Your Call Is Important To Us

by Penny, Laura

  Even though the United States and Canada are founded on the liberal principles of the Enlightenment, like freedom and democracy, the word liberal has been hijacked and turned into a synonym for treasonous America-hater. Bush’s insistence that America was founded on Christian faith is historically inaccurate; most of the Founding Fathers were Deists, who put far more faith in reason than they did in religion. Paine, for example, famously declared that the only church he needed was the one in his head. Jefferson edited his own Bible, which kept Jesus’ practical moral teachings and tossed out all the dogma and supernatural events. Sure, they believed in a benevolent Creator, but they were also pretty serious about the separation of church and state, for the benefit of both institutions. After the election, historian Garry Wills wrote an editorial for the New York Times that the reelection of Bush marked a turn away from the Enlightenment, and a turn towards theocracy and blind faith. His claim might be a tad hyperbolic, but it is not without merit. Bush’s declaration that freedom is a gift God gives us all skips a step in the old Deist formula. God gives us reason, and then we use that blessed faculty to build states that foster and protect freedom. The Bible certainly didn’t lay the groundwork for free and democratic societies. Reason did. Liberals did. And I do not trust Bible-thumpers to maintain their precious legacy.

  As Bush’s aide noted, history’s actors are not bound. They are not bound by history, obviously, nor are they bound by truth and facts. They are not bound by costs, either. Another bullshit aspect of this war is that the costs of war are being kept, like a CEO’s stock options, off the books. The 2005 budget did not include costs for operations in Iraq. The $2.5 trillion budget slashed social services, including education, in an attempt to reduce the ever-swelling deficit, but experts are still projecting it will rise to over $400 billion this year, before military costs are factored in. Spending for the U.S.’s Iraqi adventure is over $150 billion, and Bush has recently requested another $80 billion toward the cost of rebuilding Iraq. Who is going to pay for all this? Not Bush, and not Cheney, but the generations to come, that’s who.

  One of the reasons why war needs bullshit is to cover up the gruesome, unnatural truth: Wars gorge themselves on the young. Most of the soldiers fighting this war are young and poor. Jessica Lynch couldn’t even celebrate her homecoming with a beer, being two years shy of the legal drinking age. The deficits that Bush is racking up, for war costs and tax cuts and corporate welfare, are also burdens that the youth will have to bear. When MoveOn ran a contest called Bush in 30 Seconds to solicit ads opposing the president’s reelection, the winning entry, Child’s Pay, made this case graphically, showing kids toiling in factories and washing dishes to pay down billions in Bush debt.

  I’m not surprised the ad with the little spuds won. “Think of the children” is the ultimate equal-opportunity piety, invoked in the name of lefty causes like gun control and the environment, and of right-wing ones like censorship and the drug war. Bush has been selling his plan to privatize Social Security as an intervention on behalf of children’s retirement funds. On the morning of September 11, when he first heard news of the attacks, Bush was, as everyone knows, in an elementary-school classroom reading to little kids. Education has long been one of his pet causes—leave no child behind!—but his policies hurt kids now, and will have deleterious effects on them in the future.

  Bush engages in think-of-the-childrenism because every politician does. Children are the last innocents in our hopelessly profaned world. Though I have met little tiny assholes, I do not recommend expressing such sentiments aloud. It is a commonplace that crimes against kids are the worst crimes of all. Chester the Molester is the guy most likely to be beaten to a pulp by crackheads and murderers in jail. And when he gets out of jail, he is the criminal most likely to inspire furious poster campaigns by the residents of his new neighborhood. Throughout the past few years, even as the war machine trundled on, the news ran beaucoup de endangered child stories, about kiddies snatched from bedrooms by strangers or fondled by Catholic priests. When prudes freaked out about Janet Jackson’s boob, they did so in the name of the children.

  You can see our tender care for the youth in the way that we market heart attacks on buns directly at the little darlings, so that every time they pass a golden arch, the begging begins. You can feel the love for the young in each new product line, each new buddy like Barney and Elmo and SpongeBob, available in TV, book, movie, CD, T-shirt, plush, plastic, and cereal form. You can see plain evidence of our concern in the millions of children who live in grievous poverty. You can also see the love in the gentle attentions of the juvenile justice system and the lavish hands of our speed-dispensing kiddie shrinks. You can really see the love in the way that we work increasingly long hours and spend less and less time with our beloved kids, leaving them plunked in front of a blinky box munching neon crud for hours at a time. And then there’s the way we glut ourselves on nonrenewable resources like oil and clean water and arable land and blithely keep churning out smog and sludge and trash for an unspecified somebody to clean up . . . later. Think of the children? Don’t make me laugh myself new holes. We’re lucky if we can think of next Monday.

