America!?

In 1991, merely two years after Communism had collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe, Vaclav Havel--The former Czech President, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, dissident, playwright and philosopher--wrote an oft-forgotten book entitled "Letni Premitani" (translated into English as "Summer Meditations") at the conclusion of his first full year as president of the then newly-democratic Czechoslovakia. In the work, Havel spells out his vision for the redevelopment of the country after more than forty years under an oppressive communist regime with an emphasis on the privatization of business, a focus on the rehabilitation of the environment and the reestablishment of regional cultural centers (villages). However, Havel's writing--at least at this point in time-- is more interesting not so much for its optimism and articulation of how to rebuild a nation, but for its diagnosis of the societal diseases and symptoms therein that are a consequence of totalitarian regimes.

The first symptom upon which Havel chooses to comment was the state of the villages, towns and cities, of which, he found to be "uniform in grayness, ugliness, sameness and anonymity." He laments the fact that nowhere was there to be found uniqueness in character and community, as each village itself was just a copy of the previous' drab architectural design, miserable cultural offerings and insular inhabitants. He juxtaposes this with a vision of building two bakeries, two pubs, two sweet shops and an array of private, small businesses in each town and village that would all agglomerate to produce a unique 'face' and 'feel' of a healthy community, thus sacrificing stifling uniformity for vibrancy.

He then proceeds to accuse the communist regime of undermining the relationship between a person and their work by emphasizing the division of society into working classes that congealed to form one giant 'mass' of workers that did nothing but feed the exploitative machine known as "Collectivization." Havel goes so far as to equate the entire nation of Communist Czechoslovakia to a "stable meant to hold robots" that have no control over where and why they work and also over what is done with the fruits or 'products' of their labor. He claims that nothing destroyed the Czechoslovak society as much as separating peoples' professions and work from personal and holistic meaning.

Yet, he saves his most scathing review for the collectivized farm, which he claims turned villages into "Dormitories for factory-farm laborers" and turned farmers themselves into unthinking machines tied to an exploitative, monopolized industry that emphasized quantity of produce over quality; drove cattle into in-human feed lots where they were unable to run through a meadow or feel the glint of sun on their back; poisoned the land through the use of copious amounts of fertilizer; emphasized the complete mechanization of farms with polluting technologies; and threw the ecological balance of the farm--and nature--into a nosedive, leading directly to desiccation and death.

Looks a lot like modern-day America, doesn't it?

Drab box stores and parking lots stretch into the horizon, choking off regional culture uniqueness by putting in their place chain restaurants, gas stations and stoplights, thus creating a uniformity of 'communities' built only for the car and consumerism. Millions of employees and workers in corporate America have lost meaning in jobs meant solely to expand profit margins for international companies and CEOs often times to the detriment of families and to the individuals themselves. And industrial farming with its tenants of monoculture (corn and soybeans), reliance on chemical fertilizers and its complete disregard for the balance of the ecosystem --and the farmer's relationship to the land itself--has laid waste to the family farm, farm communities and former nutritional health of America.

Yet, ironically, most of the modern-day American symptoms do not come from the often-cited 'socialism' of the Democratic Party, but from the short-sighted policies of a Republican Party becoming more rigid, narrow and dogmatic than ever before.