greedy, depleted world headed for mass extinction? Only the deranged. Then there are the grossly misinformed who are perpetrators without intention or awareness… who merely act upon their mores and instincts and instructions, blindly… unaware of their own circumstances, working against themselves, undermining themselves and the planet they absolutely need for their own survival and for their progeny. Empathy and cooperation have been unabashedly excised by shallow short sighted profiteers, who will soon themselves suffer the personal consequences of their insane social surgeries. Indeed, there… Read more »