Elections in America

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The Obscenity of Major League Baseball's Militarization

Born in Pittsburgh a mere six months before Maz's World Series miracle, I have been an avid baseball fan my entire life.

In recent years, however, I have become increasingly alarmed at the way that Major League Baseball panders to the military.

Frankly, it is disgusting. To link the national pastime with a professional, imperialistic military, is a betrayal of the values that make a free, civil society possible--values that one finds mirrored in the game of baseball itself.

This has happened on Bud Selig's watch and I can only hope that his successor will have more respect for the meaning of civil society--i.e., the life of a country's citizenry that is conducted beyond the bounds of governmental influence or control.

The militarization of Major League Baseball is a shameful, ignorant, propagandizing obscenity. And it needs to be stopped.

Lewis Mumford, American Critic

F.Y.I.

The Next Big Thing: Ebolisis

A virus that beheads you if you love Jesus. Yeah, really, trust me on this. I'm not making this up.

Just remember that you heard it here first...

In one-dimensional America, the thing you fear most is not having something to fear. You fear this because you are numb, and you want so desperately to feel. But you don't know what to feel or how, because everything you've ever known, or thought you knew, has played you false.

War is peace. Love is hate. Strength is weakness. Victory is defeat.

Consumerism was supposed to make you happy--and it does, for about an hour. And then you better get back out there and shop before the bad feeling returns.

There is no news, only infotainment. Politics, sports, sex, art...There's no "there" there, it's all spectacle. So kick back and have another beer. Here's the remote--have at it!

Freedom? You've been told your whole life that freedom is choice; and then when you try to choose you are offered: Republicrat or Democan. Coke or Pepsi. The best you can hope for is mediocrity: the best lack all conviction, the worst are filled with passionate intensity.

You've been told that you live in the greatest country on earth, the land of unlimited opportunity. Anybody can grow up to be President or an astronaut or anything they want.

And part of you believes that, because you want to believe it; but deep down inside you know that it just isn't true. Because you're not rich enough or good looking enough or well enough connected...

You thought the "Zombie Apocalypse" was a joke. It's no joke: it's your life.

The Marcuse Question

The question I have long asked myself about Herbert Marcuse is this: how was he able to perceive with such clarity the "kinder, gentler" form of fascism characteristic of the American way of life (and death)? After all, he was not born or raised in the U.S.--how could he possibly understand what it is like to be an American?

This question, like many others, contains its own answer. It is precisely because Marcuse was not born, raised, and therefore socialized in the United States that he was able to see it with fresh eyes. Moreover, he saw it with the eyes of one who arrived in the U.S. having fled Nazi Germany where he had witnessed hard-core, in-your-face fascism first-hand. And, then, of course, he worked for several years for U.S. intelligence agencies (the OSS in particular, precursor to the CIA); the latter experience gave him an insider perspective on the role of the U.S. government in the active manipulation of information and the production of propaganda and its dissemination.

The better question to ask about Marcuse is a purely rhetorical one: given his background and experiences, how would it have been possible for him to think in any other way?

2014 is the 50th Anniversary of the Publication of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man

As relevant today as on the day it was published.

The Fourth Estate's Betrayal of American Democracy

The One Percent's control of Public Television is documented here.

(Doubtless the same holds true for NPR).