by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-01-26
© 2011 Peter Belmont

RSS Recent Essays (All Topics)   •(12/23) How did we get to October 7th? •(11/23) Our Political Habits Are Ending The Human Race •(10/23) Sketch of Israel-Palestine History •(10/23) Whoever controls the discourse controls emotional reactions to reality •(08/23) Russia On Trial •(01/23) The Purpose of "Conservatism" •(10/22) The project of returning the earth to the cockroaches couldn't be in better hands! •(05/22) Abortion, The Constitution, And The Supreme Court •(03/22) The Problem of Climate Change Framing or Discourse or Understanding •(06/21) Israel-Palestine: If not apartheid, then what? Always listen closely to the questions which are not asked, the topics which are not discussed. There you will discover taboos, anti-sacred-cows. These should be the center of your attention, for the energy needed to maintain a system of taboos is at the very least a suggestion of the importance of the topic or question being suppressed.

For Americans, as for most others, there are two forms of the sacred: positive and negative.

The positive sacred is something like religion, something like prescription, like dictated truth. In regard to a positive sacred, one knows what is required to be thought, to be said, to be praised, and to be done. One knows which ideas are to be denied or criticized. One knows which books and people to revere. People have affinity groups based on such sacredness. Although we joke about the uselessness of preaching to the choir, the idea of preaching the sacred and the idea of having a choir devoted to the sacred are natural ideas. The world is awash in sacred cows and religious practice.

The negative sacred, by contrast, is something like taboo, something like proscription, like dictated silence. There are ideas not to be thought or spoken. Often the power of the proscription acts so severely that people subject to it are not even aware that it is operating at all. The great power (and an obvious purpose) of suppression of speech lies in keeping ideas out of circulation to such an extent that they become not only dangerous to speak (breaking taboos is always dangerous), but difficult for some and impossible for others even to think. Very little by way of complex thought may be accomplished entirely by one person, alone. Most thinking is a community activity. There could be no science, for instance, without journals and, indeed, without “peer review”. Journals are speech. Peer review, like journal reading, is a communal activity. A scientific idea that cannot be spoken is no scientific idea at all. It is the same with political ideas.

The positive and negative sacred often act in tandem. For many Americans, both “defense” and “reduction of national debt” (or “deficit”) are sacred cows. When one considers that America spends—it is often said—as much on “defense” each year as the entire rest of the world does, and that such spending contributes importantly to the American national debt (and to the “deficit”—the increment to the national debt for a given year), and further considers that the said debt and deficit are regarded as horrors, disasters, even as evils, it would seem that no-one could entertain both of these sacred cows simultaneously without at least attempting to entertain another idea, namely, the question of how (or why) this high rate of expenditure—and corresponding high rate of increment to national debt—should (or even can) be continued (indefinitely). And yet this question, this topic, is an anti-sacred cow. This topic is not discussed in public. President Obama can give a “state of the union” speech, as he did on January 25, 2011 (“SOTU-2011”), without naming this problem explicitly, although he mentioned both defense spending and deficit and debt—as separate items. Even to mention this question, it would seem, is forbidden. An anti-sacred cow. The Congress requires new expenditure to be matched by new sources of funding or by reduction of other spending—unless the new expenditure is for “defense”. This, it seems, is sacred and must not be questioned. Or even examined.

As to America’s enormous “defense spending”—monies spend each year to train and pay vast armed forces distributed around the world,[1] to create and maintain all but uncountable foreign military bases, to manufacture enormous amounts of the very most modern and the very most expensive military equipment and munitions, and to support an “army” of private contractors (mercenaries and militias when they perform military tasks, normally paid very much more than soldiers are paid), to say nothing of maintaining a vast publicly staffed system of overlapping “intelligence”, spying, eavesdropping, data-collection augmented by a possibly even more numerous similar system staffed by private contractors (normally paid very much more than federal civil service employees are paid)—I gasp here for breath—several questions might naturally be asked. People might ask, for which people is the operation of this defense-system “good” and for whom is it “bad”? If it is “good” for people other than Americans, why do Americans alone pay for it? Why do we keep paying for it? Is its value, to Americans, worth what we pay for it? Does it benefit ordinary Americans or does it merely “make the world safe” for corporate investment? And if so, safe for American corporate investment (if there is such a thing as an American corporation, another obvious question in this new and global world) alone, or safe as well for non-American corporate investment—each of which should bear some or all of the costs of the defense-system. But these questions are never asked. Presumably they are taboo, a threat to the continued happy functioning of the well-oiled and smoothly running military-industrial-Congressional-university complex.

It is hard to think intelligently about answers to questions which may not, for reason of taboo, even be asked in public.

In America, support, honor, and reverence for Israel has been, since 1967 if not earlier, and remains (with a reservation to be noted), a sacred cow for mainstream politicians and media. Israel is holy and beyond reproach, described always (in mainstream discourse, at least) as a democracy, a bastion of Western values, a strong and valuable military ally stronger than all its neighboring countries combined (although constantly in danger as proved not only by its official rhetoric but also by the aggressive wars it frequently launches against its neighbors), a country whose values are exactly like America’s, a “light unto the nations”, the salvation of the Jewish people (themselves much injured psychologically and diminished in numbers by the Nazi Holocaust, but standing tall and stronger than ever nonetheless), etc. True, in 2010 its position as a sacred cow began slipping. Israel’s vicious siege of Gaza (2006-present, no end in sight) and its more than vicious attack on Gaza (2009-2010) and the quintessentially vicious attack on the humanitarian re-supply ship, Mavi Marmara, on May 31, 2010, widely known to Americans despite the general tendency of our sacred-cow-revering mainstream media to hide Israel’s warts, have begun a mainstream counterstream to the previously impervious negative-sacred-cow taboo on criticism of Israel.

Readers of this blog know that for me, Israel is more a criminal entity than a sacred one. I am happy, therefore, to suppose that Israel’s status as a sacred cow in America is a declining status. Israel is, for me, a “cow more sacred” than it has any right to be.

Americans, like others, are aware that global warming (climate change, human-produced and maleficent) is a result of many causes including, principally, the burning of fossil fuels. Nevertheless Americans continue to burn fossil fuels—for automotion, automation, heating and cooling, and electric power generation—without any sustained effort to reduce this (increasing) burn-rate. And exploration for new sources of oil and natural gas continues, such as the new system of “frak” extraction of natural gas which threatens the water supplies of a vast swath of the USA because of the chemicals which are injected underground in “fraking” and the radioactive and other chemicals which are extracted along with the “fraking” fluids, oil, and gas. And while many people question the safety of “fraking”, no-one makes much of a fuss about the global-warming consequences of developing new sources of fossil-fuels when one might, instead, have been developing non-fossil-fuel alternatives (or energy efficiencies to reduce the need for any sort of energy source).

And, at the same time, the population of the world (and of the USA) continues to grow, so that the total fossil-fuel consumption

(per-capita energy usage) x (number of people)

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      1234567890