Je suis un auteur français
By Matthew C. Scheck | July 22, 2008
Moi, je vois autrement. Je n’ai guère de souci et de beauté et de perfection. Je me moque des grands siècles. Je n’ai souci que de vie, de lutte, de fièvre.
Me, I see differently. I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.
- Emile Zola
Although I consider myself 100% American, 50% of my ethnic makeup is French. My mother’s uncle was the French novelist, critic, and journalist Marc Bernard (1900-1983), the recipient of the 1934 Prix Interallié for his novel Anny, and also the recipient of the more prestigious 1942 Prix Goncourt for his novel Pareils à des enfants.
He and my grandfather–who was Marc’s senior by 12 years–were born in Nimes, the sons of a drunken, skirt-chasing French-Spanish rogue named Juan-Baptiste Bernat (or Bernard, the alternate, French spelling of the name; my grandfather retained the Spanish Bernat moniker, which has passed down to his progeny in America, while Marc always went by Bernard). Juan-Baptiste was a native of the Spanish Balearic Islands who, in about 1907, abandoned his wife and young son Marc in Nimes and emigrated to America, eventually working the coal mines of Alabama. He died in America around 1911 and never returned to France or his family.
Marc’s novel Pareils à des enfants (Such a Child) is an account of his childhood struggles in turn-of-the-century Nimes. It is a work of fiction, but is based on how he, his other siblings, and his mother survived on the meager income she earned as a clothes washer. This harsh poverty didn’t dampen the spirit of the novel’s protagnist, Leonard, but it did present far too many obstacles and tragedies for him to surmont, which he did with great joie de vivre and humor. Being dirt poor and the son of an absent rake of a father did not prevent Leonard from living a rich life filled with hope and promise, and of course the real-life model of Leonard–Marc himself–proved by his life’s accomplishments that even someone from the humblest background can do great things and be a major influence on society. Pareils à des enfants remains, even in modern times, a masterpiece of social criticism and a lesson in liberty, freedom, and the power of the human spirit.
My grandfather, Jean Leonard Bernat, emigrated to the United States with my grandmother in around 1912 and eventually settled in Evansville, Indiana. Sadly, he never had the chance to return to France before he died, nor would he ever see his younger brother again, but he, his daughter Louise, son Chuck, and my mother stayed in contact with Uncle Marc for many years. The Bernat clan in America remains to this day very proud of our famous French uncle.
Although Marc was a celebrated novelist, member of the Resistance during World War II, and literary critic for Le Figaro and Le Monde, he considered his greatest achievement to be his marriage. He met his wife, Else Rechiman, an Austrian-Jewish refugee, at the Louvre in 1938, and their lifelong romance brought Marc great joy until her untimely death in 1972 of cancer. His account of her death and his subsequent grief over losing her, the book La mort de la bien-aimée, is both beautiful and tragic in how it details his inability to overcome her death. Most French critics consider this book a masterpiece.
The saddest aspect of this tragedy is that my mother, Marc’s niece, also lost her beloved husband–my father–to cancer about the same time. When my brother and I found this brilliant book in Paris in 2001, as my brother translated it to me, we both started feeling a great sense of sadness and remorse, not only for our famous uncle, but also for our mother, who also suffered tremendous grief over the death of her beloved. We were touched by Marc’s deep love for Else and how he could articulate this feeling so beautifully in his writing. We also learned our family suffered horribly through 1971-73 on two continents.
Marc was a founding member of the Proletarian Group of writers, Le groupe des écrivains prolétariens, many of whom were either Socialists or Communists. However, his novel Pareils à des enfants, while chronicling his impoverished childhood, is a spirited, humorous, and uplifting story, very much 
devoid of the depressing cynicism that was common in the populist writings of his era. Marc was a Socialist and social critic, but he also possessed immense positivity and a great sense of humor. Rarely has a leftist writer expressed such joie de vivre and hope as Uncle Marc, which explains his popularity in his time. Moreover, his tireless work as a public intellectual and Socialist advocate for over fifty years helped shape the social and political direction of modern France. That, more than any of his awards and accolades, makes me the proudest.
