VII. Modern American Stupidity

Stupidity has been a component of Americana ever since the first explorers stumbled onto the New World. In fact, the most surprising thing about America's discovery is not the usual "When" and "By whom" but the "How often" explorers had to learn of it for themselves. No other land has been discovered so often, and if all claims in this matter are valid, it was first discovered by the Irish, Romans, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Libyans, Norsemen, Welsh, Scots, Venetians and Portuguese.

Of Columbus, it might be said he was the last to discover America. He is honored as the discoverer because he had the good fortune to make his discovery when his supporting culture was cognitively prepared to appreciate it and technologically developed enough to exploit it. However, he had no inkling of what he had found nor even where he was when he set foot in the New World. He had started out for east Asia and just happened to bump into America because it was in the way. Since he had no idea what the Orient was like, he assumed he had achieved his goal and died without knowing he had accomplished more as a failure than do most "Successful" explorers.

After Columbus had shown the way, the Old World was ready and eager to follow his lead to where ever it was he had gone. The horizons and opportunities for stupidity now widened and broadened, and new forms of idiocy burst out of the traditional molds of misbehavior. Stupidity was no longer confined to the stodgy constraints of restrictive patterns of thought and action but became brash, reckless and inventive in a world in which imagination seemed the only limitation on possible blunders.

Despite this, generally speaking, those who settled the New World could not miss. Once a colony was established, the land was so rich that it did not matter what system or non-system of government, economy or society developed: nature was so generous that any would succeed.

The nineteenth century saw the end of the Golden Age of individual stupidity. In the 1800's, people went out on their own, made their own mistakes, paid for them themselves on the spot and learned as little as possible from the experience. But, gone now are the good old days when a person could go out and fail on his own at his own pace. Now he must join a firm which is overcharging its customers or work for the government, which is, true to the spirit of democracy, ripping off the people. Stupidity is now cultivated, developed and promoted by the calculating professional. It has become organized, streamlined, modernized, and incorporated. Mismanagement is now computerized so that errors which used to take weeks to unfold can be perpetrated in seconds. In a world in which stupidity has reached such bewildering bureaucratic complexity, Americans are justifiably confused and searching for something in which they can still believe.

The composite American today entertains a number of religious beliefs all of which predominated at one time or other and still comprise a significant part of his cultural heritage and national identity. The general American is sort of Christian in belief and/or behavior. Politically, he believes in democracy, although the Constitution guarantees and surprisingly provides a republican form of government. Economically, he is a devout capitalist, even if private enterprise has been pushed to the fringe by the systematic organization, ownership and control that government and big business fascistically exercise upon each other. Finally, he is socially egalitarian, at least within his own peer group. If there are contradictions in the expressions of these belief systems as they shape daily life, they are happily lost on most of us. First and last, we are pragmatists ill disposed to let beliefs disrupt the market place of life.

Not only is American stupidity thus fragmented, due to the lack of a unified belief system, but we lack a basic knowledge about ourselves for exactly the same reason. In fact, if there is one subject upon which we are invincibly ignorant, it is America, and this self-unconsciousness is traceable to the multi-schemas which provide several ready-made explanations for anything. This is one of the distinctive features of American culture: we do not have "An" answer for or "The" solution to a given question or problem. We have a variety of answers and solutions from which we can pick the one which is most appealing if not most relevant.

The pluralism of American society has not only made tolerance a necessity but has given American stupidity its anarchistic flavor. Each immigrant strain has made its contribution to the caldron of idiocy and made diversity our greatest weakness. The sloth of Hispanics contrasts with the arrogance of Germans. The self-righteous prudery of the English clashes with the emotional abandon of Africans. Each detracts in its own way from the self-confidence of the nation as every failing and drawback of

the world's jetsam and flotsam has drifted to our shores and become part of our kaleidoscope schema.

Naturally, we like to make the most of the noble purity of our ancestors. We see them as moral zealots struggling for justice and freedom against religious tyranny and political oppression. However, not since the Crusades could one find a more opinionated band of bigots than the early colonists, who had no fundamental objection to despotism, so long as they were the despots imposing their oppressive views and values on others. Added to these dictatorial bigots were successive waves of klutzes, deadbeats and malcontents—the scum from all the slums of Europe. Throw in Africans dumb enough to get caught by slavers, Orientals shrewd enough to work forever for a pittance and some Indians who acquiesced in the longest-running real estate swindle of all time and you have the makings of the social handicap of which we are so proud. Stir a little and heat a lot, and you have a model of our faltering, sweltering pot society.

Although we do not brag about it, America was peopled by failures. Our ancestors came here because they were or anticipated being failures in the old country. Upon arrival, they failed in farming, mining, business and battles. Crackpots invented ships that would sink, shovels that would not dig and boilers that would explode. Builders constructed firetraps that were unsafe an any height. As development progressed, slums arose in the cities while in the country, land was cleared so that the topsoil could erode faster. Railroads to nowhere were constructed, with promoters then misleading the unwary into settling along the wrong-of-way so that they could be more easily exploited later on.

Thus, American stupidity cannot be truly appreciated as a stagnant, torpid force but must be perceived in the dynamic context of a linguistic current ever at odds with the realities of life. Much as our national character, composition and goals have changed throughout the life of the nation, so has our native stupidity devolved so that we might always have difficulty recognizing ourselves and meeting our challenges. To illustrate the point, we need only note that the patriotic rhetoric of 1776 was mostly about "Liberty". A bell was cast and promptly cracked to symbolize our qualified commitment to this ideal. Two hundred years ago, slave owners fought for their own liberty, and now the word is all but forgotten. The current watchword is "Equality", and the government conceived in liberty has been pushing equality on the country for more than a generation. In both cases, the catchwords motivated radicals and obscured the reality that as pure ideals, they were basically inapplicable in a healthy society. Still, as a people divided by a common language, we can be as stupid as any and will no doubt continue to wrap ourselves in the illusions of misleading labels.

