Perspective?

Recently someone was asking why you don't get any perspective from the news these days, in the midst of these disastrous times.I thought that perspective had been available all the time. Badlands certainly tried to make readers aware of critical economists like Dean Baker, Mike Whitney, the great historical analyst of American imperialism, Chalmers Johnson, many other writers on websites like TomDispatch.com, CounterPunch and the incomparable globalresearch.ca -- especially the economic "Tsunami" series by F. William Engdahl, author of Seeds of Destruction. Nobody ever did it better than Tariq Ali when, during the "run-up" to the Iraq Invasion, he came to the US and spoke passionately about the Anti-Imperialism League founded by William James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and others to protest the Spanish-American War. It was Ali who brought to the attention of a few English-speaking people how quickly attacks against the invaders became coordinated. This was organized resistance, not scattered "insurgents." What about Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, Middle Eastern correspondents whose exhaustive reporting is only matched by the dead seriousness of their questions? On the economic beat, Dean Baker was writing about the huge difference between mortgage payments and rents four years ago and pointing out that we were uncharted waters and had no idea of the the consequences and, most importantly, analyzed the tendency of the American economy to operate on bubbles now due to the concentration of capital. But it was Engdahl that wrote the short history of the derivative and the casino American economy. Nor can we ever forget the dire prophesies of rock-ribbed conservative supply-side theorist and assistant secretary of the Treasury under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts. All of these people have been dead on for years.When we last played Blackjack at a casino we noticed again that when you lost, they took your money, in real time.Perspective? The horses left the barn, the county, the state, the nation and are now devouring hay in stables from London to Beijing. Journalism is accurately describing horses' asses galloping off across the globe. That's the story.The quality of the people who did this? They had no quality. They may even now still be richer and better schooled, but they are no different that the slimy little flippers on cellphones pacing Main Street, Merced, two years ago.The quality of the American people who allowed them to do this to their economy and the economy of their grandchildren? "Little Man, What Now?," Hans Fallada asked the Germans in 1932. What Chalmers Johnson exhausted himself trying to say in his Sorrows of Empire trilogy was that the only way to see contemporary American history, contemporary American reality, was as the domestic component of empire, with all its dire economic consequences for the ordinary American. Johnson saw it in terms of Thucydides describing the death of Athens in the Pelopponesian War and in terms of another great, contemporary historical guide, Hannah Arendt. The announcement of this vital tragic perspective fell mainly on deaf ears. The taste for tragic dramatic art has waned much since Robert Bolt's "Man for All Seasons," 46 years ago. Ultimately, the fault might lay in American education. From time to time, if the aim is to remain free, the citizen needs to do a little work between the ears. At least, that's what Aristotle and the Founding Fathers suggest.Will justice be done? By whom and where and how?