Marc was a famous, award-winning novelist and journalist during the Nazi occupation of France, and he was also married to a Jewish intellectual and writer of great talent in her own right. He and Else were also members of the French Underground, and one can only wonder what great courage it took for both of them to have survived that era while surrounded by vicious, anti-Semitic barbarians like the Nazis, who not only murdered Jews and Jewish sympathizers with impunity, but also killed quite a few leftist intellectuals and French resisters. With so many strikes against them, the mere fact Else and Marc survived is amazing. Marc’s war experience also proves to sneering right-wing Americans that not all French citizens during the occupation were anti-Semitic, boot-licking Nazi lackeys. Uncle Marc was nothing of the sort.
One more important aspect of Marc’s political sensibilities must be noted. When he began his writing career he harbored Communist leanings, but his disgust with Stalin’s cruel despotism, coupled with his own belief in individual freedom and liberty, led him far away from the authoritarian, Soviet-styled ideology espoused by Stalin, Mao, and Castro. Marc believed in reform within a system more than revolution against it, and if he were to envision an ideal state in which a citizen should live, I am quite sure the current French state would satisfy his vision greatly. Mostly he railed against the cruel indifference of the elite class and Catholic Church towards the poor and working class, and no matter how famous he became, he never once forgot his humble roots or the many people from his class who were not as fortunate or talented as he. In modern France, hardly anyone suffers from the harsh poverty Marc experienced as a child, and this tremendous social progress has not come about at the expense of personal freedom and liberty for French citizens, so of course Marc would approve. And of course he would still write about the many injustices that exist even today.
After Marc won the Prix Goncourt in 1942, many of his fellow proletarians sneered that this achievement was too “middle class” for their taste. Ironically, Marc seems to have been the only Proletarian Group writer after the war to continue writing with a proletarian idealism, such as in his work Sarcellopolis, which told the story of what it was like to live in post-war council estates, the massive new housing units built after 1954 to improve France’s housing shortage. The council estate chronicled in Marc’s book, the Sarcelles, was built near Le Bourget airport and had a population of 40,000, yet had no secondary schools or cultural centers. This rapid, post-war urbanization created a new kind of psychological depression, called Sarcellitis, which Marc details in his book.
Marc also wrote an excellent biography of Emile Zola, who is my favorite French writer after Uncle Marc and Voltaire. In many ways Zola was merely expanding and re-defining the sense of social justice set down by Voltaire, and Marc Bernard was further expanding the work of Zola. Toward the end of Marc’s career, he paid homage to his hero by writing his biography.
In 1970 Marc was awarded the first Grand Prix Poncetton, which is given to a French writer for his or her entire body of work, in effect a lifetime achievement literary award. The city of Nimes, Marc’s hometown, also named a library after him. Marc has been gone for 25 years but will never be forgotten. I am honored to share blood with this great man. I am also sad that neither I nor any other member of the extended Bernat clan in America ever got to meet him. Luckily, we have his entire body of work to remind us of his brilliant gifts and uplifting human spirit.
My brother and I are both writers, and we take great pride in following and further expanding the proletarian vision of our famous great-uncle. Despite being born and raised in America, holding American citizenship, serving in the American military, and being staunch American patriots, my brother and I will always be French writers at heart. It is a family tradition. And who are we to argue with tradition? Perhaps he and I can embody the Proletarian Group spirit for the future and inspire others as Uncle Marc has inspired us. If we are even luckier, our work will affect change in our country with as great an impact as Marc’s work had in France.
Sources:
1. Le Figaro, Le cercle des amis disparus [poorly translated here] by Bernard Morlino, October 15, 2007.
2. Marc Villemain, Relire Marc Bernard [poorly translated here], October 17, 2007.
Topics: Memoirs | 2 Comments »
Welcome to My New Blog!
By Matthew C. Scheck | July 22, 2008
I am moving my blog off the old cheesy Geocities host and onto my own domain at The Journal of Doubt. Welcome to the new blog! I am using WordPress 2.6 for the time being, mainly because I found Blogger to be incredibly buggie and difficult to ftp to my new host. I am still working on the design.
The following URLs can be used to access the new blog:
journalofdoubt.com
journalofdoubt.net
www.geocities.com/rangerhiq
In a couple of days the old blog will be de-activated and all URL links will be re-directed to the new one.