The importance of a word in maintaining an illusion was made vividly clear in 1902, when President Roosevelt was trying to appoint a commission to settle a coal strike. The mine owners refused to accept anyone on the commission who was designated as a union man. It was perfectly acceptable for a union man to be on the commission, but he had to be called something else (i.e., "An eminent sociologist"). Until this subtlety was realized by the President, language really was a stumbling block. Terminology prevented a resolution of the crisis so long as seating a "Union man" was perceived as granting Labor's right to representation.

Actually, twentieth century America is a concoction of misperceptions. In the early 1930's, for example, Americans did not perceive business organizations as "Governing bodies". Giant corporations were perceived as eminently successful rugged individuals. Another part of American fiction was that the nominal government in Washington had some kind of power to control events. However, in the daily life of the average citizen, a private organization determined when to get up in the morning, what to eat, what to wear, what working conditions would be and how leisure time would be spent. Today, the government at least attempts to govern. However ineffective it may be, the bureaucracy belatedly asserted itself and tries to regulate the special interests which control it and us.

The big change in thinking which occurred during the 1930's was that the "People" were mixed into the Government=Business equation. All the regulations which had been cultivated by the business community to harness government to the promotion and development of corporations were converted into mechanisms of government regulation over the industrial complex. The change occurred for the best of reasons—it had to. The business community had been granted the license to run itself and the country into the ground and had proceeded to do so.

Had necessity not been quite so compelling at the time, Americans would have been more reluctant than they were to convert from worshipping business to worshipping government. Rituals and jargon all favored the status morbus. The only problem was pragmatic—the system did not work. Of course, nothing the befuddled New Dealers did for eight years worked very effectively either until World War II bailed the country out of the Depression.

In a general and abstract sense, the New Deal amounted to an admission that the old beliefs in capitalism and the mechanisms by which business controlled politics worked to everyone's worst interest. The new emerging schema was based on belief in legislation designed to help people by limiting business. Unfortunately, the pragmatic result was not government by law but by organization. Although the underlying principles upon which government is based may be theoretically sound, human organizations are prone to take on self-serving lives of their own. Hence, the efforts to realize our ideals by legislating control have strangled business with fascistic regulations.

If the preoccupation here with systems and principles seems out of place, it nevertheless reflects the prevailing attitude of those who lived through the American Reformation of the 1930's. During the Depression, people who had gone bankrupt commonly spent their working lives trying to pay off their creditors. Few groups received or even sought handouts from the government. Mostly, they were seeking explanations—new ideologies (Socialism, Communism, Etcism) to replace the ragged individualism created by capitalism. The point is that very few people with any articulate political force actually demanded bread instead of the political circuses of the New Deal.

In one of the few intellectual ironies of the 1930's, while the people were looking for reassuring answers to theoretical questions, their leader was searching for practical solutions to real problems. As an inveterate non-ideologue, President Roosevelt was a pragmatic empiricist committed to trying one thing after another in a hit and miss fashion until he found something that worked. Despite the lack of systematics, the government's perceptible slide toward a fascistically controlled superstate was greeted by conservatives with much righteous hand wringing and expressions of concern about the downfall of laissez faire capitalism, the destruction of individual initiative and the ruin of national character. How anyone could have missed the subtlety that capitalism was already down and out can be attributed only to the incredible power of the "Laissez unfair" schema to prevent awareness of the most obvious facts of life.

On the other hand, Americans redefined themselves and turned in the tarnished idol of the brazen individual seeking opportunity for that of the cautious conformist seeking security. The resultant welfare programs may have been a boon to civil service bureaucracies, but recipients of the dole, for some unexpected reason, seem to have lost a general sense of social responsibility. As irresponsibility was not the intended goal but an undesired side effect of the welfare state, it was unanticipated by those who approved and those who administer the programs. The subtlety that people given the means for subsistence tend to lose respect for everything including themselves was lost on everyone. However, after fifty years of experience with dependence on the dole, we are beginning to realize that the quest for economic security has indeed undermined our sense of individual responsibility. Basic physical security in our cities is subject to the irresponsible whims of vandals and hooligans showing their disrespect for property and their resentment for those who own it.

Not only have we redefined ourselves, but we are continually in the process of redefining if not flat outright abusing our language. Is there not something inherently unsettling about a President referring to a nuclear missile as a "Peacekeeper"? Equally odd was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger's reference to the Marines' withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984 as "Redeployment" after the nuisance of their presence made them a threat to no one but themselves. One wonders if a person who confuses retreat with redeployment should be in charge of "Peacekeepers". After all, what would happen it he were to "Evaluate" one of them?

In a lighter vein, the Attorney General of New York in 1977 put a halt to an advertisement for the sale of "Grass". The ad read: Marijuana cannot be sold through the mail but "grass" can... People were sending in money and getting exactly what was promised—lawn cuttings. Now, that is not the funny part. The funny part is that the ad was stopped because it was considered false advertising, although it probably was one of the most honest ads ever placed. It could not have been stopped for being misleading (creating a false image), because that is what creative advertising is all about. It should have been stopped on the grounds of honest advertising because in a world of phonies and scams, nothing is so disturbing and disruptive as accuracy and honesty.

For sheer tomfoolery, however, nothing matches the advertisers' code which prohibits showing people drinking alcoholic beverages. People are shown having a wonderful time pouring beer or wine into their glasses. They sniff. They smile. Suddenly, a moose is running through a forest. Then the glasses are half empty and the people are beaming delightedly. This is obviously a childish compromise for advertisers who want to promote sales of these products (and distilled spirits as well) without being responsible for their consumption.

As amusing and innocent as this example may be, there is a sinister side to the deliberate control and manipulation of information by the media. In totalitarian states, the government uses mind control to maintain belief in the leaders. In America, the media are businesses committed to maintaining belief in the sponsors. Information which is acceptable to advertisers is presented in a manner calculated to make money by increasing circulation or ratings. If this tends to make material superficial, it is because the people will tune out anything which turns them off.

