"'The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money,
the schools, the churches and the press. In the schools they kindle
patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their
own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right.
Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and
by a lying patriotic press.'" (Tolstoy, Government is
Violence - Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, Phoenix Press,
1990, p.82)
(Professor James Davison Hunter) at the University of Virginia, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture,
in the 90s wrote a book called Before the Shooting Starts, about how culture wars always precede shooting wars and in particular was talking about violence around abortion... He came up with that title five days before the first right-wing attack on an abortion clinic in America. So he’s very good at anticipating what people internalize as motivation for violence, and what he’s saying right now is when there’s no compromise, one side is saying “evil” and the other side (is) saying “you’re denying my humanity,” those are terms for violence.
James Davison Hunter Interviewed by CBS Mornings
... the culture war ... are a cluster of public issues concerned , ironically, with the most private of all matters:
the body. Controversies about abortion, sexual harassment, pornography, ¨vulgar¨ art or music,
sex education, condom distribution, homosexuality, AIDS policy, or euthanasia and the ¨right to die¨
all trace back to the human body. Those issues that do not relate to the body deal,
more often than not, with the social institution s that claim authority over the body (family, church, school, law and the like). The body, it would
seem, is the underlying symbolic of the culture war.
Before the Shooting Begins, Searching for Democracy in America´s Culture War,
James Davison Hunter.
... your professed religion (whatever that may be) is NOT
something that 99% of believers have any choice in - it comes to a child as part of
the "Welcome Package" when they are born. Included in the package -
your race, social status, tribal identity, geographic location, etc,,
In many societies trying to reject the tenents of that package can lead
to expulsion from the group - or your death as an apostate (and the
Christians were as bad as other cultures in this)." Hugh
Spencer
"No other industrial country has anything like the
degree of extremist religious beliefs and irrational commitments that you commonly find in the United States.
The idea that you have to avoid teaching evolution or pretend you're
not teaching it is unique in the industrial world. And the statistics
are mind-boggling. Roughly half the population think the world was
created a couple of thousand years ago. A huge percentage, maybe a
quarter or so, say they've had a born-again experience. A substantial
number of people believe in what's called "the rapture." Large
majorities are convinced of miracles, the existence of the devil, and
so on." Noam Chomsky: Imperial Ambitions pg 178
The fact is that a large segment of the U.S. electorate has bought into an apocalyptic vision of America that bears no relationship to the reality of how the other half thinks, behaves or lives. We don’t have to speculate about whether this dystopian fantasy might lead to political violence and attempts to overthrow democracy; it already has. And it’s probably going to get worse.
The Dystopian Myths of Red America Paul Krugman (7/25/2022) NYT
In the world of culture, elite refers to quality, not quantity.
The fact that the true intellectual and artistic elites are now marginalized
almost everywhere in the Western world, while power elites are more dominant than ever, is reflected
in the values cultivated, values that are a perfect reflection of commerce, technology and kitsch and are completely
unrelated to Thomas Mann's description of "the grand and honorable in humanity, which manifest themselves
as art and science, as passion for truth, creation of beauty, and the idea of justice".
To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism by Rob Riemen
Our per-capita spending for public media currently stands at
about $1.63 a citizen a year, while Finland and Denmark spend
seventy and eighty times that amount. This lack of direct government
sponsorship opens a widening space for corporate underwriting,
despite the compromising and sometimes overtly censoring effects of
this strategy." The
People's Platform, Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age:
Astra Taylor p217
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it." George Orwell
The RIGHT wants to control @MarshaBlackburn: - what books kids can read - what curriculum is taught in schools - what women do with their bodies - whether, or not, women can travel across state lines - the voting age — even though it's already in the Constitution - what rights…
"U.S. movies, tv shows, video games, music, news, and schools are uniquely and increasingly violent.
Primates’ chief form of behavior is imitation. Humans are no exception to that rule.
Human cultures that have not known stories of mass-murder have also not known mass-murder.
Anthropologists have studied cultures in which people have had an absolute taboo on taking human life."
David Swanson
If you want to know what's really going on in a society or
ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising
instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society
is more concerned with manipulation that with truth or beauty. If
content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed
and content-less. The combination of hive mind and advertising has
resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this
contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are
encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations
as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity
takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely
nothing but advertising. Jaron Lanier, from You Are Not a Gadget
excerpt January. Harper's Magazine.