Topics: General | 1 Comment »
The Doubting Essays II
By Matthew C. Scheck | July 21, 2008
Part Two: E Pluribus Unum
I suppose at this point of my Doubting Essays I should point out that I am not framing my arguments with a particular polemical bent to them. This country spends far too much time mired in senseless partisan bickering, but even worse is that this bickering greatly distracts the citizenry from the pressing issues that deeply affect a vast majority of Americans.
The national media especially loves this acrimonious civil war of ideas—it is, after all, great entertainment to have countless shouting matches between partisan factions on television and the Internet. The more entertaining our public discourse becomes, the more viewers watch it, and hence more commercial time is sold. Partisan bickering is profitable, even if it’s ultimately destructive.
However, in all honesty, neither side is presenting ideas as much as regurgitating the same trite, tired, and tedious catch phrases and slogans, as if reading from the same script that has been handed down from one to the next generation of pundits and so-called public intellectuals who pollute our national conversation so recklessly and pointlessly. This twisted partisan public debate has become the theatre of the absurd, not the exercise of democratic principles. And all the finger pointing and blaming one side directs at the other has taken on an almost cartoonish magnitude lately. Guess who loses? We all do.
I no longer have the energy or will to continue bashing the ideas and positions—or the people who promote them—that are different than mine, even if these ideas and positions are stinking rotten to the core. From now on I am going to present my ideas with as much objectivity as I can muster and let the reader decide their merit. Finger pointing and placing blame no longer serve my goals. There will be no more name calling or ad hominem attacks by me. Gone too will be the acrimony, disgust, demonizing, and mock outrage that are so common in today’s ridiculously contentious partisan atmosphere, replaced by hope and a belief in America and its citizenry to do what is right. I will still present negative criticism of all that I find wrong, but my ultimate goal is to present positive and substantive ideas.
The truth is that most of the problems this country faces did not originate solely from the failed ideas and policies of the left or the right, from conservatives or liberals, from Democrats or Republicans; the truth is that both sides are responsible for the mess we’re in, and the quicker we all realize this—and stop pointing fingers—the quicker we can begin to solve many of the more pressing problems that are crippling the country.
Neither conservatives nor liberals have ever wished to cause this country harm deliberately, and for the most part both sides thought they were acting in the best interest of the country when they enacted the laws and policies and agendas that have led us to the mess in which we’re currently mired. For either side to claim the high moral ground, or place complete blame on the other side for all our problems, is deliberate lying at worst and unctuous disingenuousness at best.
What are our problems? And is America that bad off these days? Or am I just a grumpy pessimist who cannot see the glass half full?
My answer is simple yet also complex. But before I answer, let me position myself to explain why I feel qualified to discuss these matters with such confidence and authority.
Firstly, I consider myself a fairly informed and well-read intellectual. That alone, however, isn’t enough to understand the breadth and complexity of all our problems. I have other unique qualifications that help me see things on a grander scale than most people.
I probably travel around this country, and have seen more of it, than anyone I know. My work provides me the opportunity not only to travel to different places, but also for especially long periods of time, the net result being that for the last twelve years I have actually lived away from my home longer than I have been home. I have spent time in our largest cities and smallest rural communities, in the East, South, Midwest, Northeast, Southwest, and West. And I didn’t just pass through these places for a quick cup of coffee; I lived in them, worked in them, dined at their restaurants, washed my clothes in their laundromats, shopped in their stores, learned much about their history, got drunk in their bars and nightclubs, made friends with far too many locals to count, and, yes, dated lots of their women.
I haven’t experienced this country’s culture from watching it on television or from magazines or the Internet; I have experienced its vast and varied culture mainly from firsthand experience. If you just browse through my archives on this blog you’ll see that many of my dispatches were not only written from a wide variety of places, but also were about those places. I’ve wandered around most of this country observing our culture from so many different perspectives that even I forget some of the places in which I have lived and worked the past twelve years. Luckily I have my personal journals to refresh my memory.
So what have I learned about America? I have learned that America is a great country but also deeply flawed. And these flaws are causing great harm to the health, welfare, and economy of our country.
