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“The number of people who question [the official explanation of 9/11] is growing,” Mike Berger of 911Truth.org, a leading 9/11 conspiracy Web site, told Cybercast News Service. “The issue is that there has not been mainstream media coverage of any of the anomalies, the omissions, the lies regarding what we know.”

“The mainstream media have basically tried to dismiss anybody who raises questions,” he said.

I agree completely with both Roberts and Berger both about “coverage” and about “dismissal,” and I’ve tried to show why I agree — especially about “dismissal” — in essays analyzing recurrent examples of propaganda, fraud, cover-up, and deceit in, say, Amy Goodman, papers like The New York Times, Matthew Rothschild of Progressive Magazine, columnists such as Frank Rich, editors like Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch, and even the despicable, conscienceless, and quisling Popular Mechanics.

And yet, however monolithic, culpable, complicit, and traitorous the media and those working inside the media may be, our present vulnerability under the regime — including the possibility that we won’t be able to escape the regime’s worst and most murderous ofplans for us — are the result of distant sources and deep origins that reach far beyond only the media and its workers.

The media may be the cause, but what that cause has resulted in is a disease that now infects us all. And this is a disease that we’ve got to rid ourselves of if we ever hope to resist, let alone defeat, the Bushiscti regime and restore the republic that’s already been lost to us in all but name.

This disease is one that has to do with seeing. It’s one that has to do with the mind. But, most basically of all, it’s a disease that has to do with language, a disease that has corrupted language to the point where it can no longer help us but can only make us impotent and empty and thereby harm us.

Unless we can change this situation, we’re doomed.

Just take a moment to consider: It’s a simple truth that people can’t think if they don’t have language as a logical and coherent tool to think with — any more than they can drive ten-penny spikes into oak slabs without a hammer or its equivalent as the tool that makes it possible. I’ll grant at once that some high geniuses can think without a language that’s necessarily a verbal one in the familiar sense. I’ve got no wish to rule out, say, mathematicians, composers, painters and others who may not need “words” as they’re familiarly “spoken” in order to do their own kind of thinking. Such cases, however, invaluable as they may be, are in the infinitesimal minority. Most people need words. Most people need language.

And one of the most terrible, crippling, and paralyzing things about America today is not only that language itself has been made simultaneously toxic and impotent — toxic, that is, when it’s used against us, yet impotent when we make any effort use it for ourselves. That’s a situation already more than bad enough. But worse is that Americans — being so thoroughly uneducated, de-educated, and anti-educated — don’t even know that it’s happened.

What patients can be cured who don’t even know they’re sick? And here’s an even more despairing question: What patients can cure themselves if they don’t even know they’re sick?

And that’s the situation we face in the U.S. today. Nobody else is going to save us, that much is for sure. Our so-called leaders aren’t going to save us. Congress isn’t going to save us. The Bushiscti aren’t going to save us — but are hell-bent, instead, on destroying us.

So if anyone is going to save us, it’s got to be ourselves. We’re the ones who’ve got to get a grip on our language again, have got to detoxify it, have got to make it real again, make it potent, make it again into an instrument that we can use for ends that are good.

Can it be done? I fear not but pray so. I’m afraid that it’s a little bit like asking a physician-surgeon to save you from peritonitis by taking out your inflamed and near-bursting appendix. Sounds reasonable and fine, except that this physician-surgeon is so senile, so afflicted by Alzheimer’s, that he can’ remember what a peritoneum is, or what or where an appendix is, or, god knows, even what a scalpel is.

Little help from him. And that’s the way it is now with Americans. They’re so deeply undone through undergoing so much non- and anti- and de-education that they no longer know the least thing about language, are even in the least way conscious of language, know what it is, what it’s for, how to use it, or how, in turn, it’s used. After all, like almost anything else that’s very, very powerful, language can both nurture and destroy. The sun, for example — as all who know Euripides’ Medea are well aware — can give birth, warmth, food, generation, and life itself, but, on the other hand, it can also, like gunpowder, whiskey, or atomic energy, if you don’t know how to use it or know what it is, turn against you and not just not help you, but destroy you so thoroughly that not the faintest outline, shape, or remnant of what you once were will remain.

