TheMillerCircle.org

We broadly share a common view on the kind of country we would like to be, but we do not have a shared view on the kind of country we have been. Framing the relevant issues surrounding our past has been the fault line of our disagreements. Neither World War I nor World War II could have taken place without the glorification of war as a means of romantic self-sacrifice. It was the carnage of those wars, the face to face visualization of dismemberment and the complete destruction of civilian life  that led to the horrification of massive warfare in which the objective was to kill civilians and destroy cultures.  Our revulsion of war has left us more confused about our past, as we are a country born in war and have thrived in the past on confrontation. External threats are the only means of uniting us as long as those threats can be identified as a country, race or religion. But when the external threat is something like the planetary survival of the species, the nature of which requires things like scientific measurements and projections, the uniting feature of external threats dissolves. So only some external threats have the ability to unite Americans under a single banner.  In contrast,  domestic peace and focus can never be achieved, in part because we apply the same need for a common enemy and we find more than one, dividing ourselves along the seams created by our two party system. Increasingly, the divisions along party lines have been intensified by the differences that have emerged between us on the state of our planet and whether the agreed upon problems can be solved by a free market strategy, which is rapidly falling into disfavor.

It is hard to believe that we are anything other than members of the large  public reactionary team, those to whom things are done, rather than the proactionary team or those who do things that others have to think about. After all, as we were busy doing our jobs, we thought that public issues, the social contract and the financial basis of our interactions would be competently handled by others who were not indifferent to the concept of public welfare and commited to the public trust. But things have started to unravel. We no longer feel that physicians always promote the best interests of their patients, as they better serve the HMO to which they belong. It’s the HMO that dictates to the physician the service and the drugs that can be used. In peeling off the layers of our culture, we didn’t have time to get to the layer of our financial services sector before it got to us. Through incremental creep, we have increasingly wondered whether our own government participated  in the economic downturn we find ourselves in today. Naomi Klein was right. The shock of our economic collapse allowed the government to save the financial sector to an excess that is hard to swallow or imagine. Until less than a year ago, we hadn’t quite arrived at the idea that our entire financial system might be stacked against us. We don’t or didn’t have enough space left in our brains to deal intelligently with  the panoply of issues that affect our daily lives and our long range planning. We thought for example that worker pensions should be sacred, not another borrowing opportunity available for pillage through a corporate buy-out. We didn’t realize that we are not the perfect social culture, unlike the ants, who possess  social institutions that never fail because they are chemically programmed to succeed and to deal effectively with the range of problems confronted by the nest. The individual ant lives by surrendering his free will to serve the larger needs of the nest, which in turn enhances his or her chances of survival. Ants survive while the ant does not. Do we need to model our government by studying ants?

We must admit that our cultural boat is adrift and we are tossed about on a sea of uncertainty, never knowing if the waves that move us in one direction or another, or those that threaten our stability, are made by man or germinate in the wave hatchery of nature. Paranoia enters when we begin to believe that the waves that destabilize our boat are made by man, the origins of which come from over the horizon, too far away for us to really know or see how they got started. We only react when they crash into our boat. We have all learned in recent months that we need a bigger boat. The fiscal crisis we are in today is like that. All the waves of instability are man made for sure, but each of them seems to come from beyond the horizon, so we don’t know with certainty who or what is really making our boat feel so unstable. Is this like war? Is it another element along our internal fault line? Is it another feature of our culture that must be un-romanticized before it can really work? Eager to get back to the things that interest us, we tend to accept the first, most sensible explanation of news that disturbs us and, using our first impressions, we support the changes that will make the waves stop–the short-term solution–the cultural band aid.

We used to believe that all Tsunamis came from nature, but now we’re not so sure. Is it sufficient just to try and stabilize the boat? Shouldn’t we be making waves of our own and destabilize other boats? How can we do that?  Too few of us have memberships in the clubs that really count, those that change our lives and change our culture and make the waves to which we can only react.  No wave that comes by has a label on it,  so we don’t know its origins with any certainty. We merely measure each wave by the impact it has on our stability and only get alarmed when our stability is threatened. We ignore the small waves and brace for the big ones that might swamp our flotation devices or sink us to the bottom. Our alarm system is activated, but what is it that alarms us? While no waves are labeled, we are given an explanation for the biggest ones, those that will change our culture, but we are dissatisfied that the explanations given to us don’t really quite fit. Everyone of them is too simple to be true. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco was a little wave, while the Tsunami that has passed us by or may yet be on its way is nothing less than the culture of our entire financial system driven by the idea that it is somehow virtuous to earn lots of money, dismantle any company, sell off all assets, raid workers pension plans, avoid paying into 401k plans, buy companies and put them into debt that drives insolvency and in short, selling off America for fun and profit.  The business model for America is simple: to Hell with with boats of others, ours is large enough to ride out all the waves and guide us through all the storms. The drive for making big money is created by the certainty that your actions will one day bring down the system and you need a big nest egg to ride out the coming storm and have a boat big enough to survive the Tsunami that you started through your need for greed. These are the frontal lobe deniers of our culture, those that lack the chemical makeup to form a society that works for all members of the culture. The biggest wave-makers, those that most seriously threaten our stability, are those that are most admired and the first to receive bailout money. We are left to find ways on our own that encourage us to admire all the big wave-makers. But, we find it impossible to meet that simple task, as there is nothing attractive about them as people or wave-makers. Perhaps we have now found a common internal enemy.