My mother and father’s generation rose from the ashes of the Great Depression to go out in the world and save it from itself in World War II. Then they came home and built this country into the greatest nation the world has even seen, with not only the greatest economy, but also the most civil, just, and fair society, finally, after nearly 200 years since its founding, living up to the lofty principles set down by its creators. Moreover they spread our greatest democratic principles of equality, justice, and fairness throughout the world, even helping our former enemies to prosper and grow and become free democratic states. By the 1960s the United States of America was the greatest place to live in the history of humankind.
And then, slowly, painfully, and often despite our best efforts, our country has declined, often taking two or three steps backwards for every forward step we’d take, and all the while the often unbridled forces of extreme self interest began to chip away at the common weal, first in open class war between the rich and everyone else, but eventually turning the middle and working classes against themselves, and everyone ended up hating the poor, even the poor. Our infrastructure—public schools, transportation system, health and welfare systems, et al.—once our greatest strength, have all suffered from bad policy decisions and neglect that have turned them all into vastly inferior systems when compared to those of nearly every westernized, industrialized nation in the world.
America still possesses tremendous wealth and is the most powerful nation in the world, but we also suffer from great inequalities of wealth and well being. We lag behind Europe and Japan in nearly every measurable social and economic indicator that matters. In education we rank at the bottom of industrialized nations, as we do in the distribution of wealth and the quality of health care and public transportation. We rank high or the highest in violent crime, infant mortality, obesity, and illiteracy. We incarcerate a higher percentage of our citizens than any industrialized nation. And in nearly every case these indicators are not improving, but are getting much worse or remain stagnant.
The dollar’s value is in steep decline. Our economy is falling into a recession. We have been mired in not one, but two wars, neither of which have an end in sight, all to the immense drain of our military and national wealth. People are working longer and harder to make ends meet. The cost of living has, in the last year, skyrocketed because of huge increases in health care costs and the price of raw materials. Unemployment is on the rise. Recently our housing market has deflated, causing far too many people owing more on their mortgages than their homes are worth, and untold hundreds of thousands of Americans have suffered foreclosures of their property in the last year, the greatest increase in a couple of generations. Banks are failing like a wildfire, and many more banks are choking on the huge losses from the collapsing housing market.
And yet, despite all these troubles, we remain a great country, strong, resolute, and proud, but if things continue down this path much longer we will be facing a crisis nationwide we’ve not experienced since the Great Depression.
We are not prepared for this.
Placing blame as the sole domain of the right or the left, conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats, is an exercise in futility. Ultimately we sink or swim as a single nation, E Puribus Unum, from many, one. The quicker we realize this, the sooner we can begin to fix the myriad of problems we face. We do not always have to agree on how we can fix things, but we have to agree that we must fix these things together, as one nation, one citizenry, and begin the long, hard task of reversing our decline.
Step one is we must reclaim our democracy.
Next: On Democracy and Government
Topics: Philosophy | No Comments »
The Doubting Essays
By Matthew C. Scheck | July 21, 2008
Part One: Values
In which the author discusses how his value system was formed and how these values are out of step with modern culture.
Today I begin a series of essays that are rather harsh and critical about our modern culture, but I write them with great hope and trust in the ability of humankind to change for the better.
In my forty-five years of living I have witnessed the decline of democracy and the rise of a malicious form of corporatism that has turned most citizens of the modern world into subjects at best, and slaves at worst.
To most people, holding such skeptical views as the ones I am going to express in these essays would seem morbid, apathetic, and defeatist, but I am nothing of the sort. I am, however, honest and direct to a fault, so if it is sweet nothings and happy lies you wish whispered softly in your ear, then you have come to the wrong place. Moreover, if it is answers or certainty you seek, you have also come to the wrong place.
In the Doubting Essays I become the faithful witness of the world and culture in which I live, and in that role I will question nearly every aspect of our world that I feel is poisoning our democracy and collective value system, and furthermore I will identify the insidious and malicious forces that are shaping everything so destructively.
Recently I learned I have a medical condition that makes the rest of my life a crap shoot with the odds stacked against me. I could live for many years or my aorta could explode at any moment. I’ve spent most of my life almost crippled by anxiety and self doubt, but since I learned of my present condition I have found a peace within myself that makes me completely unafraid of my uncertain future. There’s a freaky calm about myself that even I find disturbing, and yet I don’t worry about that either. I don’t worry at all. So please remember that as you read these essays. I already have a gun to my head and the trigger is very well oiled, so I am beyond fear at this point. I have nothing to lose and nothing from which to hide. The unpredictability of my mortality has brought me great strength.
