Angela Davis, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Gloria Anzaldua, and Nawal el Saadawi: On Political Shallowness and One-Dimensionality worth Shattering:

The gaffe of Mitt Romney for president, at an all-rich benefit event, said that 47% of the nation is not worth caring about. Truth is, in a have and have-not society, the Capital system does not provide for all.

Paul Goodman and Herbert Marcuse would agree that beyond the bourgeois ad nauseam, “boredom in politics may set the self-focused individual free from making a stance,” where the false democracy of limiting votes to two corporate controlled parties, still hoodwinks the masses into apathy or fetish for brand name parties. “A mass alienated from deep natural concerns, but occupying the consciousness and pre-consciousness with every manner of excitement, news, popular culture, sport, emulation, expenditure, and mechanical manipulation” (Goodman).  Paul Goodman later admits that the ability of parties and governments to accomplish any positive good is slim to none.

One online video on Yesmagazine.org recently reflected that all politicians should be required to wear labels like NASCAR drivers, to reflect the truth of which corporations, donors and lobbyists pay them top dollar. “I cannot lead or easily be led, and I am dubious about the ability of parties and governments to accomplish any positive good” (Goodman).

The real wealth and power in the United States is associated, still to this day, with corporations and families tied to the Robber Barons during the earliest years in the 20^th Century, who boomed to new heights after World War II: the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Fords, the Mellons, the DuPonts, as well as the Wallmart families, those behind Bank of America and Chase, the friends of the Bush family, and those behind Halliburton, General Electric, Monsanto, and Bechtel. Each of these elites is tied to oil, natural resources, chemicals, finances, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods.

Hollywood does not have value power, nor does the elected official. Hollywood needs the current system as much as others because it provides the base for a never tired living vicarious audience. Big business reigns! Of course, Microsoft, and the Internet industries provide means to share information. But this new form of technology, still recent in the length of historic clout, has a two-way direction. One of threat to those in power and freedom of connectivity between alienated individuals, but also it could lead to dependency on the natural resources to make the technology and with stricter and stricter rules to control individual sharing capabilities. “This means of communication, available to all,” now has a growing lack in engaging people in controversial issues beyond the screen. Distracted by games, videos, and couch potato passivity, it is hard to move past the length of the power chord.

In light of Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man”, the most advanced areas of industrial society “exhibit throughout these two features, a trend towards consummation of technological rationality and intensive efforts to contain this trend within the established institutions” (Marcuse).    

Promoted by politicians and media, this One-Dimensional thought process is constructed by the political needs of special interests that convince the individual into a belief system that corporate needs are actually individual needs. As the old advertisement stated: “What is good for General Motors is good for America!” This sort of chime echoes today in Vice-President Joe Biden’s chant, “General Motors is Alive, and Osama Bin Laden is Dead!”

Controlled modes of thought and behavior become linked to no longer production, but consumption. No matter how much an alienated individual spends, it will not fill up the hole that is missing in a spiritually empty world under a capitalist mantra.

The thought police under Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, or Edgar Hoover’s America are fairly undifferentiated. Many people believe that times have drastically changed. But now that limited freedom has been gained, the gas chamber is the open environment that Monsanto, BP Oil, and DuPont pollute; the chains and the walls are restricted to mind control of manufactured consent; television, movies, and popular magazine trends are the image police, and media has no longer a journalistic responsibility, but a profit motive to boot.

The flavor and favor of the One-Dimensional world limits the definition of beauty and success; technical and administrative skills favored over mental skills; and this masterly fashion limits quality experience to masses of office spaces distracted with semi-satisfied machines, or sales-people, manual laborers, or construction workers beating out hours of work for works sake. Work, work, work, work, and if he or she has too much time on his or her hands, then give them more superficial distractions: sporting, shopping, accessorizing, and one-dimensional entertaining. Fluff can set you free and yet all it really does is perpetuate the acceptance of an affluent society unaware of its dependencies on overseas labor in China, Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc, Oil from the Middle East, immigrant labor at home, natural resource usurped from Africa, South America, or Asia; and a garbage bin big enough to dump all the leftovers, which is usually poor nations or poor neighborhoods having to choose between “poverty and poison”.

Tracy Chapman once sang, “Give them drugs and give them candy; Make them think that they are happy …  But if they start to question … Bang, Bang, Bang, Shoot them down.”

