America. Fuck... yeah?

[guitargeek]

America: The Grim Truth
Posted in Truthby lancefreeman76 on April 5, 2010

Americans, I have some bad news for you:

You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin.

If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker.

I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home.

I have lived all around the world, in wealthy countries and poor ones, and there is only one country I would never consider living in again: The United States of America. The mere thought of it fills me with dread.

Consider this: you are the only people in the developed world without a single-payer health system. Everyone in Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand has a single-payer system. If they get sick, they can devote all their energies to getting well. If you get sick, you have to battle two things at once: your illness and the fear of financial ruin. Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills, and tens of thousands die each year because they have no insurance or insufficient insurance. And don’t believe for a second that rot about America having the world’s best medical care or the shortest waiting lists: I’ve been to hospitals in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Singapore, and Thailand, and every one was better than the “good” hospital I used to go to back home. The waits were shorter, the facilities more comfortable, and the doctors just as good.

This is ironic, because you need a good health system more than anyone else in the world. Why? Because your lifestyle is almost designed to make you sick.

Let’s start with your diet: Much of the beef you eat has been exposed to fecal matter in processing. Your chicken is contaminated with salmonella. Your stock animals and poultry are pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics. In most other countries, the government would act to protect consumers from this sort of thing; in the United States, the government is bought off by industry to prevent any effective regulations or inspections. In a few years, the majority of all the produce for sale in the United States will be from genetically modified crops, thanks to the cozy relationship between Monsanto Corporation and the United States government. Worse still, due to the vast quantities of high-fructose corn syrup Americans consume, fully one-third of children born in the United States today will be diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at some point in their lives.

Of course, it’s not just the food that’s killing you, it’s the drugs. If you show any sign of life when you’re young, they’ll put you on Ritalin. Then, when you get old enough to take a good look around, you’ll get depressed, so they’ll give you Prozac. If you’re a man, this will render you chemically impotent, so you’ll need Viagra to get it up. Meanwhile, your steady diet of trans-fat-laden food is guaranteed to give you high cholesterol, so you’ll get a prescription for Lipitor. Finally, at the end of the day, you’ll lay awake at night worrying about losing your health plan, so you’ll need Lunesta to go to sleep.

With a diet guaranteed to make you sick and a health system designed to make sure you stay that way, what you really need is a long vacation somewhere. Unfortunately, you probably can’t take one. I’ll let you in on little secret: if you go to the beaches of Thailand, the mountains of Nepal, or the coral reefs of Australia, you’ll probably be the only American in sight. And you’ll be surrounded crowds of happy Germans, French, Italians, Israelis, Scandinavians and wealthy Asians. Why? Because they’re paid well enough to afford to visit these places AND they can take vacations long enough to do so. Even if you could scrape together enough money to go to one of these incredible places, by the time you recovered from your jetlag, it would time to get on a plane and rush back to your job.

If you think I’m making this up, check the stats on average annual vacation days by country:

Finland: 44
Italy: 42
France: 39
Germany: 35
UK: 25
Japan: 18
USA: 12

The fact is, they work you like dogs in the United States. This should come as no surprise: the United States never got away from the plantation/sweat shop labor model and any real labor movement was brutally suppressed. Unless you happen to be a member of the ownership class, your options are pretty much limited to barely surviving on service-sector wages or playing musical chairs for a spot in a cubicle (a spot that will be outsourced to India next week anyway). The very best you can hope for is to get a professional degree and then milk the system for a slice of the middle-class pie. And even those who claw their way into the middle class are but one illness or job loss away from poverty. Your jobs aren’t secure. Your company has no loyalty to you. They’ll play you off against your coworkers for as long as it suits them, then they’ll get rid of you.

Of course, you don’t have any choice in the matter: the system is designed this way. In most countries in the developed world, higher education is either free or heavily subsidized; in the United States, a university degree can set you back over US$100,000. Thus, you enter the working world with a crushing debt. Forget about taking a year off to travel the world and find yourself – you’ve got to start working or watch your credit rating plummet.

