Sermon to the Dark Sages.

[Ian Livingston]

What's this corporate propaganda?


On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 9:00 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> You would think it hardly necessary to remind academics that the
> transfer of power from land to financial capital, from the land in the
> country to the complex networks of the city, from the large farm to
> the large factory has involved a concomitant transfer of power away
> from those who hold titles and maintain them through personal
> allegiance, service and protection to a monarch or dictator to those
> who control labor and the exchange of goods, and that the organization
> of the workers,  and so forth, is surely progress over the rebellion
> of Spartacus.
> For the obvious fact that the center of gravity has shifted, the
> political power no longer held by kings, and lords, and dictators has
> been accomplished with a great emancipation of the individual from the
> rigid bonds of class and caste and of the dregs of religious custom
> that the Ancient Dregs sometimes questioned but in the end, almost
> always affirmed.
>
> We have produced, along with our weapons of mass destruction and our
> damaged Earth, political organization that no longer depends on the
> “superior” authority of the sages and kings and the un-elected
> tyrants, chosen of the gods. We have constructed a political
> organization that does not reduce the free will to a sin of our
> parents, but promotes the exercise of voluntary choice.
>
> As I listen to Dr. King speak of the gradualism that has produced the
> tragic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, an apartheid system of
> education here, still (2013), in the great City of New York, an
> incarceration rate for many that is proof that King’s dream remains
> only a dream unfulfilled, an unemployment rate, a stagnation of
> incomes even as profits set new records,  and a roughly 3% of the
> population that amasses, through our corrupted system, dominated by
> oligarchy,  more and more of the wealth…and so on down the road to
> Canary Row and to a Detroit belly-up, I am not ready to turn
> Malthusian and bang the death drum , call out Chicken Little,
> surrender to the pessimism of a sky falling into a toxic sea because,
> again, it seems hardly necessary to point out how the spread of
> political individualism, the spread of ideas founded on the idea that
> individuals may exercise free will and therefore are encouraged to
> question the laws, even the laws of science. There is progress, and
> are I say, justified hope, in the simple fact that we now think
> differently about the world, that the states are not ordained by gods,
> are not the work of a divine, often wrathful god, but the work of
> women and men who labor to satisfy their own desires, to exercise
> their free will. These are not, despite the sophomoric rants of Howard
> Zinn’s disciples, the new dark ages, or even dark decades.  Only
> ignorance, ignorance of history, and propaganda, and yes Zinnis
> propaganda, would cause one to reach such a conclusion. We do not live
> in the best of all possible worlds. Nor would we want to. But please,
> the world is less violent, more peaceful, a better place than the one
> I was born into. It was darkness when the Kennedys were murdered, when
> King was shot down. When Nixon and Vietnam….these are not dark days.
> The economy, stupid, needs fixing. We know how to fix it. That’s
> progress. We need only exercise our free will and our conscience.
>
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