Barbara Tuchman's 1966 book, The Proud Tower, is a history primarily of Europe in the two decades before the First World War; Chapter 6 is entitled, "Neroism Is In The Air" -- a comment by the French pacifist and critic, Romain Rolland, about what he perceived as Europe's then-cultural preoccupation with violence and unease, coupled with complacency, and which he saw as a recipe for destruction, strongman rule, and disaster.
In art and politics, culture and commonplace belief, Europe in the last years of peace before August, 1914, was speeding towards... something. No one knew what it was, but people felt it, like a wind that picks up ahead of a thunderstorm: You can see a peculiar light, the darkened and clotted sky, and smell the dust and the ozone. Even the deaf and the blind can tell something is coming.
Europe in these days is full of signs and portends, too. So is the Middle East. So is our own country. The so-called 'Arab Spring' (gone in the media, now, when the images of masses of people in the streets become tiring to Western eyes)' the mass riots across the UK over the past two weeks; the fact that one (and as of tomorrow, two) self-declared evangelical christians are declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination; the bizarre shadow-play of the fake debt ceiling crisis manufactured by Rightist Tea Partei bullies which led to S&P's downgrading of U.S. sovereign debt and a $1.5 Trillion dollar loss in the U.S. stock markets in the past five days.
I don't know what you're feeling, but you don't have to be a Dog to see the clouds in the sky, and smell the ozone; Neroism is in the air. But few people are paying any attention, even though everyone knows something is desperately wrong. That common wisdom screams to be heard that things are incredibly out of balance; that jobs are what people need, not forced Austerity; and we must have cooperation rather than the vicious, tribal idiocy that has poisoned our national discourse for almost twenty-five years.
More polarization and division will lead to... Civil War? A Rightist-christianist coup d'etat? No one knows. But we can sense it will not be pretty, and it will in all likelihood end very badly.
From just his position as an economic reporter for CNBC / MSNBC, Dylan Ratigan has often said that America's current economic path is unsustainable and (as Barry Ritholtz on The Big Picture noted), "In a conversation with a [teevee] panel about the country’s debt and credit downgrade... Ratigan passionately calls both the Democratic and Republican economic plans, reckless, irresponsible and stupid" (Though Ritholtz has it embedded in his site, a link to video of Ratigan's comments on is here on the MSNBC site).
Ratigan also has a post at The Big Picture, where he expands in more detail about his on-air comments. I don't like posting people's material in full, and have seldom done it -- but, no one reads this blog, anyway; here are the high points (some paragraphing added for emphasis):
I’m Mad As Hell. How About You?
By Dylan Ratigan - August 11, 2011 8:00PM
Yesterday, on TV, I exploded. I spent two minutes giving a primal yell at our political system, demanding the extraction of our money and dignity end. It was my most heartfelt and emotional moment on television, ever.
And the emails poured in. I hit a chord, because it’s something we all feel...
With the markets in turmoil and the global financial architecture groaning under the weight of fraud and corruption, it’s a good time to think about what leadership would look like. Believe it or not, we have had good leadership, purpose, integrity, and aligned interests in this country.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy faced a dilemma — how could he direct our intense competitive passion with the Soviet Union in a direction other than war? The answer was his call for America to beat the Soviets to the moon. Kennedy understood power; if he did not lead us towards peaceful productive competition, that same animus would have turned violent (see this key memo on the real rationale for the space race). So he took the passion and focus of our society, the technology of war and missiles, and turned it into a great mission to explore space. He gave us a shared goal.
But that’s not the full story. Kennedy also demanded we use the finest scientists and engineers to design the rockets, and made sure that the path to the moon was based on the best possible solution to get there. For large rocket boosters, he was open to chemical, nuclear, liquid fuels, or any combination.
He did not put a commission of astrologers in charge, and he did not put political cronies with no scientific background in charge of designing the rockets.
We had a shared goal, and we had a problem-solving process with integrity and aligned interests. Kennedy was the leader of this initiative, but Americans at that time, possibly because of a shared experience in World War II, had a shared purpose. They believed in prosperity as a goal, and they had a shared set of problem solving values to get there...
Today, we face the same demons as decades past. We have passion, and focus, and we want to compete. What we lack is a set of shared prosperity goals, and a shared problem solving values to get there... We still trust the same corrupted economic establishment, an establishment with no ethos of the importance of problem solving. Astrologers (like S&P) are in charge of job creation.
So now we are locked in a war of ideas and mechanics in a battle for power. But power to what end? The political solutions proposed by DC today are the opposite of Kennedy’s moonshot... there’s no mutual consent to a set of shared goals, integrity on how to achieve them, or aligned interests.
Even where there are policy discussions... [it's] the opinions of discredited ratings agencies that seem to matter. So our choices are organized around austerity measures that we know will not cut debt loads. Again, it’s using astrology to get to the moon.
...We need, as citizens, a shared purpose. And we need a commitment to integrity of process, and aligned interests so the incentives exist for all of us to contribute. You can talk to billionaires — and I have — who are scared for their children, for their country, and for the world. And if billionaires can’t create the changes we need in the machine, if Congress can’t, if the President can’t, then we must look to ourselves.
When Kennedy called for the country to go to the moon, he said that “no single space project will be more impressive to mankind… and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish”... This is shared purpose — Americans paid taxes, worked on rockets, trained as astronauts, cleaned NASA buildings, or did whatever they could do — to get each one of us to the moon using shared values to solve problems that got us closer to our objective...
This is the spirit we need today. We need to fight against the great ideological machine that lacks purpose, lacks integrity, and lacks aligned interests. The first step is to recognize our own place in it.
If we believe that our problems are all due to the Tea Party, or Obama, or corporate power brokers, or liberals, then we’re lacking the integrity necessary to reach any goal. The reality is, by boxing ourselves into a tribal two-party state, we are all part of the machine. And so, in order to change it, we must simply change our own minds. We must reorient our own ways of thinking, to a leadership driven model of citizenship.
It isn’t enough, or even necessarily important, to care about which politician is in charge. We must seek within our own lives and our own politics, food, culture, families, and schools, values. We must share a set of prosperity goals — full employment, clean energy, patient driven health care, high-quality universal education — and push our leaders and ourselves to achieve them.
...
And so we must figure out how to stop giving our consent and legitimacy to an unthinking mechanical beast that runs our lives, a beast which enslaves us to accounting mechanisms like debt ceilings instead of the shared prosperity we seek as a culture and society. We must figure out how to restore the integrity necessary to actually solve our problems and we must understand how to align all of our interests so we each have the incentives to solve them. That way, we can ensure our bridges don’t fall down and our job creation initiatives actually create jobs.
I have no doubt that by rededicating ourselves, another moonshot is inevitable. That’s just what happens when problem-solving people dedicate themselves to prosperity as a goal, make sure that integrity is the keystone of how they achieve it, and align their interests so it is doable.
Yeah; what Dylan said.
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