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WHY BOTHER? GETTING A LIFE IN A LOCKED-DOWN LAND |
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PROBLEMS Chapter One: LOSSES Over lunch one day, I asked journalist Stephen Goode how he would describe our era. Without hesitation, he said it was a time of epigons. An epigon, he explained to my perplexed frown, is one who is a poor imitation of those who have preceded. The word comes from the epigoni -- the afterborn -- specifically the sons of the seven Greek chieftains killed in their attempt to take Thebes. The kids avenged the death, by capturing Thebes -- but they also destroyed it. They were generally not considered as admirable and competent as their fathers. Being around epigons is like being trapped at a bad craft fair where everything you see seems to have been made before, only better. A New York Times article captured our epigonic era in full flower. The paper quoted the head of a TV production studio:
In anthropology class I was first introduced to the notion, revolutionary for its time, that progress was not inevitable, that there can be an ebb as well as a flow to cultures. In one American archeology course we studied the steadily improving design of a tribe's pottery. As time passed, the browns and the blacks and the whites and the zigs and the zags became ever more intricate and appealing. But then cultural entropy set in and it all started to go the other way, the art a poor imitation of its predecessors. In short, the tribe forgot what it once had known. Like the tribe, we have also forgotten much about ourselves. To be sure, this is not something we talk about, but to older Americans there is no point to the pretense. They remember the victories and their celebrations; they remember Norman Rockwell men standing motionless for the national anthem in baseball stadiums with fedoras held over their hearts; a government that did more than regulate or arrest you; politicians who were revered; newscasters who were trusted; the cop you met by name rather than with suspicion; and music that dripped syrup over our spirits and made them sweet and sticky. They remember when there was a right and wrong and who and what belonged with each, whether it was true or not. They remember a time when those in power lied and were actually able to fool us. They remember what a real myth was like even when it was false, cruel, deceptive, and the property of only a few. Now, despite the improved economic and social status of women and minorities, despite decades of economic progress, despite Velcro, SUVs, MTV, NASA, DVDs, cell phones, and the Internet, you can't raise a majority that is proud of this country. We neither enjoy our myths nor our reality. We hate our politicians, ignore our moral voices, and distrust our media. We have destroyed natural habitats, created the nation's first downwardly mobile generation, stagnated their parent's income, and removed the jobs of each to distant lands. We have created rapacious oligopolies of defense and medicine, and frittered away public revenues. Our leaders and the media speak less and less of freedom, democracy, justice, or of their own land. Perhaps most telling, we are no longer able to react, but only to gawk. To be sure, many of the symbols of America remain, but they have become crude -- desperately or only commercially imitative of something that has faded. We still stand for the Star Spangled Banner but we no longer know what to do while on our feet. We still subscribe to the morning paper but it reads like stale beer. And some of us still even vote but expect ever less in return. Where once we failed to practice our principles, now we no longer even profess to honor them. An awfulness is drifting over us. Too many have become obsessed with what we should ignore and ignore what we should celebrate or fear. Too many have lost the capacity for either grace or decency, preferring instead tricks and treachery. A culture that has so lost its way and forgotten so much is not the same as a flawed society bumbling through history trying to make itself better. A civil rights veteran compared his era with the end of the century by saying that in the 1960s there had been hope that someday the Congress, the courts, and the White House would see the right. Now, he said, we no longer have that hope. Worst of all, society lays the burden of its own failure upon each of us. Just as a strong culture buoys the individual and provides a stage upon which the brave, the compassionate, and the imaginative can act, so a craven, crumbling culture makes every act of individual will that much harder. Let's look at a few of the ways. Reality Sometime around the middle of the 1980s, I suddenly noticed that the truth was no longer setting people free; it was only making them drowsy. This realization first came in the midst of a meeting held to discuss a worthy investigative journalism project. We had considered every aspect of the proposal save one and now, unbidden, a heretical question wiggled into my mind, never to leave: did the truth being sought really matter anymore? At first it was only a sense of unease, a recognition that saying something true no longer commanded the respect it once had, an awareness that journalism was being driven away from the real and towards imaginings, mythologies, and "perceptions," that news itself was disappearing from the evening news and from newspapers, its place taken by inflated and cliched descriptions, commentaries, and analyses of the news for which there was no longer any room. We were, I had belatedly noticed, embarked