Floating in our sea of uncertainty, along came the Tsunami that is swallowing up the newspapers of America and we are left wondering how news will be covered: we can see these deficiencies already, at both the national and local level.  You don’t see the internet bloggers on the streets asking the tough questions; politicians have been given a reduced burden from fewer questions that probe their policies and voting record. And the questions asked are much easier. Eliminating our newspapers has contributed to the dumbing down of America.  It was supposed to be one of nature’s Tsunamis, created by the impact of the internet on the newspaper industry and, as we all know, everything on the internet is supposed to be free. Few bloggers make money on the internet: it has become the greatest force for disequalizing financial compensation in our entire economic history; we have witnessed the accumulated devastation of the internet on our ability to make a living over the last 15 years. To express yourself on the internet, you must have a serious day job. You are not a journalist on the internet unless you were a journalist when you started and many journalists on the internet lost their day jobs as journalists with newspapers. They are lucky to find work on the internet and if they do, it is typically at a reduced level of pay.

But did the Tsuanmi that swallowed newspapers come from nature as we have been told? Was it the impact of the internet cycling through our free market economy? Was it therefore inevitable and an unavoidable component of our progress, or was it part of the pathway to our cultural destruction? If you believe that our loss of newspapers was the natural outcome of our social evolution, then you must listen to David Simon’s testimony to Congress recently which can be viewed, listened to or read on Democracy Now. Simon is the celebrated creator of HBO’s The Wire. He had a long career as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and in his testimony, he outlined how all of the serious damage done to newspapers occurred before the internet began as a serious challenge to print media. According to Simon (who also appeared on a recent Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS), one of the major forces behind newspaper decline was created by their conversion to corporatism  through the major buyouts that took place in the industry during the 1980s and 1990s.  Before that spree, major newspapers were often owned by families who had ties within the community and felt an obligation to provide quality news. They could function adequately with a 10-15% profit margin. But the corporate buyouts and the creation of huge chains changed the economic model for a newspaper, from that of serving local readers, to serving the higher corporate model of profiteering. Newspapers were now asked to generate 30% or more profit and take on huge debts to support the buyouts and expansion which moved them beyond their capacity to carry the debt load.  With corporate buyouts of department store chains, the advertising revenue began to shrink and the expected and extravagant profit margins could not be sustained. Saddled with debt, the newspapers began to purge their major asset–good reporters. I myself watched the Star Tribune in Minneapolis go through these transitions, with multiple buyouts and  “re-engineering” to reduce the wages and number of reporters to the bare minimum. According to Simon, our loss of major newspapers had nothing to do with the internet and more to do with the corporate greed factor that has been visiting our culture for more than three decades. Simon gives a figure that, where there were once 500 reporters covering the city of Baltimore,  today that number is little more than a hundred, so important news stories and neighborhood issues don’t get any coverage at all. Graft and greed cannot help but flourish under the new shadow of this umbrella.

Our founding fathers created the Constitution with the idea that our newspapers would serve a vital force of informing the public to keep politicians honest and their actions transparent. We cannot have an open, transparent government without  functioning newspapers and, as Simon argues, there may be many good bloggers on the web who give us their opinion when major issues surface, but these people are not journalists, they are not reporters on the beat and they cannot replace the value of the newspaper to our functioning Democracy. So, the most important question we have to address on this topic  is how can we get newspapers healthy again and serving their critical function in our still fledgling Democracy? Simon wonders whether it’s not too late to save newspapers and if so, perhaps it’s too late to save our Democracy. We need to sharpen our ability to identify the waves that destabilize our boat and demand to know their origin. Social outrage must overmatch financial greed. We can’t fix our current problems without destroying the wave-makers that produced them. But hope is on the way. More on hope to follow.

RFM