Sam Smith - Under
the present political rules there is virtually no chance of decency,
fairness or common sense prevailing, because these rules function
in a culture that is largely devoid of such values. To change
anything, you have to change the culture, in our case a culture
of greed, social indifference, arrogance and cruelty that has
thrived for some three decades.
This culture
is not just a matter of law, or even of corporate propaganda
and manipulation. It has also included distorted education by
supposed intellectuals and their universities, sleazy business
school concepts so pervasive that even virtuous non-profits adopted
them, and selfish values passed on by a media that thought it
was just saying the obvious.
This is
not new. Every major change requires a cultural transformation.
Sure, the politicians will ultimately inscribe it as law, but
before that there must be a massive alteration in how people
see, understand, and believe things.
Think
about the civil rights movement. Before it, even those who knew
there was something badly wrong didn’t know what to do about
it, didn’t dare say it, or didn’t know who else might
be thinking the same thing. The movement liberated these suppressed
feelings and gave them a visible and powerful new home long before
the first civil rights measure was passed.
So it
is today. For three decades America has increasingly been going
along with the lies of the corporate elite. In time, these lies
became remarkably successful in destroying the culture of progress
that had blessed this land from the New Deal to the Great Society,
and had dramatically improved the role of the worker, the middle
class, blacks, and women, just to name a few.
And then
it stopped.
But, again,
it wasn’t a law or a collection of laws at first. It was
a change in the language, the values, the icons and the clichés.
It was a new culture that incrementally eradicated what had preceded
it and replaced it with what we have today.
To get
a sense of how irrational and strange this change has been, consider
that among today’s major pop cultural icons are Lindsay
Lohan and the Kardashians. Now look at our political icons and
consider how similar they are: vapid, talentless, unreliable
creatures famous merely for being famous.
Each movement
of cultural change does it differently. Some want admission to
the culture. Some want to turn it upside down. Some want to make
it irrelevant. Some dream of replacing it with something far
better.
And within
each movement, each individual can see it differently and perhaps
a consensus will be hard to reach.
There
is a lusty tradition in American politics of citizens of disparate
sorts, places, and status coming together to put power back in
its proper place. At such times, the divides of politics, the
divisions of class, the contrasts of experience fade long enough
to reassert the primacy of the individual over the state, democracy
over oligopoly, fairness over exploitation and community over
institution. This could be such a time if we are willing to risk
it, and one of the soundest way to start is to trade a few old
shibboleths for a few new friends.
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