Actually, the history of modern communications in general has been a story of developing the ability to mislead more and more people faster and faster. Television, especially, can convey all kinds of false impressions, most of them carefully contrived to keep the viewer tuned in for further misinformation. Usually just enough harsh reality filters through to make some prudes scream "Bad taste" but not so much that the public would be viscerally revolted by the disaster of the day on the news or the violent climax of a movie.

The media's compromise of keeping the public semi-informed is challenged every four years when pollsters make projections of the Presidential elections. In 1980, they forecast a tight race even though they knew days before the election that Reagan would win handily. Their rationale for misrepresenting their findings was that they did not want to cause a landslide for the Republicans. One must wonder just exactly what they were doing or what they were supposed to be doing. If it was going to be a big win for Reagan, was there something wrong with saying so? Were they making data available to the public? Were they misleading the public? Presenting or hiding results? Just what criteria are used to determine what the public will be told? Election night returns and network projections of winners now present problems of national importance, and the public will be informed as to what is happening when the media feel the time is right.

The more responsible media tend to be very self-conscious about the effects their news and other fictional stories will have on the public. In fact, they tend to present material for the sake of desired effect rather than simply because it is relevant and important. The initial skyjacking stories, for example, seemed to induce more skyjacking. This presented news editors with a dilemma. Reporting the news in a straightforward fashion put people in jeopardy. It simply would not do for the TV networks to inform the public about skyjackings so that the people could decide what should be done about them. The bottom line is that part of the role of the media is to keep citizens in a democratic society uninformed and misinformed.

It is in the vested interest of the monied powers in America that the public be informed just enough to conform, that beliefs in the system are confirmed and that criticism is trivialized. Basically, the leaders need stupid followers. They do not want intelligent, informed, concerned citizens who are well qualified to criticize the imbalance of power in society. Stability is best assured by a pliant and compliant public, and this is exactly what the educational institutions produce and the media maintain.

This point is dramatically demonstrated during political campaigns. Increasingly, elections are decided by 30-second spot ads aimed more at the gut than the mind—commercial techniques of image-making which pervert the process into, at best, a popularity contest. Negative campaigning against the opponent aside, the fundamental idiocy of electioneering is that it is largely unrelated to the qualifications and abilities an official needs for performing his duties once elected. That is, a candidate may be chosen on the strength of attributes irrelevant to job performance. An administrator has to be organized and make decisions, yet he might be elected because of a winning smile. It is apparently too much to expect that our political leaders might be selected for job-related skills. Increasingly, the ability to look and act the part is eclipsing the ability to play the role as a qualification for attaining office, so we can only hope that the system will somehow be able to produce some worthy leaders as, miraculously, it has in the past.

The pragmatic compromise which American political institutions have found expedient to make is one of trading off logical consistency for responsiveness to popular demands. It is much more important that governments and parties be sensitive to the general public or their own members than that they adhere to set policies and eternal principles. American "Democracy" has been redefined and adapted to a republic. The people make essentially no decisions except to choose representatives to play "Let's Make a Deal" with the lobbyists for special interest groups. In the new sense of the term, a "Democracy" is a political system which cultivates good relations with its people. Thus, America maintains the semblance of a democratic tradition, in that the people are periodically consulted and occasionally considered even while being deliberately misinformed by "Ins" determined to get reelected.

Hence, the basic myth about American government—the belief that it is working for the people. This is the root cause of much political stupidity. Two hundred years ago, this notion might have been amusing, but reality has long since supplied ample, dispelling evidence that, in fact, the people are working for the government. The average American works for four solid months—one out of every three working days—for the government. That much of his labor goes for taxes. This the average American boob does despite the growing realization most governmental agencies are working for themselves rather than the poor tax payer. Cabinet members use issues as levers to aid them as they jockey for position in the "Power Stakes". Congressmen logroll to their mutual advantage and the detriment of everyone else. Boondoggle begets boondoggle, and governmental stupidity becomes a mixture of departmental ineptitude compounded by the noise and friction of competitive haggling among the many bureaucratic agencies.

Whether this is really stupid or not depends upon one's perspective. However, in politics, it is power which defines perspectives. As a repository of power, government is clearly a means which has become an end in itself. Although the original idea was that the government was to be there to help the people realize themselves, it has indulged in a tradition of making and interpreting its own laws in self-serving ways. Government has emerged supreme. It is strangling the people it was designed to serve and who continually struggle to support it. One is hardly surprised that faith in the political system has been eroded: the surprise is that there is any left at all.

Generally, the religious fervor that was once inspired by democratic terminology has been badly compromised by pragmatism: "Liberty" is hardly worth killing for these days and certainly not worth dying for. If democratic slogans have ceased to be accepted as inspiring truths, now that we have endured over a century of hacks running the political machines, there is some consolation in knowing that bribery and corruption have become more refined and discreet. Aside from the Nixonians (who were justly punished as warnings to others not to get caught), we now have a higher class of political crooks. They are slicker, subtler and more sophisticated than before and quite capable of providing the modern public with both the image and reality expected and needed.

Stupidity becomes apparent, however, whenever the discrepancy between image and reality bends or stretches credulity beyond the breaking point. For example, for years the federal government indulged in a Soil Bank program, paying farmers to reduce food production while people all over the world and even in this country and were starving to death. Why that same money was not paid to farmers to grow food which then could have been distributed (along with contraceptives) to the impoverished needy has never been explained. It need be explained only if people realize how stupid it was for a government to prevent food production in a world of famine and an era when America was presenting itself to the world as a national embodiment of Christian ideals and compassion.

