Amidst all of the seemingly futile lambasting of El Presidentcito (“Our little president” as Gore Vidal refers to him in the article referenced below.), there seems to be absolutely no understanding of how he and his handlers have managed to subvert almost the entire system of checks and balances that have heretofore saved the United States from plummeting headlong into the military dictatorship that so many of its most powerful elements have wanted for going on three centuries.
All the complaints cycle around the political. And around the power of Big Money.
But you know…and this has been America’s saving grace during other crises…there ARE more of us than there are of them.
So why are we not doing something?
Electing people who WILL do something other than talk talk talk.
Hitting the streets.
Why?
Read on for more.
From the latest in a series of articles that has appeared in Counterpunch regarding a trip that Gore Vidal made to Cuba.
—snip—
In his mid fifties, with long, Beatles style hair, and wearing jeans and a sport shirt, Prieto has waged a two-decade long struggle with harder liners to give writers maximum freedom to express themselves in films, print and graphic and plastic arts – not on TV, radio or in print news.
Prieto became known throughout Cuba when he challenged Fidel who in a television forum disparaged writers’ and artists’ need to travel. Fidel publicly admitted his error and apologized. In his tenure, the poet-writer as Cabinet Minister has even muted the harsh line between exiles and island artists by accepting exile literature as part of the overall Cuban patrimony.
“Our cultural policy is not decided by the market as happens in so many places, where the people may not know of a great writer or musician of their own country and, however, know perfectly well the intimacies of Michael Jackson.”
Prieto explained that Cuba “cannot design a future for the Cuban where every family has – as seen in the Yankee films – two cars, a pool or a chalet. However, we can guarantee conditions of a decent life and at the same time a rich life in spiritual and cultural terms. It is a conception of culture as a form of growth and personal realization that is related to the quality of life. In this sense, we are convinced that culture can be an antidote against consumerism and against the oft repeated idea that only buying can create happiness in this world. I think that that is our goal.
Can I get an “Amen” here?
No?
OK.
How about a mea culpa?
Because it is the American people who are culpable here.
Not BushCo.
We have surrendered to their program.
We have eaten their denatured food. On EVERY level.
Celebrity instead of celebration.
Reality shows rather than reality.
News media that lie.
Empty cultural artifacts.
The consumer as king.
“The good life” as the ONLY thing that is worth desiring.
” …we can guarantee conditions of a decent life and at the same time a rich life in spiritual and cultural terms. It is a conception of culture as a form of growth and personal realization that is related to the quality of life. In this sense, we are convinced that culture can be an antidote against consumerism and against the oft repeated idea that only buying can create happiness in this world. I think that that is our goal.”
I truly think that it is too late here in the consumerist U.S. We are not going to break the hold of the corps, because there are not enough people who recognize the evil of consumerism to make much difference. Not on the left OR the right, and certainly not in the vast, paunchy middle of this soft, soft country.
And our so-called “enemies”?
The Islamic countries?
They are largely working on an even older and MORE out of date concept.
Unthinking surrender to dogma. To the degenerated teachings of long-dead sages.
What is really happening in Iraq and the Middle East is the clash between two outdated systems.
One replaces thought with gluttony and the inevitable sloth that follows, the other with religious fundamentalism.
Where the “new” really lives?
Cuba was the first.
A new race is rising in the south, Americans.
La Raza
Watch it well.
It is the future. It is the ONLY “new” on the planet right now.
Not here in the U.S., for SURE.
Not in suffering Africa, which is headed back to feudal times.
Not in the Islamic world, which still lives with one foot in the 1300s.
Not in Europe, although it is certainly better balanced than anyplace else on Earth at the moment.
China is trying to be Super-America. Basing its entire growth on producing consumer products for consumer clones. India too. All of Asia, really. The cultures are already gone in a blur of Bollywood, greed and repression.
Aurtralia/New Zealand?
Maybe…but they are really pretty small.
However…South/Central/Caribbean America?
Almost 600 million people speaking basically one language. (Portugese is really more a dialect of Spanish than a truly separate language.)
What holds together the new governments arising in this area? Bolivia, Venezuela, etc? With more to follow. bet on it.
The movement is multi-racial.
It is anti-consumerist.
It celebrates its cultural heritage.
It has roots, people.
Roots.
And it is standing up in opposition to the rot that can be plainly seen in the overprivileged north.
Roots rather than rot.
Fidel was a prophet, and his prophecies are coming true.
“…we are convinced that culture can be an antidote against consumerism and against the oft repeated idea that only buying can create happiness in this world. I think that that is our goal.”
Pay attention, folks.
And learn from your betters.
Do whatever YOU can to de-consumerize yourself, and await the inevitable change.
The U. S. is SO over.
