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A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit
America's citizens seem plagued by despair and frustration, much deeper today than the “malaise” President Jimmy Carter noted twenty years ago. Our political and social cultures are driven by issues morally complex and yet presented with simple-minded hostility. What's the matter with Kansas? What has happened to the once proud leader of the free world? How secure is our future? Does the republic stand or have we lost it already?
Born in 1941, novelist, critic, and teacher Eric Larsen sees his own lifetime as paralleling the arc of a national dissolution, and in three penetrating essays he describes an increasingly desperate situation. A blindness has set in, he argues, producing writers no longer able to write, professors more harmful than helpful, a replacement virtually nation-wide of thinking with feeling while the population seems unable to grasp even the remotest outlines of such dangerous, radical change. In the tradition of George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Paul Goodman, and Christopher Lasch, Larsen offers an impassioned critique of where we once were, where we are, and where we're very soon going if we don't watch out.
Born in 1941, novelist, critic, and teacher Eric Larsen sees his own lifetime as paralleling the arc of a national dissolution, and in three penetrating essays he describes an increasingly desperate situation. A blindness has set in, he argues, producing writers no longer able to write, professors more harmful than helpful, a replacement virtually nation-wide of thinking with feeling while the population seems unable to grasp even the remotest outlines of such dangerous, radical change. In the tradition of George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Paul Goodman, and Christopher Lasch, Larsen offers an impassioned critique of where we once were, where we are, and where we're very soon going if we don't watch out.
304 pages, Paperback
First published March 29, 2006
38 people want to read
About the author
Eric Larsen
12 books6 followersBorn in Northfield, Minnesota, Eric Larsen graduated from CarletonCollege and in 1970 took his doctorate from the University of Iowa. For thirty-five years, he taught English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, retiring in 2006. His first novel, An American Memory (1988), won the Chicago Tribune’s inaugural Heartland Prize. That novel was followed by three others, joined now by The Book of Reading to complete a saga of family and nation. For fifty-four years, Larsen was married to the editor Anne Larsen, and the couple raised two daughters, Flynn and Gavin, both active and highly productive in the arts. Larsen lives in New York City and has also authored the non-fiction works A Nation Gone Blind, The Skull of Yorick, and Homer Whole: A Reading of the Iliad. Learn more at www.ericlarsen.info.
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April 30, 2017
Eric Larsen is telling a story as old as the written word; as old as language, and as old as human beings. It's the story of how a group of ignorant, arrogant and malicious brutes try to kill or control essential aspects that make us human, in this case, language and its relation to literary art and critical thinking in general. The Nazis and the Soviets did it, and though their overall systems failed, the products and effects of their efforts remain, and so do their methods. Religions did it and succeeded, because the words offer immortality, peace or release of some kind; impossible things to prove or produce, that appeal directly to a person's hopes and fears. Larsen tells the story of certain groups of Americans in positions of influence, and their attacks on language, literature, critical thinking and the individual, since the end of WWII and especially since the late 1960s. The purposes of these attacks are varied, but all lead to the ultimate goal of control and pacification—the final hand played by the puppet masters. The fake liberal teachers may think they're playing by their own rules, but they're just puppets, being used to control and limit thought and freedom.
Professor Eric Larsen taught English and Literature for over thirty years in American universities; his book, A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, has several concurrent themes. The dominant and most essential theme teaches a way to understand literature and criticism, based on a deep sense of the individual person's experience, and guided by fundamental aspects of the human experience. He shows us what it means to study, as a whole person capable of holding multiple and differing views on a variety of subjects; and to learn from the great works, and to a degree, what it is that makes a work great. Throughout the three sections of the book, he returns to great works of literature, like Candide, to illustrate and explain his thesis. The search for truth is part (maybe all) of the act of reading; Larsen's insights into this theme expose, by contrast, the poverty and corruption of the current, dominant, issues-based political subversion of literature: reading to interpret (judge) a work by those issues. He's giving us the full picture: how teaching once was and should be, compared to how teaching is now—how literature has become a front or vehicle for political beliefs. I'm going to write about incidents that Larsen's book has caused me to think about, that are I think, related to his over-arching themes. I hope to keep to his general thesis as it develops but the book is too intricate for me to review in detail in this basic review format.
