ON THE DEMONIC LOSS OF AMERICA'S HEART AND MIND
An Excerpt from Susan Jacoby's "The Age of American Unreason"
http://www.susanjacoby.com/excerpt.html
http://www.salvationscience.com

This is very important, because it describes the basic stupid
insanity of irrational, unwarranted hatred against that which is
good. Such evil blocks the Advent and Dispensation of the Inner
Christ of a Longer, Happier Life, which is Salvation from the Eight-
Fold Suffering of Hunger, Disease, Senescence, Death, Low Mental
Intelligence, Emotional Depression, Spiritual Entrapment of
Consciousness in the Physical Dimension, and the Impermanence of the
Endless Round (Samsara) of unpleasant appearances in various bodies
and dimensions. You must first be Righteous, Sane, and Intelligent,
in order to qualify for Salvation from Suffering. These political
and psychological commentaries are presented for that purpose and to
that end. Jai Om. - Sw. Tantrasangha

The Way We Live Now: Just Us Folks

The word is everywhere, a plague spread by the President of the
United States, television anchors, radio talk show hosts, preachers
in megachurches, self-help gurus, and anyone else attempting to
demonstrate his or her identification with ordinary, presumably
wholesome American values. Only a few decades ago, Americans were
addressed as people or, in the more distant past, ladies and
gentlemen. Now we are all folks. Television commentators, apparently
confusing themselves with the clergy, routinely declare that "our
prayers go out to those folks"—whether the folks are victims of
drought, hurricane, flood, child molestation, corporate layoffs,
identify theft, or the war in Iraq (as long as the victims are
American and not Iraqi). Irony is reserved for fiction. Philip Roth,
in The Plot Against America—a dark historical reimagining of a
nation in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in
the 1940 presidential election—confers the title "Just Folks" on a
Lindbergh program designed to de-Judaize young urban Jews by sending
them off to spend their summers in wholesome rural and Christian
settings.

While the word "folks" was once a colloquialism with no political
meaning, there is no escaping the political meaning of the term when
it is reverently invoked by public officials in twenty-first century
America. After the terrorist bombings in London on July 7, 2005,
President Bush assured Americans, "I've been in contact with our
homeland security folks and I instructed them to be in touch with
local and state officials about the facts of what took place here
and in London and to be extra vigilant as our folks start heading to
work." Bush went on to observe that "the contrast couldn't be
clearer, between the intentions of those of us who care deeply about
human rights and human liberty, and those who've got such evil in
their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks." Those
evil terrorists. Our innocent folks.

The specific political use of folks as an exclusionary and
inclusionary signal, designed to make the speaker sound like one of
the boys or girls, is symptomatic of a debasement of public speech
inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural
standards. Casual, colloquial language also conveys an implicit
denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated:
talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing
rape victims as girls (unless the victims are, in fact, little girls
and not grown women). Look up any important presidential speech in
the history of the United States before 1980, and you will not find
one patronizing appeal to folks. Imagine: We here highly resolve
that these folks shall not have died in vain...and that government
of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the
earth. In the 1950s, even though there were no orators of Lincoln's
eloquence on the political scene, voters still expected their
leaders to employ dignified, if not necessarily erudite, speech.
Adlai Stevenson may have sounded too much like an intellectual to
suit the taste of average Americans, but proper grammar and
respectful forms of address were mandatory for anyone seeking high
office. The gold standard of presidential oratory for adult
Americans in the fifties was the memory of Roosevelt, whose
patrician accent in no way detracted from his extraordinary ability
to make a direct connection with ordinary people. It is impossible
to read the transcripts of FDR's famous fireside chats and not mourn
the passing of a civic culture that appealed to Americans to expand
their knowledge and understanding instead of pandering to the lowest
common denominator. Calling for sacrifice and altruism in perilous
times, Roosevelt would no more have addressed his fellow citizens as
folks than he would have uttered an obscenity over the radio. To
keep telling Americans that they are just folks is to expect nothing
special—a ratification and exaltation of the quotidian that is one
of the distinguishing marks of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The debasement of the nation's speech is evident in virtually
everything, on every subject, broadcast and podcast on radio,
television, and the Internet. In this true, all-encompassing public
square, homogenized language and homogenized thought reinforce each
other in circular fashion. As George Orwell noted in 1946, "A man
may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fail
all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same
thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and
inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of
our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" In
this continuous blurring of clarity and intellectual discrimination,
political speech is always ahead of the curve—especially because
today's media possess the power to amplify and spread error with an
efficiency that might have astonished even Orwell. Consider the near-
universal substitution, by the media and politicians, of "troop"
and "troops" for "soldier" and "soldiers." As every dictionary makes
plain, the word "troop" is always a collective noun; the "s" is
added when referring to a particularly large military force. Yet
each night on the television news, correspondents report that "X
troops were killed in Iraq today." This is more than a grammatical
error; turning a soldier—an individual with whom one may identify—
into an anonymous-sounding troop encourages the public to think
about war and its casualties in a more abstract way. Who lays a
wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Troop? It is difficult to
determine exactly how, why, or when this locution began to enter the
common language. Soldiers were almost never described as troops
during the Second World War, except when a large military operation
(like the Allied landing on D-Day) was being discussed, and the term
remained extremely uncommon throughout the Vietnam era. My guess is
that some dimwits in the military and the media (perhaps the
military media) decided, at some point in the 1980s, that the
word "soldier" implied the masculine gender and that all soldiers,
out of respect for the growing presence of women in the military,
must henceforth be called troops. Like unremitting appeals to folks,
the victory of troops over soldiers offers an impressive
illustration of the relationship between fuzzy thinking and the
debasement of everyday speech.

