The Road to Nowhere

“The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference.”

Was Ian Kershaw wrong to focus blame on ‘indifference’? Should we, today, be more concerned about “learned helplessness” or perhaps by a conditioned and inflicted “hopelessness” when it comes to deciphering the invisible forces roiling so much of our current events and politics?

“‘No One Believes Anything!’ Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News”

As the New York Times article written by Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner proclaims, “Many Americans are throwing up their hands and tuning it all out.” This is exactly no accident. This is what trimp and the GOP idiotically depend upon. And it must not be forgotten that both trimp AND the 21st century configuration of the GOP are shameless creatures of a toxic accumulation of unaccountable concentrated wealth.

What’s even more important to remember is that washing one’s hands of “dirty politics” is also shameful. It is an abject surrender to the worst of us, and the worst in us. Politics and democracy are always so frustratingly difficult because politics and democracy are always as treacherous and confused as we are. Understanding media biases is so treacherous because we humans are ever so proficient in deceiving and confusing each other (and ourselves.)

Understanding media biases is, of course, critical for an informed electorate and the idea of self government. That there are no constantly reliable shortcuts is no reason to give up in despair. What it should be is a spur for us all to struggle on to the best of each of our abilities to make a world where human freedom and dignity is both protected and sustainable.

The Chomsky Herman “propaganda model” is probably the best approach to a partial understanding of how corporate interests have so much (but often limited) influence on the perceptions of various audiences. For example, the respectable mainstream media offers a chorus of condemnation for the GOP’s attacks on institutions, experience, and the rule of law. It does this while also promoting fresh new (“and improved”) faces of relative unknowns like Barack Obama and now Pete Buttegieg.

Ideologies, affiliations, and even critically questioned theories do offer valuable shortcuts for filtering the chaos of conflicting information and sensations. Such shortcuts are actually necessary. But blind faith in any perspective, ideology, or theoretical model is dangerously naive. (Including the Chomsky Herman approach!) Yet what's even more dangerous is giving up on the hope of ANY serious understanding. Fascism requires such hopelessness. 

Fascism engenders such hopelessness. 

The billionaire class and the institutional structure of profit centered corporations should be the prime focus of serious attention and reform efforts. Billionaires today are dangerously unaccountable and irresponsible in their accumulation and husbandry of concentrated wealth. But ultimately the responsibility is with us all as individuals, family members, and participants in significant affiliations, institutions, and concerted efforts.

Of course, it may be that we are now simply too oppressed and too corrupt to help ourselves. If so, crucial prospects for freedom and dignity will be set back for many more generations—if an insulted planet permits.

 
https://www.communicationtheory.org/propaganda-model/

https://beautifultrouble.org/theory/the-propaganda-model/

https://monthlyreview.org/2018/01/01/the-propaganda-model-revisited/

http://changingminds.org/techniques/propaganda/propaganda_model.htm

Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass.  He is currently working on his second novel I Wanna Be Evil.

Nemiss

A cadre of honest civil servants including an anonymous whistleblower. A coven of convicted (or yet to be caged) canaries including Rudi Giuliani just aching to sing. Pending court cases involving impunity regarding tax returns. A marked tendency to disrupt and self-shame.

NEMESIS!

“In ancient Greek religion, Nemesis (/ˈnɛməsɪs/; Ancient Greek: Νέμεσις), also called Rhamnousia or Rhamnusia ("the goddess of Rhamnous"), is the goddess who enacts retribution against those who succumb to hubris (arrogance before the gods). Another name is Adrasteia (or Adrestia), meaning ‘the inescapable”’ — Wikipedia

But is Nemesis coming for trimp?

For democracy and the rule of law?

Or for us?

Is America condemned to pay for decades and centuries of hypocrisy and violence regarding racism and empire?

Or is insatiable humanity which hubristically despoils land, water, air (and even “outer space where there is no air) being sloughed off like a nagging infection with a global band of autocrats (of which trimp is only one) acting as implacable anti-bodies?

Who will tell our story when we are gone?

Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass.  He is currently working on his second novel I Wanna Be Evil.

Why IS College So Cruel?

A recent piece by Frank Bruni in the New York Times examined this question in terms of the social and financial pressures on young people (and their families) - especially as they relate to the chances of being admitted into the Ivy leagues. This problem, of course, is related to the increasing crush of urgencies on young people growing up in a digitized social network, and also to the devastating impacts on opportunities and a sense of future in an economy becoming ever more unequal. Still, as Bruni points out, in the past we have turned to educational institutions (high schools) to, at least partially, address scarring perplexities involving inequity and status.

