(03-13-2021, 11:59 AM)Marypoza Wrote:(03-12-2021, 06:49 PM)HealthyDebate Wrote: The US feels like it is committing suicide.
The elites control Wall Street, Hollywood, the media, and the government.
Globalists wanting to destroy the USA with wars, welfare, debt, illegal immigrants, and tyranny is one thing, but Americans who just accept this are another.
What if every conversation, book, movie, news story, bumper sticker, website, and song was about the collapse?
Would Americans wake up, protest, prepare, buy guns and gold, and resist or would Americans just become jaded and do nothing?
Is surrender the answer to tyranny?
-- no. Guillotines are
Strictly speaking, we would probably resort to nitrogen asphyxiation, which is supposedly swift and painless... much as was said of the guillotine not a part of American penal history, the electric chair, execution by cyanide gas, or lethal injection. I am satisfied with hanging as a solution for principal figures of the Third Reich, Thug Japan, and Ba'athist Iraq. There was nothing wrong with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Kenji Doihara, or "Chemical Ali" that a well-tied rope and a seven-foot drop would not have solved.
The post to which you respond suggests a totalitarian response to much that is troublesome. "Healthy Debate" suggests a monomaniacal response to which we would all be obliged to participate as he dictates. There will be plenty of room for conversations that have nothing to do with politics after COVID-19 dies as a public menace. The Great Books remain a solid basis for education of the leaders of our community and even commerce. Does anyone question whether the MBA cult could have learned something from Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt? Because America is so fundamentally capitalist and commercial, we Americans need to discover that there is more to life than economic gain, personal indulgence, and bureaucratic power -- because the abuse of those inevitably create mass suffering. Wars overseas, natural disasters, and political struggles overseas can hurt us Americans badly. "Healthy Debate" says nothing about the extreme danger that global warming can pose to Humanity as a whole. Maybe I exaggerate the hazards and the lack of obvious solutions other than acquiescence with mass death that rapid climate change would bring about, but I am on the cautious side. I know what panic can do to people.
Yes, debt is a huge problem. It is an excellent tool for keeping people so helpless that they must obey any order no matter how destructive and inhuman the consequences are. This said, Healthy Debate ignores that private debt has more personal consequences that in mass degrades life far more intimately than does public debt. Private debt necessary for mere survival or the avoidance of destitution undeniably makes people poorer. Of course people are unwise to avoid going into debt for anything that does not generate income, cut the cost of living, or improve personal life. Going deeply into debt to buy the latest thing, to buy a status symbol (they are all pathetic), to throw a lavish party, or to go on some vacation on which one really learns nothing. Yes, I recognize that life for people born about a century ago in America was generally hardscrabble by contemporary standards, but the least of problems that the GI's that were once a part of my life was that they lacked the gadgets of entertainment that I as a Boomer have known since childhood. If they were bored they turned to books because there was no idiot screen to lull them into believing that their lives were getting richer while stupefying them. If you ever met some of those GI's you would not call them unsophisticated about the basic realities of life... but I can say that many young people addled on video games, pop music, and mindless TV programming. Many of those would have richer lives if they had instead dedicated some time to Dickens or Dostoevsky.
We can go into public debt for something that facilitates trade and commerce (canals and docks in the old days; the Interstate highways and airports today), that offers benefits for people other than the recipient (K-12 education and probably now liberal arts education that so many of us miss), averts mass death and protects or expands freedom (the Civil War and World War II), or extends lives and prevents crippling conditions for people (first-rate medical care, and public sanitation that at one time included covering the sewers). Debt that makes people near-serfs in an economic order that enriches elites while making life miserable for nearly everyone else is a calamity for the people that one expects to pay that debt: the working poor who absorb that debt because the elites foist it upon them as a condition of work.
Bumper stickers? Somehow I prefer "New York Yankees", "Disneyland", "Wall Drug" or "Meramec Caverns" to "Second-Amendment Solutions". It is far healthier that politics be lesser obsessions in mass consciousness than "My trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is better that we have our focuses on sports rivalries between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals than between people who believe that liberals are no different from Commies and conservatism is a thin cover for fascism. Music? What does a Beethoven string quartet written two hundred years ago have to say about contemporary politics?
As for protest... Black Lives Matters is a valid protest much as was the protest against Jim Crow practice. Preparation? We need to improve ourselves as a people, and that means that anyone who can get something from it might as well spend some time learning the old liberal arts that had improvement of the person as an objective. The rap that it pays too much attention to Dead White Men ignores that (1) it can be expanded to include people either female or non-white, (2) that much that is relevant is non-western (especially eastern Asia... Latin America is Western, so it isn't that exotic) including in art, and (3) people can get their start in child-accessible liberal arts early. Yes, wise people read Plato in the past and still do. To be sure, much that is relevant is recent, including the newest format for great art (cinema)... and part of a solid liberal-arts education now includes cinema. One can learn something from Charlie Chaplin and from Akira Kurosawa.
If there is any problem with the Great Books, great art, and great music is that once people get to know these they become less receptive to cultural schlock. Hokusai's waves can inundate and destroy much Kitsch.
People need to recognize that the reality of their lives is too complex to encapsulate into politics, especially if that political expression has paranoid qualities, as seen in the obsession with guns and gold. Really, a dog is far safer to most people than a gun (unless one happens to be a mugger, burglar, or rapist, in which case a dog might as well be a man-eating Big Cat). Gold is a passive investment desirable as such only if things are so messed up that even currency and investments are completely unreliable -- and it is worthless if someone demands it at gunpoint.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.