Progressive dreams hoist with their own damp squibs

By David Simmons

In the good old days when people used to talk to one another and debate intelligently, instead of “tweeting”, the Shakespearean term “hoist with your own petard” still meant something (even though nobody actually knew what a “petard”  was).

Recently I watched an episode of Larry King’s Politicking program on RT on which he interviewed American lawyer Robert O’Brien, who was an “alternate representative” to the United Nations General Assembly under US president George W Bush. Honest to God, this guy makes Nikki Haley look like an intellect.

King could have saved some airtime by giving O’Brien a miss and simply providing a link to the “Neocon Talking Points Handbook”. About the only semi-original thought revealed by O’Brien was that Donald Trump’s September 19 address to the General Assembly was “hard-hitting” because it “named and shamed the bad guys” – that is, those who don’t toe the line of Saudi hegemony in the Middle East, those who don’t see Israel’s persecution of Gaza as particularly wondrous, those who don’t think the US rather than China should be dominant in the South China Sea and, of course, “socialists”.

One of the first thoughts I had while listening to O’Brien’s drivel that he was hoist with his own petard – smiling throughout, he seemed sincerely unaware of what a fool he was making of himself. But that was a rash judgment on my part. For no one ever “makes a fool of himself”: People are made fools of by others capable of thinking for themselves, shunning groupthink, listening to the views of intelligent people who differ from theirs, mounting a coherent defence of their own opinions, willing to admit it when they’re wrong, and possessed of a sense of humour that goes beyond insults and clever “memes” on Facebook.

People like that are becoming as rare as the Bornean orang-utan. And, unfortunately, not just on the right.

There are many reasons for the dumbing-down of the English-speaking world. As a longtime professional journalist, I’d argue that the steep decline in quality reporting and intelligent analysis, especially on television but increasingly in newspapers as well, is one of the main causes. To cite just one recent example, reports about the height of Melania Trump’s heels during her husband’s visit to hurricane-stricken Texas easily outnumbered interviews of scientists explaining the links between man-made climate change and the rapid worsening of tropical storms.

But there are many other factors. In all of the major English-speaking countries, access to higher education has become much more difficult over the past thirty years – more than a generation – and even when it is accessible, it has become far more difficult to justify spending huge amounts of money toward a degree in the social sciences, let alone the arts. If there is not a reasonable chance of your diploma getting you a job lucrative enough to start paying down that mountain of student debt, it’s off the table. So now what passes for education, except for the very wealthy, is strictly vocational, with little room for intellectual pursuit and independent thought. This is a fundamental change that has taken place within my lifetime.

As is so often the case, technology too has proved a mixed blessing. I currently work for Asia Times,  a website that invites commentary from people of all walks of life all over the world. While editing their contributions, it is startling how often one comes across blatant plagiarism. Before the Internet, plagiarists had to do a bit of actual work, physically and deliberately transcribing stolen thoughts into their own writings, and the smarter ones would change some words here and there to cover up their theft. Now, it’s a simple matter of copying and pasting digital data. They don’t even have to read it.

However, people like that are not the norm on Asia Times – not yet, anyway. The site invites a much broader range of views than normally found in mainstream media, and hardly a day goes by when its readers – and, probably more so, we editors – can’t learn something new. But because of the site’s openness, brainless O’Brien types are allowed to share the podium with shining intellects.

One fairly frequent op-ed contributor is a mouth-foaming denizen of the US far religious right who, if an original thought ever did worm its way into his brain, he would probably write it off as a socialist conspiracy or demonic possession. I edit out most of his bigotry and, far from being offended, he has expressed appreciation for being given a voice on a media outlet that enjoys a reputation for credibility.

Recently we ran a piece of his almost completely as he had filed it, with very few cuts. My feeling at the time was very much like my reaction to the Robert O’Brien interview on Larry King’s show. Surely anyone who took the time to read the piece would be startled not by its opinions but by its veneer-thin shallowness: another neocon warmonger hoist by his own petard.

Maybe so, but this could be a bad example. The guy in question isn’t just shallow, he’s simply not a very good writer. Lefties who never leave the choir being preached to by fellow lefties, by organizations like The Young Turks who make a living off of mocking Republicans, neocons and the religious right, can be deluded into thinking all conservatives are idiots. Or, they might think that if there are some conservatives capable of forming full sentences, they only do so to twist the truth and gull the gullible, such as Canada’s Fraser Institute.

