SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL

Thomas Edsall has reviewed a new book by noted economist Joseph Stiglitz entitled The Price of Inequality.

The book is, in Edsall’s opinion, “the single most comprehensive counterargument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories”. And there is much justification for that assessment.

But it’s also not the key to what has happened to Us that has led  – to use Edsall’s term – to “our bleak present”.

Stiglitz – and rightly, I think – refuses to accept the very widespread professional economist’s view that Our current mess is and always has been “inevitable”, i.e. that megaforces both historical and economic have simply dethroned the U.S. from its postwar (1945-1970) economic hegemony of the planet, and thus that “our bleak present” is simply the result of all those forces (globalization, automation, the easy movement of capital and goods around the planet) working on Us and working through the rest of the economies on the planet.

And Stiglitz is surely correct to reject the “inevitability” of the Bubbles (credit, mortgages) that – finally in 2008 – burst and tore the bottom out of everybody’s boat. (The remaining two Bubbles – U.S. government solvency and the status of the Dollar as the world’s reserve currency - still have not burst, although the bankruptcy of an increasing number of American municipalities and towns is ominous in that regard, as are the increasing number of arrangements among governments in various around the planet to trade among themselves in currencies other than the Dollar).

But I can’t completely agree with Stiglitz’s conclusions: that while what has happened to Us is not and cannot be ascribable merely to “uncontrollable technological and social change”, but rather Our current “two-tier society” is “the result of the exercise of political power by moneyed interests over legislative and regulatory processing”.

This shades too closely, I would say, to being merely a repetition of the dynamical explanation classically assigned to the First Gilded Age (1880-1929, roughly).

“Politics shapes the market” as well as historical and economic forces, says Stiglitz. Yes. But that’s precisely where things have gone off the track, and while the bad Consequences of much of that political maneuvering may not have been foreseen (I said “may not”) yet they were not considered with sufficient seriousness, so eager was the Beltway to run a very dodgy and certainly highly-fraught political strategy to ensure electoral viability since at least 1972.

As I have often said on this site, the Democrats in the period 1965-1972 were first and foremost concerned for developing some reliable electoral coalition of voters to replace the New Deal coalition of Southern (and Jim Crow) interests and the blue-collar industrial workers in the Northern and upper Mid-Western cities.

With an impressive practicality, the Dems worked with the materials at hand. But they were unable to keep steady on the surf board as the Wave began to take some very very torturous twists. Advocacy for American blacks had with an alarming quickness dropped Martin Luther King’s marvelous, sober, and almost Lincolnesque vision of blacks joining the mainstream of American life through the liberation from the constraints of Jim Crow (the stunning counterpoint of the Watts riots took place within ten days of the passage of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act of 1965, fatally hampering his ability – as that President realized instantly at the time – to get any further major ‘civil-rights’ legislation passed). Replacing King’s vision was a congeries of black separatism, anti-white sensibility, and even ‘revolutionary’ agitation that deranged even so seemingly worthwhile an impetus as the emphasis on Black Pride.

But the Dems tried to work with what they had, vowing to put the full weight and force of the government behind a now-urgently-needed new ‘demographic’.

But the profound problem – in view of the Constitutional and Framing Vision – was that while the Jim Crow South had comprised a matrix of many (Southern) States’ unconstitutional race laws, which clearly could be overridden by the Federal government, yet this was not true of other regions of the country.

And even in the South, there remained the ominous Question: once the Federal government had forced the abolition of those matrices of race-laws, precisely how much further could it go without deranging the entire balance of power (Federal vis-à-vis State and local government) and engorging itself vastly in relation to government’s role in regard to not only political but cultural and social dynamics? Was the Federal government really designed and authorized to terraform the Southern culture and society, rather than merely ensure that the matrix of laws in regard to racial relations was made conformable to the Constitution? Would that not simultaneously engorge the government and set it on a dangerously slippery slope?

This Question became even more vital – and, alas, thus also even more un-disussable – as the civil-rights movement entered a second phase (i.e. beyond King’s first phase) not only in the South but in the rest of the country. Which immediately complicated matters even more because there were no matrices of overt and clear Jim-Crow-type race laws in the rest of the country that would justify the engorged and active power (such as it might or might not legitimately be) of the Federal government to start terraforming not simply the Southern Jim-Crow culture and society but the national culture and society.

At this juncture, postwar French and German (the Frankfurt School, as it is known) thought became useful. There are ‘structures’ in societies, cultures and civilizations; these structures work at profoundly deep levels to accustom their peoples to see as ‘natural’ many inequalities and injustices (a stunningly complex and yet vague concept, an empty suitcase waiting to be filled by whomever gets to it first); these deep and preconscious forces exercise a profound and powerful formative influence before the conscious thought and will of individuals and even the formally-embraced principles of a society and culture come into play; thus conventional (and traditional) political activity enters the picture far too late to really have any worthwhile effect because by the time people are ready to exercise Citizenship they are already mal-formed and tainted; and so clearly the government (European revolutionary thought is inevitably statist in this regard ,even when it seeks to be ‘revolutionary’ – it doesn’t seek to simply overthrow government but to capture it and, more specifically, its power and its capacity for expanding that power) must actually take it upon itself to profoundly run the society, the culture, and the people (which is hell-and-gone from the Framing Vision).

These ideas were developed partly by European writers critiquing ‘colonialism’, which was still alive (barely) and kicking after World War Two, and partly by transplanted German and other European writers who had spent their formative or early-adult years under Hitler, had escaped in the 1930s or after the war and come here, and now hit the nails that their hammers required: the U.S. was in its own way also a ‘regime’ and demonstrated the power-patterns so monstrously demonstrated by Hitler’s Reich. And consequently, but of course, steps have to be taken …

And, of course, there were also numerous intellectuals – native-born or otherwise – who still thought that Communism – Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist, or a misch of all of them – was The Way Forward for the world and its peoples.

The Dems may not have wanted to be seen embracing such an alien (and, in truth, profoundly anti-American and anti-Framing Vision) set of dampdreams, but they were desperate. Perhaps they might ‘baptize’ all the whackness while taking political advantage of the remarkably broad menu of (statist) possibilities that was on offer in this panoply of concepts? Perhaps they could graft some of the body-parts of the European Frankenstein onto the (apparently diseased) American body politic?

And thus the Dems could somehow both create a new demographic for themselves (the American blacks) while also hugely engorging the power of the Federal government to terraform the country’s culture and society in order to give this newly-‘empowered’ demographic everything its self-proclaimed ‘official advocates’ desired and demanded.

Thus the American Federal government would start down the road of so many European governments: actively arrogating to itself the power to not merely tinker-with but to profoundly Shape and re-Shape the minds and hearts, the thoughts and feelings, of its own Citizens – who in the Constitutional and Framing Vision were The People, and who, acting in their collective capacity as The People, were the governors of their own government and the sole and indispensable source of its Sovereign authority … and legitimacy.