Literature, and the humanities are being destroyed by fake conservatives and fake liberals alike. Fake, because they've hijacked the terms and are nothing but fanatical ignoramuses who hate great art because they can't understand it and it makes them uncomfortable. Extremists want to control and kill everything outside of their narrow, dead reality.
The fake conservatives want to limit or eliminate the humanities in favor of science, business and technical courses because they see the humanities as useless or impractical, or at best, effete. The fake liberals want to control the humanities and use them to prop up the political correctness and identity politics that define and dominate their dying ideological movement. Though the ideology is dying from its own emptiness, it's still entrenched in the American university system that isn't expressly fake Christian/fake conservative; in other words, most of the schools, public and private. You see an increasing number of fake liberal politicians being honored as commencement speakers. They're there to re-enforce the four years of mind-numbing politically-tainted courses the students were subjected to, and to continue the indoctrination process for the undergraduates and their proud parents in the audience.
Harvard has published a list of “fake news” websites, many of them among the most reliable and courageous news sites on the internet, like Global Research. Clearly, Larsen's teacher/social justice warriors have melded, in this instance, with the Democratic Party and with certain college administrations to provide a unified front, not only to associate the issues of race, gender, class and ethnicity with “good” or appropriate literature, but with the Democratic Party of the Clintons and Obama, whose candidate Hillary Clinton, was the clear favorite of the CIA-corporate establishment, that has, after her stunning defeat, unleashed and exposed its total, wide-spectrum propaganda machine, using the major media, entertainment and academia in a horrifying, desperate and obvious concerted effort, all reading the same script in the hopes of destroying Trump and the bigger threat of populism and nationalism. It's clearly a case of programmed drones reacting to deeply implanted code words and conditioning: the essence of the nightmare scenario that Larsen talks about in his book, written in 2006.
Harvard of course, fails to note that many of the websites they libel as fake, write the most honest journalism about the subjects of class and race, rather than using them as tools(weapons) to create political division or to define works of art. The Democratic Party tries to claim ownership of race, gender, class and ethnicity and the media corroborates that claim. Remember, Harvard's list is aimed at controlling the students and readers of media outlets that dutifully report the list as something credible or serious. I'm sure many of the faculty actually read the banned websites and realize the mainstream ones are propaganda, even if they approve of the propaganda! This gives them a feeling of superiority.
Larsen writes about the nightmares that happened during the writing of his book, such as the Bush/ Supreme Court stolen election (junta) and the complete avoidance of any questions about the official story of 9/11. He relates all this to the breakdown in education in high school and college and to the stultifying effect of decades of idiotic advertising messages and TV content. He exposes the epidemic of namby-pamby pseudo-intellectual status seekers and careerists that make up a large part of the American literary establishment and uncovers the rot in the wider network of television, news and advertising. This network is in many ways a program of control, intent on simplifying and neutering any real thought, emotion and most importantly, dissent. The CIA has admitted to controlling the news (disinformation or limited information), but the other aspects are about different types of control: intellectual and emotional deadening, and psychological control of impulse and desire that stimulates the need to buy things you don't need, to waste, and to pollute.
Larsen describes the media “aesthetic” as part of a corporate-controlled government's plan to turn citizens into mindless consumers, giving them a fool's paradise where they forget what it means to be a citizen or better yet, to never know. The aim is to kill any instinct to question what they're being told or shown. The aim applies equally to media, entertainment, art, advertising, education and political events. This is how millions of people can be persuaded by ads, and compliant doctors, to take dangerous, poorly tested pharma-products that often have deadly or sickening side effects, essentially poisoning themselves based on an ad and the reassurance of their doctor, when there are hundreds or thousands of testimonials about how sick the drug makes people, within reach through a simple internet search. This is how so many people, from the average person to the elite media journalist, never question the official government story for wars of aggression or even bigger, catalyzing events like 9/11, that are full of official explanations that defy common sense.