They are wrong. Nowadays the word “conservative” is very often misused to refer to reactionaries or libertarian extremists. The word more properly refers to a person who believes that even if conditions are not perfect, they could be made much worse by messing with them – especially with overly generous social programs that threaten the state’s ability to afford national security, higher wages that could aggravate unemployment, labour laws that hold back productivity or give too much protection to incompetent workers, and so forth. They want a just society as sincerely as “progressives” do; but they favour a slower, more cautious methodology. And I suspect there are a lot more of these real conservatives than the racists, science deniers and other bottom-feeding dunderheads who get the headlines.

Certainly, that is the case among Asia Times’ roster of writers.

And so, once again the progressive cause faces a dilemma. Freedom of speech is fundamental to that cause, yet petards that have become damp squibs, debate that has been dumbed down to 140 characters, the economic destruction of liberal education, and the concentration of what cleverness remains in the hands of conservatives and technocrats conspire against radical change toward a world free of poverty and war, and ruled by justice and tolerance.  

Opportunist achieves senior status

By David Simmons

Today I officially become a senior citizen. I doubt anyone could look back over sixty-five years without stumbling on a bad memory, a moment of regret. I’m no exception, but those moments, at least the ones I remember, are remarkably few.

Of course there were foolish things I said, and things I foolishly didn’t say. Friendships I pursued or maintained with insufficient vigour, or that I should not have initiated at all. But who knows how many of those errors in judgment, embarrassing missteps, and flawed choices set in motion something positive, made me wiser, even happier, days or years or decades down life’s long and winding road?

I’m not adventurous, not a risk taker, but I do like to seize opportunities as they present themselves.

I’ve had the opportunity to see some of the monuments to mankind’s cruelty and folly – Dachau, a Somosista dungeon, Alcatraz, the Colosseum, Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, the Berlin Wall, even Armageddon itself  – but also to the best of humanity: the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem and the Statue of Liberty in New York, to name only two.

I’ve had the opportunity to see the icons of some of the world’s great religions – the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulchre, the Sistine Chapel, Angkor Wat and Borobodur – and great monuments to mankind’s quest to make its own way beyond the guidance of ancient scriptures: the parliaments in Westminster and Ottawa, to name only two.

I’ve been awed by the power of nature: driven through violent thunderstorms in Montana, blizzards in British Columbia, sandstorms in Arabia; gazed on the destruction wrought by Mount St Helens, stood (as long as I could) at the edge of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Climbed one of the Coast Mountains (not a very big one) in BC and stood on its peak, stood on a glacier in Alberta, swum across a lake, and snorkelled in the Red Sea. Seen bears in Banff and Jasper National Parks, macaques in Khao Yai, geysers in Yellowstone.

Angel Falls.

I’ve played slots in Las Vegas, toured movie studios in Hollywood, basked on beaches on four continents, spent months on a kibbutz, slept on a park bench in Monaco, visited a vegetarian clothing-optional commune in California. I jumped out of a light airplane, and rode in a different light plane (and stayed inside) that buzzed the world’s highest waterfall. I took a vintage train into the centre of Jamaica to sample the wares of a rum factory, and rode in the back of a truck across the spine of Central America (huddling down to avoid attracting the bullets of Contra snipers) to visit a Sandinista boot camp. I’ve driven Corvettes and big bikes and powerful boats and tractors and a Cadillac hearse, and once competed in a drag race.

Natnicha "Lukyi" Simmons.

I’ve been inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, climbed the Eiffel Tower, stood on top of the World Trade Center. I’ve seen the Mona Lisa (she’s small), Michelangelo’s David (he’s big), Venus de Milo (she’s disarming – sorry, old joke), and the Phantom of the Opera. Basked in the beerful bliss of blues clubs in Bangkok and San Francisco.

I married late in life, and adopted a little girl.

But I did miss one opportunity, and it is the only regret that stands out in my memory: the chance to circumnavigate the Earth.

Before I had the idea (and took the opportunity) to become a journalist, I was a surveyor, reaching the minor rank of junior instrumentman. In that capacity I travelled with a crew to Kuwait, where we did preliminary layout work for a telephone microwave network. Our employers, a Vancouver engineering company, paid our two-way airfare, but left it up to us which route to take on our return – they would pick up the tab for the basic fare, and if our chosen route cost more, we would pay the balance out of our own pockets.

Travelling west to east, the distance from Vancouver to Kuwait City as the 747 flies is 11,200 kilometres. We went via Toronto and Amsterdam, which totals 13,700km. If I’d chosen to keep going eastward after our job in Kuwait was done, crossing Asia and the Pacific to go back home to Vancouver via, say, Seoul, the distance would have not have been much greater – about 15,300km.

