Nation of Killers: Guns, Violence, White Supremacy: The American Dream Become Delusion

By Jack Carney, DSW

In recent years, the American dream has been usurped, taking numerous opportunities away from ordinary working-class, middle-class Americans.

In Nation of Killers, author Jack Carney shares what he believes has gone wrong and what might be done to address and correct it. Carney offers readers information they might not otherwise have, seeking to provoke them into reconsidering some conclusions about this country and its future direction. He argues that violence—rooted in white supremacist ideology—has been employed by one percenters and their surrogates to promote the country’s nineteenth-century expansion and its modern imperialist adventures and to subjugate those of its citizens who have been politically and economically marginalized since the nation’s founding.
The essays in Part II comprise an organizing primer for activists, detailing key issues to be addressed and describing tactics and strategies already being employed to address them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Oct 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483438825

Book preview

NATION

of KILLERS

Guns, Violence, White Supremacy:

The American Dream Become Delusion

JACK CARNEY, DSW

Copyright © 2015 Jack Carney, DSW.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3883-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3882-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015915836

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 10/27/2015

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface

Part I:   The American Dream in Its Historical Context

1.   Introduction: America’s Foundational Myths

2.   Guns and Violence: The American as Killer

3.   Slavery and White Supremacy: America’s Legacy

4.   Reinvention v. Regeneration

Part II:   Organizing in Its Historical Context

1.   Introduction: Talking Points

2.   America’s Future: The Constitution Usurped and Privatized

3.   The One-Percenters and the Hedge Funders Control the World: The American Dream Usurped and Corporatized

4.   Guns and Violence: Again

5.   Fighting Back: Unions and the Great Income Gap

6.   Mental Health: Misnomer and Metaphor

Afterword: What Awaits?

Appendix: Vietnam Talking Points

Annotated Bibliography

DEDICATION

This book of essays and polemics is dedicated to my wife, Diane, and to all those who struggle for justice and for an inclusive, democratic interpretation of the American dream.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to several friends and colleagues who gave their time to read the essays in manuscript form and offered valuable suggestions and analyses: Dr. Gerry Otis, a fellow member of the DSM 5 Boycott Committee; Mickey Weinberg, a fellow alumnus of the UCLA School of Social Welfare (now more grandiloquently known as the Luskin School of Public Affairs); and my wife, Diane, my fiercest critic and staunchest ally.

My thanks also go to Mad In America, Bob Whitaker’s mental health advocacy website, where significant parts of several of these essays were first posted.

I acknowledge my debt to Wikipedia; I came to rely on it for its accuracy and veracity when I needed to confirm a name or date.

PREFACE

The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.

—James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, 1931

It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

—George Carlin, Life Is Worth Losing, 2005

A dream is a yearning, a fantasy, a hope that what isn’t will become what is. A dream is both an illusion and an aspiration.

This is a book of essays about the American dream.

When I was a kid growing up poor in Brooklyn, I never gave much thought to the American dream. That was for the Beaver Cleaver families of 1950s America. And yet, an observer might say I’m an example of the promise of the American dream. Do what you’re supposed to do, follow the rules, and you’ll find success. It’s as if I osmosed it.

Well, I more or less followed the prescription. I was able to go to high school, college, and two graduate schools and undertake considerable postgraduate clinical training; I received a great education, most of it financed by government-sponsored scholarships, fellowships, and loans. I was always able to find employment and earn a good living, able to get married (twice as it turns out, and the second was the charm), start a family, and recently, get a new heart.

If I were to take you past the superficial, I’d tell you about my struggles, heartaches, and failures and about how I learned to mistrust authority and develop an intense dislike of the rich, all consequent to my experiences with helping poor and working-class folks as a grassroots organizer in South America, East Los Angeles, and Brooklyn.

Except for that last part, my grassroots organizing, I haven’t lived an atypical life for an American of my post–World War II generation. Even the heart transplant is no longer such a unique occurrence. But the American dream has been usurped, and many ordinary working-class, middle-class Americans like me might never again have life opportunities similar to mine. That is why I wrote this book; I wanted to share my perspective, developed over a lifetime, about what I believe has gone wrong with the Dream and what might be done to address and correct it.

This book of essays is about that usurpation by the richest among us, those who’ve come to be known as the one-percenters, the small, privileged class that owns 50 percent of the country’s wealth. I chose the American dream as my focus because of the meaning it has had for Americans well before James Truslow Adams coined the phrase in 1931. It provides the thread that runs through the essays and coherently binds them. It’s also the thread that runs through our history since colonial times, holding out the promise and hope for a better life for most Americans and for those who aspire to be Americans.

Since the American dream comprises myths, stories that people tell to make sense of their lives, the dream lives, breathes, and changes, at times appearing to fulfill its promise, at others not. We live in one of those not epochs that deny most Americans access to the American dream, and that now serves as the chief metaphor for the hard times, politically and economically, at home and elsewhere, that constitutes our daily reality.

There was one time in our history, perhaps the first and only time, dating from the New Deal in 1933 to the escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1968, that the interpretation of the dream and its day-to-day manifestation appeared to be inclusive, almost universal.

