by James Lester © 2012
How foolish of us pink-humans to imagine that we can describe “mankind” in our image, alone. We leave out 80% of all other humans, People-of-Color, as if they were not born as equally human as we. And, even if we excuse ourselves by claiming that it was normal for our ancestors to do so, because “that is how all ‘humans’ thought,” it still leaves the above foolishness untouched. We cannot claim that excuse for modern pink- human society. We do know the truth about the composition of mankind. Yet, we still insist on describing all our activities as those of “mankind,” even though we are perfectly aware that they are only the activities of our 20%, or less (aided by the forced labor of some of the other 80%).
All the pink-people of Western Russia, Europe (including Great Britain), pink South Africa, Canada, the United States, and Australia only comprise roughly 20% of the world’s population of humans. They are the only ones who want to go to the stars; have highly exploitative economies; a high standard of living; luxuries for the masses; automobiles; an abundance of food and water; pink skin.
Is it realistic to describe the whole human race in terms of a segment which represents so small a minority? Isn’t it more accurate to describe humankind in terms of its majority condition? If we do, then we must admit that mankind is predominantly People-of-Color; predominantly poor; poorly fed; poorly housed; lacking in education; lacking in means of transportation, communication; all these, especially by comparison with the affluent pink-human minority.
But, why is this true? Because the pink-human minority has learned how to hoard the wealth of the rest of humankind in order to effect this anomalous condition. It does so at the expense of the People-of-Color of the human race. How long will the 80% allow this to continue?
We can say that People-of-Color know even less about their fellows around the world than we pinks do, so it is not likely that they will ever get together in sufficient numbers to effect wholesale change. However, we pinks were the ones who made the fatal mistake of singling ourselves out on the basis of color of skin in the first place. In doing so, we not only put the spot light of attention on our own small number, but by default, we have informed People-of-Color of their vastly greater number.
A further irony is that, far from progressively improving the condition of mankind, pink-humans have been diminishing the overall fitness of the whole race (all humans now living on the planet are of the same race). The truth is that pink-humans have been improving their own minority by stealing the labor and wealth of People-of-Color. They have been trying to hide these facts from themselves and the rest of the world by claiming these are the acts of all humankind. They attempt, at every turn, to have it both ways. On the one hand, they claim that “all men” would do the same, while on the other hand, they claim that only pink-humans are truly human; only what they do is worthy to be accredited to mankind; what People-of-color do is negligible, to be ignored as inferior. On the one hand, pink-humans claim the advances were made for all mankind, while, on the other hand, these advances are only enjoyed by pink-humans. The overall result is that the history of the last two thousand years — especially the last 500 years — only records the deeds of pink-humans, who are, therefore, confirmed in their own supremacy.
CIVILIZATION
Civilization is like a railroad train without brakes. Given that the passengers wish to stop the train, get off, and then demolish it, they can’t even start the process because there is no way to stop the train. Further, if a way is devised to stop it, it must not be a way that will destroy the passengers; like running into a mountain, or off a cliff.
Our efforts to make American society recognize that all humans are born equally human might be the way to begin designing a brake system that would eventually stop the train of civilization. If we can all agree that, even if all Americans treated each other as equals, capitalism can only continue as our economic system if we continue to treat all other humans in the world as inferiors. So, treating all humans in the world as equals spells the end of capitalism. Soviet-style socialism and royalty have both been defeated in most of the world; American capitalism and soon the civilization it was based upon would follow. The time would come to resume life in the wild, just as our ancestors, who lived in the hunter-gatherer/scavenger mode for millions of years, until 12,000 years ago. But this would require a massive paradigm shift, accompanied by an equally massive dying-off of civilized humans. The planet could not accommodate the present numbers of civilized humans in a hunter-gatherer/scavenger mode, especially since they would be restricted to the tropical zones of the world.
PARADIGM SHIFT
The concept of “paradigm shift” is coming into the popular vernacular. The most frequent examples cited of past shifts are the discovery of fire, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and Darwin’s theories of evolution. In each case power to redefine the universe and state a new world view passed to a new group, leaving those aligned with the old order struggling in their wake, increasingly unable to effect social or political adherence to what had been traditional values.
Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we in the West are feeling the wind of change. We are trying to sense the direction of the next paradigm. But we are being hampered by the fact that the last shift involved the compartmentalization of knowledge. That is, we have become so specialized in our understandings of our world that no one person can comprehend our present world view as a whole. For this reason, we are hearing predictions of the next shift from many different sources, each unaware—and in most cases unable to assess the accuracy or rationality—of the claims for shift from the others.
It is not surprising, then, that “chaos theory” appears to be the unifying concept for the next shift. It is only a matter of time until it is applied to each of the compartments of knowledge in the present tradition. To date, the only area of thought I have not heard from on this matter is that of what I will call human relations. By “human relations,” I mean all of the aspects of the interrelatedness of the members of the human species: political, economical, social, national, religious, cultural, and personal.
For five hundred years, power has resided in the so-called “Western World.” The application of that power was accompanied by a new belief in the progress of all aspects of life through time. Man was believed to have risen from the lowly status of the other animals to his present status of power over all nature. This was in direct conflict with the previous tradition of the descent of man from a state of grace in paradise to his present state of depravity. These two “paradigms” still vie for our minds in our everyday lives, accounting for a condition of “double think,” especially here in America, worthy as an Orwellian example.
But, chaos theory resolves these contradictions. Chaos theory says that we cannot ever achieve long-term prediction of ongoing events in time. The concept of prediction is rooted in the paradigm of “progress.” Progress assumes orderliness; direction; usually upward; sometimes downward. The terms “upward” and “downward” are, of course, value judgments made by the human mind to suit his or her understanding of what appears to be “good” or “bad” for humans at the time. Progress assumes that events are not the result of mechanistic processes, but steps toward some naturally preconceived end. But, preconceived by whom? I think this concept is the product of the double think cited above.
Chaos theory, when applied to “human relations,” as I have defined it, says that we will never sufficiently understand the underpinnings of the changes in the human condition to enable us to predict or to affect human history, except on a short time scale.
If this is true, and the same is true of all other human endeavors, then where does that leave us? Out on a limb; a twelve thousand year long limb. And, who is the “we” that is out on this limb? Not all mankind as our media would have us believe—only those who have followed the “Western World,” or who have been forced along with us against their will and better judgment. True indigenous cultures, those who are still pre-hunter/gatherers are the present day extension of the human cultures of pre-civilization times. They never changed; never took the left turn of civilization—never knew that anyone else had.
So, the first thing one must do to get a grasp on the “gestalt” of human history, is to take the widest possible view of the subject, starting from today’s perspective, We hear incessant repetition of the phrase “mankind has done this,” or “mankind has done that.” In fact, mankind has done nothing as a whole, except to continue procreating. Mankind did not invent farming; did not, invent writing; did not fight horrendous wars; did not cause, and then cure, epidemics; did not move into the industrial age; did not invent nuclear fission; did not go to the moon. If you think about it for a moment, you will realize that only certain men and women did these things. It is true that these things that were done by some humans had far-reaching consequences for both the rest of humankind and for the earth, itself. But, they cannot in any way be said to have been the activity of humankind as a whole. They cannot even be said to have been done by the few for the “benefit” of the many; since only the few have benefited from any of these things. And, a very convincing argument can be made for the idea that mankind as a whole is far worse off today than it has ever been as a whole in history; while, at the same time the size of the “few” who are well-off because of that fact has grown by leaps and bounds.
Who is it, then, that constitutes the living end of that “branch” of the human species called “civilized”? It just, happens to be the pink Europeans of the world who have that dubious distinction. Moreover, it is we who, throughout the last five hundred years have hewed and cut and exterminated lest anyone of the eighty percent People of Color of the rest of the world should ever forget. And we still do.
Strange, isn’t it, that this left turn taken by the few twelve thousand years ago—taken by people of color somewhere in what we now call the Middle East -- refined by those same peoples into ‘the civilizations of the Mesopotamian Valley, the Nile, North Africa, China, Meso-America — this wrong turn should be picked up by ignorant European clans—themselves subjected to more than a thousand years of genocide from Rome -- and championed as their own invention? Perhaps it has been the karma of the “civilized”, People of Color of the world to have their own invention rammed down their throats by one of their victims. But I ask my fellow pink-Europeans: Is it wise to bring such attention to ourselves?
There may be two grounds for concern about the above question. First, we were once the victims of the civilization imposed by Rome. A good argument can be made for the proposition that social systems which create victim/oppressor relationships between human individuals and groups probably do not represent the optimum design for long-term human survival. Again, we can look to the nearly two million years of pre-hunter/gatherer/scavenger life style common to our ancestors and ancestral species. If long-term survival of a species is the measure of its success, would we accept behavior associated with a period of only 3 percent of its existence (12,000 of the last 350,000 years for Homo sapiens) as an accurate description of the whole species -- would we do that when we know that we are focusing on the activities of only approximately twenty per-cent (the pink-Europeans) of the members of that species? And, further, where we also know that the activities focused upon are radically different from the activities associated with the rest of the 96.5 percent of the time the species has existed? No, of course not! But, we do this regarding our own species in the Western world all the time. It is the reason for our ignorance. In blindly advocating civilization as the “only” way for humans to live, we perpetuate the blindness of the ambition of our former oppressors. We push that blindness to its logical extreme: extinction of the species.