Those species that do not live in compliance with the law
become extinct. In the scale of biological time, they become extinct
very rapidly. And this is going to be very bad news for the people of
your culture - the worst they've ever heard. (From a novel: Ishmael
by Daniel Quinn)
...pitting market values against human values, is the real
culture war of our time. James Gustave Speth: America the
Possible
"The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no
evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the
silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more
likely to be foolish than sensible." --Bertrand Russell, Marriage
and Morals, p. 58
The corporatization of just about every aspect of American
life, including the publishing industry, is at its core an assault on
culture. Chris Hedges, The Progressive, August 2011.
"The infrastructure of suburbia can be described as the
greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." -- JH Kunstler
Celebrity culture--with its very limited room at the
top -- is another cause and effect of the winner-take-all society. Karen Sternheimer
"A ... paradox is evident in America's
workaholic marketplace, where leisure
time and playful spectatorship are anything but leisurely or playful,
and where people actually work longer hours than their compatriots
anywhere else in the industrialized world, not for the glory of
work but for the supposed rewards of play. No people work harder at
play or expend more energy on leisure than American consumers.
Leisure means anything but lazy here. No French-style,
thirty-five-hour work week in the United
States, the abbreviated Gallic workweek mandated
by law now being ridiculed in those parts of Europe anxious to
imitate the United States. No six-week summer vacations where
business literally comes to a nearly summer-long halt in world
cities like Berlin or Madrid. No original slow
food in the manner of the charming Italian movement
that affects to put a roadblock in the way of
McDonald.
In the postmodern capitalist economy it's
hard work creating the easy life. A full-service shopping society
needs consumers with a lot of leisure, but in fact leaves them
little time for anything but consumption and the hard work that
pays for consumption, so that they rarely feel leisurely or free.
Vacation destinations and the travel to reach them are anything but
vacations from shopping. There is shopping underway at airport
malls and train-station malls, shopping at theme-park and casino
facilities, shopping all along the highways leading to and at the
tourist destinations to which they lead, shopping at every grand
hotel lobby, and shopping on television and the internet when you
get to your room." From Consumed by Benjamin
R. Barber
"In the pointy-headed northeastern America of my experience
there were no legends of wandering prophets, no dinner-table
discussions about personal salvation. But in the rest of the country
you had this weird
dichotomy, and advanced industrial economy confidently riding the
superconductor and the microchip into the space age while most of its
population hurtled backward away from the Enlightenment, living out a
Canterbury Tales-type quest for revelation in a culture dominated by
superstition and mystery."
Matt Taibbi: The Great Derangement
"I'd seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible
poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I'd never seen anything
like this. If what I had seen tonight--house after house after house
abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster--if this
was poverty, then it must be a new kind poverty, maybe in the same way
that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a
new kind of wealth. I had never really understood how a nation that so
celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this
country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are
replaceable and the products are identical. The identical cars are
followed by identical gas stations, identical restaurants, identical
motels and, as an extension of these, by identical TV screens, which
hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment
and identical dreams. Not even the Soviet Union at the height of its
power had succeeded in creating such a unified, collective identity as
the one Americans lived their lives within. When times got rough, a
person could abandon one town in favor of another, and that new town
would still represent the same thing. Was that what home was here? Not
the place, not the local, but the culture, the general?" Karl
Ove Knausgaard: Saga
Two surprising conclusions emerge when
America's culture wars — from Jefferson's heresies to same-sex marriage
— are stacked up and weighed together. Conservatives typically start
the battles, and liberals almost always win them."
Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars, Even When They Lose Elections:
Stephen Prothero.
“Major ways of thinking about the world constitute
just-world theories...The Catholic Church is a just world theory. If
the Inquisition burned heretics, they only got what they deserved.
Bolshevism was a just-world theory. If Kulaks were starved and exiled,
They got what they deserved. Fascism was a just-world theory. If Jews
died in the concentration camps, they got what they deserved. The point
is not that the good people get the good things, but the bad people get
the bad things. Neoclassical economics, our principal source of policy
norms, is a just-world theory.” Avner Offer, author of the Challenge of
Affluence , Self-Control and Well-Being in the United States and
Britain Since 1950 quoted in Wages of
Rebellion, the Moral Imperative of Revolt: Chris Hedges pg 77.
Does media determine culture or does culture determine media ? It works both ways.
