George Carlin – Engaging Peace

by Stefan Schindler

Part One: YESTERDAY’S STORM AND TOMORROW’S RAINBOW

There is nothing stable in the world; uproar’s your only music. – John Keats

Fifty years after President Eisenhower launched a multi-trillion dollar arms race with the Soviet Union, the Cheney-Bush Administration (in a version of “the boy who cried wolf”) saw fit to shout the greatest and most dangerous lie in American history, claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and repeating – day after day, week after week, in the post-9/11 rush to vengeance and preemptive war – “Mushroom cloud! Mushroom cloud! Mushroom cloud!”

Thus did Cheney-Bush – and their cabal of Gingrichian sycophants, aided by a cheering mainstream news media – bring to fruition the nightmare envisioned in Bob Dylan’s 1963 tour de force, “Masters of War.” Dylan sings, and the lyrics still resonate:

You’ve thrown the worst fear / that can ever be hurled:

fear to bring children / into the world.

In the dawning of the year 2019, it remains to be seen whether President Donald Trump will also escape punishment for his narcissistic and multitudinous lies, for his continuation of American militaristic violence, and for his Reagan-Cheney-Bush-like crimes – economic and ecological – against the American people and the planet.

In what Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia,” the Orwellian ignoration of the citizen population continues unabated. For example:

I go to the store and buy some stamps. The clerk hands me a packet. Each stamp has an American flag on it. In the lower left hand corner of each stamp is written “USA Forever” – a truly insidious slogan. Nothing lasts forever. Not a season; not a life; not an empire. George Carlin said: “That’s why they call it the American dream. You have to be asleep to believe it.”

In 1821, John Quincy Adams warned that America should not go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” for in doing so, “she might become the dictatress of the world, [but] she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”

In the late 1890s, Mark Twain witnessed America’s imperial acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the Spanish-American war. Twain responded with an observation not taught in school: “America’s flag should be a skull-and-crossbones.” Then he added: “America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.” Adams and Twain understood that empire and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Lyndon Johnson said in 1964 that he did not want “a wider war” in Vietnam, even as he was lying about events in the Gulf of Tonkin and planning the invasion that President Kennedy refused to launch. Richard Nixon said he would bring The Vietnam War to an early end with “peace and honor,” yet disgraced himself with a heartless disregard for peace and an utter lack of honor, becoming the first American president to resign from office.

Due to the lies and depredations of Johnson and Nixon, the American people grew increasingly suspicious of their political leaders. That distrust deepened into cynicism when President George W. Bush’s claim – that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” which he then used as a pretext for war – proved to be an outrageous lie. And now, alas, Donald Trump inhabits the White House, proving once again that a Nixonian neurotic and Bush-whacking ideologue can become the most powerful and most dangerous man in the world.

Yet all is not lost, not hopeless, not without redemptive possibilities. Despite the forces of obstruction, the American landscape is filled with a multitude of brave, inquisitive, vocal, active, dedicated justice-seekers and peacemakers. They recognize that they are not alone, that solidarity is our only hope, and that their collective voice indicates something like A Renaissance of The Renaissance. They – We! – know who Tom Paine was, and why he wrote “Common Sense” and “The Rights of Man.”

We know that John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed for their courage of conscience; and because we refuse to let their lives and deaths be in vain, we carry the torch they lit for a sane and better world. We dare, with John Lennon, to Imagine. We know that there are millions around the world who feel the same, and who are also doing their part to bequeath to a new generation the world of peace and beauty they deserve. Accordingly, we shall not despair; we shall not relinquish hope; and we shall indeed do whatever is necessary to restore America’s tarnished ideals to their once and future glory, for the sake of all humanity, and for Mother Earth and all her blessings.

Stefan Schindler

…………………….

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War. His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

by Guest Author Stefan Schindler

“Fascism ought more rightly to be called corporatism, since it embodies the fusion of state and corporate power.”

Benito Mussolini

“That’s how wars start. Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.”

Karl Kraus

“America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”

Mark Twain

To manipulate, ignorate, stupefy, distort and deceive – such is the primary function of America’s mainstream news media, political establishment, and compulsory system of miseducation. George Carlin declared: “That’s why they call it the American dream. You have to be asleep to believe it.”

The Weapons of Mass Dysfunction employed by the national security state and corporate elite have also infected America’s colleges and universities. How else to explain the explosion of high-paid bureaucrats, the implosion of student minds, a 50% faculty of adjunct teachers with slave-labor wages, the astronomical rise in tuition, collective student debt now more than a trillion dollars, and the graduated lunatics who assume positions of political power?

Gore Vidal once observed that in the United States of Amnesia, “words are used to confuse so that citizens vote against their own best interest.”

Recalling Plato’s cave parable, Howard Zinn observed: “The truth is so often the opposite of what we are told that we can no longer turn our heads around far enough to see it.”

Noam Chomsky adds the koan-like conclusion: “The problem is not that people don’t know; it’s that they don’t know they don’t know.”

Did I use the verb “ignorate” in my opening sentence? Yes indeed. We have the word “educate.” Why not “ignorate” – especially if it names the fundamental rot at the core of American politics and culture?

Of course, not all graduates are historically illiterate and ethically warped. Great teachers, informed writers, astute students, ethical businessmen and women, brilliant artists, morally authentic political activists and office holders – they are by no means absent in American society.

From William James and Mark Twain to I. F. Stone and Martin Luther King; from Mother Jones and Emma Goldman to Hellen Keller and Dorothy Day; from Woody Guthrie and Lenny Bruce to Dalton Trumbo and James Baldwin; from Sam Cooke and Muhammad Ali to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan – the United States has always had its politically enlightened rebels. Of course, they don’t agree on everything. But they are independent thinkers, and they do follow in the footsteps of Thomas Paine.

Nevertheless, their ideas are mostly drowned-out by the blizzard of epistemological confetti blown relentlessly at the American populace by mainstream news, ubiquitous advertising, and pseudo-“conservative” talk radio. Result? An American economic apartheid more egregious than the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression and World War Two.

What is to be done?

In addition to dismantling the American empire – the largest empire in world history, with a thousand military bases scattered across the globe – we can start by integrating “ignorate” into our educational and collective vocabulary, as a way of diagnosing the linguistic poison that more or less began with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, was perfected and championed by Newt Gingrich, and climaxed in George W. Bush and Donald Trump, generating the divisive sophistry that went unchallenged and was silently sanctioned by Republican Lite (i.e., the almost equally soulless Democratic Party).

In addition to “ignorate,” we also need to employ the word “interbeing.”

Interbeing names the socially relevant discovery of quantum physics: All things are thing-events, and all thing-events are interconnected, interdependent, interpenetrating. To be is to interbe.

This was illustrated by Chief Seattle when he said: “What we do to the earth we do to ourselves.”

Interbeing was also long ago affirmed by Socrates, Jesus and Buddha when they said that what we do to others we do to ourselves. Hence they recommended a pragmatic path to the Peaceable Kingdom by the individual and collective practice of the Golden Rule at the heart of the Torah: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

If we commit to moving in that direction, we could inaugurate an educational and political revolution that would light the world.

Bio: A graduate of Dickinson College, guest author Stefan Schindler taught philosophy, psychology and religion for 40 years at institutions of higher learning, including The University of Pennsylvania, La Salle University, Berklee College of Music, and the Boston and Brookline Centers for Adult Education. Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon. He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.

TO ENGAGE OR NOT TO ENGAGE – THAT IS THE QUESTION

TO EDUCATE OR IGNORATE: That is The Question