Agreed.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/29/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Absolutely, I'm not arguing that class doesn't determine one's
opportunities. My point is different. It's that when you look at world
events, how countries behave, toward their citizenry and toward each other,
how the western countries behave toward other countries, what happens
politically within a country, seeing events only through a Marxist lens can
limit yor analysis in the same way that seeing them through a psychoanalytic
lense or a religious lens can. If you look at how FDR behaved as President,
yes, as a person, his character was formed by his class, and also very much
by his relationship with his mother. His mother was also a product of her
class, but she had a particular individual personality which caused her to
act in specific ways. But as President, his actions were also influenced by
geopolitical factors factors which are the same kinds of factors that
influence every other president. That is why our country's foreign policy
doesn't really change.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 12:51 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Down the Memory Hole: Living in Trump's
United States of Amnesia
Miriam,
Certainly FDR was a complex person, as are you and I. But in each of our
cases we are shaped by our Class Status. Franklin Roosevelt was most
definitely influenced by his membership(by birth) in the Old Line Elite of
the Northeast. Those were the established families that believed themselves
to be the Natural Leaders of this nation. Their Nation! Franklin Roosevelt
hobnobbed with the wealthy first families, the likes of his cousin Theodore
Roosevelt. He was expected to make his mark, and due to his strong family
ties, even Polio could not stop him from becoming President.
Born the same year as FDR, out in Illinois, Levi Earl Ludwig, my maternal
grandfather, was born into a Working Class family. Each man was, to a great
extent, products of their station in life. Franklin, taught to use his wits
and charm. Earl Ludwig, taught to make his way in the world of labor with
his hands and his knowledge of plants and nursery stock. Franklin was swept
into the middle of political give and take. And he became skilled in
knowing how to move up through the crowd and reach the top. Earl Ludwig was
skilled as a nurseryman, coming "out West" to Spokane from Iowa, meeting
Blanch Alexander where she worked picking apples at Green Bluff. They
married and Earl settled on a piece of land covered with rocks of all sizes.
While Franklin Roosevelt worked his magic and moved closer to the White
House, Earl Ludwig worked his magic and cleared the land, creating stone
fences, tilling the rocky soil and planting his nursery stock, while working
as a box car repairman at the Northern Pacific Roundhouse.
Both men had great energy, working long hours every day of every week.
The top two differences, to my way of thinking, were: 1. FDR died in
1945 at the age of 63, while Earl Ludwig died in 1979, just shy of his 97th
birthday.
and, 2: Franklin Roosevelt was born into the Upper Crust of American
Society, which afforded him unlimited opportunity...which he took good
advantage of. Earl Ludwig was born into a Laboring Family. His formal
schooling took him through the 8th grade. But his informal schooling, due
to his natural curiosity and boundless energy, continued almost to the end
of his life.
Both men were well respected in their circles of family and friends.
Both men were opinionated, and spoke their minds. As a result, both men had
their dis tractors. When I consider all of the facts, as I know them, the
major difference between these two men was education and opportunity. I
can't even say, in fairness, that FDR possessed a higher IQ than Earl
Ludwig. Their Station in Life makes it impossible to determine which one
had the better mind. Both men married well, and both fathered families.
Earl had 2 sons and 4 daughters. I forget how many children Franklin had.
But so far as I know, out of
23 grand children and countless great and great great grand children, Earl
had only one grandson break the law and serve prison time.
All of Earl's children served or had husbands who served in WW II.
All lived full lives, working and participating in building communities that
were friendly places for Working Class people to live. And of course, Earl
Ludwig was still working in his nursery over a quarter of a century after
Franklin had been laid to rest.
To my way of thinking, Class does strongly factor into who a person is.
Put bluntly, if Earl Ludwig had been born to a millionaire father, he would
have been at least as "successful" as Donald Trump. And since Earl was such
a clever "horse trader", he might well have over shadowed the Trumpster.
Station in life with all that it means, makes one Hell of a difference.
And by the way, I am proud of Earl Ludwig, even if he was an old Abe Lincoln
Republican.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Carl,
Actually, I think if you want to understand FDR, it's necessary to put
aside the class analysis, or, move it to the side, so you can see what
kind of a person he was, what things motivated him, and from what I
can gather, he was a consummate politician for one thing, and for
another, he was the leader of a western power. Yes, of course, part of
what western powers do is to smooth the way for business because the
nation's power and its business elite, at least in the past, worked in
concert to keep the nation first and foremost in international
politics. Both FDR and Obama seem to have thought in those terms.
Their main job was to keep the US all powerful and as much in control
of the rest of the world as possible. FDR did care about the welfare
of the people. There's a quote from a December 6 speech, I think it
was in 1934, about economic inequality that could have been given by
Bernie Sanders in 2016. However, the welfare of the people was just one
factor that FDR considered when making policy. It had to be balanced out
with other things.
And that appears not to have changed at all. One of the most
interesting things is that FDR was influenced to some extent, by
Eleanor in his thinking about the needs of the people. But Eleanor was
way to his left in her thinking and although she gave him a lot of
information and attempted to convince him to take certain stands, she
never differed from him in public.
She never got in his way. The relationship between them is weird and
complex. Both of them were having extra marital dalliances, he with at
least two women, Eleanor, with a female reporter. There they were, the
First Couple, having an "open marriage" in the 1930's and the First
Lady was having a lesbian affair.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2017 7:37 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Down the Memory Hole: Living in Trump's
United States of Amnesia
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_t
r
u
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_1
0
0
_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-ar
e
-
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-missta
t
e
d-key-
clinton-email-evidence-at-hearing-say-people-close-to-investigation/
2
0
17/05/
09/074c1c7e-34bd-11e7-b373-418f6849a004_story.html?utm_term=.92e8ebb
d
5
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-reveal
e
d
-highl
y-classified-information-to-russian-foreign-minister-and-ambassador/
2
0
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-man
y
-
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-th
e
-
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-climat
e
-
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/pres
i
d
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-resear
c
h
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-da
t
a
-is-be
ing-sidelined/2017/05/14/3ae22c28-3106-11e7-8674-437ddb6e813e_story.
h
t
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-out
r
a
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-of
f
-
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-tr
u
m
ps-cam
paign-statements-just-vanished-from-his-website-so-lets-remember-the
m
/
?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-heari
n
g
-round
-two/) to argue against the president's executive orders
(https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/03/06/executive-or
d
e
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-afghani
s
t
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-bil
l
-
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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