Why Bother? and Save Harry

[Gary Ruskin]

Commercial Alert				October 18, 2001

1. Why Bother?
2. Save Harry

1. Why Bother?

Sam Smith has written an inspiring new book: "Why Bother?"  It's half
description of how low our culture has sunk, and half meditation on why
one might do something about it.

Here's part of Sam's conclusion:

"Hectored, treated, advised, instructed, compelled at every turn,
history's subjects may falter, lose heart, courage, or sense of
direction.  The larger society is then quick to blame, to translate
survival systems of the weak into pathologies, and to indict as neurotic
clear recognition of the human condition."

"The safest defense against this is apathy, ignorance, or surrender. 
Adopt any of these strategies – don't care, don't know or don't do – and
you will, in all likelihood, be considered normal.  The only problem is
that you will miss out on much of your life."

Sam's book is a balm of solace, and a kick in the pants.  It will set
you working on the problems that need fixing.

Below is an announcement and column by Russell Mokhiber and Rob Weissman
about "Why Bother?" and Sam Smith.

Friends:
No one Mokhiber/Weissman column has received more response than the
column we wrote in November 1999 about Sam Smith's quest to answer the
simple question: Why Bother?

Smith at the time was writing a book with that title. He approached 14
publishers and three agents. Each said no. No one gave a good
explanation as to why "Why Bother?" wouldn't fly. Even Sam's regular
agent said the book was "too dark and dour."  Finally, the small west
coast publisher Feral House took on Why Bother? and published it last
month.

Sam says he gave up on the book three times. One of the times he stopped
giving up on it was when we ran our column and got an overwhelming
response from you -- our readers.

Sam got the same encouraging response when he read out loud from the
book to gatherings around the country. It's still unclear to him why
regular folks love the book while agents and publishers generally don't.

In any event, as a public service, in these times of doom and gloom, we
reprint below our November 1999 column "Why Bother?"

You can buy the book at Sam's web page: http://prorev.com/orderwb.htm.

Russell Mokhiber & Robert Weissman
----------

Why Bother?
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

We have been writing this column for a couple of years now.
Periodically, we'll get a message from a reader that goes something like
this:

"I've been reading your column for a while, but it's all negative. You
lay out the problems -- problem after problem, week after week -- but
give no hint at a solution. It's all so depressing. Please take me off
your list."

We and others can advocate more democracy until we turn blue in the
face, but at some point, we must look carefully at the question of why,
given the facts on the ground, there is no mass human revolt against the
corporate control over our democracy.

We set out recently in search of solutions. And luckily for us, our
first stop was the Washington, D.C. office of the Sam Smith. Smith is
the editor of Progressive Review, and is a long- time small d democrat.

Smith has written a new book, tentatively titled: Why Bother? Reasons
for Doing and Being. He's searching for a publisher.

Smith says that during a meeting on a new journalistic enterprise in the
1980s, he realized that to a large degree, facts didn't matter anymore.
"I noticed that truth was no longer setting people free," he writes, "it
was only making them drowsy."

We were in an age, as philosophy professor Rick Roderick put it, where
everything once directly lived was being turned into a representation of
itself.

So, Roderick argued, we watched Michael Jordan to remember what a life
filled with physical exertion was about. Similarly, Smith says, we now
watch C-SPAN, to remember what democracy was about.

As we were glued to the television set and computer screen, a culture of
impunity took hold.

How does a culture of impunity differ from ordinary political
corruption?

Ordinary political corruption represents the corruption of the culture.
A culture of impunity becomes the culture.

"Such a culture does not announce itself," writes Smith. "It creeps up,
day by day, deal by deal, euphemism by euphemism. The intellectual
achievement, technocratic pyrotechnics and calm rationality that serves
as a patina for the culture of impunity can be dangerously misleading.
In a culture of impunity, what replaces constitution, precedent, values,
tradition, fairness, consensus, debate, and all that sort of arcane
stuff?  Mainly greed."

Smith reminds us that the Italians, who invented the term fascism, also
called it estato corporativo -- the corporatist state.

"Orwell rightly described fascism as being an extension of capitalism,"
Smith writes. "It is an economy in which the government serves the
interests of the oligopolies, a state in which large corporations have
the powers that in a democracy devolve to the citizen."

Is there any doubt that ours is a corporate state?

No.

And it is our increased consciousness of the corporate state that has
led us to deeper despair.

"To accept the full consequences of the degradation of the environment,
the explosion of incarceration, the creeping militarization, the
dismantling of democracy, the commodification of culture, the contempt
for the real, the culture of impunity among the powerful and zero
tolerance towards the weak, requires a courage that seems beyond us,"
Smith writes. "We do not know how to look honestly at the wreakage
without an overwhelming sense of surrender."

In the face of this despair, Smith rejects the way of the reformer in
the hope that a new activism will arise -- the citizen who will seek the
"hat trick of integrity, passion and rebellion."

"We need no more town meetings, no more expertise, no more public
interest activists playing technocratic chess with government
bureaucrats, no more changes in paragraph 324B of an ineffectual law, no
more talking heads," he writes.

Instead, we need an uprising of the soul, that spirit of which Aldous
Huxley described as "irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that
has gone before."

Smith wants to see Huxley's uprising of the soul. He's asking us to
begin to fundamentally question the corporate culture that has, step by
step, unannounced, engulfed us -- junk food pushers in the schools, tort
deformers educating judges, oil companies cleaning up in public museums,
big companies of all stripes taking over public interest groups -- the
list is endless.

The uprising of the soul will replace the reformer with the rebel, the
negotiator with the defender of justice, the prevaricator with the
honest citizen, the diplomat with the radical.

"We need to think the unthinkable even when the possible is undoable,
the ideal is unimaginable, when power overwhelms truth, when compulsion
replaces choice," Smith writes. "We need to lift our eyes from the
bottom lines to the hills, from the screen to the sky, from the adjacent
to the hazy horizon."

Why bother? Smith asks.

We have no other choice.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime
Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based
Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The
Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common
Courage Press, 1999; http://www.corporatepredators.org)

(c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber
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<------------------------------>
2. Save Harry

Following is a note from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Dear Friends,

"Harry Potter" fans, concerned parents, teachers, and health advocates
all over the world are trying to Save Harry from the clutches of the
Coca-Cola Co.! Coca-Cola has bought the exclusive global marketing
rights to the upcoming "Harry Potter" movie and is turning the "Harry
Potter" phenomenon into a sales vehicle for junk food!

It is time to say enough is enough and stop the aggressive marketing of
junk food to kids.

*** TAKE ACTION!

At www.SaveHarry.com, you can send an e-mail to author J. K. Rowling,
Warner Bros., and Coca-Cola.  Plus, there is lots of information about
the health problems related to soft drinks, a way to alert your friends,
a fun game for kids, and more!

*** Go to www.SaveHarry.com

Sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a global
coalition of concerned organizations.
<---------------------------------->

Commercial Alert's mission is to keep the commercial culture within its
proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting
the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and
democracy. 

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-- 
Gary Ruskin | gary@essential.org 
Commercial Alert | http://www.commercialalert.org
Congressional Accountability Project | http://www.congressproject.org
phone: 503.235.8012 | fax: 503.235.5073

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