Angela Davis connects directly the relationship between minorities, immigrants, and the civil rights movement to the greater global international direction socially and economically; and this divergence is due to the dislocation/severed limbs between democracy and capitalism. The two ideologies do not go hand in hand. The limbo of today’s dilemmas and the future solutions are blotchily unforeseeable, except for the immediate drift towards catastrophe and collision. 

The 47% that Romney cancels out are not only those Americans, who make $10,000.00 a year or less but are also veterans, elderly, citizens with disabilities and predominantly minorities. Many are too busy working to actually find the time to vote. Many are convinced that neither party will do any thing to help the greater community, with good reason to believe this. As well, Third Party candidates are always naively easily cancelled out. There are many who do not know enough to make a stand as well as those who are unemployed, unemployable, outsiders, outcastes or other cultures.

In a letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to Erich Fromm about Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man” she summarizes, “Marcuse seems preoccupied with the idea that an advanced industrial society has replaced ontology with technology … we (individuals) have lost our power (according to him) of ‘negative thinking’ and have become so much a part of the status quo that” they are a ‘technicality’ rather than an opposition, who are easily swallowed up in minor modes of protest …” When capable the modes of “Zen, Existentialism, and Beat ways of life …  like other such modes of protest, are no longer contradictory” but have been absorbed into the status quo (Dunayevskaya). These modes of protest are no longer negating the status quo but have now become a ceremonial part of behavior practice. Such modes are now merely fashionable and are harmless like Punk, Rap, Graffiti, and Skate Boards.

While Raya Dunayevskaya until her death still believed in the ‘proletarian revolution’, Herbert Marcuse, had long given up on the Marxist notion. He equated that the blue-collar worker, the white-collar worker, and the average Joe had now been so absorbed into the consumer system that the working class had lost its ability to revolt in the previous capacity that Marx had anticipated. Voting seems just another mechanical chore, even though less than one hundred years ago women and minorities were strictly prohibited in accessing such rights.       

In Kevin Anderson and Russell Rockwell’s intro on Dunayevskaya’s correspondences with Marcuse and Erich Fromm, they note the differences between Marcuse and Dunayevskaya: “for Dunayevskaya, the creative role of labor is the key to all else” and for Marcuse, “interprets creativity ‘outside of labor’, as central to the post-capitalist society.”   In summing, one will either have creativity in their choice of work, or one will find creativity in his or her life outside of work. The debate comes to terms with the fact that human daily activities cannot fully abolish the need for labor, but it can be a means and not an end to self-development only if it leads to intellectual growth not just consumptive material growth.

If Marxists wanted a revolution of laborers over CEO’s and business elite, the post-revolution would have put the power over work in the worker’s hands; but for Marcuse, this is not enough if we do not redefine the ideal meaning of ‘work’. As for Anarchist-Intellectuals, such as Paul Goodman, they do not believe this type of revolution that Marxists hope for would lead to a healthier future under communism but instead a decline in actual freedom. Evidence is seen in the social evolution in Stalin and Mao’s grip over revolutionary power; leaving only single dictatorial voices over what is acceptable or not.

Goals of most historic Anarchist-Intellectuals, such as Har Dayal of India and Ricardo Flores of Mexico were of the “objective to not just reform government, but to leave government as unnecessary and only nominal” because if individuals have been educated enough to be ‘responsible and inclusive’ in decision making, governance would not be necessary (which a great many at the top of the greed list fail to learn) (Har Dayal). Our system is not self-improving but self-declining because of a failure in responsible leadership. The hierarchy of power is unnatural and willing to sacrifice the mass to save those at the top tier. 

Many critical workers realize that for the most part, “people who actually perform a function usually best know how it should be done.” Most employed individuals can admit that far more than they need, a boss is unnecessary. When the job is being performed, the limited micro-management the better, so as to improve self-efficiency; an ‘honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.’ The illusionary ‘busy’ work is not fooling anybody. It even does little to relieve job anxiety.

In similar alignment with Marcuse, Paul Goodman’s summation in “Drawing the Line” reflects that, “an enormous amount of effort from people in our society is used to create a synthetic demand.” Advertisers, politicians, and those in commodities “caught up in the profit system,” make you believe that you need more materials than you actually do need, and their salaries are based on hoodwinking the masses to believe this synthetic demand is natural (Goodman). This behavior is quite irresponsible and self-seeking. This artificial stimulation leads to personal egotism, and is a buffer to the ‘one-dimensional’ reality seen today at work, at home, or in social circles.

