FROM MY CORNER

America: Ancient Greece Revisited

A people known as The Dorians, it is speculated by historians, dismantled ancient Mycanae. Later, from this occurrence, emerged the Greek launch of our own eventual Western civilization. Our current president is (unknown to the historically illiterate Trump himself) essentially mimicking The Dorians.

He and his corporate allies are striving to dismantle some 250+ years of American government. As they do so, they keep the American public off balance with absurdist media spectacles specifically designed to divert our attention.

When Greece finally emerged from Mycenae’s dismantling, its people developed an exemplary culture. It is particularly notable that their amazing sense of ethics and honorable political standards were achieved under desperately poor conditions.

Greece’s savagely rocky physical geography forced a rigidly stubborn poverty upon its people. However, due to this they built a profound sense of community and a culture we inherited but have now allowed to become endangered.

Rather than seeking truth, our inordinately rich capitalist corporate culture has embraced lies and deception to enhance their wealth, knowingly conscious that they do so at the cost of economic deprivation for millions of their countrymen.

Trump and corporations (particularly the Kochs) have their eye on some of the most valid underpinnings of our society. They are impoverishing our very culture to safeguard and markedly enhance their billions of dollars of accumulated treasure.

They are able to do this because of the political and ethical laxity of the American middle class. While Trump and his allied corporate cabal strive to return America to relatively Pre-Dorian status, the middle class sit dumbly by, protecting their own modest and fragile wealth.

For a false sense of security, the middle class have allowed our government to abandon thousands of homeless veterans; they have passively helped abandon Puerto Rican Americans; they have remained mute as inroads to the corporatization of Social Security and other public safeguards have inched forward.

Trumpism is largely a direct consequence of a near-sighted middle class, a dubiously-educated group refusing to become politically engaged in their own tenuous status, selling the rest of the country to a power determined to dominate America solely for personal profit.

You might ask, “What could America’s middle class do?” Well, they could ask all their religious leaders to organize a nationally collaborative movement demanding the government start serving the financial needs of all people, not just primarily giant corporations; they could fill Washington’s streets with their bodies insisting Puerto Ricans obtain adequate help.

Additionally, they could join the kids in the streets for saner gun management; and how about they all personally pledge to start helping all the homeless by donating five percent of their monthly incomes directly to those in their towns until they have gotten back on their feet?

The front page review of the New York Times Book Review last Sunday, March 18, 2018 documented the depth and breadth of our current situation in two astute analyses by American legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein: one a Harvard University paper called Impeachment, the other a Day St./Morrow paper called Can It Happen Here?

I wonder how many middle-class Americans read the review, let alone the original writings? Many, I am confident, have become so politically illiterate they will have assumed only from the titles to guess the contents of the papers, without bothering to actually read them for factual enlightenment.

The Times Book Review ends its review with the telling summation that Benjamin Franklin predicted the present American experiment in self–government “can end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

The Times added its own words about the current America people: “They voted for the kind of monarchy the American republic was designed, above all else, to resist: and they have gotten one.”

Let us hope The Times is eventually proven wrong.

Then again, as in Greece’s example, perhaps a few decades – or centuries – of desperate poverty is what our middle class and their children need to educate themselves out of their political lethargy.

Hal