I have posted two articles in my Archive. They are entitled:
Click on either to go to the archive to read them.
Neither is related to my usual topic Dementia (DM) or
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). At the same time they are on point. As a country and as a community we do not
appreciate the calamity that AD will soon be. They are equally on point on what
we have let happen to our country, our society and ourselves. Having gone
through a complete overhaul of the economy of our country, we became bellicose
about our power and wealth, and we squandered it all with two unwinnable wars.
This catastrophe in the making has been fashioned over the
last thirty years. Our mantra became “Greed is Good.” Politicians on both sides
removed all of the safeguards carefully placed over our economy and country as
a result of the Depression, the war that followed and the post war period under
Eisenhower when we were placed on the pathway to prosperity.
We were blinded by the Kennedy Cult; we then recovered good
sense under Johnson and the many social programs put into effect during his
administration. Followed by Nixon, the hated one, who was a competent
administrator in spite of his aggressive election posturing that got him pushed
out of office, had it not been for his electoral shenanigans history would have
called him an excellent President.
We then went through Ford and Carter both of whom had
lackluster results, which led to the guru of all Ronald Reagan. In this
administration change was the modus operandi.
Reagan the master communicator brought us “Morning in
America.” In the deep south he declared he too was a “States Righter.” This was
the token way of telling the south they would have a friend in Washington on
all of the State Rights issues that many pundits said included non-enforcement
of segregation laws.
As the South came into real power many of the social changes
started. Outside of the South, Wall Street was on holiday. The regulators left
town and the free market became the open market where no rules applied.
The most masterful manipulation was with the wars. Bush II
leading to 9-11-01 didn’t appear to be doing much as President. The metaphor of
his administration was in the footage from Florida when he was informed of the
terror attack and the camera portrayed his signature “Deer in front of the
Headlights” stare that lasted before he then got up and left the stage where he
had been reading a story to children. He then disappeared for a day.
It all changed with 9-11. The President was given a new
script the defining slogan being: “If you are not with me you’re against me.”
The war drums were pounded, the war paint applied, Demagogy became the lingua franca of all of the administration
supporters.
Wikipedia describes Demagogy as follows:
Demagogy or demagoguery
is a strategy for gaining political
power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears, vanities and expectations of
the public—typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda,
and often using nationalist, populist or
religious themes.
Early on a movie premiered in the theatres named “The Tail
Wagged the Dog.” This was a story about a president who got in trouble with the
polls so he started a war! This saved him. No one, but no one, put this
together with what was happening in Washington.
The Congress supported or buckled under the Demagogues,
supported the irrationality, and nary a word was raised but for a few negative
votes, not enough to make a difference.
Then came the crash of 2008. Three years later that crash is
still unfolding.
Why?
In the article entitled A Theory of Everything Tom Friedman
analyses the Arab Spring, the Israel and Palestinian Conflict. He asks why? The
answer is an Israeli he quotes as follows:
We are fighting for
an accessible future.” Across the world, a lot of middle- and
lower-middle-class people now feel that the “future” is out of their grasp, and
they are letting their leaders know it.
He then explains Why Now?
We are increasingly
taking easy credit, routine work and government jobs and entitlements away from
the middle class — at a time when it takes more skill to get and hold a decent
job, at a time when citizens have more access to media to organize, protest and
challenge authority and at a time when this same merger of globalization and
I.T. is creating huge wages for people with global skills (or for those who
learn to game the system and get access to money, monopolies or government
contracts by being close to those in power) — thus widening income gaps and
fueling resentments even more.
Read that in
between both of these quotes. It makes a lot of sense.
Then comes the question Why Don’t We See This? Why don’t we
act to remedy this?
The second article, The Elusive Big Idea, gives explanation
to this.
Friedman mentions it
this article dwells on it.
If our ideas seem
smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because
we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in
an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas
that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer
people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the
Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.
It is no secret,
especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which
rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the
battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition,
faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological
advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock
— to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old
modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not
exactly the same.
Post-Enlightenment
refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational
thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the
style…
The real cause may be
information itself. It may seem counterintuitive that at a time when we know
more than we have ever known, we think about it less…
But if information was
once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them.
We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated
…with so much information that we wouldn’t
have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.
….In effect, we are
living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial
information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational
Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.
We prefer knowing to
thinking because knowing has more immediate value
These are the reasons the Fox
was let to be in the Hen House and no one cared. It is a direct result of
Eisenhower’s Warning in his Farewell Address:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned. “The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let
the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
We had no idea this could happen, events of 30 or more years have
carried us here and it has happened. We just didn’t think!
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