Financialization

I was reading a Common Dreams report on the corporation-sponsored financialization of biodiversity concerns. Their effort is being made at the United Nations 11th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Biodiversity. Both Friends of the Earth International and Food and Water Watch have warned the assembled delegates from 170 nations against this practice as being disastrous for biological diversity and the future of our species, which is dependent upon that diversity.

You may be familiar with the concept of financialization as expressed in the cap and trade “control” of greenhouse gas emissions. The practice puts a polluting value (the cap) on a unit of emissions and companies can purchase the right to pollute from other companies who do not use their alloted pollution rights. This creates a speculative market for the right to pollute analogous to any other commodity market such as pork bellies.

Obviously this process favors the wealthy, including the wealthy nations. In creating one more market, including the inherent speculation, it is also a source for generating more profit from the basic needs of the planet and mankind.

As I read the article, titled 'Recipe for Disaster': Group Says No Financialization of Nature! found at http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/10/13 , it occurred to me just how much financialization is a disease of our time, but also what other common denominator can we find that will allow us to exchange our values and avoid engendering value conflicts, the most unresolvable of all conflicts.

Financialization is a relatively new financial concept. Some have traced it to Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics. Financialization is not quantification, which had a somewhat similar effect during the Industrial Revolution and was heavily criticized by those who resisted the quantifying of qualities. This concern is illustrated in John Galsworthy's narrative essay titled Quality about a bootmaker who was known for the high quality of his boots, but who was losing customers who bought cheaper factory made boots. The work revolves around the bootmaker's loss of self-worth.

Quantification leaves whatever was quantified untouched. The quantified object, whether boots or bricks remains itself and is simply counted. Financialization transmutes the object into a financial instrument that can be sold and purchased like any other real commodity. As a security it can enter markets it had never seen before and therefore establish values it had never seen before. This, in effect, is what happened in the recent subprime mortgage fiasco. Mortgages are very old, established, instruments of debt and enjoyed a greater repayment likelihood than many other forms of debt. Mortgages were financialized by breaking them up via computerization and repackaging these parts into securities to be sold in the financial markets. It was argued that this process minimized risk because a single mortgage default would affect only part of the security's value that contained it. The common mortgage was turned into a financial instrument no longer thoroughly attached to the property that generated it. Eventually this disconnect sank into the heads of investors generating a massive sell-off and the resulting recession. As securities very loosely attached to anything real the mortgage was subject to the uncontrolled speculation the market is capable of. This financialization led to the practice of subprime loans because the value of a mortgage became what it could generate in the speculative financial market rather than the value of the asset it was based on.

Another liability of financializaton mentioned by Friends of the Earth is the lack of accountability it generates and the games corporations tend to play. For example, Enron set up numerous corporations and then declared as profits the moneys they moved among these entities. Corporations can so dilute relationships that accountability is extremely difficult and expensive to prove, if indeed it can be done.

In my judgment financialization is also an instrument by which power is transferred from government to corporations. Up until the introduction of financialization government determined any exchanges that were to take place in the achievement of public purpose. Indeed, when the matter became serious enough, as in World War 2, government simply rationed materials such as gasoline. The market was not used because the market always favors the rich. During World War 2 everybody had to get to work, not just the wealthy. If you had an emergency or other extremely important job your ration would be commensurately higher. There was, of course, the usual attempts to misuse ration cards, but the system itself responded directly to the need. The profit motive exploited by the market approach of financialization exposes critical decisions and processes to the whims of speculation.

Financialization is a form of abstraction, about which I have expressed my concerns before. Abstraction has been a, if not the, fundamental instrument of human development. It has taken humans from the concern with the immediate and mundane world of the hunter-gatherer to the world of planetary exploration. But it is a two edged sward that can destroy with equal ease and efficiency. The reflective precautionary principle should apply to the use of abstractions, especially in areas critical to human well-being. In short, Alan Greenspan should never have been “shocked” by the collapse of the mortgage market as he testified before Congress. That he was, betrays how much his economic understanding was little more than the doctrine of Milton Friedman that the market will always correct itself and, therefore, government should have no role in regulating it. As philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said of science Seek simplicity, but distrust it, so we should say seek abstraction, but distrust it.

Bob Newhard

Will Prudence Replace Morality in Humanity's Effort to Survive?