And that’s what we, as a republic, are facing now.

Ditto for all those who know The Bacchae of Euripides.

Paul Craig Roberts’ concise, plain, understated sentence — “Today academic freedom has disappeared just like the independent media” — implies even more bad news than it actually, and correctly, declares. The reason that academic freedom has disappeared, after all, is that the language to justify and defend it has also disappeared. And the reason for that prior disappearance is that the system of education that once existed — however imperfectly — to preserve it is now in a state of almost total failure. Meanwhile, other systems of education, whose several purposes include the elimination and forgetting of that language, prosper beyond all imagining.

The “anti-schools,” as you might call them, include very nearly the entirety of the mass media (including movies, ads, images, marketing methods, the works). They include the mercenary, death-embracing hallways of the corporatocracy most assuredly. And — here may be a surprise for some — they include most of academia itself, certainly in its so-called “higher” reaches. Far and away the best, soundest, and most humane education in the United States today takes place in kindergarten and pre-school, with a fall-off gradually occurring up to grade six or so. High school is worse yet, college dismal and dangerous (see A Nation Gone Blind), while graduate work in the humanities offers education just about as pernicious as any coming from the mass media and corporatocracy themselves (ditto A Nation Gone Blind).

Higher academia, after all, like the corporatocracy itself, is now made up of very, very few people — and those few rapidly disappearing — who were born earlier than my own birth year of 1941. What this means is that soon no one in corporate work or in academia today will have lived any part of his or her life outside the atmosphere and reach of the contemporary mass media. None of them, as a result, will any longer have a personal memory of what I call in A Nation Gone Blind the “old” America, which I date as having existed in 1947 and before. Here’s a passage from the first age of the book:

I have become grateful for the fact that I was born in 1941, since if I had come onto the scene even, say, five or six years later, I would have missed one of the most important experiences of my life, which was being privileged to get a meaningful impression, at first hand, of what I and many others now think of, rightly, as the “old” America.

That is, I was born just early enough that I was able to see, hear, smell, feel, taste, and walk around in the “first” America, the real one, as opposed to the one we’re left with now: the mass media America, the corporation America, the television America — the empty America.

I doubt very much, if it weren’t for the indescribably powerful influence of the mass media as we know it, that we would now be watching the United States — under the putative governance of the Bush-Cheney regime — being systematically dismantled as a republic and rebuilt as a police state at home and as a crushing military empire abroad. Without the mass media as we’ve known it now for sixty years, the chances of so enormous, ruinous, cataclysmic — and successful — committings of crime, murder, treason, rape, law-breaking, invasion, and pillage as the Bush regime is already guilty of — well, without the help of the mass media, I doubt that such a thing would have happened, would have been capable of happening, certainly not on so vast a scale.

Call me naïve, but I still think that bad education as opposed to good is what’s gotten us into the deep and malicious hell we’re now in. As for the word “naïve,” I’m pretty sure that the brilliant and energetic John Hanks would most likely use it on me, since the implied answer to his rhetorical question (which follows), at least for me, is yes:

Is it true [he asks] that liberals are starry-eyed idealists that think a better class of humans can be produced in classrooms?

Let me clarify. I would answer “yes” to the “classrooms” and “better class of humans” parts of the question. At the same time, I’d give a resounding “no” to the “starry-eyed idealists” part.

Here’s why.

Forty centuries of history (western history, to be more precise) show with a near absolute clarity that nobody is going to get anywhere in the bringing about of a “better class of humans” until such a person first tosses onto the permanent junk heap the “idealist” notion altogether and turns to the “holistic.”

That said, allow me to turn to the “classrooms” part of the question, the part that’s about “education.” With idealism having been thrown far, far away out through the window, I won’t just give my answer, but I’ll shout out that, yes, education matters; that, yes, education can and does make people better; and that, yes, education alone is the thing that can save us (or could have saved us) from the collapse and fraud and deceit and murder and brigandage and rape and crime and sadism and greed and pandering and torture and death that we see now everywhere “round us and under us, [and] over us” in our poor, hideous, dying world.

I’ll shout all that out. I’ll do it from the rooftops.