You can see the problems here.

And then it dawned on the Dems that even at their most numerous, their newly-valorized ‘black’ demographic would only constitute nine percent of the population.

Thus baffled once again, the Dems were obviously going to be open to any ‘solution’ pushed their way.

Feminism – most especially in its Radical variants, shrewdly enamored of European and Euro-communist and structuralist thinking – offered the jaw-dropping potential of a full fifty-one or fifty-two percent of the population. This was a demographic to be sought at all costs and in the service of whose agendas the pols would have to ‘do whatever it takes’.

It has taken quite a lot.

Especially when the Radical Feminists kicked their more moderate sistern to the curb and then (without too much messy attribution) shrewdly and slyly adopted the culture-war, culture-undermining strategy of early 20^th-century Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. And his signature concerns were: hegemony, dominance, oppression, and marginalization; his objective:  to bring the marginalized into the center (of political power, not of any moderate centrist political praxis) and thus undermine the functioning democratic polities of the West and open the path for Lenin’s version of communism.

The Dems figured they could baptize this into the American Vision and in their lab on the Hill create some fresh new creature that would combine all the best of Gramscian and Framing thought (with the indubitable emphasis, of course, on their clients’ Gramscian bits).

Thus in a stroke the Dems a) ensured their political ‘success’, b) engorged the statist power of the Federal government, c) conceptually doubled the workforce at a stroke (women needed jobs to be ‘independent’ and shouldn’t have to spend their lives enserfed to families and raising kids and having happiness-obstructing babies), and d) ignited a profound culture-war (spun as merely backlashing by traditional power-holders who didn’t want to share power) that then also e) served to distract national attention from the hugely vital and increasingly urgent Question of how to remain a powerful and productive and solvent economy in the face of increasing competition from a Europe now recovered from World War Two’s devastation and a Third World now able to begin emulating the West and competing for production and business opportunities.

Quickly surfing in on the coat-tails of ‘structuralism’ came Victimism. This was an international movement that had begun in the immediate postwar era, concerned for the innumerably and monstrously demonstrated ways that people could be victimized by their own governments.

It quickly went viral here, under the eager horticultural ministering of the pols. And mutated ominously: now ‘victims’ were not ‘victimized’ by their governments, but rather by the structures in their culture and their society that ‘marginalized’ as well as ‘victimized’ them. A Problem for which the government would, in the engorged plentitude of its power, ride to their rescue, as if it were saving baby harp seals from evil predatory hunters (formerly known as the Citizenry, now cast as the ‘dominant, oppressive, hegemonic, marginalizing and backlashing’ evil power-holders).

Additional Identities were quickly embraced: Youth being one of the largest (the Boomers clearly constituted a seductively huge demographic and 18 year-olds were given the vote in 1972).

Immigrants were another: and a neat two-fer, since you imported a vast amount of ready-made non-White Oppressor folks who would vote (somehow) against all the ‘traditional’ arrangements while also undermining the well-paid status of unionized blue-collar American labor (the iconic Archie Bunkers who were destined now for the trash-bin of America’s History).

Neat again.

And if you added up all the Identities, and their inevitable Necessary Oppressor-Monsters, you got an amalgam that could be handily described as the White, Adult, Patriarchal, Sex-crazed (and later Straight) Male, especially if he was Middle-Class or Working-Class;  and thus conversely you got a Victimry (if I may) comprised of everybody who, in whole or in part, was not that.

Neat.

The problems this ‘strategy’ posed for a democratic politics along the lines of the Framing Vision should have been as clear as a fire in an oil refinery, but while the flames were acknowledged, they were cheeribly asserted to be merely ‘creative destruction’ and ‘liberating transgression’.

The Dems worked overtime in the lab up in the castle on the Hill. By the presidential election of 1972 they were ready to unveil their new Party to The People. They were rejected 49 states to one (Teddy K’s Massachusetts). And then they got really dark. And decided that ‘traditional’ democratic politics were not The Way Forward.

Meanwhile, watching the Dems fabricate a new Leviatha, the Republicans decided it was OK for them to bring back Leviathan – that monstrously engorged and omnivorous government that had been caged so ably by the Framers, and locked-lips with the Big Money interests.

This wasn’t such a big problem for the Dems, since now both Parties were somehow indenturing themselves to not only their ‘special interests’ (Identity-politics demands and Big Pain on the Left, Big Money on the Right) but also to the Very Very Big Government necessary to ensure that all the agendas, objectives, and demands of the various ‘special interests’ could be met.

And as Theodore Lowi observed as early as 1967, the government had now solved the Problem of not-wanting to appear ‘coercive’ in the immediate postwar era by allowing the ‘special interests’ of that era – mostly Labor, Business, and Agriculture – to write their own laws, which the pols would dutifully pass, or their own regulations – the authority for which the pols ‘delegated’ to an increasing pandemonium of all-powerful regulatory Agencies. Which, I would then add, was a dynamic monstrously engorged when the ‘special interests’ were astronomically expanded to include the various Identities of the Left and all their demands and their agendas and their objectives.

Meanwhile, the economy – and especially the Dollar – was in as much trouble as were the Culture and the Framing Vision. Nixon had to abrogate the 1946 Bretton Woods international financial arrangements and float the Dollar in 1971. And nothing really worked right after that.

The Identities demanded all sorts of regulation and policy and legislative ‘reforms’ that made hiring and keeping employees increasingly onerous for employers large and small. Big Money and Big Capital sensed that there were far less complicated sources of labor overseas. The solution for the Beltway (now in a condition of abject but robust Indenture): make American employees increasingly unattractive through various ‘protections’(ensuring continued domestic political ‘success’) while simultaneously allowing Capital and Production to go overseas (thus ensuring the satisfaction of Big Money and Investment Capital).

Genuine domestic Productivity dropped at intensifying rates.

The solution deviesd to handle that was to create government jobs wherever possible; although government employment beyond a certain point is not useful economically because it doesn’t create produced-materials for sale but rather simply re-shuffles (and redistributes) public tax monies like the peanut in the proverbial shell game. And to create an increasing panoply of ‘entitlements’ (so many people were ‘victims’ and were being ‘structurally victimized', no?).

And in addition to all that, the intensifying sense of ‘entitlement’ – coupled with the increasingly unreal environment of a national life that offered few constructive employment opportunities for the enterprising or the simply dutiful and responsible – did nothing to improve many folks’ sense of personal industriousness, productivity, and even responsibility (which was itself kicked to the curb as being ‘oppressive’ and 'blaming the victim').

Meanwhile, and especially as actual Production declined, the actual management of Big Money (the so called F.I.R.E interests: finance, insurance, real estate) actually became the primary sources of such wealth-generation as remained, and they had their own agendas and objectives which the government (Executive as well as Legislative) could no longer ignore … or even control: as regulations increased in the service of the Left, they were increasingly removed in the service of the Right and Big Money.