Slightly more idiotic than the Soil Bank program are the contradictory policies in Washington toward tobacco. This is a substance recognized as a poison by everyone but those controlled by it. Yet, because of the political clout of the tobacco states on Congressional committees, the government supports the price of tobacco. Then it taxes cigarettes and assures us they menace our health. Just why tobacco farmers cannot grow food, which would help people live, is more a matter of money than morals. An obvious victim of political morality was the Constitutional mandate that the government promote the general welfare of the people. Perhaps we should all be grateful that the cyanide industry is not powerful enough to enlist government support for its product.

Even stupider than the government's policies toward tobacco is its policy toward drugs. Twenty years and $70 billion after the War on Drugs began, American society is still inundated by cocaine and heroin. Increasingly, it is becoming obvious that we will never lick the drug problem as long as we deal with it as criminal behavior. There is simply too much money available to corrupt any efforts to put an end to drug dealing. The only way to win the war on drugs is to legalize their use and deal with the whole matter as a problem of health. Users could then go to physicians, enroll in rehabilitation programs and get prescriptions for their needs which could be filled at prices so low that the drug cartels could not compete. Until we adopt such a strategy, the drug problem will remain no matter how much money the government throws at it. When we legalize drugs and let the medical establishment monitor and control their use, the problem will disappear. Of course, the main stumbling block to adopting this kind of policy is primarily psychological—we would have to change our drug-related schema so that we would perceive the addict not as a criminal but as a sick person who needs and deserves professional help in finding a cure.

It is rather sad to note that nothing makes government look stupider than an accurate, objective recitation of official acts and policies. Much as people need to believe in the system, they find it difficult to worship an organization which insults their fading mental sensibilities as it pours their tax dollars down one bottomless rat hole after another. Our current crusade to represent the "Underprivileged person" as a cause célèbre in our political conscience is a case in point. Helping people help themselves is one thing, but the goal of making everyone equally privileged is so asinine that only a democratic government could embrace and only a totalitarian government could achieve it. While handouts and doles are worthy short-term, emergency measures, they have now become standards in a culture which accepts emergency conditions as normal. Government is promoted but the establishment of effective, long-term solutions to our social problems is actually thwarted by the institution of such desperate programs, which foster not human development but human dependence on self-perpetuating, self-defeating bureaucratic agencies.

The functional guiding principle of crafty administrating is really quite simple—offend as few significant people as possible while placating as many as possible. Thus, when a decision is made by a civil servant, the prime concern is the satisfaction of the noisiest and most influential pressure group. Other factors which also enter into the decision-making process are (in order of importance); 1.) advancement of the decider up the pecking order, 2.) thwarting interdepartmental rivals, and 3.) facts relevant to the particular problem at hand. If public interests happen to be served by such officials, that is only because they happen to fall in line with these criteria deemed crucial by those laboring in the context of the bureaucracy.

In public service, employees and officials routinely find that institutional stupidity in its many forms makes their jobs (i.e., helping people) all the more difficult. Organizational guidelines take on lives of their own and inhibit even the well-intentioned workers from accomplishing their appointed tasks. Hospital personnel spend as much time filling out forms as tending to patients. School teachers spend one or two class periods a day administrating or patrolling rather than teaching. The military is not permitted to win a war because the weapons or tactics necessary for victory would create "Bad press".

Another factor contributing to the frustration of goal achievement is the excess of information available to anyone who wants to be confused. Understanding is rendered nearly impossible when a person is inundated by conflicting data. A common ploy under such circumstances is to make, in effect, no decision at all but to stick with existing policy regardless of complaints or reports indicating its shortcomings and failings. Repetition of what was once acceptable then provides government by inertia.

A further impediment to goal achievement is that those effecting policy would rather perpetuate errors than admit to making them. Of course, this strategy has the advantage of saving those in charge the bother of correcting or eliminating such mistakes as do exist. Unfortunately, the Veteran's Administration provides a rather sad example of what this can mean to victims of government bureaucracy. In its own hospitals, the VA often failed to enforce its own safety standards and failed to follow its own lax rules for investigating patient death rates. Further, VA consultants were quite content to push paper around instead of demanding an end to dangerous conditions that were causing needless deaths early in the 1980's. This indifference allowed the perpetuation of a venerable tradition of surgical errors. Worse yet, all this was made probable by the 1980 Congressional Invitation to Ineptitude Act which made reports dealing with the quality of VA medical care confidential. And who is served by this law? Certainly not the patients! The beneficiaries are the bungling doctors and their incompetent staffs.

This is the abject lesson of American politics—the government serves those who prey on the public. Those on the inside, from the clearly criminal to the merely contemptuous, protect themselves. Although officials must occasionally reward public service, they also strive to cover up mistakes and encourage conformity to mediocre standards for the sake of the esprit de corps. Just so they all feel they belong, the dull are promoted and the bright discouraged from competence or from setting examples of excellence that others might resent. The ultimate danger of all such institutional stupidity is that it passes unrecognized as such and becomes a new and lower standard for judging the acceptability of incompetence.

Along with our misplaced faith that ours is a political system of, by and for the people, we entertain an unjustified belief in justice. We do this by listening to what we are told about the courts rather than watching what happens in them. As high priests of the legal religion, the Injustices of the Supreme Court set the general tone of their trade by sanctimoniously desecrating the Constitution while extolling its virtues.

The Fourteenth Amendment provided the Court with an excellent opportunity to show what it could do to a law. It was an amendment conceived and composed with the rights of people clearly in mind. Nevertheless, the term "Person" was expanded to include corporations as legal entities. It was indeed a banner day in the history of civil rights when the Court interpreted "Person" to mean "A human being". The key phrases of the Constitution—"Due process", "Equal protection", etc.—are like so many legal spigots courts regulate to suit their circumstantial fancy. Is the legal process getting too "Due"? Well, the courts can cut back a bit on dueness. Is protection of the law getting too equal? Then certain, favored people will be granted a bit more equality than others by a Court which has long since abandoned its efforts to create an open society and is instead committed to the establishment of a standardized, homogenized America.

