A 4-pt. New Year's Resolution

Over X-mas an American friend from my Berlin days phoned, and in the course of our conversation informed me he had seen some stats that showed Americans’ IQs are 4 points lower than Germans, and he believes electing Donald Trump is proof positive.

            What can I say? Especially in the wake of the new tax bill passed just before Xmas. We know business has only one guiding principle—the bottom line. So who’s surprised he gave himself and real estate son-in-law big tax breaks? 

             Most things conspire against the difficult chore of cultivating critical intelligence.

             Three or 4 years ago I got a flat screen TV and Netflix, which I love.  When I left Denver in 1985-6, I got rid of my TV because I had begun to believe that sitcoms were making me stupid and advertising keeping me from thinking straight. Haven’t had TV since, but now that I have Netflix, I am beginning to wonder if it isn’t subtler.

            Nearly every evening, especially these long days when you can’t get outside and plant or paint or mow, I watch. Netflix is full of high quality documentaries—Get Me Roger Stone, The Civil War (Ken Burns), Walking with Destiny, and lots of history. The fiction is almost as good. Godless, a Western is tightly scripted, stars Michelle Dockery, and seems admirably realistic, at least in terms of the clothing, set and landscape. Loads of international films.

While it doesn’t feel as mindless as sitcoms, it does keep me from reading books. I keep up with the magazines I order, but I must wonder if I am not undermining myself.  Good place for a New Year’s Resolution, huh?

Let's Hear It for the Experts!

They had this “expert” on the radio the other day named Ilana Gershon. She's written a book called Down & Out in the New Economy: How People Find (Or Don’t Find) Work Today. She went on at great length about the “Neoliberals” and “Quitting Economy.”
That’s Gershon’s term for the work world, where the minute you land a job, you are already looking for another because you can pretty well count on being downsized or fired, so you need to be constantly on the prowl, networking, marketing, etc.
That certainly describes how workers must function in this economy. Ms. Gershon laid blame on the doorstep of the “Neolibs.” Oh, and she’s a college prof at Indiana U.
The real reason businesses can get, or more precisely refuse to give workers what they need is they have surfeit of them. In fact, 2 billion additional people on the planet, a lot of whom can get on a plane and go anywhere. Come here if they want.
According to the media, we are almost at full employment and salaries should be going up. Wonder of wonders, they never budge. Jobs just get more demanding, less secure and scarcer.

Any critical eye can see it is the world birthrate, immigration and technology (robots and computers doing more work) that configure the work world and blaming anybody (Who are Neolibs, anyway?) else is not very smart for a college prof.

Theories Abound; Answers Don't Satisfy

It’s been a spell since I have posted a word to Critical Eye-Q. Credit an inundation of summer visitors! More truthfully, advanced housekeeping indolence.

The FBI and other agencies are undoubtedly busting blood vessels probing the nooks and crannies of Steven Paddock’s life to elucidate his horrific act. For my money, they can save their time and energy. We know. Steven Paddock’s act—inflicting death, violence and misery on defenseless people beneath him is quintessentially American. Happens all the time.

A quick gander across American society provides more illustrations than you can stack on a page: Wall Street and its facilitators in Washington have murdered the American Dream. Yes, so-called liberals like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. People we trusted.

The banking industry inflicts its powerful will on ordinary college students making them indebted as indentured servants. This week we heard about the Jones Act, most of us never knew existed, but it allows the shipping industry to inflict economic pain on a poor place like Puerto Rico. Making us recall Smedley Darlington Butler, a decorated marine general who maintained he made the world safe to collect Bank of America’s debts.

Mixed with the Paddock slaughter coverage we got Harvey Weinstein’s long career of inflicting his sexual will on women. (Routine in American life--think Roger Ailes & Bill O'Reilly.)  He’s hired a fleet of lawyers and therapists for his big mea culpa show and it’ll be biz-as-usual soon enough.  A thoughtful woman phoned a radio talk program the day after the event and said, “Look, it’s men doing these things.” The embarrassed moderator, indulged her point, and quickly went on to another caller.

Patricians have created a “gladiator class” of mostly African-American men who have deflected the discussion of the violence in football from concussions. That keeps the $ rolling in, and most Americans are complicit: buying tickets and/or watching it on TV.

During the last election campaign, Donald Trump, who glorified inflicting his will on an underdog on TV program called The Apprentice, bragged he could shoot somebody on 5^th Avenue and still be elected. I believe it. He’s big buds with the NRA—Americans who want to forcibly inflict their will on other people. The EU fined Amazon and Microsoft for their corporate misdeeds, but here hardly anyone notices wealthy men doing what they want, as it is the accepted norm.
The kind of gerrymandering that exists in Texas and Wisconsin is a grand example of a powerful elite inflicting its will. Democracy be damned. It will be reviewed by the Supreme Court this fall, but I am not holding my breath, but I hope I am surprised, because I have filled up this page, and  not begun to scratch the surface of available examples.

If you are honing your critical eye and need more examples, you don’t have far too look in this American life.

"Memorializing" Decoration Day

Do you suppose the editor of the Cascade Pioneer realized the whole top half of the 31 May edition was covered with military photos? In a saner, less militaristic time Memorial Day was referred to as “Decoration Day,” for recalling relatives: to visit cemeteries, bring flowers, and clean the birdpoop off headstones.

I am not quite sure when it was co-opted by the military, which is not to say we don’t owe a debt to veterans, in terms of health care because we do.  And it grieves me to hear that is not being honestly met in some states, though here in Iowa, it appears we are.

However, in the Vietnam era there were men who left the country to avoid the military, and they are my heroes. They were part of the demise of that illegitimate, unpopular war. We might have avoided Geo Bush’s Iraq war over WMDs that didn’t exist, if we had some of that spirit left, but it seems to have evaporated.

Now, that we have a voluntary military—more accurately, a poverty draft—insuring that the upper class never has to fight for its country. Even when there was with a draft, families like Bushes kept their little Georges out of harm’s way. Though courageous ones like the Kerrys and the Kennedys didn’t, though that didn’t keep John Kerry’s opponents from swift-boating him when he ran for office. Where was respect for the military then?

The military is under civilian control for a reason. Killing people is basically a rather dishonorable activity and should not be referred to as a job or career. Marginal reasons for doing it makes it doubly dishonorable. We should not lose sight of it.

A New Year's Thank-You Duty

Americans have 17 days counting this one to write the Obamas and thank them. Mind you, I am not thanking them for everything they did, because I really believe what we got coming into the White House is partially Obama’s fix for Bush’s boo-boos (the big bank bailout), but from Day 1 Obama was between a rock and a hard place. Congress only exacerbated the situation. So sensitive, intelligent people have a special obligation to acknowledge the truth here.

Dear President and Mrs. Obama,

I am writing to express my appreciation for your eloquent and elegant leadership in the past 8 years. As well, to articulate my personal shame at how badly you were treated by so many members of Congress. It is truly hard to believe that people in such high places could be so low. All Americans should be mortified.

Not that I agreed with you 100% (or believe that Trump can fix any of it.) The American Middle Class is on the skids; we shouldn’t have bailed out the banks, and the TPP is trash.

But you two at least know how to behave in public. Thanks, I am already missing you.
S. Keyron McDermott, the Critical IQ