Diatribes of Jay: Rampage of the Mind-Rapists

[For all the reasons why the FBI’s “investigation” of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim of sexual abuse was a sham, click here. Fox sixteen reasons to vote this time for Democrats only, click here. For a note on the likely electoral consequences of the GOP ramming Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, click here. For a note on why the issue has become personal for many, click here. For a short note on how important Professor Ford’s charges are, click here. For comment on President Obama’s decision to join the political fray, click here. For a possible path to Trump’s impeachment and removal, click here. For comment on Trump’s deal with Mexico, click here. For a brief homage to John McCain, followed by reasons to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For a brief note on vote suppression in Georgia as a reason to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For other good candidates and causes and how to contribute easily, click here. For recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Introduction
Our national and global problem
Who done it
Conclusion

Introduction

How would you feel now if you were Christine Blasey Ford’s mother or father? Because you had taught her to know right from wrong and not to lie, you would believe her story. So you would believe that the same man who tried to rape her, while drunk and laughing—when she was only fifteen!—is now one of the nine highest judges in our land.

You would also see through the various feints at assessing her claims fairly. You would know them for the charades that they were—mere cover for a raw exercise of political power. You would know that Jeff Flake (even in impending retirement!), Susan Collins, and Joe Manchin were just playing with us. They never had any real chance to “get to the bottom of this” or to do justice. They apparently don’t mind putting a still-accused attempted rapist on the High Court as long as they have their “win” and their right-wing hammer.

The kind of rape whose attempt Professor Ford charged depends on a much subtler form: the mind-rape of vicious propagandists. That mind-rape has degraded our collective morality and maimed our democracy to the point of destruction. This essay describes how it happened and who is principally responsible; a future essay will outline some principles of resistance.

Our national and global problem

We Americans have a supreme leader who, as we now know, “won” a smaller fraction of the popular vote than any president in the last century, save two who fought off unusually robust third-party challenges, That “leader” has told 4,713 lies and misleading tales in less than twenty months.

And what of his politics and “policies” of hating those who don’t look like you, and keeping desperate refugees down and out? Whatever happened to “love thy neighbor as thyself”? to “love they enemy”? Whatever happened to succoring the refugee? nurturing the “least among us”? Whatever happened to empathy, compassion and cooperation?

It’s not just our president who’s corrupt. It’s all of us. Corporations are the latest stage in the social evolution of human beings. They are only a few hundred years old. Yet they perform vital social-evolutionary functions in specializing economic activity and distributing economic power. So they are here to stay.

At present we widely abuse these useful institutions for amoral and immoral aims. Business schools tells us their sole purpose and reason for being is to make money for shareholders. Today’s watchword for business is “monetizing” everything a corporation does. How fundamentally corrupt is that? Are there no human goals or values but cash?

Is that all there is, Alfie? Are we all but two-legged salamanders in a pit, climbing over each other’s slippery bodies to reach the top and the light? Have all serious attempts to promote human morality ceased? Have we as a species forgotten the principal traits that made us top dogs on our small planet: empathy, compassion, and cooperation?

It certainly seems that way. Look at the Catholic Church. A two-thousand-year old bulwark of human morality is collapsing in a vast stink of pedophilia and child rape. Even under Pope Francis—perhaps the most humble and Christ-like leader of the Church in a millennium—money and secular power weigh more heavily in the Vatican than simple right and wrong. The Pope is battling an enormous hierarchy of power and privilege even more entrenched than the GOP in Congress.

The other great muscular, proselytizing religion is Islam. How’s it doing? It’s falling apart in brutal wars among its schismatic factions, mainly Sunnis and Shiites. Many of its practitioners justify mass murder and astonishing atrocities, as long as they are committed against “infidels.” Sometimes they define “infidels” as including every Muslim who doesn’t believe precisely the same way that they do. That sort of thinking has devastated Syria and Yemen.

Christianity, of course, is far from dead. Throughout the Americas, Catholics are leaving the moribund Catholic Church in droves and becoming evangelicals. But do they spend their days protecting the weak and raising the poor, as Jesus advised? Not hardly.

Instead, they spend their days trying to make their churches popular, wealthy and powerful. They try to pass laws to control women’s bodies as reproductive tools. They seek subsidies from the very secular governments that they claim to detest. “Freedom-crushing” government isn’t so bad, it seems, when it subsidizes Christian education and promotes Christianity, even against the letter and the spirit of our American First Amendment.

The question before us is not how we are today. Our degeneration is painfully apparent, worldwide. The salient questions are how we got that way and whether and whether and how we can change.

Who Done it

In America at least, virtually all these changes—all this corruption of basic human values—are postwar phenomena. Most have occurred within the last two generations.

They began well after the end of World War II. The generation that helped win that war, founded the United Nations, paid to get Germany and Japan back on their feet, fought the Cold War, and established fair rules for international trade under the GATT (now the WTO) kept faith with our species’ core values. Now, all of a sudden, we are abandoning those values like tired workers on a wild, drunken binge.

Changes this dramatic and all-encompassing of course require leaders. It’s tempting to blame it all on Donald Trump, who epitomizes the depth of our moral degeneration perhaps better than any other living figure.

But Trump has had a lot of help in corrupting us. And if the truth be told, the process of degeneration started at least two generations ago.

The one who first got the ball rolling downhill was also a president. Ronald Reagan was a man of infinite charm and optimism but limited intellect. His fatal bout with Alzheimer’s started while he was in still in the White House, leading him to fall asleep in Cabinet meetings. Yet he was smart enough to adopt an immoral but effective practical principle: you can win power in politics by appealing to people’s greed and selfishness.

