American Denial: Living in a Can’t-Do Nation

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:



American Denial
Living in a Can’t-Do Nation

By Tom Engelhardt


Graduates of the class of 2010, I’m honored to have been asked to address you today, but I would not want to be you.

I graduated in 1966 on a gloriously sunny day; then again, it was a sunnier moment in this country. We were, after all, still surfing the crest of post-World War II American wealth and productivity. The first oil crisis of 1973 wasn’t even on the horizon. I never gave a thought to the gas I put in the tank of the used Volkswagen "bug" I bought with a friend my last year in college. In those days, the oil for that gas had probably been pumped out of an American well on land (and not dumped in the Gulf of Mexico). Gas, in any case, was dirt cheap. No one thought about it -- or Saudi Arabia (unless they were working for an oil company or the State Department).

Think of it this way: in 1966, the United States was, in your terms, China, while China was just a giant, poor country, a land of -- as the American media liked to write back then -- “blue ants.” Seventeen years earlier, it had, in the words of its leader Mao Ze-dong, “stood up” and declared itself a revolutionary people’s republic; but just a couple of years before I graduated, that country went nuts in something called the Cultural Revolution.

Back in 1966, the world was in debt to us. We were the high-tech brand you wanted to own -- unless, of course, you were a guerrilla in the jungles of Southeast Asia who held some quaint notion about having a nation of your own.

Here’s what I didn’t doubt then: that I would get a job. I didn’t spend much time thinking about my working future, because American affluence and the global dominance that went with it left me unshakably confident that, when I was ready, I would land somewhere effortlessly. The road trips of that era, the fabled counterculture, so much of daily life would be predicated on, and tied to, the country’s economic power, cheap oil, staggering productivity, and an ability to act imperially on a global stage without seeming (to us Americans at least) like an imperial entity.

I was living in denial then about the nature of our government, our military, and our country, but it was an understandable state. After all, we -- the “sixties generation” -- grew up so much closer to a tale of American democracy and responsive government. We had faith, however unexamined, that an American government should and would hear us, that if we raised our voices loudly enough, our leaders would listen. We had, in other words, a powerful, deeply ingrained sense of agency, now absent in this country. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175255/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_living_in_the_51st_state_%28of_denial%29___/#more (the story follows a brief intro)

[FiveGoodMen]

1. K&R

[raccoon]

2. You beat me to the post! Some more gems from this great article:

Even in protest, (in 1966) there was a sense of... well, the only word I can think of is "abundance." At the time, everything seemed abundant.

The very idea of defeat -- hardly mentionable in those years but ever-present -- was corrosive to what, in a book of mine, I once called America's "victory culture."

Who can deny that our American world is in trouble? Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest; that we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens?

… what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive "solutions" to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas.

I think I can guarantee you one thing, for instance, about the historic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When the commissions have commished, and Congress has investigated, and the president has re-staffed the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, and the pundits have pontificated, and everything else that could possibly happen has happened, we will, once again, have learned next to nothing -- other than, perhaps, how to drill for offshore oil at the depth of one mile marginally more safely. We will not be any closer to an alternative energy future. We will not have one mile more of high-speed rail.
Nothing that matters will have happened.

[Lorien]

4. It's true. Once the uber rich found their formula they locked us all into it

While the rest of the world gets high speed mag lev monorails, wind farms, electric taxis and the like we continue on our downward death spiral of predatory capitalism, peak oil and outsourcing innovation. Nothing that matters will happen because those who benefit from the status quo will ensure that it doesn't, and their lackey cheerleaders on both sides will pat themselves on the back for "saving America" once again.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. This is an excellent address. So very true.