But even if I could have afforded the fare, there didn’t seem much point if I couldn’t make a few stopovers on the way (I had not yet been to East or Southeast Asia at that time). And I could not afford to do that. So it would have been a circumnavigation for no purpose but the right to say I’d done it.

Ah, well. Maybe I’ll have another opportunity. There’s still time.

Myth-making, the modern way

By David Simmons

In the ancient world, myths took a long time to percolate and, if successful, become entrenched in folklore or, if even more successful, in religious dogma. But like everything in the 21^st century, myth-making now is fast-tracked.

The most enduring myths born millennia ago probably started out as parables, the metaphoric tools of teachers and philosophers, coloured with the intricate poetic forms characteristic of, for example, ancient Hebrew. During my university years, I spent two years studying biblical Hebrew, initially out of interest in the Bible but later out of fascination with the Hebrew language itself.

I’m obviously no Hebrew scholar, but even studying it for as little as two years can shed light on how the Old Testament myths developed, and maybe even give us an inkling of how the ancient scribes and teachers who composed the great biblical stories thought. It should also put to rest the much later dogma of “divine inspiration”.

The Chinese Gun-Yu flood myth. Photo: Ancient Origins

For there is almost no evidence that the writers of the Bible had any intention of their parables becoming central to a belief system trapped in reactionary ignorance, with even wars being fought over their interpretation. In fact, some of the most powerful biblical myths, such as the flood story, were themselves reinterpretations of earlier lore from foreign cultures, rewritten with the cast of characters renamed to make them more relevant to the audience of the day.

Well, there’s nothing we can do about that now. Not many religionists want to burn people at the stake any more for suggesting that the Earth revolves around the sun, but there are plenty who still think our planet is only six thousand years old, and that destroying our environment is fine because Jesus is going to return any day now.

Once a belief, no matter how absurd, no matter how great the pile of evidence against it, gets burned into our psyches, it is very, very hard to extricate it.

Unlike those ancient scribes who simply wanted to use poetic language and metaphor to illustrate an important lesson, modern humanity has evolved a new breed of myth-makers who want to save time and get right to the indoctrination stage.

Possibly the most famous practitioners of this were Adolf Hitler and his propagandist Joseph Goebbels, advocates of the große Lüge (big lie). Though there is no actual record of Goebbels saying “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself,” there is little doubt he and Hitler employed that principle to deadly effect. But they weren’t alone. In a better-documented quote, Goebbels wrote in 1941: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

These days, that risk – of looking ridiculous – seems to concern no one. One of the most prevalent True Beliefs in recent political doctrine involves the Known Fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin “hacked the US presidential election”. Even otherwise intelligent people who know full well that “throwing” an election in such an intricately controlled system as the US electoral process is next to impossible in the short term (the system is instead manipulated and corrupted over many years by gerrymandering and special-interest bribery), opinion polls late in 2016 showed that fully fifty per cent of registered Democrats believed that the Russians had tampered with electronic voting machines.

While the Russophobia perpetuated by this and other big lies is potentially dangerous, especially if the wet dreams of the most mouth-frothing warmongers in the US Congress and the arms industry come true and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provokes Russia into war, it’s still possible that Wall Street and other non-military corporate forces will realize that there is more money to be made by making peace with Moscow. So this idiocy could be short-term.

Longer-term, however, and so far much more successful, is the war against democratic socialism. Recently in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, lamented in a piece comparing the Conservative and Labour manifestos in the current UK election campaign: “British voters look like they’re rejecting Santa and embracing Scrooge. Why?”

In a critique of Freedland’s piece, journalist Jonathan Cook argues that the answer is clear: British voters have been propagandized relentlessly for decades, perhaps from the very birth of modern democracy, that democratic socialists might be good-hearted and well-meaning, but they cannot be trusted with the nation’s treasure. This despite the fact that in rare cases when genuinely progressive political parties or movements have managed to gain power, they have nearly always spent taxpayers’ money frugally and wisely, while conservative governments have nearly always run up huge deficits by wasting money on corporate subsidies and military “toys for boys”, among other things.

Cook writes:

Here are some other pertinent questions for Freedland. How did most of the British public end up concluding – entirely counter-intuitively – that the global economy can grow indefinitely by plundering the resources of a finite planet? How did they determine that private corporations would care for them better than the state – or, for that matter, co-operatives of workers?

When did they decide that it was more important for Britain to become a “service economy”, run by hedge-fund managers, than a green, sustainable economy? How did they ever believe that a party openly representing Big Money would prioritize their interests above those of a global elite?

How indeed? Are these “alternative facts”, or poetic licence like that practised by the ancient scribes? I’m old enough to remember a time when journalists would ask questions like that.

A history of hysteria: Womb with a view

By David Simmons

The Romans believed that irrational reaction to events or circumstances was a feminine trait, and when they decided they needed a word for it, they turned yet again to that treasure trove of useful terms, ancient Greek. The solution was ὑστερικός, “suffering in the uterus”, which became hystericus in Latin.

The word has stood the test of time, not just in the European languages but far afield. Out of curiosity, I asked Google Translate to find the Thai word for hysteria, and it answered ฮิสทีเรีย. The patented Davidic System of Thai Transliteration used exclusively by this blog renders that as histeria.

Did hysterical male Romans not exist? Seems unlikely, but it’s clear they saw uncontrolled emotion as a weakness, and – like all doomed empires – subscribed to the myth that females were the “weaker sex”, and therefore to blame.

So why is hysteria a weakness? Because it muddles the mind, lets emotion obscure rational analysis. And without rational analysis, we make stupid, dangerous choices.

But it can also be useful. This is seen most clearly in the politics of fear, which with few exceptions determines the world we live in.

There are many recent examples of this. Brexit is one; the 2016 US election, especially the presidential campaign of Democrat Hillary Clinton was another.

The politics of fear was used shamelessly by both sides of the debate leading up to the June 23, 2016, vote by UK citizens on whether to remain in the European Union. And after the Leavers narrowly won the referendum, the hysteria was relentless: The economy will be in ruins (as if it wasn’t already); climate change will be unstoppable (as if it isn’t already); workers’ rights will be unprotected (as if Britons haven’t ensured that by continually voting in conservative governments); the pound is in the toilet (as if the blow to the carry trade’s billionaire beneficiaries is a tragedy anyone but them should give a damn about).

Another example is Russophobia, which at the moment appears to be the only basis for government foreign policy in Western nations. It is sometimes called the new Cold War, but unlike that old hysteria about the Soviet Union, this time it has a convenient boogieman to allow it to be personified.

Every time I hear about Vladimir Putin’s latest crime, I think of Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon-cum-populist-politician who upset the applecart of establishment rule by Thailand’s Bangkok-based elite. Not only was he a despised upstart from the country’s mostly rural northern hinterland, he was a brilliant manipulator of every system he touched, outdoing every crook in the comfortable royalist elite. And unlike them, he shared that power with his rural base, diversifying wealth away from the capital and into the villages and farms of the common people. They loved him for it, cared little that he used the power they gave him to line his pockets (name one Thai politician who hadn’t done the same, or worse), and locked the reactionary opposition out of power so firmly that its only option was to send in the troops.

Since then, with Thaksin driven into exile, every ill that Thailand suffers from is blamed on him. The last democratically elected government was headed by his younger sister Yingluck, but the dominant hysteria was that in fact Thaksin “ran the country” from his suite in Dubai, while simultaneously making himself even richer by travelling the world making business deals, “buying votes” for every successive political party that rose from the ashes of bans by the corrupt courts, and even provoking a near war between Thailand and Cambodia over a little-known Buddhist temple ruin on the border.

How to stop worrying.

Like Thaksin, Putin is apparently omnipotently evil. Not only did he “invade Ukraine”, he plans next to invade Estonia, which as we all know is the linchpin of European existence. Hence NATO’s sabre-rattling on Russia’s borders has nothing to do with fattening the only US industry that is still growing, the arms industry, through lucrative sales to frightened Europeans and everything to do with “stability” and “security”.

Putin is also personally responsible for the Olympics doping scandal. And he “undermined US democracy” by helping WikiLeaks reveal the dirty tricks of the Democrat National Committee against Bernie Sanders, and by unleashing his “propaganda arm” RT to cover events ignored by the mainstream media, such as Occupy Wall Street and the dangers of fracking.

All this brings to mind a hymn that was popular a hundred years or so ago when I was an evangelical Christian, the first two lines of which are adapted here:

Vlad can do anything, anything, anything

Vlad can do anything but fail.

He’s Vlad the Unfailer.

Meanwhile hysteria, whether naturally occurring or deliberately provoked, obscures people’s ability to see real dangers. Crippling economic inequality and destruction of the environment are the results of a dysfunctional system of which the EU and both main US political parties have been primary agents. The threat of war is pushed toward boiling point by those who would profit from it, primarily the arms industry.

The womb is the source of human life, and should be a symbol of hope. Should we blame the Romans for seeing it instead as a source of unreason, a tool of the unscrupulous to obfuscate reality?

Might as well; it’s easier than dealing with genuine dangers.