When the Truth Is Called Defeatism

When activists in America consider the unbelievable apathy of the American people, there are generally two reactions.

The first is to invoke the hackneyed ideology of ‘the people as victims of an oppressive government;’ the second is to psychologize the palpable indifference of the American people to what’s happening in society and the world. Both are predictable, and inadequate responses.

Of course, there is a third tried and true way--simply deny that we’re a broken people, and thereby help sustain the plague of deadness that gripped America well before Bush-Cheney, and has been spreading throughout the world since.

Because denial isn’t holding water anymore, the question of how a people become broken, and what brings about healing, is the only serious and viable way to proceed.

There’s a disturbing agreement between conservatives and progressives on this issue. Reacting to the underlying truths, people on both sides of the spectrum say, “Shut up about how doomed we are.” That attests to a curious congruence between the reactionary’s demand to “think positive,” and the activist’s injunction against “defeatism.”

In short, the boilerplate explanations that many progressives hold for the moribund state of American citizenry, bolstered by banal psychological diagnoses, have grown stale beyond the pale.

It’s just lazy thinking to say, “Truths about how Americans have been victimized have led to shame about how they have allowed it…causing them to feel helpless to effect change.” Drawing an analogy between abusive spouses and an abusive government simply doesn’t cut it.

Let’s begin with a right question: “What forces have created a demoralized, passive, discouraged U.S. population?”

We have to dispense with the “oppressed people” ideology where some peoples, especially Americans, are concerned. Certainly there are places, notably in Africa, where peoples are blatantly oppressed and manipulated. But the subtlety of the ‘oppression’ in the United States, and the real-time reactiveness of the market (including the political market) to the American people’s wants and desires compels us to take a deeper look.

Having predicted the Bush-Cheney win in 2000, Gulf War II in 2003, and the reelection of Bush-Cheney in 2004, I’ll claim a little column cred, not so much for doing so, but for giving the reasons why all three scenarios were all but inevitable to my mind.

We on the Left have willfully neglected the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions, and they have been used to beat us at the workplace and the ballot box for decades. Allow me, through personal anecdote, to speak to these dimensions.

The day after Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 (we need to go back a bit), I knew America was going to invade Iraq with as many ‘allies’ as we could muster. I was certain the whole thing had been set up, politically and metaphysically. (That intuition was later verified when US Ambassador to Iraq Gillespie admitted that she was told to say nothing to Hussein when she met with him as he massed troops on the border, thus giving ‘our boy’ during the Iran/Iraq war what he thought was a green light.) I was roundly criticized before both wars for giving speeches and writing columns saying we had to prepare for the aftermath, because the invasions were a fait accompli. The pattern of Gulf War I was replicated, from even greater evil and with far more devastating impact on the human spirit, under George Junior in Gulf War II.

Right after America’s glorious victory in the first Gulf War, having tested our new generation of high-tech weapons and succeeded in killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to less than 200 Americans, I went into a funk. Having experienced depression in my ‘20’s, I knew it wasn’t that, or even something personal at all. Living in Silicon Valley at the time, I took walks in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay a few times a week, whenever I could get away. I kept asking, what is this feeling?

A few weeks after the war ended, I was still in a funk and still asking the question why. One day, while walking, I asked again. For the first and only time in my life, a voice that didn’t seem to come from my own head said with great depth and finality, “You’re in mourning.” That’s it! I thought, with the relief of one who finally knows what’s ailing him. My next question was instantaneous: What am I mourning? “You’re mourning the death of your nation’s soul,” came the reverberating response. The gut feeling of the truth in that moment has remained all these years, and helped explain much.

The eventual, ineluctable political manifestation was the election of Bush-Cheney in 2000. And, because the death of the ‘American spirit’ hadn’t been acknowledged and faced by a sufficient minority of people, we reinvaded Iraq, and Bush-Cheney were reelected in 2004.

There are pundits in the United States who say with a straight face that “our inward-looking culture” is the problem. That’s rich. It absurdly and willfully confuses the obsessive externalization, materialism, and isolationism of Americans with anything that resembles looking within. (For the first time in our history, the existential orientation of our outward-looking culture may be changing. People across income and educational levels say they’ve begun valuing the quality of their experiences over the quantity of things they can put into bigger and bigger houses and cars.)

Some years ago, Bill Moyers said (after the people’s death had already occurred): “A people can die from too many lies.” An essential intactness is lost, and cannot be recovered without a deep reckoning. Of course, Obama uses that word now, but it’s a lie, because there has been no reckoning. Though far better than the alternative, Barack catapulted to the presidency by capitalizing on people’s hopes and wishful thinking after eight excruciating years under Bush-Cheney.

What is the resolution? Regeneration cannot occur without acceptance of fact. The death of a nation’s soul, or, if you prefer, the loss of a people’s essential intactness, cannot be denied, cut to fit a Procrustean ideology, or psychologized in an overly-psychologized culture that hands out anti-depressants like antibiotics.

Death, whether of a loved one or a people, must be faced, felt, and passed through. Only then can there be renewal, regeneration, and a new way of living.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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