Bring Alexis de Tocqueville back for an update at a Phoenix
mall. Americans need a firmer grip on global realities – and their notion of
exceptionalism.
By Mort Rosenblum, The Daily
Climate
The Waltons then.... |
PARIS – That hoary
fable has it wrong. Frogs have the sense to hop out of heating pots. We
Americans don't. Degree by degree over decades, we've been scalded senseless.
It is time to snap out of our stupor.
Consider the ironies.
Back in 1967, I went
to the Congo and then kept going, curious to find the strangest society on
earth. These days, I could just stay home.
Americans in the 70s
loved the Waltons, a hardscrabble West Virginia fictional family who fed any
stranger at the door. Today, six real Waltons are worth $115 billion, more than
the bottom third of the nation. For one of their Wal-Mart peons, that is seven
million years of base pay.
No one thought about
climate then. Water made headlines in 1972 but only with "gate"
attached to it. Reporters revealed Richard Nixon burgled the Democrats'
Watergate offices. Outraged citizens impeached him. Today, most of us just
shrug when we learn how the White House snoops on us all.
Generals and their drones
Congress cripples
essential services to save a few trillion dollars over 10 years. We squandered
twice that on two unwinnable wars, despite the lessons of Vietnam, only to make
yet more people hate us. Iraqi oil now goes to China.
When allies who need
our leadership warn that we are bumbling toward the scrapheap of ex-empires, we
wave bigger flags. If sovereign states thwart us, our generals fondle their
drones.
We vaunt our
generosity but, per capita, our foreign aid is the stingiest among rich
nations. As George Packer notes in the New Yorker, it is "an awkward
exercise of high-minded self-interest, humanitarian goals uneasily balanced
with strategic calculations."
At home, we take
comfort in our bedrock strength, defended over centuries: Our freedoms to
choose. Yet we allow ourselves to be fleeced by partisan politics and a tiny
fringe of big-money players.
Alternative realities
Two pals visiting from
Arizona offered a diagnosis. Workaday Americans, overwhelmed, focus on their
own narrow bread-and-circus worlds. Kids, seeing bullshit all around them,
thumb alternative realities on tiny screens. The way out, my friends conclude,
is to build awareness and incrementally spur action.
That is like a flight
crew's directions as a troubled airliner nears a mountain: Buckle up, lean
forward, and kiss your ass goodbye.
We need to move fast,
as a collective. We can each act locally, but we've got to think on a planetary
plane. Borders in today's world are only lines on a map.
Bring de Tocqueville back
For starters, let's
face reality. Sure, we're a great nation. But I'd love to see Alexis de
Tocqueville back for an update at a Phoenix mall among feckless golden youth.
Or at a Tucson gun show where old guys in boots arm themselves for Armageddon.
Tocqueville came in
1831 to see how France might improve its prisons. Now I could show him Maricopa
County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's pink-clad inmates frying in summer sun. He would
find we lock up 760 of every 100,000 inhabitants, seven times France's rate,
more than Cuba and China combined.
He marveled at how
people stayed free and happy by holding governments to account. When citizens
grow apathetic, he wrote, democracies slide toward "soft despotism,"
and majorities tyrannize
minorities. (He'd likely be amused by our term,
sequester. In French, “sequestrer” means “kidnap”.)
We are no longer so
exceptional. In a lot of countries any kid can grow up to be president. An
American must raise a billion dollars and show Donald Trump a birth
certificate. We sneer at others' corruption, yet ours is built into our
institutions. Special interests can legally rent all the legislators they need.
Obsessed with
ourselves, we don't see how others view our violence. A terrorist band killed
3,000 people in 2001, and we still rain fire halfway around the world. Our guns
at home take 11,000 lives each year. In Japan, by contrast, gun deaths totaled
seven in 2012, two fewer than deaths by scissors.
Urgent priorities
Here are some urgent
priorities:
First, we need a firm grip on global realities. That requires
professional reporters along with thoughtful readers who absorb what they
report. Today's avalanche of "news" from multiple directions would be
great if we knew what to trust. Mostly, it only confuses us. Good stuff gets
lost in a tower of babble.
Too often, we reduce "news" to nuggets that feed prejudice and agenda. Example: It was senseless to fixate on the Benghazi calamity. No government can field enough agents and troops to secure countless far-flung snake pits. We need to reduce frustrations that breed enemies who target easy prey.