Herbert Read, who also has a great essay book entitled “To Hell With Culture”, commented on Herbert Marcuse’s “One-Dimensional Man”. Read stated that “Marcuse had moved to reconcile that originality and spontaneity and all the creative aspects of our human nature have been reduced in all its varieties of temperament and desire into one universal system of thought and behavior”. He notes that Marcuse does not claim to solve this problem, “but by presenting the alternatives in clear and critical terms, he makes the choice inevitable to every socially responsible individual … that we realize that the choice is now between the life and death of our civilization” (Read).

Though Marcuse does not claim to solve the problem, other intellectuals since then have pushed on how we can activate past the dilemma. Angela Davis in a 1995 interview with Lisa Lowe reflected on her experience with Herbert Marcuse during the 1960’s, and though he was in his 70’s at the time, the elderly activist participated in helping the youth movement. In the interview, Davis states, “The Seduction of the ‘One-Dimensional Society’ can be resisted (and still can be). He not only theorized these developments but he actively participated in mobilizations both in the US and in Europe. Working so closely with him at the time, I learned that while teaching and agitation were two very different practices, students need to be assured that politics and intellectual life are not two entirely separate modes of existence. I learned that I did not have to leave political activism behind to be an effective teacher” (Angela Davis).

Paul Goodman in agreement with Angela Davis also noted that “if anything is to be accomplished, it must be accomplished through continual pressure … Wiser, more compassionate people must continue to educate those who surround them.”    

Nawal el Saadawi and Gloria Anzaldua go even further. One-Dimensionality can be resisted. Nawal el Saadawi, in an essay entitled “Women and the Poor”, suggests: “we need unity and solidarity between men and women who resist global injustice at the local level as well as the international level. But we need a movement that is progressive, not backward, which seeks unity in diversity, by breaking down barriers built on discrimination (by gender, class, race, religion…)” and she emphasizes that we need to “Unveil the Mind”. Unveiling the Mind must expose the contradictions of both the economic and cultural order now controlled by corporate interests. Locally, we are controlled by the status quo. Globally, we are controlled by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (Saadawi).   

As with the act of unveiling, Gloria Anzaldua has invoked the image of a ‘Nagual’, a spiritual shape-shifter that goes ‘in-between’ spaces. Such terminology from her essay “Haciendo Caras, Una Entrada” where the masks that we wear (or veils) have driven ‘a wedge between our intersubjective personhood’; after “years of wearing masks, we may merely be just a series of roles” or merely just one-dimensional. Anzaldua suggests breaking down into fragments, creating space between the single mold, which as with any shattered piece “provides space” between the broken shards, and we must crack the masks. In our “self-reflexivity and in our active participation with the issues that confront us, whether it be through writing, front-line activism, or individual self-development, we are uncovering the interfaces” (uncovering pieces that came out from the shattering) (Anzaldua).

‘Uncovering our interfaces’ or ‘unveiling our minds’ resist one-dimensionality.  The ‘new mestiza’ that Gloria Anzaldua mentions is a person who inhabits multiple worlds due to gender, sexuality, color, race, class, bodies, spirituality, and other realities. Such a provocative alternative will allow the responsible individual to find “the guts and adrenaline that horrific suffering and anger, evoked by some of the shattered pieces, catapult us into” that acknowledges history rather than ignores history (Anzaldua). “These pieces are not only about survival strategies, they are survival strategies.” Anzaldua notes that dwelling on terms that cliché ‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ is a way of avoiding serious dismantling, not only of racism but also the one-dimensionality that trivializes our independent histories. “Inherent in the creative act is a spiritual, psychic component – one of spiritual excavation” that requires ‘body, soul, mind and spirit’. 

While the election nonsense reflects the superficial politics that whitewash depth of a clearer democratic void, real politics deals with shattering the One-Dimensional thought process that has limited the American society for far too long. Voices of resistance, such as Gloria Anzaldua, Angela Davis, and Nawal el Saadawi continued and have gone beyond the realms Herbert Marcuse, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Paul Goodman had attempted to reach due to each woman’s unique creative ability and layerage of personal history. This is a quality that the 47% in deed have but need to embrace. Marcuse and Goodman started the discourse, but those who picked up the single fold that followed gave reason to shatter the process of one-dimensionality even beyond. Resistance is necessary, and activism in teaching is a required responsibility.  