upon an age that denied the existence of objective truth and, by extension, the value of any facts that might point to it. This was now an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick put it, when everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of itself -- news no less than anything else. As one frustrated television journalist explained. "I used to be a reporter for the Washington Post; now I play one on TV." In the end we are left not with reality but with a recreated memory of reality, the repeated replacement of human experience. We watched Michael Jordan, Roderick argued, to remember what a life filled with physical exertion was about. Similarly, it can be said that we view C-SPAN to remember what democracy was about, just as we watched the Yugoslavian conflict on CNN for a sanitized recollection of war. But if there is no value in truth and the real, then there is no value in pursuing any lack of these qualities. If nothing is real then what is left to report other than the image of what was once real? Hence the disappearance of facts from the media and their replacement by polls, pronouncements, and perceptions. Hence the growing feeling as we catch the evening news that we are watching a movie about television news that we've already seen and didn't like much. Even more troubling questions emerge. If there is no reality, what guides us in our choices? Do we simply become one more perception that we market to other perceptions? Everywhere we turn we are confronted with the hegemony of the artificial, the sovereignty of the fake. Of course, for the tourist, the television viewer, or the consumer, this is nothing new. In 1975 Umberto Eco wrote an essay, Travels in Hyperreality, in which he provided a field guide to some of America's many counterfeit cultural destinations. He described, for example, the reproduction of the 1906 drawing room of Mr. and Mrs. Harkness Flagler in the Museum of the City of New York, a drawing room that was itself inspired by the Sala dello Zodiaco in the Ducal Palace of Mantua. The museum thus was offering its visitors a reproduction of a reproduction. Eco also tells of going, within 24 hours, from the fake New Orleans of Disneyland to the real city where a paddle-wheeler captain, said it was possible to see alligators on the banks of the river but in fact was unable to produce any and "you risk feeling homesick for Disneyland, where the wild animals don't have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality than nature can." One of Disney's later projects was the recreation of the Catholic Church in a TV series about a priest. The question of whether Disney's image was faithful to the church became not only a matter of considerable controversy but "news." Could Disney do for God what it had done for alligators? Hail Minnie full of grace? One of those mediating this pseudo-crisis as a member of the Disney board was a (real) man of the cloth who also ran Georgetown University. At one point he found himself helping a group of Hollywood moguls decide whether a fake priest should be considered an actual heretic. He eventually joined the moguls in granting absolution, but how could even a good Jesuit be sure any more? It's no longer just about show business. The synthetic images once largely contained within the spheres of entertainment, recreation and culture have become ubiquitous. It is no accident that Disney subsequently turned to remaking that most brutally honest of America's landscapes, the urban downtown. We all live in the theme park now. In fact, an extraordinary portion of the gross domestic product is currently devoted to deception in one form or another, concealed though it may be as marketing, advertising, management, leadership seminars, news, entertainment, politics, public relations, religion, psychic hotlines, education, ab machine infomercials, and the law. We have become a nation of hustlers and charlatans, increasingly choosing attitude over action and presentation over performance and becoming unable to tell the difference. It's not all that surprising because, whether for pleasure, profit, or promotion, and in ways subtle and direct, our society encourages and rewards those who out-sell, out-argue, and out-maneuver those around them -- with decreasing concern for any harm caused along the way. As they say in Hollywood, the most important thing is sincerity. Once you've learned how to fake that, the rest is easy. Anything in the culture that remains true to itself becomes a target. You want to emulate the 1950s and sit out your alienation in a coffee house? Sorry, you're too late. Starbucks, Brothers and Xando have the franchise. You want to retreat to the world of ideas, to reflection on the choices that remain? To insist on freedom? To recover choice? Well, you won't be alone. Just turn on your TV:
Or:
Or:
