excerpts from the article

The Quiet Storm

Blowin' In The Wind Of Cultural Decay

by Sam Smith

The Progressive Review, http://prorev.com/

Thomas Jefferson saw it coming. He warned, "From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion."

Among the conceits of our elite and media is the assumption that America, in the form that they wish to imagine it, is immortal. Part of this is the arrogance of the big, part comes from an admirable if naive faith in progress, part of it is pathological delusion. For a host of reasons, beginning with our own survival, it is long past time to permit the question to be raised: is America collapsing as a culture?

... Our politicians, bad as many of them are, in the end are mainly symptoms of our disintegration. A strong country would not have fallen for as flagrant a fraud as Ronald Reagan or George Bush ...

It is fair to say, however, that much of our decline began with the Reagan administration and, without exception, has continued since. The evidence for this is strewn across the landscape, but here are just 25 things that have gotten worse in the past 25 years:

1. Real income of Americans
2. Decline in wealth of the bottom 40%
3. Number of older families with pensions
4. Foreign debt as a percent of GDP
5. Personal bankruptcies
6. Housing foreclosures
7. Annual personal savings rate of families
8. Corruption in politics
9. Number of people in prison
10. Drug induced deaths despite drug war
11. Civil liberties lost as result of drug war and war on terror
12. Pensions that include health care benefits
13. Number of families without health insurance
14. Numbers of corporations controlling most of the media
15. Public trust in major media
16. Time children spend playing
17. Divorce rate
18. Increase in wealth of wealthiest senators
19. Decline in voting participation
20. Number of registered lobbyists on Capitol Hill
21. Wages of recent male high school grads
22. Wages of bottom ten percent of workers
23. Ratio of executive to worker pay
24. Decline in real value of minimum wage
25. Harassment of young people for minor offenses

... America has always been a high myth country. Only 13% believe that God was not involved in the evolution of human life. One poll found that 61% believed that Genesis is literally true, sixty percent believe in Noah's ark, and a third believe in ghosts. Americans believe that over half the people in the world speak English (actually it's closer to 20%). Ironically, Americans' mythological inclinations often have more in common with the currently hated Muslims than with many Europeans.

Such myths are not novel developments, so why is it that we find them mattering so much these days? One answer is that while the general populace chooses what to believe, they are heavily influenced by their leaders as to what these beliefs mean. Thus, while ethnic prejudice is a widespread human trait, it takes a Hitler or southern white politicians to give it an actively vicious role. In both cases, the argument blamed society's problems on a minority, pandering to myths and twisting them into a new and virulent form.

Similarly today, we find the Republican Party pandering to religious myths, but also manipulating them to its own perverted advantage to blame groups like gays or women who have freed themselves from traditional roles. We have always had fundamentalist Christians in this country; what is different is that they once voted the Democratic ticket. Today their myths have been rhetorically twisted against their own interests - including their substantial economic, educational, and environmental problems - and turned towards irrelevant targets that deflect the blame from those truly responsible. In a similar way, Hitler initially used Jews as a cause of Germany's economic problems, but in the end had them actually taking jobs from Germans by forced labor in concentration camps. In a similar way, poor southern whites were kept in their place by being convinced it was all the blacks' fault, which helped to keep down the wages of both groups.

Such cynical behavior can come to no good end. And in the process, the culture that accepts such a redefinition of its own myths becomes a prisoner of the myth twisters, causing it to turn - as in the present case - not to Christ but to a Karl Rove or George Bush for an understanding of what faith means. While plenty of cultures have thrived on mythological faith, it is impossible to do so when faith becomes a massive fraud.

... What is tragic about the disintegration of American culture is the promise it held, the freedoms it created, the hope it sustained. The single common thread behind the forces that led to its collapse was greed: national greed, economic greed, lust for a greater audience and so forth. As Jefferson predicted, "They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights."

On the other hand, the scattered remnants are still there - certainly larger in scale, say, than the early American colonies that adopted the Constitution yet still lost in the miasma of the paranoid, prevaricating, gluttonous parody of America the larger culture has become. Those who would preserve the better America and recreate from its damaged remains are not naive fools; they are the new founding fathers and mothers of a time and place still to come. Nor are they fantasizing. Any place, any community, any gathering can become what Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, an oasis of freedom, decency and hope, in which a new culture can take sprout. Name it, enjoy it, use it. It's the best we have at the moment.

As for the rest of America, it is long past time to drop the pretense. As I was walking through one of our frightened airports I heard the real motto of our land repeated over and over: "Caution, the moving walkway is about to end." It's true. We're on our own now.

America page

Index of Website

Home Page