Practically all popular beliefs about Constitutional government are results of political propaganda. At best, they are misleading; at worst, they are completely false. Civics books, for example, are written to inculcate in future citizens a sense of belonging beyond a sense of reason. In no civics book does the fledgling American find that law breaking is a major preoccupation at every level of government. Although lawlessness in America has a long, dishonorable history, citizens are always surprised when they first encounter it. The Watergate affair was not unusual in the tawdry history of Presidential shenanigans; it was just exceptionally idiotic of officials who had pointedly alienated the media beforehand to have indulged in such misbehavior.

Without a doubt, the most shameful episode in the annals of official neglect and abuse of the Constitution was the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. This was due to wartime paranoia, but it proved the impotency of the Constitution as a guarantor of rights. The rights we enjoy are indulgences granted by government authorities for the moment. As grants, they are subject to revocation whenever it suits those in power to exercise this totally illegal and unconstitutional option. Further, when there is an abuse of authority, the courts are as likely to protect the villains as the victims.

Courts really are show places for the legal process. They are invariably pretentious, ritualized and somber. Upon entering a court, one gets the immediate impression that something important must go on in such an august setting. The impression is correct: justice is dispensed with. A killer is set free because some functionary dotted a "T" or crossed an "I". A defendant is railroaded because the judge or prosecutor is up for reelection and needs to toughen his image. The bottom line is not justice but the belief in justice, but on what is that belief based? Facts and knowledge and/or ignorance and stupidity?

The facts are that for every 1,000 major felonies, 17 perpetrators go to jail but for what? In pretrial maneuvering, armed robbery is watered down to simple robbery, and rape is plea-bargained down to assault and battery. Further, in 1983, while forty-two percent of those sent to state prisons were on parole for prior convictions, 55,000 criminals were set free on legal technicalities. These are facts upon which our belief in the legal system is not based.

Along with our belief in Constitutional government, we believe in the dollar. It is curious to note that the dollar is impossible to define with accuracy and validity. At best, it is one of those green pieces of paper in your wallet or pocketbook. At worst, it is a figment of a collective imagination which makes the economy one of the newer permanent, floating con games in America's history of scams. Unlike the "Silver certificates", which at least said they were redeemable in hard metal, today's dollar bill is not worth the paper it is printed on in any literal or legal sense. It has value only because everyone believes in it and accepts it accordingly.

Our motto really should be changed from "In God we trust" to "In the dollar we believe". Of course, God seems to be doing Her best to separate Herself from the country, and who can blame Her. The Constitution is meaningless and the dollar worthless. It is only our determined unwillingness to perceive these facts that holds America together and keeps it going. Apparently, no fundamental facts of life, no basic knowledge of reality, no logical analysis of the establishment can shake America's faith in the system, and it is precisely this unfathomable faith which permits our national nonsense to continue.

The key to understanding the incomprehensible is that we believe in capitalism. Just why we do is a mystery. Perhaps it is because we do not perceive the estates of the rich in a cause/effect juxtaposition to urban slums. Perhaps it is because the ritual of buying and selling in the market place sustains the faith in the system. Most probably, however, it is because most of us cannot grasp the idea that "Capitalism" is just a word which has next to nothing to do with the workings of the economy.

The fact is that as an economically overdeveloped nation, America distributes poverty and misery via a politically regulated system of tribute and taxation. Of course, the role of free enterprise in the economy of things is essentially negligible. In fact, the major contribution of the corner shoeshine man and local farm stand operator is not economic but psychological—justifying the continuation of capitalistic rhetoric in a world of collective regulation by megacorporations or governments. At municipal and state levels, public utilities which are not socialistically owned by government are fascistically regulated by it. However, regulation of private enterprise is most common in Washington, where federal officials routinely engage in back scratching interactions with the special interest groups they are supposed to be controlling.

As bad as such regulation is for the economy in general, "Deregulation" can lead to some unexpected problems in some areas, as it did in banking. For more than fifty years, banks hid in an artificially sheltered, unnaturally conservative environment with legal protection from competition while Federal Deposit Insurance guaranteed the survival of even the most poorly managed organizations. Stagnation replaced enterprise, and sheer incompetence became commonplace. With the opening up of competition among financial institutions in the 1980's, banks sank money into a number of black holes—soil, farmland, the Third World, commercial real estate and leveraged buyouts. In this case, it was the absence of a functional schema which proved disastrous: with no guiding cognitive model based on experience to help them understand what they were doing, manic bankers seemed immune to learning from each succeeding fiasco, and only a handful of CEOs were canned for mismanagement.

On the labor scene, strong unions were thought to be a counterpoise to greedy business but in fact joined with mismanagement and big government to bamboozle the American worker. To the extent that unions obtained more pay for less work, they created unemployment and caused inflation. It may have been all well and good for an assembly line worker in Detroit to make an average of $23 per hour—until the Japanese flooded the market with better, cheaper cars. In 1984, the government protected and the consumer subsidized (to the tune of $600/car) management's ineptitude and labor's greed. Presumably, national interests were served by the protection of obsolete marketing and manufacturing strategies and the employment of workers who prevented the economic production of quality cars.

Another peculiar aspect of the American labor scene is the irrelevance of selective criteria use when people try to join the work force. Traditionally, America was a caste society covered over with egalitarian maxims and morals and an incongruous ideology of racial superiority which sanctioned the system while it inhibited random interactions among equal people. Whites derived their social eminence from their technological control of the economy and, through that, the political system, although all these are eroding as the moral imperative of social justice is realized.

While it was stupid to repress talent and stifle ability in the past, it is inexcusable that we still continue to do so. Nevertheless, we continue our tradition of self-induced inefficiency by demanding the work force reflect not the distribution of ability in it but the racial composition of society in general. To this end, "Race norming"—rigging employment aptitude tests to favor minorities—has been used by thirty-eight states at the behest of President Reagan's Labor Department in order to enhance the chances of blacks and hispanics of landing jobs.

