Wingnuts of America, I Salute You

© Charles D. Hayes

In the movie Gladiator, at the opening of the games, an arena combatant says, "We who are about to die salute you." Having entered my eighth decade on the planet, I can relate to his assertion, hopefully with a bit more time left than an imminent contest. I am, though, nearing checkout time, and I am concerned about the future that subsequent generations will inherit when my mine has fought its last battle. That said, here are some political behaviors and beliefs that I find encouraging:

 

o   If you are one of those people who have nothing but contempt for the government and who never tire of trashing everything public, while championing everything private—with the exception of the Pentagon— by all means keep it up.

o   If you never miss a chance to disparage immigrants, especially those whose labor makes it possible for you to eat inexpensive fruit and vegetables, I encourage you to pick up the pace and increase the audible decibels of your rhetoric.

o   If you constantly harp about ending a woman's right to choose whether or not she will give birth to a child against her wishes, for whatever reason, please don't stop. Instead, put more effort into upping the level of vitriol about reversing Rowe v. Wade.  

o   If you are one of those people who think Ayn Rand hung the moon with her declaration that selfishness is our greatest virtue, please spread the word and give my regards to John Galt.

o   If you think that one person, one vote is an antiquated notion and that whatever you can do to gerrymander and rig election laws to prevent your political opponents from voting is legitimate, then by all means continue and send out frequent press releases.

o   If you think Wall Street has been shackled with unnecessary regulations, please raise your voice and make yourself heard. Start gathering donations for the next bailout.

o   If you if think gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage, please don't miss an opportunity to make your point with all of the supporting reasons you can muster about how it will adversely affect your own marriage.

o   If you think we need a military that is bigger than it is now, please tell us why at every chance you get.

o   If you think we should do away with the minimum wage so that more people can be employed at slave wages, please print up some handbills and put an ad in your local newspaper. Then get a burglar alarm for your home. 

o   If you think insurance companies should be completely in charge of medical treatment, speak up.

o   If you believe there should be no restrictions, whatsoever, on the private ownership of firearms, including background checks, please say so. Show us pictures of your bazooka.

o   If you believe that America is a bastion of socialism, where government deregulation is all we need to reenergize the economy, tell your legislators, but don't forget your neighbors.

o   If you believe that Social Security and Medicare should be abolished, please shout it out. Then subscribe to the Hemlock Society newsletter because you may need it.               

 

If you agree with any and especially all or most of the points above, I salute you. I do so because this means there is hope for the future. There is hope because you and your party are hell-bent on self-destruction. It means that your narrow views and the bigotry and contempt you spew forth toward those you deem to be pathologically different (calling it plain old common sense) is finally being seen for the shallow thinking that it represents.

 

American demographics are changing the political landscape toward a more thoughtful and tolerant society. If you persist with your vitriol, your political party will soon be small enough to drown in a bathtub.   

 

Over time, perhaps, some of you will wake up and realize that you don't have ideas so much as ideas have you—that the totality of your worldview comprises shallow assumptions that you cling to in spite of never having studied any relevant subject in depth. Worse, your opinions are not well reasoned. Instead, they amount secondhand insecurities borrowed from ignorant individuals whose major concerns in life are best described as identity-based paranoia. The world is moving on and away from overt racism and bigotry, which in the past were routinely passed off by your fellow travelers as patriotism. These attitudes are anything but.

 

The vast majority of extreme right-wing rhetoric that has been so prominent in America for the past two decades is a strain of populist contempt that bears no relation, whatsoever, to the ideas upon which America was founded. The movement to make abortion illegal has much more to do with protecting an authoritative masculine worldview than with an actual concern for children. This is easy to confirm if you get close enough to see what most of the proponents really value when it comes to the choices they make in life.   

 So go on. Sip your tea, wear funny hats, shoulder muskets, and carry placards with hateful slogans, because you and your ideas belong with the flintlock era. Once again, I salute you farewell and wish you and your ilk good riddance. Don't let the Constitution hit you in the face on your way out the door.

