TheMillerCircle.org

I am a university Professor of Neuroscience, with a narrow focus of research into nerve cell function of the vertebrate retina, and a broad interest in the issues that bind us through a set of common goals and aspirations, generated by a sense of shared humanity. I am deeply concerned that the issues under which we should strongly coalesce, in support of a simple set of objectives, like the protection of our environment, reduction of greenhouse gases, protecting endangered species, reducing deforestation, providing health care for our citizens and reducing to the point of elimination all nuclear military arsenals….these issues, and the reasons why we must do something about them, have been so distorted by the political process in America, namely through the shameful practices and ideology of the corrupt Republican Party, that we must now wonder whether the United States can or even should continue as the leader of the Western World. Surely someone else can do a better job. We have badly defaulted on our leadership commitments and tend to view every international problem as a military threat, or one that can be resolved by military means. Many of us in this country now painfully share this tragic view of our own nation that we once thought stood for purpose and high integrity and most of all for peaceful solutions to problems. No one remotely familiar with our early history would argue against the notion that Thomas Jefferson, among many others, including John Adams,  would be anything but appalled by our present government, whic is currently dominated by secrecy, isolated from public opinion and distorting or concealing most or all if its actions and intentions. These are the characteristics of, as Noan Chomsky as said "a failed state."

Virtually everyone who feels this way is suffering from double shock. We were shocked at first by the horrific events of 9/11, but since then we have been exposed to a series of un-American responses by our own government that force us into a state of denial and shame and a more prolonged state of shock about the nation that we thought we knew, but which now seems so repulsive to us because of the almost daily litany of new revelations about the behavior of our government. As a nation, we no longer know our own history and we seem unable to accept the facts of our own actions. The attack on 9/11 was a blowback attack on us. We created the hostilities that led to this attack and unless we recognize our responsibilities in producing these events, such as "Charlie WIlson’s War", the probability that we can do something long-lasting about them is virtually impossible. Bombing countries back to the stone age as we are doing in Iraq creates more enemies, more uncertainty for our own future, more public debt and more spending on military needs to defend us against these new threats, which we hype to the point of creating massive, fictive armies out of a few thousand radical, pissed off fundamentalists. Of equal importance and perhaps more critical to us as a country is the fact that these kinds of actions badly divide us amongst ourselves, something we should strive hard to avoid by developing a consensus on our strategies and, if necessary, educate the country on why we need to take actions that may seem outside of our national character. A very, very long time ago, most of us thought of ourselves as a peaceful nation.

We are on a course that seems designed to best serve the interests of our military-industrial complex. And continued preoccupation with these issues will postpone our ability to focus on the long-term solutions needed to address our real problems. We need the kind of national intelligence that has been outlawed by the Republican Party. Imagine in the face of stiff challenges to our future, we have one of the two major parties pushing homosexuality, gun control and abortion as the nation’s most pressing problems.

Recent polling data published in Science Magazine evolution-poll.pdf has revealed the shocking truth about the sad state of scientific knowledge and understanding that exists in our country today. The question was asked if "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals" and those interviewed were asked to respond with true or false. The United States of America, home of the best research universities in the world, finished second to last among more than thirty nations polled: only Turkey finished behind us. Furthermore, these numbers have been getting worse in this country as the religious fundamentalist movement has become more dominant. A recipe for certain disaster is in our future if we don’t recognize the meaning of these polls and get alarmed about the future of our country, especially as these attitudes begin to encroach upon our way of life, including the fate of our educational and research institutions. Already we have placed our scientific future at grave risk by the encroachment of religious fundamentalism into our national funding policies, such as stem cell research and global climate change. We can already see the impact of our research neglect as new progress in these areas increasingly comes from other countries: our leadership in science has never been more threatened than it is today. This seems doubly tragic because it’s about the only thing we have left, having given up on manufacturing, and now existing as a country where the financial service sector is the top dog. Soon the drop-off in Nobel prizes will replaced by the top hedge fund manager salaries….and the winner is……!

I am not just talking about science. The dumbing down of our entire culture has reached art, literature and the entire spectrum of the humanities. The American value system has eroded, partially fed by false news and stories. Political power is one thing to put in Washington, but political leadership in cultural values is an American disaster. There seems to be little sense that we have a common culture or set of aspirations or even curiosity about things, except what comes through our television sets. A popular television show is valued more highly than a good book. We need Oprah Winfrey to tell us what to read. We have a mass culture that feeds on short-term fads and the alternative achievements such as writing well or developing new knowledge of the world is irrelevant for the pop culture of today. Our publishing industry has focused on profit, not quality, book sales, not development of authors, easy topics, not the tough ones. Yet this confoundedly naive aptitude that seems to be flourishing in America, an unwillingness to face our past with some degree of objectivity, is the very element that allows us to plunder abroad while Americans believe we are doing good in the world. GWB is not the cause of our problems more than he is an indication of how far was have gone down a road that may be difficult for us to leave. Setting a new course seems almost impossible, as we don’t remember what the old one looked like.

