From: harelb@math.cornell.edu (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)
Subject: Re: The Decline of America series
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 21:59:08 GMT

To: XXX (reply to email sent to me at harelb@math.cornell.edu)
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[CC: to nets/list -- as I do when responding to personal email from
someone I don't know, when I post, I've removed the identifiers.]
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

   Date: Sun, 4 Oct 92 19:06 PDT
   From: XXX
   To: harelb@math.cornell.edu

   In article <1992Oct4.155944.6225@mont.cs.missouri.edu> you write:
   >The Decline of America: "Strong Family Values" (IV)
   >
   >
   >We're Number One in percentage of population without health insurance.

	   [...]

     This article is misleading, since it only gives data for a few of the
   100+ countries of the world.  Please post the complete list.


You would have us compare the U.S. health care system to Somalia's,
perhaps?

In fact the chart is extremely thorough, listing precise *all* the
nineteen Western Industrial nations.

I get this type of email many times from otherwise intelligent people
reacting with extreme irrationality; I make this point repeatedly, in
turn, not to try to claim these people are secretly from an insane
asylum but to point out that it is the ideological blinders we have
allowed to be put on ourselves that is perhaps the only (consistent)
expalanation for such reactions from otherwise reasonalby sane and
intelligent people.

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In another email on the series, you referred to the post with anger
that it is "propaganda" -- the post was a listing of poverty rates for
different countries.

This is a truly remarkable indication of the totalitarian nature of
the American political culture. Referring to data on poverty rates,
homelessness, infant mortality rates, etc, as "propaganda" one
pictures, perhaps, a Soviet commissar or Pravda editor; in the West
the U.S. is perhaps unique in the level of Orwellian Denial of the
irrelevant facts which contradict the ideological Washington Party
Line. This is not a coincidence but has much to do with the ways in
which the U.S. is virtually unique amont the western industrial
nations in the respects outlines in the Decline series.

In the U.S. people are, just beneath the surface of jingoistic slogans
largley appreciative of the fact there is no real democracy in this
country (as displayed, in part, in the abysmal voting rates), that the
two factions of the Corporate Business Party which control the system
will not make any significant changes to it regardless of which
candidate we vote for. Without real participation, real democracy, the
only outlet we have, then, are flag-waving slogans of "we're number
one" to provide a shallow high;

When these illusions are (quite painfully) shattered, there is nothing
left to hold on to, hence the quick resort to angry, often irrational
denial, aggression, etc. The true patriot will take the more difficult
but ultimately the only moral and meaningful path, of addressing the
problems and fixing them, even if in the process we are required to
painfully shed illusions about our country and those who own and
control it by virtue of the for-profit economy and the vast
ownership/influence of the media and politics which the elites in this
society, paralleling the CP elites of East Europe, control.

##################################################################
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive,alt.activism,soc.women