Video - KRS-1 Self-Destruction
MorrisBerman | We are at a point in American history where, to paraphrase Blake, Bad is Good. This is why I’m rooting for a Palin presidency: if anyone can deepen our self-destruction, it’s Sarah. Meanwhile, two articles just appeared documenting the process even further, so I’d like to share them with you. The first is by my hero and yours, Chris Hedges: “Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System,” which he posted yesterday on truthdig.com. The second is by Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” which you can find at vanityfair.com.
To start w/Chris, then: He points out that the American educational system “celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state.”
[What we have in this country by now, of course, are nearly 310 million stunted human products. Not exactly the best raw material for turning the system around, I’m guessing.]
Talking about the NYC school system, Chris goes on: “In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals [without principles, one might note] and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs.” The problem, he says, is that “To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence.” [Sound like any country you know of?]
But there’s more: “The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business.” And they know that “moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness.” For “Once justice perishes…life loses all meaning.” As Hannah Arendt put it, “The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”
“Unconscious civilizations,” Chris concludes, “become totalitarian wastelands.”
Of course, with 310 million nobodies (stunted human products), what other future is there for the US? Rhetorical question. Let’s turn to Joe Stiglitz.
MorrisBerman | We are at a point in American history where, to paraphrase Blake, Bad is Good. This is why I’m rooting for a Palin presidency: if anyone can deepen our self-destruction, it’s Sarah. Meanwhile, two articles just appeared documenting the process even further, so I’d like to share them with you. The first is by my hero and yours, Chris Hedges: “Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System,” which he posted yesterday on truthdig.com. The second is by Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” which you can find at vanityfair.com.
To start w/Chris, then: He points out that the American educational system “celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state.”
[What we have in this country by now, of course, are nearly 310 million stunted human products. Not exactly the best raw material for turning the system around, I’m guessing.]
Talking about the NYC school system, Chris goes on: “In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals [without principles, one might note] and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs.” The problem, he says, is that “To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence.” [Sound like any country you know of?]
But there’s more: “The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves. They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million families from their homes as the cost of doing business.” And they know that “moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective unconsciousness.” For “Once justice perishes…life loses all meaning.” As Hannah Arendt put it, “The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”
“Unconscious civilizations,” Chris concludes, “become totalitarian wastelands.”
Of course, with 310 million nobodies (stunted human products), what other future is there for the US? Rhetorical question. Let’s turn to Joe Stiglitz.
4 comments:
The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves, hmmm
magical thinking is indistinguishable from stupidity...,
http://www.livescience.com/14306-whites-blacks-racism-victims.html
Conscious Raising Need Here
Consciously griotic, African American literature is passionately concerned with cultural custodianship. As the voice of a culture that has since its inception felt itself under mortal siege, African American literature is fundamentally shamanistic and vitally concerned with communal health and development. Arthur FlowersConsciously griotic, African American literature is passionately concerned with cultural custodianship. As the voice of a culture that has since its inception felt itself under mortal siege, African American literature is fundamentally shamanistic and vitally concerned with communal health and development. Arthur Flowers
Speaking of a passionate concern for the cultural custodianship voice and the related mortal siege, don't miss the Walmart video at DV, a true classic... http://denmarkvesey.blogspot.com/2011/05/its-diet-stupid-is-government-putting.html
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