  One of the reasons why think-of-the-childrenism enervates me is that I spend long hours with people’s children. Don’t worry, by the time I get my hands on them, they are in college, almost adults, and already ruined. Many are working way too many hours outside the classroom just to pay for class, or putting themselves into major hock before they’ve had their first legal bender. Plenty have no desire whatsoever to be there, and are merely in school because that is what you gotta do to get a good job. Several emerge from high school without a clue about stringing together a paragraph or reading and interpreting a complex document, and many of them view reading as a chore, rather than a necessary survival skill, or one of the world’s great pleasures. I’m not saying your kids are dumb or lazy. Most of the kids I have taught, from the D students to the A pluses, have been perfectly delightful. They have just been marinating in ease, soaking in fun and cool, and so what’s boring and hard is all the boringer and harder.

  I am not the only concerned university educator out there, fretting about the decline of literacy and standards. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni is a group of virtuecrats that advocate for academic freedom, more history in the schools, and university accountability. The group, co-founded by Second Lady Lynne Cheney, issued a report in 2001 called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.” It is a real humdinger. The report collects more than a hundred comments from seditious university professors in the wake of 9–11, which are mostly innocuous, wishy-washy root-cause stuff, like the suggestion that we ought to use our strength for peace, not war. The report thoroughly excoriates the academics for holding such views; rather than serve the cause of liberty, Ivory Tower nerds choose to BLAME AMERICA FIRST. Their caps, not mine.

  Let us leave aside the absurdity of an organization ostensibly devoted to academic freedom censuring the insufficient jingoism of the Ivory Tower set. Let’s consider the corrective. What, they ask, is to be done about Professor Granola, and Doctor Peacenik? Well, the angelic doctors who make up the ACTA think that kids should be learning about Lady Liberty’s glorious past, boning up on their Western Civ instead of absorbing all that trendy hogwash about postcolonialism and postmodernity. Consequently, the report enthusiastically endorses great-books programs. It just so happens that I am also an enthusiastic endorser of great-books programs, being both a product and a teacher of one, but reading all those canonical books by Dead White Males sure didn’t make me a patriot or a Republican. I may be a positively arteriosclerotic conservative when it comes to syllabi, but it is, in part, my time as a Western Civ nerd that makes me revile the shoddy fraudulence of everything else that the cons stand for and continue to perpetrate.

  You don’t really want the kids to take up and read, Lynne, believe me. That would totally fuck with the
obfuscation and ignorance upon which your husband’s fortune and the rest of his regime depend. Just think of all the subversive material in a great-books program. Young kids might pick up Plato’s Republic and read about how democracy, though the most attractive and colorful form of political life, is fundamentally unstable and gives way to tyranny. The kids might notice how hard a task it was to found the Roman Empire, secundum Vergil. They might notice that usurers, rather than waiting for nations to come bow and scrape for their credit ratings, wander the burning sands in Dante’s Inferno, and that barrators, those who profit from political office, are sunk in a bolgia of boiling pitch, eternally poked and tortured by demons. They might notice that the last round of major Allah vs. Jesus-my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God smackdowns raged on for at least five centuries. They might encounter inconveniently stringent statements like Kant’s “to be truthful in all declarations is, therefore, a sacred and unconditionally commanding law of reason that admits of no expediency whatsoever.” This is not even to mention the latter half of your average great-books year, which includes skeptics like Hume, liberals like Mill, commies like Marx, scientists like Darwin, and atheists like Nietzsche. Even a cursory reading of such texts by middling students may well leave the beloved children scratching their heads after the latest State of the Union address.

  ACTA is only one of the groups taking academia to task. Right-wing activist David Horowitz has recently been campaigning for an Academic Bill of Rights, to protect the youth from the fulminations of Professor Peacenik. Horowitz does a swell job of spinning this crusade into a fight for academic freedom and intellectual diversity, but it is actually a right-wing assault on one of the last bastions of genuine liberalism in American culture. Having successfully captured all three branches of government, the judiciary, and a goodly chunk of the media and public discourse, the right now wishes to seize academia, too, to protect their children from the trauma of having a hippie professor. Professor Stanley Fish, who has written several essays arguing that the university should be an apolitical environment, devoted solely to the search for knowledge, has described Horowitz’s Bill of Academic Rights as a Trojan horse. Under the guise of diversity, the bill calls for more right-wing professors, and tells liberal professors to stuff a sock in it.

  The right’s latest poster boy for the radical corruption of academe is a real doozy, a Colorado professor of ethnic studies named Ward Churchill, who does not have a PhD, and who might be a fake American Indian. Churchill wrote an essay after 9–11 that referred to the victims of the WTC attack as “little Eichmanns.” Bad taste? Certainly. But the pro-life movement has been taking the Holocaust’s name in vain for years; tenured radicals do not have the monopoly on bogus Nazi comparisons. When O’Reilly and the gang got their hands on the offending essay in 2005, years after it was published, Churchill became the symbol of everything wrong with tenure and the professoriate in general. The right let out a mighty hue and cry. We pay those traitors’ salaries! And they have our children!