Uranium, AIDS, War or Uranium Aids War

Farfetched or Not so Far...

Uranium Kills! In a previous post I mentioned Winona LaDuke’s call for ‘Cyclical Thinking’, where natural flows and cycles create birth and rebirth. If negative acts occur, the cycle will bring back in unknown ways additional returns. The purpose of this essay is to look at ‘unknowns’ or ‘known-but-not-open-to-the common-ear’ and attempt to connect abstract dots with recent information I had stumbled upon. It is a talking out loud to see if farfetched equations are actually not so far fetched. Can it make sense? Is it already known but not spoken about?

AIDS (Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome), Cancer, and War are some of the most atrocious killers of innocent people across the globe. One of the scariest weapons today is a Nuclear Weapon. Back one hundred years ago, neither AIDS, Cancer, or threats from nuclear weapons or even nuclear power were very foreseeable to the crisis they have come to today.

It is clear that radiation causes cancer. Large amounts of radiation kills and studies regarding the after-effects of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 have shown direct evidence that nuclear fallouts can significantly lead to cancers, immune deficiency, leukemia, and other deadly diseases. Scientists, doctors, and researchers, such as Vladimir Chernousenko and Jay M Gould, have recorded their findings regarding wide-spread impacts to public health not just in the immediate area around Chernobyl but groups of populations in neighboring areas in Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and within a radius where wind currents and water flows.  

The US and NATO bombings of the Balkans have had similar findings from the conflicts in the 1990’s. The uranium from the bombs dropped in Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia have resulted in a rarely spoken in the media human cancer epidemic and an environmental disaster that will continue decades after the actual conflict had ended.  Reports from doctors such as Doctor Slavko Zdrale have noted specific types of cancers in locals, and European and American soldiers since. Similar findings are occurring in Iraq.

Nuclear Power is dependent on uranium. This is true with the Chernobyl disaster. But also, the War Industrial Complex in the United States and NATO are dependent on uranium for missiles, bombs and other weapons that companies such as Lockheed and Martin produce with uranium.  

Uranium is a by-product of gold. Corporations since the beginning of the 20^th Century have been mining uranium. Nuclear Power industries need uranium to thrive, just as much as the Nuclear Weapon industry. For most purposes, they are one in the same. The earliest mining of uranium was off of the Native American reservations and out of Sub-Saharan Africa.

In Africa, John Gunther has recorded in his book Inside Africa, that Edgar Edouard Sengier observed Belgian uranium mines in the Congo particularly at the key time of World War II, and due to the Belgian’s abhorred relations to the Germans at the time sold radioactive uranium to the United States just before the US used the uranium to make the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. The Belgian company, Union Minicere, had been pulling uranium out of the Congo in areas of Kambove and Katanga throughout the colonial occupation of Africa.

At the same time that the Belgian’s were mining uranium out of the Congo, the apartheid South African government and corporations were profiting on sales to the US military with mines in South Africa and current day Namibia. Mines most likely existed in neighboring Botswana as well. Throughout the 20^th Century, the resources for nuclear weapons, weapons, and nuclear power were being plundered from the African continent. However, the other key region of the world where uranium was being pulled from the environment was in areas allotted to Native American tribes in the United States. Winona LaDuke and Paula Gunn Allen mention the private and military interests in native territories or alongside of native reservations that led to eventually significant statistics of health crimes to the populations.

New Mexico was where the US military first tested the atomic bomb. The Laguna Pueblo had noticed the US government mining uranium in their areas around the late 1930’s. The Anaconda Company’s Jackpile Mine lasted until 1981. Since the discovery of uranium in native territories the environmental damage and health hazards to the local communities have increased significantly. Pulmonary cancers have been linked highly with uranium miners, recorded in research by Joseph Wagonner, Ariel Schurgin, and Thomas C Hollacher.

Not only did the mining of uranium lead to environment and health depletion, but the disposal of Nuclear Waste after uranium is used for nuclear power and weapons led to and continues to lead to some major hazardous regions of the United States. In Nevada, as Winona LaDuke has reported on, the Yucca Mountain is the largest nuclear waste dump in the continental US, where at least 109 nuclear plants have shipped toxic waste to be buried deep below the surface. However, since the birth of the waste dumpsite, the Shoshone Native American tribe has had major fatalities due to related diseases due to the radioactive mountain.

