I have read many exhortations, in many forms and guises over the past three years, to “speak truth to power”.
I guess something’s up.
I was deeply struck today, when casually reading a recent entry on Doc Searls’ blog, in a way that helped me piece together a bevy of floating semi-connected thoughts I’ve held for quite a while, in a loose-ish frame.
Doc was making some sort-of wrap up after the election comments on his blog, when he came across an essay written by an elderly North Carolinian columnist. Here’s the part that struck me:
Early one Saturday evening, after my aunt’s funeral, I drove south from Rochester, N.Y., into the Allegheny foothills. In late September twilight I drove 90 miles, almost to Pennsylvania, before I found a motel or any substantial sign of life. The dozen towns I drove through were ghost towns, with empty streets, empty storefronts and scarcely 20 functioning businesses that I could count — and 15 of those sold pizza. It was like a medieval countryside emptied by the plague. Do ghosts eat pizza?
Every 40 miles or so a Wal-Mart sits like a fortress in the same medieval landscape, the Wal-Mart that murdered these once-charming villages, that created five mega-billionaires on the latest list of the super-rich, that controls all the retail business and most of the jobs that remain in wasted rust-belt regions like Western New York. And I know from the experience of living there, as well as the flags and ribbons, that most of these people support the war and support this president. Out here even the ghosts vote Republican.
It’s here in the empty country that the great Republican gullibility holds sway. People surrender their soldier-children, their votes, their meager taxes without a murmur, then call in to rightwing radio hosts to rage about abortionists and same-sex marriage. Where hope is hard to find, people turn to more accessible emotions, like anger and fear. They need enemies to give them purpose in the world, and if Osama bin Laden is out of range they’re happy to substitute you and me — the too-tolerant, too-skeptical “secular humanists” for whom, ironically, the post-Enlightenment American democracy was expressly designed.
The Republicans are wondrous manipulators of these lost souls, these disenfranchised Middle Americans. But Kansas isn’t our enemy. It’s our responsibility, as a few serious politicians understand. Sander Levin, Democratic congressman from Michigan, is an intelligent, compassionate, somewhat sorrowful-looking old man who looks like the Hollywood stereotype of the wise old liberal legislator. On his wedding anniversary, he drove out to a Kerry fundraiser in upscale Chevy Chase, Md., to rally the troops, who had been reading discouraging polls.
I have lived in a variety of places in the USA, in Canada, and Europe, travelled reasonably widely, and have also borne witness to the incredible scope and pace of change that has invaded our individual consciousness since the mass adoption and embedding of the computer in our lives. I have done menial blue-collar work for long enough to have had callouses that lasted a year or more. Several years later I had migrated to being a financial analyst and learning how to build spreadsheets and construct logical macros. Eventually, wiith the years I also became polished enough as an intellectual courtesan to have also worked in some of the boardrooms of some of the largest corporations on Earth. I have been lucky enough, and I suppose smart enough, to adapt effectively a number of times to very different circumstances.
In fact, for a good decade or so, I was a senior consultant in areas such as compensation, organizational design and development, leadership and organizational change - areas that (I believe) have given me some insights into human motivation, psychology, learning, adaptability, and the polar opposites … inertia, unconsciousness, refusal to admit new facts and learn, lack of flexibility and so on.
Several things struck me in the piece above. First, I spent the years from 7 to 13 in deep rural New Jersey, living in a house surrounded by farms. My parents were middle-class (or higher, there, I guess) professionals, and they decided that when it was time for me to go to high school that I would not go to school there, as the general level of education was, let’s say, less than first-rate (and I thank them for that decision). I am reminded, in the context I’ve offered, that there are many people who have grown up in and remained in such places, even though many would now be suburbs or near-suburbs.
And, before I go any further, I am categorically NOT suggesting that the people generally who live in such rural areas are dumb (some are, some aren’t). All I’m saying is that many have access to a different set of circumstances than others of us … and maybe that a certain proposrtion of people don’t move far from where they grew up.
But in that growing up … many have grown up inculcated with the same messages about the America that at least half the USA feels has disappeared, or is sinking out of sight very rapidly … the America of the pledge of allegiance, of In God We Trust, where corporations are powerful, authority figures (especially strong ones) are to be obeyed, play the American game and you’ll be alright, foreigners, especially brown ones, look, smell, talk and act funny, boys aren’t supposed to love boys and girls aren’t supposed to love girls (all the daily playground and hangin’-with-friends messages you’ll remember from grade school and high school).
