Calling All Cars!

The Literate Face What They Fear Most, the Illiterate!
It has been a long cynical contention of mine that the majority of Amuricans (the way Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson pronounced it) are pretty damn stupid. I never, however, thought of this collective stupidness as being due to nobody reading or even being able to read anymore. I've known for many years that books, magazines, newspapers were losing readership. Today, books, for instance, that do sell are "breeze read" books, like these tons of celebrity books that hit us year after year, or the romantic pulp crap that Oprah peddles on her teevee show (I call her Okra)(I apologize to the vegetable okra. I consider it a noble African-genesis vegetable--and I used to dearly love it sliced and rolled in cornmeal and deep fried. Throw tons of salt on 'em and gobble 'em up with a cold mug of a good beer close by to wash 'em down with--or okra gumbo--come on, that's some good eatin'--I'm sounding archaically strange, am I not?). Anybody been to a magazine stand these days? There are thousands of magazines. Magazines on every subject known to man. Magazines filled with prefabricated drivel written by free-lance, pretentious (I should talk) writers trained at a Learning Annex. Still even those magazine sales are nose diving. And newspapers! Forget about 'em! Rupert Murdoch, that sorry bastard, admits he loses multimillions of dollars a year keeping his pulp rag, The New York Post, going--and the Post used to be such a good newspaper, too. The Christian Science Monitor announced recently it's going full-time Internet. No more printed Monitors--except I think they said maybe a printed weekend edition. To tell you the truth--I haven't bought a newspaper in years--except when it rains and I don't have an umbrella and I buy an NY Post as a temporary umbrella--I've done that a time or two. But like I said up top, I've been growling my growls over how stupid most people are for a thunderhead of years. And trust me, dear reader or two, that I have, I ain't callin' y'all stupid. Anybody reads The Growler has to be tolerant; has to be patient; has to have a wit about them; has to have a sense of wry humor; has to be humanely intelligent; and has to be sort of wild in consideration of statements...I like to think of The Growler as my northern range of packing around the wilderness of information looking for something hot and fresh-killed and bloody juicy to devour.

What got me started on this ramble? I was rummaging around the Internet yesterday and I cruised into BuzzFlash to dig some news--and, yes, you'll be glad to know, BuzzFlash is still desperate for bucks--and I scanned their latest headlines and came across something under Chris Hedges's byline. Chris Hedges is a smart dude and I like the way he thinks and writes and I hadn't read anything by him in a long time, so I opened the file up (back in the old newspaper days you "filed" your story). It was filed in this site www.commondreams.org--[Mr. Ed: for some reason this site won't open from here--weird--I suppose it's a subscription site maybe. Whatever.] a site I just discovered to my delight last week. (Am I writing like a wimp? I'm not growling and howling and yowling and running up on a mesa and howling my head off! I'm not in love at the moment so I'm free to roam the ranges of my desires and sing my reasoning out into the hollow canyons of the emptiness that surrounds me with only the full moon to keep me warm. Damn, I get high when I'm high on the act of writing!)
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Published on Monday, November 10, 2008 by TruthDig.com

America the Illiterate

by Chris Hedges

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.
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Come on, brothers and sisters, you've got to like Chris Hedges. Look how he boils into that last paragraph up above. That's a The Daily Growler Hall of Writing Fame paragraph. Old Chris is dynamite by the time he gets to our brave new world.

TO READ THE REST GO: www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/10-6
[Mr. Ed: For some reason, commondreams.org says this is not a page of theirs or there's an error in the address. Horseshit. Go to the TruthDig.com at the beginning of Hedges's article.]

I'm already hoisting a jigger of 12-year-old Jameson's to the lad (Chris Hedges). My kind'a writer/thinker/lambaster.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

More Jots & Tittles From Our Friend in Lake Flaccid, New York:

--James Weldon Johnson's "God's Trombones" champions the great black orators of our past.

--Tacitus called money "the sinews of war."

--I.F. Stone started learning ancient Greek at 70.

-- A laxative commercial on commercial-jammed teevee uses "going" as a synonym for "shitting." I wonder. "Ma, I gotta go." Not very definitive. Better: "Ma I gotta go shit!" Much better. "Be sure and wipe good...and don't use so much paper." Isn't that a contradictory statement? My mother was controversial...but I'm not going to get personal; not my mission.

--Taps Miller made a recording of "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?" with Count Basie in 1948 or '49; like Basie, I can't remember exact things.