Here's Larsen, on the essence of the intellectual corruption that dominates literature, quoting from the website of the North American Review, in their “Note to Prospective Contributors.” [p.167]:
“The North American Review is the oldest literary magazine in America (founded in 1815) and one of the most respected. We are interested in high-quality poetry, fiction and nonfiction on any subject, but we are especially interested in work that addresses contemporary North American concerns and issues, particularly with the environment, gender, race, ethnicity and class.”
Larsen continues:
“And there it is, the automated, code-word litany of narrowing, proscribing, predigested categories of permissible seeing, as if these few agenda items were all that's left of life, the rest having fallen off somewhere in the darkness...now, the intellectual life no longer has to do with love, life, death, being, nothingness, progress, fear, passion, childhood, birth, hope, desire, beauty, rage, terror, metaphysics, the role of human beings and nations, history itself, salvation, fate, the cosmos, or madness—to cite only a few examples of the stuff of art. No longer, it seems, is life what calls out to the artist's mind and heart, but, instead, what compels the creating self are “subjects” “concerns” and “issues.”
I have seen the same gender-class-race-ethnicity phrase from the North American Review, in the descriptions written by many literary agents, of the kind of work they're interested in. Even if a literary work touches on those things, in the wider, richer context of art or possibly, great art, what real artist would ever say that their work is about something as limited and generalized as that?
Larsen again. [p.216]:
“...The political left set about destroying itself through a kind of intellectual suicide, doing so in the name of all that it considered good and also in the wrong belief that it was doing good—though, in fact, as we now can see, it was doing incalculable and irrevocable harm by removing liberalism from the active political-intellectual field altogether (and putting it in the realm of feeling and righteousness), thus leaving a vacuum for the right to fill, which the right began doing immediately and without the least hesitation.”
This is the program for the sheep, or the masses. The wolves know what they're doing, and what they're doing in literature is making what is an intensely complex and private experience, subservient to the political issues of race, ethnicity, gender and class. The specific rage and anger that these teacher/social justice warriors feel, appears to be, for them, never-ending and unresolvable. Two steps forward, one step back, indeed. To larger governmental factions tasked with controlling the masses, these are the age-old things that stoke hatred and keep people divided and fighting. Whether or not teacher/social justice warriors are consciously aiding a fascist government control program makes no difference since the outcome is the same. Ironically, many of these social justice types view themselves as radical left wingers, indeed, it's what unifies them as a group. This is true in the case of most of the issues-based teaching but we mustn't forget the fake conservatives who also seek to neutralize literature. I recall an English professor at a fake conservative/fake Christian college that I was forced to attend to get certified to teach in public schools, sidling up to me while I was reading Babbitt in my spare time before class, and telling me that Sinclair Lewis “hated America.”
So we get a group of outraged parents, white and black alike, demanding that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn be removed from high school libraries because it has the word “nigger” in it. No discussion at all about what the work is saying and how it is saying it, or about the many great writers who consider it of the highest artistic order and importance to American culture. All the beauty and complexity of the book is ignored, and the book is reduced to one word. Most of the outraged protestors probably didn't even read it, either because they were simply too overcome with emotion every time they saw the word nigger, or because they have never read anything more than a gossip rag, and are just agreeing with the herd.
I'll make a concession based on experience. I contend that great art is not meant for these people. Larsen says they've been conditioned and simplified into their current state but these are the same brutes that attacked impressionist paintings with umbrellas or shot the nose off the Sphinx for target practice, as Napoleon’s troops did, or else allowed for the unrestricted carpet bombing of major European and Japanese cities, cathedrals and museums included, out of sadistic revenge, and in a case of the most perverse irony, as part of their fight “against barbarism.” Anyone with any sensitivity recoils in horror from idiotic ads and TV, yet so many people are thrilled by them; to hell with them, don't throw pearls before swine. Here's my concession: any students who personally, or whose parents object to Huckleberry Finn or any other work that musters up mass rage, will be placed in a separate English class where only grammar is taught. They will not have the privilege of studying literature. If they reject Huck Finn, then they must reject it all. I certainly will demand a fight to the Supreme Court if the brutes and their PC overlords demand the book be removed from the library. Larsen says that this war must be fought in small battles like these; it's the only way to achieve any sort of victory. The sensitive students who are cursed with brutish parents and are forced into the grammar-only course will at least have the possibility of reading the book in the library if they want to.
