Miriam,
I'm going to have to make the time to read the three books. I
certainly grew up with a far different FDR than the one I learned
about as an adult. Some of my change of attitudes toward the Great
White Father, was his willingness to get into bed with the Dixicrats.
Is it "compromising" when I join forces with a group who support
defacto slavery? So I can only measure Roosevelt and Johnson(LBJ) by
the positive gains they help support for the Working Class, framed by
the constraints placed around them by the Oligarchy. I think it's
safe to say that there has never been a United States president who
put the Working Class ahead of the Ruling Class. FDR saw the danger
faced by a Ruling Class grown fat and indifferent, so he focused on
preserving the government and forcing enough inclusion by the Working
Class, to stave off a revolution.
It is Capitalism, and today, Corporate Capitalism that is blocking a
majority of Americans from equal partnership in the government.
This nation has always seen itself as the "New Roman Empire". Until
we replace their "Great America" with a People's World, we will
continue to be in this tug of war that is now dragging us toward the
line.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm slowly creeping my way through those three volumes of The Life of
Eleanor Roosevelt. I'm about 10 hours into Volume 2 which is 30 hours long.
Well, it's history, detailed history, and it's educating me. FDR is a very
different man than the one I thought I knew, the one I read about in other
books and heard about from people older than I, people who were adults when
he was President. Carl, if you and I had been adults, talking about his
actions back then like we did when Obama was President, we'd probably been
ranting and raving in the 1930's just as we've been doing for the past 8
years. FDR compromised. He supported dictators. About one of them he said,
"He's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch". He wouldn't publicly
support anti lynching legislation because if he did, the Southern Democratic
Leadership wouldn't support his economic measures. He is the President who
got us involved with Saudi Arabia. There's a lot of interesting stuff in
that book, lots and lots of it.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2017 4:37 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Down the Memory Hole: Living in Trump's
United States of Amnesia
Rebecca Gordon ended her article by quoting Augustine: "...it is on the
basis of memory, he added, that "I reason about future actions and events
and hopes, and again think of all these things in the present. 'I shall do
this and that,' I say to myself within that vast recess of my mind which is
full of many rich images, and this act or that follows."
Rebecca Gordon comments: "If Augustine was right and memory gives us our
selves, allowing us to "reason about future actions and events and hopes,"
then a political regime that seeks to destroy its people's memory is an
existential threat."
But what if the People have been fed false memories from the very beginning?
What course of action can we set, if our entire Self is built upon lies?
When I was a boy, I asked my dad if it were true that George Washington cut
down the Cherry Tree and when his father asked him if he did it, George
Washington said, "I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the Cherry Tree."
Dad told me, "History is written by the victors." The victorious Colonists
wrote their constitution and their Bill of Rights. And they wrote their
History. It was not a history of the American People, it was a history of
the American Oligarchy, designed to display the perfect Land of a Kindly,
Peace Loving, democratic, Christian People.
It reflected America the Beautiful, Land of the Free and the Brave.
Certainly we were forced to defend our Promised Land from the Red Savages.
Naturally we sent our young men forth to claim those far distant shores of
the mighty Pacific Ocean, and bring civilization to the Mexicans living on
our new land. And my school lessons taught me that we Americans were
fighting for Freedom during WW II, and we never killed anyone needlessly.
We treated our prisoners of War with kindness, even though they tortured our
soldiers. I read that every young boy could grow up to become President of
the United States...with no mention that this road was closed to Black
youth, and Mexican, and Asian, and Atheists and Jews, and anyone else who
was not
Christian. And of course we learned that women could not be
president, either. They were far too emotional to lead our nation with a
clear head. We learned nothing about disabled people, and no one ever
mentioned Gays...although we seemed to instinctively hate them. For many
years we Americans lived in a bubble, kept safe from the rest of the world
by two huge oceans.
And now we have put in office a man who is going to bring back this
Greatness...even though it never really existed.