--Kevin Phillips once a Reagan supporter/apologist and Conservative theorist has done a flip-flop in recent years and is now leaning farther more and more left every day. He's written a new book and he's touring and during his tour he said that We the People overstate our hopes with each new presidency. He attributes Obama's landslide to a "proud black turn out." Kevin says in a new economy money must be channeled quickly to the middle-class and poor for it to work. He adds that financial constraints will be hard to enforce. And Obama's a corporate lawyer type--knows nothing about Economics--same as most economists, those who pose Economics as a pure science. It is not. Like thegrowlingwolf has stated in his Growler posts, like its parent Sociology, Economics is merely an empirical observation of the Capitalist fiduciary system we inherited from our Brit White Fathers (read: Ricardo and Hume--and read a lot of John Locke, too, while you're reading R & H--read some Jeremy Bentham, too--quite a character! and be sure and read our great American Economics/Sociologist theorist, Thorstein Veblen). Economists take their empirically gained "facts" and formulate them using Statistics--using random sampling to develop a median--then using that median bunch of observations to predict trends--though as predictors Sociologists have been much more on-the-nose than Economists. When Economics was taken out of the Humanities and put in the Business schools, it was then forced to prove Capitalism worked versus Marxism (Communism, Maoism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Gus Hallism) which didn't work--Economics was forced to predict and write essays about how Communism was a failed system--even though the Soviet dictators long since Lenin threw out a lot of Marxism to promote their own self-interests and to dictate alright, but to dictate their own powers over the proletariat--to use the workers as slaves to their unimpeachable power, like Uncle Joe Stalin did and like Chairman Mao had to do as their systems went totally out of control until a true Marxist like Gorbachev, in the case of Russia, saw the light and closed the Soviet Union down--by the bye, Ronald "Raygun/Star Wars" Reagan didn't bring down the Soviet Union--nor did he "bring down that wall." That's all Amurican hogwash legend. Fuck legend, stick to the facts. [Mr. Ed: We apologize for Mr. Munn-Dayne's beginning to go off into outright punditing. He was supposed to be brief with his "jots and tittles"; otherwise we'd just let thegrowlingwolf blow on for another 5 pages! Just horsing with you, Wolf Man, just horsing around. Afterall....]

--American workers's income hasn't gone up in 30 years. Where were the labor unions during that time?

--Did you know "talking" is an ancient monkey ability? There was a great monkey show on PBS up here in Lake Flaccid the other eve. A repeat, of course. PBS wastes all their money backing Ken Burns and lame Brit teevee. They did do some cool Tony Hillerman Native American detective adaptations a few years back, I'll give them that. I heard Tony Hillerman is dead now.

--An irony for the Wolf Man's file: Louis 16th supported the American Revolution--he supplied the Continental Army with weapons (guns) and bullets and gun powder and such. Later the French Revolution used a prototype Guillotine to slice off his pudgy head.

--Did you know Ted Turner is the largest landowner in the USA. He owns millions of acres of land in Montana alone. Rich people from all over the world are flocking to and buying land in Montana. One European architect fop bought a whole mountain out there and built him a dream modern-castle on its old top. David Letterman (an Indiana goofball game-show host turned night-show-Johnny-Carson-copycat host) has a ranch in Montana.

--A women's skin cream commercial says, "It's Your Turn to Love the Way You Look." What does that mean? I suppose they are appealing to women with skin problems, right? Blotches; acne; boils? Cicatrix's? Is that a word?

--Gary Carter, the old MLB hind catcher--with Montreal and the NY Mets, is now manager of one of my favorite baseball teams, the Long Island, New York, Ducks. I proudly wear my Ducks teeshirt every spring and summer--even up here in Lake Flaccid where we are supposed to be Hudson Valley Renegades fans. The General Manager of the Ducks is ex-Met Buddy Harrelson. Go Ducks!

--GMAC, the General Motors loanshark financing company, has decided to become a bank now and get in on some of this free money We the People are giving Wall Street and banks and now our stupid failing automotive industry that is coming back from its failed European ventures begging for some of those free bailout bucks. Obama's for it. Too bad. We the People are going deeper and deeper in debt. Does that make sense? Did you see the AIG CEOs and Board members were caught on spy video living it up at a fabulous California spa? What arrogant bastards!

barabasmunn-dayne
for The Daily Growler