On the US controlled island of Saint Lawrence, between Alaska and Russia, which was a 1952 military base, abandoned in the 1970’s, the Yup’ik Eskimos have had major health problems and fatalities due to the remains abandoned and still not cleaned-up by the US military. The former base continues to pollute the island and the ocean waters that surround it. Even the Navajo reservation near the first testing of the atomic bomb, around the Crown Point Area, has recorded since the 1970’s major health problems due to the irresponsible activities.

Japan’s 2011 earthquake triggering the nuclear fall-out is another key example why nuclear power should not be considered as a clean energy source regardless of media-advertisement.

Immediate results of uranium related activities, whether simple excavation in mines, testing weapons, dropping weapons during war time, or disposing of nuclear waste from power plants, has enormously damaged the environment and attributed to major cancer related diseases. But that is not all.

The mystery behind how the AIDS epidemic in Africa began may be more related to the uranium than we can rationally connect. An Abstract concept, in deed, but not impossible; before cancelling out the absurdity, one must map it out. The largest region plundered of uranium in Sub-Saharan Africa is from the Congo through Angola, Namibia, Botswana, to South Africa. The largest population exposed to AIDS is in deed the same region.   

High levels of critical thinking leads one to ask – Did high doses of radiation from uranium exposure in the mines in Southern Africa, lead to the secret behind how AIDS began in Africa? Radiologist specialists Sternglass and Scheer have considered the potential link.

But first, to build a parallel, lets analyze the involvement of radiation that led to the rise in Hantavirus in the United States. Hantavirus is a deadly disease when humans are in contact with rodent feces. According to the US Army Medical Research Institute, Connie Schmaljohn states, “HPS was first described in 1993 when a cluster of cases of adult fatal respiratory distress of unknown origin occurred in the Four Corners region of the United States (New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah). The unexpected finding that sera from patients reacted with Hantaviral antigens was quickly followed by the genetic identification of a novel Hantavirus in patients' tissues and in rodents trapped near patients' homes” (Schmaljohn). Like AIDS, Hantavirus first appeared in the public by unknown origins.  

The leaking of toxic materials into the soil, Paula Gunn Allen notes, created a radioactive hazard. At first slightly unnoticed, except in isolated cases, the outbreak led to the growing awareness that Hantavirus was indeed in existence. Some reports believed that the virus came about when rodents, mice and rats, ate contaminated materials in the soil and water. Radioactive material has been recorded to appear even in areas congested with mushrooms, as seen in areas like the Balkans on mountainsides adjacent to areas bombed during the conflict in the 1990’s. The toxic chemicals from uranium weapons biologically cycle through the environment and nature attempts to mutate the waste, which is one reason locals in areas along mountains are recommended to not eat certain mushrooms. If mushrooms are natures way of recycling toxins, it is possible to connect that not all animals, such as rodents, will be as affected by toxic waste as humans would be. Hence, rats and mice that carry Hantavirus, which appeared in areas like New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah, trekked through the very areas where there was nuclear waste and uranium depleted soil, and can possibly carry a deadly disease to humans but not be at harm.

Yes, absurd to connect the details in such a way. But areas heavily mined by local populations in southern Africa could have been exposed to uranium’s harmful after-effects without awareness and then the exposure could have mutated in the body, followed with spreading the new virus to others they came in contact with.  If this is true, then it could very easily be true for some people to say that ‘the White man did bring AIDS to Africa’. Industry’s excessive greed to mine uranium out of the continent during the colonial period and today parallels the rise in AIDS. AIDS emerged in the public eye in the early 1980’s. Auto-Immune Deficiency Syndrome, like the effects of chemotherapy radiation, begins by depleting the human body of its immune system. Let’s come back to this thought…

The rates of HIV in Russia and Eastern Europe have significantly increased since 2001. Is there a correlation between the Chernobyl catastrophe and the increase, regardless to the increase in drug use, sexual relationship standards and the lack of social health institutions that vanished after the end of the Cold War? Maybe, or maybe not, but if the environment has depleted their immune systems, the environment may have led to the bodies inability to fight off the virus.

Perhaps as Hantavirus passes toxic exposure from soil to rodent to man, AIDS bypasses the rodent and is a connection of toxic exposure passed from soil to human to human.