And this led to an intensifying downward spiral of smoke-and-mirror shows to try to keep up everybody’s confidence in the health and wealth of the financial system and the economy: there was borrowing on the authority of America’s (former) economic strength and hegemony – in Reagan’s second administration the U.S. went for the first time ever from being a creditor-nation to being a debtor-nation); diversification (corporations that made machinery getting into cookie-manufacturing and such); and hostile-take-overs (to simply lay off workers, drive up the stock price of the acquired business and then sell it to whomever at a profit, where the process would be repeated); out-sourcing (the jobs going overseas); off-shoring (not only the jobs but the taxable profits going to the host country); and then finally a series of Bubbles (about which you probably already know).

And, of course, extensive and habitual government jiggering of official figures to make the whole thing look a lot less bad than it was quickly becoming; while simultaneously everything was being spun as ‘liberating’ and proof that you can have ‘many revolutions at the same time’, kill the Goose that laid the Golden Egg, and still keep up the world’s greatest supply of Golden Eggs.

And then – even more ominously – as the tricks finally ran out, there was a lethal turn to overseas military (mis-)adventure to Go Out And Grab (GOAG) other people’s stuff. Which was cheeribly and nobly spun as ‘liberation and thus We embraced the national strategy of Go Out And Liberate And Grab (GOALAG), using – marvelously – the well-entrenched domestic trope of ‘sensitive’ Liberation to justify ‘humanitarian interventions’ and the regime-changing of whatever governments had lots of useful resources and couldn’t fight back and had – by whatever standard was convenient to the case – an ‘oppressive’ government. (And of course, if you’re talking about ‘women’ being ‘oppressed’, then just about any other government on the planet could easily be placed on the List.)

And yet these military (mis-)adventures cost the lion’s share of whatever actual national wealth remained and required a huge investment in the Pentagon operations.

(I pass over in silence the huge costs to military operation efficiency imposed by the various Politically Correct impositions on the military, and the catastrophic ill-consequences to the fighting forces of not only those impositions, but then the experience of fighting un-winnable military operations for years on end. We had been assured in the 1990s that with the USSR gone We would have no peer-competitor in a military sense and that thus We could afford to 'de-prioritize' military operational efficiency and competence, and then that It Doesn’t Make Any Difference Anyway because computers and whizz-bang technology would win all the wars and operations. And has any of that been working for Us?)

So then, I don’t think Stiglitz gets to the heart of the matter by blaming everything on the Right and the rich – who, admittedly, are now a ‘top-tier’ that approaches the obscenities of the First Gilded Age, but at least back then We were a rising nation whose potentials had not been fully tapped … which isn’t the case any longer. Not hardly.

And thus too, “inequality” is not the heart of the Problem now: just as the inequality of passenger classes on Titanic was not the core Problem facing those hapless souls after she ripped herself open like a tuna can on the berg.

If for no other reason, there really isn’t any money left to ‘equalize’ people; even if you took all the billions personally owned by the ‘top-tier’ tomorrow and ‘redistributed’ it (the Big Lie seduction of the past 40 Biblical years of the Left’s magic-act) you wouldn’t begin to make a dent.

People need not only to ‘earn’ money, but they need to feel like they are earning it through a useful and productive job: otherwise you don’t create Citizens but only unripe and (dependably ) dependent  ‘clients’, like the masses of ancient Rome (and Czarist Russia’s serfs and proletariat). No democratic and Constitutional republic can survive if it has to rely on material like that. As you perhaps have begun to see.

Thus also I can’t fully credit that assertion that “inequality violates moral values [and] … also interacts with a money-driven political system to grant excessive power to the most affluent”.

In the first place, it hasn’t been just “money” that has been driving the political system for the past 40 Biblical years – it has been the agendas of the ‘special interests’ and organized Advocacies of the Left’s Identity-Politics, whose lethally deforming influence has been exercised not through political contributions of cash but through the power of votes – votes ‘bought’ with the various schemes and stratagems of their pandering patrons in the Beltway.

Face it: individual ‘votes’ that have been ‘bought’ with the deliberately un-boundaried largesse of public tax monies are as lethally deranging to the American Vision’s political dynamics as legislative votes bought with corporate cash.

And face this: “dominant interests” cannot accurately be defined today as merely the old bugaboo ‘special interests’ of the First Gilded Age. Today’s dominant interests include those on the Left, through Identity-Politics and the whole of that lethally misguided strategy.

If Big Money has “captured” regulatory authorities and legislators, so has Big Identity – and if either of them are cause for serious concern, then both of them working in tandem are cause for the most vital and profound public alarm.

Nor is it enough for Stiglitz to lament – accurately enough as far as it goes – that “lack of opportunity” means that the nation’s “most valuable asset – its people – is not being fully used”.

Decades of the government operating as a snow-plow of first-resort to clear the paths of Life that human beings vitally and profoundly need to feel they have cleared for themselves have worked a horrible and soul-stifling corrosion, as any sense of personal or communal enterprise and responsibility were baffled and choked away.

Nor is it completely relevant – although hardly inaccurate – for Stiglitz to observe that “the rich”, needing fewer “public services”, don’t want to pay for any. The rich need fire and police and highway maintenance just like everybody else.

What’s more accurate is to acknowledge that what is nowadays meant by “public services” is hell-and-gone beyond what that term has usually meant in prior eras of American history: that term now means the entire panoply of government largely and literally substituting itself for both individual maturity and enterprise and effort and local community concern and effort, and the ever-increasing pandemonium of ‘service providers’ that battens off the whole thing.

We have replaced the fiber and capacities of individual human beings and communities, of Citizens and their locally-administered polities, with blanket government imposition of tax monies in the service of political convenience. And – who can be surprised? – the more that such a dynamic undermines the competence of individuals and communities, the more We ‘need’ the ever-engorging Feds and their government impositions. We are well on the way to becoming soup-rabbits, caged in iron or velvet, awaiting the Call to the Cook-Pot.

This is the genuine fons et origo of Our intensifying and expanding en-serfment, which is now no longer merely political (as if that weren’t bad enough) but morale (used as an adjective here; ‘moral’ has too many religious connotations, which are not inapt but in this context, I think, distracting).

Avoiding that reality will do Us no more good than having another glass of champagne or a quick shot of rot-gut or moving queasily aft toward the still-dry fantail appeared as a good idea to the hapless and doomed souls aboard Titanic.

ADDENDUM

We approach – by coincidence – the 46^th anniversary (August 20, 1966) of Mao’s kick-off of the Cultural Revolution with the campaign against “the Four Olds”: old Stories, old Customs, old Habits, old Ideas. That ‘Revolution’ – as revolutions so often do because that’s what revolutions do – wrecked so much of the matrix and fabric of Chinese history and culture that almost half a century later China is still trying to repair what damage can be repaired.