In the past I have argued that mankind needs to transition its social values from nation, tribe, religion etc. to humanity itself, and this lonely planet itself, if it is to survive. But what if this cannot be done, as is so evident in the Middle East, where people of the same religion, but different sects, are willing to kill each other in large numbers rather than compromise? Is there another path to survival open to mankind?

Have you ever noticed that the larger the group, the less the role of moral values in major decision making? Foreign policy of a major country is not conducted on the level of whether a country, its leader, or its people are morally reprehensible or not. At levels such as these prudence takes the place of morality in making judgments.

A general truth of large numbers of things, whether natural resources or human beings, is that as the numbers increase the value of each constituent decreases. Put another way, scarcity breeds value. If human beings are to be valued, you do not overproduce them.

I suggest that at some point mankind may find that it has to replace assessments of what is the right thing with assessments of what is the wise thing. This is because prudential assessments are related to facts, especially those of the natural world. Moral assessments are all too easily divorced from the facts of human existence and can create havoc with human well being. There is no fantasy that cannot be endowed with moral value. Consider that the fantasy of a human soul contributed to human overpopulation by denying contraception to women, not to mention what it has also contributed to the limits placed on women ranging from denial of education to denial of employment.

The problem with prudence is that it tends to neglect minority or individual needs. Our Constitution sought to deal with this tyranny of the majority in its Bill Of Rights.

However, remember we are talking about the survival of the human species. I was reading to day of the outrage of some African women at being sterilized without their consent. However, what if the survival of our species required such action, except it would apply to humanity in general, both men and women? Such is possible, indeed given China's mandatory “one child” family, likely. Perhaps, considerations such as these can begin to convey to the world's populace the urgency of the need to reduce our human population. As in China, people will lose the right to have as many children as they desire. This is but one example of the revaluation, if not transvaluation, of values that the unique and overwhelming consequences of impending global catastrophe will impose on humanity.

The answer to those who pose the moral argument that the majority does not have the right to dictate to the minority, which is held sacred in our Bill of Rights, is that these rights cannot survive in a world threatened with human extinction. If we want our rights we must protect their existential foundation. Dealing with our moral values is but one consequence of the world humanity has made for itself. There are many other, neglected as this one is, that need to be articulated until the full dimension of what we are faced with begins to take shape. We cannot assume that we or people like us or societies like ours will be dealing with these unprecedented global forces as we have dealt with large issues of the past. I remember in the 1950s the evacuation plan for the Los Angeles basin announced by the authorities in the event of a nuclear attack. It made, for example, assumptions about the freeway capacities which anyone familiar with normal rush hour traffic found ludicrous. Katrina is another example of our refusal to take the future seriously. We can expect more of the same on a much larger scale if we do not come to grips with the world we have created. Prudence requires that we do everything we can to reduce our population, our consumption and our wanton destruction of our planet's ecosystems.

Bob Newhard

On Reading Chris Hedges

I have been reading Chris Hedges' book The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress. In a long introduction Hedges delivers an impassioned (I am tempted to say “agonized”) attack on the current journalistic delusion of “balanced” or “objective” reporting and the destruction it has wrought on the institution deemed so valuable it received special protection in our Constitution. In this denunciation it becomes quite clear why he left the New York Times. He candidly admits that journalism is a moral undertaking for him. This situation of a moral person trying to function effectively in a large and very complex world, increasingly run on the only common currency it has been able to find, i.e. money, is a paradigm for the current state of mankind.

This raises the question of whether social morality is limited by the size of the society and hence can we expect to create a global society accepting a common moral system.

One way that humans have coped with the dilemma of moral sentiments in a complex and large society is to make a virtue of cosmopolitanism, which allows a society to continue a kind of cultural identity by downgrading what it considers moral parochialism. The cosmopolitanism of large cities succeeds by either disregarding the moral sentiments of smaller groups or by a courteous bow of recognition without any hint of belief.

However, cosmopolitanism requires a degree of cultural sophistication not commonly available. It is also vulnerable to the passions aroused by that kind of morality commonly found in small groups usually raising some aspect of cultural tradition to a high level of immediate moral intensity. You may recall how the Equal Rights Amendment had all but passed both houses of Congress until Phyllis Schlafly and a small group of right wing anti-feminists mounted an impassioned attack on it. All that is needed is to remind a society of some ancient relevance and harp on it until the old sentiments are revived.

One of the things most obvious about Hedges' moral sentiments is that they are concerned with social injustice in many of its ramifications. But social injustice arises as an issue between human beings. What about perilous issues that confront mankind as a whole such as global warming? My reading of Hedges, which is not encyclopedic, is that he is less morally outraged with these issues, catastrophic though they may be. He has an excellent article in this book on human overpopulation,which has the potential to be lethal to our species sooner rather than later. However, the outrage that would call for mass protests, etc. is not there. My point is not that Hedges is falling short in any unique fashion, but, like the rest of us, finds it difficult to make these large issues affecting human survival a source of moral outrage commensurate to what we bring to, say, the gross inequality of resource access taking place on our planet. In this, even though he has a more developed moral sensibility than most, he is like most of mankind. Why, for instance, has not global warming and its increasingly adverse impact on human food and water supply not been made a moral focus? Where are the massive protests elicited by unemployment or issues of war and peace? Chris has an excellent article on overpopulation in this book, but makes no call for street protests even though he sees the end of the human species if this issue is not dealt with promptly. A UNICEF report that can be found at http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/present/stats.htm?tql-iframe says that “Every year 15 million children die of hunger. Where is the moral outrage at food-reducing global warming or religion-motivated overpopulation? Our moral sentiments born in tribal societies remain egregiously inadequate in the world mankind now inhabits. A moral reach born in small groups has apparently reached its limits and a revaluation of moral values is called for which should be focused on humanity itself and its survival. A major effort at consciousness-raising is required. Once again, progressives are not devoid of opportunity to be of substantial service to human well being and Chris Heges can convert some of his justified moral outrage to making these issues of human survival the moral concerns they should be.

Bob Newhard

The South Has Risen

Did you notice that both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions were held in the South? This is but the latest evidence of the success of the Republican Southern Strategy initiated by Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. This strategy was a flagrant exercise in racism and tapped the most heinous socio-political sentiments that have beset this country.

It was specifically the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the anger they generated in the South that the Republicans took advantage of to turn the Democratic “Solid South”, although a thorn in the side of progressives such as Franklin Roosevelt, into a Republican Right Wing bastion.

However, due to the shallowness of American political thinking, the South, once inside the Republican Party, took it over. We have lived with the consequences ever since. The Republican Party became the vehicle for the spread of a long regionalized ethos of virulent racism, gun toting pickups, “right to work” suppression of labor that brought the New England textile mills to the South, the rebel railing against government, the introduction of religious zealotry into politics and a blind patriotism that made the South the preferred military recruiting area for the all volunteer army. While all of these proclivities can be found scattered among the American populace in general, it is the South where they have been nurtured and acculturated.

Is this too strong an indictment? I don't think so. As a young soldier in World War 2 I was stationed for awhile in 1943 near Tampa, Florida. I saw the public drinking fountains and public restrooms for whites only and blacks only. As a California boy, I was appalled that this could be going on in the same country I was raised in. On a bus I got up from my seat near the front to give it to a black woman struggling under a load of purchases, a common courtesy in my home state. I was sharply reprimanded by the bus driver and told to return to my seat. Here it was, almost 80 years after the end of the Civil War, yet American citizens, born free, were being made subservient to others by law.

All this is to point up the fact that the South, with an economy dependent upon slavery, has returned to the distinction it made between master and slave, that is between a superior and an inferior class of human beings, at every opportunity. It is to this kind of societal fault line that the worst in human bigotry and cruelty gravitate. Though the original arrangement was defeated by the Civil War, it found a way through Jim Crow laws and share cropping to achieve much the same end. When that was brought to a halt, wage slavery in the form of right to work laws was used to attract industry to the South. I am aware that New Englanders with their slave ships were deeply involved in this despicable practice, but unlike the South the general populace did not live with the immediacy of the South's intense practice. I am also aware that it has been American corporations who have taken advantage of Southern bigotry to profit from the deprivations of low wage laws. Having set the standard in the South, these corporations have gone on to exploit cheap labor world wide.