Here's Larsen, using Hamlet as an example. [p.165]:
“The meaning known ahead of time—‘Hamlet is a misogynist play’—is an agenda. The unknown meaning—‘Let Hamlet talk to us so maybe we can discover what it means’—is an experience.
The agenda is received. The experience is earned and taken.
And the effect of accepting the agenda is not that a person becomes in any sense realized, but only that a person becomes one of a group. The person becomes attached to the group of putative “like-minded” others, and the aim of the new professors is to make this group as large as conceivably possible. The corollary thus emerges, that the aim of the new professors is to make the group of passive recipients of the agenda as large as conceivably possible. And so we see that their aim is exactly the same as that of the mass media.”
Larsen's over-arching equation is that television and advertising condition people from a young age to accept simplified and false realities for the purpose of control. Once in the classroom, especially high school and college, issues-based humanities courses indoctrinate the preconditioned minds to accept certain political beliefs, and to make those beliefs the standards by which they judge everything, then, when released into the adult world of work, they will respond to vote or act out accordingly whenever their political masters trigger the issues by demonizing their opponents. Their view will be so narrow that they will be unable to see massive deception. They'll agree with a war of aggression against Iraq or Afghanistan, based not only on initial catalyzing events like 9/11 that are full of dubious aspects, but also because their political masters will tell them that women are being mistreated there. This issues-based aspect to rationalizing the perpetual war against Muslims was used by the Bush gang of fake conservatives and continued by the Obama gang, proving that the tactic is more about mind control than left-right ideology. It's nothing but mind control and divide and conquer, masking itself as social justice, and can be used by either party that's in power.
A Nation Gone Blind is a book that has been largely neglected. I hope that this review will generate some interest in a work of great psychological insight into the malaise and falseness in much of American intellectual life. The mainstream media is reduced to lies of omission, and cheap obvious smears and innuendos. They think that if they don't discuss something, it doesn't exist. They think they're the Masters of Reality, but even the most stultified TV victim is starting to see how desperate these liars are to hold on to the illusion that they're honest people who consider the facts in a rational manner. True to Larsen's analysis, the academic establishment is supporting the media establishment, and this is the ultimate failure of American intellectual life. Even if there are dissident professors here and there, the administrations are in step with the media. As citizens, and parents of children who will possibly/probably be, or are already being subjected to this sort of distorted, academic influence in the humanities, we must be aware of this massive failure and betrayal and make our children aware of it. The only real intellectual life in America now is with a few independent journalists and web sites, some dissident tenured scholars and amateur scholars, some artists, and many concerned people who refuse to give up their citizenship and their individuality.
Professor Eric Larsen taught English and Literature for over thirty years in American universities; his book, A Nation Gone Blind: America in an Age of Simplification and Deceit, has several concurrent themes. The dominant and most essential theme teaches a way to understand literature and criticism, based on a deep sense of the individual person's experience, and guided by fundamental aspects of the human experience. He shows us what it means to study, as a whole person capable of holding multiple and differing views on a variety of subjects; and to learn from the great works, and to a degree, what it is that makes a work great. Throughout the three sections of the book, he returns to great works of literature, like Candide, to illustrate and explain his thesis. The search for truth is part (maybe all) of the act of reading; Larsen's insights into this theme expose, by contrast, the poverty and corruption of the current, dominant, issues-based political subversion of literature: reading to interpret (judge) a work by those issues. He's giving us the full picture: how teaching once was and should be, compared to how teaching is now—how literature has become a front or vehicle for political beliefs. I'm going to write about incidents that Larsen's book has caused me to think about, that are I think, related to his over-arching themes. I hope to keep to his general thesis as it develops but the book is too intricate for me to review in detail in this basic review format.
