"Still, we have ways, both individually and culturally, of hiding this from ourselves. There are so many anodynes around--such as the constant outpouring of new technological toys--and the media is brilliantly adept at drowning the country in the kinds of spectacles that keep our minds focused on the trivial and the sensational....that one media rebel, David Barsamian, rightly refers to as 'nuzak.' But it goes deeper than this, because in an odd way, the heart of our decline is, paradoxically enough, the vitality of this culture itself. American energy is quite palpable; it's the first thing foreign visitors notice, and often admire. There is always a busyness in the air: a new film, a new scandal, a new idea to toss around (for a week), and, of course, the ever-fluctuating fortunes of the Dow. How, one might reasonably ask, can we speak of a decline, given the president's assurance, in his 1999 State of the Union speech, that the American economy is the strongest it has been in thirty years? Unemployment is down; the market is up. Our prosperity is obvious, right? What Mr. Clinton did not tell you, however, and what a number of analysts have documented in painstaking detail, is that the data are misleading, and deliberately so. This is a prosperity enjoyed by the rich; the reality is very different for most Americans, and almost all of the president's initiatives in the direction of economic equality were PR stunts, long on shadow, short on substance. (Once again, he "didn't inhale.") I shall say more about this in Chapter 1, but the reader should be aware that under the Clinton administration, no less than those of Reagan and Bush, the gap between rich and poor has widened dramatically, and the middle class has found itself growing smaller, and in an increasingly precarious position.
"When I speak of a new, contemporary class of monks (see Chapter 4), I do not, of course, mean that literally. I am not talking about asceticism or religious practice, and certainly not organization into monastic orders. But I am talking about renunciation. Today's 'monk' is determined to resist the spin and hype of the global corporate world order; he or she knows the difference between reality and theme parks, integrity and commercial promotion. He regards Starbucks as a sad plastic replica of the gritty (or bohemian) café of bygone days. She has no truck with the trendy 'wisdom' of the New Age, and instead seeks guidance about the human condition from Flaubert or Virginian Woolf, rather than from the latest guru tossed up by the media or the counterculture. Computers and the Internet are, for such a person, useful tools, not a way of life, and she understands that both the Republican and Democratic parties represent corporate interests, rather than genuine democracy.... The new monk is a sacred/secular humanist, dedicated not to slogans or the fashionable patois of postmodernism, but to Enlightenment values that lie at the heart of our civilization: the disinterested pursuit of the truth, the cultivation of art, the commitment to critical thinking, inter alia. Above all, he knows the difference between quality and kitsch, and he seeks to preserve the former in the teeth of a culture that is drowning in the latter. If she is a high school teacher, she has her class reading the Odyssey, despite the fact that half the teachers in the school have assigned Danielle Steele. If he is a writer, he writes for posterity, not for the best-seller lists. As a mother, she takes her kids camping or to art museums, not to Pocahontas. He elects, in short, to save his life via the monastic option."
Return to anarchy for anybody