It is, however, more than a coincidence that at precisely that point in time the Dems began to consider doing the same thing here. Because if the demands and agendas of its soon-to-be-embraced Identities and Advocacies were to be met, then huge and deeply-laid chunks of American Tradition, Culture, Belief, and Ideas would have to be ripped out and tossed away – under whatever ‘philosophical’ or legal or political pretexts could be devised.

Neatly, the Advocacies pushed a whizzbang New Idea their way: if you call all of our demands and agendas “rights”, then you pols won’t have to worry about trying to explain anything or persuade the Citizenry – you can just claim that this is ‘a matter of rights’ and so you don’t have any choice but to give in and rip out the Old; you’ll be covered by the hallowed American respect for “rights’ so you won’t even have to do much heavy political lifting.

The Supreme Court had already beaten Mao to the punch – without perhaps quite realizing it – when in 1965 it declared that it had found more “rights” in “the penumbras of the Constitution”, which is to say, in the shadows and darkling historical and conceptual fog surrounding the actual document that the Framers wrote … where nobody had seen anything before. Neat.

Then the structuralists got into the act and claimed that since there were levels of ‘marginalization’ and ‘victimization’ so deep that nobody even realized they were there, then – but of course – all such marginalized and victimized persons (and groups and demographically valuable groups) must – but of course – have some “rights” that required the government to make all that marginalization and victimization go away. And the pols – and the Supreme Court – were happy to agree and comply.

And the victimists certainly agreed with all that.

And so did the Gramscian-soused ‘radical feminists’ and the Eurocommunist ‘radical democrats’ (who really had no use for ‘democracy’ or ‘deliberative democratic politics’ at all).

And lubricating the friction of the whole queasy and treacherous scheme was the general and specific frisson provided by Mao’s then-current and then-imagined ‘success’ in imposing and unleashing the Cultural Revolution against the Four Olds in Red China.

The Great Helmsman would rip out the framework of the hull while the Great Vessel, loaded to the gunwales with ‘souls’ trying to make it through Life, was far out on History’s sea, ploughing through the mountainous waves and the not-infrequent storms and typhoons of modern History.

WE ARE ALL PARTISANS NOW

Back in November of 2006 I wrote a Post on this site entitled “Homeless Partisans”.  Given developments over the past half-decade I am including sizable chunks of that Post with thoughts about Our present situation and its possibilities.

Up in Boston there is a statue. (See here for views of it). Actually it’s a collection of figures, just slightly larger than life-size: five mounted horsemen, armed with swords slung on their hips and each with a lance that rises up behind him. They are riding in a loose double file, the horses at a walk. It is one of the most remarkable sculptures I have ever seen, and speaks deeply to me. And I think it is a quick diagnostic for any of us, how we react to it.

The riders themselves are thick-booted, but without helmet or headgear – the lack of the helmets suggesting that they are not ‘troops’ and yet the boots are military type, reminding us that at times they must laboriously travel the earth on missions.

The swords, thick and heavy, hang down although not on a pure vertical plumb, joining the boots in their message that the matters of this earth are thick and dense, not always on-plumb and heavy to engage. Yet the lances are perfect thin spires that rise up above them, reaching with sharp lightness for the sky, a natural medieval city of spires, an echo of the forests that gave them shelter.

The riders are recognizably human males but without individually distinctive facial features. But – no surprise for the deeply Catholic Polish tradition – each rider’s face has a beard, and of the cropped type often seen in paintings of the Crucifixion; the effect is heightened by each rider’s head bending slightly forward, with the upright ‘tree’ of his lance directly behind.

The physical contours of their upper bodies are clear, as if they had no shirts (against the cold night) or very threadbare shirts; the lead rider seems to have old medals pinned to whatever shred covers his chest; the effect is of an undemonstrative vulnerability, freely accepted and robustly, austerely borne.

They sit their mounts square and straight, but with their shoulders hunched, as if pressing forward against some strong countering force. Counter-intuitively, this imparts strength to them, as if in gathering his arms in toward his torso, each was marshalling his resolve, and the tensile seriousness of the group itself is thus multiplied.

But while the heavily-booted legs bond with the torsos of the horses, each individual’s upper trunk rises free of the close-grouped mass, each lance then further elongating its owner, extending him almost as an El Greco saint, straining upwards under the tension of his spiritual dynamism and yearning.

The horses are equally marvelous. Thin-bulked, they give the impression of not having eaten a great deal recently. Their legs are long, which serves to further extend the group on the vertical plane, downwards as if to balance or complement the lances’ reaching into the heavens. I think of a racing yacht: mast reaching high so that the sails can catch every bit of wind, yet the keel reaching deep to balance the vessel as she responds to the wind.

But the legs are not bent as if the animals were weak; rather, the legs are flexed, tensively and dynamically; they are in the very act of moving at a walk. The necks, however, especially of the lead animal, are stretched out, extending the group on the horizontal plane, pulling it forward into the uncertain future; while the tails stream out behind, wispily evoking a past that has been left behind and perhaps is no more.

One of the following animals – bringing up the left rear of the group – is caught perfectly in the midst of one of those inimitably equine gestures: the simultaneous extending of the neck to the left and shaking of the head from side to side, almost audibly accompanied here by a whinny. And its neck, extending obliquely outward further to the left, breaks that plane of the presentation, as if reaching out to the viewer.

Yet too, the animals’ legs are not only thin, but also enlongated; as if the necessarily thick burden of the men and their mission is raised up on thin, if determined legs. It speaks of the fragility of all human undertakings, and of how determination must often compensate for a lack of more abundant resources.


And further, as if those who pursue strenuous, lonely but honorable paths, even though burdened, pursue their duty on a plane above the plain dimension of quotidian earth, of daily life. As if, even while passing through the common dimension, their strenuous errand actually lifts them into a dimension above the common appearances – perhaps Above them.

The whole group arises from a single base. It is executed completely in a very darkish, pitted and pocked bronze-like metal. No child-smooth, brightly polished, proudly mawkish encomium here. Rather, the metal’s darkness and texture grittily respects the tremendous and lonely exertions of the committed adult, so often carried out in physical hardship and the darkness of uncertainty, unlit and unsmoothed by any clear promise of success or aid.

Or of support. For these men, in this group, are alone. Darkness dwells with them, even in the daylight. They are hunted as well as hunters, and cut off even from their own countrymen, who cannot or will not join them in their hazardous duty, who may well not acknowledge their exertions to be any sort of duty at all, but rather a madness that is also a crime, endangering everyone. And thus burthened they press onward with a quiet will.

But then again, who knows what energies those long-extended lances attract as they reach into the sky?

They are partisans, modeled by the sculptor Andrezj Pitynski in 1979, on those Polish fighters who fought the Nazis and then the Soviet Communists, in the awful years spanned by Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Iron Curtain.