Someone who is 45 today and lives in rural or semi-rural America was 20 years old in 1985, and 10 years old in 1975, just as the Vietnam War was wrapping itself up, and just as Watergate was playing out. In what proportion of such folks, and to what degree, will they have experienced, assimilated, understood, and adapted to the new wrold we are beginning to experience … the one that is in the tall office buildings in New York City, in the slums of Philadelphia, in the lay-off scarred neighbourhoods of Chicago, in the urban cool of San Francisco ?
Since that time (in 1975 I was 20 and just graduating from university, and had only a vague notion there were things called computers), we have been launched into the Information Age, if not the Knowledge Age … business as a movement, with its business and revenue moidels, cost accountants, financial derivatives and business process reengineering has come and gone, and is now being fine tuned with the help of RFID chips and increasingly intelligent code-based algorithms, and on and on.
Paradigm shifts were talked about all the time 15 years ago …. everyone nodded understandingly, and went about doing what they did the day before, and what they would do the same way the next day … especially in rural, non-urban areas. But I don’t think many people really understood what they might mean then, and how the paradigm has and hasn’t shifted.
Those Wal-Marts cited up above … they’re wired, man. The process engineers they use are the best ones on the planet. I’ll bet they use all sorts of exotic forward contracts to hedge any losses they might contemplate with any of the billions of loose cash likely to be found in their transfer accounts. The Information Age has blown through all the ghost towns where Wal-Mart has called, and not much is left standing … as the author vividly describes.
Now, for the people part of all this. Evidently, the election just past was won on “moral values”. I believe that an awful lot of the people who voted for George Bush were actually voting based on vague feelings of a vestigial 1960’s security and grace. They long for the America of the American Dream, using an irrational and religion-abetted denial that what has happened all around them, and increasingly around the world, is real. And GWB, Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al are dishonest enough and cynical enough, and yes Machiavellian enough to use that dumbstruck fear and denial to their advantage, to create a machine that at times looks invincible. And, to make matters worse, they are probably close to the stage where they are getting drunk on their power.
I maintain … steadfastly … that the best movie I’ve yet seen about the (eventual) effects of interconnectedness and the Web is a small, and in my opinion underappreciated classic film titled Pleasantville. I think it represents a paradigm shift, and a celebration of the magic in each individual human which can only flourish in community with others, in appreciation.
There’s a scene in the movie in which the father of the two protagonists, aided by the Mayor, the Police Chief, the School Principal, and the Town Businessman, put on trial the young people they believe are the perps behind all the strange changes going on in Pleasantville. It doesn’t work … the changes are too human, too real, too principles-based … the people of the town push back and begin speaking truth to power.
I believe that many many people in the USA are isolated from the rest of the world, their psyches fed by television, new cars, and the ever-present fear of losing their jobs, even if those jobs are at best meaningless and at worst demeaning. I believe some wag has termed this state of affairs Wealth Bondage.
They haven’t been helped to understand that these changes are happening all over the world, and that while some of the changes require new job skills training, others require skills such as open minds, curiosity, literacy, tolerance, civility, responsibility to a community and so on. I say that in the full knowledge that there have been reams of articles, and scores of books all aimed at explaining the massive changes that have occurred and continue to arrive on our doorsteps … all well-intentioned, by smart people, with some degree or other of an effective picture of the changes and some partially-effective remedies or recipes for adaptability.
There’s something missing, or “croche” (crooked, bent) as the Quebeckers would say. I believe it lies in the messages I learn at Wealth Bondage, or over at How To Save the World (my friend Dave Pollard).
We have been seduced, by marketing, by the belief that we have an entitled right to a way of life that has been built artificially. We are coerced, by the need for money and thus a job, into collusion with a machine designed for controlling us (having us swallow TV and crap cash) and keeping 95% of the people labouring away to the benefit of the other 5% who managed to get into the club, and have no hearts, care not for their fellow human (protestations to the contrary notwithstanding).
At this stage of my life, for me, one little speck of humanity in the long arc of time, I can do nothing better with my time and energy than speak truth to power.
I hope others feel the same way, not because I want to be right, but because I don’t want to feel so lonely.
Update
John Perry Barlow covers the same ground, basically, but about a thousand times better … wish I could write like he does.
And what he has written brings to mind a quote from Barbara Marx Hubbard I have never forgotten …
… “It’s too late for pessimism”