  As someone who has spent her whole life in academia, let me say that the right wing’s claims are, as usual, exaggerated. Humanities faculties may skew left of the current American political dial, but the Ward Churchills are few and far between. And if you take a walk over to the business or law schools, you will find plenty of conservative hatchlings. Universities don’t have the time and resources to be Marxist indoctrination camps. Most professors are far, far too busy trying to teach skills like essay writing, which students did not learn in their underfunded high schools, to foment the rise of the revolutionary proletariat. But this vilification of universities by the right is already starting to affect their own children’s education. A colleague who had the pleasure of teaching in the American South told me his students said that their ministers and parents had warned them about university professors and their wicked ways. They were supposed to keep their heads down, get good grades, and not listen to the liberal claptrap. If you check out a right-wing message board like Free Republic, you will see the same advice. Until the university changes and expresses the right’s worldview, the kids of cons are encouraged to detach themselves from the educational experience. This advice is about as anti-intellectual as it gets.

  This right-wing incursion into university politics is disturbing because education is our only hope. I know I said I wasn’t going to offer any solutions. But if there is one thing that can stem the tide of bullshit or reduce its deleterious effects, it is a critical and well-educated populace that knows its own language well enough to know when that language is being abused and misused. Education also helps facilitate income mobility, combating the erosion of the middle class. Even Bush says so. When, in the debates, the president was asked about income inequality, he immediately began talking about education programs like No Child Left Behind as a corrective. This was a classic Bush swerve away from a question he cannot answer, but there was a grain of truth in it. Education does help people move on up, provided they can afford the cover charge at the door, which is getting steeper and more onerous. Bush’s rhetoric on education is nice, but his policies have been underfunded and wrongheaded, pushing teachers to teach to standardized tests. This kind of test-based curriculum is precisely why I have to teach eighteen-year-olds how to write complete sentences.When people cannot own and operate their own language, they are that much more susceptible to bullshit.

  The bullshit pandemic is not a mystery. We are under the rule of pusillanimous, self-serving prevaricators, and thus, pusillanimous, self-serving prevarication is the rule. There’s more shame and misery in being broke than in being fake. Why not bullshit? If it’s good enough for the captains of industry, the titans of politics, the Catholic church, the medical establishment, and the media, then it’s good enough for you.

  Let’s look at the tally.

  It’s bullshit that private interests have eclipsed public goods.

  It’s bullshit that companies devote more time and money to telling us how great they are, or how desperately we need them, than to simply providing quality products and services.

  It’s bullshit that the fruits of the boom went largely to the richest of the rich, and that the poor were once again left sucking the mop.

  It’s bullshit that the law treats corporations as people, and allows artificial people to get away with things that real people would never even dream of doing. Increased wealth concentration and growing corporate power are the result of deregulation and generous tax policies, which can be attributed to the best government the big-money lobbies can buy. And the fact that government is bought and paid for by the fortunate few means that the rest of us do not trust politicians or engage in the political process.

  It’s bullshit that pharmaceutical companies and the insurance industry have succeeded in privatizing public issues, like access to health care, and turning them into very valuable cash cows. Major retailers and other service industry titans go on and on like it’s all about you, the almighty customer, but they are far more interested in their bottom line than the time you spend holding the line, listening to the titular blah-dee-blah.

  It’s bullshit that discount shopping and phone service are how we will spend our time and money, and that serving and waiting are our glorious employment future.

  It’s bullshit that so much of the news is so resolutely newsless, particularly in a time when we are suffering no shortage of newsworthy—dare I even haul out a dusty Hegelianism like world-historical?—events.

  Even as I shake my tiny fist, I dig my comfy couch, my big TV, my salty snacks, and all the other accoutrements of my plush and cushy First World life. It’s just that my eyebrows are plum tuckered out from all the arching, and my peepers are strained from persistent rolling. I am weary of responding to the news in the negative double affirmative: “Yeah, right.” No ad campaign, no wonder pill, no blockbuster movie, no celebrity, no candidate, no entertainment complex, no glorious blandishment can compensate for a lack of trust and the sense that all is a scam or a sha
m, for the feeling that one is being fooled and fobbed off. Neat stuff and air-conditioned comfort are pleasing, but must they come at the cost of this fog of fibs? Does our prosperity really depend on an edifice of phoniness, erected by the fortunate few in their best interests? I don’t think so. Nevertheless, ads fudge and fake, companies overstate and omit, governments euphemize and evade, the media distort and dumb down, and we are exhorted to smile and shrug and return to our regularly scheduled shiny things.

  One of the dangers of writing a book such as this, besides its unendability, is that one is invariably warbling to the choir, or at least for fellow musicians. If you picked up this book, you were probably a little pissed off already. You, Gentle Reader, are probably not one of the powerful malefactors of great bullshit, so all of this huffing and puffing is kind of like chastising kids for poor attendance at school. The kids who are congenitally un-there aren’t around to hear you chew them out.