At this point, it’s unavoidable that AT LEAST two years of very affordable post-secondary education/training be made available to everyone. But that’s only a start. We need to continue to develop creative ways to ensure that everyone also has affordable, broadly based, LIFE LONG educational and training opportunities.

One of the pitfalls to avoid is profiteering and price gauging from educational institutions, new or established, ostensibly non profit or not.

The most important pitfall is the idea that such education and training is primarily for “the job market” as it is projected in then near or even long term.

Citizenship and especially the associated habits of mind should always be the focus. (Most employers already agree in confidential surveys where they repeatedly say most of what they looking for are certain “soft skills” along with more measurable abilities to communicate and analyze.) These habits of mind, including more nuanced abilities to think systematically, abstractly, and critically, are more likely to be developed in humane environments where efforts are made to differentially balance the need for Challenge & Standards on one side with the equally important need for support and nurture on the other. The need for such a balance is even critical in the many individualized online learning environments epitomized right now by DuoLingo and Kahn Academy.

Life-Long Educational Opportunities FOR ALL delivered via many types of technology and varieties of non profit institutions is possible with guidance, support, and informative promotion from federal and state departments of education, and local school districts (which would still be primary), public & private universities — as well as by many independent (community or expert based) supporters and evaluators. It is not only possible but is even being developed all around us even now.



Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass.  He is currently working on his second novel I Wanna Be Evil.

trimp WANTS An Incident

Liberals and progressives may comfort themselves imagining our current administration* orchestrated by a fulminating wretch perched tensely on a toilet angrily tweeting juvenile spite in the wee dark hours of every empty morning.

But the taunting provocative threats of nationwide armed raids against migrants with deportation orders should frame this image in a much bleaker and more dangerous context. What is being spun above us is more than improvised performative cruelty intended to roil a racist base of bitter, sullen, and hair on fire revanchists whether they manifest as comfortable retirees, lost soul unemployables, or anxiously overworked members of the growing precariat.

Some very clever, and nominally well educated, “masterminds” are assiduously generating similar razor wire policy options for the grifting bully now soiling the sleeping places of people like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While trimp soaks up emoluments with more suction force than a terrorized squid exerts to spurt foul black protective ink, crafty “advisors” are gleefully generating copious new policy menus of an atrociously similar ilk.

Clearly, communities across the nation are rallying to protest the promised raids as well as to protect their designated victims. And as “masters of war” well know, the anticipation of “shock and awe” can generate terror, despairing enervation, and all manner of rash miscalculation.

The power of the nativist trimp backlash is, in large part, contingent on a sense of victimhood. 

Honest, white, good, hardworking, Germans (er I mean “Americans”!) are being WRONGED by illegals who break the laws just by being here even when they DON’T take OUR jobs and murder/rape OUR women/children. The invasion by these swarthy disease-ridden hordes is facilitated by sanctimonious left-wing extremists who have NEVER valued hard work, the glorious homeland or its pure values (both the latter of which are vividly reified whenever thick toothed blond children raise their voices in innocent joyful song).

The (barely) latent fascism of trimp enablers (who now include the apparatus of the Republican Party) is not, however, confined merely in the noisome coils of racism. Just as potentially deadly are the provocations themselves. Empires, great powers, bullies, and insurgent cabals inveterately seek to instigate overreactions to be exploited as justifications for additional outrages, clampdowns, invasions, and assaults. No doubt some three-pieced trimp minion in the White House, dreaming of his own Reichstag Fire, is eagerly anticipating a meme of some overwrought ANTIFA abusing a Federal ICE official.

It’s time to brace ourselves while also steeping everyone with an open mind and a decent heart in the resources, traditions, power, and promise of non-violent resistance.


A.J. Muste, Gandhi M.L. King, and Gene Sharp are the names that should be on all our lips as their ideas guide our "best-laid" plans and hopes.





Some Resources:


Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns: second edition | War Resisters League
https://www.wri-irg.org/en/pubs/NonviolenceHandbook
All over the world, activists are taking nonviolent action for a more just, more peaceful world.



NVC Instruction Self-Guide | Center for Nonviolent Communication
https://www.cnvc.org/online-learning/nvc-instruction-guide/nvc-instruction-guide



A manual for a new era of direct action | Waging Nonviolence
https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/manual-new-era-direct-action/



[PDF] Everyday Rebellion Training_Manual.pdf by CA Miller
Strategic Nonviolent Struggle: A Training Manual discusses strategies for embarking on the path of peace by applying nonviolent approaches to resolving issues ...