If the legality and sagacity of that policy are at best dubious, one certainty in the American labor market is that the individual worker has become an anachronism. In the superficial and entertaining world of professional sports, performers may be rewarded for proficiency and technical expertise. However, in the general work force, non-performance criteria determine hiring (race and sex) and promotion (seniority), so mediocrity can be maintained by emphasis on factors irrelevant to job efficiency. In fact, a worker's main job is not to accomplish a task but to conform to and fit into a group of fellow employees.

Although it is a secondary consideration, to the extent that a job requires an employee to do something, workers must have some basic ability, acquired through training, to handle machinery or computers. This means that some people are going to be denied jobs for the outrageous reason that they are unqualified. If such people are unwilling to accept menial positions of employment, society will probably find a place for them on welfare. We already have third generation deadbeats who expect the country to provide not just an opportunity to earn a decent living but the decent living itself—as if a good income is an economic right.

In general, we now face the problem that any governmental program, policy or plan of action may quickly become maladaptive. Traditional values may be irrelevant to the young, and old definitions may not even be challenged so much as ignored. The extended family has made way for the extended state, which is being computerized as it assumes its new role. All this is rather trying for anyone clinging to presumably fundamental, eternal values in an ever evolving culture. Belief in God has been partially displaced by a belief in people, and now this humanistic tradition is itself giving way to beliefs in secular organizations which are struggling to strangle themselves.

For example, the belief in federal welfare has led to government funding of urban ghettos, and as a contemporary case study of what a benign if not bungling bureaucracy cannot accomplish, our city slums compare favorably with the Indian reservations of the last century. The major difference is that reservations are legally defined areas, whereas ghettos are extralegal territories. The major similarity is that both may be characterized as tending toward the same omega point of economic, cultural and spiritual genocide. In both cases, emphasis on the level of funding and degree of sympathy misses the subtlety that providing people with food, shelter and trinkets falls short of helping them become self-sufficient.

Traditionally, black culture in America was basically a tension-reducing strategy. Fundamental Christian rituals provided temporary and meaningless release from the oppressive white world. However, for all the singing, shouting and hand clapping, heavenly rewards were to be granted only those who accepted their downtrodden condition here on earth. As debilitating as resignation was, it was the best coping technique available to people who were systematically denied opportunities to acquire and use skills for worldly advancement.

Now, blacks are granted opportunities to use skills even when someone else is better qualified. This perversion of the Constitutional mandate of equal protection of the laws undercuts the great social myth of contemporary America that poor minority groups are being helped by legitimate policies of the courts, charities and liberals who worship at the altered altar of "Civil rights". The concern of many people to help those in need is humane as well as laudable, but just how effective have the means adopted been in helping the needy escape the slovenly despair of the ghettos? Are our slums any smaller or more bearable for all the Head Starts and hot lunches that have been pointed in their direction? For all the good intentions of the establishment to beguile those in the slums to accept whatever is granted them, most children of the ghettos know that the easiest way up and out is through crime. This is the saddest indictment that can be made of our urban policy.

If it is demoralizing to look inward at our domestic idiocy, it is equally discouraging to note that our foreign policy for forty-five years was stuck like a broken record in a rut of negativity. Over and over again, we were anti-communist, anti-communist, anti-communist. If this attitude was justifiable, it was partly because no American with an ounce of cognitive integrity could make positive pronouncements abroad about the corruption, drugs and crime in his country. We were once the hope of the world, but we betrayed that hope, so now we just struggle along like any other country trying to get on with those who depend on us and those who just have to tolerate us.

As for those perceived as our national enemy, the Soviets always called for an end to the Cold War because they defined it as attacks on or criticism of Communist states by the West. What they did to the Western bloc or anyone else was covered over and sanctified by the term "Peaceful coexistence". They have finally comprehended that we really did not want to beat them in a war. Of course, we wanted even less to lose to them, but our general posture toward the Soviet Union was quite consistently defensive: we were very much oriented toward holding the line.

Now with the end of the Cold War, it is time to reverse the tradition of finding better ways to kill our enemies and develop better ways to live with them and ourselves. Fortunately for everyone, the time has past when we had to have not only the weapons necessary but also the insane willingness to use them to produce the ultimate peace. We can now stop pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into weapons systems we will not have time to use unless it is the last thing we ever do. We can alter the traditional picture of the incomparable stupidity of the arms race, when the conditions which caused wars—cultural isolation, aggression, need for resources, etc.-were all promoted by the fervid commitment of the world's great powers to attain ever greater destructive capacities. Now we can concern ourselves with the underlying problems of famine, disease, poverty, ignorance and, yes, stupidity. At the same time, we can take some perverted satisfaction in knowing that every dollar spent on defense nets us five dollars worth of ill will and suspicion abroad.

As for the domestic impact of the military, we were given a lesson on the power of defense complex during the Presidential campaign of 1984. President Reagan advocated a 7% increase in defense spending for the next fiscal year; Walter Mondale wanted to hold the line at 3%. Yet, a poll indicated the American public wanted no increase at all! This may be taken as an indication of 1.) recognition by "those in-the-know" of a real need for a strong defense and/or 2.) the power of business interests to promote profits at the expense of "Democracy". Regardless of the national debt and despite the popular desire to reduce defense spending, the military-industrialists will probably continue to do their worst to contribute to financial disaster with policies from which the best relief would be a little reason and sanity.

Unfortunately, one way to spell "Relief" is S-T-U-P-I-D-I-T-Y, because it is this which provides us an escape from the incredible world we have constructed for ourselves. Fortunately, on the other hand, the situation is not so desperate that some fool cannot render it absurd to the point of amusement. In the case of defenseless spending, levity was provided by the Air Force General who described the price tag of $7,622 for a 10-cup coffee maker as "Reasonable"! This is the kind of reason which brings comic if not financial relief to beleaguered taxpayers who never did find out what price the good General would have considered "Unreasonable": $10,000? $100,000? Of course, anyone who actually believes $7,000 is a reasonable price for a coffeepot should not be serving in Air Force Procurement: he should be out selling coffeepots.