 

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Putting Worldviews in Perspective

© Charles D. Hayes

Imagine visitors from another planet landing on the earth and drawing up a profile of human beings to send home. Surely one of their main reporting points would be that this is an incredibly diverse species with an immeasurable range of individuals, and yet, if the neural matter in each of their heads doesn’t form similar patterns, they are prone to set about killing one another. As a footnote the visitors would likely observe that once certain brain patterns set up and become deeply ingrained they are difficult or nearly impossible to change or alter.

 

Unless they regarded such behavior as normal, I suspect the aliens would leave earth trying to figure out how a species that seems to defend individual initiative so strongly would strive so hard to emulate the regimented behavior of insects. It would puzzle them that so many individuals could insist on bee-like or ant-like behavior from their fellow man and would readily condemn those who are reluctant to conform as being unpatriotic or subversive in some way. Returning to their own planet, our visitors could easily speculate that if these human beings were only secure enough in their own views to be able to tolerate contrary views, the killing might stop.  

 

My own inquiry suggests that once a person’s fundamental beliefs are formed, they are very much like snapshots or still photos, and extraordinary efforts will be required to justify a reshoot. On the one hand, this propensity ensures our survival because it enables us to make instantaneous decisions based on confirmation with our photographic assumptions. But this propensity also threatens our existence for the very same reason. We are too quick to make up our minds, since we require only a hint of confirmation from our stored mental picture to confirm the views we already hold. In too many instances we make no room for alternatives or exceptions, and we ignore or reject contrary evidence.

 

All human beings, regardless of where we are on this planet, are born into reality shelters that we commonly refer to as our culture. The late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that cultures amount to codified hero systems in which members are aided in seeming to transcend death through deeds and their reverence for icons and symbols. And thus we grow up with a take on reality given to us in such nuanced and discreet ways that we remain unaware that we are internalizing an off-the-shelf worldview. If we aren’t careful, it can stultify and set up like software that can't be overwritten or reprogrammed.

 

After more than 30 years of dedicated self-education, and now at age 70, I’m confident that educator Neil Postman was right when he said, “Education is a defense against culture.” It’s that and more. We live in our heads. What we do with the knowledge that our respective cultures insist we put there, and how we deal with it, set the tenor, tone, and trajectory of our lives. What we learn and come to know is important, but it’s what we strive hard to understand beyond our culture that determines the essence of our character, what we do with our lives, how we relate to others, and how and for what we are likely to be remembered.

 

That things are often not as they appear is one of life’s most important lessons—so glaringly self-evident, in fact, that few of us doubt it. Unfortunately, even fewer of us heed the lesson. From an early age, we are taught that appearances are deceiving, and yet we do not hesitate to take a firm position on matters we’ve never really looked into beyond a superficial appraisal. We are quick to make baseless snap judgments that diminish our potential for achieving a just democratic society, even as those judgments add to our personal angst and inflame our contempt for matters we haven’t yet investigated.

 

A willingness to learn can trump our predisposition to act tribally and selfishly. It can dispel our mistrust of those whose politics, religions, traditions, and lifestyles we’ve not previously made an effort to understand. It adds quality to our lives, making the term golden years something more than a cliché. A willingness to learn and to continue learning is our best chance to leave the world a better place.

 

Computers are not much help unless we have many rewritable programs. In similar fashion, our lives are much less enjoyable if the software in our heads has solidified and our minds can't be changed. It is an unfortunate trait of our species that we are predisposed toward an ethos of the fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion, and that we will argue vociferously over subjects we know nothing, whatsoever, about.

 

All one has to do to verify this is read a sufficient number of letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers. Popular talking points serve as substitutes for in-depth knowledge, and arrogance stands in for a willingness to do one's homework before commenting. Limited worldviews lead to misunderstanding and to the warring conflict that follows.

 

Extraterrestrial visitors could understandably have a hard time getting their minds around our egotism and our unwillingness to learn beyond our cultural indoctrination. I can imagine them scratching their heads on the way home, wondering if there are any other species in the universe who reach adulthood and think they already know everything they need to about everything important without a purposeful intention to continue learning.

