Re: Why can’t I cheer?
On Oct 16, 2006, at 10:47 AM, Chuck Grimes wrote:
It’s something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. It has something to do with the idea that first of all the people of this country or at least the voters put these jerks in power, when it was promised to be a very bad idea in the first place. Now that it has finally, some six years too late dawned on enough of them, that yes, it was a bad thing to do and they put them in for bad reasons. The elected jerks might go, but the people who put them in haven’t changed.
What element of the higher circles - what would-be element - has such
immorality not touched? Perhaps all those cases that come briefly to
public attention are but marginal - or, at any rate, those that were
caught. But then, there is the feeling that the bigger you are, the
less likely you are to be caught. There is the feeling that all the
petty cases seem to signify something grander, that they go deeper
and that their roots are now well organized in the higher and middle
American ways of life. But among the mass distractions this feeling
soon passes harmlessly away. For the American distrust of the high
and mighty is a distrust without doctrine and without political
focus; it is a distrust felt by the mass public as a series of more
or less cynically expected disclosures. Corruption and immoralities,
petty and grand, are facts about the higher circles, often even
characteristic facts about many of them. But the immoral tone of
American society today also involves the lack of public sensibility
when confronted with these facts. Effective moral indignation is not
evoked by the corrupt public life of our time; the old middle-class
moralities have been replaced in America by the higher immorality.
[…]
‘Crisis’ is a bankrupted term, because so many men in high places
have evoked it in order to cover up their extraordinary policies and
deeds; as a matter of fact, it is precisely the absence of crises
that is a cardinal feature of the higher immorality. For genuine
crises involve situations in which men at large are presented with
genuine alternatives, the moral meanings of which are clearly opened
to public debate. The higher immorality, the general weakening of
older values and the organization of ir responsibility have not
involved any public crises; on the contrary, they have been matters
of a creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out.
- C Wright Mills, The Power Elite, pp. 341, 345