Chapter Five

Denial

John St. John

This author is very uncomfortable with a lie. I have no luck writing fiction. I have lied many times but little good ever came of it except some bad writing. My wife and daughter were discussing taking my two-week old grandson off breast feeding and giving him formula. The formula was constipating him but the doctor said a baby that age could go a week without a bowel movement . . . My grandson was to become an anal retentive! The baby cries a lot and my wife said that he should be left alone in his crib to accustom him to not being held all the time. Unreasonable child! This prompted me to remark that "no animal would treat it's young like that." My daughter snapped back "We are not animals!" Calling anyone an animal is universally condemned by everyone except biker gangs and anatomists. The reality that we all possess livers and hearts and genitalia does not faze the creationist liar. Do animals talk? Do animals drive cars and jets? Do animals paint pictures? Maybe not but they have the same basic equipment. Still . . . we are so different even from our cousin the chimp that it might be said we are something else. The pride of the animal is that it can survive with nothing more than what it was born with. We, on the other hand, have to be cared for as helpless infants for a long period of time, and when we reach maturity we cannot survive without technology. Our power resides solely in the fact that we originate technology. We wear it, we eat it, we sleep in it, we drive it, we fight with it, and are buried in a coffin.

It amazes me that all the great thinkers from Darwin on have not made the connection that the evolution of Man was mandated by his own technology. More significantly . . . how can anyone deny that this ape steeped in technology, has not had his behavior modified by it. How could a brain like Freud get lost in sex when technology is infinitely more meaningful? My grandson was taken from his mothers breast and fed the technology of formula consisting of soya bean and God knows what. He lies swathed in blankets of technology. Technology will surround him for the rest of his life. Of course, Darwin was right and Man lives in a world where the fittest survive. The difference is that the fittest Man is the one with the best control over technology. "The Virginian" said "The lord made big men, and the lord made small men, but Smith & Wesson made them all the same size.

What we are dealing with is not just Man . . . but a symbiotic relationship between Man and technology. Man and technology are inseparable. The Tarzan ideal of a human in nature without technology is absurd but it gave comfort to English aristocrats who were unhappy about having an ape for a cousin. They did give Lord Greystoke a hunting knife (technology) because they knew that without something their hero would have a difficult time killing crocodiles.

The drive to unity of our small planet is two-pronged. One is a single world marketplace of capital and technology, and the other is planning and formulating techniques to unify the peoples of the world to live within it. If trade is to be totally free then trade unions must be encouraged, dictatorships discouraged and community infrastructure created. Supply side market forces are not equipped to solve the problems presented by tribal differences. Lack of human understanding not only affects our professional people but it sends our corporate one-worlders on the course of forcing freeway economies on Third World countries. Like Crusaders they are moving ahead into a netherworld of tribes and tribal animosity without the social understanding that One World demands. This mornings paper headlined "Fifty seven people killed in Mexican uprising." The state of Chiapas now has its population under arms against the Mexican government because of the NAFTA initiative. These Zapatistas will not go away. When the total realization of NAFTA strikes the Mexican people, the wealthy few that own Mexico will be faced with an angry citizenry.

Generations have eked out a living in the harsh mountain deserts of Mexico by raising cattle fed on corn. Hillside "potreros" are small cornfields that depend on seasonal rain. The labor involved in this enterprise is excruciating. Corn is cut with machetes and stacked and hauled back to the ranch by burro.

Large families have been raised on dry volcanic soil. They are accustomed to work that no North American has ever been forced to do. the technology of the tractor and corn shelling machine has been available for some time. It is owned by private contractors who have been able to buy these machines by working in the United States. This small amount of technology has caused more illegal immigration than ever before. With NAFTA cattle raisers in Mexico will be able to buy American corn at a price that will do away with the potrero. This will increase the immigration problem ten-fold. If the product of one Nebraska farm is dumped on the Jalisco market, a way of life for millions of Mexicans will disappear. Large families in third world countries are generally a result of two factors: The Catholic Church and the fact that child labor is the difference between survival and starvation.

