DOOMSAYER!!

Professor Henry A. Giroux Knocks It Out of the Park in Salon.com

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SATURDAY, JUN 24, 2017 07:00 AM MDT

Manufactured illiteracy and miseducation: A long process of decline led to President Donald Trump 

A deep-rooted crisis in education, and a long cultural and political decline, is what got us here. There's hope! 

HENRY A. GIROUX

I am wholeheartedly recommending you read this article.

It's a straight-up super piece of reality, a facing of facts, and a powerful call to action.
Just what Doomsayers are supposed to do, get us off our duffs.

Go read it at Salon!

A FEW HIGHLIGHTS. (Kind of like the briefing before the battle.) Cliffs notes of Prof Giroux's diagnostics on where the U.S. of A. is slipping off the tracks:

-a plague of deep-seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system and a contempt for reason

-the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship

-a politics of bigotry and hate is transformed into a spectacle of demonization, division and disinformation.

-the menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, threats and humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization and violence that looms over society like a rising storm.

-a dis-imagination machine, characterized by an utter disregard for the truth and often accompanied by the president’s tweet-storm of “primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.”

-George Orwell’s famous maxim from “Nineteen Eighty-four,” “Ignorance is Strength,”

-Truth is now viewed as a liability and ignorance a virtue. Under the reign of this normalized architecture of alleged common sense, literacy is regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data and science is confused with pseudo-science.

-ignorance becomes the primary organizing principle of American society. For instance, two-thirds of the American public believe that creationism should be taught in schools and a majority of Republicans in Congress do not believe that climate change is caused by human activity, making the U.S. the laughing stock of the world.

-the wider culture has been transformed into a spectacle for violence and trivialized entertainment, and a tool for legitimating ignorance.

-illiteracy becomes the norm and education becomes central to a version of zombie politics that functions largely to remove democratic values, social relations,and compassion from the ideology, policies and commanding institutions that now control American society.

-Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence, unbridled self-interest and the never-ending whirlwind of consumption.

-contemptuous and boisterous claim that science and evidence-based truths are “fake news,”

-illiteracy now constitutes the modus operandi of a society that both privatizes and kills the imagination by poisoning it with falsehoods, consumer fantasies, data loops and the need for instant gratification. This is a mode of illiteracy and education that has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship. 

-illiteracy is also about refusing to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency.

-authoritarian society that eliminates public spheres that make thinking possible while imposing a culture of fear in which there is the looming threat that anyone who holds power accountable will be punished.

-forms of historical, political and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

-Such a vision suggests resurrecting a democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in massive inequality and endless assaults on the environment, a social order that elevates war and militarization to the highest and most sanctified national ideals.

OK, I'M OFF MY DUFF!  Awkward, that, being a Duff myself.

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