So here I go.
We like to think we live in the greatest age, and in some ways we do. Our technology is brilliant and has created a world community that communicates with itself at the speed of light. We are awash in gadgets and scientific breakthroughs that help us live longer and in greater comfort. The standard of living in westernized, industrial nations is higher than it has ever been. Moreover, in the last ten years, Third World nations such as China and India have made tremendous strides to improve their economies and standard of living. Globalization and free trade have never flourished as they do today.
And yet…there is much to criticize about today’s world, and much more to lament.
I shall begin by establishing who I am and what I believe. First I will tell you what I am not: I am not famous; I am not fabulously educated with a trunk full of degrees and academic honors; I am not a sage, guru, or prophet seeking to lead a flock to some promised land; I am not a particularly erudite or eloquent writer; I am not even very likable or worthy of much admiration.
I am an average person with average intelligence, fairly well read, but not a scholar by any accord, and I certainly don’t hold myself up as an example of anything good or virtuous or moral. There is nothing exceptional about me except that I am stubborn, fearless, and extremely self-confident. Most people find me enigmatic and strange, a confusing mess of intelligence and hyperkinetic energy who lacks humility and tact, and with poor social skills even in my most charming moments. I rarely make good first impressions, but even my least affectionate admirers would admit that my few virtues and positive personal attributes greatly outweigh my multitude of neurotic pathologies.
I suppose the best description of me is that, personally, I make little sense. However, what I say and write often makes great sense. I have always been grounded in common sense and rational thinking, and while the expression of my thoughts has often made people feel uncomfortable and even angry, that hasn’t meant I have been wrong. I have never been able to deliver my ideas with a spoonful of sugar to make it more easily digestible, and I certainly won’t do that in these essays to follow.
I was raised in a modest, lower middle-class home by a widowed mother who had to support the five of her nine children still living at home after my father passed away at the age of 48 in 1973, so I understood at a young age the idea of self-sacrifice and selflessness, just by my Mom’s excellent example.
Because money was tight and Mom had to work full time, my siblings and I learned the value of modesty, thriftiness, moderation, and self-reliance. We were too poor to be materialistic and avaricious, but at the same time, because we were well-spoken, proud, and carried ourselves with dignity and class, we always seemed much better off to our peers than we were. We were, in effect, poor snobs. Just because we grew up in the lower income bracket didn’t mean we had to act like peasants and uncouth morons. This fierce sense of self pride was ingrained in us by our very proud, intelligent, and classy mother. Poverty is a state of mind and much as a state of being, and therefore in our minds we were never poor.
My mother and father were members of what has been called the “Greatest Generation,” and I would agree with that sentiment. Both were born in the 1920s and lived through the Great Depression and World War II, and both lived their lives with the kind of modesty, decency, and lack of selfishness that hardly anyone from my generation even understands any more, let alone tries to embody. Their moral compass always pointed them in the right direction no matter how hard life ever became for them. My father served in the war as a Coast Guard signalman and saw plenty of action in the Pacific Theater, and my mother worked as a civilian with the Army Air Corps, so both had a sense of self-sacrifice for a cause much greater than themselves. Plus many of their friends and loved ones died in that horrible war in numbers that my generation cannot even imagine. Obviously, both would have rather not lived through the economic depression and global war that followed, and for the rest of their lives they tried their best to make it so their children would not have to live in such a vile, unforgiving, and cruel world as it was in their youth.
Even before my father died in 1973, we weren’t exactly living in the lap of luxury. Raising nine children on a teacher’s salary in the 50s, 60s, and 70s didn’t leave my parents much room for luxurious living even in the best of times, but at the same time we lived a modestly middle class life where my parents owned their own home and could afford to keep their children clothed and fed, plus in the summers, which my father had off because he was a teacher, we’d pack up our camper and head off to the state parks, campgrounds, and wilderness preserves all over the Midwest, where we shared some of the best times my family ever experienced. The one great aspect of being a teacher was you got tons of time off to spend with your family in the summer, and my old man exploited this benefit about as much as any of his peers. You just cannot place a monetary value to how important this became in our lives to be able to spend so much time with our excellent father.