Even after the New Deal had become a faded memory and the impact of Vietnam and the ascendance of the white-supremacist right began to squeeze the dream and its promise slowly shut, Americans continued to look to the dream for the hope and possibilities it still seemed to offer. Since 9/11, the American dream has become ever more elusive to ordinary Americans, particularly black Americans, indeed all Americans of color. Those we’ve come to call the one-percenters, the country’s richest and most powerful individuals, appear to have laid claim to it as their exclusive domain.

These essays trace this evolution and the shifts in political power that have determined the breadth of interpretation, of inclusiveness, of the American dream—who will have unfettered access to it, and who will benefit and who won’t. Part I comprises four essays that track the origins of the American dream in the colonial era and the formulation of its three foundational myths: spiritual regeneration as depicted in Puritan John Winthrop’s image of the Shining City on the Hill, the accumulation of material wealth and the myth of El Dorado, and personal reinvention, as illustrated by Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.

In the intervening three hundred years and the emergence of the United States as the world’s preeminent imperialist power, the dream’s original myths morphed into what the American author, Russell Banks, termed the three Cs: Christianity, capitalism, and civilization (Dreaming Up America, 2008). These in turn have combined to form the tripartite explanation that the United States has employed to rationalize its pursuit of its Manifest Destiny here and across the world; the aggression it used to remove Native Americans from their ancestral homes to secure more land for the nineteenth-century expansion of slavery; and its aggression against native peoples in the rest of the world to protect the one percenters’ corporate interests since the end of World War II, particularly those involving fossil fuels.

Under Reagan and the empowerment of the one-percenters’ right-wing politician surrogates, the foundational myths have undergone further changes in interpretation. First, capitalism has been rebranded free-market [unrestrained] capitalism, the preferred mechanism through which to bring Christianity and civilization to the world’s masses. Here in the United States, Reagan and his supporters married El Dorado and material wealth to the Shining City and spiritual regeneration and produced personal re-invention through acquisition of wealth (Banks, 2008) as their offspring, one predisposed to violence. As Gordon Gecko advised us, Greed is good.

Part II is the larger section of the book. Its six essays explain in detail how the foregoing has affected life for ordinary Americans in the here and now, and they offer a detailed analysis of why and how to push back against what seems to be an unrelenting momentum. Each of the essays is devoted to providing contextual information and talking points to be used in grassroots organizing around the issues I consider crucial to address in today’s oppressive America. When you’re getting kicked, I believe in kicking back. Nonviolently, of course.

The first essay, or Chapter 1, is essentially an organizing primer that details the key elements of grassroots organizing and how to employ them to effect. It serves as an introduction to the five remaining and more-extensive essays, each of which has as its focus a specific issue along with a description of a fight-back campaign currently being conducted by ordinary Americans.

Chapter 2 is concerned with Americans’ civil liberties and the hijacking of the US Constitution by the one-percenters and their surrogates, specifically the First, Second, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Chapter 3 deals with income inequality and its effect on public education and looks at the rise of the one-percenter oligarchs, particularly the Koch brothers, and the hedge-fund operators who have taken a sudden interest in charter schools, and the model campaign being waged by the UFT, the New York City teachers’ union, against their depredations.

Chapter 4 has as its focus guns and violence, particularly the violence that guns in the home spawn, and the ongoing police violence against African American men.

Chapter 5 is about the growing income gap in the country, which many economists attribute to the demise of the American union movement, and the effort by the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) to reverse the trend by promoting and financially supporting the Fight for 15 campaign, the SEIU’s effort to organize the unorganized and woefully underpaid food service workers.

The sixth and final chapter of Part II is concerned with the corporatization of the public mental health system and the renewed threat to psychiatric users of service and survivors raised by E. Fuller-Torrey’s highly publicized proposal to revive and refurbish the country’s long-term psychiatric institutions. The essay also contains a description of the several-years-long campaign being waged by the Center for the Human Rights of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry to convince the US Senate to ratify the UN Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The Afterword contains three brief and forward-looking essays that touch on the United States as a an emerging Creole nation as Russell Banks would term it, on Baltimore and another incident of police violence against a young, unarmed black man, and on the Pentagon’s planned Vietnam War Commemoration and the thinly concealed attempt by the federal government to rewrite history. An Appendix provides pertinent facts and figures about that era and the war.

Ordinary citizens as well as organizers need to possess a worldview, an in-depth understanding of the context or multiple historical variables that surround the issue that’s the focus of the organizing they’re doing. Accordingly, each essay, including those in the appendix, is rich in historical detail and analysis to provide proactive citizens and prospective organizers with essential information.

If you’re interested in returning the American dream to the ordinary Americans who should possess it and rolling back the one-percenter tide, read the essays and educate yourself about the issues I’ve chosen as essential for that. Make sure to put to good use the information you encounter there.

Portions of Part II’s Chapters 1, 2, 4, and 6 were previously published as blog posts on Mad In America’s website, www.madinamerica.com.

PART I

The American Dream in Its Historical Context

1

Introduction:

America’s Foundational Myths

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, (Requiem for a Nun,1951)

I’ve been at home in Brooklyn for more than a year