If you’re “lucky,” you might even land a job good enough to qualify you for a home loan. And then you’ll spend half your working life just paying the interest on the loan – welcome to the world of American debt slavery. America has the illusion of great wealth because there’s a lot of “stuff” around, but who really owns it? In real terms, the average American is poorer than the poorest ghetto dweller in Manila, because at least they have no debts. If they want to pack up and leave, they can; if you want to leave, you can’t, because you’ve got debts to pay.

All this begs the question: Why would anyone put up with this? Ask any American and you’ll get the same answer: because America is the freest country on earth. If you believe this, I’ve got some more bad news for you: America is actually among the least free countries on earth. Your piss is tested, your emails and phone calls are monitored, your medical records are gathered, and you are never more than one stray comment away from writhing on the ground with two Taser prongs in your ass.

And that’s just physical freedom. Mentally, you are truly imprisoned. You don’t even know the degree to which you are tormented by fears of medical bankruptcy, job loss, homelessness and violent crime because you’ve never lived in a country where there is no need to worry about such things.

But it goes much deeper than mere surveillance and anxiety. The fact is, you are not free because your country has been taken over and occupied by another government. Fully 70% of your tax dollars go to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is the real government of the United States. You are required under pain of death to pay taxes to this occupying government. If you’re from the less fortunate classes, you are also required to serve and die in their endless wars, or send your sons and daughters to do so. You have no choice in the matter: there is a socio-economic draft system in the United States that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for the military.

If you call a life of surveillance, anxiety and ceaseless toil in the service of a government you didn’t elect “freedom,” then you and I have a very different idea of what that word means.

If there was some chance that the country could be changed, there might be reason for hope. But can you honestly look around and conclude that anything is going to change? Where would the change come from? The people? Take a good look at your compatriots: the working class in the United States has been brutally propagandized by jackals like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Members of the working class have been taught to lick the boots of their masters and then bend over for another kick in the ass. They’ve got these people so well trained that they’ll take up arms against the other half of the working class as soon as their masters give the word.

If the people cannot make a change, how about the media? Not a chance. From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you’ve got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don’t think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?

If change can’t come from the people or the media, the only other potential source of change would be the politicians. Unfortunately, the American political process is among the most corrupt in the world. In every country on earth, one expects politicians to take bribes from the rich. But this generally happens in secret, behind the closed doors of their elite clubs. In the United States, this sort of political corruption is done in broad daylight, as part of legal, accepted, standard operating procedure. In the United States, they merely call these bribes campaign donations, political action committees and lobbyists. One can no more expect the politicians to change this system than one can expect a man to take an axe and chop his own legs out from underneath him.

No, the United States of America is not going to change for the better. The only change will be for the worse. And when I say worse, I mean much worse. As we speak, the economic system that sustained the country during the post-war years is collapsing. The United States maxed out its “credit card” sometime in 2008 and now its lenders, starting with China, are in the process of laying the foundations for a new monetary system to replace the Anglo-American “petro-dollar” system. As soon as there is a viable alternative to the US dollar, the greenback will sink like a stone.

While the United States was running up crushing levels of debt, it was also busy shipping its manufacturing jobs and white-collar jobs overseas, and letting its infrastructure fall to pieces. Meanwhile, Asian and European countries were investing in education, infrastructure and raw materials. Even if the United States tried to rebuild a real economy (as opposed to a service/financial economy) do think American workers would ever be able to compete with the workers of China or Europe? Have you ever seen a Japanese or German factory? Have you ever met a Singaporean or Chinese worker?

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty. The best case is a slow but orderly decline – essentially a continuation of what’s been happening for the last two decades. Wages will drop, unemployment will rise, Medicare and Social Security benefits will be slashed, the currency will decline in value, and the disparity of wealth will spiral out of control until the United States starts to resemble Mexico or the Philippines – tiny islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty (the country is already halfway there).

