Saturday, September 12, 2009

PERHAPS Gail Collins is the only pundit who so thoroughly understands the gleeful stupidity of our politics as theater of the absurd.


"woman with blue hair" (2009) monotype with pen and ink

Quoting ...

FROM Chapter III, "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle," by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chris Hedges:

The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, along with most elite schools, do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, AP classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams, and blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. Responsibility for the collapse of the global economy runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and academic halls in Cambridge, New Haven, Toronto and Paris to the financial and political centers of power.

The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers, and rigid structures designed to produce such answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service — economic, political, and social — come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and also with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the "specialist" and, of course, the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students, and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political, and cultural questions. Those who critique the system itself — people such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader — are marginalized and shut out of the mainstream debate. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement, and information systems are the only things that matter. ...

... If we do not grasp the "societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms," we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society, and wields power through naked repression. ...

... Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don't expect them to save us. They don't know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us.

Friday, September 11,2009

"distracted" (2009), an etching

LIKED this comment on a NYT blog:

You want to get Health Care insurance reform passed?

Simple.

Terminate government paid group medical insurance for any and all elected officials — federal, state, county, municipal — and require them all to buy their own individual policies on the open market until universal health care insurance is signed into law.

Once it’s passed, all elected officials names would be entitled to the equivalent of Medicare coverage (or its equivalent public option plan) at government expense. Anything beyond that, they pay for out of their own pockets.

I guarantee you we’ll get meaningful medical insurance reform passed before the year is out. Oh, and I suspect the public option won’t have any trouble passing …
— Menno van Wyk

Indeed. I assume all Republican members of Congress, so fearful of "government-run" health insurance, have already declined to participate in the government-run insurance cooperative open to all elected members and instead are buying individual insurance on the open market.

Surely they've done this as a matter of principle and to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy.

Quoting ...

FROM Tom Friedman:

The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.

“Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

Addendum ...

THE conservative blogger, Andrew Sullivan, expounds on the lunacy of thinking that Republicans are fiscal conservatives. And be sure to check out the Bruce Bartlett link, too.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

HERE'S a poignant comment on Bob Herbert's column in Tuesday's New York Times, from Cdr. John Newlin, USN (Ret.) of Vista Calif.:

The Republic is being beleaguered by two potent forces. Together they just might send this country of ours permanently over the cliff. One is racism. Stop and think about it. About 95% of the angry shouters at the town meetings and "tea parties" are old. 50+ or more. You don't see many young people raising their voices in protest. There is a much deeper current of racism that courses through the older generation of Americans than anyone realizes. The Republicans know that and have tapped into it in a way that has everyone circling the wagons. A black president just won't do, don't you know? They have managed to translate the fear and uncertainty that attends the economic hardships brought on by the recession into fear and mistrust of a black President. It's sad, but as Edith Ann was wont to say, "It's the truth."

The second is money. The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries are hitting the Senate and Congressional Wal-Marts buying Senators like Baucus and Conrad like candy kisses. Until the money is eliminated from American politics, there is little hope of the kind of civil and sane political "log rolling" needed to solve our enormous problems.

Yes, we need help, Mr. Herbert. But from where? From whom? The older generations are too permeated with racism to put aside their fears and the 20-somethings that were a major force in electing President Obama are too concerned with avoiding the N1H1 virus at their colleges and worried to distraction about getting and holding a job when they graduate.

Where indeed, Mr. Herbert, do we seek the help we so desperately need?

Where's the artwork, someone asked? Gotta take some more photos, when I get a chance. In the throes of organizing stuff and working on a tedious encaustic piece.

Monday, September 7, 2009

YES, good question, Dr. Krugman, how did the economists get it so wrong? An interesting essay.