 

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An Exploitation Tax Is Past Due

© Charles D. Hayes

Many full-time employees of some of America's largest employers need government assistance, including food stamps. Guess who picks up the tab? Right: we do, the taxpayers. I say it’s long past time for the repatriation of work, and it’s time to impose an exploitation tax on those whose compensation strategy ensures that their employees will experience long-term poverty. Job creators should not be poverty enablers.

 
Young people find it hard to believe when I tell them about growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, when an entry-level job, even at a gas station, made it possible to earn a decent living. It was a time when working man was synonymous with virtue. Not so anymore. Working men and women today are considered chumps by those who preach the high-finance version of success. That people don't earn enough to support a family is considered a character flaw instead of what it is: contrived inequality. 

 Over a period of four decades, the essence of work has been systematically devalued, while the worth and legislative influence of capital in the financial sector has soared. Wall Street functions more and more like a casino.

 

This is an economic perversion, undermining the truth of what one of our Republican presidents once made clear in this statement: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” So said Abraham Lincoln.

 

But today, instead of having a much higher consideration for labor, we give it little or none. Right-to-work laws are a euphemism for the right to lower wages and to stifle dissent.   

From the early 1900s until 1970, wages for working people kept rising. We were one of the most equal opportunity countries in the world (unless one was a minority, but that’s another article). When I was in grade school, corporate taxes amounted to about $1.50 for every dollar from individuals. Today corporations pay about 25 cents in taxes for every dollar paid by individuals. The tax burden has shifted dramatically because of lobbied influence. Wages for working people have suffered stagnation since the 1970s while CEO compensation has increased more than 725 percent. The result is that about a third of our citizens are now poor.

 There is nothing divine about wages or free markets. These numbers do not come from God. They are not shaped by virtue. Wages in many cases are not remotely in sync with the actual value of the work they represent. Wages express relationships of power, or a lack of it. Those with authority and control are insulted by hourly wages—they get salaries, bonuses, and stock options.

 In Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a compelling argument that some aspects of our society thrive on disorder and some failures are necessary in order to compensate and thus grow stronger. He makes clear in clinical fashion that actions have consequences and that we learn more from failure than from theory. Fragile systems weaken with error. Anti-fragile systems gain strength from stressors in the same manner that our bodies protect themselves by building up immunity from exposure to germs. America's workforce should be anti-fragile too, but it's not. Let me explain why.

I grew up with a generation that paid great heed to the parable of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant worked hard storing up for the coming winter, while the grasshopper played. When winter came, the grasshopper asked the ant for food and shelter but was turned away. Lesson learned.

If one were to rewrite that fairy tale today, however, it would be wise to include buzzards appearing and raiding the ant’s storehouse. The financial sector operates under the guise of being a crucial component of the economy, but its increasing propensity to gamble recklessly with other people's money amounts to scavenging off of the labor of the men and women who keep our economy in gear.

 We human beings are viscerally wired to be wary of free riders. We are so sensitive about the issue that we are easily manipulated emotionally. This is why we overreact with penalties for failure that cost the public more than they cost the individuals we think we are punishing. It's why stinginess prevails when it comes to helping impoverished families.

This is why generations of children grow up lacking the resources that enable them to function economically and emotionally. This is why we spend more to keep people in prison than in school. And this is why we are so easily distracted by the disingenuous rhetoric of buzzards when they try to scare us with tales about ravenous grasshoppers. Taleb reminds us that never before in history have so many people with so little downside exposure exerted so much control over our economy. People with no skin in the game, as he puts it. I prefer to call them buzzards.

The real chumps today are those of us who have watched the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from the bottom up to the top two percent, and have remained silent. Taleb provides us with an aphorism that should become the primary functional app for navigating the twenty-first century: "If you see fraud and you do not say fraud, you are a fraud."

 Elsewhere I have ridiculed Newt Gingrich as being a hypocritical politician with bad ideas. But just as Taleb has provided us with a face-saving aphorism, Gingrich has given us the operative metaphor to redress raging inequality. During his run for president, he said we need to replace the social safety net with a trampoline. It was, and is, the most sensible and stupendous thing said about inequity in decades. We need to see to its creation before the buzzards strip us clean to the bone.

