Author: Chuck Young

CUSTOMER: I wish to register a complaint.

CLERK: Sorry, mate, it’s time for lunch.

CUSTOMER: Never mind about that, my lad. I wish to complain about this pelican that I purchased not half an hour ago from this very Oval Office.

CLERK: What’s wrong with it?

CUSTOMER: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. It’s dead. That’s what’s wrong with it.

Last March I went to the Left Forum in New York, which is a yearly gathering of liberals, progressives, anarchists, socialists, communists, hippies, punks, mystics, conspiracy theorists and anti-conspiracy theorists who are all trying to figure out how to get to a decent future from the indecent present. Nobody, of course, knows how to do that. There may not even be a path to a decent future from the indecent present, but I always find the Left Forum hopeful because a few thousand people in one place are at least putting their minds to the problem.

The panel discussion I most wanted to see (out of 300 or so) was called “The Crisis That Gives the Capitalist Class Nightmares,” because Michael Hudson was speaking. Whenever Hudson writes something, I read it, because he’s one of a tiny number of economists with academic credentials who predicted the present debt crisis. (Apparently not predicting crises is necessary for tenure in most economic departments these days.) At the panel, he explained that when labor is squeezed to the point that it can’t purchase anything, the capitalist is left with nothing to invest in, except more debt, and so we end up with Wall Street creating ever more complicated, ever more leveraged, ever more worthless junk for its gambling habit. When this collapses, as it must, half the hospitals in Latvia (which Hudson advises) have to shut down for lack of funds.

The Texas State Board of Education is a lot like the weather. Everyone talks about it, nobody does anything about it.

Except Judy Jennings. She’s running for the Texas State Board of Education in District 10, which stretches in vast zigzags from the ‘burbs of Austin to the ‘burbs of Houston. In area, it is bigger than 12 states. It was gerrymandered by Tom Delay to include lots of Republicans. Jennings is a Democrat. She thinks that public education is a good idea, that actual science should be taught in science classes supported by tax dollars, and that the Texas State Board of Education should not be a laughingstock in large newspapers and small blogs around the world.

The Pentagon Channel is not the Military Channel. The Military Channel is Hitler plus top ten lists. You wanna know about the failed plot to assassinate the Fuehrer in 1944 and then learn the ten best attack submarines of all time–the Military Channel is your meat. It’s the NFL Network with a drill sergeant instead of a coach yelling at an audience of men so bored with their lives that trench warfare is an attractive alternative.

The Pentagon Channel is not the History Channel. The History Channel looks at many tyrants in addition to Hitler, plus UFOs and Biblical prophecies and ghosts. The Pentagon Channel is also not the the History Channel International, which is indistinguishable from the History Channel.

The Pentagon Channel has been broadcasting since 2004 without many people noticing. It’s on most of the basic cable systems in the United States, probably nestled in the high numbers with the other obscure reality channels. It seems to discuss Hitler less often than its competitors. Every few hours on a program called “Battleground,” they show a vintage propaganda film where he may be given passing mention. One of the best is called “Why Vietnam?” which must have been made around 1967. It shows a clip of Neville Chamberlin promising “peace in our time,” and then Hitler starts gobbling Europe. If Hitler had been stopped at the first mouthful, catastrophe would have been averted. And that is why we must fight in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara are shown begging—not too strong a word— the American people to continue supporting the war, lest the “terrorists” win and gobble up the rest of Southeast Asia, just like Hitler.

In the spring of 1994, I went to the Socialist Scholars Conference in New York where I encountered a large red-faced man with white hair. He had the look and manner of Santa Claus, minus the beard, and he was standing behind a table from which he was selling audio and video cassettes of lectures by Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and other prominent anarchists, socialists, communists and even some vaguely progressive Democrats. He was also selling photocopies of an interview I had done with Noam for Rolling Stone.

“Hey,” I said, “that’s my interview with Noam Chomsky!”

“Cool,” said the large, red-faced man. “Would you mind if I crash on your couch tonight? I came all the way from Maine and I don’t have a place to stay.”

That famous definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing has come to define this present moment of American politics.
–Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

I know that I criticize you [Bernie Goldberg] and Fox News a lot, but only because you’re truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.
–Jon Stewart

To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism–it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.
–Barack Obama

This is an old argument, one that The Nation’s Benjamin DeMott examined in “Seduced by civility,” a 1996 essay subtitled, “Political manners and the crisis of democratic values.” The line back then, which hasn’t changed much in fourteen years, was that progressive politics was caught in a stranglehold of cynicism, meanness and counterproductive finger-pointing.
–Katrina vanden Heuvel

* * *

When I was in tenth grade, I had a habit of making disparaging comments about politicians in my world history class. The teacher got exasperated with me one day and said, “Oh Chuck, you’re just a cynic.” Other kids started calling me a cynic as well. It seemed to make me a little bit dangerous, and for a few weeks I swaggered around with my new identity until it occurred to me that I had no idea what a cynic actually was. So I looked it up in the dictionary and it said, as I recall, “a person who attributes base motives to others.”

That described me accurately enough, but there was also a second definition, something to the effect of, “an adherent of the Cynic philosophy.”

“Wow,” I thought. “There’s a whole philosophy of attributing base motives to others? Why have I not heard of this?”

I charged off to the philosophy section of the library, looked for “cynic” in every index, and discovered a man named Diogenes, who lived in Greece from about 404 B.C.E. to 323 B.C.E. All the anecdotes about his life as the most famous Cynic, all the translations of his sayings, all the assumptions about his meaning were wildly contradictory from source to source–and still are–but somehow I knew I had discovered one of the great human beings ever. I now suspect that all the contradictions occurred because so many of the writers were fans of Plato and Socrates, the two patron saints of bad college professors everywhere, and Diogenes made a point of humiliating them in ancient Athens. A good rule of academic thumb: If your teacher is walking up and down the aisle trying to engage you in Socratic dialogue, the next hour is going to suck the mop.

(The best text I have found on Diogenes and his philosophical descendants is The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy, edited by R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Caze.)

Anyway, Diogenes came from a town called Sinope. His father was some kind of banker, and Diogenes started his career as a cynic by either defacing or debasing money. That’s the first big contradiction in different sources. Debasing money means adding base metal to precious metal for the purpose of creating more coins than you could get just from the precious metal. It is an act of greed. Since Diogenes spent the rest of his life with almost no possessions, did nothing for money except beg and was conceded to be ruthlessly honest even by his enemies, I’m guessing that he wasn’t debasing coins.

No, almost certainly, he was defacing coins. There is even archeological evidence for this around Sinope, where coins with the face chiseled off have been discovered. The people of Sinope and, one must assume, Diogenes’ father were outraged, and Diogenes went into exile, eventually taking up residence in an old wine jar outside of Athens.

It is worth digressing at this point to consider one of Diogenes’ most famous contemporaries, namely Buddha, whose life was following almost the exact same plot line in northern India. A prince, Buddha was living a life of luxury when he had some chance encounters with old age, sickness and death on a hunting trip. He had a sudden realization that he didn’t understand anything and had to leave the the big, comfortable, insulating lie that was the royal compound, so he abandoned his wife and child and went to live in the forest and eat dirt. After six years, he decided that extreme asceticism wasn’t the way to live either, and he sat under the Bodhi Tree until he had his moment of enlightenment.

Diogenes went to the marketplace in downtown Athens and jerked off.