L’etats c’est l’etats; truth is in the tautology Maintaining order is the only rule of operation for any State, whether France, the United States, Iran, Russia, China, Sweden, Nazis Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, Stalin’s Soviet Union. It does not matter if it is a Third world dictatorship or a totalitarian super state, neither is the only one concerned for order; the United States no less than Iraq or North Korea. The desired result of every state is smooth operations for its bureaucratically run functions. Every modus operandi of every l’Etats is always a more perfect union. And what would be more perfect for the State than for all to serve the state and only the state, as any or all bureaucrats understand, standing firmly as administrative pillars under the maxim that state must for certain and always come before the people.
Bureaucrats everywhere are of one mind; their function is of, by and for the bureaucracy alone, in itself the sole protector and defender of the state, the limits of life, of limb, of the fundamental dimensions of social reality for most everybody, especially servants of the state; and in as much as we systematically under educate at every turn in our standard public education, we are not likely to enlist bureaucrats with anything more than the standard under education, the barely functional literacy that this State of states maintains as its internal policy of control. We have a system of administering government aligned with a program of service that does not serve the people, cannot serve the people, no longer understands serving the people as an integral ingredient in our democracy. We have a bureaucracy only a little more than “fucntionally literate;” therefore, we will not likely endorse the kind of literacy in our system of education that we once sponsored as standard.
The political and the literary, moreover, have for always been mutual antagonists, metaphysically; and herein I establish as self-evident that there are metaphysical energies that can parallel those of the physical world, that the metaphysical is not just an articulation of the real, but is the real. The metaphysics of politics will for always remain an antagonist to the metaphysical protagonist literature in any theater of being. For any of us who do aspire to high literary expression, or the few of us who do respect the literary enough to love her too much, it should be no surprise that writers and governments have always had a tenuous relationship at best, certainly precarious and mortal in the worst of times. Hollywood’s black-listing was parallel with Stalinist post-war purges. There cannot be a one-to-one correspondence between the two societies, but one must draw analogies properly, and in ratio. There was no space in America for Stalinist purges, but there was space for McCarthyism. No they are not equal and the same, but they emanate from similar social and political energies, excepting degree and density; their mass was not the same, but analogies were applicable as they remain intellectually viable.
Writers inevitably become enemies of the state where they are not tolerated as antagonists in a political theater that serves the performance of the state as it does here in America and abroad in Western or western style democracies today; but this is what must be ascertained, just how much states and governments create space or subversion in order to control subversion. Writers have often found themselves hanging by a precipice whenever they have been too closely scrutinized by political leaders, or those agents of government who maintain loyalty to their state in counterbalance to any fidelity to art, or to the people. Bureaucrats are usually those whose only link with intelligence is a base and state serving pragmatism.
The soul of the people and the anti-soul of the governmental administrators are mutually exclusive entities metaphysically and antagonistic players in any drama performed in society. They share little to nothing in common, cannot endure for long the existence of the other. They are as close to matter and anti-matter in physics as any two things could be. Fascist and communist politically.
Politicians as we know them today, inside any sense of democracy anyone might hold in whatever variety that has been possible throughout history, are not interested in the advancement of literacy, no. Advanced literacy is not even favorable for any serious political campaign, and that’s serious about getting elected. Even a campaign as seemingly mostly about ideas as was Barack Obama’s, an elevated literacy was not the prime question–the populus was never to read his speeches, but listen to the ringing oratory in his phrases, the rhythm of his cadences–a great public speaker speaking to the public for whom the state stands and will only ever withstand. And this was all in spite of however repetitive it became.
A population that can read is not a population that is easily controlled; it is not a population that can be easily transformed into a state guided and supported public–states are not interested in people, really; never have been. Most states are the mortal enemy of all that is good in the individual human soul; people as an amalgamation of individuals is never in the state’s interest. I believe in a human soul as readily as most educated Americans believe in mind. Reading at an advanced stage of literacy is not a requirement for political participation in America, but then bread and circuses is not new to the American state and governments have supported an innumerable number of variations on representative government without the masses either literate or participating. The people are taught to read through many of the organs of the state, thereby insuring a level of advanced under eduction at an inflated value–public education as we have it in New York City is an example of this kind of inflation, but then an inflation that is contingent with the overproduction we have in education where all are special, any can be talented, and semi-literacy meets the demands of a society that produces little of what it consumes, underpays and enforces wage slavery around the world to feed its greed, its tape-worm driven gluttony. Yes, office cubicles resemble more the cells in a beehive than they do anything else; perfunctory level jobs for life for perfunctory performing drones.
Even in, or especially from, our free media (and that is an allegedly free media, those protectors of social and political dogmas of state as much as any agency of government sworn to protect the state and all that is by the state, for the state and of the state)–yes, even this allegedly free media represent firstly and foremostly the moneyed interests of state and society as often as they presumably protect the freedoms of the people. But media has advertisers, and when millions of dollars are spent on advertising to sell goods and services in an economy upwards of tens of billions of dollars, no branch of media will ever be completely separate from the state and its ideology, its programs, no more than Krups was separate from the Wermacht, the great industrialist of the Nazis regime that made hundreds of millions of dollars on the misery of tens of millions of people, reaching a zenith of economic hegemony through slave labor. Enjoy your coffee . . .
But then, America has had its experience with slavery as has the Soviet Union, China and Japan and any other country you wish to choose in random observation; and I have not begun to discuss wage labor, minimum wage, and the unavailability of affordable health care, even for children–Health Care Plus is mostly a joke when you examine closely the pay schedules and at what income level a single mother would have to start paying in full for her child. The hostility to families and children and the elderly in this society from government and bureaucracy is alarming; I don’t expect the capitalist class to favor workers and their benefits, but when the agents of government sworn to serve the people serve mostly the capitalist class, then the idea that capitalists have about maximizing profits by minimizing costs will become entrenched in government too. The latter’s policies will always be about cutting costs, maximizing fares and tariffs and taxes on the people in a hard sell about asking not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.
Roosevelt did do more with less than Cuomo or Bloomberg will ever be willing to do. There is little notion, let alone any idea that the state must serve the people; Obama’s age of service, as delivered in his Inaugural Address, seems more in line with Kennedy’s ask not what your country can do for you, which was the beginning of state abdication of serving the people. In fact, especially in America, the state can do without the people and would prefer a more massive and self-denying public, as the public is always the people in service of the state, for the state and by the state, with the state always.
We see it already with government seeking to increase taxes and costs at the same time they seek to reduce services. One year after airlines played a charade with the burgeoning recession by dropping airfares, most have almost doubled them back. Perhaps you think I protest too much when I say that government has not been as generous as our current governor has recently stated when he set his sights on decreasing pension benefits for state workers; but then it is Gertrude who says that she thinks the lady protests too much, herself watching the play within the play, The Murder of Gonzalgo.
The Falling Leaf Review 