Taleb offers us another great word: optionality. Options, indeed, are what’s missing at the bottom rungs of society in order to make it anti-fragile. This subject warrants aggressive exploration. An option is what happens on a trampoline with each bounce.

 But for now, nothing is more important, in my view, than the repatriation of work. We begin by imposing an exploitation tax. Here is how it works:

Any company whose full-time workers qualify for food stamps or public assistance would pay an exploitation tax. And so would the companies who arrange their work schedules in a way that categorizes their employees as part-time to avoid paying additional benefits. The amount would be determined by that expression that grates on my nerves but is appropriate in this case: it is what it is. In other words, the tax would cover the cost of the taxpayer subsidy with enough additional penalty to inspire just compensation to begin with. 

We Americans are the chumps for ever having let inequality get so egregiously out of control, and we will be chumps as long as these people laugh all the way to the bank while letting taxpayers subsidize their employees. The executives who run businesses that can't pay a living wage and stay in business need to close shop. Fiefdoms demanding that workers be paid wages commensurate with indentured servitude belong in history books. Such work is better left undone.

Moreover, if executives and entrepreneurs can donate hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates, then, as Alaska writer Shannyn Moore points out, they can easily pay higher taxes. Better yet, let them pay their workers a living wage directly, thus regaining their own self-respect and effecting the repatriation of work in the process.

In 1914 Henry Ford shocked the nation when he more than doubled worker wages to a record five dollars a day. But he didn't do it for benevolent reasons. Paying a living wage solved his high turnover problem, improved production quality, and inspired company loyalty. His workers gained the respect of their community, and they were able to purchase the products they produced, which increased demand. Treating workers with respect and paying them well was good business a century ago and it still is today.

The notion that raising wages costs jobs is a myth sustained by unrelenting mantras, but it's still a myth. If business owners want to avoid taxes, let them do right by their employees and avoid an exploitation tax. It's long past time for American citizens to rescind the right to exploit without penalty.    

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Driven Apart: Failure in a Land of Plenty

© Charles D. Hayes

A plethora of new books suggest America has entered a state of rapid decline. Two recent works on this subject, both heavily footnoted, are worthy of attention. One is by an elitist on the right and the other by one on the left. In contrast, a third new book is full of hope.

The first to consider is Coming Apart: The State of White American, 1960-2010 by sociologist Charles Murray, whose work I've been reading for years. He refers to himself as a libertarian, although a better characterization might be that he is an ideologue's ideologue. For decades he's argued in a subtle and often guarded tone that some of us are just morally and genetically inferior to others, and he has become rather adept at appearing to stumble accidently onto his biases. In other words, his narratives contain a thinly disguised philosophy that is implied rather than stated outright. 

Coming Apart offers lots of good data, and the contents could make a really good book if the author had been intellectually honest about what has driven us apart. Murray, however, has never been quite smart enough to avoid the transparency of his biases, even when they are cloaked in his data. He submits a two-pronged account of how America is fracturing into enclaves of upper class and lower class, portrayed as Belmont and Fishtown respectively. We are asked to pay no attention to the cause. Instead Murray lays the book out so the unsuspecting will discover his predetermined conclusions embedded in his statistics along with him. He wants us to ignore the greed and lobbied power that have in effect looted the country from the top down. He wants us to concentrate instead solely on the moral failings of inferior folks and to recognize once again that big government is destroying the moral fiber of America.

New York Times columnist David Brooks declared Coming Apart the most important book of the year and said he would be "shocked if there's another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society." This should be tempered by realizing how easily Brooks is shocked. That Murray does not want to discuss the reason for society’s coming apart is what is shocking. For more on Murray's book, check out Joan Walsh's brilliant review at salon.com.

The second work is Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline by social critic Morris Berman, who throws all subtlety out the window. He’s concerned not with moral failings of the poor, but with what he regards as the mindless aspirations of those we deem successful. He characterizes the New Deal not as a restructuring of the economy, but as "a few concessions to the poor and working class." He warns us that when hustling and technological innovation become the purpose of life, there is no purpose, and he sees little hope for course correction. According to Berman, we are a country where people throw their lives away for toys. Our obsession with connectivity results in social isolation as we destroy the planet through what amounts to disingenuous acts of trivial pursuit.        