The second reason for concern about claiming ownership of the concepts of civilization has to do with our claim that civilization has anything at all to do with our skin color. This only has the effect of bringing attention to a genetic difference we are powerless to alter should negative attention be attached to it by the rest of the world. pink-Europeans represent only about twenty per cent of the world’s population. Previous to Colonial times, the color of a man’s skin, while it might represent a curiosity in some instances, was not associated with any of the concepts people had of “humanness.” It was only when the Spanish threw off the domination of the North African Moors in 1492 that pink-Europeans began insisting that they were superior to other men by reason of their skin color; that that claimed superiority gave them the right to dominate all other humans. In their provincial ignorance, they thought they represented a significant proportion of human kind. They compounded this ignorance by refusing to classify the little they did know of the rest of the world’s population as human.
Because of this intransigent racism, pink Europeans find themselves out at the end of a limb. To the extent people of color the world over are convinced to agree that there is something genetically “different” about those of us with pink skins, we turn more and more potentially unsyrnpathetic eyes toward that undeniable, though essentially meaningless, fact. Pay-backs are hell, they say. Backlash is nearly certain. When the backlash comes from an eighty per-cent majority of the world population, Hell will seem a pleasant resort to our twenty percent — the limb could easily be sawed off — unless….
Unless we begin to undo the ignorance and stupidity associated with elitism/racism/civilization.
We can begin by breaking down racism. Racism is an invention of pink Europeans. It was legalized in this country in Virginia and the Carolinas in the 17th century to prevent the continued collusion of enslaved Africans, indentured servants (mostly pinks), and enslaved American Indians. It identifies the pink race as the perpetrator of unspeakable acts of genocide against other races. All other races are aware of this fact.
However, if the pink race were to begin championing the equality of all races, the brotherhood of all men and women, we will have, while yet powerful, before waning in our ability to influence world-wide events, set the example for how we wish to be treated when the power base shifts to hands which we have, in other eras, called “other.”
In order to do this, we must thoroughly repudiate all of our past leaders and their actions. We must, show the rest, of the world, and our own children, that we consider the activities of the past to have been crimes against human kind and our leaders to have been criminals. For Americans, this means the vilification of every leader from Columbus to Bush. All must join the fate of Adolph Hitler in the mind of the present. For Europe and Europeans throughout the world, it will mean the vilification of all from the Egyptian Pharos, Greek Philosophers, Persian Potentates, Roman Caesars, and the Catholic Popes, to present-day leaders.
All of our past leaders have operated on the principle that it is possible for one human to be intrinsically more human than another; for one human culture to be better than another — and, what is worse — for one culture to better than all others. With this formula, they have doomed our species and many others to utter annihilation.
Once racism has been overcome, it will be obvious that, in order for “business as usual” -- capitalism -- to continue, we would need to create a substitute for racism that would provide the cheap labor necessary. This would not be palatable to the people of the world so soon after victory over racism.
At this point, it will be possible to begin attacking the whole idea of social elitism; the idea that some humans are capable of becoming more worthy of living than others, and that it is those humans alone who are capable of making that determination.
In the mean time, it should have become impossible to maintain the present human population in the world. Now it will be possible to attack the idea that success for any species is determined by their ability to constantly increase their numbers. The fact that species success is determined by the species’ ability to maintain populations capable of procreation, and in balance with other elements of Earth Processes, will be well understood. The present world populations, and the activities to which they have been turned by the elite will be seen as an insupportable burden on what some have called “Biosphere One. “
The dramatic drops in world population associated with these new understandings will make it possible to further understand that it is the Earth and its processes which have always determined the number and variety of life; that it was Earth Process that eventually brought about, or allowed, the existence of human kind in the first place. It was Earth Process with which our ancestors and our ancestral species were cooperating in order to ensure longevity for themselves and their descendants.
It was when, some twelve-to fifteen-thousand years ago, some groups (or a group) of humans began to herd a specific species of animal (sheep? goat?), began to plant specific seeds, and were using fire and clothing to violate the territorial restrictions of the tropical zone, that the original “covenant” with Earth Process was first broken.
Until that time, human groups moved as Earth Process dictated. Members of the groups were selected, first by the fertility customs of the group, then the gantlet of gestation, next by the scrutiny and selection of the nurturing persons present at parturition, and finally by the individual’s ability to learn successfully the survival techniques of his or her group.
The fertility customs were determined by all the factors common to the habitat or niche occupied by the group. Too many or too few members would put all members at risk. The methods for determining when a particular female of the group could become pregnant varied from group to group. It is most likely that these decisions were made by the older females of the group, just as they were probably the ones who decided when to move when to stay and what to eat. It was the female who interpreted Earth Process.
This would have made sense, because it is obvious to all human groups today, even when most do not pattern their lives on it, that there is a clear parallel between the birthing activity of the earth and that of a female. I am not talking about volcanism here, but rather, the growth of all life forms on the planet. The earth is literally the mother of all life. Our ancestors knew this and considered themselves to be one of the forms of life mothered by the earth. The earth was, literally, the God of our ancestors. All other and later notions of God are preceded by this one. And, this God was female.
It was this God, Earth, which determined who lived, and who died. It was only after civilization began, that men, males, usurped the prerogatives of God. It was only then that these males inserted their control and mastery between the Earth and Females. It was only then that the Earth became something to be coerced into production for the “needs” of Man. The Female suffered the same fate; she must produce ever more progeny. This was the great rape; it has never ended.
But it was not perpetrated by all Males. That is why we still find human groupings living in that age-old way. It is these groups which must be preserved from further harm and from contact with us, until we can stop ourselves and bring our numbers down to the point that we can no longer affect them. They are living the way humans were meant (to the extent that a meaning can be applied to life) to live on this planet.
We civilized humans are no different relative to these “indigenous” humans, than are zoo animals relative to animals in the wild. We all know how inappropriate it would be to confer the “benefits” of zoo life on all animal species. Imagine killing all wild animals in the world because we now have the ability to keep a male and female of each in a zoo. Not many would disagree about the enormity of such a crime. Yet, over the last twelve thousand years, that is what civilized humans have done to the human race; they have trapped them in the zoo of civilization, and increased their number in the cages. And, through their present activities, they may kill all the other animals regardless of the ability to save them in zoos.’
But, of course, it is not each and every civilized male who does this. Right from the start, it was the strong few, sometimes the strong one, who forced civilization on the many. Consistently throughout history it is these few, the ones we call the wealthy, who consider themselves, if not the only real humans, then the only ones who count. They use the rest of us to create “human-zoo-like” conditions for them at the expense of both ourselves and, especially, the indigenous people of the world; those who count even less to the wealthy than we do.
Examine your mind for a moment concerning your impressions of indigenous people. What does the term, indigenous, mean to you? The term, “aboriginal,” or, ”native,” might come to mind. If so, we have all been conditioned to think of such people as anachronistic throw-backs to a primitive time in our collective history when we were simple, ignorant animals. Thus, indigenous peoples are simple, ignorant animals to us. The wealthy want it so. It is in their best interest to perpetuate that myth, since it is, after all, that very life style (of the indigenous) which they started out to avoid.
“Well,” you say, “I certainly don’t blame them for that.” And, to the extent that you really mean that, you define yourself as a dupe of the wealthy; their mouthpiece; their puppet. Every element of information upon which you base that reaction was given to you by the wealthy. All descriptions of indigenous cultures have been rendered by civilized people for the information of civilized people. Even descriptions which seem to extol the virtues of indigenous cultures, are merely stealing cultural elements for use by civilized people to continue destroying indigenous culture.
Let us go back in our minds to a time, twenty thousand years ago, when there was no such thing as civilization. How were people living? We aren’t really sure, except we know there was no writing, no reading, no school, no art as we know it, no music as we know it, no buildings, no cloth, no herds of animals or birds bred by humans, no shoes, no jails, no crime statistics, no auto, plane, or train accidents, no endemic diseases, in short, nothing that we associate with our lives today.
The human groups at that time were normally comprised of about twenty-five to thirty-five individuals, male and female, children and adults; an extended family. Female-headed, this group moved throughout a range of their part of the world in a circular manner, returning to each portion of the range at periods determined by growing seasons and climatic changes. They inter-acted with other similar groups of humans, and occasionally, came together in one location for ceremonial purposes.
Intellectually, they were identical with modern humans. They used their brains to learn the survival skills of their group, their ancestral lineages, and herb and Earth lore. We can safely assume they had happy moments, moments of comfort, joy, fear, sadness. And, of course, they had to deal with the reality of death. Death had fewer causes than it does now. More causes were associated with Earth process than now. This included contact with the other animals of the world.
It was the contact with the other animals of the world which had always marked humans as being simply one of them. Millions of years before our species appeared, our ancestor species were evolving in the same way as were all species of animal life. Instinct provided the basic pattern for survival of the individual, and therefore, the species as a whole. Each individual emerged from the gantlet described earlier, except the matter of fertility was determined by instinct as were most other matters.
Somewhere along the line of evolution toward our species, the gene or genetic material responsible for instinct got left behind (or became recessive). This probably didn’t matter at first, because the new, “instinctless” species was initially taught by mothers possessing instinct. Essentially, individuals of our species were never aware (some are not to this day) that they had a choice. But, during the great ice ages, some exercised choice without realizing that what they decided to do was counter to what instinct would have dictated.
Our species did not evolve in an ice-bound environment; it evolved in a tropical one. Some, however, became attached to the movements of the herds of mastodon elephants which came down from the frozen north. Not realizing that instinct, had they possessed it, would not have allowed for this attachment, they followed these herds farther and farther north, eventually becoming trapped with them during one or more of the Pleistocene ice ages. By this time, so many of their social and survival customs had become coded to their life in the ice with the mastodons that they had altogether given up the previous, tropical-oriented customs of their ancestors; customs which the rest of human-kind in the tropics was still pursuing. Indeed, none of the other groups of humans—which had by this time spread over most of the world, including Australia—were aware of the groups which bad disappeared into the ice.
During many thousands of years — perhaps even twenty- to thirty-thousand -- these ice-bound groups fought for survival. We can only dimly imagine what life must have been like for them cut off from the tropical past — seldom encountering fruits or vegetables of the kind or quantity available to the rest of human-kind — deriving most of their sustenance from the meat of the mastodon and other arctic animal species — having to live in unnaturally close quarters in ice caves and holes — having to develop unnatural social customs because of this isolation. It is not hard to imagine most of the social customs of European humans coming from this kind of social matrix. This explains such differences from all other human groupings as:
—the shift away from a concept of mother Earth
—the sun as God
—women as witches
—women/Earth as traitors
—women/animals/emotion/moon/nature/sexuality fears
—an emphasis on meat as the mainstay of the diet
—the extreme division of labor between genders
—the extreme emphasis on the female’s procreative role
—the shift from the
[Female/Earth/Moon] managing/seducing [Male/Sun]” paradigm
To
“[Male/Sun] raping/enslaving [Female/Earth/Moon]” paradigm
—fear of homosexuality for both genders
—extreme cruelty
—extreme violence
—new focus on “nuclear,” instead of extended, family
—women as possessions of male
—children as possessions of male
—silencing and stilling (and male control of) female attraction to men
—emphasis of male domination of women and children
These are some of the major ways in which European humans differ from other human groupings. Of course, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it appears that very few human groupings are different from this list. It only takes a brief glance at the past five-hundred years, however, to understand that European humans have forced their social standards on most of the rest of the world. The present-day similarity of other cultures to our own is a self-induced mirage.
European humans should be judged from a non-European view point if one wishes to understand human nature and humankind. Europeans have largely succeeded in re-defining humanity in their own image. This leads to errors which are quite convenient to the claim of supremacy for this relatively small, warped segment of humanity.
ANGER
I want to address the subject of anger; specifically, cultural anger. This is the kind of anger we were taught to feel toward people of other cultures, and other cultures as a whole. For example, I was taught to feel anger toward the Spanish conquistadors for having destroyed the knowledge and artifacts of the civilizations of Meso-America. (I was not told about their destruction of the peoples of that region, except in terms of battle casualties, and for that subject, I was taught to discount the lives of enemy “soldiers” because they had, presumably, chosen to fight.) I was taught to feel anger toward any one who would seriously attempt to make me see the plight of the American Indian or the Negro or Asians or Hispanic people who might have had problems in our country’s history. I was taught to feel anger toward any so-called “angry young man,” no matter what his age. And more so, the older he was.
Angry young men, I was taught (by whom, I am not sure), were trying to make me feel guilty for something I did not do. For some murky purpose (I was not encouraged to guess what that purpose might be), they were trying to rake up mud about all that my culture holds dear. Angry young men were members of my own culture who’s lives were wasted in mindless, pointless (treacherous) and futile railings against the powers that (rightfully, by God!) be.
So, one can imagine the anger I was taught to have toward any one purporting to represent any minorities or other subjugated peoples or cultures not my own. Can one imagine this? I am not sure, now, what all that was supposed to mean. What slight or injury was it that I was supposed to be angry about? I can certainly remember feeling that anger when someone would bring these subjects up. I can remember becoming hot under the collar about it.
But, I especially remember the flush of anger (undifferentiated, irrational) that I was conditioned to feel (and felt) toward people like Hiro Hito and Mussolini, Hitler, and even Malcolm X (since all of these were really equated in terms of deserving my anger). Any American-Indian who dared speak out against the U.S. was to be hated and exterminated.
On the other band, I was taught to look up to those in my culture who were appointed (anointed?) to express our anger against these “ne’er-do-wells”: President Roosevelt against the Japanese; Winston Churchill against the Germans; Our Catholic priest against Malcolm X; Every one against the American Indian.
But, what was it, exactly, that these people did to us—to us, to our culture—that justified such righteous anger?
Well, of course, by now I know the answers to these questions. But, at the time I was being conditioned, I did not. I was carefully kept ignorant of the reasons (or, more accurately, the rationale) for these angers. I was a good little mushroom.
Before my mother died, she told me of an incident in her life which was a perfect example of this conditioning. In 1968, she and my Father were visiting New York City. Some friends (business associates of my father’s) invited them to a Jewish service. It would be my mother’s first brush with either Jews or the Jewish religion. She had been raised to despise them and their history (but not Jesus or the other Jews of the Old Testament). She told me that she had felt so proud of herself that she was overcoming a learned prejudice. She went to the service, knowing how grateful the little congregation would be that she was condescending to expose herself so gratuitously to their culture.
What was her surprise when in the homily given by the Rabbi, he should make the unforgivable gaffe of talking in angry tones about the horrors of the Nazi holocaust? My mother had come to this service as a queen who steps down to break with tradition and enter the home of a commoner. All should be sweetness and light. All should be aflutter with the flattery of her presence. How would the queen feel if no one recognized who she was and what she was doing for them? How would she feel if they actually conversed in her hearing about the horrors of her reign?
My mother felt that the Rabbi chose this subject either because of, or in spite of her presence in the synagogue. How dare he subject her to such a horrendous subject, such distasteful details? She was angry. She could not forgive. It was obvious to her that they either did not possess the intelligence to know what she was trying to do, or did not care. Her reaction was to re-entrench herself in her briefly vacated shell of bigotry, and feel newly justified in it. She never again attempted to understand or empathize with the plight of the Jews. She wrote them off—simply never thought about them again.
Where did this anger come from? What terrible injury had the Jews ever done to my mother that would justify the mind set with which she began this ill-fated experiment? How could she have interpreted the goings-on at a Jewish Temple in New York City as a personal insult to her?
First, my mother was a Catholic and was taught from childhood that the Jews were being punished by God for having killed Jesus Christ; that it was incumbent upon all good Catholics to cooperate with God in this matter by not doing anything to lessen the suffering of the Jews anywhere in the world. Secondly, my mother’s maternal ancestors had come to America in the generation before her mother from Germany. Not only had she inherited the cultural mind-set of Christian Germany, but during the Second World War, she had had to pretend to reject all such feelings in order to distance herself from identity as a German. Consequently, by the time she was attending this service in New York City, she thought her cultural background was invisible, and that her presence there in the congregation was known to all. The Rabbi’s topic had the effect of stripping my mother naked.
Actually, I am sure no one even knew of my mother’s presence in the congregation or what it meant to her. But, my mother felt the heat of her own spot light—her own conscience.
What she was not prepared to do was to grant any legitimacy to the anger of the Jews in her presence. They might have some right to be angry at certain individuals in Germany or elsewhere. But they had no right to burden her with it, or expose her to the discomfort of the reasons for it. And, furthermore, in future they would be well advised never to speak of that subject at any of their services if they expected any Christians to accept them. It was obvious to her that they had not yet instituted that very necessary repression, and until they did, they would not find my mother looking in their direction.
Well, all of this anger in my mother just shows the exalted opinion she had been taught to have of her own culture and herself as a representative of that culture. And it is this burden (privilege as she was taught to view it) of representation that accounts for much of the anger.
As a woman, she was taught that she was to represent all that was decent, right, kind, and worthy in our culture. As a mother, she was taught that it was she alone who could transmit these values to her children She entered that Jewish Synagogue as though she were an envoy from her culture to “theirs.” She fully expected to be feted with the best “they” had to offer her. She expected to be made aware of “their” fervent desire that she be pleased with “their” performance. She was even prepared to pretend to be pleased, though their efforts might be sophomoric by the standards of her culture.
Instead, the homily seemed to her to focus upon that very person, the one she was so conscious of representing herself to be, as the antagonist in the Rabbi’s recounting of the betrayal of German Jewry.
Of course, it is obvious that my mother would suffer the same fate in gatherings of any of the victims of Western culture, whether it would be at an American Indian Pow-wow, an Asian- American cultural event (whether Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Viet Namese, Thai, Pilipino, Cambodian, Persian, Indian or Turkish), a Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander luau, an African-American church service, a Hispanic-American political meeting.
My mother felt that none of these had the right to make her feel anything but welcome should some overwhelmingly unavoidable circumstance compel her to attend. She felt this on two grounds: first, that she, herself, had never done any harm to any of these people (or to anyone else, for that matter); and, secondly, all of these cultures owe a debt of gratitude to her culture for their very continued existence. Therefore, they should make every attempt to make her feel welcome and comfortable in their midst.
In her mind, the Jews of New York City did not do this. She was angry.
My poor mother had been "carefully taught." I am so glad she had a chance to tell me about it.
So, I have decided to label all of my former and present angers as illegitimate, fraudulent, hypocritical, to the extent that they are directed at the oppressed, the poor, the homeless, the helpless (and their defenders) -- in short, the victims of my class of society. There can be no other purpose in such anger than to maintain my privileged status over them through the threat of my displeasure.
Rather, it is their anger which is legitimate. It is legitimate because it is based upon true wrongs done to them by my class in society. My class, the privileged class (regardless of degree), exists solely at the expense of the underprivileged. The underprivileged have that status because my class stole goods or labor from them to hoard for ourselves. We did this (and continue to do this) on the claim, among many others which seem convenient to us, that we know better how to utilize those possessions (goods and labor) than those from whom they have been taken (but we prefer to say that they have “lost” them through their own folly).
And so, the utility of my anger toward the underprivileged is as a reaction against the legitimate rage of those who have been robbed. I have been conditioned to label every expression of that rage as an aggression against a peaceful, law-abiding citizen — me. The peace and law by which I legitimize my reactionary anger has the sole purpose of ensuring the uninterrupted use and enjoyment of my ill-gotten gains; the only justification for my possession of which is my claim that I know better how to dispose of these gains than those who formerly possessed them.
My anger is the anger of the “caught thief.” Therefore, I am no better than a common thief, and neither is my class of society, nor by extension, my European culture so long as I do not speak out against its wrongs. Those whom we oppress have a right to their anger against us. To deny it to them is a further theft. But, by acknowledging the legitimacy of their anger without redressing the cause, we add insult to injury.
The End
Last modified: Thursday, August 29, 2013 James
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Mushrooms
by James Lester © 1992
FALSE PATRIOTISM
I wrote this piece in 1992, intending it to be the first chapter in a book on the subject. But, starting in that same year, my health broke down when I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. I continued working on the other offerings on this web page, still intending to somehow make it all into a book, when I had a massive heart attack in September 1994, followed by a 5-way bypass operation in December of that year.
Throughout the years 1992 to 1999, I had seven bladder operations for tumor removals, three courses of chemo and three electrical burnings-out of tumors, along with a cystoscopic exam every three months or less. Needless to say, my time for uninterrupted creative writing was limited. Nevertheless, I did complete the other offerings.
In the meantime, a friend of mine came into some money and kindly bought me my first PC in 1998. I immediately invested in MS FrontPage and this website was born.
Another, smaller, heart attack in 1999, followed by installation of two stents brought me through the millennium.
I continued writing MUSHROOMS, but lost track of it as the VA worked on medications that would stabilize my health condition.
Last year, 2011, I was diagnosed with Parkinsons Disease.
Recently, I came upon the continuation of Mushrooms and published it here.
James
Yesterday, This day‘s madness did prepare;
To-Morrow‘s Silence, Triumph, or Despair
—Omar Khayyam
When I was in the infantry in 1957, I once asked my sergeant to explain a confusing order from headquarters. "What's going on?" I asked. He turned to me with a tired, resigned expression and said, "Infantry men are like mushrooms, son. You know how they grow mushrooms, don't you?" "No," I said. "You keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit," was his answer.
That is what has been done to America. We have been kept in the dark, and fed the "shit" of false patriotism. It is a rich brew, and as long as we are ignorant of its real purpose, we cannot be blamed too harshly for our addiction to it.
Our form of government, democracy, is not at fault. Democracy is, rather, the hope of civilized humans. It is capitalism that lies at the root of the problem. I know, we have been told that democracy and capitalism are inseparable; one cannot exist without the other. That is not true. If we think about the difference between them – and we are carefully taught not to do so – we think of capitalism as our economic system, and democracy as our political system. But, they are actually two separate systems of government operating simultaneously.
For this reason, I should lead off with a thumbnail sketch of the history of these two systems. I have relied heavily on the relevant volumes of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. There are many sources of this information, but the Durants have provided such a wealth of factual detail in their books that the reader is able to filter fact from commentary more readily than in the others.
The methods of modern capitalism were developed in seventeenth, and eighteenth, century France and England. The merchant class which developed these methods, described loosely as colonialism, was at first financed by feudal monarchies which hoped to benefit from the enterprises. But the merchants themselves were the beneficiaries and it wasn't long before they possessed more money as a group than did the Monarchs, who depended upon the less lucrative ownership of land and slaves. Soon, these rich merchants were able to buy the lands and titles of the established nobility, and to challenge the authority of the King himself. In the long run, they have largely succeeded in displacing monarchy as a form of government.
On the surface, that success looked like a long-delayed return of wealth from the feudal lords to the people, because the wealth of European kings had been extorted from the people at sword point over the previous thousand years. In fact it was simply a change of actors in the same play; the merchants became the new ruling elite. But, they lacked the justification for their new power that the established monarchies had spent thousands of years creating for themselves: That their right to rule came not just from brute strength, but rather, from God and the traditions of a mystical past. The merchants had to devise a new "justification" that would not only explain their own right to rule, but would at the same time strip monarchy of its pretended legitimacy.
How the merchants went about creating this "new Order" is an interesting story because the conflict goes on to this day. Monarchies had traditionally used a populace conditioned to defend royal power when threatened. During times of peace, monarchs claimed their power to rule came directly from God. But, during times of war or other threat, being unable to draw from this fiction, they claimed that God was using the populace as His tool to protect the monarch and therefore the country. All monarchs relied intimately on organized religion to accomplish this conditioning of the populace and rewarded it grandly for its service.
The new merchant class, knowing where the monarch's power really came from, chided the populace for their blind faith. Organized religion – represented most powerfully by the Catholic Church – knowing where its butter came from, weighed in heavily on the side of monarchy as the legitimate form of government. The merchants were on their own.
However, the merchants had recently learned that long before the Christian and Muslim age, the Greeks had developed for a short time what they had called democracy; rule by the people. This example was used to show that divine right to rule was unnecessary to good government; that, since the real power of the King came from the people, not God, the people – represented, of course, by the merchant class – ought to be able to decide who would rule them.
There were many factions in this struggle. Organized religion got left on the sidelines and now insists that, although they may have been wrong about the power of the monarch, they had been right about the power of the populace coming from God. Some of the merchants could see the wisdom of using the Church as monarchs had, resulting in so-called Christian democracies. But, most of the powerful merchants decided to base their power to rule on the "law of the jungle," or what we now call" social Darwinism," and as such a return to the first step of monarchy: "Might makes right." Philosophers and scientists were engaged to falsify and manufacture "evidence" for both sides of the debate.
And so, our modern ideas of democracy began simply as a way to justify the rule of the many by a different few.
In the meantime, the general public heard the debates between these powerful factions. They began to understand that finally their power was being recognized. Most took sides as to which elite would win, not realizing that any other choice existed. But, some began to insist that, since it was now acknowledged by all that power to rule came from the "people," it should never again be taken out of their hands by an elite group or individual among them. They saw these elitist groups as a parasite on the body public.
We all know that capitalism in the hands of the merchant class defeated monarchy in the Western world. Out of this conflict of interest has come the struggle between the "royalty" of capitalism and the "egalitarianism" of democracy. The French revolution was the first great victory of that "new royalty" over democracy; our own revolution is only now resulting in the second.
Again, nothing had really changed because the merchant elite were using the same old tried-and-true methods of extortion as the Monarchs had used to get their wealth and control. They simply used them at first on non-European populations of humans, establishing new "superior" blood lines with a new blood bath of physical force. It wasn't long before the new "kings" took over from the old.
The net result to the majority non-elite mass of humans was that, instead of losing their land, and thus their life to a dictator class, they now lost their life through the theft of that most intimate of "land," their own body, to a new dictator class, the capitalists. For, wealth was no longer calculated in terms of land area and population. Now it was calculated in terms of the price of individual labor. If a person could not do something of use to capitalism, they were no longer a person; no longer a human being. From then on the humanity of the child of a human female was determined only by its money value to capitalism.
Throughout the period of the conflict just described, the American Colonies were big businesses run by European capitalists. Our revolution simply made these big businesses independent of Europe and substituted democracy for its failing system of monarchy. Because of this, democracy as a means of social government took the same back seat position to capitalism as monarchy had in Europe and the former colonies. Therefore, despite what we are taught, democracy has yet to be tested as a comprehensive form of government.
It is the conflict between the principles of economic elitism embedded in capitalism, and the ideals of social equality undergirding democracy that accounts for what may be called our national schizophrenia. We are struggling with a crisis of conscience which worsens every year. But we are kept confused about its causes and consequences by a system of"doublethink" as potent as that described in George Orwell's book, 1984: The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The capitalistic half of this adverse combination, based as it is on theories of racial superiority, perpetuates the racism peculiar to American society.
I am an average pink American. I went to average schools and learned what everyone does from the media. I was a liberal on social matters; a conservative on fiscal and international matters. I prided myself on having few prejudices. I knew that there had been bad times in the past for certain minorities, but I had been taught in high school that laws and customs had changed so that now only a few individuals still had these problems; the country was fulfilling its promise to all its citizens; those who were still having problems were either ignorant, or just plain lazy.
The social and political upheavals of the sixties exploded these myths. Yet, nothing has been done since then to dismantle the declared cause: institutional racism.
Why not?
And, why did I not know what was going on?
I am an extreme example of the MUSHROOM syndrome. I was raised from the ages of ten to eighteen in a predominantly Catholic enclave of Chicago's North Side. I attended Catholic schools where nothing – and I mean, nothing – got through to us from the outside. Our bubble of privilege was air-tight. But, I was totally unaware of this. We were taught to be proud of the excellence of our school and its curriculum. We thought we were being taught all that was worth knowing.
I had my first experience with other-than-middle-class-pink-Americans in the army in the late fifties. I saw and heard many instances of individual racism and class prejudice. But, I had been taught not to see them as symptoms of a continuing, larger, deeper injustice in our society. I viewed them as isolated examples of an outmoded mentality; almost as exceptions that proved the rule; blemishes, if you will, on the skin of an otherwise healthy body. Yet, I always had a nagging suspicion that all was not right.
I have since learned that these loathsome incidents are not the cause of racism. Rather, they are the boils associated with the real cause, the cancer within. Burn them out – cauterize them – focus public attention on them as we will, and should – they will only return in greater numbers in succeeding generations, so long as we do not see that they are only the visible tips of the icebergs of institutional racism founded in our economic system.
Most of us would agree that prejudice, bigotry and the ignorance which feeds these characteristics are to found in all human groups. They account for irrational thoughts and actions regarding everything from food to philosophy. Racism, however, is a specific term. It refers to the translation of irrational thoughts about races of humans – defined in terms of skin color in Europe, America, Australia and south Africa – into public policies which favor one race over all others. this can only be done by the race which has social, economic and military power. Therefore it is what is called a "power term." And, since public policy can only be made effective through the institutions of government, we arrive at the term "institutional racism." Our institutions were established by pink racists, and serve the capitalistic aims of our government.
But, our apologists – the media and politicians – have always succeeded in shifting the blame to individuals. They tell us that this is the only expression of racism left in America; a few embarrassingly ignorant individuals. This tactic makes many pink Americans feel resentful towards the members of their race who do such things. They feel unfairly accused of racism for simply being members of the majority race. This individualist explanation of racial tensions reinforces the defensive belief that racism is natural to all races, which it is not, any more than is capitalism. It makes efforts to solve the problem appear futile, because we believe human nature cannot be changed, except through our supposed laborious, ages-long progress toward some distant utopia. It makes our leaders look like the idealistic, heroic champions of that progress. And it leaves Americans of color to explain to us why they are having so much trouble in spite of all our good intentions.
This in turn, then, leaves the door open to the capitalistic argument that Americans of color just do not measure up, and it is no one's fault but their own; firmly absolving us of our own guilt.
It is a circular argument unworthy of us.
I thought as most Americans do on the subject. I was so proud of America for being the bastion of equality and freedom for all its citizens; the land of the free and the home of the brave. I was in my late forties before I began to find out the sad truth. And, in order to do so, I had to become one of the small percentage of Americans who has a college degree with post-graduate level study; and one of the even smaller percentage who study the ethnic history of our country. That is where the information that refutes the circular argument is buried, far from the inquiring mind of the average pink American.
The average pink American can only learn what the schools, the publishing industry and television producers will tell them. Those responsible for the output of these sources of information are mostly pink Americans. They are Mushrooms like the rest of us.
They still think as I once did that negative information about our national history comes from the distortions of malcontents and Communists; that if I checked their sources, as many I respected claim to have done, I would find that the events reported were actually inevitable, or the person portrayed was merely acting out of the universally accepted understandings of the time; that, were I in their shoes, I would have done the same as they. I felt that no good is served wallowing in the mistakes of the past; that we have a duty to ourselves and our children to glorify, even sanctify, selected persons and events in our past and gloss over the less-than-glorious. All of this in order to provide as magnificent a national fable as any other country has, and to prevent the supposed chaos and trauma that public knowledge and discussion of our mistakes would undoubtedly cause.
I subscribed to and perpetuated these precautionary tactics because I was told the average American cannot deal with these negative truths without irreparable damage to the national psyche. Therefore, negative information must be watered down, rendered harmless, elevated to a level available only to a few university-trained individuals, who then claim that they alone have the enlightened intellect to understand it. This is an ancient practice which accounts for much of the "mystery" surrounding so-called social Progress.
It does not matter, then, how many of the educated few discover the truth; they are always too few to be able to cause change. Change can only occur if the general public is given access to the information. This home page is inspired by some who are trying to do just that. Howard Zinn has written, A Peoples' History of the United States; Ronald Takaki has written Iron Cages; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. All were written for popular consumption, yet all have been shunted to the university book stores for the consumption of the few. Read these books and check some of the referenced sources. And, also, click on the Znet link on my homepage where you can dialogue with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, among others.
But, I also listened to the oppressed minorities, themselves. Listening in my post-graduate level studies to their testimonials and the results of their research, my eyes were opened to the enormity of the gulf between what I had been led to believe without question, and what has really happened in the United states of America. And I was humbled by the realization that most of the people of color in this country already know these things without having to receive "higher education" to find them out.
Over the years, I have several times come across a woodcutting, or etching, showing a pastoral scene with peasants in the foreground hoeing a field, leading beasts of burden out of the nearby woods, in the background, a walled castle and town. Overarching this scene, like an immense band shell, is the vault of the sky showing sun, moon, and stars on its convex inner surface. Outside the vault, not visible to those within, can be seen what looks like a giant clockwork of gears, all connected by drive shafts to the heavenly bodies. At the left edge of the vault, a solitary man thrusts head and shoulders through the vault. He is gazing in awe at the workings of the solar system, while his fellows go on about their business in comfortable ignorance. The etching represents the age of enlightenment in which Copernicus and Galileo participated.
After my studies, I felt like that man. I had been transported outside the bubble of contrived American history, and was seeing for the first time how the lives and toil of countless other humans, here and abroad, were being wasted to support the standard of living of pink Americans. And those inside were either ignorant of it, or had been led to believe that life inside the bubble of pink privilege was a matter of choice for all humans (a color-blind pink society in America has this utility); that if those suffering outside would but embrace the ideals of capitalism (masquerading as democracy) they could share in the abundance.
This is the vaunted "American dream."
I have learned it is the nightmare of much of the rest of the world.
In the past, I felt frustrated in my efforts to help those outside find their way in so they could share in the wealth. I honestly thought that all they needed to know was how to do it. I came to realize that in order to do it, they would have to join pink America in perpetuating their newly-achieved status as insiders by actively participating in the subjection of the very group on the outside from which they had just emerged. This is exactly what Japan, Korea, and Singapore are now doing on an international scale. We spread capitalism, not democracy.
Missionary types preaching the message of assimilation are increasingly ignored by today's minorities in this country. Gone are the days when liberal bleeding-hearts can select a particular minority as "their people," cull the cream into the bubble, and ignore the plight of the "inferior" rest. This invitation to compromise the ideals of human equality is repugnant to Americans of color. They know that pink Americans have always considered them to be members of populations which can produce only a few people "worthy of elite status." It is cold comfort to them to know that we pink Americans are being deceived by our own leaders.
My frustration had turned to anger. I felt like a professional boxer who has just discovered that he is the champion only because the boxing commission has been fixing his fights. Further, he has found that there is nothing he can do about it from the inside. He has a choice. He can either close his eyes, accept the falsity of his pride, sit back and enjoy the ride; or he can opt out of the profession, and try to reform the commission. I realized that the system is fixed. There is no way to correct the problems from within it, even by the use of our democratic processes, because the means of prevention have been in place since the founding of the country.
I am angry that I cannot speak simply as a human being who happens to be an American. The "establishment" has made sure that I can only speak as a a pink American. We have never been allowed to listen to those who have told the truth, because they were immediately branded as subversives, anarchists or even psychopaths.
I am an average pink American who does not aspire to be a leader. I only want to know and share the truth. And, I am not alone.
Yet, in raising my children, I shared, unwittingly, in the cleverly designed double-standard which, while nominally blind to skin color, nevertheless defines the quality of humanity and citizenship by Euro centric (pink) economic (capitalistic) criteria. This is nothing less than pink supremacy, pink racism, disguised by lip service to ideals of equality and fair play. Its purpose is to keep Americans of color out of the mainstream so that they can continue to provide cheap labor for our economic system.
Depending, as it does, upon despoiling the weak and disadvantaged, capitalism may be compared to rape. And, rape prevention is not served by preaching to rape victims the mistaken notion that rape is a legitimate punishment for certain actions, or dress, ("She asked for it....That's what you get when...."). Neither is it served by burdening the victims with the education or reform of the rapist. Further, just as the hypocrisy and ignorance of the general public often justifies – even champions - the rapist, so the ignorance of American pinks justifies the racial, ethnic, cultural and class divisions upon which capitalism is based.
Our public and private institutions cling stubbornly to a whole range of mistaken assumptions about humanity and history which supports and feeds this ignorance. The changes necessary to remove these inequities will be sweeping, profound, even drastic. But, just as with the rapist, change must be initiated by the perpetrator, not the victim; by pink America, not the victims of racism.
I cannot presume to preach to people of color. I can only help them by telling other pink Americans what is being done to Americans of color in our name. Most Americans of color are fully aware of the inequities of their country, since they are its victims. American Indians have been telling us about it for centuries.
