Occasionally the tip of the iceberg pokes through, and the reported facts corroborate the experience of most of the people. The recent Pew Center report that has now reached broad circulation shows that a full 93% of US households *lost* ground in the much vaunted recovery of 2009-2011. [ http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/viewart/20130423/BUSINESS/304230011/Pew-93-households-lost-net-worth-2009-11 ] This just validates what we are all living through, glossed over by averages, smoke and mirrors. There is no "recovery." Sectors *within* the top quintile are holding on, but barely.
This is the starkest portrayal I've seen in black and
white; I had previously been telling anyone who would listen that, while there
seems to be a pickup for those in the $250,000 and up range, it is clearly not
the case for the bottom 4 quintiles [i.e. $100,000 of combined household income
2010]. It should be shocking enough to most middle class types that the real
picture is so different from what they believe to be living--that is, that they
are actually in the top 8-10%... BUT the data shows even worse. Even families
up to $500,000 (!) are losing ground.
This bespeaks the desperation in the political outlook of
what Zinn called "The Guards" and what Chomsky called "The Priesthood": people who
are doing just fine in the current system but think it needs a few tweaks. As
this sector shrinks, the internal contradictions will become more apparent and
the response of the state becomes harsher and less elastic. So households with
"two good jobs" say $100,000 plus each, are prone to seeing some
hope, the famous 'green shoots' mantra that fell on deaf ears for most of us a
few years ago. Come on, guys--it *can* work! We all need to just be a bit more
patient! Etc., etc.
The political ramifications are quite alarming. This
sector is crucial to the viability and perceived legitimacy of the system, and
their panic has far reaching consequences. It may be just beginning to dawn on
them that they, too, will ultimately be left behind in the wealth shift, and
that it was never really about them. Slowly but surely, and to varying degrees,
they are recapitulating Judas' epiphany [the Andrew Lloyd Weber version, at
least]: "My god I'm sick. I've been used--and you knew all the time!"
They are just beginning to see that they are facing an uphill battle in a
rigged game against the house with a stacked deck--and any other cheesy
analogies you want to cram in there--but there is nowhere for them to go.
Paradoxically, the initial wave of reaction to this
newfound betrayal by their patrons in the ruling class is not to turn on their
masters. It is to express this anger at those below, in the age-old game of
shooting the messenger. Consequently, they become even better
"shushers," the Seinfeld term for viewers who keep order in a
theater. Border collies, gatekeepers... they have always been there, but they
were more consciously part of the professional 'left,' an icon of the political
class. In the current period, their anger is more desperate and more diffuse:
They have always been more inclined, for example, to trust the police, to
believe the official version of events, to avoid sources of information
considered by their class position and experience to be beyond the pale. Having
rarely, if ever, been on the wrong side of Officialdom, or had to bail
relatives out of jail, or had any race-tinged experiences themselves, they are
primed and pampered to be the intellectual shock troops of Acceptable
Discourse. In the face of increased perfidy on the part of their class betters,
they can't (yet) bring themselves to bite what they still perceive as the hand
that feeds them. Consequently, they will lash out at the incongruously labeled
'parasites' who they feel are ruining their banquet, even as the din of
cognitive dissonance grows inside their heads.
The brutal fallout from this game is apparent all around
us, as the body counts rise and the single-minded terrorism of the state
apparatus grows ever more horrific in its attempt to maintain their bloated
lifestyles through hegemony over the world's resources. This transaction is
completely lost on the Shushers--rather, they become its ghoulish cheerleaders,
with or without acknowledgement. They are capable, somehow, of rationalizing
the complete destruction of country after country--even as they are shown they
are being lied into doing so. It is inconsequential to them that their
government is funding, arming and training the very Islamic terrorists in Syria
and Libya that they are primed to fear elsewhere. The simple mathematical rule
of balance and scale demands that they acknowledge and reject the 1000 : 1
ratio of violence ravaging the world in their name, with their money, with
their silence at best and enthusiastic endorsement at worst. They just don't
give a sh*t, and their macabre privileging of the relatively few victims among
their own--as awful as these surely are--is lost outside the bubble, where the
rest of the world grieves for their victims.
The economic consequences of their loss of station scares
the sh*t out of them: while logic and basic morality dictate that they should
wake up every morning with the bloody carnage of their own drone army foremost
in their minds, they are instead preoccupied with how they can no longer afford
an annual pilgrimage to Disney, or that they may have to postpone the
kitchen/bath/boat/car upgrade they have been contemplating. If this makes them
sound like monsters, it should. There is something epic about the horror of
simultaneously having no power over a political system that wreaks such
destruction and yet defending that very system as acceptable and benign,
without at the very least having been the proverbial canary in the coal mine,
the littlest Who shouting 'We are here!' from the tallest available tower. It
is more than a sham and a shame. It is a moral crime, a breach of ethical duty
that will yield unimaginable consequences when the balance is eventually
righted. And yes, for international readers, I do realize the self-absorption
of focusing on the internal Amerikan experience, and hear your cries of
"Who gives a sh*t!' inside my head." If you have stuck with me this
long, much respect. Sometimes I feel it necessary to speak to and about my
Amurkan countrymen from the perspective of one who shares, albeit sometimes
tangentially, their experience.
I believe we are living in the time where this sh*t will
all hit the fan. It may take a year or two or ten, but in historical terms we
are living in that instant, that one day where, looking back, it will become
apparent that everything changed. It is the pivotal moment so brilliantly
enacted by the montage at the end of Les Miserables where all social actors, no
matter their role or position, sense that something momentous is on the
horizon: "Tomorrow we'll discover what our God in heaven has in store. One
more dawn. One more day. One day more!"
