“…well, if they want to
they’ll sell you the president.
These guys start at the top…”
-Song lyric from “The Perfect Crime” by Betty Kaplowitz
The words “real American” or “patriotic American” are bandied about these days ad infinitum. And each so-called real American tends to portray as un-American those who represent their biggest fears. While this is not new in American history, what is new is that nobody seems to remember or even want to remember that it isn’t new. And so, we repeat the worst of our history.
The stigma of intellectualism in our country never seems to go away. People who want everything to be uncomplicated and homogenous have never accepted intellectuals as “real Americans”. Intellectuals are considered “elite” by the Sarah Palin extreme of the right wing, which is amusing since the true elite, the 1%, never seem to be seen that way in our political landscape. Of course people want simple, easy answers to the problems in the world. It makes life less burdened. It also makes things a little less reality-based. “Democracy isn’t easy.” [Aaron Sorkin, The American President] It requires debate, discussion and, yes, Mr. Boehner, even compromise. While easy, simple answers may serve in the immediate – and they often don’t even do that – they almost never work in the long run. Vision for the future requires deeper thought and actual planning – at least a vision that works for the most people.
The technological propaganda machines pump out the most glorious visions that can come from corporate America in the hopes that these visions will block out any ugliness underneath and continue to entice Americans to accept that everything is a commodity. The people at the helm of the giant corporations that truly rule America love to present a picture of perfect happiness and delight at almost every turn. Take a close look at TV commercials. It doesn’t seem to matter that there are American children who go to bed hungry every night or that more and more Americans are sleeping on our streets or in shelters or that children are not taught to think for themselves or that aspiring to buy an expensive car doesn’t make sense when you can’t pay the rent. Corporate America has made its own policies and values the norm even to the point of Presidential candidates touting their corporate leadership as being somehow useful for the person who will lead the nation. It shouldn’t have needed emphasizing, but Paul Krugman and others have pointed out that, gosh, America isn’t a corporation.
If you take off the blinders and restore memory, a few things come into focus. One is that “Almost half of all Americans lived in households that received government benefits in 2010, according to the Census Bureau.” [Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff; The New York Times, 2/11/2012] And yet, those who have become members of the extreme right wing club in our country talk about shrinking the Federal government and like to blame the current administration and all the “lefty” (don’t I wish?) elected officials in it for the bulk of our current economic problems. The refusal to look at the alleged “free market” and the structure of capitalism itself is in part the result of the last 35 years or so of successful propaganda by those who still contend that America’s success rests upon its undying loyalty to the very rich and the corporations and banks they run.
The United States of America is the most diverse nation on earth. This is its strength. It is also why compromise is necessary since it is impossible to get everybody to agree on every policy. But if you never question your simplified assumptions about good and evil, about so-called elites and so-called real Americans, about who people really are and what they may believe, then it is not even possible to attempt to solve the problems of the nearly 7 billion singular people on this earth.