But of course, they are a tribute to all partisans anywhere, whose complicated passions draw them into the tangle of human darknesses amplified through war and the dark ragings and arrangings of governments, and yet whose un-complex ideals draw them upward above the spume and dust of the human fray, reaching spire-like for a heaven that, if it exists, must out of tactical necessity assume the shape of a spear rather than a fully-formed cross.

They ride together yet each separate, always in semi-darkness, in a hard and pocked world, on a mission that is never completed, un-detained by any welcome, stretched out across more than one dimension, a vortex comprised out of the living fiber, the colliding energies, of the Vertical and the Horizontal, the Past and the Future. And of the Beyond.

And, contemplating the spirey but so thin lances, one cannot help but be reminded of the charge of the young Polish cavalry against the Panzers and the machine guns and the Stukas in that awful September of 1939. Yet the human will to be free – not equally taken up among individuals of our species – proves itself sparked by the divine when it is welcomed into the heart and reaches out to others of similar stature.

For twenty-three years, this group had ridden its Long Mission on the lawn at the western edge of the venerable Boston Common; hardly an inappropriate spot. Here stern Puritans gathered to drill for their errand into the wilderness, militia formed to join General Washington in Cambridge or man the fortifications on Dorchester Heights, and Union troops paraded en route to the colossal struggles far to the South. Only yards from their site, the new Polish Pope had said Mass in October of 1979. If this group is out of place, it is only because of their stern message. And maybe because they’re Polish.

The group was removed early in 2006. The heirs – by Deed and mortgage if not by blood or spirit – of those grittier earlier generations, the current ruling residents of Beacon Hill, to whom the City has granted the trump-right of outrage and preference, finally took an unofficial vote and decided that the piece did not fit in with the “spirit” of the Common. The sculpture was “depressing”. And perhaps a 'downer, dude'. And no doubt scared the children – or ‘the help’.

Apparently the nearby Civil War monument, several stories tall, does not depress them. Perhaps because they can’t quite place it, that particular war. Or perhaps because they can only recall that General Sherman had had tea at great-great-grand-mama’s when he attended the unveiling. Or was it General Washington?

That their defecating Lhasa Apsos and cavorting poodles do very much fit in on the Common was taken as a given; ditto their white-tent receptions and twittering parties, held on that hallowed ground by City permits vouchsafed only to the utterly proper, the impeccably appropriate, and the irresistibly-connected.

It’s “depressing”, they say. The horror! Well, anything more expensive than cheap grace always is, to a certain type. It’s a type that is not in short supply among us today, arguably it’s even in the majority. If there is a ‘grace’ to Citizenship, a genius, a set of skills (or are they gifts?) of mind, heart, and character, then what are the different Citizenship roles played by the ‘cheap grace’ folks and the ‘strenuous grace’ folks?

Is there a tipping point when the inertia or chaos wrought by ‘cheap grace’ finally overwhelms the Republic?

Or is it pretty much expected that the Republic is bound to have more ‘cheap grace’ types – perhaps many many more – than ‘strenuous grace’ types?

The Founders probably had a very specific and narrow range of folks in mind when they declaimed “We, the People”; might it not be crazy to expect that a wider democracy would be able to platform sufficient Peopling skills? Or did they hope and pray mightily that enough folks might competently take up the task of being a Citizen and so sustain the Founders’ great gamble of a Republic?

When Lincoln rhapsodized sparely about “The People”, was he describing what he really believed existed or was he only limning an ideal that he hoped enough folks would adopt as their own? Will we recover enough of the skills, in any case, to be able to People this much-expanded Republic? Or will we simply slide into a paralyzed political senility lubricated by near-hysteric distractibility bordering on dementia?

It was not long after the sculpture was removed up in Boston that Ray McGovern was shushed by a white-tent-full of oh-so-proppah pretend-gentry from the Great State of Jawjah. He is the former CIA intelligence agent spearheading others of his peers in an effort to lay open to the light the treachery and perfidy by which the Bush Administration initiated (and hardly by accident) the stampede that sent the country into Our current debacles on the Eastern Front. 

He had arisen at a Q&A presided over by His Imperial Efficiency, the Rumster, somewhere down there along the line of Sherman’s March, and amidst the bosky tinkling and tittering and self-important twittering, had asked the then-almost-former Secretary of Defense about fudged intelligence. And in so doing thus ruined the rhythm of antiphon-and-response, the tone of democratic rapport established between the good (and gated) burghers and their war-master. The horror!

McGovern’s brazen temerity was considered an egregious breach of form branding him the worst sort of hussy, and the heroic patriots shushed him as if with one common lung in order to defend the graces. They have their priorities. At this rate His Rumship might never feel quite comfortable coming back for a second fawning banquet  – how awful is that?

A pox on the faux-proprieties that dictate polite applause as war-masters bask confidently and the Republic is drawn closer to that tipping-point experienced by Rome herself when, through her people the mistress of her own house, yet she was betrayed by those same people to Caesar.

The propriety and right-thinking that enables these McMansioned gentry to gate their drives and keep the sinecures that pay their mortgages has not served us well. If there is little good done for the Republic by beer-swilling Fox-fed chest-thumpers waving plastic flags, there is equally little good done by wine-swilling fake aristocrats demonstrating their good manners to the whipmasters of war.

As we saw in Germany decades ago, the only difference was whether you wound up in the huge mob, cheering yourself hoarse while sweating profusely, or you got gussied up for the invitation-only post-speech reception, where you could applaud tastefully with your gloved hands and shuffle alertly down the receiving line. Ja, surely there is a great difference between those who cheer deliriously and importunately at the Leader and those who gently gush their names to him with a respectful grace. And to think that your invitation marked you as one who had not only some standing and some cachet but a security-clearance! Very heaven! Ach!

But that is no difference at all, in the Larger Sense of which Lincoln spoke. A soup rabbit is a soup rabbit, whether it is temporarily parked in an iron cage or a velvet one. And if we are to be a People, if we are to be The People, we need very much not to place our trust in the manners, mindsets,  and habits of soup rabbits.

Knowing that in the eidesis of the sculpture they are Polish partisans, we are brought up short by their weapons: horses, swords, and lances against Wehrmacht Blitzkrieg and the Red Army’s T-34. And perhaps, given their beards and profound self-possession, these few are survivors of those doomed cavalry charges, their uniforms now tattered, their no-longer-young but awesomely robust souls bronzed in the crucible of war and lit from deep within by a starkly embraced dedication to ‘strenuous liberty’.


How pathetically quaint. How hopeless. How unshrewd. How useless. What can they be thinking, these partisans?

Is it equally depressing to realize how quaint Character, Virtue, Will, Commitment, Self-Mastery, and the Beyond have become among us? How flat our un-Vertical world has become? How smooth our un-adult world has become? How dangerous our world has become in its government-engorging selective crusade for societal and individual purity? How disenchanted our world has become without a Beyond?

If there is anything ‘proper’ and ‘appropriate’ for us, it is the willingness to do the work of Peopling. Is it depressing to recall what stern exertions Liberty demands? Then we need to re-educate ourselves as to just what the hell we have inherited here in this Republic. Our economic and cultural elites are depressed by statues that speak of the vigorous darknesses of life; our young troops are depressed (with far more reason) by the stern realities of war – and a failing war to boot. And against this ‘depression’ we are exhorted to ‘go shopping’ while our troops are prescribed sleeping-pills in a war-zone. And at all times to applaud politely as our whipmasters urge us on. Are we lemmings? Are we soup rabbits? Are we – in the gay argot – bottoms? Whatever we are becoming, if this keeps up we will most certainly be slaves.

The sculpture was, after some time in a storage shed, given a new billet, by the Transportation Authority, outside one of its ultramodern stations: on a concrete overpass, above the newly re-developed cement and asphalt plains of the city’s old fish pier and warehouse district. You have to know where it is. Once you get there, you have to imagine them riding the actual earth (although, rightly, the group has been ‘planted’ in an earth-filled wooden stand).

But they are there. And they are Here. Homeless because their cause requires them to have no home; betrayed by a smarmy propriety as treasonable to the human spirit as any hidden treachery … they pursue their mission. To such spirit, the whole earth is home. And yet no place on it can be Home. In their stern, faithful, resolute struggling for Justice and Liberty partisans make themselves unacceptable to the comfortably appropriate. And as it is for Justice and for Liberty, so also for partisans and the spirit of Resistance: only willing human hearts can create a place for them. But no permanent place. If we wish their company, we will have to join their stern and strenuous mission.

The soil of Boston Common was gracious to The Partisans. The twittery hearts of its current presiders were not. How can a Republic bloom if it is not rooted in the soil of the heart of The People? Not everyone who treads Boston Common is a patriot; not every one whose forebears entertained Washington is truly his heir.

The cheap-grace of Easy Abundance is over now. For just about everybody (except the wealthy). And if David M. Potter was right in 1954 that it was this continent’s Abundance that enabled its Democracy rather than the other way around, then what happens to Democracy when Scarcity returns?

(Among his numerous acutely useful pieces, see Chris Hedges here as a handy checklist of how far south things have gone in these parts now.)

 

The cheap-grace of Easy Wealth is over now. Gone are the “affluent masses”, like the herds of buffalo that once roamed the plains. It’s official: American advertising honchos and honchettes have now declared it and are altering their attentions accordingly. Most Americans are not worth the time and the advertising dollar any longer.

The cheap-grace of maturity is over now. Only a very few will be able to maintain the glitz and gleam that used to pass for adult ‘achievement’ and ‘success’; everybody else can reconcile themselves to being also-ran’s, plow-horses, or get an early start on the plod to the glue factory.

What happens to generations that were raised with that cheap-grace delusion that having lotsa shiny, beepy things makes for the choice-filled, totally autonomous, utterly liberated self? What happens to a self held together by the exo-skeleton of shiny, beepy stuff while the interior is a gooey mush of unripe desires, passions, and shallow sensations passing for thought and Character? What happens to a Maturity that was actually propped up by Abundance, when the Abundance goes and the time of Scarcity returns?

(And in regard to that point, let me point out one of my abiding thoughts: What has wrecked the Left of the past 40 years: while corporatism, consumerism, and the increasingly lethal depredations of the developing National Security State and the National Grab State and its ‘humanitarian interventions’ and ‘kinetic military actions’ have done their share to create the actions, it was the Left’s embrace of whackulent anti-reality theories and the undermining of genuine Values and Character and any sense of an actual national commonweal embracing all Americans that provided the simulacrum of philosophical justification for the whole thing AND ALSO spun it all as ‘liberation’. The nasty and deceptive rubric under which this nation now goes out to ‘liberate’ others has been ruthlessly played in Our domestic political arena for 4 decades now.)

What happens to a great nation that has squandered its heritage on sooo many levels, and now – in the absence of any larger Hegemon upon whose coat-tails it can decently pretend to be its old razzle-dazzle self – faces the awful choice: either fade away to has-been status or man-up, gas up the gunboats, and head out to grab other peoples’ stuff?

Was Qua-daffy a 3^rd rate monster? The Beltway found it could live with him for the past 40-plus years. Suddenly it can’t. Perhaps because he is sitting on oil reserves fully one-third the size of Iraq’s huge cache (you recall Iraq, don’t you?) and his independent Libyan central bank is sitting on top of almost 150 tons of pure gold.

That’d be a handy place to have in your pocket. If imperial Spain found her (temporary) salvation in the gold and riches of the New World, then here’s a place with lots of gold, a great location in the planet’s central resource-rich belt, a whole lotta oil, and – as if God willed it – an independent-minded tyrant who’s easily classifiable as ripe for ‘humanitarian replacement’ and a dose of (American-controlled) democracy. If Iraq didn’t work out so well, maybe this smaller place will work out now that the Beltway has worked out the kinks in its gameplan.* 

If the Beltway has gone so far down the road of ‘deconstructing’ this country’s productive capacity and the nasty, sweaty, masculine culture that actually made quantities of stuff that could be sold competitively, then … if you can’t Produce, then ‘real men’ Go Out and Grab.

We should have guessed it when Archie and Edith were replaced by the well-coiffed, Audi-driving simulacra in “Ordinary People”. Sooner or later those smooth and shiny types were going to need to have only Correct people around them, and that need would radiate out across the planet in ever-expanding radial waves, like a tsunami of Correctness. And anyway, after they’d blown their wad buying up all sorts of foreign goodies, they’d need more Golden Eggs.

And having ‘deconstructed’ their own Golden Goose, they’d have to multitask and raid other peoples’ hen-houses while imposing the choice-filled total-autonomy of Correctness. Democracy at the hands of armed missionaries … even Napoleon was leery of that as a sustainable national gameplan. But what did he know?

And this country is no longer simply going in to preach Democracy – there’s a shopping list to be filled and a whole lotta shopping bags humped along for the purpose; America charges for its services now, and the Beltway doesn’t come cheap. (I read somewhere this past week that during the summer a Congressman was asked to leave Iraq when he suggested rather bluntly that Iraq should have the good manners to pay the US for expenses related to its liberation.)

Meanwhile the Partisans continue their long ride, in season and out of season, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, deriving their energy from an interior strength and dedication to a genuinely worthy Cause, doing their bit as best they can.

‘Depressing’? Have you looked around recently?

NOTES

*I think a genuine moral issue for American Citizens in the Age of Scarcity is this: as Our own Abundance fades, are We going to allow Our government to continually initiate military action (“kinetic military action” as the current Administration likes to put it to distinguish it – semantically at least – from plain old ‘war’) in order to Grab Stuff and compensate for the shortfall in American Abundance by going out and taking it? THIS, I would say, is the genuine and urgent moral challenge of the day for all of Us.