As occasional whistle blowers have discovered to their dismay, the prime concern of those in Waste Management seems to be to see that it continues. For a circuit breaker that John Q. Citizen could buy for $3.64, the Air Force paid $2,543. An hexagonal nut which cost 13 cents at the local hardware store was purchased by pentagonal nuts for $2,043—a markup of only about 1,500,000%! After repeated warnings of serious, potentially widespread criminality and accumulating evidence of misconduct, Secretary of Expense Caspar Weinberger initiated disciplinary actions against the naval officer who approved an eleven part $659 ashtray. Presumably, relieving the officer of command had a sobering effect on the 400,000 bureaucrats entrenched in the Pentagon's procurement offices —especially those with career commitments to absurdity. Many of these have devoted themselves to expanding the Defense department's definition of "Procurer" to cover someone who overcharges an anonymous party (i.e., the taxpayer) for something more than just a simple screw.

Updating this theme of waste and changing the image of mismanagement to the field of human software, a memo from commander of the Navy's surface Atlantic fleet Vice Admiral Joseph S. Donnell characterized lesbian sailors as "Hard-working, career-oriented, willing to put in long hours on the job and among the command's top performers". One might think that characterization would serve as a reason for recruiting lesbians into the Navy, but whoever said the Navy was reasonable? The document concluded that lesbians should be rooted out of the service, and if there is something counter-productive in this, it is at least consistent with the prevailing rather square Pentagon policy, which maintains that homosexuality is incompatible with military service. This attitude remains despite the fact that two studies commissioned by the Pentagon found no evidence that homosexuals disrupted the armed forces but rather praised their performance and urged their retention. The Department of Defense initially suppressed these reports and then dismissed them as unresponsive to the original research request, which was to confirm the reigning schema— the demonstrably fallacious notion that the presence of homosexuals was detrimental to military efficiency.

If the defense establishment policy toward efficient and productive gays is decidedly hostile and costly, the relationship of America to its natural environment is basically parasitic if not suicidal. However, we have surprisingly few illusions about ourselves being anything but exploiters, as we simultaneously rape and poison our life support system. Eventually, such behavior will limit our development, and we are actually hastening that day, in that we have made exploitation something of a cultural virtue.

There are two factors which are crucial to the systematic desecration of the environment: 1.) the organization and mobilization of people for the task, and 2.) the development of machinery to facilitate the process. Our population is well suited in both quantity and quality to wrecking the environment in that there are too many of us committed to a standard of living beyond the carrying capacity of nature—that is, to a standard which is attainable for only a limited period of time. In addition, there is specialization and division of labor in our attack on the environment: those not actively engaged in ravaging the land usually devote their energies to polluting the air and water. All this is done in the name of profit and for the sake of more bigger and costlier possessions for as many people as possible. It is rather sad to realize that the ultimate limits for population growth will be determined not by reasoned planning but by the efficiency with which we poison ourselves and convert our urban centers into behavioral sewers.

To accelerate this process of social suicide, we have turned to machines and computers. The guiding maxim is that the world must be made safe for technology. The worst part of this trend is not that we are evermore efficient at wrecking the environment but that we are bent on creating a world in which machines rather than people can thrive. To the extent that we become robots, we too may fit into the world we are creating. However, our success in adapting will be directly related to our willingness to renounce the differences between humanity and computers. Civilization has developed to the point that we will have to become less human as we adapt to the technology which creates us.

The message of contemporary America to itself is perfectly clear: people are out. They are obsolete, except to the extent they can serve computers. The age-old tradition of humans adapting to their tools has reached the pointless point that all phenomena (like feelings) which cannot be quantified for computers have been rendered irrelevant by them. In this sense, technology and modern art lack the same essential element—they are both devoid of human emotion.

People and feelings were distorted and abstracted out of art early in this century. As artists sought novelty of expression for its own sake, emotional impoverishment came to reign in a world of any and all contrived means devoted to no particular end. Just as modern composers labor to eliminate the distinction between music and noise, modern artists express the extreme of total irrelevance that civilization has achieved. As exercises in cognitive and spiritual futility, contemporary art reflects the moral bankruptcy of Western institutions and life.

This bankruptcy is further demonstrated by the way many serious social problems develop unexpectedly, often resulting from neglect, ignorance and wishful thinking. For example, when the government insisted on busing school children in and out of cities, about 30% of the white suburban school population simply dropped out of the public school system and went to private schools. It is certainly to be hoped that the equalization of academic training achieved by busing between urbs and suburbs compensates for the effects of discrimination on the students, and to the extent that the goal of integration was achieved, liberals must have been gratified. However, the discriminatory method applied was counter-productive in that it drove off many of the students counted on to serve as "Racial units" in the bus-drive to substitute one bunch of equal kids for another. Of course, this has been a lesson largely wasted on departments of human services.

The contemporary mania for social equality might be laudable were not egalitarians so passionately committed to leveling downward. Formal educational systems cannot be expected to improve society because schools are now primarily social institutions designed to bring young people together in an integrated setting. The commitment to academics is not dead, but it is distinctly second to our efforts to create equal citizens. Naturally, this makes any gesture toward excellence awkwardly out of place.

In addition to our egalitarian bent, a commitment to illusion rather than achievement contributed to the deterioration of academic standards over the past few decades. At the same time that we were inflating our currency to create the illusion that we were getting more than we earned, we were inflating our diplomas to create the illusion that students were accomplishing more than they learned. Of course, cheapening grades does nothing for the learning process, but it makes a lot of students feel good about themselves. The long-term result is that bloated grades and diplomas cease to be of value to anyone, but that is irrelevant to those who live in a world of symbols.

Sad to say, not everyone loses equally. Those who are the real losers are the students who need to develop skills for coping in the job market because those who need extra help are the ones most likely to get inflated grades rather than more training. Worse yet, those who aspire to escape the inner cities may have to attend schools which are physically the oldest and in which teacher turnover is the highest.