[PDF]Handbook for Nonviolent Campaigns
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/.../wri_handbook_2014_inner_AMENDED.compre...War Resisters' International (WRI) is a network of mutual support, where we learn and support each other.

Going with the Flow of Gender etc.

Urgent and insistent claims about gender, made especially by very young people, are making it ever more apparent that ideas like “binary” and even “spectrum” entrap us in images which are far too rigid - and which may also be harmfully misleading in a vast number of cases. Conflicts and consternations about terminology are only part of the current upset. Out of the many alternatives now being offered, perhaps the term “fluid” is an essential key to understanding and grappling with these claims and the quandaries they pose. And maybe the term will also be useful in understanding other perplexing complications in dimensions extending far beyond mere gender.

A bigger problem, however, might actually spring from the term “identity”. Think about gender (whether physically, psychologically, socially or “whateverly”) as it is expressed in so many ways by so many different people - AND as it is expressed in so many ways by the same person over the course of a lifetime, a day, or a moment. Thinking like this makes it hard to avoid the notion we are ALL somewhat “gender fluid” in different ways and to different extents in the multiple fashions we express and see ourselves.

Some individuals are cursedly blessed with a compulsion to act out unfamiliar ways of being. One such way might be in helping us all come to an understanding of “fluidity” (in terms NOW of gender) whether or not we value this insight which could be liberatory, disruptive, or even catastrophic to so many inherited forms, roles, responsibilities, and “identities”.

The roles and responsibilities of any society involve a myriad of pressures, some of which can indeed be quite oppressive. Roles and responsibilities rarely fail to involve various levels of personal discomfort and challenge. One method of coping is to internalize into our “identities” what might have originally been felt to be imposed. But not all that gets crustified into our self-image is truly crucial to fulfilling necessary responsibilities.

An additional sense of the term “identity” involves affiliation or even tribalism. Fluidity reminds us how some of our limitations are also constructs which are subject to alterations. The last half century or so has demonstrated how gender roles involving work, property, family, and sexuality can be rapidly reconfigured. Homosexuality, for instance, is still sometimes associated with deviance and criminality invoking the power to ignore, strip away, or deny certain rights to certain individuals who see the types of sexuality involved as part of their identity: an affiliation essential to claiming and defending an entire set of rights which are still being codified - and erased.

It might be hard to conceive, or even sometimes hard to remember (for those who have lived long enough especially if we've never been seen as female), but women who were nominally U.S. citizens were not generally afforded the full rights of personhood unproblematically granted to men until the 1970s. This did not happen without some persistent "nudging", and today's "Me Too" movement is only one demonstration that U.S. women continue to struggle to achieve recognition of their "rightful" parity with men. It is notable that some of the ideas related to "gender fluidity" were and are resisted by contingents of feminists and gay activists who worry (not without cause) that such innovations could endanger recently won (and still precarious) gains. The most potent resistance still comes from tribes who identify with more "traditional" roles concerning gender and sexuality. And change, even when it does not involve issues of power and intimacy, is always met with varying levels of acceptance and resistance.

Fluidity might be an essential key to grappling with many present and future challenges, but fluidity is often a state difficult to achieve or maintain. We may only yet be beginning to build structures for ourselves that permit the type of flow we may need as much as the types of safe containers and boundaries we also require for safety, wellbeing, and liberty.

The viscosity of history preserves old injustices, but it also serves to protect (to an extent) hard-won properties such as "rights". The need for structure will always generate tensions against urges for fluidity, a concept both more specialized and somewhat distinct from "freedom".

We will always struggle to determine how much fluidity is too slippery and how much viscosity is too rigid - or vicious.

Ongoing changes in the structures of jobs and the expectations associated with careers are likely to benefit those ablest to incorporate more fluidity into self-perceptions while also maintaining a certain sense of continuity, depth, and "identity". Convulsions associated with automation portend opportunities and threats to what are now seen as essential components of "identity" in even more visceral ways which may soon make sticky preoccupations with gender seem rather quaint.

If fluidity regarding human identities is indeed a magical key for dealing with inevitable future challenges, guidance and inspiration for its use might be found in the types of myths, folklore, and fairytales associated with childhood where transformation and multiple identities are taken for granted. Though we encrudge our children with horribly mixed legacies, they may find the resources for more than an unenviable survival.

Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)

He Who Will Die . . .

Strummer and Jones sang out “He who will die is he who will kill”. Not largely true in the actual practical working out of this wild world, but still resonant with a deep type of truth.

In the actual practical working out of this wild world indiscriminate access to guns leads to suicide and accidents far more than it leads to mass shootings whether in schools, mosques, synagogues, workplaces or random assemblies in parking lots or campgrounds.

The more we understand how guns are used, misused, and made available, the more important it is for serious people to demand sensible restrictions and regulations using laws, market interventions, education, and all the tools available for social change.

The unserious, dishonorable, and lame minded who say nothing can or should be done need to be recognized for what they are - and their ”opinions” should be discounted appropriately.

(It seems like an interesting story how this young woman was able to purchase a shotgun.)

Free College (and more) For All?

Is it so difficult to understand the difference between making college AVAILABLE for all v. requiring people to go to college, perhaps because we don’t offer enough viable alternatives?

“Traditional” college education should certainly be affordable and available to all - which will mean it would have to be subjected to much more oversight.

But, regardless of where people receive formal education, what we value about college and education should also be available to everyone. I am talking about:

1. A good liberal education for citizenship,
2. Opportunities to develop specialized skills, and
3. Opportunities to join and cultivate mutually supportive networks.

These opportunities can be provided in traditional college settings for traditional college-aged students, but just as young people develop on widely varying and eccentric schedules, the needs of adult learners evolve and change based on thousands of semi-predictable variables. That’s why educational opportunities in a wide range of formal, informal, and blended settings must be supported for individuals of all ages.  Lifelong education should also a wide range of opportunities for skills training and self-enrichment.

By necessity, this means we need to work towards a culturally supported system of lifelong education where informal values and practices normalize the occasional resort to formal structures of learning for all based on individual needs and inclinations just as much as on the dubious dictates of the so-called “labor market”.

BF Skinner famously noted that "the evolution of culture is a gigantic effort in self-control." Notions of transcending "freedom and dignity" remain quite as disturbing on their own even when not linked to the idea of "cultural engineering". Still, narrow and fragile notions of "freedom" and "dignity" are being whipped into a toxic melange of ideas regarding "identity", "race", and "nation" with this process driven, in part, by dangerously reckless and irresponsible provocateurs. Skinner's challenge, "We have not yet seen what man can make of man" leaves no one off the hook. To not self consciously participate in creating culture may be the most bitter form of irresponsibility. This can be done in a way that avoids heavy-handed “centralized” control.

The role of formal education in creating and recreating culture can easily be exaggerated, but it's just as facile to minimize its role. Certainly, this role is limited by the more informal mechanisms of education wafting through popular culture (online and off).  These include family, religion, and everyday interactions of participation, domination, resistance, diversion, and mutual appreciation, all of which are powerfully influenced by traditions, history, and the assiduous influence of concentrated wealth.

No doubt we all must invest more effort and intentionality in building a culture that supports everybody's opportunity to realize freedom and dignity in meaningful and responsible ways. And just as surely, this is a Sisyphean endeavor. For even if there was ever no chance for backsliding, the daunting slope would inevitably increase exponentially and asymptotically. Such is the "nature" of insatiable humanity. But like Camus's Sisyphus, we must not be discouraged. To the extent we can, we must work to ensure we all have access to the necessities of food, shelter, meaningful occupation, and dignified leisure.

The role of formal education, another basic human "right" is a considerable factor in how cultures and economies evolve to meet (or fail to meet) these needs. The right to life long educational opportunities is now within our grasp. We can continue to build upon the models of public education inherited from the Puritans, Horace Mann, and industrial magnates with an eye toward humaneness as we balance challenge and support for all learners. We can learn from models provided by free online resources such as DuoLingo and Kahn Academy. There are also lessons to be learned from (and about) the Massive Open Online Courses offered now by so many major universities. Schools and colleges all around the world are experimenting with distance and blended learning models of all stripes. All manner of experimentation should be encouraged and supported with a wide range of funding and accreditations backed up with pervasive mechanisms of informal attention and scrutiny.

We are all culture creators even as we are all constantly being shaped (or distorted) by vaster cultural currents. We can responsibly open the institutions of higher learning to all regardless of class, race, or age. And then let's see what we make of ourselves.

Joe Panzica (Author of Democracy STRUGGLES! and Saint Gredible and Her Fat Dad's Mass for which he is seeking an agent . . .)
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