Making Light: comment on "Why we hate America"

nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004261.html#004261
Why we hate America
We don’t, of course, but dweeblings from the far right keep saying we do. It’s a bizarre but persistent habit of theirs ...

contribution to Comments on this entry
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -- Theodore Roosevelt

"My country right or wrong" is like saying, "My mother drunk or sober". -- G.K. Chesterton

"To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, 'Our Country, right or wrong,' ... Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?" -- Mark Twain
(Remarking on his opposition to the Philippine-American War, which " The War Prayer" is one lasting reminder of -- see earlier posts March 25, 2003 and October 10, 2002 )

In Far Horizons of July 1999 ("Babylon 5 -- Creating the Future" at www.rastus.force9.co.uk/B5Floyd.html ) Robin Floyd has a few pertinent things to say about some of the themes & messages in B5 (made 1993-1998 & with an episode called "The War Prayer" and a Ministry of Truth, among other references) such as choice & community. One is turning about the saying "Power can't be given, it must be taken" in a character's speech "Nobody takes power. They're given power by the rest of us".

Another piece which shows some themes have been with us for quite a while is Orwell's "Second Thoughts on James Burnham", 1946 (from Shooting an Elephant) also printed as a pamphlet "James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution"? It is about the ideas of an American who published, during WWII, The Managerial Revolution, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom & an essay, "Lenin’s Heir" who, Orwell says, wrote along the lines

Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers”.

www.counterpunch.org/tripp06142003.htm ("They Just Don't Want to Know: Of Dissidents and Dissonance" by Ben Tripp - Counterpunch June 14, 2003)

... the Founding Fathers (now Foundling Fathers, sorry guys) ... established a series of checks and balances to ensure that human weakness didn't get in the way of human affairs. We've done away with said checks and balances, mostly, and so the brilliant system of setting three separate branches of narrow self-interested shysters against each other, thus to ensure the common good will be served in the resulting scrum, has broken down.

How does this cause cognitive dissonance? Because people don't want to believe it, at any cost. They are desperate to believe it's all going to work out fine...

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 1/10/2004 01:20:00 am