The connection with uranium and AIDS from the research from Brown University of Dr. Ernest Sternglass and Dr. Jens Scheer are tied with the similar destruction of the immune system and mutations due to radiation exposure. Other doctors such as David S. Greer and Lawrence S. Rifkin were quoted as early as 1985, in an LA Times and New York Times matching articles, stating the similarities between the effects of nuclear fallout and AIDS: "Since large numbers of the survivors of nuclear war can be expected to have immunologic deficits like those in individuals with AIDS, a marked increase in the incidence of AIDS and AIDS-related diseases should be anticipated" in the event of such a war, the report said. "Epidemics . . . are likely in the months and years following a nuclear attack."

In her 1985, LA Times news article Marlene Simons stated that David S Greer’s findings reflected that “diseases likely to occur after such an attack include tuberculosis, leprosy, pneumonia, legionnaire's disease and cancer, the report said, as well as the illnesses most commonly associated with AIDS, Kaposi's sarcoma, a rare skin cancer, and Pneumocystis carinii, a respiratory infection” (Simons).  

Dr. Greer was quoted saying, “The abnormalities of the immune system found in AIDS patients are marked by an "absolute depression" of these "helper" T-cells. Basically, these "helpers" direct other immune-system cells to attack invaders such as cells of tumors, disease-causing bacteria and viruses.”

Cancer rates in the world are at a record high and will only increase as long as the technologies that we use to power society is profit-driven and not health-driven. Cancer is directly connected to exposure to radiation whether one can pinpoint which direct exposure triggered the rise in depletion of health. Uranium has been directly or can be directly connected to major disasters that used weapons or enriched materials, such as Chernobyl and NATO bombings in the Balkans and Iraq.

Why is AIDS quickly discounted in the connection? I’m extrapolating, thinking out loud, maybe there is some level of correlation. The truth is that what the public has been informed or exposed to about the roots of AIDS is limited and small. In the future, all the knowledge about AIDS today will be looked at as primitive and all our assumptions will be clarified, perhaps one hundred years from now. Just look at our knowledge of diseases today compared to one hundred years back. 

But Uranium still kills. It seems most people do not even understand what uranium even consists of. But the sales are political and controversial.  Even as of today, September 14, 2012 in ‘Uranium Investment News’, the United Arab Emirates Nuclear Program was granted funding while the Iran Standoff escalates, the Australian Government remains silent on its own Uranium Mining efforts, in Canada, outside of the Athabasca Basin, the Kivalliq Energy Corporation is advancing Northern Canada’s Highest Grade Uranium Project, and in India the protests towards the opening of the Koodankulam nuclear power plant has been mostly ignored by the government, reflecting little concern for public distrust of claims that it is safe or inclusive to the greater populations health and future.

The Failure of the Self in the Consumer World: American Culture Exposed

In the wishful spirit of Mother Jones, Ida B Wells, Emma Goldman, Angela Davis, Grace Lee Boggs, Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash, and Lolita Lebron; these are individuals we should ‘draw our sustenance from’, but we don’t. Who is the ‘we’? Specifically, those citizens residing in the lines of the globalized economic system accepted by most governments in the United Nations, regardless of free volition.

Politically, as in context, why do so many Americans still think that America was great under Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton’s presidency? Just recently the governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie claimed, “Let’s make America great again!”  Yet when was he believing America was great and for whom? The answer is Never, if greatness comes at the expense of so many: foreign and domestic. Intentional amnesia misses clear claims to US wealth: genocide to Native Americans, Slavery, atrocious working conditions before the Labor Movement domestically, and continually abroad, supportive dictators for oil, resources, and much more. Oh, but so many say it is not our problem what happens overseas, but it is our problem. We created those problems. How does it make Iraqi’s feel that we’ve already forgotten what our nation has collectively done to them?

Standing at a bar, I see the masquerade. I see it in our movies and on the streets. Our characters are empty, settling for image rather than depth. Herbert Marcuse was correct to note that the way the self exists in America is mostly one-dimensional. So how best can we create a sense of self, when it has been flattened of edges, waves, spirit, resistance, and sustenance?

Toni Cade Bambara, notes in her essay, ‘Deep Sight and Rescue Missions’ that “the less children know, the easier it’ll be for them to fit in and make their way, seemed to be the thinking of half the household. They lobbied for lobotomy, in other words, convinced that ignorance was the prime prerequisite for assimilation, and assimilation was the preferred path to progress” (Bambara). In contrast, while walking in Harlem the other day, I saw a shirt on an elder African-American woman that stated: “Danger: I am intelligent.” Why do so many people fear intelligence? Critical thinking skills are key for individuals when separating the self from a mindless existence of consumption.