The urbanization of populations will slow down the population boom in the long run. But what will we do with all these people now? The madcap drive for markets must carry with it some form of social planning to ameliorate its devastating impact on populations. It is an old story that happened in Europe with the invention of the steam engine and the spinning jenny. These innovations led to the soot-covered misery of the industrial revolution with its sweatshops, child labor, and long hours of labor . . . It also led to communism.

Public anger at depressed living standards in a world of plenty can not be controlled by the time honored methods used in our fathers day. News was formerly the sole property of newspapers that were owned by large chains like Hearst and Scripts Howard. Radio news could be overseen and edited for the masses by the networks. This has been difficult since the advent of television and now with C-Span and fiber optic cables, computer networks, and independent radio stations . . . thought control has become a nostalgic memory of retired executives. The phenomenon of Ross Perot's presidential bid has not been fully appreciated. The notion that Ross's billions were behind his bid for the presidency is not true. When he said that he would run if the people would put him on the ballot in all fifty states he had no idea that they would take him at his word and do it.

A government that does the bidding of commerce will soon become no government at all in an era of mass information. The good side of business is that it provides us with goods and services. The bad side is that it keeps humans on the books as costs of production and consumers. It drives for low wages and high prices. This is a contradiction that sooner or later leads to crisis and collapse. It is the cause of the "business cycle." Industry has a history of shooting itself in the foot. The deregulation of the Reagan-Bush era left us with the enormous national debt and the saving and loan scandal. The unholy anomaly of four U.S. congressmen (Democrat and Republican) twisting the arm of a poor bank regulator on behalf of David Keating must never be forgotten.
 

Social scientists are on the payroll of the tobacco and alcohol industries to help evade any legislation controlling them. They provide the think in the think tanks that conclude that NAFTA is just dandy. They head symposiums by insurance companies to explain why insurance companies should continue in charge of the nations health. They help the entertainment industry dispel rumors that violent theatre is responsible for violence. "It provides a safety valve for hostility."

American University's lobbying Institute had a chamber of commerce speaker who lectured the neophyte lobbyists with great enthusiasm on how they pushed through NAFTA . . . "not just the Fortune Five Hundred but the top two hundred corporations." Now they are teaching lobbyists how to get to the grass roots. Bribing congressmen has become less attractive as congressmen are forced to weigh the lobby money against voter dissatisfaction. It was amusing to hear these paid hacks call themselves "social scientists". It confirmed my conviction that the social sciences are warped to help corporations attain short term goals and have little to do with social problems affecting the country. Now they are recommending policy for the global economy. Watch and see the debacle that will result from this assault on the totem gene.

When a youngster is caught in some childhood atrocity his reaction is to deny everything. This same technique is utilized by our social scientists. If you are a corporate polluter or are selling off old growth timber to Japan as raw logs, hire a professional to deny it for you. If the price is right they will deny anything. The professional deniers got five living presidents to deny that NAFTA would harm the American standard of living.
Somehow a bald-faced lie from a scared child is not so bad but the blatant lying by public relations people shows a contempt for the public. They are practitioners of Hitler's big lie." They know that the ordinary person would not dare tell a whopper of this magnitude and can not imagine anyone else doing it.

I am not going to deny that what I present here is an ideology. It is an ideology of dualism. It is not anti-business, nor pro-labor. The time has come when Americans must drive a wedge between themselves as tribesmen and commerce in its role as natural jungle. I do want to see the tribe organized to protect itself from the jungle as my remote ancestors did. There is only one change that I would mandate were I in charge, and that is I would prohibit The Stock Market. Shares in ownership should not be bought and sold like used cars. Under common law, ownership was integral with liability. If you own a pit-bull and it kills a neighbor’s child, you can not blame the pit-bull or the neighbors child. The owner of the pit-bull is culpable. Corporations do damage all the time but stockholders are exempt from prosecution. Union Carbide can kill 3000 people in India and get off with a fine, paying off lawsuits, throwing some employees to the wolves, or taking chapter 11 bankruptcy, from which they emerge intact and posting a larger profit than they did before the crime.