Well, at least a few historians have written a more honest history.
To date, my favorite history book is the work of Howard Zinn, A People's
History Of the United States. If you haven't read it, I urge you to do so.
Then think about where you and your people fit into this more real history.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/26/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
Down the Memory Hole: Living in Trump's United States of Amnesia
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/down_the_memory_hole_living_in_tru
mps_un
ited_states_of_amnesia_20170525/
Posted on May 25, 2017
By Rebecca Gordon / TomDispatch
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176287/)
President Trump and members of the press aboard Air Force One in
January.
(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead / Wikimedia Commons
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Trump%27s_First_100
_Days-
_7_(34383318535).jpg) )
The Trump administration seems intent on tossing recent history down
the memory hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole) .
Admittedly, Americans have never been known for their strong grasp of
facts about their past. Still, as we struggle to keep up with the
constantly shifting explanations and pronouncements of the new
administration, it becomes ever harder to remember the events of
yesterday, let alone last week, or last month.
The Credibility Swamp
Trump and his spokespeople routinely substitute "alternative facts"
for what a friend of mine calls consensus reality, the world that most
of us recognize. Whose inaugural crowd was bigger
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/03/06/here-are-
the-ph
otos-that-show-obamas-inauguration-crowd-was-bigger-than-trumps/?utm_t
erm=.8
86522f38d6d) , Barack Obama's or Donald Trump's? It doesn't matter
what you remember, or even what's in the written accounts or photographic
record.
What matters is what the administration now says happened then. In
other words, for Trump and his people, history in any normal sense
simply doesn't exist, and that's a danger for the rest of us. Think of
the Trumpian past as a website that can be constantly updated to fit
the needs of the present.
You may believe you still remember something that used to be there,
but it's not there now. As it becomes increasingly harder to find, can
you really trust your own memory?
In recent months, revisions of that past have sometimes come so
blindingly fast that the present has simply been overrun, as was true
with the firing of FBI Director James Comey. First, the president
ordered up
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/comey-misstate
d-key-
clinton-email-evidence-at-hearing-say-people-close-to-investigation/20
17/05/
09/074c1c7e-34bd-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html?utm_term=.92e8ebbd5
9ed)
some brand new supporting documents
(https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/09/us/politics/document-W
hite-H
ouse-Fires-James-Comey.html) from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and
his deputy, Rod Rosenstein. These were designed to underpin his line
that Comey was fired on their recommendation-for being "unfair" to Hillary
Clinton.
Then, even as his surrogates were out peddling that very story, Trump
told
(https://www.vox.com/2017/5/11/15628276/trump-comey-fired-russia)
NBC's Lester Holt that, "regardless of [Sessions' and Rosenstein's]
recommendation, I was going to fire Comey." And he explained why:
And in fact when I decided to just do it I said to myself, I said,
'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,
it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they
should've won.'
Which rationale for Comey's departure is true? Both? Neither? What is
"truth" after all?
When the need to ask such questions occurs once in a while, it's
anomalous enough that we notice. We have time to remark that someone
or various people in this story-Sessions, Rosenstein, the surrogates,
Trump himself-are mistaken or even lying. Fortunately, in the case of
Comey's firing, journalists are still reporting the lies, but what
happens if the rewrites of our recent history begin to come so fast
that we stop keeping up?
During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson was famously said to
have a "credibility gap." People, including journalists, had stopped
believing everything his administration said about one very important
topic: the war.
Trump doesn't have a credibility gap; he's tossed us into a
credibility swamp. We're all there together swimming in a mire of
truth and lies, with the occasional firecracker
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-revealed
-highl
y-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/20
17/05/
15/530c172a-3960-11e7-9e48-c4f199710b69_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-m
ain_tr
umpintel-0504pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.f5c52fa9ca3e) thrown in
just to see if we're still paying attention.
