Long before business was centralized by dehumanizing
corporate power, Emerson could assert in 1841: [T]he general system of
our trade…is a system of selfishness; is not dictated by the high
sentiments of human nature; is not measured by the exact law of
reciprocity; much less by the sentiments of love and heroism, but is a
system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving
but of taking advantage…."
And Thoreau, writing in
Walden
would complain: "Most men, even in this comparatively free country,
through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious
cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits
cannot be plucked by them…Actually the laboring man has not the leisure
for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the
manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the
market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine. How can he
remember his ignorance - which his growth requires - who has so often
to use his knowledge?"
Troubled by a culture based upon such
"ignorance" and "taking advantage," civic and religious leaders, dating
back to Puritan New England, "emphasized literacy, especially
sufficient literacy to read the Bible, as a means to bring civilization
to their country.
"But, as Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens conclude, this push for literacy
'was never more than a utilitarian value to serve greater spiritual and
social ends.' [Soltow and Stevens,
The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States, p. 18] It was a '
particular'
sort of literacy; certainly not designed to 'open vistas of
imagination.'" [Ibid, p. 22, quoted in Walter C. Uhler, "Democracy or
dominion,"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 2004]
Because such "education" actually was designed to "instill proper
beliefs and codes of conduct" [Soltow and Stevens, p. 22] rather than
rigorous thinking in the minds of coarse, laboring Americans, one
shouldn't be surprised that the mere ability to read the Bible didn't
prevent the widespread propagation of the bogus "Curse of Ham" as the
"most authoritative justification for 'Negro slavery.'" [David Brion
Davis,
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, p. 66]
As actual readers of Genesis 9:18-27 should have known, Noah did not
curse Ham, but Ham's son, Canaan. Moreover, Genesis 9:18-27 contains
nothing to hint of race or color. That hardly mattered, however,
because, as David Brion Davis has concluded, "it was not an originally
racist biblical script that led to the enslavement of 'Ham's black
descendents,' but rather the increasing enslavement of blacks that
transformed biblical interpretation." [Ibid, pp. 66-67] Moral rot!
Professor Davis offers a devastating comparison of the immorality of
late 19th century Southern Christians, still embracing the bogus "Curse
of Ham," and the barbarian Tupinamba slaveholders in 16th century
Brazil. According to Davis, the Tupinamba took great delight in
humiliating their male slaves, before eventually murdering them and
eating them - even saving specific bodily organs for honored guests.
According to Davis, "[T]his freedom to degrade, dishonor, enslave, and
even kill and eat gave the Tupinamba not only solidarity but a sense of
superiority and transcendence." [Ibid, p. 29]
Although late 19th century American lynch mobs did not eat the blacks
they murdered, a rotten superiority and solidarity were served as
"Southern whites eagerly gathered as souvenirs the lynched victims'
fingers, toes, bones, ears and teeth." They called them "nigger
buttons." [Ibid]
Unfortunately, as Anatol Lieven has pointed out, "for a century and a
half…the desire to preserve first slavery and then absolute Black
separation and subordination had contributed enormously to the closing
of the Southern mind, with consequences for America as a whole which
has lasted down to our own day." [Lieven,
America Right or Wrong p. 112]
For example, as Stephen R. Haynes has written, in
Noah's Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery,
the Rev. Benjamin Palmer delivered a 1901 New Year's Day, "Century
Sermon" in New Orleans, in which he "utilized Noah's prophecy as an ex
post facto rationale for his government's removal of Native Americans
'from the earth.'" And, as Haynes also notes, "when legal segregation
came under concerted attack in the 1950s, the first impulse for many
white Christians was to revive the curse to serve as a biblical defense
of racial separation." [p. 103].
Keep in mind, (1) the
Greater South extends beyond the borders of the former Confederacy,
perhaps as far north as Route 40, which cuts across the middle of Ohio,
Indiana and Illinois [Lieven, p. 107], (2) Southern evangelical
Protestant religion has spread to other parts of the country [Ibid.]
and (3) there are many Southerners and other Americans to whom these
generalizations do not apply.