VAYA!!!!
It comes.
Soon.
Bet on it.
AG
Tips, comments, recs…???
YOU know…
AG
I have Cuban friends (liberal, progressive friends) who would disagree with you. Castro is a dictator, and has imprisoned and killed his political opponents. Certainly, American policy toward Cuba has been a travesty, but there is much about his regime to deplore. I think the things you praise could just have easily have been acheived using a less repressive, more open model such as the one the Sandinistas have employed.
I am sorry, Steven. The words “liberal” and “progessive” and all of those who identify themselves as such are part of the problem.
I reiterate:
The Cuban model…yes red in tooth and claw as is all of the natural world…has WORKED.
It has withstood the test of time; it has successfully resisted the depredations of American imperialism, and it is now the model upon which the rising continent to the south is modeling itself.
Fidel Castro will eventually be seen as the George Washington of the United States of South America.
Or better.
Watch.
Castro understood some things that the weak, moody, overprivileged left of America does NOT understand. He based his revolution upon the poor, and he did not betray them afterwards. He did not betray their CULTURE. And he was willing to take violent action to achieve those ideas.
We have a group that is willing to take violent action now here in America but stands for exactly the OPPOSITE of that idea. For the glorification of false culture and the enslavement of the many in service to the few.
And we have a group…an “opposition”…that disapproves of ALL action except talk. Why? Because it too has lost its connection to the culture. In fact, most of the culture to which it should be connected is lost.
Irretrievably lost.
It’s gone, baby. Gone. Get on it. Wrapped up in yesterday’s editions of USA Today and thrown out with the rest of the bathwater.
There was a functioning culture here once. A SET of cultures. A mythos that flat-out worked. It wasn’t perfect; it just worked.
The white working class cultures? The ones that were brought over from Europe by those who still believed in them when Europe was in a centuries-long state of cultural and political decline (A decline the most easily apprehended evidence of which was quite plainly the evil of racially-based imperialism.) that did not end until Hitler offed himself in a nasty little Berlin bunker.
Gone.
All of them.
The black culture that proved its steel when it survived 100 years of post-Civil War trickery, deceit and segregation in amazingly loving and positive shape?
Gone.
Cracked and welfared and dis-infoed/dis-educated right out of existence. Shot right off a motel balcony, may God rest Martin’s immortal soul.
And…surprise, surprise…what is/are about the ONLY culture(s) currently surviving here in relatively good shape? Relatively uncontaminated by the poisonous system now in place in the United States?
The South/Central/Caribbean cultures.
Man, all’s you have to do is get in your car on a nice Saturday afternoon/evening and look at the action on the street in damned near ANY HISPANIC NEIGHBORHOOD IN AMERICA to see the truth of this.
There is happiness to be had.
NOT complaint.
NOT fear.
NOT hiding.
Out there, grooving.
Like America USED to be.
I played with a real, high level roots-of-NYC-Latin-Culture band last week (The Giants of Latin Jazz. You could look it up.) at a convention of the American academic music system, so-called “jazz” subcategory. The International Association of Jazz Educators. The IAJE. Sheer bullshit, 98% of it. JUST like the rest of America, from cars to combat.. A multi-million dollar industry that is churning out jazz wannabes in 1000 times the numbers that are necessary to fill the available job slots.
I normally pay it little mind, this organization (I like to refer to it as The International Association of Jazz Enemies.), but since I am rapidly reaching mature/elder statesman status in that world…one of the last functioning players who learned on the bandstand rather than in a sterile classroom, and one who can actually communicate in words as well as music…and feel as if I can both contribute something real to the 2% of it that IS healthy and make some much-needed money in the process, I stuck my nose into it a little further than just doing a performance there.
The STENCH!!!
I listened as group after group got on stage and literally jerked off the audience with derivative, false performances of dead music. And the one group that did NOT do this (The one group that I heard, because I had to leave town before the thing was over. I’m sure that there was more. The above 2% rule HAD to apply.), the Giants band in which I was playing, was SO DISSED by the administrators that we seriously considered just walking out. 20 of the best and brightest of the NYC latin field over the past 30 years, all playing at their prime and playing the original charts from the Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodriquez bands as well or better than they were originally played, cut from 1 hour to 25 minutes so that a New Jersey-sounding lounge band with a dyed-blonde singer could rattle off what sounded to me like a wedding band set from 1992 and then some other no-playing motherfucker (a jazz technical term) could blather on for 15 minutes about what an honor it was to receive an award in the name of one of the REAL teachers on the jazz education movement, the late John LaPorta. A man whom I knew well, someone personified the working class European mythos (Italian division) of which I spoke earlier.
As above, so below.
And vice-versa.