What is going on here is the conversion of concepts central to our history, our politics, and our philosophy into mere merchandise. Capitalist personal trainer Tom Peters wants the young and ambitious to do the same with themselves: "Starting today, you're every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi or the Body Shop." James Atlas, writing in the New Yorker on the Harvard Business School, describes a classroom video in which Ogilvy & Mather CEO Charlotte Beers tells her advertising agency employees what went wrong with that classic marketing failure, "New Coke." People rejected the product, Beers said, "because the brand is owned by the people who consume it ... I had my first kiss while I had a bottle of Coke in my hand ... Coke isn't about taste; it's about my life." Asked to explain why Campbell's Soup was such a powerful brand, one of the Harvard students replied, "I was thinking about my life in general and Campbell's Soup came to mind. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought a lot about the sustainability of it as a brand. When I was a little kid, you know, you always think, mmm, good." Of course, owning or becoming a brand can be time-consuming. While a philosophy or religion can hold sway for centuries, the collapse of a product-based identity -- whether it be that of a cool dude or a cool soda -- can occur swiftly. Being someone was hard enough when it was just a matter of faith; now one is constantly in danger of falling into that huge, painful purgatory between the avant garde and retro. As I walk along Washington's streets of power, I try to guess what all the suave and important-looking people around me actually do for a living. Is the brush-cut, with the shades the width of a tongue depressor, a stock clerk or a law student? Is the hyped-heel, cell-phoner brushing impatiently by me badly needed on Capitol Hill or is she, perhaps, the woman who will ring up my books later that day at Kramer Books? We live in a time of democratic disguises when everyone -- at least until they reach their place of employment -- can be whoever they want. A nation of poseurs treating life as though it were an endless masque ball. Those who fail at the deception are the poor, the fat, the shy, the awkward, and the otherwise terminally declasse. For the rest, a manic preoccupation with style and attitude tempts them to become not a reflection of who they are but who they want others to think they are. Our primary business as Americans is to fool each other. Our tools come not from religion or politics but from the modern corporation. Hence the quiz shows that reward those who have absorbed most precisely the marketing messages transmitted to them. Hence the modern writing genre in which brand names replace generic adjectives. Our angst has become not that of the existentialist but of the discriminating shopper, witness the New York Times writer who summed up his 23-paragraph crisis as, "can a white consumer really get away with wearing a product designed and marketed by a youthful African-American company whose very name is a rallying cry of racial solidarity and economic empowerment?" Juliette Guilbert in the weekly, Generation Next, was no less challenged as she examined the consumptive effluvia of 1950s retro. What does it mean, she somberly asked, that so many young people are "fetishizing a period before rock and roll, before women's liberation, before Civil Rights?" As I wander down the aisles of these verbal WalMarts, I likewise feel a terrible burden for, as Guilbert put it, "like it or not, everyone who buys a vintage toaster is engaged in a culturally significant activity." If this is true, then who has time for politics or ideas? Even sex, which is what people did for virtual reality before computers and White House communications directors came along, has been affected. For example, a San Francisco Chronicle story described a form of unprotected gay group sex that takes place with the knowledge that one participant is HIV-positive. This practice had earned criticism, especially from gay activists working to protect their kind from disease. Tom Coates, the director of an AIDS research institute panned an aggressively non-judgmental gay magazine article by Michael Scarce for not only "sensationalizing the movement but for not presenting a balanced view. Nowhere did I see the word 'responsibility.' As an HIV-infected man myself, I take that responsibility very seriously." The Chronicle then continued:
Note that Coates' offense was not one of fact or even of motive, but rather of age, attitude, and image. Who needs the National Institute of Health when a hipper perspective will do the job just as well? *** The problem with having one's culture defined in such a manner is that the once persistent and predictable tyranny of elders, church, and chieftains becomes one controlled by a fickle and ever-changing semiotic oligopoly guided primarily by what it thinks you want. These shamans of symbolism project back on us a kind of virtual individualism, telling us how we should behave if we were as free as they make us look in their ads. In return, we wear their logos to say, yes, that really is the sort of person we think we are. Or would like to be. In a society informed by theme park information and run by theme park rules, replacement reality becomes the property of the management. Life becomes a giant magic show in which the audience is not allowed to see the real action or the mechanisms that create the real action, but only a dramatization of the action. Our participation is limited to the consumption of false images and false words as we become permanent hostages of the prestidigitators. Even a moderately skeptical and energetic media might help us remember again. But the media is an essential part of the legerdemain, making information ever more a lever of control rather than of freedom. Just to glimpse the problem could change the way a journalist wrote or spoke of the world. But the rules of the magic kingdom rigidly discourage that. In a postmodern world, truth is part of the privilege of power and to question received truth is to forego received power. As Michael Parenti put it, reality itself has become radical. To speak on its behalf is a form of insurrection. Writer David Edwards, in an interview in the literary journal, The Sun, put it this way:
*** The destruction of reality was already old hat to Umberto Eco by the mid-60s. In 1967 he was writing of remedies. In Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare he noted that "Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country, you had merely to control the army and the police ... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications." To the conventional mind, a proper response to such a phenomenon would be to wrest control from those in power. Eco thought this might produce only skimpy results and offered an alternative:
Such a reordering of the news on arrival, rather than during creation, has been traditional in minority communities where understanding reality remains closely related to survival. But perhaps the most dramatic and revolutionary example of rearranging information is to be found on the Internet, which is one of the last media ecologies still hospitable to truth. The Net allows anyone with a little technology to deconstruct the news in any manner and be assured of at least some audience. To be sure, the quality varies from the brilliant to the wrong to the absurd, but that is a small price to pay for relief from the mediocre, monochromatic, and manipulative alternative. To replace Big Brother with an infinite number of little siblings. To have choice again. The mediacrats and the government sense the danger and have launched a fierce war for control. This, and not sex or national security, is what the debate over the Internet is really about. A few signs:
Those not in media elite have found something quite different on the Net. They are creating a cyberarchy of transformation -- as different from the hierarchy of traditional information and politics as the vast wilderness of America was from the taut geography of 19th century Europe. The old dukes and baronets, clinging to their decadent landscape of conventional thought, rail against the primitiveness, the raucousness, the freedom of the new media, but theirs is effete whining in a happy hubbub of people discovering the ubiquitous potential of a new frontier with its fertile soil for the real. With the heady discovery of how many of us there really are has come a sense of incipient rebellion based not on ideology but on dreams and values -- a shared faith that truth, freedom, the individual, community, and decency still matter. Social democracy It wasn't always like this. Grown politicians did not always go around ripping apart the normal functions of government just so they could claim to have balanced a budget. People who called themselves leaders did not pride themselves on setting citizen against citizen, or trying to see how many criminals they could fry, immigrants they could deny medical care and education, or welfare mothers they could further disparage. Reform was not always used by press and politicians as a euphemism for repeal. From the start of the New Deal to the end of Jimmy Carter's tenure, the main course of American domestic politics was directed towards the improvement of life for the average citizen. The pace might vary markedly and the methods change, but not until the arrival of Ronald Reagan did power turn massively inward -- determined to serve itself firstly and mostly. Even that otherwise egregious warlock of Whittier, Richard Nixon, practiced domestic affairs in the tradition of social democracy. He was, in fact, our last liberal president, an amazing claim until one considers that he favored a negative income tax; revenue sharing; a guaranteed income for children; supplementary programs for the aged, blind, and disabled; uniform application of the food stamp program; better health insurance programs for low income families; aid to community colleges; aid to low-income college students; the creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and increased funding for elementary and secondary schools. Today someone of Nixon's domestic political tendencies might be considered too radical for C-SPAN. With Reagan and subsequent presidents -- again without respect to the party in the White House -- politics drastically changed. In the place of social democracy came a bipartisan effort to repeal decades of American social and economic progress. Since then the moral burden has been shifted away from collective social responsibility towards increasing sanctions against transgressors and laggards, indifference towards the victims of moral apathy, and a government free to do whatever it wants. Those too young to have remembered productive liberalism -- before the species became a rigid, profligate, incompetent parody of itself -- easily accepted the idea that our problems were due not to faults of those in currently in power but to the very policies that had helped create the comfortable perches from which the successful so loudly complained. Such developments were complimented by efforts of major corporations to get Americans to accept a lower standard of living, albeit cleverly concealed in the rhetoric of economic growth. For the bulk of Americans not playing the stock market, the end of the century told a less than glorious story:
What corporate America wanted was nothing less than the Third Worlding of the US, a collapse of both present reality and future expectations. The closer the life and wages of our citizens could come to those of less developed nations, the happier the huge stateless multinationals would be. Then, as they said in the boardrooms and at the White House, the global playing field would be leveled. Once having capitulated on economic matters, Americans would be taught to accept a similar diminution of social programs, civil liberties, democracy, and even some of the most basic governmental services. Free of being the agent of our collective will, government could then concentrate on the real business of a corporatist state, such as reinforcing the military, subsidizing selected industry, and strengthening police control over what would inevitably be an increasingly alienated and fractured electorate. We would be taught to deny ourselves progress and to blame others for our loss. Worse, underneath the sturm und drang of political debate, the American establishment -- from corporate executive to media to politician -- reached a remarkable consensus that it no longer had to play by any rules but its own. There is a phrase for this in some Latin American countries: the culture of impunity. In such places it has led to death squads, to the live bodies of dissidents being thrown out of military helicopters, to routine false imprisonment and baroque financial fraud. We are not there yet but are certainly moving in the same direction. In a culture of impunity, rules serve the internal logic of the system rather than whatever values typically guide a country, such as those of its constitution, church or tradition. The culture of impunity encourages coups and cruelty, at best practices only titular democracy, and puts itself at the service of what Hong Kong, borrowing from fascist Germany and Italy, refers to as "functional constituencies," which is mainly to say major corporations. A culture of impunity varies from ordinary political corruption in that the latter represents deviance from the culture while the former becomes the culture. Such a culture does not announce itself. It creeps up day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism. The intellectual achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics, and calm rationality that serves as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading. In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values, tradition, fairness, consensus, debate and all that sort of arcane stuff? Mainly greed and power. As Michael Douglas put it in Wall Street: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works." Of course, there has always been an overabundance of greed in America's political and economic system. But a number of things have changed. As activist attorney George LaRoche points out. "Once, I think, we knew our greedy were greedy but they were obligated to justify their greed by reference to some of the other values in which all of us could participate. Thus, maybe 'old Joe' was a crook but he was also a 'pillar of the business community' or 'a member of the Lodge' or a 'good husband' and these things mattered. Now the pretense of justification is gone and greed is its own justification." The result is a stunning lack of restraint. We find ourselves without heroism, without debate over right and wrong, with little but an endless narcissistic struggle by the powerful to get more money, more power, and more press than the next person. In the chase, anything goes and the only standard is whether you win, lose, or get caught. *** The major political struggle has become not between conservative and liberal but between ourselves and our political, economic, social and media elites. Between the toxic and the natural, the corporate and the communal, the technocratic and the human, the competitive and the cooperative, the efficient and the just, meaningless data and meaningful understanding, the destructive and the decent. If you look around the country, though, you can see the outlines of a new political and cultural fault line -- so new that it lacks a name, stereotypes, cliches, experts and prophets. In many ways it seems more a refugee camp than a voluntary assembly. On one side are libertarians, ethnic minorities, greens, populists, some unions, free thinkers, the alienated apathetic, the rural abandoned, the apolitical young, as well as others convinced that America is losing its democracy, its ground rules, and its soul. On the other side is the technological, media, legal, business and cultural elite of both major parties, centered in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington. At times it feels as if all of America outside of these centers has turned into a gigantic, chaotic salon des refuses. It is in this great room, no matter how strange and variegated, that a new future will have to be formed. Time and space Urban sociologist Claude S. Fisher writes that "our species has lived in permanent settlements of any kind for only the last two percent of its history." As late as the 1850s, just two percent of the world's population lived in cities of more than 100,000, by 1900 only about 10 percent. At the end of the last century, however, about half the world's humans lived in cities. In America, fewer than a quarter of us occupy a physical environment that is not primarily manufactured -- a place in which time and space are not mainly defined by nature rather than by other human beings. In fact, there are now more people in prison than there are farmers, which is to say that you are more likely to find an American being kept in a cage than you are to find one who is raising corn or cattle. In two centuries America has moved from frontier to supermax. My first diurnal sign of temporal and spatial control often comes with the morning news -- "police activity," the local public radio station strangely calls it, a euphemism which could mean a burning tractor-trailer, a multi-car crash, or the diaspora of construction, but certainly means a delay for those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Washington's Capital Beltway hosts many of these incidents. It was completed in 1968. Since then the population of the metropolitan area has doubled. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, according to planners at Berkeley, San Franciscans are losing about 90,000 hours a day sitting in traffic jams. That's the amount of hours considered normal. All around us are rules, exigencies, interruptions, and delays caused by ever more of us wanting to do the same thing at the same time. The line at the movie or nightclub. The restaurant with no table until 9:30; the hotel that is booked; the sign on the Massachusetts Pike warning that rest rooms at the next service area are limited. The cause of these delays is a world in which nearly 11,000 people are added every hour, creating a new population the size of Newark, NJ each day. If nothing changes, America will be double what we are now by about 2058. Which means, as former Gaylord Nelson has pointed out, twice as many cars, trucks, planes, airports, parking lots, streets, bridges, tunnels, freeways, houses, apartment buildings, grade schools, high schools, colleges, trade schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons. Twice as much water and food if you can find it. Twice as many chemicals and other pollutants in the air and water, twice as much heat radiation from all the new construction, twice as much crime, twice as many fires, twice as big traffic jams, and twice as many walls with graffiti on them. *** Whenever I hear of another school shooting or other youthful violence, the first thing I think about is Dr. Calhoun and his mice. Dr. John Calhoun put four pairs of white mice in a steel cage eight-and-a-half feet on a side. Within two years the mice had increased to 2,200. The adult mice began excluding young mice from their company and the young began biting, attacking, and slashing one another. Finally social and sexual intercourse became impossible without violence. The mice stopped reproducing and eventually all died out. We're in a cage, too, except it has shopping malls and freeways and cops with guns and sirens. We have governments and hospitals and schools and we have talk shows and newspapers to help us forget that we're in a cage. But spend an evening surfing the channels and count the humans being destroyed -- by crime, for fun, in sport. You can say it's television's fault, but, in the end, the producers and the reality cops and the extreme fighters are also in a cage, just like the viewers. Each is trying to control an environment over which they have lost control, whether using a gun, a ball, a camera, or a zapper. And it always ends in another confrontation: another ratings war, another arrest, another illegal deal, another TV pilot, another channel. If you step back, there is madness in this, but if you think only of those in the cage -- what they can hear, see, and understand -- then a primal logic emerges, the need to restrain, suppress, or eliminate the proximate usurpers of one's rightful time and space. We don't talk about it much except when somebody suggests we might do it differently and then we say they are "thinking outside the box." Thinking and living inside a box is now more normal. As with Dr. Calhoun's mice, the problem begins to reveal itself with the young. After World War II, spurred by a series of reports from Harvard president James Conant, America deliberately dismantled the education system that had brought it that far. Among other things, Conant considered the elimination of the small high school essential for the US to compete with the Soviets. America listened and between 1950 and 1970 the number of school districts in the country declined from 83,700 to 18,000. Schools increased in size, administration became centralized, principals became corporate executives and wardens rather than educators, and teachers became bureaucrats rather than prophets with honor in their own classrooms. And now we are giving up education itself in favor of cram courses. And now, again as a matter of premeditated national policy, we are reducing knowledge, wisdom, and survival to a matter of checking the right box. Standardized tests for standardized humans -- without time or space for anything else. *** The corporations are doing their part. When I first read that we were being exposed to more than 3,000 advertising messages a day, I didn't believe it. Then I counted them as I walked the five blocks from my dentist to my office. Several hundred. Then I sat at a suburban intersection and counted 50 before the light had turned green. I think I don't pay attention to them but I do. At least some of the messages surrounding me push their way into my brain, shoving aside what was already there, perhaps only for a few seconds, perhaps never to be retrieved. I don't protest because I have been taught that this is the way a city is meant to look. The fact that it didn't always look like this doesn't enter my thoughts because to me, as to everyone else, it doesn't seem that much worse than before. Which is to say, yesterday. There are less obvious thieves of time and space. Such as the government. In the past 30 years the number of laws in our society has exploded, bearing little relationship to population growth, cultural complexity, or any other rational explanation. The number of lawyers have grown with it; in Washington there are nearly seven times as many attorneys as three decades ago. This is not the product of necessity. Neither is the explosion the product of ideology. Both liberals and conservatives