Equally likely is a sudden collapse, perhaps brought about by a rapid flight from the US dollar by creditor nations like China, Japan, Korea and the OPEC nations. A related possibility would be a default by the United States government on its vast debt. One look at the financial balance sheet of the US government should convince you how likely this is: governmental spending is skyrocketing and tax receipts are plummeting – something has to give. If either of these scenarios plays out, the resulting depression will make the present recession look like a walk in the park.

Whether the collapse is gradual or gut-wrenchingly sudden, the results will be chaos, civil strife and fascism. Let’s face it: the United States is like the former Yugoslavia – a collection of mutually antagonistic cultures united in name only. You’ve got your own version of the Taliban: right-wing Christian fundamentalists who actively loathe the idea of secular Constitutional government. You’ve got a vast intellectual underclass that has spent the last few decades soaking up Fox News and talk radio propaganda, eager to blame the collapse on Democrats, gays and immigrants. You’ve got a ruthless ownership class that will use all the means at its disposal to protect its wealth from the starving masses.

On top of all that you’ve got vast factory farms, sprawling suburbs and a truck-based shipping system, all of it entirely dependent on oil that is about to become completely unaffordable. And you’ve got guns. Lots of guns. In short: the United States is about to become a very unwholesome place to be.

Right now, the government is building fences and walls along its northern and southern borders. Right now, the government is working on a national ID system (soon to be fitted with biometric features). Right now, the government is building a surveillance state so extensive that they will be able to follow your every move, online, in the street and across borders. If you think this is just to protect you from “terrorists,” then you’re sadly mistaken. Once the shit really hits the fan, do you really think you’ll just be able to jump into the old station wagon, drive across the Canadian border and spend the rest of your days fishing and drinking Molson? No, the government is going to lock the place down. They don’t want their tax base escaping. They don’t want their “recruits” escaping. They don’t want YOU escaping.

I am not writing this to scare you. I write this to you as a friend. If you are able to read and understand what I’ve written here, then you are a member of a small minority in the United States. You are a minority in a country that has no place for you.

So what should you do?

You should leave the United States of America.

If you’re young, you’ve got plenty of choices: you can teach English in the Middle East, Asia or Europe. Or you can go to university or graduate school abroad and start building skills that will qualify you for a work visa. If you’ve already got some real work skills, you can apply to emigrate to any number of countries as a skilled immigrant. If you are older and you’ve got some savings, you can retire to a place like Costa Rica or the Philippines. If you can’t qualify for a work, student or retirement visa, don’t let that stop you – travel on a tourist visa to a country that appeals to you and talk to the expats you meet there. Whatever you do, go speak to an immigration lawyer as soon as you can. Find out exactly how to get on a path that will lead to permanent residence and eventually citizenship in the country of your choice.

You will not be alone. There are millions of Americans just like me living outside the United States. Living lives much more fulfilling, peaceful, free and abundant than we ever could have attained back home. Some of us happened upon these lives by accident – we tried a year abroad and found that we liked it – others made a conscious decision to pack up and leave for good. You’ll find us in Canada, all over Europe, in many parts of Asia, in Australia and New Zealand, and in most other countries of the globe. Do we miss our friends and family? Yes. Do we occasionally miss aspects of our former country? Yes. Do we plan on ever living again in the United States? Never. And those of us with permanent residence or citizenship can sponsor family members from back home for long-term visas in our adopted countries.

In closing, I want to remind you of something: unless you are an American Indian or a descendant of slaves, at some point your ancestors chose to leave their homeland in search of a better life. They weren’t traitors and they weren’t bad people, they just wanted a better life for themselves and their families. Isn’t it time that you continue their journey?

[motorpsycho67]

I subscribe to this...

http://www.escapefromamerica.com/

[Sisyphus]

Any good news...?

[Sisyphus]

Any good news...?