If Horace Greeley were asked where the action is today and had enough sense to be able to tie his own shoelaces, his answer would be “Go south, young man. Go south.”
Bet on it.
Later…
AG
this comment got you a rec…was gonna ask you about the IAJE…but thought it might be out of place
know a couple of folks who attend it every year to ‘verify their bonifides’…no playing motherfuckers pretty much sums them up.
Peace
John McCain: The truth.
Thank you.
As above so below.
My ongoing life in the real fires of what remains of American culture is what informs my whole view of our problem.
VAYA!!!
As above so below.
AG
Yes, there is hope to be had in Latinamerica, but we are westernizing just as much, I think, as the rest of the world.
There is a town called Sahagun in the north coast of Colombia; a sea level tropical town without sea, rivers or mountains around to cool the air. It was a lovely place between 1 and 3 o’ clock in the afternoon: everybody just slept or did nothing. It gave the town a slow, sort of natural pace. The one town hobby was chatting (more than chatting, people were very good at talking, at telling jokes and anecdotes), sitting in a rocking chair on the curb.
Then bars and motorcycles came in. Kids started getting motorcycles and now their roar invades the sacred ours between 1 and 3, and people started going to bars, to drink beer and attempt to talk over the loud music.
That’s just an example to say that the cancer of late capitalism and fast licing has spread south.
I enjoy your passion, though
Columbiia will have its turn…
The drug states will be last.
AG
The performance was praised in one blog:
This might be going a little to far.
I think the real GW of South America has yet to appear on the scene. It may be Chavez, but we need to see how he plays out his power over the next several years.
You paint with so much anger and passion — – and an awfully broad brush, A.G.
It’s one thing to criticize Americans, though (and we are much, much more complex than you picture us), and another to laud Fidel’s government.
Corruption por la izquierda plagues Cuba, supporting a black market for consumers. Fidel complained about it in late 2005, and his brother has had a hard time coping with it since then.
I distinguish the Cuban government from the Cubans, who admirably cope with adversity and lack of materials.
Why should a culture of anti-consumerism require shutting people up? What do they have to say that’s so dangerous?
Pero se siente de la patria el grito
Point by point?
1-Corruption? A black market? If the U.S. had not maintained a strangling embargo on Cuba for 50 years ore so, how many “shortages” do you think that there would be now?
2-Not able to access agrochemicals?
Turning to more diverse, traditional agricultural methods?
An unintentional blessing from Poison Central America.
See much obesity in Cuba?
I would be curious to see the cancer rates compared to the U.S..
As far as I am concerned, latanaw, that is simply some more consumerist bullshit that has been deftly spun into one end of your own personal system and you are now spouting it out of the other end.
Just as it was designed to do.
3-“John Kavulich, a senior policy adviser with the nonprofit U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council”?
Please.
I smell CIA/military/industrial/academic/corporate complex all OVER that name.
Non-profit, eh? And who DOES pay their salraies, pray tell? Follow the money to find the spin.
ANY organization that uses titles like “senior policy advisor” should be immediately viewed with at the very least a jaundiced eye after the last 50 years of American fiasco that has been totally presided over by OTHER “senior policy advisors”.
“I wouldn’t join a club that would have me” said Groucho Marx.
Would that these senior policy advisors had the same good sense.
4-Jailing journalists?
On the evidence of our last 50 years…from the JFK whitewash right on through to the he latest lap-doggery being afforded the current Riders of the Purple Surge…jailing journalists is a recommendation, not a negative.
If you were to try to clean up the Augean stables-like false media of the U. S. today, the FIRST thing that you would have to do is put in jail every journalist who has has spread false news in the pay.of the government. Taken directly or indirectly, in any form from money to influence.
Talk about your prison overcrowding problems…
Why…we might have to free some POT smokers!!!
5-Extreme repression of political dissent? I guess it depends on what the dissent is ABOUT.
And who pays for it.
CIA?
Yup.
Bet on it.
They didn’t jail Sr. Prieto when HE “dissented”. (Read the article.)
6- You ask ” Why should a culture of anti-consumerism require shutting people up? What do they have to say that’s so dangerous?”
Your innocence is frightening.
Go on Newstrike for a few months.
You REALLY do need it, y’know…
later…
AG
I’ll give you a couple of Amens! One of your best diaries ever.
Incredibly perceptive. Look what Chavez is doing in Venezula. Chile under Bachlet. Argentina throwing out the IMF.
Would you believe the Financial Times has had to devote page space to debunking Marx recently?
Starting with this lovely quote:
BushCo has totally discredited a system Keynes and Roosevelt tweaked, fixed and saved. They think military might and force can save them and us and gives them carte blanche to do whatever they want to do.
But didn’t the Soviet Union hollow out from the inside despite their mighty throw weight?