The sheeps-clothing of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the even more pretextual assertion that a culture’s not-being in compliance with official American feminism’s assessment about ‘the status of women’ in that culture justifies military action, are not the primary challenge here. (Nor for that matter, do many cultures around the planet really not-notice that the liberation of an imposed ‘regime change’ also includes an imposed ‘culture change’ on a profound level.)

Whereas in the late 19^th century this country was flexing its new muscle as it went out and ‘liberated’ the Philippines and toyed around in Latin, Central, and South America using gunboats and Marines (Marine general Smedley Butler later said he functioned as nothing more than an armed goon for United Fruit), now in the early 21^st century this country has blown its wad and needs to find Stuff – and lots of it – quickly. And other large (not to say great) nations on the planet – though in a rising rather than falling phase – are also playing that same old Game, which they have been playing for a very long time.

Do We accept some level of reduced wealth and a return of some level of Scarcity, or do We allow Our government to go out and Grab Stuff for Us?

THE NEW GLOBAL ELITE

Chrystia Freeland has an interesting article  in ‘The Atlantic’ entitled “The Rise of the New Global Elite”.

It indicates, whether she quite intends to or not, that the time has come to speak of many things.

She is discussing, as she says, the rise of a new class of rich and superrich. This is a super-elite class of new-wealth CEOs of international and global corporations, none more than second-generation rich and many having acquired their wealth in their own lifetimes by their own activities.

This is not the ‘old money’ and the ‘old’ rich of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood flicks: older, having inherited their wealth that had been built up by earlier generations of their family or clan, aspiring to a certain old-Europe aristocratic clawss and detachment, and thinking of ‘the poor’ as being the objects of a certain amount of charity and otherwise separated from them by a comfortable abyss of wealth and social position.

The new “super-elite” are “hard-working, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition”. In a sense, then, they more closely resemble an earlier American type, the founder of great industrial enterprises and corporations and fortunes (think Vanderbilt, Astor, and Carnegie and Ford). The so-called Robber Barons of the Gilded Age but also the individuals who helped – with more ruthlessness as well as savvy self-application than their descendants or the nation at large might care to admit – harness America’s resources (natural, cultural, human) toward the marshaling of huge, corporately-organized Production and Productivity.

In a sense, the new super-elites have done the same thing.

Except that they have been doing it in other countries, using the cheaper labor and determinedly cooperative governments of the former Developing World to increase profits and to actually generate – over there – new huge middle-classes of consumers.

They are repeating the archetypal American magic of turning Resources into Produced Wealth.

Except they are no longer doing it in America.

As I have often noted, it seemed to me that the Beltway’s great strategic deal, struck originally by the Dems for political purposes in the 1970s but soon joined by the Republicans, was: pander to the New Left by granting all the many demands for this and that ‘right’ – especially in terms of employment – while also collecting through Tip O’Neill’s recently-erected PACs nice gobs of cash from the corporations to quietly allow them to pursue profits elsewhere on the planet.

This was a bipartisan gambit almost from the beginning. The Dems would be able to keep their newly valorized Identity demographics happy by pointing to the welter of laws that would force business to accept the burdens of opening up classic American jobs to increasingly numerous Identities regardless of the consequences to productivity and competence. The American job became ‘a piece of the pie’ for this and that group, with the radical-feminists insisting most weightily that employment was an absolute essential for female empowerment and liberation, and that employment in the ‘classic’ male jobs of industrial capitalism and production would also instantly confer ‘status’ and bring about essential ‘change’ in American culture and society. And anyway, smokestack industrialism was so ‘male’ – and mostly ‘white – and all that had to go, according to revolutionary doctrine of the day.

Daniel Bell’s 1973 “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” (see my immediately previous Post) assured everyone that as a ‘mature’ capitalism, America would be shedding its ‘smokestack’ industries and becoming an economy of highly-educated, networking and net-worked collaborators in the generating of ideas, the shuffling of many papers, and the provision of services ranging from barrista to entertainment to government-employment by one of the dozens of thousands of Federal and State agencies authorized to make hires (according to all that welter of quotas and regulatory policies). And the ‘financial sector’ would no longer be a neutral, sober cash-careful repository of accumulated generated wealth, but would actually be one of the post-capitalist profit-center businesses, merging the old sober and solid banker with the gung-ho Gordon-Gekko tiger-like entrepreneurs and business whiz-kids of the ‘80s.

But the Right, always more business-conscious, had read Bell too. And if America was now going to de-emphasize productivity – in workplace and hiring regulations and laws, in the very warp and woof of the culture – then America was by government policy becoming deeply less Production-friendly. Quietly but definitively, it was time for the corporations to move on. They, unlike Bell, realized that somehow, somewhere, things salable had to be actually made in profitable quantities in order to make the money that Bell seemed to assume, rather airily, would just keep on coming (the Eggs, by divine indult, to keep coming even as the Goose was ‘devalorized’ and kicked to the curb – and maybe had for dinner at the gloating gatherings of this and that gaggle of revolutionary Identity-cadres).

Like the old Boston matron who did not ‘buy’ her hats but simply ‘had’ her hats, America – even in the eyes of the New Left – would not make its wealth, it would simply ‘have’ its wealth. And the only job of the government was to re-slice the pie and pass the plates around.

With increasing speed the corporations began not simply to eat up smaller American businesses but to outsource their production to countries whose people were willing to work for much less and whose governments would be more concerned with Production than with making the workplace a more sensitive and caring and enjoyable life-experience.

It was artfully done, resulting in an enchanting political kabuki that paid off for the corporations and the Beltway: the corporations publically accepted the ever-efflorescing tangle of regulations and laws that imposed increasing ‘reforms’ on hiring and work practices and made a respectable show of being gung-ho and ‘on board’ with it all; this enabled the pols to prove to their client-demographics that the pols could deliver the pie. But at the same time, quietly but surely, the corporations were getting out of town as fast as could be decently managed, assisted by new business philosophies such as out-sourcing, down-sizing, globalizing and this and that (which in Clinton’s time the Beltway erected into a major national Plan).

Meanwhile now, the Developing World host-countries’ price, often, was that an American-chartered corporation would have to create a local subsidiary to oversee things. The host government thus got a primary crack at the swag and the profits, alas, would mostly stay in the newly-blessed host country, where – as is now happening – new working and middle-classes would be created.

Which gets down to the point that one of the great un-mentioned dramas of current American and world-history has been the love-affair between formally American-chartered corporations and host governments and cultures and societies who are more amenable to re-creating the early eras of Industrial Capitalism in America. The Great American Dream is being recreated … just not here.

And since many Western nations that had succeeded in the original Industrial Revolution aped American examples, and were themselves therefore becoming increasingly less Production-friendly as they pursued American-type policies, then their CEO-classes too began to reach out into the Developing World. And again, not simply to create cheaper products to ship back to the home country, but to re-create the Industrial Revolution Moment (or Miracle, if you wish) in more and more of the Developing World, replete with those work-friendly working classes and even those budding middle-classes.