[piccini9]

There are only two possible futures facing the United States, and neither one is pretty.

Or, everything will be OK.

[Toonce(s)]

Socilist!

[12ci]

why do you hate America ?

[SomeMook]

Somebody call the Waaahmbulance! I don't have enough vacation time and I may have to pay my doctor for services rendered! Fuckin hippies.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_one_way_to_mars

[Aggroton]

agreed. with gg.

[Jaeger]

This guy makes somevery valid points. It's certainly a thought provoker, that's for damn sure.

Considering the number of non-natives with whom I work -- from Russians to Indians/Pakistanis to Lebanese/Syrians to Europeans -- every one of them LOVE the US, and they live here because they want to be here. American citizenship is still very much a Good Thing, and these folks have worked really hard to get it.

Don't kid yourself, the rest of the world is pretty jacked-up and crazy. I've talked to all the above (non-native) folks, and many more, and what it boils down to is that while there are some serious fundamental problems here in the States, it's still a goddamn good place to be -- for some of us, anyway.

I've traveled around the world a little, and while there are certainly some very pretty places and some incredible cultures out there, the good ol' US of A is still the world's mixing bowl, and still offers much that's difficult to find elsewhere. (Stupid example -- ever try to find Chinese food in Italy?)

To put it bluntly, I live near one of those "islands of wealth surrounded by great poverty," so life is fairly good... though the surveillance and "security" here are pretty intense sometimes. It is what it is. I could move (and often think and talk about doing so), but ultimately NoVA ain't a bad place to be, and there's plenty of work here, particularly for hacks like me.

Not trying to brag, but I got it pretty good, so I try to enjoy it.

I've put up plenty of posts about my thoughts on the functioning of the gubmint so I won't belabor them here. Yes, we spend waaaay too much money on defense or "security."

I did, however, just forward this article to three of my non-native co-workers (Austrian-born, Soviet-born, and Indian-born), all of whom worked hard to get American citizenship. I'll share any pertinent comments if/when I receive them.

--Jaeger

[xtian]

sure, you should all move here.

I could use a few riding (3 months a year)/drinking (the rest of the time) buddies and you could fix my bikes.

[Sisyphus]

You seriously only get 3 mos/yr riding? Really?

And yes, we have our share of problems and always have and always will but the number of people it's affecting is on the rise. Think of all the things that used to be "poor people" problems which are now shared by more and more people. Malnutrition, sickness, poverty, inability to find a job or keep your house up, get an education. There's trouble coming.

[WeAintFoundShit]

Yeah, three months, huh?
No wonder Belgians are so damned evil (plus, they share a border with the dutch).

[Trav]

I subscribe to this...

http://www.escapefromamerica.com/

I get it.. but what makes this not propaganda as well

This is obviously photoshop...

[DerGolgo]

Just FYI: It's not all peaches and bunnies over here.
Big corporations have laws made to order, politicians squeal with happiness whenever someone suggests a new way of surveilance, privacy invasion or censorship.
But, while bad evil, it's not nearly on the same scale as in the USA, and I have some hope the fuckers will get their comeuppance.
Personally, from following the news from the USA, I don't think I'd want to live there.
Yeah, you got some stuff that's better than our stuff.
But, on the whole, I think the important stuff we got is better than the equivalent stuff you got.

There are a lot of succesfull, educated people, doctor's, lawyers or civil engineers etc. over here who will tell you how great the USA is, how they loved the year they spent there as a student, how it's so much better and so easy to be succesfull over there...and yet they live here. Weirdly enough.

My brother in law works for a company that is part owned by an American company and occasionally has to go to the California or Texas office for something or other. He always comes back baffled and exasparated. He explained to me that something like two days work get's done in a week as the Americans are obsessed with investing as much time, energy and skill as possible in meetings where they plan how to do the work and portion up the blame for delays rather than doing any work.
Also, your coffee sucks, you all can't drive and checking in for a flight is a nightmare.

