Two recommended essays — focus on America's celebration of our inability to think

© 2016 Peter Free

 

03 September 2016

 

 

These two short essays are worthwhile

 

 

Sonali Kolhatkar, I Have Never Stood Up for the National Anthem—and Never Will, TruthDig (31 August 2016)

 

Chris Hedges, America the Illiterate, TruthDig (10 November 2008)

 

 

The first

 

Sonali Kolhatkar wrote her paragraphs with Colin Kaepernick's anthem-sit protest in mind:

 

 

No country is worth pledging blind allegiance to.

 

Kaepernick’s critics have proven his point: that there is deep and abiding racism against black people and people of color in the U.S., and that for many Americans, there is far greater anger over an athlete sitting out the national anthem than over our ongoing epidemic of police killings of innocent, unarmed Americans who are disproportionately black.

 

© 2016 Sonali Kolhatkar, I Have Never Stood Up for the National Anthem—and Never Will, TruthDig (31 August 2016) (extracts)

 

 

Angry yay-hoos are more upset over Kaepernick's placid protest, than they are over the blood running in our race-hating streets. Demonstrating again Stupidity's dependably absent sense of proportion.

 

Sonali Kolhatkar's perspective on Wazoo Nationalism (my term) matches that of World War II's resistance leader, Herman Bodson — expressed toward the end of his life:

 

 

The kind of patriotism I have responded to in the past I consider today narrow and obsolete. . . .

I have become an earth patriot. . . . We now must move toward “world patriotism,” going far beyond borders, creeds, races, or places.

 

© 1994 Herman Bodson, Agent for the Resistance: A Belgian Saboteur in World War II(Texas A&M University Press, 1994) (at pages 242-243) (paragraph split)

 

The second essay — among the best of its kind

 

Eight years ago, Chris Hedges addressed a main cause of U.S. culture's mouth-foaming nitwitism:

 

 

We live in two Americas.

 

One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.

 

The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection.

 

Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation.

 

Campaigns that succeed . . . . create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia.

 

It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions.

 

And it works because so much of the American electorate . . . blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates.

 

We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

 

© 2008 Chris Hedges, America the Illiterate, TruthDig (10 November 2008) (extracts)

 

 

The moral? — The problem with American democracy is people

 

De-enslaving knowledge and analysis lie everywhere. Libraries. Internet. We can teach ourselves to read and think with these tools. Conversations can extend across millennia, rather than drown in disconnected instants of manipulated pap.

 

Whose responsibility is it, then, that Freedom's Foundation lies mostly untouched?

 

No liberty-based system can survive the mental sloth of its constituents.