First Rahm Emanuel — Barack Obama’s chief of staff — said torture is okay, as long as we’re the ones doing the torturing. In a sharp turn toward an ethical position, Obama himself actually concurred with the rule of law, indicating we just might prosecute those responsible for torturing alleged terrorists (which, according to the Bush administration, includes anybody Dubya says … because he says).
Joe Bageant’s recent piece, Escape from the Zombie Food Court, is a classic. He clearly and concisely dismisses the notion that our lives are lived in anything resembling freedom. The corporate media and their primary brainwashing device, television, have taken care of that:
As the sucker rally on Wall Street passed the four-week mark, your president, Congressional delegations, and media worked themselves into a lather explaining how a recovery was under way. To which James Howard Kunstler appropriately asks, “recovery to what?”
I love the Socratic aspect of academia, and it’s the part I do best. I supervise nine independent-study projects this semester, with a total of ten students. Most of them have spent a weekend at the mud hut, or soon will. Indeed, I’m just back from the mud hut, where I spent the weekend with one of the students, the poet in resident at the renowned University of Arizona Poetry Center. He called the trip “transformative.” I meet regularly with all the students, probing and pushing until they do more and better work than any of us thought possible. Ditto for the small, hard-working herd of graduate students I advised and mentored during two wonderful decades.
As we pass from the industrial age to the post-carbon era, the mantra of real-estate agents comes to mind. But the important factor isn’t so much “location, location, location” as “community, community, community.” The latter can be created in any location. Well, except for those locations the United States bombs into the stone age. It’s tough to build community when the U.S. military is carpet-bombing the ‘hood.
If you believe your life depends upon water coming out the taps and food showing up at the grocery store, you’ll defend to the death the system that keeps water coming out the taps and food showing up at the grocery story. News flash: If your life depends on that system, you’re a very unusual human, especially historically, and you support a culture of death. And you’re sorely mistaken, besides.
Let’s review.