But only after it’s absolutely clear to everyone that the education I’m talking about is the right kind. That is to say, it can’t be a fraud or a fake, and it can’t be any of the myriad sorts of pernicious and ruinous “lying-projects” that pass for “education.”

No. It’s absolutely got to be the real thing and nothing else, nothing less, nothing other.

If you’d like illustration, begin by reading Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Then you could read Plato and watch him demolish the prospering and vigorous world of holism portrayed in the epics and the tragedies in order to replace it with the repugnant and life-negating (death-desiring) imaginary dichotomies that comprise the philosophic disaster we know as idealism. Then watch the Christians carry on the big mess, Des Cartes make doubly sure it remains alive and kicking (after the Renaissance’s noble effort to kill it forever), and existentialism at last fight grandly against it one last time: Until the Age of Simplification (read A Nation Gone Blind to find out what that is) discontinues education altogether, so that down the Memory Hole goes the very notion that 1) philosophy either exists or matters, and that 2) it can conceivably have anything to do with the nurturing or improvement of life in human societies.

Now, I know it’s up to me to explain what I consider this “real thing” to be, especially after claiming such importance for it. The trouble is, though, that that’s a big part of what A Nation Gone Blind does, and I’m sure readers will understand my not wanting to do again here what I’ve already done there. So, instead of defining good education, I’ll quote a passage that describes a bad kind — specifically, the kind the mass media has provided for the past sixty years or so. Then I’ll take a look at some other places than the media — Princeton University, for example, and, for another, “victimology studies” — that also appear to be providing that same bad kind, thereby doing their bit, like those other traitorous exemplars of propaganda, fraud, and deceit I mentioned earlier — Amy Goodman, Frank Rich, et alii — to help hasten and assure the republic’s regression from free state to police state and from world guardian to world psychopathic rapist.

A bit of history first. At the end of World War II a huge and historical opportunity was missed, lost, or thrown away. It can easily be argued that the U.S. at that time breathed free, stood on the high ground of right victory, and — this isn’t stretching believability, no matter how many may call it naïve — could have overseen the formation and nurturing of a world era unlike any known before. That era could have brought into existence a global balance of powers and a conscientious husbanding of global resources that would make it a period of undeniable historical significance. But, as we know all too well, nothing of the sort came about. In fact, one of the worst periods in all of human history came about instead.

Nineteen forty-seven can be thought of as an especially significant year by merit of having been filled with the magic of unsought blessings and simultaneously cursed with the cruel promise of their certain betrayal. The year could have been famous as the first in long period of global peace. Instead, infamous 1947 marks the exact moment when the United States set out knowingly, deliberately, and calculatingly on a course not of peace but of unending and purposefully self-aggrandizing war.

That is to say, 1947 saw passage of the National Security Act of that year, an act that brought about the creation of the National Security Council and transformed the old OSS into the new CIA. Why was it done? There are some who will argue down to this very day that the National Security Act was a patently necessary and entirely reasonable response to a dire and pressing international threat, primarily from an aggressive Soviet Union. Others will argue exactly the opposite: That there was no such threat, that the Soviet Union had been brought to its knees by the long and costly campaign to defeat the Nazis and by its final tally of almost 24,000,000 war dead (13.4% of its population — as compared to the 0.32% of its population lost by the U.S.). Seen from this latter point of view, the U.S. decision to turn away from peace and toward war was taken as almost wholly cynical, a decision based on greed, self-interest, and a desire for economic — corporate — growth of the same intensity and degree as the war-economy in the second half of the 1940s had brought into existence and had in those years maintained.

For those who lean to or who hold the second view — as I do — the matter boiled down simply to this single, awful, desolating, ruinous truth: That the world war had proven itself so profitable for so many corporate interests in so many areas of production and supply and finance — that the leaders and groups of leaders in those industrial and manufacturing and corporate areas wanted the war to go on forever because only in that way they could go on making more and more money than ever — forever.

No one I know puts the matter more succinctly — or bitterly — than Gore Vidal in his short book Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. You can also read the relevant passage — the one below — by going to this site. There, you’ll find the author of the site, B. John Zavrel, explaining that the quotation comes from a chapter that was “actually a letter (written for Vanity Fair before the November 7, 2000 presidential election) to the new President-Elect.”