Literature, and the humanities are being destroyed by fake conservatives and fake liberals alike. Fake, because they've hijacked the terms and are nothing but fanatical ignoramuses who hate great art because they can't understand it and it makes them uncomfortable. Extremists want to control and kill everything outside of their narrow, dead reality.
The fake conservatives want to limit or eliminate the humanities in favor of science, business and technical courses because they see the humanities as useless or impractical, or at best, effete. The fake liberals want to control the humanities and use them to prop up the political correctness and identity politics that define and dominate their dying ideological movement. Though the ideology is dying from its own emptiness, it's still entrenched in the American university system that isn't expressly fake Christian/fake conservative; in other words, most of the schools, public and private. You see an increasing number of fake liberal politicians being honored as commencement speakers. They're there to re-enforce the four years of mind-numbing politically-tainted courses the students were subjected to, and to continue the indoctrination process for the undergraduates and their proud parents in the audience.
Harvard has published a list of “fake news” websites, many of them among the most reliable and courageous news sites on the internet, like Global Research. Clearly, Larsen's teacher/social justice warriors have melded, in this instance, with the Democratic Party and with certain college administrations to provide a unified front, not only to associate the issues of race, gender, class and ethnicity with “good” or appropriate literature, but with the Democratic Party of the Clintons and Obama, whose candidate Hillary Clinton, was the clear favorite of the CIA-corporate establishment, that has, after her stunning defeat, unleashed and exposed its total, wide-spectrum propaganda machine, using the major media, entertainment and academia in a horrifying, desperate and obvious concerted effort, all reading the same script in the hopes of destroying Trump and the bigger threat of populism and nationalism. It's clearly a case of programmed drones reacting to deeply implanted code words and conditioning: the essence of the nightmare scenario that Larsen talks about in his book, written in 2006.
Harvard of course, fails to note that many of the websites they libel as fake, write the most honest journalism about the subjects of class and race, rather than using them as tools(weapons) to create political division or to define works of art. The Democratic Party tries to claim ownership of race, gender, class and ethnicity and the media corroborates that claim. Remember, Harvard's list is aimed at controlling the students and readers of media outlets that dutifully report the list as something credible or serious. I'm sure many of the faculty actually read the banned websites and realize the mainstream ones are propaganda, even if they approve of the propaganda! This gives them a feeling of superiority.
Larsen writes about the nightmares that happened during the writing of his book, such as the Bush/ Supreme Court stolen election (junta) and the complete avoidance of any questions about the official story of 9/11. He relates all this to the breakdown in education in high school and college and to the stultifying effect of decades of idiotic advertising messages and TV content. He exposes the epidemic of namby-pamby pseudo-intellectual status seekers and careerists that make up a large part of the American literary establishment and uncovers the rot in the wider network of television, news and advertising. This network is in many ways a program of control, intent on simplifying and neutering any real thought, emotion and most importantly, dissent. The CIA has admitted to controlling the news (disinformation or limited information), but the other aspects are about different types of control: intellectual and emotional deadening, and psychological control of impulse and desire that stimulates the need to buy things you don't need, to waste, and to pollute.
Larsen describes the media “aesthetic” as part of a corporate-controlled government's plan to turn citizens into mindless consumers, giving them a fool's paradise where they forget what it means to be a citizen or better yet, to never know. The aim is to kill any instinct to question what they're being told or shown. The aim applies equally to media, entertainment, art, advertising, education and political events. This is how millions of people can be persuaded by ads, and compliant doctors, to take dangerous, poorly tested pharma-products that often have deadly or sickening side effects, essentially poisoning themselves based on an ad and the reassurance of their doctor, when there are hundreds or thousands of testimonials about how sick the drug makes people, within reach through a simple internet search. This is how so many people, from the average person to the elite media journalist, never question the official government story for wars of aggression or even bigger, catalyzing events like 9/11, that are full of official explanations that defy common sense.