And if, even after learning the truth, we are happy with things the way they are, then we must abandon the charade of equality, democracy, freedom, and admit to the world, and ourselves, that we are not unique in the community of nations as we have for centuries advertised ourselves to be; that we are at heart, after all the layers of false patriotism are peeled back, simply race patriots. Worse, to justify our artificially achieved pink majority, we would have to openly accept the ideals of the Ku Klux Klan, and other pink supremacist groups, in their contention that the color of our skin, and the preference of a pink God, do indeed, entitle us to enslave people of color not only in this country, but throughout the world.
Whether we know it or not – whether we accept it or not – we are all supporting an economic system which drives national policy and foreign policy to act upon that "divine right" to superiority. No such "right" is stated in our Constitution, or its amendments. In fact, our constitution rejects such "rights." These concepts of superiority come, rather, from the principles of capitalism – the partnership that wealthy merchants of the Renaissance forced upon the remaining feudal Lords of the middle Ages. The egalitarian principles of our Constitution come from those sixteenth and seventeenth century English and French philosophers who fought against the concentration of wealth among the privileged few. Thus, without realizing it, the people of the United states have fought for, and achieved, political and economic freedom for the wealthy. By the use of our democratic freedoms, we must now free ourselves and the rest of the world from the economic tyranny of capitalism.
Our president, congress, corporations and military establishment have acted on these feudal principles since our founding as a nation. It is not surprising that this should be so when our founding fathers were pink supremacists, as evidenced by their letters and other facts of their lives preserved in the Library of Congress. It was they who superimposed capitalism onto the egalitarian principles of the Constitution for the express purpose of reserving the power and benefits of citizenship to pink landowners. It was they – the wealthy few of their time – who created the two governments: capitalism for the rich, democracy for the poor.
I am loyal to the democratic, egalitarian constitutional principles upon which my country was founded. I am disloyal to the tenets of capitalism because they have eclipsed the light of our constitution in our everyday life.
Corporate America is not the America we teach our children about, but it is the America we actually live in. We imagine that we are all equal under the law, yet we spend most of our days within the feudalistic structure of our economic system. There, we willingly subject ourselves to the domination of Kings, Dukes, and Princelings – in today's corporate language: C.E.O.s, Vice Presidents, and Employers – who then become our political leaders.
"Skin-color-racism," – "apartheid, American-style," is an integral element of this system.
We proudly, or resentfully as the case may be, live the roles of masters or servants in this grand, seductive game. And then, worst of all, we use these corporate labels, as was done in feudal times, to define our worth as human beings, and the value of our citizenship.
By these means, we buy and sell that most precious of possessions: our citizenship. It is for sale in the market place of capitalism!
We corporate Americans chuckle cynically at the idealism of the young as they struggle with the obvious disparity between the constitution and the market place. But, we have swallowed the myths of our "peculiar democracy" with the same zeal as our children are made to swallow the myth of Santa Claus. In our maturity we are expected to continue to give lip service to the ideals of social and economic equality, while "graduating" to the "realities" of the market place. The difference is that, unlike Santa Claus, democracy actually exists here. But it is a political system held captive, perverted and rendered impotent by a ruthless economic system.
America could be the land of the free. I want my country to be what we say it is. It will be, someday, I am certain. But, only if we face up to the truth and abandon capitalism. The means for change need not be violent or revolutionary. If we all think long and hard about solutions and alternatives, we will surely proceed to a truly unique American result, as new and breathtaking as was our Constitution, upon which that change would be based.
However, before any change can be made we must first have accurate information. Only by finding where we are, can we determine how to proceed to a desired destination. If we conclude that we are not where we should be, and further, that we have been headed in the wrong direction, then we have two additional tasks to perform before we can strike out in the right direction. We must find out how, and why, we got here. This is important, because the faulty directions have sounded correct, or we would not have followed them for so long. We do not want to fall for them again in the future. These are matters of history, though, and luckily we are one of the few countries which does not destroy our historical records, but only buries them. The information we need is there. We need only read it.
Access to that information is limited in order to prevent change, or in order to channel the means and direction of change through the hands of an elite few. Dissemination of accurate information to the public is the antidote.
But, the American public is carefully prevented from having accurate information about what is done in their name by the president, congress, the top military brass and the top two percent wealthy of this country. That small, elite group knows what I am telling you, here, yet they perpetuate the lie we live with.
We are like mushrooms: We are kept in the dark and fed the "shit" of:
To-Morrow‘s Silence, Triumph, or Despair
—Omar Khayyam
When I was in the infantry in 1957, I once asked my sergeant to explain a confusing order from headquarters. "What's going on?" I asked. He turned to me with a tired, resigned expression and said, "Infantry men are like mushrooms, son. You know how they grow mushrooms, don't you?" "No," I said. "You keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit," was his answer.
That is what has been done to America. We have been kept in the dark, and fed the "shit" of false patriotism. It is a rich brew, and as long as we are ignorant of its real purpose, we cannot be blamed too harshly for our addiction to it.
Our form of government, democracy, is not at fault. Democracy is, rather, the hope of civilized humans. It is capitalism that lies at the root of the problem. I know, we have been told that democracy and capitalism are inseparable; one cannot exist without the other. That is not true. If we think about the difference between them – and we are carefully taught not to do so – we think of capitalism as our economic system, and democracy as our political system. But, they are actually two separate systems of government operating simultaneously.
For this reason, I should lead off with a thumbnail sketch of the history of these two systems. I have relied heavily on the relevant volumes of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. There are many sources of this information, but the Durants have provided such a wealth of factual detail in their books that the reader is able to filter fact from commentary more readily than in the others.
The methods of modern capitalism were developed in seventeenth, and eighteenth, century France and England. The merchant class which developed these methods, described loosely as colonialism, was at first financed by feudal monarchies which hoped to benefit from the enterprises. But the merchants themselves were the beneficiaries and it wasn't long before they possessed more money as a group than did the Monarchs, who depended upon the less lucrative ownership of land and slaves. Soon, these rich merchants were able to buy the lands and titles of the established nobility, and to challenge the authority of the King himself. In the long run, they have largely succeeded in displacing monarchy as a form of government.
On the surface, that success looked like a long-delayed return of wealth from the feudal lords to the people, because the wealth of European kings had been extorted from the people at sword point over the previous thousand years. In fact it was simply a change of actors in the same play; the merchants became the new ruling elite. But, they lacked the justification for their new power that the established monarchies had spent thousands of years creating for themselves: That their right to rule came not just from brute strength, but rather, from God and the traditions of a mystical past. The merchants had to devise a new "justification" that would not only explain their own right to rule, but would at the same time strip monarchy of its pretended legitimacy.
How the merchants went about creating this "new Order" is an interesting story because the conflict goes on to this day. Monarchies had traditionally used a populace conditioned to defend royal power when threatened. During times of peace, monarchs claimed their power to rule came directly from God. But, during times of war or other threat, being unable to draw from this fiction, they claimed that God was using the populace as His tool to protect the monarch and therefore the country. All monarchs relied intimately on organized religion to accomplish this conditioning of the populace and rewarded it grandly for its service.
The new merchant class, knowing where the monarch's power really came from, chided the populace for their blind faith. Organized religion – represented most powerfully by the Catholic Church – knowing where its butter came from, weighed in heavily on the side of monarchy as the legitimate form of government. The merchants were on their own.
However, the merchants had recently learned that long before the Christian and Muslim age, the Greeks had developed for a short time what they had called democracy; rule by the people. This example was used to show that divine right to rule was unnecessary to good government; that, since the real power of the King came from the people, not God, the people – represented, of course, by the merchant class – ought to be able to decide who would rule them.
There were many factions in this struggle. Organized religion got left on the sidelines and now insists that, although they may have been wrong about the power of the monarch, they had been right about the power of the populace coming from God. Some of the merchants could see the wisdom of using the Church as monarchs had, resulting in so-called Christian democracies. But, most of the powerful merchants decided to base their power to rule on the "law of the jungle," or what we now call" social Darwinism," and as such a return to the first step of monarchy: "Might makes right." Philosophers and scientists were engaged to falsify and manufacture "evidence" for both sides of the debate.
And so, our modern ideas of democracy began simply as a way to justify the rule of the many by a different few.
In the meantime, the general public heard the debates between these powerful factions. They began to understand that finally their power was being recognized. Most took sides as to which elite would win, not realizing that any other choice existed. But, some began to insist that, since it was now acknowledged by all that power to rule came from the "people," it should never again be taken out of their hands by an elite group or individual among them. They saw these elitist groups as a parasite on the body public.
We all know that capitalism in the hands of the merchant class defeated monarchy in the Western world. Out of this conflict of interest has come the struggle between the "royalty" of capitalism and the "egalitarianism" of democracy. The French revolution was the first great victory of that "new royalty" over democracy; our own revolution is only now resulting in the second.
Again, nothing had really changed because the merchant elite were using the same old tried-and-true methods of extortion as the Monarchs had used to get their wealth and control. They simply used them at first on non-European populations of humans, establishing new "superior" blood lines with a new blood bath of physical force. It wasn't long before the new "kings" took over from the old.