Nevertheless, says Lieven, "a process may have been at work in the
United States which could be called the 'principle of the Claymore
mine.'
"A Claymore is essentially a shaped plastic case packed with explosives
and steel balls. The explosion, blocked at the rear and sides, hurls
shrapnel in the direction of the enemy. Politicians and even media and
business figures who express racist hostility to domestic minorities in
public now often pay a very heavy price, even though everyone is well
aware that, in private, such attitudes continue to stream through much
of White American society.
"But as with a Claymore mine, the suppression of feelings at home may
have only increased the force with which they are directed against
foreigners, who remain a legitimate and publicly accepted target of
hatred." [Ibid, p. 46] It's called bellicose nationalism.
And it's easy to tap into such moral rot. Take the candid 1989
admission by first generation neoconservative, Irving Kristol, the
all-too-deserving father of the despicable "thug," William Kristol. It
was the father who boasted: "If the president goes to the American
people and wraps himself in the American flag and lets Congress wrap
itself in the white flag of surrender, the president will win…The
American people had never heard of Grenada. There is no reason they
should have. The reason we gave for intervention - the risk to American
medical students there - was phony but the reaction of the American
people was absolutely and overwhelmingly favorable. They had no idea
what was going on but they backed the president. They always will."
[Ibid, p. 166]
Such moral rot explains why, when presidential candidate George W. Bush
smugly asserted, "I may not know where Kosovo is, but I know what I
believe," he was not judged to be a dimwit, but a man of character.
Such moral rot also explains the ease with which an evil president and
vice president — with the cynical aid of America's neocons — could
manipulate the ignorant fears and blind rage of Americans into support
for an illegal, immoral unprovoked war against Iraq.
Moreover, such moral rot explains why, even in the disastrous wake of
the evil invasion he inspired, Darth Cheney could send out Christmas
cards containing Benjamin Franklin's words: "And if a sparrow cannot
fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire
can rise without His aid?" And, alas, such moral rot explains why
President Bush - who, until two months before ordering his evil
invasion of Iraq didn't even know that the country was populated by
Sunnis and Shiites - could feel sufficiently confident about the
collective stupidity of Americans to erroneously compare Iraq to
Vietnam (a war that the moral coward supported, but worked so mightily
to dodge).
Moral rot also explains American's current inability to see through
Bush's "surge" propaganda. Simply consider two incontestable truths:
(1) "As of late-August, no progress had been made in achieving the key
objective of the "surge" - to provide safe space for political progress
at the national level." [Anthony Cordesman, "Iraq's Insurgency and
Civil Violence: Developments through Late August 2007," p. ii] and (2)
such political progress, in the form of national reconciliation, cannot
occur because the Shiites now in power consider their permanent
political ascendancy to be predicated upon their ability to outlast the
American occupation.
As the
New York Times
correctly noted: Mr. Maliki's government "is the logical product of the
system the United States created, one that deliberately empowered the
long-persecuted Shiite majority and deliberately marginalized the
long-dominant Sunni Arab minority. It was all but sure to produce
someone very like Mr. Maliki, a sectarian Shiite far more interested in
settling scores than in reconciling all Iraqis to share power in a
unified and peaceful democracy." ["The Problem Isn't Mr. Maliki,"
New York Times,
August 24, 2007] Of course, it's difficult to foresee such problems, if
you're a president who did not even know that the country he was
preparing to invade contained such Shiites and Sunnis. Moral rot!
Finally, moral rot now explains what appears to be the inevitable march
to war against Iran, or at least the bombing of its nuclear energy
facilities. Having supported an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq,
which has inflicted untold suffering upon its people, most Americans -
including Americans currently sitting in congress and running for
president - find themselves incapable of thinking through just how to
deal peacefully with Iran, the sole regional power to emerge preeminent
from the debacle we initiated.
And, yet, we still consider ourselves an exceptional people!
Walter C. Uhler
is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been
published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow
Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the
Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).
waltuhler@aol.com
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