Religion was the earliest media. It supports art, music, architecture. Art work told stories, and grand cathedrals took resources of entire communities. Gutenberg brought the message to the literate privileged. Belief was enforced by the confessional (the first mass surveillance), the inquisition, or in the Middle East by Sharia law. Religious war occurred throughout history. Violence is persuasive. Genocide effectively silences those with different views.
The poorest countries are the most religious.
The culture war is a war on the Truth, editing history to make slavery look beneficial,
forgetting indigenous genocide, calling racial discrimination CRT, gun culture no big deal,
January 6 insurrection just a tourist event.
Book bans, censorship, curriculum editing, academic interference, are on-going in Republican States.
Teachers are leaving them.
Propaganda from the right wing noise machine such as Fox News, OAN, NewsMax and others reinforce it.
The Culture War is an effort to erase history of racism, genocide, that includes attacks on higher education, book bans, censorship, and propaganda like Fox News.
Noam Chomsky. our most penetrating media critic, is not allowed on any major media including PBS. Trump has taken over the news.
US media is concentrated into a few corporations, they get to decide what to broadcast.
Leading the right wing noise machine is Fox News that determines or supports Republican culture.
Murdoch, in a courtroom, claimed it is the latter. That Tucker and the others had to broadcast Trump lies because that’s what the audience wanted. At other times, he said he wanted Trump to win. His other media engaged in climate denial.
Polarization is a product of media. People choose their bubble depending on their media choices:
Talk radio, Fox News, OAN, and other right wing outlets take direction and money from the well funded right as does the GOP. The church is media also: evangelicals, Catholics, and fundamentalists naturally ally with authoritarians.
Super heroes, strong man politicians, or gods are propaganda for authoritarianism.
When they say that they alone can solve problems, that they know better than the experts, they are rejecting democracy in favor of dictatorship. They demand loyalty and punish deviance.
When ideology suppresses truth, science is irrelevant, creativity is discouraged, progress slows. Disasters loom when real challenges are not recognized.
The choice comes down to dictatorship or democracy.
Growing polarization, has culminated in an attempt at armed overthrow of the government. Some of the mob even flying the Confederate flag.
Former President Trump incited the January 6 mob after numerous attempts to overturn the election failed in the States, in the Courts, and even in the Supreme Court. He even appointed loyalists to the DOJ and the Pentagon to stand down response to the attack.
Bill Maher and others warned that he would not leave office peacefully.
He is trying hard to come back.
Miserable poor people become religious and Republican, a vicious cycle, good for the GOP.
Could be that is why their opposition to Social Security, Medicare, and other social supports.
The happiest countries, the Nordic Countries, are mostly secular, inclusive democracys.
"those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities" Voltaire
Too
Much Magic:
Wishful Thinking, Technology,
and the Fate of the Nation
James Howard Kunstler. Atlantic Monthly, $25 (336p) ISBN
978-0-8021-2030-4 With
characteristic curmudgeonly enthusiasm, Kunstler brilliantly if belligerently
shows us what a pickle we're in and how inept we
are at dealing with it. As Kunstler writes: "Our
lust for ever more comfort, pleasure, and distraction, our refusals
to engage with the mandates of reality, our fidelity to the cults
of technology and limitless growth, our narcissistic national
exceptionalism”all propel us toward the realm
where souls abandon all hope. He offers astute
critical histories of both political parties, narrating the
Democrats decline into the
party of nothing in particular, and how the
fundamentalism of Southern poor agricultural
peasants combined with car culture to create the
right-wing official party of
stupidity. Equally disturbing, he proposes that our
financial system may already be in permanent collapse, that the
promise of natural gas abundance is based more on desperation for
fossil fuel than reality, and that Mother Nature may be exacting
revenge. Not surprisingly, his best-case vision for the future
mirrors his unsettling 2008 novel World Made by Hand, complete with
the end of feminism. Surprisingly, Kunstler concludes with homely
advice worthy of a graduation speech: Demonstrate to yourself that you
are a competent person who can understand the signals that reality is
sending to you... and act intelligently in response.
Agent: Adam Chromy, Moveable Type Management. (July)
What is corruption? Corruption is the abuse of entrusted
power for private gain. It hurts everyone whose life,
livelihood or happiness depends on the integrity of people in a
position of authority. Transparency International's
corruption perception index.
The Culture of Fear,
Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage,
& So Much More: Barry Glassner