Vidal:

“. . .fifty years ago, Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid. Exact date of replacement? February 27, 1947. Place: The White House Cabinet Room. Cast: Truman, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a handful of congressional leaders. Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that he could have his militarized economy only IF he first “scared the hell out of the American people” that the Russians were coming. Truman obliged. The perpetual war began. Representative government of, by, and for the people is now a faded memory. Only corporate America enjoys representation by the Congress and presidents that it pays for in an arrangement where no one is entirely accountable because those who have bought the government also own the media. Now, with the revolt of the Praetorian Guard at the Pentagon, we are entering a new and dangerous phase. Although we regularly stigmatize other societies as rogue states, we ourselves have become the largest rogue state of all. We honor no treaties. We spurn international courts. We strike unilaterally wherever we choose. We give orders to the United Nations but do not pay our dues... we bomb, invade, subvert other states. Although We the People of the United States are the sole source of legitimate authority in this land, we are no longer represented in Congress Assembled. Our Congress has been hijacked by corporate America and its enforcer, the imperial military machine... ”

Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. Paul Roche (from the Fifth Choral Ode, preceding line 1329).

Anyone who may really think I reveal myself as not only naïve but also mad as a hatter (an idealistic hatter, I might add) by saying such things as I do here about what could have happened in 1947 might take a look at these absolutely wrenching passages about Eisenhower and the way he was shanghaied by the corporate pressure-men near the same time we’re talking about. The passages are from The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, by the late, towering historian, William Appleman Williams (from his timely Chapter 8, “The Terrifying Momentum Toward Disaster”).

Here’s some of what you’ll find out when you listen closely to people, however eminent — like Shirley Tilghman or Cornel West — who think they’re thinking, or who think they’re talking about “significant topics.” Just click here and start reading.

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It’s time to recall Paul Craig Roberts’ comment from some time back: “Today,” he said, “academic freedom has disappeared just like the independent media. No one but powerful organized interest groups has a voice.”

In Tilghman and West, indeed, we’re seeing exactly those “organized interest groups” in action — and yet we must go a step farther even than Paul Craig Roberts did. These interest groups are even more pernicious than the ones Roberts was talking about, the kind indicated by his reference to the Norman Finkelstein case and “Censorship at Harvard.” It’s perfectly true that the Larry Summers vs. Cornel West incident (without which we’d never even have had the Shirley Tilghman incident) does demonstrate “organized interest groups” at work. And it’s also perfectly true that, insofar as such groups gain leverage in academia without first laying intellectual foundations to justify that leverage, they, de facto, constitute and demonstrate instances of the disappearance of academic freedom. If I were to advocate the establishment of a White Studies Center at Princeton, I’d be dismissed out of hand — although not if I were to advocate the establishment of a Women’s Studies Center. These are matters not of academic freedom or of intellectual contest, but of “idiot games... [as if] the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust... ”

But there’s worse news still. And that worse news is that this collapse of academic freedom is in actuality a collapse into academic emptiness. And, worse still, the emptiness was created first. And then, after the emptiness was ready, academics, freedom and all, collapsed into it.

This is what’s so important about language and about what’s happened to it over the sixty-years’ worth of indoctrination and simplification that its everyday users have undergone for their whole lives, users from the lowest halls of Walmart on up to the ivied halls of academe and beyond. Even the most intellectual of Americans have stopped being able to see for themselves, very possibly able to see at all. It’s not just a matter of nit-picking when, in the first chapter of A Nation Gone Blind, I analyze the work of fifteen American writers and find their average grade to be “D.” The reason for that shocking and egregious failure? The central reason is that so many of them are unable to think, see, or feel by and for themselves. Instead, they’re able to “think” only by beginning the process from a point that’s “at least one level of abstraction above actual reality.” Instead of writing about human beings they’ve known, for example, or about ideas that they have had or gained through experience, they write about abstractions like “race, class, gender, and ethnic identity” and they imagine all along that they’re actually writing from the first, initial, fundamental level of observed reality when, truly, they’re doing no such thing at all.

