Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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These ideals were true, as we were then ceaselessly reminded, during the time of the Stasi in East Germany. They are still true in the USA of the TSA, the NSA, the FBI the DIA, the CIA and a whole host of other overly curious government agencies.

Were dignity a concern, we would, in our roles as employees, stockholders and citizens, refuse to nod passively when upper management decides to trade-in the livelihoods of perfectly productive employees, and with it, the peace and stability of their households, to gain a higher marginal return on company stock.

Similarly, we would never allow something as basic as the health care, which is to say the physical and mental well-being of millions of our fellow citizens at the their lowest life ebb, to be controlled by people for whom healing outcomes are, at best, a secondary concern.

Finally, if dignity had a major place in our national imaginary, we would insist that the people who bring us the news stop using the euphemisms invented by government “perception management” experts—terms like “surgical strikes” and “collateral damage”—to refer to the US killing of mostly innocent human beings in far away countries. And rather than assent to the prevention, by executive order and the bullying and banning of Al-Jazeera, of our own necessary encounter with the visible results of our well-funded killing machine, we would beg to know more about the victims and those they left behind and would seek to imagine just what it will take to put their shattered lives back together.