Authoritarian Politics in the age of Social Illiteracy - Henry Giroux at Tikkun

"The emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations." - Chris Hedges

Our cultural illiteracy is our inability to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency. It is a social formation that extends from the mainstream broadcast media and Internet to a print culture, all of which embrace the spectacle of violence, legitimate opinions over facts, and revel in a celebrity and consumer culture of ignorance and theatrics.

Literacy is now regarded with disdain, words are reduced to data, and science is confused with pseudo-science. Thinking is now regarded as an act of stupidity, and ignorance a virtue.

Chris Hedges is right in stating that “the emptiness of language is a gift to demagogues and the corporations that saturate the landscape with manipulated images and the idiom of mass culture.”

Words such as love, trust, freedom, responsibility, and choice have been deformed by a market logic that narrows their meaning to either a relationship to a commodity or a reductive notion of self-interest.

We don’t love each other, we love our new car. Freedom now means removing one’s self from any sense of social responsibility so one can retreat into privatized orbits of self-indulgence.

This has been a willful practice and goal used to actively depoliticize people and make them complicit with the forces that impose misery and suffering upon their lives.

The full article is available here

Album Review: Bob Mould - Patch The Sky - AV Club

Bob Mould is undeniably in the midst of a ferocious late-career tear. 

Bob Mould might have been having a self-deprecating chuckle at himself when he named his 2012 record Silver Age, but the alternative-rock torchbearer is undeniably in the midst of a ferocious late-career tear.

Having explored subtler, more experimental musical terrain through most of the 2000s, his recent run alongside drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy has been nothing short of pure guitar-rock TNT.

At 55, Mould has come full circle, returning to his love for massively melodic alt-punk, and his music continues to undercut his age by a sizable margin.

His third record in almost as many years employs the same muscular sonic approach of Silver Age and 2014’s Beauty And Ruin, but it also doubles down on the emotional angst. In true Bob Mould fashion, the record’s most kinetic moments come when sound and subject matter crash head-on. When he contemplates the end of the world on “The End Of Things,” Narducy and Wurster are there to give noisy support to his vision. The same goes for the riff-heavy “Daddy’s Favorite” and the sub-two-minute screamer “Hands Are Tied.”

More than 35 years into the game, Mould is still hard at work on the tense, dynamic soundscapes some would argue he perfected long ago. But it’s his refusal to rest on his laurels that still makes his songs worth the listen. It’s fair to wonder how many more runs through the alternative-rock mill one guy will get, but if Patch The Sky is any indication, Mould’s still a long way away from being on the clock.

The full article is available here

Not In Trump’s List Of Charitable Giving: Own Personal Cash - Washington Post

His giving appears narrowly tied to his business and, now, his political interests.  

Since the first day of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has said that he gave more than $102 million to charity in the past five years.

To back up that claim, Trump’s campaign compiled a list of his contributions — 4,844 of them, filling 93 pages.  But, in that massive list, one thing was missing.

Not a single one of those donations was actually a personal gift of Trump’s own money.

Many of the gifts on the list came from the charity that bears his name, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which didn’t receive a personal check from Trump from 2009 through 2014, according to the most recent public tax filings. Its work is largely funded by others, although Trump decides where the gifts go.

His giving appears narrowly tied to his business and, now, his political interests.  

His foundation, for example, frequently gave money to groups that paid to use Trump’s facilities, and it donated to conservatives who could help promote Trump’s rise in the Republican Party. 

The foundation’s second-biggest donation described on the campaign’s list went to the charity of a man who had settled a lawsuit with one of Trump’s golf courses after being denied a hole-in-one prize.

The full article is available here