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
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