“It’s your money,” Reagan told us (emphasis added). So you deserve to pay less in taxes. And why was that a good thing? Because “government is the problem, not the solution.” It’s your God-given right to pay lower taxes and starve government, until it gets to the point where you can drown it in a bathtub. (An obscure, bearded ideologue of greed named Grover Norquist added this bit.)

But what is government, actually? It’s the means by which we humans act together as a society. It’s how we make and enforce rules for ourselves. It’s how we preserve our rights and protect the weak and infirm. It’s how we finance basic research that private capital won’t finance, how we defend ourselves, and how we set up mechanisms, collectively called a “safety net,” to prevent our poor and downtrodden from appearing as rotting, sore-covered corpses on our city streets. It’s how we try to institutionalize all those values that Jesus praised—those that don’t force their ways into every soul unbidden, like grabbing wealth and wielding power over others.

The greatest and most powerful mind-rapist of America was also the most subtle and smooth. Reagan’s mind-rape was nothing like the drunken, laughing attempt at pure male dominance of which Brett Kavanaugh still stands accused. With infinite charm and grace, using the words and manner of a trained actor, Reagan performed his mind-rape so smoothly that we hardly noticed the penetration.

The shock troops of mind-raping soon followed. The Fox propaganda machine dares call itself “Fox News,” though virtually every sentence or paragraph spewing from its studios is scorn, sarcasm, raw opinion, or “spin.” Then we have Sinclair Radio, which has 190 radio stations and near-monopoly dominance in many local radio markets. Although less transparently than Fox, it dishes up a steady diet of “conservative” cant, the gist of which is that we would all be better off if we were even greedier and more rapacious and even more heedless of the ones we leave behind.

Then there’s Rush. This prophet of greed, intolerance, selfishness and mindless male rage survives on a fluke of technology in the Internet age. If you don’t have satellite radio and aren’t fluent with mobile media and podcasts, you have little to listen to as you drive the vast distances in our Heartland.

FM stations’ signals don’t propagate as far as AM stations’ do. They fade in and out as you drive along the Interstates. So Rush, who dominates talk on the AM waves in the vast middle of our country, has a captive audience. He woos less-affluent hard workers in their older cars and pickup trucks, as they drive three or more hours a day without satellite radio, Bluetooth, WiFi and all they imply.

A friend of mine recently drove from Wooster, Ohio, to my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico—right across our nation’s midsection. He made the trip in two days. For most of it, Rush Limbaugh was in his car and in his head. Why? Rush was simply all he could receive—or receive consistently and clearly—as he drove along. It was a mind-rape of a captive audience.

So now we have a so-called “conservative” president telling us, repeatedly, that it’s OK to let millions of us suffer without health insurance, or in poverty, because they’re not like us. We’ve got the most powerful and in-your-face video and audio media giving us the same message, day after day, mile after mile, in terms that would make Archie Bunker blush.

Religion, as we once knew it, is morally on the ropes. And the media that air more thoughtful pundits—who wonder, once in a while, what happened to the kind, generous, caring men and women Americans used to be—operate in big cities where people who vote for Donald Trump mostly don’t live.

What, morally speaking, could possibly go wrong?

To add to all this, there’s positive feedback. It’s not just a thing with global warming, as the most recent United Nations panel report warned. There’s a grand feedback loop in corruption, too. Media domination brings money and power, and those who get them exploit self-serving nonsense to sell yet more media and advertising, which supports yet more propaganda in favor of willful corruption and media control.

Rupert Murdoch showed us the way. He made billions selling simplistic ideology, selfishness, greed and hate. Sinclair and Rush perfected the exercise.

So the merchants of immorality are growing in wealth and power day by day. They wax rich by destroying our democracy. What we used to call “organized” religion is declining precipitously. Or it’s morphing into wealth-seeking “megachurches” that preach “Jesus wants you to be rich!” and try to beat Fox, Sinclair and Rush at their own games.

Conclusion

This social disease will not be easy to cure. Selfishness and dominance are part of the human condition. They are inherent in all of us.

But never in the twentieth century did they come so close to controlling our common psyche and our politics as now. Never have we come so near to accepting greed and dominance as basic “democratic” values—what makes our society run. Never has America come so close to standing for little more. (For a succinct analysis of Mitch McConnell’s leading role in all this, click here.)

So we have on our hands an historic moral crisis. It infects our entire species, but it seems to have begun, this time, in the United States.

We must stop the mind-rapists while there are still people alive who remember our peoples’ goodness and decency before. Otherwise, the state of having been mind-raped may become a permanent condition. We may lose not only our Republic, but our souls.

So it‘s imperative that everyone who remembers a better time write and speak about it now, especially to the young. We do not want to normalize greed, corruption, mindless dominance and mind-raping as American values.

In an upcoming essay, we will discuss specific ways to fight the mind-rapists. Some will involve organizing and collective action. Regulation and political control might be effective, but they will almost certainly take too much time. The most powerful and immediate remedies will be actions that we can take in the privacy of our own homes, families, circle of friends, and minds. Forewarned is forearmed.

We humans are on the threshold of great developments in science, medicine, energy, and economics. We are also on the precipice of an unprecedented moral decline. If we fall off that precipice, our otherwise brilliant prospects will avail us nothing.

We may succumb—even as far as species self-extinction—to infighting, neglect of global warming, or war in the Nuclear Age. We Americans, in particular, may replay the brutal dictatorships that wracked Latin American during the last century, and that threaten Brazil today.

Only if we can right ourselves and come to our moral senses will our collective future be bright. So stopping our moral degradation is job one. In that cause, stopping the mind-rapists is an essential first step.

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Diatribes of Jay

09 October 2018

Rampage of the Mind-Rapists

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