Now contrast the views above with another recent book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. They write: "Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp." They lay out their argument in nineteen impressive chapters.

So, we have here two cases for a dystopian future due to moral failure and one utopian argument that, even if such a future were possible, would require an ideological remaking of society that goes far beyond simply offering a few concessions to the poor and the working class. The first order of business is to favor work over capital, or Main Street over Wall Street, and that would take an effort just short of a political revolution.

Our dilemma comes to this: The only way to a future worthy of our highest ideals is to get beyond our Stone Age political mindsets, in which millions of people are so fearful that someone else might get something underserved that they would rather see most have nothing. The biggest obstacle to a bright future is adolescent politics. As I advocate in September University, it is time for adults to speak up or forever lose the opportunity to do so. What a predicament: to choose spite or infinite possibilities.  

 

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Time for Political Depolarization

© Charles D. Hayes

The election is over, and the holiday season offers a chance for us to calm down and attempt to depolarize, as a practical matter, for the sake of governance. It’s an opportune time to reexamine the notion of values. In a nutshell, values means like us. Unless we understand this at a deep emotional level, we will be ill-prepared for the years ahead, especially if we are not happy with the election results.

The evidence that we human beings are a tribal species is irrefutable. When we form groups around beliefs that sometimes appear to stretch credulity, we adopt an identity that will set us apart from others. Our differences then give rise to perpetual anxiety at the mere mention of those who do not share our worldview because, if we are wrong, then in a deep-seated psychological sense we can't be who we think we are. This makes us existentially fearful and on the lookout for scapegoats. Our social history makes this clear beyond doubt.

When the hot-button issues that divide us become the preoccupation of media in order to gain audience share, the result is intense demographic polarization. The greatest difficulty in dealing with these aspects of our behavior is that much of the anxiety and scapegoating described above plays out in our subconscious beyond our conscious awareness.  

We are not cerebrally wired for equitable negotiation with people who do not appear to belong to our particular group. This is why achieving a genuine democracy is so hard and so rare. To judge whether or not this is true, one need only to look the world over for examples.

The great irony is that if we could simply get beyond the superficial arguments, accusations, and misunderstandings we occupy ourselves with politically, we would discover that, fad and fashion aside, most of the things human beings value on this planet are similar. It’s genuinely hard to fathom that, as much as we have learned about human behavior in the past three decades, the world is still fractured by enclaves of people who believe they are fortunate enough to have grown up with a righteous and truthful worldview that has escaped practically everybody else.

No matter where we look in America, we find people who believe that they are the only true possessors of truth, the only people who really count in the overall scheme of things. And yet, if we ask to what source their knowledge and special virtue can be attributed, we will find that this truth exists simply because their particular group wills it so, or because they think they have found the only true religion or worthy political platform. 

The criteria for what constitutes values are straightforward. We value that which supports and exalts our kind. When we hear the word values in the right context in political commercials, it rings our identity bell. That's why the term can be used to nullify or ignore criticism. Values as a euphemism for like us can trump all facts and evidence to the contrary by triggering group identity with sufficient force to obliterate what could have otherwise been a knock-down argument.

What we project outwardly is a worldview that provides a mirror image of ourselves as individuals and as members of a particular group. In other words, we are what we think and what we believe, and therefore this is what we long to see. It’s how we learn to define worth, and it explains why we feel threatened when others disagree with us. Indeed, the current political rhetoric about values is really more about who we think we are than about the kind of people we really are and what we truly care about.

Consequently, if we can't relate to our political leaders, then we don't view them as being one of us, which makes them certifiably illegitimate. This is why many liberals could never accept the presidency of George W. Bush as being valid; it's also what fuels the birthers and those who claim Barack Obama is un-American.

Still, my studies lead to me to conclude that we Americans are not as viscerally divided as our media would have us believe. When it comes to solving practical political problems, groups of neighbors—minus professional politicians and media pundits—are often able to reach common ground and compromise without much difficulty. We need to keep this in mind, especially with regard to how we view media. Political news media maintain audiences by treating hot-button issues like beach volleyballs, spiking the ball as often as possible to keep us watching.