By debased speech, I do not mean bad grammar, although there is
plenty of that on every street corner and talk show, or the
prevalence of obscene language, so widespread as to be deprived of
force and meaning at those rare times when only an epithet will do.
Nor am I talking about Spanglish and so-called Black English, those
favorite targets of cultural conservatives—although I share the
conservatives' belief that public schools ought to concentrate on
teaching standard English. But the standard of standard American
English, and the ways in which private speech now mirrors the public
speech emanating from electronic and digital media, is precisely the
problem. Debased speech in the public square functions as a kind of
low-level toxin, imperceptibly coarsening our concept of what is and
is not acceptable until someone says something so revolting—Don
Imus's notorious description of female, African-American college
basketball players as "nappy-headed hos" is the perfect example—that
it produces a rare, and always brief, moment of public consciousness
about the meaning and power of words. Predictably, the Imus affair
proved to be a missed opportunity for a larger cultural conversation
about the level of all American public discourse and language.
People only wanted to talk about bigotry—a worthy and vital
conversation, to be sure, but one that quickly degenerated into a
comparative lexicon of racial and ethnic victimology. Would Imus
have been fired for calling someone a faggot or a dyke? What if he
had only called the women hos, without the additional racial insult
of nappy-headed? And how about Muslims? Didn't Ann Coulter denigrate
them as "ragheads" (a slur of which I was blissfully unaware until
an indignant multiculturalist reported it on the op-ed page of The
New York Times). The awful reality is that all of these epithets,
often accompanied by the F-word, are are the common currency of
public and private speech in today's America. They are used not only
because many Americans are infected by various degrees of bigotry
but because all Americans are afflicted by a poverty of language
that cheapens humor and serious discourse alike. The hapless Imus
unintentially made this point when he defended his remarks on
grounds that they had been made within a humorous context. "This is
a comedy show," he said, "not a racial rant."

Wrong on both counts. Nothing reveals a lack of comic inventiveness
more reliably than the presence of reflexive epithets, eliciting
snickers not because they exist within any intentional "context" but
simply because they are crass words that someone is saying out loud.
Part of Imus's audience was undoubtedly composed of hard-core
racists and misognyists, but many more who found his rants amusing
were responding in the spirit of eight-year-olds laughing at farts.
Imus's "serious" political commentary was equally pedestrian. He
frequently enjoined officials who had incurred his displeasure
to "just shut up," displaying approximately the same level of
sophistication as Vice President Dick Cheney when he told Sen.
Patrick J. Leahy on the Senate floor, "Go fuck yourself." As the
genuinely humorous Russell Baker observes, previous generations of
politicians (even if they had felt free to issue the physically
impossible Anglo-Saxon injunction in a public forum) would have been
shamed by their lack of verbal inventiveness. In the 1890s, Speaker
of the House Thomas Reed took care of one opponent by observing
that "with a few more brains he could be a halfwit." Of another
politician, Reed remarked, "He never opens his mouth without
subtracting from the sum of human intelligence." Americans once
heard (or rather, read) such genuinely witty remarks and tried to
emulate that wit. Today we parrot the witless and halfwitted
language used by politicians and radio shock jocks alike.

The mirroring process extends far beyond political language, which
has always existed at a certain remove from colloquial speech. The
toxin of commercially standardized speech now stocks the private
vault of words and images we draw on to think about and to describe
everything from the ridiculous to the sublime. One of the most
frequently butchered sentences on television programs, for instance,
is the incomparable Liberace's cynically funny, "I cried all the way
to the bank"—a line he trotted out whenever serious critics
lambasted his candelabra-lit performances as kitsch. The witty
observation has been transformed into the senseless catchphrase, "I
laughed all the way to the bank"—often used as a non sequitur after
news stories about lottery winners. In their dual role as creators
of public language and as microphones amplifying and disseminating
the language many American already use in their daily lives, the
media constitute a perpetuum mobile, the perfect example of a
machine in which cause and effect can never be separated. A sports
broadcaster, speaking of an athlete who just signed a multiyear,
multimillion dollar contract says, "He laughed all the way to the
bank." A child idly listening—perhaps playing a video game on a
computer at the same time—absorbs the meaningless statement without
thinking and repeats it, spreading it to others who might one day be
interviewed on television and say, "I laughed all the way to the
bank," thereby thereby transmitting the virus to new listeners. It
is all reminiscent of the exchange among Alice, the March Hare, and
the Mad Hatter in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "Then you should
say what you mean," the March Hare tells Alice. "I do," Alice
hastily replied; "at least—at least I mean what I say—that's the
same thing, you know." The Hatter chimes in, "Not the same thing a
bit! Why, you might just as well say that `I see what I eat' is the
same thing as `I eat what I see.'" In an ignorant and anti-
intellectual culture, people eat mainly what they see.

© 2008 Susan Jacoby
http://www.susanjacoby.com/excerpt.html
http://www.salvationscience.com