Winona LaDuke believes in ‘Cyclical Thinking’, which is common to most indigenous groups or cultures, and is an understanding that “the world (time, and all parts of the natural order, including moon, tides, women, lives, and seasons) flows in cycles. Within this understanding is a clear sense of birth and rebirth and a knowledge that what one does today will affect one in the future!” (LaDuke). This absence appears in the daily actions nurtured in contemporary postmodern America. Instead, our society nurtures that tomorrow doesn’t matter unless “I enjoy first, today for my self.”

The postmodern American Self does not think cyclically. The modern American surprisingly does not like to think, does not want to think, and is nurtured via technology and media to not. “Let somebody else solve the problems (why not vote for a janitor rather than a politician to clean up our mess).” This lack of thinking should not be confused with the teachings of Zen Buddhism, where the mind is ideally supposed to free itself in meditation. We are not all following the goals of Zen by zoning-out the world with headphones, cell phones, smart phones, and I-phones.

Though there is a scarcity of women recorded in classic Zen literature, as Grace Schireson notes in her book ‘Zen Women’; Moshan Liaoran, one of the earliest Zen women in historic Buddhism, taught that, “the Peak is not revealed … I am not pointing to myself, my position, or my ability. To understand the peak, the essence of my teaching, you need to penetrate your own confusion, and whatever has covered this peak from your view. I have no need to show off to you, to point to this, the peak, but you may uncover my teachings by seeing through your own delusions” (Schireson).

It is not even just delusions but the ability to get away from self-focused thoughts. The American culture has embraced the ‘virtue of selfishness’. This obedience to make the world revolve around the I rather than the reverse makes it extremely challenging for the material projected self of what-one-has and what-one-does-not- have-yet to think about other worlds and other I’s, adhering to each one’s own Napoleon complex.  This is a crisis, which is cyclical and will be short sighted. This is as close to a lobotomy from reality as one can get locked behind self-seeking technology. This will come back to us in unseen ways in the near future.

On the same front, one of the earliest French novelists, rarely acknowledged in the literary canon, was Francoise De Graffigny, who lived in 1747, and her novel ‘Letters from a Peruvian Woman’ represented an Incan princess kidnapped by the Spanish during the conquest of Peru. In an English translation, her confessions acknowledge, “When one single object draws all our thoughts, events only interest us through the relations we find them to have with the object … Time like Space is known only by its limits. Our ideas are equally lost when confronted with constant uniformity of one or the other.” If individuals today cannot associate objects, events, and history with their own personal self, they cannot comprehend meaning for them. When the self is intentionally limited to a consumer level, the expectations for them to bring far ranging details for a higher purpose outside of self-gain, is even lower.

Individuals are allowing the culture to funnel the choices for a subjective self rather than looking beyond to a higher Zen, cyclical self, or whatever deeper level one can name for that reference. The Hungarian Marxist Agnes Heller reflects on the idea of the self as well. “Kierkegaard once said that if you do not choose yourself, you let others choose for you.” Individuals born in the ‘consumer’ world are a ‘bundle of empty possibilities’. Heller reflects that the self is the ‘idiosyncrasy of the interpretation’ he or she has with the human world, and this world according to a narcissist is one of emptiness, which will remain empty as long as he or she is solely self-focused causing the ‘self’ to be merely on its own: useless.

Agnes Heller emphasizes in her essay, ‘Can Everyday Life be Endangered?’ that “the Newborn is certainly not like a tabula rasa … everyone is thrown into a concrete network of social regulations by the accident of birth. Culture takes care of transforming this accident, perceived as organic embedded-ness, into fate or providence. Both social regulations and genetic uniqueness are therefore prior to human experience”(Heller). If this bundle of empty possibilities does not go beyond the self in the consumer world regardless of class, race, or gender, he or she will remain empty (and not in the Zen way).

