I've been thinking about this all day long. Last night when I read Krugman it sort of stuck in my unconscious as too un believable, too consummately evil a thought to be real in America. Are you all, and Krugman, saying that the dumbing down of America is deliberate?
The horrendous implications of such a statement, for the fulfillment and life's work of individual Americans, is so immoral, beyond sinful, that it constitutes a form of intellectual genocide for market purposes. Immoral but it could have been predicted. It's not so strange when you realize that the bloom of European culture happened after 1492 when the money began to roll in from the gold and silver of this continent. The whole blossom of European wealth and the theories of wealth and economics flow from the ravages of North, Central and South America. The cultural hierarchy and the flow of humanism from Shakespeare to Blake to the Heilige Kunst of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Shakespeare, the Camerata di Bardi with Vincenzo Galileo and the creation of the operatic form and his son [who practically invented Western Science straight out of the discussions of acoustics and art in the Camerata] all flowed from the rape and pillage of the Americas and wealth they found here. It began with bodies and slavery and continues even today in the Natural Resources where the very Mountains are being eaten to feed the beast. It was a great cultural blossom in Europe that sped across the world in Empire. The people who came here first were not a part of that cultural blossom. Like the poor of Ireland they were not a part of the wealthy training of the European servants who would come to America and begin the 66,000 opera companies all over America from all of the European countries with orchestras criss crossing the country so much that one Railroad was known as the Thomas Orchestral Highway. They were poor but they had airs. And they learned and America was born of an idea built in the mixed values of cultural interaction. Later the Europeans culture would flood the country and create what the composer Charles Ives called a cultural paradise that was short lived. The cultural bloom came from the wealth so they thought culture was a product of wealth because it WAS, for Europe. Whole theories of economics sprang from the experience of Rape and Pillage. It took two horrible world wars to break the habit in Europe but before that there were wars every 25 years for five hundred years. They got practice here and took the habit home. But the cultural Oak trees of European Classical Art when coming to America declined into the bushs of country western and popular trinkets and trash barroom cultural identity. Even in the churches and synagogues of today. They are completing the removal of the worth of the competent and masterful individualism that drove Mozart, Beethoven and the musicians up through the great musical studios with Mahler and Schoenberg. They scream for liberty but have no desire to earn it through competence and culture. The plains were too wide, the forests too sparse for the European Oaks with their shallow all too recent root structures. The forests of European culture still holds, in Europe, but there are holes breaking through in spite of the French and the Germans. To maintain a forest with shallow roots you have to keep up the practice of planting. In America we have eaten the seed corn and now we are starting on the children's cultural heritage that once belonged to the University. Feeding on the children. Not the money for social security and medical care. Their souls. Junk food, junk religion and junk legacy. anonymous From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 11:48 AM To: 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] NYTimes.com: Degrees and Dollars Sounds like the need for a redefinition of work and culture from the market paradigm. Your problem is not so different from the ancient times when instead of automation they had slaves that were replaceable. They didn't solve it either. Ancient Greece like Peru really had only a couple of hundred years of glory before they collapsed under the work virus. You have to solve the problem of the meaning of work and its value beyond the simplicities of the market. best, anonymous From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Gurstein Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 8:35 AM To: [email protected]; 'RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION' Subject: Re: [Futurework] NYTimes.com: Degrees and Dollars Thanks very much for this Sally... It is an argument that has been waiting to be made for almost a generation -- going back to the earliest days of automating white collar work in offices. The question is where to go with this... As I mentioned in the blogpost I pointed out to Lawry, the issue being raised here is probably most immediate in the MENA revolution countries since the revolution there was in large part by youth against their immediate situation of unemployment, including the unemployment among educated youth. The solution that will need to be found will not be the easy one (sufficient only to postpone the requirement to address the issue directly) that is how to create meaningful employment for vast numbers of young people when the solutions of "modernization" i.e. neo-liberal privatization, automation, outsourcing etc. have (even if corruptly) been partially introduced already over the last half dozen years at the urging of the usual gang of Big Four consultatns, World Bank, IMF, USAID etc.etc. (I've discussed this to a limited degree in a different blogpost on Tunisia http://wp.me/pJQl5-4o My feeling is that there will be a need to change the paradigm and go for intensification of human service delivery (with ICT supports) and withdrawal from global markets especially for services and very likely the use of alternative currencies to pay for this through local exchange systems rather than globally convertible ones. It will be wrenching and may not be possible but the current track to my mind, at least in those countries and others (with the likely exception of China and possibly India) is more or less completely blocked. Nothing of this is of course, possible in the short run in the US--we've seen the reaction to the beginnings of this for years there already with the vast increase in the numbers incarcerated, the dumbing down of the education system which reduces the demand for intellectually fullfilling jobs, and the externatlization of the anger onto immigrants. Mike -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: Monday, March 07, 2011 9:58 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] NYTimes.com: Degrees and Dollars http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif <http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York TimesE-mail This http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif This page was sent to you by: [email protected] OPINION | March 07, 2011 Op-Ed Columnist: <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?emc=eta1> Degrees and Dollars By PAUL KRUGMAN The hollow promise of good jobs for highly educated workers. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif Copyright 2011 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html> The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/> | Privacy Policy <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/privacy.html> http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifhttp://www.nytimes.com/ad x/bin/adx_remote.html?type=noscript&page=emailthis.nytimes.com/openrate&posa ll=Bottom1&pos=Bottom1&query=qstring&keywords=
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