After my father died things got rough for a while economically, but we were never broke and could still eke out a fairly middle class lifestyle with my mother working and dad’s pension (the Illinois teachers union was magnificent) and Social Security benefits making up the difference in the income lost from my father’s death. We never had to augment our income with Food Stamps or Welfare, but I am sure we would have if things had gotten any worse. My mother was thrifty, frugal, and completely selfless, and could stretch a dollar with great skill. I never once felt as if we were struggling or that our situation was hopeless or even unfair. It just was what it was, and while my mother kept us afloat economically with such great skill, more importantly she helped us walk through life with our heads held high. Not once in my youth did I ever feel poor or disadvantaged.
Moreover, greed was something we never quite understood well in my family, or, better yet, greed and avarice never took much of a hold on our psyches. I am proud I grew up in a home where I didn’t always get what I wanted even if everyone else had these things. It taught me that my life doesn’t have to be enriched by the things I “have” to have just because everyone else has them, and that I can survive the indignity of not always relenting to peer pressure and how it would affect my standing among my peers because I didn’t have all those things (the best sneakers and clothes, or a cool car after I was 16) that would have made me “hip” or “cool,” or seem “rich” in their eyes. I wasn’t rich and I wasn’t hip or cool, and I didn’t care, which helped me to survive my youth with my sensibilities about myself and the world around me fairly undamaged.
Because I came from a large and relatively poor family, I learned early on the value of shared sacrifice and selflessness. Hailing from a huge family with nine kids, fourteen grandkids, and nine great-grandkids, I have been saddled with familial responsibility since before I was a teenager. After my father died, my older siblings always looked out for me, and then when they became parents, I have always been a stable, positive, loving, and extremely generous presence in the lives of their children and grandchildren. Since I am a bachelor and don’t have kids of my own, being an uncle to such a massive brood has been the most enriching aspect of my life.
What has made matters worse for my family is that, since 2001 my strong, brilliant, and amazing mother, who has been the rock of my family for nearly sixty years, has slowly declined from Alzheimer’s to the point where she is mostly gone to us these days, still alive but with most of what made her wonderful lost amid the madness and complete lack of clarity in which her brain is engulfed. Since I was 10 I have dreaded losing my mother, and now that it has happened I’m about as lost as I have ever been. Luckily she raised me to never lose hope even in the worst of times, but losing her wise council has probably made my moral compass much more difficult to read these days. I have spent most of my adult life living it in a way that wouldn’t disappoint my mother, and now I find myself wondering if any of that matters any more. We shall see.
What furthered my development in a positive way was that I lived outside American popular culture from the age of 19 until I was 27, so by the time I returned to it I never really fit in and often found myself confounded by the images and messages of the American mass media and its sponsors. The rampant materialism, unbridled greed and avarice, and myopic solipsism that our popular culture promotes always seemed foreign and repugnant to me.
Our modern culture is repressively materialist in a way that is actually sad and mostly destructive. So many people define their identity by their material possessions instead of by their intelligence and knowledge and wisdom. Outward signs of your martial wealth (or looks) are much more easily recognized by your neighbors and peers than your more inherent qualities, which don’t always manifest in ways that people can see superficially. Most people have self-images based upon on completely false indicators of their self-worth as individuals.
For the most part, our culture and its people have become unconscious. Most people today want to live in a world where, as long as they have bountiful food and material possessions, they don’t care who makes decisions for them.
We have lived with almost fifty years of relentless marketing in our mass media and its effects upon our national psyche. We watch commercials and the phony world they portray, and without too many filters this kind of thinking engulfs our sensibilities until most of our decisions are driven by unconscious desires placed in our minds from powerful forces who only wish us to buy more of their products as a way of satiating these unconscious desires and insecurities that their marketing invokes in our mind.
Marketing has become almost devious in how it creates a neurotic insecurity in people so overwhelming that they are completely susceptible to the power marketers have in selling useless shit to people that they don’t need but feel they need because somehow owning these things empowers them. Marketing creates a psyche where you are never beautiful enough, thin enough, or rich enough to be worthy of others. If only you have these THINGS your life will be so balanced, you will be beautiful and perfect, you will be a complete person, and people will love you and want to hang out with you! We are what we consume, and what we consume is us.