If the age of Trump doesn't end relatively soon, the daily effort to
sort out what happened from what didn't may eventually become too much
for many of us. Memory fatigue may set in, and the whole project of
keeping the past in focus shelved. In that case, we might very well
start to give up the concept of citizenship altogether and decide
instead to just get on with our own private uninsured
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/us/politics/health-care-bill-vote.
html) , underpaid
(http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-idUSKBN15I0I1) , and
overworked
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2016/10/17/job-juggle-real-many-
americ
ans-balancing-two-even-three-gigs/92072068/) lives.
Sometimes it's easier to simply adjust to an ever-changing official
version of reality than to keep up a constant, unrewarding struggle to
remember.
This was the phenomenon George Orwell described so unforgettably in
his dystopian novel 1984
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061767646/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) .
His hero, Winston Smith, becomes aware that the sole party that runs
his country incessantly rewrites the past to its own liking and
advantage. In fact, he realizes that "the past not only changed, but
changed continuously."
Like most inhabitants of the mega-state of Oceania, it wasn't that
Smith couldn't accept such a reality. He could. What he couldn't
shake was a nightmarish sense "that he had never clearly understood
why" the Party needed to do it. "The immediate advantages of
falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was
mysterious" to him. That "ultimate motive," he eventually realizes, is
to so destroy people's hold on memory that they come to believe that
truth genuinely is whatever the Party says it is.
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and
you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make
that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of
external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of
heresies was common sense.
And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking
otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we
know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works?
Or that the past is unchangeable?
Does President Trump know what he's doing? Does he know that, in a
more chaotic fashion than Orwell's "Big Brother," he's grinding away
at American memories, threatening to turn them into so much rubble?
It's hard to say; he appears to be incapable of either self-reflection
or planning, indeed of acting in any way except on impulse. He does,
however, seem to know in an intuitive way what works for him, what
gets him things he wants, as he has his whole professional life. He's
called
(https://www.fastcompany.com/3068552/i-call-it-truthful-hyperbole-the-
most-p
opular-quotes-from-trumps-the-art-of-the-deal) his method "truthful
hyperbole." And regardless of what he himself understands, there are
certainly people around him who do grasp all too well the usefulness
of that "ultimate motive," of convincing the public that facts are not
all that stubborn
(http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/18/facts-stubborn/) after all.
The Memory Hole
Supplying alternative facts is one way of destroying memory. Erasing
real facts is another.
In Orwell's 1984, there was a slot in the wall at the Ministry of
Truth where Winston Smith worked, a memory hole, into which
inconvenient documents could be fed to be consumed forever by a huge
basement furnace. There are, it seems, plenty of memory holes in
Washington these days.
Since January, the Trump administration has been systematically
removing from federal websites inconvenient information on subjects as
diverse as climate change and occupational health and safety, and
replacing it with anodyne messages. Take, for instance, this one
(https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/signpost/cc.html) , which
you get when you search the Environmental Protection Agency's website
for the term "climate change" and click on links that search turns up:
This page is being updated.
Thank you for your interest in this topic. We are currently updating
our website to reflect EPA's priorities under the leadership of
President Trump and Administrator [Scott] Pruitt. If you're looking
for an archived version of this page, you can find it on the January 19
snapshot.
If you do click on the link
(https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climatechange_.html) for that
January 19, 2017, "snapshot," you can still (for now) see what the old
climate change portal of the Obama era looked like. At the top of the
"snapshot," however, is a bright red notice announcing:
This is not the current EPA website. To navigate to the current EPA
website, please go to www.epa.gov. This website is historical material
reflecting the EPA website as it existed on January 19, 2017. This
website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some
internal pages may not work.
The government has now entered full-scale climate change denial mode.