American history is very clear about the characterization of how our nation was founded and by whom. Our founders were intellectuals by any standard, and we cannot maintain a nation founded on democratic principles without rising to the same caliber of thought. If we value what our founders valued, we should aspire to an identity that says to be an American is to put pettiness aside and abide by the better argument, regardless of its source. But because of our political predispositions, a great deal of conscious effort is required to achieve the level of citizenship that our founders intended. 

Hot-button issues aside, we the people should be a sufficient measure of identity to engage American citizens in the business of acting democratically. This could be accomplished if we refused to let media and ambitious politicians use the existential angst that comes with the human condition to divide us in order to further their own ends.

The election is over. It's time to examine and reevaluate our values in light of the latest research about how our minds really work. It's time to stop the nonsense and act like people who are truly interested in achieving democracy.

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Historical Corruption: Conservatism at Its Worst

© Charles D. Hayes

 

It’s an old cliché to say that victors write the history of their times, but the opportunists who take full advantage of these biased histories are the ones to keep an eye on. Every time I think about this subject, I’m reminded of the arrogant school board members in Texas who work tirelessly to make ideological fairy tales out of their students’ textbooks.

Enter Newt Gingrich, who calls himself a historian, but whose selective use of history is less about the truth of what happened in the past than about glorifying his role as a guard and protector of American values. Family values at that. Gingrich’s bombastic views amount to airbrushed history, modified to suit his personal, political, and religious beliefs. He says he lives a frugal life but spends a fortune on jewelry.  

Textbook history written with a biased political agenda leads millions of people to embrace a worldview based on lies. Gingrich’s political campaign is over, but his prejudices are a center position of conservatism, namely to reveal our history using grandiose claims that distort the past so severely that it can't be discussed intelligently. He constantly speaks about American exceptionalism and then offers himself as an example.

Gingrich acts as if he is very nearly alone in his ability to debate the reality of history. But his take on the past is so selective that if it were applied to an individual's resume for employment, a homicidal maniac could be made to seem like an ideal employee. He is a master at dramatizing superficiality, and his personal history makes one wonder if his mental condition might be diagnosable. What gives him away are his frequent neck-snapping gaffes. When he treads into a given territory, unaware that normal people will find his views about it bizarre, he retreats and revises accordingly. His advocating that poor students could work as school janitors would be a case in point.

Contemporary conservatism has come to rely on ideological history for its very existence or, to be more exact, for its identity. The trouble with using only the high points in your argument is that the resulting view of reality is so skewed it has to be kept in place with arrogance or political muscle because real facts won’t support it. Moreover, once this ethos takes over, it's nearly impossible to admit ever having made mistakes. When applied to war, this tactic adds a deep-seated barrier to achieving peace.

Most Americans teach their children that it's appropriate to apologize to anyone whom we have wronged, regardless of whether the act was purposeful or an accident. But when arrogance achieves the critical mass of super-patriotism, as in the rewriting of history, political candidates begin spouting the "I will never apologize for the United States" mantra. Mitt Romney is already on board with this nonsensical assertion. Such rhetoric makes us look like arrogant fools. It's a glaring, in-your-face declaration that we believe we are better than anyone else on the planet and rules of etiquette do not apply to us.       

In his book The Folly of Fools, anthropologist Robert Trivers points out that we highlight the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492 with three ships that school children are expected to know the names of, but we slip into historical amnesia about his second arrival with seventeen ships in 1493, when he enslaved the local Indians, killing and mutilating them by the thousands and at times feeding their newborn infants to his human attack dogs. You won’t find this kind of information in Texas schoolbooks or in Gingrich’s self-selected historical narrative. And yet, not knowing these things makes us exceptionally dimwitted about the dark side of human nature and the blatant injustices that permeate our past and continuously spill over into the present.

Wrongs can’t be righted if no one knows about them. Moreover, to be in the position of constantly defending false versions of history requires exceptional arrogance, the kind that leads to fervent nationalism and the use of force, which is itself but a short step to the abyss. The exaggerated sense of self-importance that results from constantly censoring history is precisely why the conservative political platform put forth today is so anti-intellectual in nature.