Here's Larsen, on the essence of the intellectual corruption that dominates literature, quoting from the website of the North American Review, in their “Note to Prospective Contributors.” [p.167]:
“The North American Review is the oldest literary magazine in America (founded in 1815) and one of the most respected. We are interested in high-quality poetry, fiction and nonfiction on any subject, but we are especially interested in work that addresses contemporary North American concerns and issues, particularly with the environment, gender, race, ethnicity and class.”
Larsen continues:
“And there it is, the automated, code-word litany of narrowing, proscribing, predigested categories of permissible seeing, as if these few agenda items were all that's left of life, the rest having fallen off somewhere in the darkness...now, the intellectual life no longer has to do with love, life, death, being, nothingness, progress, fear, passion, childhood, birth, hope, desire, beauty, rage, terror, metaphysics, the role of human beings and nations, history itself, salvation, fate, the cosmos, or madness—to cite only a few examples of the stuff of art. No longer, it seems, is life what calls out to the artist's mind and heart, but, instead, what compels the creating self are “subjects” “concerns” and “issues.”
I have seen the same gender-class-race-ethnicity phrase from the North American Review, in the descriptions written by many literary agents, of the kind of work they're interested in. Even if a literary work touches on those things, in the wider, richer context of art or possibly, great art, what real artist would ever say that their work is about something as limited and generalized as that?
Larsen again. [p.216]:
“...The political left set about destroying itself through a kind of intellectual suicide, doing so in the name of all that it considered good and also in the wrong belief that it was doing good—though, in fact, as we now can see, it was doing incalculable and irrevocable harm by removing liberalism from the active political-intellectual field altogether (and putting it in the realm of feeling and righteousness), thus leaving a vacuum for the right to fill, which the right began doing immediately and without the least hesitation.”
This is the program for the sheep, or the masses. The wolves know what they're doing, and what they're doing in literature is making what is an intensely complex and private experience, subservient to the political issues of race, ethnicity, gender and class. The specific rage and anger that these teacher/social justice warriors feel, appears to be, for them, never-ending and unresolvable. Two steps forward, one step back, indeed. To larger governmental factions tasked with controlling the masses, these are the age-old things that stoke hatred and keep people divided and fighting. Whether or not teacher/social justice warriors are consciously aiding a fascist government control program makes no difference since the outcome is the same. Ironically, many of these social justice types view themselves as radical left wingers, indeed, it's what unifies them as a group. This is true in the case of most of the issues-based teaching but we mustn't forget the fake conservatives who also seek to neutralize literature. I recall an English professor at a fake conservative/fake Christian college that I was forced to attend to get certified to teach in public schools, sidling up to me while I was reading Babbitt in my spare time before class, and telling me that Sinclair Lewis “hated America.”
So we get a group of outraged parents, white and black alike, demanding that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn be removed from high school libraries because it has the word “nigger” in it. No discussion at all about what the work is saying and how it is saying it, or about the many great writers who consider it of the highest artistic order and importance to American culture. All the beauty and complexity of the book is ignored, and the book is reduced to one word. Most of the outraged protestors probably didn't even read it, either because they were simply too overcome with emotion every time they saw the word nigger, or because they have never read anything more than a gossip rag, and are just agreeing with the herd.
I'll make a concession based on experience. I contend that great art is not meant for these people. Larsen says they've been conditioned and simplified into their current state but these are the same brutes that attacked impressionist paintings with umbrellas or shot the nose off the Sphinx for target practice, as Napoleon’s troops did, or else allowed for the unrestricted carpet bombing of major European and Japanese cities, cathedrals and museums included, out of sadistic revenge, and in a case of the most perverse irony, as part of their fight “against barbarism.” Anyone with any sensitivity recoils in horror from idiotic ads and TV, yet so many people are thrilled by them; to hell with them, don't throw pearls before swine. Here's my concession: any students who personally, or whose parents object to Huckleberry Finn or any other work that musters up mass rage, will be placed in a separate English class where only grammar is taught. They will not have the privilege of studying literature. If they reject Huck Finn, then they must reject it all. I certainly will demand a fight to the Supreme Court if the brutes and their PC overlords demand the book be removed from the library. Larsen says that this war must be fought in small battles like these; it's the only way to achieve any sort of victory. The sensitive students who are cursed with brutish parents and are forced into the grammar-only course will at least have the possibility of reading the book in the library if they want to.