A basic irony in all of this is that the political party that had so many of the abolitionists that fought slavery has become the party of the ideological descendants of the slave-owning South. Witness the current efforts of the Republican Party to purge voter rolls of those without prescribed identification, striking heavily against poor black people and that party's vigorous anti-immigrant efforts. Ari Berman's Nation Magazine article How the GOP Is Resegregating the South is especially informative on this matter. It can be found at http://www.thenation.com/article/165976/new-southern-strategy

The recent book by Michelle Alexander and Cornel West titled The New Jim Crow details how Jim Crow segregation is being reintroduced through unjust criminal codes including the war on drugs, deprivation of eduction, etc. They have one chapter titled Thinking Is for Mechanics, Not Racial-Justice Advocates (the title of which I thoroughly disagree with) which articulates problems requiring the most profound thought if massive unrest and violence is to be avoided.

The fundamental social characteristic of slavery and one that continues to characterize its residue in the Republican Party is the pervasive distinction made between classes of people. When these rigid distinctions are made, especially along lines such as skin color and ethnicity which cannot be changed, they become the areas of exacerbated conflict to which many other issues gravitate. These kinds of distinctions between people are so obvious that the ignorant, the traditionalist, and the simple minded can be easily convinced that they have some miscreant meaning. These distinctions are the favorite tools of dictators such as Hitler's use of the Jews to gain support for his Nazi regime. There are reasons why white supremacists are to be found in the Tea Party.

Of course the above condemnation of “the South” refers to an ethos, not particular people; that would be the bigotry condemned herein. Evidence of this can be found in progressives like Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, Ronnie Dugger, founding editor of the progressive Texas Observer, all of Austin Texas, a city regarded by the majority of the Texas legislature as another planet, as described by Molly. The Southern Poverty Law Center in Birmingham Alabama is another brave testament to progressive tenacity.

The steady march of this Southern bigotry, albeit in a more sublimated form, must be candidly and objectively evaluated, the full dimension of its horrors laid bare, its current forms and future impacts identified, those primarily responsible for the reintroduction of American apartheid identified and a program of countervailing legislation developed. A big order? Obviously yes. A necessity for the preservation of American democracy? Equally obviously yes.

Bob Newhard

On Honoring the Troops

In my last post I offered some comments on the problem of honoring soldiers who voluntarily fight in a bad war such as the invasion of Iraq. I want now to consider honor itself, which leads to such delusions as honoring the troops.

Honor, like patriotism can be the refuge of scoundrels, which indicates that honor is not self justifying. In the name of honor people kill others in duels. In the name of family honor some Muslims kill their daughters who have been raped. Nations have gone to war over slighted honor.

The notion of honor is a human creation and applies only to humans. It is therefore independent of the issue of human survival itself, although survival can be made a matter of honor if humans so choose as in the gallantry displayed on the sinking Titanic. Notice, however, honor is here reserved for specific acts. When honor is applied to a class of humans, unless they each have demonstrated the kind of self sacrifice mentioned above, the term becomes vacuous and misused, which is what is happening in the phrase “Honor the Troops.”

This is what we do when we institutionalize personal virtues and in so doing we mislead and deceive as is so common in the advertising that so permeates the American mind that it can no longer distinguish between hero and celebrity.

Let us take as an example of how egregiously we can be led astray by the notion of honoring the troops, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Vietnam War was instituted by a patent and known fallacy, namely, the Domino Theory of Communist Expansion in Southeast Asia. China had become communist and it was argued that Vietnam would in due course become Communist. This theory, supported by President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, completely disregarded the long-standing enmity between Vietnam and China. What was a colonial war between France and the Vietnamese became our Vietnam War in which the might of the most powerful nation on the planet was unleashed against a small, mainly agrarian, country in Asia. We poisoned the land with Agent Orange and to this day people step on land mines in their fields and their children die playing with cluster bombs we dropped. What honor can be found in an unprovoked war with these kinds of results? Obviously humanity requires a new kind of national monument, a testament to a nation's remorse. In my judgment one of the healthiest commemorations would be a global day of remorse, in which nations would acknowledge, as the Germans have, that they have caused grievous death and suffering and in so doing restore lost value to truth and provide a sobering reminder to counter the jingoism that so easily influences people. The United States would acknowledge that there was no need for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This destruction was undertaken to impress Russia. Japan would express its remorse for the invasion of China and the murderous rape of Nanking. Britain, France and Belgium for the horrors they unleashed on their colonies. Such a Day of Remorse would point up the dire need for a global ethic in which the well-being of our species, and by extension the planet we inhabit, is the foundation of our moral system. With the technology of destruction we have and continue to develop and the increasing sources of conflict as we exhaust the world's resources, such a global moral system is an imperative for the survival of humanity. All efforts to create peace should be founded on this need.

Instead of the monument to shame that should have been erected we built the Vietnam Memorial Wall to honor the soldiers who died carrying out this heinous war. That monument has become a grieving place for many Americans who lost loved ones in that disastrous military exploit. Where is the memorial to the millions we slaughtered or to the little girl fleeing her napalmed village with her body on fire from the onslaught? Howard Zinn had the courage and humanity to go back to the German town he had been ordered to bomb at the very end of World War 2, after he found out there was no need for the mission. Where is the country that will do likewise and thereby begin one of the processes necessary to stimulate a social consciousness of one people on this lonely planet?

The only country, at least in recent times, that has faced up to its crimes is Germany, which has accepted responsibility for its actions under the NAZI regime. Unlike its response to the defeat of its aggression in World War 1, which was to blame and slaughter Jews, the German nation and people accepted responsibility, expressed regret, maintained the concentration camps as testament to the barbarity they permitted and recompensed those who survived.

It will be said that expecting nations and their people to acknowledge their barbarities is expecting too much of human beings. In reply I say that if we are to create the global society our survival as a species requires, we must undertake new paradigms of self and group identity; nation, religion, ethnic group will no longer suffice. The honest dealing with honor by making it responsive to the crimes it is used to cover and to those crimes it would cover in the future is imperative for a just society.

Bob Newhard

Creating Perpetual War

You may be aware of the current outrage over NBC's new “reality” show Stars Earn Stripes in which so-called celebrities are paired with combat veterans, mostly from special forces like the Army's Green Berets and the Navy's SEALS, to undertake simulated military attacks. General Wesley Clark has been hired to host the series, presumably to give it additional credibility. On its web site devoted to promoting this series, NBC would have you believe that this series is devoted to honoring all those who have served in the military. They are called heroes. No mention is made of that emotional kickback from combat called PTSD and the high rate of suicides resulting from it. No mention is made of the thousands of civilian casualties in these operations dehumanized to the level of “collateral damage.”

Nine Nobel Peace Laureates have sent an open letter to NBC and Clark condemning the series as glorifying war, creating entertainment out of war, and sanitizing the profound horrors of war and the aftermath of suffering it leaves.

To the charge of glorifying war leveled by the Nobel Peace Laureates NBC responded “This show is not a glorification of war, but a glorification of service.” This is an old ploy used by war mongers to emotionally trap people into war, namely, the self-sacrifice of the soldiers is among the honorable acts a human can perform, therefore the war that produces these acts of self sacrifice must be good. Emotionally, you cannot honor the soldier without honoring the war. Among the services progressives can provide to a people in the process of losing their democracy to militarism is to carefully and thoroughly lay bare the deviousness of this deception. If, for example, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were undertaken to control Middle East oil, as is patently evident, especially in Iraq, then those prosecuting these wars cannot be doing a good and honorable thing. The soldiers fighting this war are all volunteers and whatever their motives they are willing to kill others in the prosecution of such wars. They are responsible for their actions just as a Mafia hit man, loyal to his “family,” is nonetheless regarded as a criminal because the Mafia is engaged in a vicious, self-serving enterprise. Personally, I believe this confusion of means and ends contributes to the high rate of suicides among veterans of these wars as they realize the horror of the acts they have committed in a callous war of conquest. I believe progressives can provide a real service, especially to the young who are lured into these wars by the most reprehensible of deceptions that bad wars can produce honorable soldiers that we all too easily call heroes.

Beneath the calloused inhumanity and perpetual-war mongering of this TV series, provided by a subsidiary of a major arms manufacturer (General Electric is a 49% owner of NBC) lies the continuing and largely successful effort to militarize the American nation. Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex pales in comparison to what has actually happened and continues to happen.

I think this latest effort to make militarism palatable to the American people by presenting it as normal entertainment, promoted during the Olympics by NBC ads, is ample evidence of what is behind this continuing effort to miltarize the American mind and the American society.

Consider the following:

• Americans have been subject to a war mentality since the beginning of World War 2. Over 70 years of relentless concern with enemies. This makes them prime candidates for war propaganda.

• Projections are that America will no longer dominate the world economy and thus secure what it wants through economic means. It will increasingly have to share economic power with China and other rising economic powers.

• Lacking the economic dominance it has enjoyed for so long it must rely on military dominance to maintain as much of its power as possible. This, I believe, is the corporate agenda for America in a global economy. I believe the major decisions have been made and we are seeing in such morally and intellectually repulsive propaganda as the Stars Earn Stripes “reality” program the unfolding of this agenda.

The final result of this agenda will be a garrison state now being prepared for by the Homeland Security Department as it deploys its drones and increasingly incorporates combat-equipped local police into its operations. Notice protesters at political and corporate events are now put behind fences. The police are trained to treat the citizen as the enemy. Their mission is no longer to serve and protect, but to dominate and subdue.

This garrison state—think ancient Sparta—is the vehicle for insuring continued American global dominance as it loses its economic clout. It is totally antithetical to democracy, but Americans seem to be having little trouble giving that up. Do we progressives thoroughly understand what we are losing? I don't think so, otherwise there would be mass protests in the streets. “Freedom” is a mantra of the far right as they pursue an agenda that is destroying it. We must make it very clear that war is so dangerous to freedom that until Would War 2 this country had rapidly demobilized after every war.

We live in a time of cruel, highly destructive deceptions of which Stars Earn Stripes is but the latest, and more than usually blatant, instance.

We must vigorously unmask these deceptions and castigate those who practice them for the moral degenerates they are.

Bob Newhard

The Public Intellectual

Gore Vidal died Tuesday, July 31, 2012 at age 86. The passing of this great novelist, playwright, essayist and cultural and political commentator reminded me of the importance of the public intellectual to society, especially a democratic society.

The public intellectual is not a formal career. Universities do not offer curricula for it nor can it be found on any job listing. It is a function taken on by thinkers voluntarily out of a concern for society and a deep passion to understand. The breadth of Vidal's interests is astounding, running from issues like the America First movement to the Byzantine emperor Julian who attempted to restore the Roman gods that had been replaced by Christianity.

Other public intellectuals such as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre have been key figures in helping people understand their cultures, both the good and the bad. This species of humanity is as ancient as Socrates walking the Agora debating the nature of goodness. That the public intellectual as a recognized undertaking is still suspect is evidenced by Wikipedia's expressed reservations on the legitimacy of the “topic” even though it is merely reporting the 100 most significant contemporary public intellectuals as determined by polls conducted by two reputable magazines, the Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US).

A significant number of these people have been novelists, which indicates the role the novel can play in understanding and evaluating a culture. My own sense is that the complexity and immediacy of human life hides the more general characteristics, trends and forces of a culture and it is these that the public intellectual brings to the surface in a way consonant with the lives of those who read them. Public intellectuals are not social scientists concerned with demographic percentiles or specific tendencies quantified for use by others in decision making. Nor are they journalists, as important as these can be, who report immediate conditions and events.

This country began with a plethora of public intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine and it shows in our founding documents, especially the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. With this range of intelligence and concern it has seemed a tragedy to me that this country has so firmly rejected the role of the intellectual in influencing the decisions it makes and the courses it takes. Evidence that intellectualism has become a political liability was blatantly displayed when Adlai Stevenson ran for President and was attacked for being an “egghead.” Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in America details the depth of this sentiment in the American psyche. My own judgment is that intellectualism got lost in the immediacy of survival needs as the population in increasing numbers continuously dealt with the demands of the western frontier. The longer view or the search for underlying influences seemed to have little value in this environment, indeed intellectualism came to be seen as a kind of pretension. A very interesting and challenging question to ask oneself is “What would Jefferson or Madison say or do once they saw that their cherished individualism had spawned a corporation-dominated society deaf to the needs of all except the wealthy?” Would they, for example, be found on Wall Street with the rest of their rich brethren? Would they feather their economic bed like Bill Clinton has done or would they make the transition to the concerns of ordinary people in a mass society? Would they be Libertarians with their freedom uber alles view and the law of the jungle it entails or would they see freedom as dependent upon human well-being as did Franklin Roosevelt?

As Peter Scheer wrote in TruthDig's Vidal obituary “A student of history, he struggled to tolerate America’s strange regression in the new millennium.” Vidal was caught between America's promise and America's rejection of that promise.

Bob Newhard