Overall, society might well go to pot over here as it would over there, but we won't be having mega-church preachers turning into christian-fundamentalist warlords, raising armies from the well-armed psychos just waiting to kill anyone who disagrees with them.

[Sisyphus]

I make a good goddamn cup of coffee. Fly your ass over here and see for yourself.

Everything else, however... Yeah, that's pretty much it.

[guitargeek]

I make a good goddamn cup of coffee. Fly your ass over here and see for yourself.

Everything else, however... Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Ditto, my coffee kicks ass.

[xtian]

my coffee's not that bad either and it's ridable at least 7 or 8 months a year if you have heated grips and don't fear black ice. free beer. bikes to fix ... anyone ?

[Sisyphus]

free beer what? Am I the only one that saw that?

[Rench]

A) for WAFS, fuck the Dutch. On principle, nothing personal.

B) Really, the fairest point he had there was the last paragraph. Our forebears did it, there's nothing wrong with us continuing the journey, if it's needed.

Much of the rest I'd say is very subjective. I bet with some effort you could debunk the average days off. And of course all the tourists in Nepal are happy and healthy. If they can afford to get there, they're not the average citizen of any western nation I'd wager.

-Rench

[sandor]

.... Millions of Americans go bankrupt every year due to medical bills....

just as a quick point, in 2009 there were 1.4 million household and business bankruptcies (7th highest in US history). the american journal of medicine last published a report (with 2001 and 2007 data, published in 2009) that about 60% of household bankruptcies are prompted by medical bills.

that is 840,000 medical-indiced bankruptcies in a fairly historically-high bankruptcy year. not millions. about 840,000.


i never mind people quoting statistics, but if there is one thing i have learned while working in medicine, it is to have sources to back up your words.



http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_stud ... y-2009.pdf
http://www.uscourts.gov/Statistics/Bank ... stics.aspx



also, in working at a tertiary care clinic, i have seen parents go deep into debt, into bankruptcy, to save their child's life. i have also seen people travel to us from other 1st world nations in order to be treated in a medically necessary time frame. i've also seen john doe's walk into our ER and end up getting the same treatment as those who took second mortgages to pay...


regardless though that is all anecdotal, so i'll just stick to my first comment of "if you are going to quote statistics a) make sure they are correct and b) cite your sources."

[Pintgudge]

O.K. Here we go!

This is where I exhibit all of the stars in my eyes and rainbow effects. It could be flashbacks, who knows, BUT!

I have always thought and dreamed that a person should be able to go live in Mexico. or Patagonia, or Belgium, or Ireland, or Romania, or anywhere I fucking want to without any paperwork bullshit. Just like I hitchhiked from Tacoma to L.A. and lived there for three years 'till I got tired of it and hitchhiked back to Tacoma.

The European Union is having some rough economic times, and the United Nations has unfortunately always seemed like a bad joke, but that is where my thoughts go, a world government. I don't want to be a citizen of the United States, I want to be a citizen of the World.

And I want some more of that mescaline that I had in 1977!

[Zim]

free beer what? Am I the only one that saw that?

No... I'm looking for my passport right now.

[Beemer Dan]

Come to Oregon! The coffee is fantastic, you can walk around naked, weed is legal medicine and as for days off, hell, we've got 9.9% unemployment! Every day is a vacation without pay!

I agree with a lot of what this guy is talking about, but not entirely with what he is saying. Yes, the USA is pretty fucked up right now and we're (for the most part) creating more problems than we are fixing. The religious fundy nuts would rally around legislation to amputate everyone's left hand if their herders asked them to. The rich conservative fuckers would charge people for writing their own names if they had the opportunity. You can take away it seems pretty much any freedom from the stupid people as long as they can keep their guns- newsflash, if the government decided to go police state it doesn't matter if you have guns, you've already lost.