Our present administration, led by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, can take credit for finally achieving the long-term goal of the conservative Republicans, namely that of making our government so dysfunctional that we may be forced to abandon some of our cherished programs, which will be too expensive to support, with of course, an exemption for the military. Katrina is the most glaring example of this new governmental state, but the insidious, growing evolution of this country into an economic aristocracy is equally troubling. In 1894 when income data first became available, John Rockefeller, the richest man in America, reported an income of $1.25 million or about 7000 times the average income in America. But last year, James Simons, a hedge fund manager, made $1.7 billion or 38,000 times the average American salary. And, the more recent revelations about medical care for our soldiers, inadequate armor for the troops most directly placed in the front lines in Iraq and the poor attention to health care issues of our veterans, all paint a picture of a government that has decayed into a moral and functional state of incompetence and moral collapse. Yes, George Bush and Dick Cheney will have to spend some time in purgatory before moving on, but before they get there, each of them should be impeached. Our constitution specifically forbids the kinds of practices that Bush and Cheney have made common place. We have an unconstitutional government and an illegal war!

America has gone into a free-fall in its international prestige and the vitality of its leadership. The concept of public service in the Bush administration has been replaced by greed and feeding at the public trough. To compound the horrors of the civil war now raging in Iraq, where we are directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, at home our government is suppressing expression of its own science and scientists. The Federal government that once supported the growth of science is now openly denying and suppressing the conclusions and opinions reached by mainstream scientists, while promoting the views expressed by fringe scientists who are typically supported by the industrial and corporate interests of America. And it is their products that have often raised concerns about the health of humans exposed to them.

If America were returned to us tomorrow, it would take many years to get back the country we had at the turn of the 21st Century. The Republican Party has violated so many of our legal and constitutional principles, that, together with its manipulation of science and suppression of scientists, the party itself could easily be outlawed for practicing political machinations destructive to America. Impeachment, yes. How about a constitutional amendment outlawing the Republican Party as the party of toxic political waste whose function is to wage war on America? It has become the Party of American Toxicology, that’s PAT.

We are rapidly giving up our leadership in science that we established and maintained for more than fifty years. A miraculous post-war (WW II) investment in education and research, further stimulated by our reaction to Sputnik, allowed us to become the world leaders in research especially in the biological sciences. Before WW II American scientists won four Nobel prizes, but since then, Americans have won more Nobel prizes than all other countries combined. Yet, the degree to which the intellectual basis of our culture has deteriorated make it unlikely that our prestige in science can continue in the midst of such destructive behavior. Recovering what we had in this country just a few years ago will not be easy. The party that got us here has deep pockets and they have achieved the artful state of lying about almost everything, from global warming to the causes of obesity, to the introduction of religious viewpoints into government and on and on to a never ending list which adds up to a history of destruction of our government to make way for the "free market economy" that the Republican Party has adopted as their mantra for solving everything. If it solves so much why are we in such trouble in almost every element for our economy and our culture?

The choice for our future is clear. We are smart enough and experienced enough to know what to do. But the Republican Party has put us into such a deep state of debt and moral implosion that getting out of this hole and recovering and sustaining what we once had will be, perhaps, the single most challenging task we have faced since the end of WW II. I urge you to read about the solution we adopted to address the new responsibilities we faced after WW II and especially after Sputnik. Strip out the anti-communist posturing which led to the Cold War and proved to be such an unnecessary disaster for us and for the Soviets and then concentrate on how our investment in education, the GI Bill, the reaction to Sputnik with the expansion of research universities and the establishment of America as a center of science, not a center of anti-communist strategies, how these more substantive efforts are those that propelled us into a state of unparalled international prestige and long-term prosperity. That is what we need to rediscover in America and embellish it once again as the essential keys to our success and future: the lost tablets of success need to be rediscovered. And by the way, one of the reforms so badly needed in this country is that of a more enlightened press and public broadcasting system. These are public airways and they should be held responsible for better journalistic standards, not the dumbing down of news and redefining what constitutes journalism. They need to stop removing the war from the front pages and recognize the destruction we have brought to a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Wake up America! What can you do to help?

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