have overstuffed the law shelves, albeit for different reasons. But whatever the source, it now takes longer, requires more paper, and stirs up more intimations of liability to do almost anything worthwhile than it once did. While our rhetoric overflows with phrases like "entrepreneurship" and "risk-taking," the average enterprise of any magnitude is actually characterized by cringing caution with carefully constructed emergency exits leading from every corner of chance. We have been taught that were we to move unprotected into time and space, they might implode into us. Every law office is a testament to our fear and lack of trust. Then there is the media, purportedly our surrogate priest, parent, and teacher, but in fact gangs of burglars breaking and entering our brains and stealing time and space. What was once extraordinary became merely unusual and finally universal as we moved from manuscript to microphone to camera and cable. With each step, context, environment, and points of reference became ever more distant and external. With each step, we became ever more dependent on things and people we would most likely never see in their unprojected, unfilmed, unrecorded nature. Sitting in a bar, riding an exercycle at the gym, or waiting in the airport, we trade proximate reality for a distant, visible, noisy but ultimately unreachable substitute. I even attended a wedding during which a large TV broadcast the NCAA championship in a room adjoining the reception hall. More than a few chose the ritual of the NBA over that of a traditional rice of passage. It just seems more natural to think inside the box. It is reality that has become strange. *** There is at present no politics of time and space, no reporters assigned to cover them, no time on their broadcasts nor space in their papers. And so we are confined in silence. We accept corporate trespassing on our hours and our acres with stunning passivity. We permit monitors in public areas to interrupt our conversation, distract our reading, and strain our conversation. Others spy on us. We turn much of what is left of our space and time over to our government, as though we considered ourselves no longer competent to handle it for ourselves. There are, of course, exceptions. For example, the quarter of us who live in places of undefined range and unincorporated rhythms. Part of the political tension in America stems not so much from our differing ideologies as from our contrasting ecologies. It has been like that ever since the first adolescent left the farm for the city, but now the natural and the mechanical are too close to each other, symbolized by cell towers planted on our landscapes like great flagpoles of corporate conquerors. Time and space were once an essential part of our nature. Gertrude Stein wrote that "in America there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is." By the 1950s, however, Alan Ginsberg was already speaking of "an America which no longer exists except in Greyhound bus terminals, except in small dusty towns seen from the window of a speeding car." The deeply religious, the utopian, the cybernetic, and the fraternal can still escape into frontiers set at odd angles to the geographic. In fact, the freest people left in America may include the computer nerd and the contemplative nun, for each exist in a zone of tolerance for the human soul and imagination. Others of us pass in and out, shaping our homes, our offices, our associations, and our families into temporary places of unregulated humanity, finding little oases in the desert of technocratic progress. Or we move furtively into the countryside, like Winston Smith escaping Big Brother, seeking what we have lost. But most of it we do it either alone or in small, polite equivalents of the gangs to which urban adolescents gravitate in their search for something they haven't lost because they never had it. When we speak of time and space, we treat it as a personal problem. As if we were the only one too busy, too crowded, too behind the program projected on the schedule beaming up from our palm. Typically, we passively accept the strip-mining of our time and space. We tolerate the grossest corporate graffiti while jailing the young who scrawl it just for love and attention instead of for market share. We let our children be huckstered in the classroom by Channel One when we could be destroying the magic of advertising by teaching them how it really works. We adapt to an explosion of prohibitions in our legal code, the invasion of our privacy to enforce them, and a government that is determined to scare us into doing precisely what it wants. And we remain far from that point described by ecologist Edward Abbey when we "draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land, and say to the bulldozers, earth movers, government and corporations, 'thus far and no farther.''' The moral outsider A common thread runs through our losses: the fading of the outsider of integrity, those to whom society has traditionally looked for moral guidance: teachers, ministers, writers, intellectuals, activists. What Weber called the pariah intelligentsia. In short, those at the last ramparts of hope and faith, on the last battlement of the human spirit. In Chaucer's time these people were called "clerks," which is to say someone other than a layman. For example, when we speak of a cleric, for example, we are hearkening back to when such a person would be known as a "clerk in holy orders." Today these "clerks" are known as academics, lawyers, writers and other members of the intelligentsia. In the late 1920s, the French essayist Julien Benda wrote La Trahison des Clercs, which has been fairly translated as The Treason of the Intellectuals. Benda tells of Tolstoi seeing one of his brother Army officers strike a man who had fallen out of rank during a march. Tolstoi demanded: ''Are you not ashamed to treat a fellow human being in this way? Have you not read the Gospels?" The officer replied: ''And have you not read Army Orders?" Benda targeted "most of the influential moralists of the past 50 years in Europe" who had called "upon mankind to sneer at the Gospel and to read Army Orders." In other words, to replace morality with law and bureaucracy:
We have seen the type in our time: the professors promoting the Vietnam War, the Henry Kissingers simultaneously playing conqueror and egghead; the Arthur Schlesingers hard at work preserving the myths of the New Frontier; the Council on Foreign Relations; the nearly one-third of top Clinton aides who went to Harvard, Yale, or Georgetown, helping to drive the country far to the right and away from social and economic justice; the "conservative intellectuals" in the Bush administration spinning as hard as any PR flack. Benda had them in his sights:
Benda noted that while Plato believed that morality decided politics and Machiavelli believed that politics was beyond morality, now it was believed that politics should determine morality. The new intellectuals favored many of the same principles popular among today's leaders. Among them:
In the 1920s, Benda foresaw a "future war when a nation would decide not to look after the enemy wounded," a society that prided itself for its freedom from "stupid humanitarianism," and even the coming of genocide: "The logical end of the 'integral realism' professed by humanity today is the organized slaughter of nations or classes." Further, Benda saw the potential for a perverse form of reconciliation, driven by an understanding that the "thing to possess would be the whole earth," an "imperialism of the species preached by all the great directors of the modern conscience. "
In short, a globalized world that daily seems more familiar as we dispense with the need for any indices save those measuring the expansion of power and wealth. The new world order. This order emanates from a mandarin class that is neither left or right. Its members often are the sort of which it has been said that when they are alone in a room, there is no one there. In such a culture the marketplace of ideas essentially shuts down. There is no longer any real politics, only deals. No victories, only leveraged buyouts. No ideology, only brand loyalty. No conservative and liberal, only Coke and Pepsi. Remember: we are talking here of culture, not of conspiracies. If you have a strong enough culture you don't need a conspiracy. One of the reasons ethnic minorities and women continue to have such a hard time moving ahead is precisely because there is no one to blame, no smoking gun, nothing on paper -- only an invisible wall of implicit values and ingrained behavior. The mandarin class prides itself on its wisdom and intelligence, but its greatest true skill is the circumnavigation of guilt. No embarrassment is too great, no crisis too unnecessary, no expense too inexplicable, and no war too unjustified. A language of exculpation develops. The candidacy of a woman running for the House of Representatives, already a bit rocky owing to her having killed somebody in 1979 in a case ruled self-defense, came to an end after she first denied, and then admitted, having also assaulted a state trooper 11 years earlier. Her withdrawal statement proved, however, that she was fully qualified to live in Washington: "Various stories appearing recently have made me realize that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to focus and discuss the meaningful issues of the campaign." Among the powerful, "mistakes were made" but no one has to admit that they were the ones who made them. Instead, the elite rises as one to pronounce it not the time for blame, but rather for moving forward together into the future and putting this or that "behind us." Everyone nods their heads and the foxes are allowed back into the chicken house one more time. All this is carried out with a numbing smugness. The prototypical member of the elite possesses, as Cromwell says in A Man for All Seasons, "a self-conceit that can cradle gross crimes in the name of effective action." Among the elite there is not even any particular loyalty to this country. More and more, its business is elsewhere; and it is shamelessly willing to use political power to further that business. It seeks greatly weakened countries in which stateless corporations and their managers are accountable to no one. Their only pledge of allegiance is to a trade agreement. Like a hit and run driver, America's elite has left the scene of the accident. More and more, those who run this country have the character of wealthy, isolated strangers -- armed but afraid, intrusive yet indifferent, personally profligate but politically penurious, priggish in rhetoric yet corrupt in action. No longer does national myth connect them with the greater mass of America. Nor, any longer, does politics separate them from each other. Republicans and Democrats have become, rather than choices, degrees of the same dismal thing. They have become like those of whom Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby.
And through this all -- the unreal, the undemocratic, the amoral, the crowded, and the uncritical -- the American individual walks alone.
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