The net result to the majority non-elite mass of humans was that, instead of losing their land, and thus their life to a dictator class, they now lost their life through the theft of that most intimate of "land," their own body, to a new dictator class, the capitalists. For, wealth was no longer calculated in terms of land area and population. Now it was calculated in terms of the price of individual labor. If a person could not do something of use to capitalism, they were no longer a person; no longer a human being. From then on the humanity of the child of a human female was determined only by its money value to capitalism.
Throughout the period of the conflict just described, the American Colonies were big businesses run by European capitalists. Our revolution simply made these big businesses independent of Europe and substituted democracy for its failing system of monarchy. Because of this, democracy as a means of social government took the same back seat position to capitalism as monarchy had in Europe and the former colonies. Therefore, despite what we are taught, democracy has yet to be tested as a comprehensive form of government.
It is the conflict between the principles of economic elitism embedded in capitalism, and the ideals of social equality undergirding democracy that accounts for what may be called our national schizophrenia. We are struggling with a crisis of conscience which worsens every year. But we are kept confused about its causes and consequences by a system of"doublethink" as potent as that described in George Orwell's book, 1984: The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The capitalistic half of this adverse combination, based as it is on theories of racial superiority, perpetuates the racism peculiar to American society.
I am an average pink American. I went to average schools and learned what everyone does from the media. I was a liberal on social matters; a conservative on fiscal and international matters. I prided myself on having few prejudices. I knew that there had been bad times in the past for certain minorities, but I had been taught in high school that laws and customs had changed so that now only a few individuals still had these problems; the country was fulfilling its promise to all its citizens; those who were still having problems were either ignorant, or just plain lazy.
The social and political upheavals of the sixties exploded these myths. Yet, nothing has been done since then to dismantle the declared cause: institutional racism.
Why not?
And, why did I not know what was going on?
I am an extreme example of the MUSHROOM syndrome. I was raised from the ages of ten to eighteen in a predominantly Catholic enclave of Chicago's North Side. I attended Catholic schools where nothing – and I mean, nothing – got through to us from the outside. Our bubble of privilege was air-tight. But, I was totally unaware of this. We were taught to be proud of the excellence of our school and its curriculum. We thought we were being taught all that was worth knowing.
I had my first experience with other-than-middle-class-pink-Americans in the army in the late fifties. I saw and heard many instances of individual racism and class prejudice. But, I had been taught not to see them as symptoms of a continuing, larger, deeper injustice in our society. I viewed them as isolated examples of an outmoded mentality; almost as exceptions that proved the rule; blemishes, if you will, on the skin of an otherwise healthy body. Yet, I always had a nagging suspicion that all was not right.
I have since learned that these loathsome incidents are not the cause of racism. Rather, they are the boils associated with the real cause, the cancer within. Burn them out – cauterize them – focus public attention on them as we will, and should – they will only return in greater numbers in succeeding generations, so long as we do not see that they are only the visible tips of the icebergs of institutional racism founded in our economic system.
Most of us would agree that prejudice, bigotry and the ignorance which feeds these characteristics are to found in all human groups. They account for irrational thoughts and actions regarding everything from food to philosophy. Racism, however, is a specific term. It refers to the translation of irrational thoughts about races of humans – defined in terms of skin color in Europe, America, Australia and south Africa – into public policies which favor one race over all others. this can only be done by the race which has social, economic and military power. Therefore it is what is called a "power term." And, since public policy can only be made effective through the institutions of government, we arrive at the term "institutional racism." Our institutions were established by pink racists, and serve the capitalistic aims of our government.
But, our apologists – the media and politicians – have always succeeded in shifting the blame to individuals. They tell us that this is the only expression of racism left in America; a few embarrassingly ignorant individuals. This tactic makes many pink Americans feel resentful towards the members of their race who do such things. They feel unfairly accused of racism for simply being members of the majority race. This individualist explanation of racial tensions reinforces the defensive belief that racism is natural to all races, which it is not, any more than is capitalism. It makes efforts to solve the problem appear futile, because we believe human nature cannot be changed, except through our supposed laborious, ages-long progress toward some distant utopia. It makes our leaders look like the idealistic, heroic champions of that progress. And it leaves Americans of color to explain to us why they are having so much trouble in spite of all our good intentions.
This in turn, then, leaves the door open to the capitalistic argument that Americans of color just do not measure up, and it is no one's fault but their own; firmly absolving us of our own guilt.
It is a circular argument unworthy of us.
I thought as most Americans do on the subject. I was so proud of America for being the bastion of equality and freedom for all its citizens; the land of the free and the home of the brave. I was in my late forties before I began to find out the sad truth. And, in order to do so, I had to become one of the small percentage of Americans who has a college degree with post-graduate level study; and one of the even smaller percentage who study the ethnic history of our country. That is where the information that refutes the circular argument is buried, far from the inquiring mind of the average pink American.
The average pink American can only learn what the schools, the publishing industry and television producers will tell them. Those responsible for the output of these sources of information are mostly pink Americans. They are Mushrooms like the rest of us.
They still think as I once did that negative information about our national history comes from the distortions of malcontents and Communists; that if I checked their sources, as many I respected claim to have done, I would find that the events reported were actually inevitable, or the person portrayed was merely acting out of the universally accepted understandings of the time; that, were I in their shoes, I would have done the same as they. I felt that no good is served wallowing in the mistakes of the past; that we have a duty to ourselves and our children to glorify, even sanctify, selected persons and events in our past and gloss over the less-than-glorious. All of this in order to provide as magnificent a national fable as any other country has, and to prevent the supposed chaos and trauma that public knowledge and discussion of our mistakes would undoubtedly cause.
I subscribed to and perpetuated these precautionary tactics because I was told the average American cannot deal with these negative truths without irreparable damage to the national psyche. Therefore, negative information must be watered down, rendered harmless, elevated to a level available only to a few university-trained individuals, who then claim that they alone have the enlightened intellect to understand it. This is an ancient practice which accounts for much of the "mystery" surrounding so-called social Progress.
It does not matter, then, how many of the educated few discover the truth; they are always too few to be able to cause change. Change can only occur if the general public is given access to the information. This home page is inspired by some who are trying to do just that. Howard Zinn has written, A Peoples' History of the United States; Ronald Takaki has written Iron Cages; Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. All were written for popular consumption, yet all have been shunted to the university book stores for the consumption of the few. Read these books and check some of the referenced sources. And, also, click on the Znet link on my homepage where you can dialogue with Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, among others.
But, I also listened to the oppressed minorities, themselves. Listening in my post-graduate level studies to their testimonials and the results of their research, my eyes were opened to the enormity of the gulf between what I had been led to believe without question, and what has really happened in the United states of America. And I was humbled by the realization that most of the people of color in this country already know these things without having to receive "higher education" to find them out.
Over the years, I have several times come across a woodcutting, or etching, showing a pastoral scene with peasants in the foreground hoeing a field, leading beasts of burden out of the nearby woods, in the background, a walled castle and town. Overarching this scene, like an immense band shell, is the vault of the sky showing sun, moon, and stars on its convex inner surface. Outside the vault, not visible to those within, can be seen what looks like a giant clockwork of gears, all connected by drive shafts to the heavenly bodies. At the left edge of the vault, a solitary man thrusts head and shoulders through the vault. He is gazing in awe at the workings of the solar system, while his fellows go on about their business in comfortable ignorance. The etching represents the age of enlightenment in which Copernicus and Galileo participated.
After my studies, I felt like that man. I had been transported outside the bubble of contrived American history, and was seeing for the first time how the lives and toil of countless other humans, here and abroad, were being wasted to support the standard of living of pink Americans. And those inside were either ignorant of it, or had been led to believe that life inside the bubble of pink privilege was a matter of choice for all humans (a color-blind pink society in America has this utility); that if those suffering outside would but embrace the ideals of capitalism (masquerading as democracy) they could share in the abundance.
This is the vaunted "American dream."
I have learned it is the nightmare of much of the rest of the world.
In the past, I felt frustrated in my efforts to help those outside find their way in so they could share in the wealth. I honestly thought that all they needed to know was how to do it. I came to realize that in order to do it, they would have to join pink America in perpetuating their newly-achieved status as insiders by actively participating in the subjection of the very group on the outside from which they had just emerged. This is exactly what Japan, Korea, and Singapore are now doing on an international scale. We spread capitalism, not democracy.
Missionary types preaching the message of assimilation are increasingly ignored by today's minorities in this country. Gone are the days when liberal bleeding-hearts can select a particular minority as "their people," cull the cream into the bubble, and ignore the plight of the "inferior" rest. This invitation to compromise the ideals of human equality is repugnant to Americans of color. They know that pink Americans have always considered them to be members of populations which can produce only a few people "worthy of elite status." It is cold comfort to them to know that we pink Americans are being deceived by our own leaders.
My frustration had turned to anger. I felt like a professional boxer who has just discovered that he is the champion only because the boxing commission has been fixing his fights. Further, he has found that there is nothing he can do about it from the inside. He has a choice. He can either close his eyes, accept the falsity of his pride, sit back and enjoy the ride; or he can opt out of the profession, and try to reform the commission. I realized that the system is fixed. There is no way to correct the problems from within it, even by the use of our democratic processes, because the means of prevention have been in place since the founding of the country.