This relentless assault on our sensibilities has changed us in ways most of us cannot even recognize. Popular culture in and of itself is a giant marketing scheme to get people to buy things they don’t need but feel they have to have. Without this mindless consumption our economy would falter. So it has become an endless cycle from which we have no idea how to slow down or stop. Far too many of us live in debt to finance our fantasy world, and because of this massive personal debt people have much less social mobility than they would like to admit.
Our modern age has made solipsism, self-worship, and greed much more important than modesty, and moderation, self-sacrifice, civic duty, shared responsibility, and community. Why else do you suppose so many people have been turned off to government and democracy? Democracy requires participation and effort, and within it you don’t always get your way. Plus democracy is a slow and balanced means of governance that requires informed debate, compromise, consideration, and the synthesis of all ideas and values, and, more than anything, a shared responsibility between the citizenry and its elected governors. In our modern culture we far too often seek decisive leaders, instant gratification, and easy answers, all of which are anti-democratic. Far too many people would gladly embrace an authoritarian rule simply because it is more efficient and expedient.
Government is the only legitimate power structure we citizens own, and without effective government we become more like subjects than citizens, trapped between the competing self-interests of corporations and powerful groups.
Our culture loves to tout individuality, but only if ten million people are expressing this “individuality” exactly the same way by the products they own. Or by how they look. Or by what they drive. Or what crappy but well-marketed beer they drink. We just want “the best” for us and our kids. What we fail to consider is what this means for the rest of the world, or for our own future. Our neurotic need to satiate these unconscious desires and insecurities has forced much of the Third World to provide the raw materials and cheap labor to fuel our self love, and all the while their world has turned to shit while we bask in the glory of our reflection in the mirror.
The sad thing is so few of us even consider how this mindless and conspicuous consumption and unbridled egocentrism is going to affect the future of our progeny and their world.
Our national debt alone, coupled with a declining work force (and taxpayer base) in the next 100 years is going to bankrupt our country. And lords knows how badly we are affecting the environment with our relentless pursuit of good times and owning more shit than we really need.
Ah, but this is something so few will talk about. It is very uncool to talk about moderation and environmentalism and turning back the tide of conspicuous consumption. Its almost becomes sacrilegious to speak of such things in America. Once again, marketing is doing its job. There is a large army of sophists and false prophets whose sole purpose is to eradicate or debase any and all dissent of our consumer culture and the corporatist empire that rules us. We are free as long as we do what we are told and keep our mouth shut. And shop; we are constantly told to shop.
Isn’t it odd that more people place faith in corporations, organized religions, and the marketplace than in their democratic government? We live in strange times indeed, and this is the strangest aspect of our culture. It all comes back to values. Our collective value system has broken down as much as any other aspect of our culture. Because of this, our democracy is in decline, our economic system is quickly plummeting, and our culture is rotten to the core. We are neither bad people nor malicious, but we’re lost and ignorant, angry and afraid, and our values have been twisted and distorted by the relentless assault upon our minds by the lords of corporatism.
What can we do to fix all this? How do we change? Where do we go from here to make things better? I wish I had even a few answers to these questions, but I don’t. What I can do is ask the right questions and identify our problems with honesty and candor. I am far from perfect, and I would never claim to be anything more than a rational thinker guided by a healthy amount of doubt and skepticism, but I sincerely wish to be part of the solution for our future and not just another whiny, apathetic, and cynical malcontent. I will tell you this: all of the solutions to our problems reside within ourselves and not with some higher power.
Much of what I’m going to write in the following essays will make most people uncomfortable, or worse, will make them angry. I only hope that people who read them will try their best not to take my criticism personally. I am not criticizing any of you personally. Also, I reserve my harshest criticism for myself and my thinking, so please understand that I am much harder on myself than any of you. I most certainly do not think I am smarter than any of you, or better than any of you, so please don’t think otherwise.
Next: E Pluribus Unum, in which the author disusses why all Americans share the blame for our troubles, not just one or the other side of the political spectrum.
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