When I was a graduate student in New Orleans in the early 60s, everyone knew the Crescent City was a catastrophe waiting to happen. A city surrounded by water, six feet below sea level, protected only by a complex system of dams, levees, canals, and pumps was a virtual time bomb. When Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore a few miles east of New Orleans with all its fury causing the levee separating Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans to fail, only President George W. Bush seemed to have been surprised.
Who could ever forget the grim television images portraying New Orleans as an impoverished Third World country. For nearly a week, tens of thousands of mostly poor New Orleanians were without food, water, shelter, medical care, and sanitary conveniences in the Louisiana heat while Washington dithered.
Those who either chose not to flee the City before Katrina struck, or could not do so, behaved as though they were experimental mice on an electric floor after experiencing learned helplessness from repeated shocks, waiting to be rescued by the City or the State, not knowing that the mayor and the governor had completely abdicated their responsibility for emergency assistance to the federal government. It was as though they were frozen in time in either the Superdome, the Convention Center, or on a stretch of Interstate 10. Unfortunately, the federal government was nowhere to be found until the fifth day after the storm. By the time the cavalry finally arrived, many were seriously ill, while others had died of neglect. It was too little, too late. The emperor had no clothes.
While claiming to be world-class individualists, millions of Americans behave as though they were robots—remote controlled, automatic devices which perform repetitive tasks in a seemingly human way. We pretend to be “the captain of our ship and the master of our soul,” even though we all march to the beat of the same drummer. Not only do we appear to be content with our plight, but we consistently try to convince others that they should be just like us.
The cloning of Dolly, the Scottish sheep, through genetic engineering precipitated a national debate over the moral implications of human cloning. But what’s the big deal about human cloning? Millions have effectively been cloned by our government, our politicians, our large corporations, our universities, and our public schools without altering a single DNA molecule. Furthermore, no one seems to care.
Even though we all have different genetic maps, most of us think the same, vote the same, watch the same TV programs, visit the same Web sites, and buy the same consumer goods. While subscribing to an ideology that raises individualism to godlike status, most Americans are conformists.
We live in a one-size-fits-all world in which the U.S. government, Corporate America, Urban America, the media, Internet service providers, public schools, colleges and universities, health care providers, social service providers, and religious institutions want all of us to be the same, just like they are.
Clearly the global system of mass production, mass marketing, mass distribution, mass consumption, mega financial institutions, and global telecommunications works best if we are indeed all the same.
It matters not which of the two major political parties elects the president of the United States. The results are always the same. We have a single political party, the Republican Party, disguised as a two-party system. The Democratic Party is effectively brain dead, having had no new ideas since the 1960s. Our government is owned, operated, and controlled by Corporate America.
Not unlike the former Communist Party in Moscow, large American companies are among the least-democratic institutions in the world, doing everything possible to silence dissent and quell behavior which differs from the corporate norm. There are no rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, or due process. One can be fired on the spot at the whim of one’s supervisor.
Most influential American newspapers and the five major television networks are owned by huge conglomerates. Nothing better illustrates the enormous influence of television than the overwhelming political support which American TV networks afforded Presidents Bush I and Bush II in their respective high-tech invasions of Iraq in 1991 and 2003. It was the Middle East equivalent of “cowboys and Indians.” Americans were mesmerized by the one-sided patriotic hype and the apparent precision of the bloodless missile strikes. Iraqi casualties were treated as a non-event by the media.
The dumbing-down of our overcentralized, overregulated, values-free public schools is nothing new. Above all, what one learns at school is what it means to be “cool.” What is cool determines how you dress, how you behave, how you speak, whether you have sex and whether you take drugs and abuse alcohol. Our schools are among our nation’s more effective cloning agents. Most colleges haven’t a clue as how to undo the damage wrought by four years of high school. It’s all about one-size-fits-all.
Nowhere is the pressure for conformity greater than in our colleges and universities. Too many students take too few courses, spend too much time grubbing for grades, drink too much, party too much, think too little and learn too little from faculties concerned more with political correctness rather than creativity, originality, morality or truth. If an undergraduate degree has any meaning anymore, it is to certify that the recipients are no different from thousands of like-minded graduates. Thus it was hardly surprising that a cover-page article in Harper’s (April 2002) by Thomas de Zengotita was entitled “The Numbing of the American Mind.” No one dares challenge the one-size-fits-all rule.
In no field is the one-size-fits-all mentality more pervasive than in the health care sector. While condemning the mass medicine features of socialized medicine in countries like England, our health care system has managed to replicate most of the more onerous characteristics of socialized medicine in a free-market setting without any of the benefits. Not only is our complex maze of hospitals, physicians, and insurance companies a complete dehumanized mess, but it is the most expensive health care system in the world.
Finally, our foreign policy assumes that everyone else in the rest of the world would like to be just like us. But just in case they are predisposed to be different, then they run the risk of invoking our wrath and finding themselves to be the object of a foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance and imperial overstretch.
Nothing better illustrates the absurdity of our one-size-fits-all foreign policy than our half century embargo and travel ban with Cuba. My father went to Cuba in 1941 when I was five years old to attend the international convention of the Lions Club. Since that time, I have always wanted to visit Cuba. Yet because a handful of right-wing, anticommunist Cuban exiles living in Miami possess so much political clout, I am forbidden to visit Cuba. Furthermore, Vermont farms and small businesses are not allowed to trade with Cuba.
Through national television, the results of every conceivable international tragedy are brought into our living rooms including hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, famines, plagues, floods, plane crashes, riots, mass murders, and acts of genocide. Each evening on the local television news we are treated to a menu of homicides, mayhem, rapes, accidents, fires and other acts of violence. The television coverage of the death of Princess Diana, the Columbine High massacre, the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey, the sordid life and death of Anna Nicole Smith, the death of Russian Alexander V. Litvinenko by polonium 210 poisoning in London, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the September 11 tragedy went on endlessly. What do we make of all of these tragedies over which we have no control and whose results we are virtually powerless to affect?
Through Fox News we can witness the comings and goings of every military dictator, every guerrilla movement and every terrorist group in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. But the more we watch, the more confusing it gets. The differences between the good guys and bad guys have become increasingly blurred—particularly in the former Yugoslavia and in the Middle East.
In his commencement address at Harvard University over two decades ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn lamented the fact that we have forfeited the “right of the people not to know.” Ignorance may not be bliss, but it may be better than being overwhelmed by far more information than we can ever comprehend, process, or act upon.
Is it any wonder that so many college students are disillusioned with politics? They too have experienced learned helplessness and sit silently and motionless on the sidelines. Others retreat to the world of hedonism, anti-establishment rock music, and substance abuse. Why should it be otherwise? One size truly does not fit all.
Rebél
Thomas H. Naylor
August 15, 2008