A distorted view of the past leads to a confusing present and inauthentic efforts to fashion a future. Any half-hearted attempt to achieve an objective reading of our history and our present political mess should prove this beyond doubt. An objective study of history should enable us to view the past in a way that brings us together in finding common ground. Instead, censored versions foster arrogance, contempt, and hatred.          

Politicians who brag about what never was are doomed to promise what will never be.

 

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Political Ads Work If Citizens Don't

© Charles D. Hayes

 

It is sad to say, but demonstrably true, that as a nation we are democratically illiterate. If most Americans lived up to Thomas Jefferson's expectations about attaining the knowledge required of citizenship, thirty-second political ads would be a waste of money. That any Americans make up their minds about which candidate to vote for through the influence of television commercials is evidence of a misguided, overtly manipulated, and egregiously irresponsible electorate.

Jefferson argued that government fails when left to elected officials without close attention and scrutiny by knowledgeable citizens, and that democracy is not possible without an aggressive pursuit of civic education by the electorate. And yet, we have high school graduates who can't name the three branches of government, and adults when asked on the street can't pass an elementary citizenship exam.        

America's love affair with liberty has always been such a front-and-center issue that the enormous responsibility that makes freedom possible is too easily overlooked. Jefferson argued vociferously that abuse and perversion of power would ultimately lead to tyranny, unless we educate ourselves as citizens with regard to what must be done and then hold our elected representatives accountable for achieving those results. He noted that we cannot prove or disprove that which we don't understand, and ignorance is not an acceptable excuse for not figuring out what is to be done.

With every presidential election season, I can't help but wonder what Jefferson would have thought of citizens making up their minds about whom to vote for, based not on the plans and polices of the candidates, but on whether or not he or she appears to win a debate. It's often played out like an Olympic contest where people decide to vote for a 9.8 over an 8.9 debate performance, political agenda be damned. Of course, Jefferson is not the only founder who would have thought this is madness, because it is madness.

The hundreds of millions of dollars spent each election season on political advertising is an apt measure of a void of responsibility. This expenditure gauges the depth of our collective ignorance. Too much focus on entertainment. Too much freedom from responsibility. Don't have time to examine the issues? Too busy? Nonsense, says Jefferson. Nothing we do is more important than our duties as citizens because we are the very safeguards of liberty. He put it this way, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

To be swayed politically by television commercials, slogans, clichés, platitudes, placards, signs, and bumper stickers is to cede one's responsibility of citizenship over to manipulation by the highest-bidding propagandist. Swing voters underscore the issue of political advertising with cynical clarity in that their indecisiveness can't be the result of closely examining the election issues at hand. If they were to do that, their decision about how to cast their vote would ultimately become clear. Instead they bounce back and forth like ping-pong balls in match play to the rhythm of mindless television ads, which often amount to little more in substance than character assassination.

So what would the man who said he couldn't live without books think today about American citizens who call themselves patriots, who don't read but who have adamant opinions about myriad subjects they've never studied or looked into in depth? I've read enough of Jefferson's work to be certain that he would be appalled and ashamed, but perhaps not surprised. I wonder, though, how he would have reacted to the stark reality that more and more people in the present mistake ideological derision for evidence of patriotism, while embracing a system of misinformation designed to justify the status quo and to stand in as a substitute for freedom.

 Champions of the status quo have known for decades that acclimating citizens to feel at home in an unjust society is easy to do if the fuel used is contempt. All that's necessary to normalize the perception of escalating inequality is to wave symbols and push the public's hot buttons by pointing to an out-group as the cause. It works nearly every time.

The sad epitaph for those beholden to defend an unjust society under the guise of sustaining freedom is that it is far easier and more emotionally satisfying to protect the powerful forces that pull their strings than to admit to having been made a puppet. Before one can see the hidden strings that manipulate, it is first necessary to tune out the barrage of political ads that would have us feel instead of think.

We can either be citizens or consumers, but if we default to the latter, we stand to lose the former.

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