Too often, we reduce "news" to nuggets that feed prejudice and agenda. Example: It was senseless to fixate on the Benghazi calamity. No government can field enough agents and troops to secure countless far-flung snake pits. We need to reduce frustrations that breed enemies who target easy prey.
Second, we have to elect people who remember their oaths of office.
Here is Robert Reich:
"Conservative Republicans ... basically shut
Congress down. Their refusal to compromise is working just as they hoped: No
jobs agenda. No budget. No grand bargain on the deficit. No background checks
on guns. Nothing on climate change. No tax reform. No hike in the minimum wage.
Nothing so far on immigration reform."
Our legislators do not shoot their way into office. We vote them in, and we can bounce them out when they put their own interests ahead of ours. We need to undo gerrymandering that lets minorities hold majorities for ransom.
Third, we need to realize that in the long run schools matter most.
When I start a class, I'm always stunned at how little 21-year-old journalism
students know about the world they are about to inherit. At the end, I'm
thrilled at how eager they are to keep learning more. That interest should
start in third grade.
Each Reaper drone missile load costs at least $320,000, enough to hire a handful of teachers who can explain to future generations why it is a bad idea to blow up distant strangers. If some kids disagree, fair enough, as long as facts, context, and critical thinking factor into the process.
Each Reaper drone missile load costs at least $320,000, enough to hire a handful of teachers who can explain to future generations why it is a bad idea to blow up distant strangers. If some kids disagree, fair enough, as long as facts, context, and critical thinking factor into the process.
Squeezed by banks
Half a century of
poking into other societies has shown me that people are more alike than they
are different. They know injustice when they see it, social and otherwise.
Muscular nations with big appetites need to keep that in mind.
Latin America is
finally narrowing the rich-poor gap. Ours widens. Corporations rule. Banks we
bailed out squeeze us at every turn. Other nations see health care as a human
right. Our version enriches insurance companies, overburdens doctors, and does
little for many it was meant to help.
This is no commie
rant. I reported from the Evil Empire when it collapsed. Soviet socialism
didn't kill it. People finally had enough of leaders who used state power to
favor a chosen few and quell dissent. Sound familiar?
But only half of us
even bother to vote, let alone protest. Look how Turks reacted when the prime
minister tried to make Taksim Square into a shopping mall.
What America was
Wherever I go, friends
tell me they miss what America was and could be. Gustavo Gorriti, the most
respected reporter in Peru, sent chills up my spine.
"I admire the
United States profoundly," he said. "Some of my best years were spent
there." Like so many others, he studied the American style of journalism
that set the world standard. Now, he says, that is over.
"We now all pay
the price of your having devastated real newspapers," he said. As he sees
it, few Americans realize that a complex public-private universe operates over
their heads. When an Edward Snowden attempts to shed some light, he is hounded
as a traitor into the enemy camp.
'Too crazy' for Orwell
"Orwell would
have thought this was too crazy for his novels," Gorriti said. He fears
Europe is being muscled to follow along, eroding democratic foundations built
up over centuries.
"There has to be
a reaction from the people," he concluded. "Americans have to take
their country back. If people don't act in the United States, in Europe, we are
going to lose the greatest achievement of human history."
Farfetched? Orwell
wrote "1984" on the Scottish island of Jura. Just recently, the BBC
reported, Jura vanished from view. Google inexplicably wiped it off the map.
This was later corrected, but the point was made. When virtual replaces real,
anything is possible.
We need to bang away
at family and friends and then widen our circles. TV won't help much. John-Boy
Walton narrated how Franklin Roosevelt shepherded America out of the Great
Depression. Today we have faux reality and that porcine putz with preposterous
hair on Celebrity Apprentice, who takes such delight in bellowing, "You're
fired."
Firm action
People can be
inspired. Stéphane Hessel, in his 90s, sold four million copies worldwide of a
pamphlet, Indignez-vous! Roughly, Get Off Your Butt. Then he
wrote Engagez-vous. Stay Off Your Butt, and Keep At It.
Hessel was French but
his message was universal. He advocates simple firm action, not violence. Civil
disobedience only incites police to break heads. We need to understand that
those cops work for us. And so does Congress.
In America, if a 99
percent majority cannot revive a hallmark democracy and a free-choice economy,
that metaphoric frog has already croaked.
Mort Rosenblum is a former Associated Press
special correspondent and ex-editor of the International Herald Tribune. You
can find more of his perspective on Facebook at Reporting Unlimited.