Further, in developing analytical stupidity and frustrating artistic ability, American educational institutions are highly one-sided in that they concentrate intensely on the verbal left hemisphere of the brain. As befitting a highly industrialized society, the abilities to focus on fantasies, ignore facts, misapply rules and massage data to confirm preconceived illusions are all cultivated in our classrooms and labs. Rather than being wellsprings of creativity, our schools and colleges are devoted to propagating acceptable answers to established questions. In the sterility of academics, everything is reduced to reason while being renders irrelevant.

In the world at large, leaders are often the worst students and quite reluctant to learn about and understand what they are doing. Mental stagnation at upper levels of government is as common as is supposed, since rulers usually strive to maintain intact the schemas with which they started. No less of a pundit than Henry Kissinger noted that leaders of state do not learn beyond their convictions. Experience may confirm beliefs or lead to minor adjustments of policy, but the mighty are ill disposed to learn they are wrong about anything. In contrast to our victory over Iraq, our government backed losers in China, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran in its commitment to demonstrate America's inability to profit from its losses for the sake of being itself.

Maintaining "Identity" can really be most stupefying, as demonstrated in Louisiana in the 1960's when local officials were proceeding with all deliberate sloth to integrate the schools. A proposal that integration be started in kindergarten and then proceed one grade per year for twelve years was rejected because it would work. The good ol' boys in power did not want a plan that would work; they wanted to be themselves. The only problem with "Being yourself" is that it can create so much difficulty for everyone.

Frank Serpico was just such a problem. He wanted to be a good policeman, which to him meant upholding the law. This made him something of an anomaly in New York City during the mid-1960's. Officer Serpico found that bribery, graft and extortion were such common forms of police behavior that cop after cop was encouraged by the prevailing norms to go on the take. In a department awash in its own arrogance, he made a career of making enemies among his colleagues by the unheard of practice of policing the police. Naturally, by standing on principle, he became known as a trouble maker because he insisted on pointing out trouble where it existed. His career was ended by a serious wound received when his colleagues left him out on a limb during a drug raid.

Even so, in terms of cleaning up the police department, Serpico's efforts were not totally in vain. Although the department ignored him as best it could for as long as possible, he finally went to the newspapers and generated enough publicity to bring about some temporary reforms. However, the point here is that he had to fight against the system just to get it to live up to its own stated standards. He was peculiarly obsessed with the notion that the government should obey the law. He discovered the hard way that the Nixonian doctrine that officials are above the law is rather common in American life, and this wisdom and his integrity was lost to the nation when he went into self-assumed exile in Europe.

In this vein, a person who insists on asserting his integrity in a world of cons and scams really can be annoying. An Hispanic, with the unlikely name of Henry Harrison, proved this point when he became a fly in the ointment of integration by insisting on doing what he felt was right. In 1984, Mr. Harrison was a fireman in Miami when he asked his superiors to remove his name from a promotion list so that he would not advance over colleagues he considered more deserving. Chief Ken McCullogh expressed shock and confusion over Harrison's reluctance to take advantage of Affirmative Action guidelines to move ahead of fellow workers who had scored higher in the qualification process. From Harrison's standpoint, his decision might be considered stupid, in that he was sacrificing his own advancement for the sake of creating a more efficient fire department. The ironic point is that he had to do this in the face of regulations and expectations of the system, which was set up to promote people according to qualities irrelevant to job performance. How nice it might be if advancement of individuals within a group and improvement of group efficiency went together rather than being at odds with one another.

As vexing as officer Serpico's acts of conscience were for the establishment, Mr. Harrison's was even more so because he showed that simply obeying or abiding by the laws and rules is not enough if those regulations themselves are unconscionable. Beyond commandments inscribed in stone, Constitutions written on parchment and laws compiled in books, there is a spirit which animates a culture. It is this which provides an ethical and moral basis for judging the stupidity of official schemas. The irony inherent in culture is that our religious beliefs are so often at odds with our behavioral norms.

This problem is particularly confusing for Americans, because, more than any other nation on earth, we are a hodgepodge descended from Europeans, Africans, Asians and native Americans. We are Christians, Jews and atheists. We are capitalists, fascists and socialists. We are a dynamic conflict of many competing interests all bent on getting more than their share of the national pie. No student of society, government or economics can look upon us without a sense of bewildered amazement. If life is a temporary state of dynamically imbalanced conditions, and it is, America is certainly very much alive, but that such a chaos of conflicting schemas can flourish is due in large part to the stupidity of Americans who resolutely refuse to perceive inconsistencies where they exist. Only those who are stupid enough to try to understand what is going on find that it could not possibly "Make sense". Oddly, there is both security and danger in the incomprehensibility of the American experience: we are too complex to be wrecked by deliberate planning, but we have lost control of our own fate.

The basic problem of America is one of breadth without depth. With so much to draw on in terms of both human and natural resources, national character was shaped by pragmatic, short-term policies geared to specific and often isolated situations. So often, as both the New Dealers and Watergate Gang found, solutions became problems: the reaction to bad business and bad politics was bad government. The only thing we do not have is an American way of wrecking the country. American stupidity is creative in that there seems to be no limit on the ways we can find to take a bad situation and make it worse.

Ironically, the national commitment to our own well-being has become a fatal break preventing us from achieving the progress politicians are always proclaiming or promising. Progress is a matter of passing beyond an existing state of affairs. In a material sense, this means developing a higher standard of living, and this we have achieved. However, attaining the physical comforts of material prosperity has made us both proud and uneasy, as there has been no progress toward peace of mind. Behind our pride exists the gnawing realization that immediate compassion and concern for the downtrodden and dispossessed cannot be converted into legislative programs of any significant long-term success. Slums, apathy, ignorance and stupidity remain as real and potent as ever before. In human terms, America represents little in terms of progress or even promise for the future.

Notes