Margaret Halsey

Margaret Halsey, (may she rest in peace) who most of you probably never heard of, died in 1997 (I think). She was a great liberal who wrote books commenting on the eccentricities of the English and the peculiarities of Americans, but also about race relations (at a time when such discussions were not at all fashionable). Among other books she wrote a book called Color Blind, an account of one of the first integrated USO type organizations, which demonstrated that integration was not impossible (at a time when most people certainly thought it was). Naturally, as she was concerned about discrimination, poverty, and such things she was unfairly branded as a communist (as she pointed out herself, anyone who believed in fair play, equality, justice, etc., was automatically considered a communist (this was during the McCarthy period, of course).

Her last book, which appeared in 1963, was entitled The Pseudo-Ethic. In it she argued that the United States was becoming a one institution society, and that one overriding institution was business. She wrote of this: "...Today's ethics reflect the fact that America has become in recent years a one-institution society. Sparta was a one-institution society, the single institution being militarism. Europe in the Middle Ages, before the rise of the nation-states, was similarly organized, the dominant institution being the Church. In such a society, the single institution tends to be so much in the ascendant that there is no place you can go to get away from it. In the United States today, the dominant institution is business.
Business is so ubiquitous that, except to those outside the culture, its ascendancy is almost not visible.
Farming is now a mechanized industry.
Education, at least on the college level, has become a threshing floor for the great corporations.
Philanthropy is keyed to tax evasion and is dominated by huge foundations set up with industrial fortunes.
Scientific research, even in universities, hardly exists except as sponsored by corporations or by a government that runs interference for business.
In politics, the electorate is treated like a body of consumers, not a body of voters, and Eisenhower's backers openly avowed their candidate would be sold 'like toothpaste.'"

Is this not a perfect description of what we have become? Except that we have attained this culture of business far beyond even what Halsey would have imagined. We are completely dominated by corporate interests. Where these characterists were perhaps still nascent in the 1960's they have now matured into the military/industrial/government nightmare that is keeping us in perpetual war and converted whatever ethics we once had into irrelevancies of the past. This Bush/Cheney administration has no ethics whatsoever. To them even the constitution is nothing but "a godamn piece of paper." This is the most immoral, unethical, administration in the history of the United States. With them, anything goes: bombing and killing innocent children and non-combatants, torture, secrecry, pre-emptive "wars," lying to Congress and the public, war profiteering, violations of international agreements that we signed (and even promoted), treason, fiscal responsibility, common human decency, you name it, they do it in spades. There are apparently no honest, responsible, moral, ethical, or decent Congressmen or Senators anymore. They are all "on the take," and they take from the same huge corporations that now control the world. I believe Margaret Halsey must be turning over in her grave.

Not only has the concept of ethics disappeared, so, too, has the concept of cooperation. As long as we (and our Israeli buddies) believe we can coerce the rest of the world into doing our bidding by the use of naked force there can never be peace in the Middle East (or anywhere else on earth, for that matter). We need a drastic change in our foreign policy, a drastic change in our attitudes towards the rest of the world, and a drastic change in administration. The mindless evil savages that brought all this about because of their greed and dreams of empire must be held accountable. Otherwise there is simply no hope for the world.