The "American Dream" used to be about working the same job and being rewarded for such, buying your own home in a nice neighborhood (not neccisarily a wealthy one), maybe a car or two, maybe a few hobbies or luxury items, sending your kids through school so they can have a better life than you and spending your golden years enjoying the fruits of your labor. Somewhere along the line it changed to getting absurdly rich or famous for any random bullshit talent, activity or "idea" and becoming a world famous billionaire who will share it with all of their friends. When did being comfortable and happy with hope for the future get trumped by bullshit pipe dreams of razzledazzle stardom? Beats me, but it sure sounds like very well executed but completely unplanned conspiracy by the rich and powerful to keep the proles occupied while they churn through the best days of their lives in the workmill, dreaming about the future that will never be as they get deeper and deeper into debt.

The original "American Dream" is mostly a joke these days for everyone. The dreamers drinking the kool-aid think it's too pedestrian to shoot for and the realists know that it's just very unlikely as the resources are fast disappearing. Keeping the same job for more than a few years? Not likely unless you are employed by the government or a university. Buying a house? Is anyone even considering that anymore... oh nevermind the banks aren't giving out loans sorry. Retirement... What? We won't have anything to retire on! THey economy is fucked, social security will be gone and if the republitards have their way we won't get any medical care! WHEEEEEEE!

It's all bullshit.

There is no more American dream.

I don't know if it will be better anywhere else, but if we don't have nationalized healthcare in the US in the next decade I'm sure as fuck not sticking around to grow old here. Since the great ignorant state of Texas is the one controlling what goes into our schoolbooks I sure as fuck wouldn't want to send my kids to public school here either. I could go on for days about all the problems, but what is the solution.

As far as I can tell, the solution is to realize that this whole experiment of civilized society is a process, and it will have it's ups and downs. Try to think forward not just with our own personal existence but with the future of all of humanity in mind. There is nothing wrong with moving elsewhere if the current place sucks, there is also nothing wrong with trying to fix where you are.

In this tiny little town I'm in there aren't hordes of crazy right-wing jeasus-preaching gun-fucking lunatics trying to ruin the world, and there aren't mobs of welfare sucking illiterate violent criminals tearing the place up either. It's kinda boring on the weekends I guess, and you can't get a pizza delivered at 3am with a bottle of vodka and a pack of smokes (I do miss that), but that just means you need to plan ahead. You can lie down naked in your front yard and read the paper if you want, nobody cares.

Some of what is happening on the national level is disturbing, and there are plenty of places here that you can go where things suck ass. There are also plenty of good places, depending on what you prefer. I don't know if those of us wielding logic and humanity can drown out or convert the crazy, ignorant and rotten people in this country, but it's worth trying. Hope isn't dead, it's just got cancer.

[guitargeek]

Grist for the mill...

The Origin of America’s Intellectual Vacuum

Monday 15 November 2010

by: Chris Hedges | Truthdig | Op-Ed


The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country’s intellectual life.

“You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent—not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders,” he wrote in his 1959 essay “...From an Exile.” “You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand. You must (defying outside power; gritting your teeth as we grit ours) take us back.”

But they did not take Davis back. Davis, whom I met a few days ago in Toronto, could not find a job after his prison sentence and left for Canada. He has spent his career teaching mathematics at the University of Toronto. He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the professors ousted from universities never taught again. Radical and left-wing ideas were effectively stamped out. The purges, most carried out internally and away from public view, announced to everyone inside the universities that dissent was not protected. The confrontation of ideas was killed.

“Political discourse has been impoverished since then,” Davis said. “In the 1930s it was understood by anyone who thought about it that sales taxes were regressive. They collected more proportionately from the poor than from the rich. Regressive taxation was bad for the economy. If only the rich had money, that decreased economic activity. The poor had to spend what they had and the rich could sit on it. Justice demands that we take more from the rich so as to reduce inequality. This philosophy was not refuted in the 1950s and it was not the target of the purge of the 1950s. But this idea, along with most ideas concerning economic justice and people’s control over the economy, was cleansed from the debate. Certain ideas have since become unthinkable, which is in the interest of corporations such as Goldman Sachs. The power to exclude certain ideas serves the power of corporations. It is unfortunate that there is no political party in the United States to run against Goldman Sachs. I am in favor of elections, but there is no way I can vote against Goldman Sachs.”