Instead of seeing for themselves, they’re receiving from sources already prepared, already simplified, already categorized, narrowed, and, most important of all, already moved up — yes, that’s right — at least one level of abstraction above actual reality.

Try it and see for yourself. Start listening to people who are putatively thinking about the standard-issue “subjects” and “topics” that they passively and unquestioningly accept, over and over and over, as if they were “real” or “true” or “relevant” to something or other, when in actuality they’re nothing more than stock notions and prefab, fake “concepts.”

If Americans weren’t already so badly damaged both intellectually and emotionally — hadn’t been so extremely simplified and been made so extraordinarily passive — the war in Iraq could and would never have gotten off the ground. Not for a minute. The whole project was far too absurd and laughable, a thing built far too inanely on a transparent foundation of lies, falsehoods, deceptions, hissy fits, childish “outings,” and frat-boy-worthy vindictive accusations ever to have survived more than a very, very short career by merit of possessing a worthiness as nothing more than a public laughing stock before dying away altogether.

But we’re a nation gone blind. The American population really has been damaged that badly, badly enough that not even after six whole years can people see — for themselves and by themselves — the simple, obvious, overwhelmingly evidenced truth that 9/11 was pulled off by our own country for the very purpose of cashing in on precisely and exactly the inability of Americans to see for themselves that we’ve been talking about. And what do we get at a time like this? What do we get when we’re under greater oppression and threat from a “foreign” power — a power that’s internal and yet that’s set upon destroying the American Constitution and thus America — than we’ve been at any time since the years preceding 1776?

You know what we get. We get pap. We get inertia. We get boilerplate. For intellectual leadership we get the likes of Shirley Tilghman and Cornel West. For political leadership we get the likes of Nancy Pelosi, who lies like a rug because she knows that Americans won’t do anything about it, or the likes of John Kerry, who can’t even see — can’t see for himself, can’t see it for what it is — the tasering and arresting by rogue police of a student in broad daylight and in a public place for doing nothing whatsoever except asking a factual question about Skull and Bones. Watch that video of Andrew Meyer being tased as neither John Kerry nor the audience does a thing and ask yourself who is not seeing and what they’re not seeing and why they’re not seeing it and therefore why they’re doing nothing.

Americans can no longer see reality for themselves, and therefore they can’t and won’t believe it even when it’s stuck right in front of their blinded eyes. This statement — the one I just made — is no longer metaphoric, but now it’s real. With the destruction of language and the raising of it up at least one notch above the empirical real; from that destruction follows the destruction of thought and its replacement by pseudo-thought; and from those two processes of destruction there can only emerge a people frozen, a people of no self-reliance whatsoever, a people numbed and confused into stasis and doubt by their own inability to tell the unreal from the real.

How did it happen? How could it have happened?

Dr. Johnson remarked that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and I’m convinced that we can say with equal certitude that abstraction, boilerplate, and cliché are both the sign and the destiny of the non-thinker. Having lost the language to do it with, Americans can no longer think, and because they can no longer think they can no longer see, and certainly they’ve lost the power once given them by the language that’s theirs no longer, the power to explain objectively and accurately what it is that they actually see and therefore be able to respond to it as reason and ethics would normally direct.

It may be that we’re lost, but I know now — I didn’t always — that the loss came before George W. Bush. The loss is an emptiness, already there, and he — and all the banal evil and fierce destructiveness he represents — simply fell into it.

I also know that if we can’t regain our language, can’t regain our access to it and the traditional uses we were once able to make of it — I know that if we can’t do those things, then we truly are doomed. It may be true already. Without language, we can’t speak. And if we can’t speak, how can we possibly save ourselves?

Here’s the last sentence from the Paul Craig Roberts essay we started with, “Conservatism Isn’t What It Used to Be”: In America today, speaking your mind in the media or in academia is a thing of the past. A country that has no voices independent of powerful interests is a country in which freedom is dead.

In computer programming, it used to be said routinely, “garbage in, garbage out.” Why in the name of all things holy should we ever have imagined that the case would have been any different with regard to human beings?

— Eric Larsen

— September 25, 2007

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