I am angry that I cannot speak simply as a human being who happens to be an American. The "establishment" has made sure that I can only speak as a a pink American. We have never been allowed to listen to those who have told the truth, because they were immediately branded as subversives, anarchists or even psychopaths.
I am an average pink American who does not aspire to be a leader. I only want to know and share the truth. And, I am not alone.
Yet, in raising my children, I shared, unwittingly, in the cleverly designed double-standard which, while nominally blind to skin color, nevertheless defines the quality of humanity and citizenship by Euro centric (pink) economic (capitalistic) criteria. This is nothing less than pink supremacy, pink racism, disguised by lip service to ideals of equality and fair play. Its purpose is to keep Americans of color out of the mainstream so that they can continue to provide cheap labor for our economic system.
Depending, as it does, upon despoiling the weak and disadvantaged, capitalism may be compared to rape. And, rape prevention is not served by preaching to rape victims the mistaken notion that rape is a legitimate punishment for certain actions, or dress, ("She asked for it....That's what you get when...."). Neither is it served by burdening the victims with the education or reform of the rapist. Further, just as the hypocrisy and ignorance of the general public often justifies – even champions - the rapist, so the ignorance of American pinks justifies the racial, ethnic, cultural and class divisions upon which capitalism is based.
Our public and private institutions cling stubbornly to a whole range of mistaken assumptions about humanity and history which supports and feeds this ignorance. The changes necessary to remove these inequities will be sweeping, profound, even drastic. But, just as with the rapist, change must be initiated by the perpetrator, not the victim; by pink America, not the victims of racism.
I cannot presume to preach to people of color. I can only help them by telling other pink Americans what is being done to Americans of color in our name. Most Americans of color are fully aware of the inequities of their country, since they are its victims. American Indians have been telling us about it for centuries.
And if, even after learning the truth, we are happy with things the way they are, then we must abandon the charade of equality, democracy, freedom, and admit to the world, and ourselves, that we are not unique in the community of nations as we have for centuries advertised ourselves to be; that we are at heart, after all the layers of false patriotism are peeled back, simply race patriots. Worse, to justify our artificially achieved pink majority, we would have to openly accept the ideals of the Ku Klux Klan, and other pink supremacist groups, in their contention that the color of our skin, and the preference of a pink God, do indeed, entitle us to enslave people of color not only in this country, but throughout the world.
Whether we know it or not – whether we accept it or not – we are all supporting an economic system which drives national policy and foreign policy to act upon that "divine right" to superiority. No such "right" is stated in our Constitution, or its amendments. In fact, our constitution rejects such "rights." These concepts of superiority come, rather, from the principles of capitalism – the partnership that wealthy merchants of the Renaissance forced upon the remaining feudal Lords of the middle Ages. The egalitarian principles of our Constitution come from those sixteenth and seventeenth century English and French philosophers who fought against the concentration of wealth among the privileged few. Thus, without realizing it, the people of the United states have fought for, and achieved, political and economic freedom for the wealthy. By the use of our democratic freedoms, we must now free ourselves and the rest of the world from the economic tyranny of capitalism.
Our president, congress, corporations and military establishment have acted on these feudal principles since our founding as a nation. It is not surprising that this should be so when our founding fathers were pink supremacists, as evidenced by their letters and other facts of their lives preserved in the Library of Congress. It was they who superimposed capitalism onto the egalitarian principles of the Constitution for the express purpose of reserving the power and benefits of citizenship to pink landowners. It was they – the wealthy few of their time – who created the two governments: capitalism for the rich, democracy for the poor.
I am loyal to the democratic, egalitarian constitutional principles upon which my country was founded. I am disloyal to the tenets of capitalism because they have eclipsed the light of our constitution in our everyday life.
Corporate America is not the America we teach our children about, but it is the America we actually live in. We imagine that we are all equal under the law, yet we spend most of our days within the feudalistic structure of our economic system. There, we willingly subject ourselves to the domination of Kings, Dukes, and Princelings – in today's corporate language: C.E.O.s, Vice Presidents, and Employers – who then become our political leaders.
"Skin-color-racism," – "apartheid, American-style," is an integral element of this system.
We proudly, or resentfully as the case may be, live the roles of masters or servants in this grand, seductive game. And then, worst of all, we use these corporate labels, as was done in feudal times, to define our worth as human beings, and the value of our citizenship.
By these means, we buy and sell that most precious of possessions: our citizenship. It is for sale in the market place of capitalism!
We corporate Americans chuckle cynically at the idealism of the young as they struggle with the obvious disparity between the constitution and the market place. But, we have swallowed the myths of our "peculiar democracy" with the same zeal as our children are made to swallow the myth of Santa Claus. In our maturity we are expected to continue to give lip service to the ideals of social and economic equality, while "graduating" to the "realities" of the market place. The difference is that, unlike Santa Claus, democracy actually exists here. But it is a political system held captive, perverted and rendered impotent by a ruthless economic system.
America could be the land of the free. I want my country to be what we say it is. It will be, someday, I am certain. But, only if we face up to the truth and abandon capitalism. The means for change need not be violent or revolutionary. If we all think long and hard about solutions and alternatives, we will surely proceed to a truly unique American result, as new and breathtaking as was our Constitution, upon which that change would be based.
However, before any change can be made we must first have accurate information. Only by finding where we are, can we determine how to proceed to a desired destination. If we conclude that we are not where we should be, and further, that we have been headed in the wrong direction, then we have two additional tasks to perform before we can strike out in the right direction. We must find out how, and why, we got here. This is important, because the faulty directions have sounded correct, or we would not have followed them for so long. We do not want to fall for them again in the future. These are matters of history, though, and luckily we are one of the few countries which does not destroy our historical records, but only buries them. The information we need is there. We need only read it.
Access to that information is limited in order to prevent change, or in order to channel the means and direction of change through the hands of an elite few. Dissemination of accurate information to the public is the antidote.
But, the American public is carefully prevented from having accurate information about what is done in their name by the president, congress, the top military brass and the top two percent wealthy of this country. That small, elite group knows what I am telling you, here, yet they perpetuate the lie we live with.
We are like mushrooms: We are kept in the dark and fed the "shit" of:
FALSE PATRIOTISM
I wrote this piece in 1992, intending it to be the first chapter in a book on the subject. But, starting in that same year, my health broke down when I was diagnosed with bladder cancer. I continued working on the other offerings on this web page, still intending to somehow make it all into a book, when I had a massive heart attack in September 1994, followed by a 5-way bypass operation in December of that year.
Throughout the years 1992 to 1999, I had seven bladder operations for tumor removals, three courses of chemo and three electrical burnings-out of tumors, along with a cystoscopic exam every three months or less. Needless to say, my time for uninterrupted creative writing was limited. Nevertheless, I did complete the other offerings.
In the meantime, a friend of mine came into some money and kindly bought me my first PC in 1998. I immediately invested in MS FrontPage and this website was born.
Another, smaller, heart attack in 1999, followed by installation of two stents brought me through the millennium.
I continued writing MUSHROOMS, but lost track of it as the VA worked on medications that would stabilize my health condition.
Last year, 2011, I was diagnosed with Parkinsons Disease.
Recently, I came upon the continuation of Mushrooms and published it here.
James
Take a Stand
If you're a pink-American born and raised in the USA, you're a racist like me.
You don't like that? I don't either! So stop denying it. Let's own our problem and act affirmatively against it. Begin by understanding the basis of all prejudice to be the result of careful instruction of the young, beautifully captured by the lyrics of this song;
You've Got To Be Carefully Taught
You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people who's eyes are oddly made
And people who's skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be carefully taught
Although only two attributes are referred to in the lyrics, prejudice can be based on an infinite variety of characteristics. Also, these lyrics are carefully chosen to be credibly expressed by any human group, in any language, because they do not describe in what manner the oddity of eye, or shade of skin is different from that of the "singer."
So, while we may agree that prejudice is common to all human groups, we must recognize
that in the United States of America we have written prejudice out of our society by declaring
in the Declaration of Independence (see below) that all humans are born equally human and have the same unalienable rights. Yet, the prejudices of the majority group, those of Anglo ancestry, pervade
social and political policies, connecting them to the seat of all forms of power. This gives Anglos
an unconstitutional advantage over the interests of all citizens of color, and because it is based
on skin color, this peculiar "prejudice" may be called "Racism."
From the Declaration of Independence
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people who's eyes are oddly made
And people who's skin is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught
You've got to be carefully taught
From the musical South Pacific, 1947
Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
Although only two attributes are referred to in the lyrics, prejudice can be based on an infinite variety of characteristics. Also, these lyrics are carefully chosen to be credibly expressed by any human group, in any language, because they do not describe in what manner the oddity of eye, or shade of skin is different from that of the "singer."
So, while we may agree that prejudice is common to all human groups, we must recognize
that in the United States of America we have written prejudice out of our society by declaring
in the Declaration of Independence (see below) that all humans are born equally human and have the same unalienable rights. Yet, the prejudices of the majority group, those of Anglo ancestry, pervade
social and political policies, connecting them to the seat of all forms of power. This gives Anglos
an unconstitutional advantage over the interests of all citizens of color, and because it is based
on skin color, this peculiar "prejudice" may be called "Racism."
From the Declaration of Independence
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.My Anthropological Interpretation
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all", humans are born equally human, "that" all humans are therefore equally, "endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
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