Here's Larsen, using Hamlet as an example. [p.165]:
“The meaning known ahead of time—‘Hamlet is a misogynist play’—is an agenda. The unknown meaning—‘Let Hamlet talk to us so maybe we can discover what it means’—is an experience.
The agenda is received. The experience is earned and taken.
And the effect of accepting the agenda is not that a person becomes in any sense realized, but only that a person becomes one of a group. The person becomes attached to the group of putative “like-minded” others, and the aim of the new professors is to make this group as large as conceivably possible. The corollary thus emerges, that the aim of the new professors is to make the group of passive recipients of the agenda as large as conceivably possible. And so we see that their aim is exactly the same as that of the mass media.”
Larsen's over-arching equation is that television and advertising condition people from a young age to accept simplified and false realities for the purpose of control. Once in the classroom, especially high school and college, issues-based humanities courses indoctrinate the preconditioned minds to accept certain political beliefs, and to make those beliefs the standards by which they judge everything, then, when released into the adult world of work, they will respond to vote or act out accordingly whenever their political masters trigger the issues by demonizing their opponents. Their view will be so narrow that they will be unable to see massive deception. They'll agree with a war of aggression against Iraq or Afghanistan, based not only on initial catalyzing events like 9/11 that are full of dubious aspects, but also because their political masters will tell them that women are being mistreated there. This issues-based aspect to rationalizing the perpetual war against Muslims was used by the Bush gang of fake conservatives and continued by the Obama gang, proving that the tactic is more about mind control than left-right ideology. It's nothing but mind control and divide and conquer, masking itself as social justice, and can be used by either party that's in power.
A Nation Gone Blind is a book that has been largely neglected. I hope that this review will generate some interest in a work of great psychological insight into the malaise and falseness in much of American intellectual life. The mainstream media is reduced to lies of omission, and cheap obvious smears and innuendos. They think that if they don't discuss something, it doesn't exist. They think they're the Masters of Reality, but even the most stultified TV victim is starting to see how desperate these liars are to hold on to the illusion that they're honest people who consider the facts in a rational manner. True to Larsen's analysis, the academic establishment is supporting the media establishment, and this is the ultimate failure of American intellectual life. Even if there are dissident professors here and there, the administrations are in step with the media. As citizens, and parents of children who will possibly/probably be, or are already being subjected to this sort of distorted, academic influence in the humanities, we must be aware of this massive failure and betrayal and make our children aware of it. The only real intellectual life in America now is with a few independent journalists and web sites, some dissident tenured scholars and amateur scholars, some artists, and many concerned people who refuse to give up their citizenship and their individuality.
September 5, 2009
I enjoyed this book a lot. So much so that I ventured an e-mail to its author. He responded.
August 22, 2016
“A Nation gone Blind” by Eric Larsen is a compelling read. Larsen outlines in three essays how television and modern literature since 1947, has changed the face of America. Television is made for large corporations who molded television to suit their interests and not for entertainment or enlightenment. And the entire advertisement industry changes how American’s thinks and act. He also indicates that literature is based on economics. Writers write to get paid, not to enlighten. “In reality, this is all evil, all the sheerest laziness, all the easiest path, the simplest thing, the equivalent to the world of thought that entertainment is to the world of art. “ Larson provides a detailed critique of where America has been and where we are going. Why three stars? I enjoy Larsen’s books, but found this too gloomy and preachy. His hypothesis has merit, but he goes way overboard on the impact on culture in America. America is still grand, the greatest place on earth.
January 24, 2008
Some truth here, admixed with the paranoid ravings from a certifiable fruitloop.
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January 8, 2011An intuitive method for readings with Zener ESP cards.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews