Politics

Killing time at Heathrow

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• Tuesday 7th August 2007

Leaving Womad (see above), I arrived at Heathrow with several hours to spare before boarding my flight back to the States. Alays the nervous traveller, I augmented the book I was reading with the purchase of a recent book of interviews with Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions; Conversations With Noam Chomsky On The Post 9/11 World.

Now, I’m a big Chomsky fan, and I’ve read a few of his books, both original work and interviews. If you’re not familiar with the work of this impressive social philosopher and groundbreaking scientist, I would actually recommend this book as a first read.

Foe a while, I’ve been struggling to articulate what I suspected was one of the issues at the root of the Republican/Democrat/corporate manipulation of American culture and media; I found two excerpts from the book that sum it up quite nicely:

But there is something much deeper involved. Social Security is based on a principle that is considered subversive and that has to be driven out of people’s heads: the principle that you care about people.

Social Security is based on the assumption that we care about each other, that we have a communal responsibility to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves, whether they’re children or the elderly. We have a social responsibility to pay for schools, to ensure day care, and to guarantee that whoever is taking care of our children – including mothers – will be supported for doing so. That’s a community responsibility and, in fact, the community benefits from it collectively. Maybe each individual can’t say, “I benefit from that kid going to school,” but as a society we benefit from it. And the same is true of caring for the elderly.

But that idea has to be driven out of people’s heads. There is huge pressure to turn people into pathological monsters who care only about themselves, who don’t have anything to do with anyone else, and who therefore can be very easily ruled and controlled. That’s what lies behind the attack on Social Security. And it reflects a deep imperative that runs through the whole doctrinal system.
…

…When Medicaid is destroyed, as it probably will be, that’s going to really harm people. But those people are unorganized. They’re not in unions, they’re not in political associations, they don’t participate in any political parties. The genius of American politics has been to marginalize and isolate people. In fact, one of the main reasons behind the passionate effort to destroy unions is that they are one of the few mechanisms by which ordinary people can get together and compensate for the concentration of capital and power. That’s why the United States has a very violent labor history, with repeated efforts to destroy unions anytime they make progress.

And that last point about unions is one to keep in mind. The prevailing thought about unions is strongly molded by what’s reflected in the media; corrupt union bosses, stolen funds, etc. Really a very small and aberrant segment of a once-huge and supportive network of organizations that managed to make great changes in American social institutions.

The stereotype of lazy and contentious union workers is also one strongly put forth by newspapers, television, etc. With our social support networks being actively destroyed by the right-wing scum, organized ressistance might have at least slowed them down; But, since Reagan, the most vigorous of the domestic “Wars” hasn’t been on drugs, or poverty, or big government – it’s been the destruction of the union movement.