The silencing of radicals such as Davis, who had been a member of the Communist Party, although he had left it by the time he was investigated by HUAC, has left academics and intellectuals without the language, vocabulary of class war and analysis to critique the ideology of globalism, the savagery of unfettered capitalism and the ascendancy of the corporate state. And while the turmoil of the 1960s saw discontent sweep through student bodies with some occasional support from faculty, the focus was largely limited to issues of identity politics—feminism, anti-racism—and the anti-war movements. The broader calls for socialism, the detailed Marxist critique of capitalism, the open rejection of the sanctity of markets, remained muted or unheard. Davis argues that not only did socialism and communism become outlaw terms, but once these were tagged as heresies, the right wing tried to make liberal, secular and pluralist outlaw terms as well. The result is an impoverishment of ideas and analysis at a moment when we desperately need radical voices to make sense of the corporate destruction of the global economy and the ecosystem. The “centrist” liberals manage to retain a voice in mainstream society because they pay homage to the marvels of corporate capitalism even as it disembowels the nation and the planet.

“Repression does not target original thought,” Davis noted. “It targets already established heretical movements, which are not experimental but codified. If it succeeds very well in punishing heresies, it may in the next stage punish originality. And in the population, fear of uttering such a taboo word as communism may in the next stage become general paralysis of social thought.”

It is this paralysis he watches from Toronto. It is a paralysis he predicted. Opinions and questions regarded as possible in the 1930s are, he mourns, now forgotten and no longer part of intellectual and political debate. And perhaps even more egregiously the fight and struggle of radical communists, socialists and anarchists in the 1930s against lynching, discrimination, segregation and sexism were largely purged from the history books. It was as if the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had no antecedents in the battles of the Wobblies as well as the socialist and communist movements.

“Even the protests that were organized entirely by Trotskyists were written out of history,” Davis noted acidly.

Those who remained in charge of American intellectual thought went on to establish the wider “heresy of leftism” in the name of academic objectivity. And they have succeeded. Universities stand as cowardly, mute and silent accomplices of the corporate state, taking corporate money and doing corporate bidding. And those with a conscience inside the walls of the university understand that tenure and promotion require them to remain silent.

“Not only were a number of us driven out of the American academic scene, our questions were driven out,” said Davis, who at 84 continues to work as emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. “Ideas which were on the agenda a hundred years ago and sixty years ago have dropped out of memory because they are too far from the new center of discourse.”

Davis has published science fiction stories, is the editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer and is an innovator in the theory of operators and matrices. He is a director of Science for Peace. He also writes poetry. His nimble mind ranges swiftly in our conversation over numerous disciplines and he speaks with the enthusiasm and passion of a new undergraduate. His commitment to radical politics remains fierce and undiminished. And he believes that the loss of his voice and the voices of thousands like him, many of whom were never members of the Communist Party but had the courage to challenge the orthodoxy of the Cold War and corporate capitalism, deadened intellectual and political discourse in the United States.

During World War II Davis joined the Navy and worked on the minesweeping research program. But by the end of the war, with the saturation bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he came to regret his service in the military. He has spent most of his life working in a variety of anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.

“In retrospect I am sorry I didn’t declare myself as a conscientious objector,” he said. “Not at the beginning of the war, because if you are ever going to use military force for anything, that was a situation in which I would be happy to do it. I was wholehearted about that. But once I knew about the destruction of Dresden and the other massacres of civilian populations by the Allies, I think the ethical thing to do would have been to declare myself a CO.”
He was a “Red diaper baby.” His father was a professor, union agitator and member of the old Communist Party who was hauled in front of HUAC shortly before his son. Davis grew up reading New Masses and moved from one city to the next because of his father’s frequent firings.