Information of just about any sort on global warming has been or is
being memory-holed in a wholesale fashion at other agency websites as
well. The Guardian, for instance, reports
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/14/donald-trump-climate-
change
-mentions-government-websites) that, in the part of the Department of
Energy's site addressed to children, "sentences that point out the
harmful health consequences of burning coal and other impacts of
fossil fuels have gone." At the State Department, references to
President Obama's Climate Action Plan
(https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/image/presid
ent27s
climateactionplan.pdf) and a recent U.N. meeting on climate change
have similarly been expunged.
However, it's not just government pronouncements on issues like
climate change that are being sanitized. Actual data is disappearing
from government websites. The federal government collects vast amounts
of data, much of it the results of studies it has funded. Some
agencies, like the Environmental Protection Agency, are required by
law to retain data they collect, but they are not required to post it.
This means basic information and the results of scientific research,
once available online, are now only available through a Freedom of
Information Act request. Of course, you have to know that the
information exists in the first place in order to request it.
One result of hiding such data is that scientists citing U.S.
government webpages as sources in their own work are now finding that
the references they've pointed to have disappeared. Arctic researcher
Victoria Herrmann describes
(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/28/arctic-research
er-don
ald-trump-deleting-my-citations) watching her citations dissolve into
thin
air:
At first, the distress flare of lost data came as a surge of defunct
links on 21 January. The U.S. National Strategy for the Arctic, the
Implementation Plan for the Strategy, and the report on our progress
all gone within a matter of minutes. As I watched more and more links
turned red, I frantically combed the Internet for archived versions of
our country's most important polar policies.
Herrmann was able to find some of her missing articles using the
Wayback Machine (https://archive.org/web/) , an internet archiving
project. But as Herrmann points out, "Each defunct page is an effort
by the Trump administration to deliberately undermine our ability to
make good policy decisions by limiting access to scientific evidence."
It's not just environmental information that's been tossed down the
memory hole. Concerned about the health and safety of workers or
animals? The Washington Post reports
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/under-trump-inconvenient-data
-is-be
ing-sidelined/2017/05/14/3ae22c28-3106-11e7-8674-437ddb6e813e_story.ht
ml?tid
=hybrid_content_1_na&utm_term=.d85203a2ced7) some things you won't
find anymore on federal sites:
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for instance, has
dramatically scaled back on publicizing its fines against firms. And
the Agriculture Department has taken offline animal-welfare
enforcement records, including abuses in dog breeding operations and
horse farms that alter the gait of horses through the controversial
practice of 'soring' the animals'
legs.
Sometimes information only hangs around for a brief moment, before
sliding down the memory hole. That's what happened to an advertisement
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/24/us-embassy-site-outra
ge-mar
-a-lago-winter-white-house) for Trump's Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago,
which was masquerading as an entry on Share America, which the State
Department calls its "platform for sharing compelling stories and
images that spark discussion and debate on important topics like
democracy, freedom of expression, innovation, entrepreneurship,
education, and the role of civil society." The page appeared on the
website of the U.S. embassy in London.
Someone must have realized that using the State Department to
advertise the President's private club was not a great idea. Conflict
of interest? No problem. It's down the memory hole.
Nor is it just government websites that are being reworked in a
distinctly Orwellian fashion. Recently, the Trump 2020 reelection
campaign
(https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trump-kicks-off-
his-20
20-reelection-campaign-on-saturday/516909/) (yes, it already exists)
quietly removed many 2016 campaign documents from its website. The
Washington Post's Avi Selk describes
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/09/all-of-trum
ps-cam
paign-statements-just-vanished-from-his-website-so-lets-remember-them/
?utm_t
erm=.609ec4aea9b6) some of the missing press releases, among them the
one that reproduced Trump's full interview with ABC News' George
Stephanopoulos in which he so infamously insulted Khizr Khan, the Gold
Star father who spoke out against him at the Democratic Party
convention, and his wife, Ghazala.
Similarly, links to Trump's "New Deal for Black America," released a
week before the 2016 election, now bring up a dreaded "404 - Page not
found"
message on the Trump-Pence website. Whatever that "deal" was, it's
evidently no longer on offer, nor is it even to remain in the
historical record.
