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Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn - November 17 2003
Smoke and mirrors fatal weapons in US
war against reality
Years ago a New Zealand publisher of tarnished repute told me his
simple secret to life. "Deny, deny, deny," he said, over one of
his legendary dinners. I was young and for a short while taken by
him and his defective philosophies.
I was reminded of him as I stood on a balcony in Los Angeles and
watched a thin trail of smoke rise elegantly above the hill behind
my hotel. It was the tinder-dry first day of the fires that were
to ravage many parts of California and I had just read Joan Didion's
new book, Where I Was From. Her insights into the mindset of that
community, the greed, acquisitiveness and wasteful extravagance
lurking beneath eternal sunshine, were prescient.
But it was the denial that Didion got right into, the state of
mind that blithely builds and rebuilds along flammable chaparrals
and into high, dry forests without concern for the ecological burden,
or the reality of fires, that have been part of that ecology from
time immemorial.
San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit calls America feckless.
"Californians," she says, "are no different than other Americans,
just more so."
But when you start to look, really look at the culture of denial
that seems to pervade America, feckless is an understatement. From
the top down it's more like a profound and wilful ignorance.
President George W. Bush recently told the world, that he gets
his news from objective sources. "And the most objective sources
I have are the people on my staff," he said, without a shadow of
doubt crossing his brow.
Everywhere you look here you see mind-boggling denial. Like the
new advertisements for KFC that extol eating fried chicken as a
weight-loss tactic. Or the daily parade of people so fat they individually
overflow the booths in a cafe near our hotel as they fill up on
super-sized portions of everything. Or the wilful denial entailed
in believing all those 'nature-friendly' advertisements for ultra-polluting
four-wheel-drives that make up most of the traffic on the roads.
Freud described denial as a primitive defence mechanism, a way
to reduce anxiety by refusing to become aware of certain unpleasant
aspects of external reality.
And certainly, from the untruths that begat the war against Iraq
to the denial inherent in this country's attitude to the environment,
the external reality of America is increasingly unpleasant.
Take the legislation last week that virtually eliminated industrial
smokestack regulations, despite the fact they were already the lowest
in the industrialised world. Or the effective abolishing of wilderness
protection in favour of oil and other exploration interests. The
list goes on, all amounting to the rolling back of 30 years of environmental
gains, all at the behest of big polluting, corporate campaign contributors.
Or the rejoicing last week at short-term economic gains caused
by tax cuts for the rich at the direct expense of social programmes
for the poor. Or that national debt is increasing by $1.59 billion
a day but none of the increase is being spent in areas of social
need.
All while a new report reveals more American families are too
poor to eat anything but the cheapest junk food, and the gap between
rich and poor has never been so large (the top 1 per cent own 30
per cent of the nation's wealth while the bottom 40 per cent own
1 per cent.)
Or the scary little fact that the United States Constitution and
Bill of Rights does not apply to the workplace. The minute you extrapolate
this fact, fill it with the abdication of government in favour of
the corporate takeover, leaving every citizen exposed to the unbridled
capitalist agenda, you see that denial is not just a river in Egypt,
it is a gushing torrent in America.
But to take these things on board would be tantamount to seeing
the American dream as Didion does. As a miasma. So, instead, Americans
deny the reality before them and vote as the people they think they
deserve to be, namely affluent Republicans.
I know that calling denial a cultural attribute is a harsh pronouncement.
And, clearly, as our local publisher with his own special mantra
proves, it's not an exclusively American trait. But in this country
of smoke and mirrors it is an essential mindset, the only way to
carve a life inside the deadening dream of endless consumption without
cost.
In the end, can there be anything more tragic, more symbolic,
than the story last week of a man burned beyond recognition, huddled
in his bathtub, his charred cat clasped in his arms, in the burned-out
shell of the blue-collar California home he refused to believe would
burn down?
Not all Americans are in this state of numbed hubris. Staff Sergeant
Georg-Andreas Pogany, an Army Special Forces interrogator isn't.
He publicly described his reaction to seeing the mangled body of
an Iraqi. He began shaking and vomiting and was terrified he would
be killed.
And for this, his inability to deny the truth of war, his undeniably
real response to the prospect of dying horribly? He faces a dishonourable
discharge and prison time. For cowardice.
ENDS
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
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