-Caveat Lector- NATION OF CHILDREN, NATION OF AMNESIACS By Carla Binion >From the moment George W. Bush was declared president-installed, certain political leaders and media pundits have told the rest of the American people to: (1) Quickly forget voting irreguarlities in Florida, and (2) Revere our rulers and pundits, as if we were children and they embodied all parental wisdom. Here are the reasons why it is a bad idea that we become a nation of amnesiacs, and a nation of children: Both George Orwell and Aldous Huxley imagined an eerie dystopic future, where democracy would be destroyed because citizens did not remember their own history. Huxley's vision in BRAVE NEW WORLD involved a nation so entranced with diversion-seeking that its people voluntarily gave up democracy in favor of hypnotically sucking the pacifier of non-stop entertainment. Today television pundits urge people to move from one news event to another at warp speed. We are not even supposed to remember history that happened as recently as a few weeks ago. For example, the public barely began to digest the fact that thousands of voters complained of voting irregularities in Florida. Before we could assimilate that piece of information and respond intelligently, TV talking heads and politicians badgered us to forget that story and focus on the "newer" news -- that of giddily embracing a Bush presidency. Neil Postman laments the "present-centered" nature of television news in his classic AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH. He says, "Tyrants of all varieties have always known the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent." Television news, says Postman, helps render people unfit to remember. He adds that, by contrast, remembering history gives us necessary context -- "something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned." Postman quotes journalist Bill Moyers, "I worry that my own business helps to make this an anxious age of agitated amnesiacs. We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years." Here are some important historical facts to remember, in order to put recent political events into context: The American people -- the generations alive today -- have been handed an extraordinary opportunity. Our ancestors bled and died so that we might self-govern by electing representatives and then holding those representatives accountable. Third world nations do not have that same opportunity. It is also important to remember that the electorate, we average Americans, are the parents -- not the children -- of our government. When TV talking heads and political leaders speak about "giving" civil-rights advocates a voice, or, for example, not "allowing" a Jesse Jackson to challenge Florida's voting irregularities, those leaders assume a parental role. Civil liberties advocates are not the children of media pundits or politicians. Pundits and politicians do not "give" the public a voice. As Donaldo Macedo writes in LITERACIES OF POWER, that voice is not a gift. It is both a human right and a democratic right. It is a right won after our ancestors sweated and struggled long and hard, and it was finally enacted into law. However, laws that support civil liberties are fragile in the hands of political leaders who think that they are the parents, and that the majority of Americans are their children. Macedo, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, talks about political leaders' antidemocratic efforts to sanitize public discourse and keep the public unknowledgeable about important politic realities -- a process he calls "stupidification." He says the call for less strident descriptions of human rights violations is a call to "bleach" the subject of meaning. The request for "gracious" discourse is often a thinly disguised plea for verbal whitewashing. Macedo adds that it is dangerous for the public to pretend that empty slogans such as "freedom," "liberty," "equality," and "democracy" are realities already fully won. If we falsely believe we have attained those ideals, we neglect the fact that winning them is an ongoing battle. When the civil rights of one group of Americans are violated, it injures us all. Historian Howard Zinn writes about the southern abolitionist Angelina Grimke whose fellow abolitionists said they should not promote sexual equality because "it was so outrageous to the common mind that it would hurt the campaign for the abolition of slavery." Grimke responded: "We cannot push Abolitionism forward with all our might until we take up the stumbling block out of the road....If we surrender the right to speak in public this year, we must surrender the right to petition next year, and the right to write the year after, and so on. What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?" What can a nation of children do for fellow Americans whose voting rights were violated if we stay (some of us voluntarily) subservient to parental media pundits and paternal political leaders? In THE SIBLING SOCIETY, Robert Bly uses the word "sibling" as a metaphor for adults who are not fully grown up. Siblings, says Bly, have no interest in history, and no concern for those less fortunate than themselves. They do not participate in their own political system. Bly asks why such large numbers of Americans choose to remain children, saying, "Serious participation in politics is at an all-time low; Congress allows corporations to meet air quality standards by lowering the standards. We are always under commercial pressure to slide backward, toward adolescence, toward childhood." It is not in the best interest of average citizens to choose amnesia and eternal childhood over remembering history and actively participating, as mature adults would, in our nation's political life. Yes, we are all busy, and at times it appears our lives revolve only around making money and attending to only our own immediate concerns. However, focusing only on our personal lives and failing to put current events into historical context are the very behaviors that make us a nation of children and a nation of amnesiacs. We have been instructed by media pundits and certain politics leaders to forget what happened in Florida and to blindly suck the newest media pacifier -- namely, the upcoming Bush inauguration extravaganza. What should we graciously suggest our paternalistic leaders to do with that pacifier instead? <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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