The same memory hole has also evidently devoured a December 2015 press
release announcing that "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and
complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our
country's representatives can figure out what is going on."
Fortunately, versions of that particular statement were repeated often
enough in enough places that lawyers have been able to continue to use
it
(http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/15/politics/9th-circuit-travel-ban-hearing
-round
-two/) to argue against the president's executive orders
(https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/06/executive-orde
r-prot
ecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states) banning the
entry of people from seven (now six) majority-Muslim countries.
The Trump administration's memory holes have swallowed up more than
documents and data. People have also disappeared-if not from the
world, at least from their government positions. We still remember
former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former FBI Director
James Comey, but who remembers Ponisseril Somasundaran or Courtney
Flint? They are among the scientists recently dismissed from the
Environmental Protection Agency's Board of Scientific Counselors.
Among their duties was to give advice on environmental regulation.
They are to be replaced, according to agency spokesperson J.P. Freire,
by people "who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated
community"-that is, representatives of polluting industries.
The United States of Amnesia
Gore Vidal coined the expression "the United States of Amnesia" in a
2004 book
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/156025744X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20)
about George W. Bush's America. The particular instance of amnesia
Vidal highlighted with that phrase was the failure of those then
waging the "war on drugs" to remember the disasters of the prohibition
of alcohol sales in the 1930s, and the ensuing corruption, gangsters,
and smuggling rings that came with it.
His larger point, however, was that, in general, American historical
memory is short. Thirteen years after Vidal's book appeared, and with
a new Republican administration ascendant, it seems that this country
is in danger of sinking ever deeper into a state of amnesia. And can
there be any question that, in a distinctly Orwellian fashion, the new
administration is doing everything in its power to hasten that
process? As the Trump administration prepares
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/us/politics/donald-trump-afghanist
an-tro
ops-taliban-stalemate.html) for a new "surge" on the perpetual
battlefield that is Afghanistan, we've conveniently forgotten how
little
(http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/25/the-afghan-surge-is-over/) the
last one achieved. We've forgotten how deregulation
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/business/economy/26inquiry.html)
led to the Great Recession, as the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry
Commission concluded in 2011. "The greatest tragedy," that panel wrote
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/business/economy/26inquiry.html) ,
"would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this
coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this
notion, it will happen again." Yet the Republicans in Congress can't
wait
(http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/05/04/dodd-frank-repeal-bill-
advanc
es-in-house.html) to repeal Dodd-Frank, the law that restored a
semblance of regulation to the world of commercial banking.
The fifth-century African bishop St. Augustine was probably the first
western thinker to pay attention to human memory. In his Confessions
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199537828/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) ,
Augustine observes that it is memory-the ability to bring into present
awareness past experiences and the ability to recognize the difference
between past, present, and future-that makes us self-aware beings. He
described the "vast hall of my memory," where "I meet myself and
recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was
affected when I did it." It is on the basis of memory, he added, that
"I reason about future actions and events and hopes, and again think
of all these things in the present. 'I shall do this and that,' I say
to myself within that vast recess of my mind which is full of many
rich images, and this act or that follows."
If Augustine was right and memory gives us our selves, allowing us to
"reason about future actions and events and hopes," then a political
regime that seeks to destroy its people's memory is an existential
threat.
In that case, the first act of resistance is to remember who we are.
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176263/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_b
elieve
_the_autocrat/) , teaches in the philosophy department at the
University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg:
The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1510703330/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) .
Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches
in the
Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TomDispatch) and
join us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/tomdispatch) . Check out
the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower's The Violent American Century:
War and Terror Since World War II
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467236/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) ,
as well as John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands
(https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608467244/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) ,
Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608466485/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) ,
and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and
a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20) .
Copyright 2017 Rebecca Gordon
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