[Peace-discuss] Hey... and they didn't even ask Joe Sixpack!!

Mon Oct 20 13:26:39 CDT 2008

Waaaaay too many things to set you straight on in this posting, Carl, for me to provide a written response. Next time we're staffing a table, we can get into it. Meanwhile, get out from behind yr books and talk to the regular folks. Use eveyday words, and don't call them members of the secondary bourgeoisie. 
 --Jenifer

--- On Mon, 10/20/08, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Hey... and they didn't even ask Joe Sixpack!!
To: jencart13 at yahoo.com
Cc: "Peace- Discuss" <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Date: Monday, October 20, 2008, 1:09 PM

The contempt of the tertiary bourgeoisie in America (about 20% of the
population) for the other 80% is sometimes hard to believe. ("Tertiary
bourgeoisie" = those who have passed through the "third level"
of formal
education = roughly the graduates of traditional four-year colleges.)

Of course that contempt is manufactured -- strongly encouraged by that fraction
of 1% who make up the American owning (and ruling) class, whom the 20%
apparently desperately want to be like (or belong to, a revealing phrase).  And
the 20% are told if they want to belong to the club, they need to despise the
only real threat to the club, the other 80% (who have increasing reason to
resent their rulers in recent years, as inequality and the concentration of
wealth increase and in fact accelerate).

The American ruling class has hated and feared Average Citizens (and democracy)
from the beginning.  I recently posted some examples from our "founding
fathers"
(and mothers).  It wasn't just Hamilton who held that "Your people
sir, are a
great beast!" It's remarkable that the 1% can seduce the 20% to their
way of
thinking, but it's not new.  About 1890 the American financier Jay Gould
said,
"I can always hire one half of the American working class to kill the
other
half." And the overwhelming majority of Americans were "working
class" -- i.e.,
people who had to sell their work of head and hands to the owners of factories
and fields in order to eat regularly.  (How many of us today have to rent
ourselves to the owners of capital to live?)

The control of ideological institutions (universities, media) and governmental
mechanisms by the ruling class means that they can seduce away that 20% from
their real interests by teaching them to despise those who are below them on
the
socio-economic ladder -- a long-term version of Gould's hiring half the
working
class to kill the other half, and an effective way to prevent a united front
against themselves.  That's why so much of media propaganda is directed
toward
the 20%, the "middle class.'

Many in the 80% don't vote because they know, correctly, that the election
isn't
about them.  Whoever wins, the conditions of their life will remain much the
same.  On the eve of the 2000 election, polls from Harvard's Vanishing
Voter
Project showed that 75% of the electorate regarded it as a game played by rich
contributors, party managers, and the PR industry and the media.  Very likely,
that is why the population paid little attention to the “stolen election”
that
greatly exercised educated sectors. And that opinion is at least as strong
eight
years later.  It's only the 20% who buy the assurances that Bush/Gore,
Kerry/Bush, & Obama/McCain are important decisions.

If however you separate the candidates' names and party affiliations -- so
important to the 20% -- from general questions of how the society should be
run,
you find remarkably enough that a majority of Americans hold generally
social-democratic (roughly"New Deal") views -- all the more
remarkable because
they've almost never heard these views in the media or championed by a
major
party candidate.  As a result the official parties are generally to the right
of
the populace, while the propagandists try to convince the populace that one (or
the other) party represents their interests.  The burden of Obama's book,
Mendacity of Hope, was that he could do that job better than most, and to some
extent it seems that he can. But it's still a lie.

Regarding people in the 80% not knowing, e.g., who the UKPM is, I'm
reminded of
Sherlock Holmes' answer when his friend Watson found out that Holmes
didn't know
that the earth went around the sun:

     "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression
of
surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
     "To forget it!"
     "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain
originally is like a
little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the
knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled
up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands
upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes
into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in
doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most
perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls
and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every
addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the
highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the
useful
ones."
     "But the Solar System!" I protested.
     "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently;
"you say that we
go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of
difference to me or to my work"....

Similarly, in spite of what the 20% believe about the importance of the
election, an American from the majority might with reason say that the outcome
"would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work"....

Just after the 2000 election, Noam Chomsky wrote as follows:

    ...over 80 percent of the population feels that the government is “run
for
the benefit of the few and the special interests, not the people,” up from
about
half in earlier years ... similar numbers feel that the economic system is
“inherently unfair” and working people have too little say, and that
“there is
too much power concentrated in the hands of large companies for the good of the
nation.” Under such circumstances, people may tend to vote (if at all) on
grounds that are irrelevant to policy choices over which they feel they have
little influence. Such tendencies are strengthened by intense media/advertising
concentration on style, personality, and other irrelevancies (in the
presidential debates, will Bush remember where Canada is?; will Gore remind
people of some unpleasant know-it-all in 4th grade?).

    Public opinion studies lend further credibility to the simplest model.
Harvard’s Vanishing Voter Project has been monitoring attitudes through the
presidential campaign. Its director, Thomas Patterson, reports that
“Americans’
feeling of powerlessness has reached an alarming high,” with 53 percent
responding “only a little” or “none” to the question: “How much
influence do you
think people like you have on what government does?” The previous peak, 30
years
ago, was 41 percent. During the campaign, over 60 percent of regular voters
regarded politics in America as “generally pretty disgusting” ... the
country is
being driven even more than before towards the condition described by former
President Alfonso Lopez Michaelsen of Colombia, referring to his own country: a
political system of power sharing by parties that are “two horses with the
same
owner.” Furthermore, that seems to be general popular understanding.
<http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200101--.htm>  --CGE

Jenifer Cartwright wrote:
>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20081015/sc_livescience/americansflunksimple3questionpoliticalsurvey
> 
> 
> Yo, check this out, those of you who think that Average Citizens (aka Joe
> Sixpack et al) don't vote because there're no candidates that
support their
> views!! Folks more-or-less paying attention to a variety of news sources
were
> surveyed, but not those paying no attention what-so-ever... and still,
look
> at the numbers!!
> 
> No surprise to some of us... --Jenifer

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