“I was raised in the movement,” he said. “It wasn’t a cinch I would be in the Communist Party, but in fact I was, starting in 1943 and then resigning soon after on instructions from the party because I was in the military service. This was part of the coexistence of the Communist Party with Roosevelt and the military. It would not disrupt things during the war. When I got out of the Navy I rejoined the Communist Party, but that lapsed in June of 1953. I never got back in touch with them. At the time I was subpoenaed I was technically an ex-Communist, but I did not feel I had left the movement and in some sense I never did.”

Davis got his doctorate from Harvard in mathematics and seemed in the 1950s destined for a life as a professor. But the witch hunts directed against “Reds” swiftly ended his career on the University of Michigan faculty. He mounted a challenge to the Committee on Un-American Activities that went to the Supreme Court. The court, ruling in 1960, three years after Joseph McCarthy was dead, denied Davis’ assertion that the committee had violated the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech. He was sent to prison. Davis, while incarcerated, authored a research paper that had an acknowledgement reading: “Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System. Opinions expressed in this paper are the author’s and are not necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons.”

Davis, who has lived in Canada longer than he lived in the United States, said that his experience of marginalization was “good for the soul and better for the intellect.”

“Though you see the remnants of the former academic left still, though some of us were never fired, though I return to the United States from my exile frequently, we are gone,” he said. “We did not survive as we were. Some of us saved our skins without betraying others or ourselves. But almost all of the targets either did crumble or were fired and blacklisted. David Bohm and Moses Finley and Jules Dassin and many less celebrated people were forced into exile. Most of the rest had to leave the academic world. A few suffered suicide or other premature death. There weren’t the sort of wholesale casualties you saw in Argentina or El Salvador, but the Red-hunt did succeed in axing a lot of those it went after, and cowing most of the rest. We were out, and we were kept out.”

“I was a scientist four years past my Ph.D. and the regents’ decision was to extinguish, it seemed, my professional career,” he said. “What could they do now to restore to me 35 years of that life? If it could be done, I would refuse. The life I had is my life. It’s not that I’m all that pleased with what I’ve made of my life, yet I sincerely rejoice that I lived it, that I don’t have to be Professor X who rode out the 1950s and 1960s in his academic tenure and his virtuously anti-Communist centrism.”

Emphases mine.

[WeAintFoundShit]

my coffee's not that bad either and it's ridable at least 7 or 8 months a year if you have heated grips and don't fear black ice. free beer. bikes to fix ... anyone ?

Free beer and bikes to fix.

In Belgium.

Sounds like a Tripel win to me!

[GeekGrl]

I make a good goddamn cup of coffee. Fly your ass over here and see for yourself.

Everything else, however... Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Ditto, my coffee kicks ass.

Sorry lads, but MY coffee is the best! and the first cup's free ...

But ... as to the article ... LMFAO!

I grant that it was quite masterfully written, and preys upon many of the very real concerns of a vast number of people. And I grant that the States are by no means perfect ... but then, no where is.

[Davros]

I make a good goddamn cup of coffee. Fly your ass over here and see for yourself.

Everything else, however... Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Ditto, my coffee kicks ass.

Sorry lads, but MY coffee is the best! and the first cup's free ...

I can indeed vouch for GeekGrl's coffee.

[Mean Chuck]

Stupid example -- ever try to find Chinese food in Italy?

Probably the best General Tso's chicken I ever had was in Nuremberg, Germany.

[Toonce(s)]

Yes, I make excellent coffee; No, I did not notice the photoshop because I was mesmerized by boobs. I interpret this to mean that I could either move to a different country and do well or stay and be distracted by bread and circuses until I'm dead enough to not care.

Having kids does make me more interested in leaving though. I explained to the teenager the other day that: To heck with Pakistan and eventually Iran having nukes, this country is going to be a much greater threat to global security in the next few decades.