In the globalized world of economic dependencies and interconnected markets, ‘Why is it essential that the American remain self-reliant?’ The Laguna Pueblo activist, Paula Gunn Allen, answers her own question regarding why the American self can go on being community-less, without a place to belong, without a past to remember, or indifferent to all of the above. The American culture was built upon a separation of the self from the circle of nature clinging to a loneliness that reasserts man’s power over nature. Why do we cling to loneliness? Gunn Allen notes, “there is something that can be done, there is a way around the destruction” that perpetuates more destruction foreign and domestic, “but it requires giving up America’s real love: loneliness.” Such chants of affluent children to exemplify this loneliness are ‘I want my own car’, ‘I want my own room’, ‘I want my own cell phone,’ and ‘I want my own way to block out the rest of the world.” I am not aware that I am connected to the rest of the world.

Paula Gunn Allen notes that we are ‘idolized for singular determination’ and overall  “American society substitutes love of the family, comrade, village, community, and tribe for the self-proclaimed triumph of the isolated, superior individual.” Many have taken the messages of 19^th Century Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau far beyond their original intent. In Gunn Allen’s book ‘Off the Reservation’ she projects that the real reason American corporate elite feared and still fear socialism and communism is because it requires cooperating with others, and sharing … “It seems fairly obvious from this that a society intent on eradicating theft in all its forms must eradicate ‘civilization’. Cooperativeness, the willingness to share goods and land, is not possible in a basically selfish framework” (Gunn Allen). 

In parallel to Paula Gun Allen’s awareness of the American self, the philosopher Julia Kristeva pulls to the forefront that now beyond the US border and within, “21^st Century Globalization hopes that passions will be reduced under the two fold effect of Nasdaq economic well-being and Prozac’s biological well-being” (Kristeva). This leads to a stunted-self of ‘consumption’, economics, and pharmaceutical bliss. When reduced to this sort of universal, true individual potential is sacrificed to emptiness and buffed up with egotistical cosmetic and psychological cover-up. Democracy under these conditions will not lead to communalism but ignorant pawns voting for puppets that benefit the few elite.

Outside of the privileged and outside much of the lobotomized masses, one sees America as an “imposed financial, economic, and cultural oligarchy that is liberal in its inspiration but risks excluding an important dimension of human liberty. Other civilizations have other visions of human freedom. They also need to be heard in this globalized world and to be allowed to add their own corrections, through diversity, to this new global vision.” … At present, instead of this liberty, humanity is betraying itself in a process of increasing technical and robotically uniformitarianism (Julia Kristeva, ‘Hatred and Forgiveness’). Limiting humanities opportunity to be more whole, more complex, and more multi-dimensional stunts sustenance and ignores cyclical growth. This fragile system is in danger of progressing to a more violent conflict foreign and domestic. Can the ‘self’ afford to remain shallow, or must it find an outlet to go deeper and beyond what pays the bills and feeds the greedy?

Susan George tries to practically answer this question economically and structurally in her book ‘Whose Crisis, Whose Future’. She lays out how the regime of neoliberal globalization keeps the public in prison without the needs of actual prison walls but through financial spheres of coercion both politically and socially. Those with power use the tools to divide the selves. They give wealth to a status group and occasionally gift a few lucky individuals with affluence. They feed the status quo with patriotic election confetti so that the masses can one-dimensionally decide which puppet on the ballot will target interests for the next four years to divert attention or simply to build up public apathy.

Susan George cannot see a big bang, a ‘once-for-all end to our present economic system’, or a revolution. Instead, she sees an “ongoing process of transformation fuelled by constant public pressure” with constant voicing from larger selves who go beyond the individual self for a cooperative social context. She doesn’t believe that “violence can provide a lasting solution or advance human emancipation, but” she fears it could overtake us unless we act quickly enough to reduce the glaring injustices in the present global and national interrelated conditions.

After voices like Julia Kristeva, Susan George, Paula Allen Gunn, Winona LaDuke and Agnes Heller, et al, make empowering analysis, specifically female intelligence that is stronger than the reflections of the male leadership that overrides government and executive boards; why are such voices dangerously being ignored? The ‘virtue of the selfish’ is not qualitative. It is an obedient emptiness. The flaw so apparent at this time of those who control the economic, political, and subjective landscape is that they are running out of ideas fast and they don’t want to hear from intelligent voices beyond their capacity and who state the obvious future that they have no power in. The corporate elites are running out of ideas, this is evident with the current global stagnation and unrest. They are also aware that there are less areas of the globe to bully. They are shortsighted and fail to use natural cyclical knowledge.  The self must seek sustenance from the healthier teachers that nurture a higher personal growth not one of emptiness, limited politics, and economic malnutrition.