This new “transglobal community of peers” have actually got more in common with each other, Freeland says, “than with their countrymen back home”. And indeed, their ‘homes’ are the great jets that zip them from one venue to the next, for international conferences with each other. As one of them notes, he knows the stewardesses on his flights better than he knows his own family.

Freeland hits it nicely: no matter where they maintain their “primary residences”, “today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves”.

Nor are they embarrassed about the fact. Indeed, “many of them – as a result [of their hard work and unremitting travels] – have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly”.

The whole country, my fellow Americans, has become fly-over country and we are all backwoods trailer-trash to these paragons.

India and China – with their huge populations – are now the new venues of Productivity Capitalism, and their own working and middle-classes will be developed to consume what is made ‘over there’. Meanwhile, back at the (American) ranch, the now burned-out American consumer has been relegated to fly-over status, reaping now the bitter fruit of having been seduced without much objection into the bauble-wealth of Reagan’s borrowing (We became a debtor nation on his watch, rather than the world’s mightiest creditor nation) and the out-sourcing and down-sizing and privatizing sell-off wealth of Clinton’s day, and the somehow-so-appropriate Bubble-based wealth of the George Bush era.

Effecting this huge terra-forming transformation (eerily similar to the Beltway’s profound Identity-Politics terra-forming of American culture and society away from Productivity) makes this new super-class of rich consider themselves to be “the working rich”, whose massive tasks and the marvelous ideas they share at their international conferences to be well-worth their mighty incomes and emoluments. They have no shame and no qualms about the rightness of it all. They are most industriously and generatively content.

In a way children of the very ‘revolutionary’ era in American politics that considered all ‘change’ to be good, and the more transgressive the better, and considered ‘elites’ to be so far ahead of those who ‘just don’t get it’ that they need not waste time and breath ‘deliberating’ in a democratic sorta way, these new mega-rich elites entertain large thoughts of re-shaping not simply American culture (THAT has worked sooooo well) but of re-shaping the world’s cultures (perhaps into a new productive World-Culture, who knows?).

Whether at Davos, or in the first-class lounges of commercial jets, or in the first-class lounge that is the essence of the private corporate jet, or on yachts larger than many countries’ warships, they biddy-biddy-boom with each other, while consulting a welter of personal communication devices that make James Tiberius Kirk’s warbling communicator look like an iron toy.

And who knows but that someday they envision a corporate Star-ship (why not call it the Enterprise class?) that will provide them with a secure and comfy command-post to oversee their planetary plans.

Very much children of their era, spawned here in the past few decades, they see no ‘moral’ dimension to their wealth, nor perhaps to themselves. Like Carnegie they will leave behind Great Works as their undying monuments (although Carnegie sought to evade the ineluctable and implacable Hound of Hell by building free libraries across the American landscape, and who reads – or thinks they need to – any longer?). As the cadres of Identity-Politics plunged the culture into a monodimensional, this-worldly Flatness in which the success of the ‘revolution’ (whichever one you’re a cadre of) justifies all, they see their Great Work of terra-forming great swaths of the planet in the service of Productivity as their greatest service.

And, really, SOMEbody has to make stuff, no? Money doesn’t just grow on trees (although the US is now reduced to killing a lot of those things just to print up more dollars – much as the Germans did in the awful years after World War 1).

Freeland continues: “The good news – and the bad news – for America is that the nation’s own super-elite is rapidly adjusting to this new global perspective”. One international hedge-fund manager confided to her that the firm’s master investment committee “often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy”. And in one recent internal discussion, one of his senior executives asserted that “the hollowing out of the American middle-class really didn’t matter”. Said that gentleman, “if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle-class and meanwhile one American drops out of the middle-class, that’s not such a bad trade”.

Congratulations, my fellow Americans. You are now all collateral damage and ‘acceptable losses’.

The hell-hot ironies!

The Boomers hatred of the bourgeois and the Archie-Bunker blue-collars has morphed (or mutated) into this. Nor can the New Left refuse to accept that the whole idea constitutes a world-class ‘liberation’ and ‘empowerment’. Wheeeee!

But not for the ‘acceptable losses’ dwelling in fly-over country (formerly known as the United States). And for its inhabitants, formerly known as The People, but – what they hey? – they just didn’t get it anyway.

They’re going to get it now. Oh yeah!

Freeman quotes the marvelously-Correct Taiwanese-born CFO of a US-chartered internet company: Americans “demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world … So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value”. But of course, the whole idea behind the Revolutions of the Identities, erected into a Plan and a government policy courtesy of the Beltway, was that “productivity” was no longer a priority; that was so ‘masculine’, so judgmental, so ‘smokestack’. *

And as I said, since America already ‘had’ its wealth, then the whole government enterprise was simply to distribute the pie-slices and make a lot more client demographics beholden to their political patrons.

I think that the Bubble-era that seemed to take George Bush and the Beltway by surprise when it ran the whole of Good Ship America into a berg-field back in 2008 was really lubricated by the fact that by then the Beltway and Congress and the Presidency – regardless of Party – had come to realize that the F.I.R.E. sector of the economy was now in the driver’s seat and there was nothing they could do but let it go where it wanted to and do what it wanted to.

But how do you admit THAT to the American People? How admit to The People that you have pretty much lost control of the whole thing and are now just hoping to make your own nest-egg and get out of town before the whole thing goes kablooey? The Beltway had begun to resemble the Soviet nomenklatura of the mid-1970s: they knew the whole thing was coming apart and just hoped to get out of town with their swag before things got too obvious.

Neatly, in a recent report on a January meeting of American economists, those worthies lamented the fact that they were held in such disrepute. They cawn’t think why.

That they had either been witlessly or treacherously wrong about the economy’s health in the past decade(s) did not occur to them. Rather, “they seemed more intent on finding ways in which they could get ordinary workers to accept lower pay and reduced public benefits in the years ahead. This would lead to better outcomes in their models”.

Americans are now not only ‘collateral damage’ and ‘acceptable losses’ but mere statistics in theoretical models (that have proven inaccurate in the extreme). And Americans now have a whole new bunch of things to forget: like the days of decently-paying and reliable employment.

Because, insist the economists, they are going to be needed in the days and years ahead. While the economy will get better (by next year or by 2018, take your pick) yet “the new normal will be worse than the old normal”.

Meaning the party’s over and the good times will not be coming back. Gone, baby, gone.

This being the case, then, a few thoughts arise.

What happens when the corporations outgrow the government that chartered them? And this may already have happened; after all, Congress and the Executive have now proven clearly that they are unable to rein in either the financial or the corporate interests. First, because they are providing whatever actual income, or at least the appearance of wealth, the country can still lay claim to (unless you want to moon over photos and video-clips of huge nuclear aircraft carriers and whizzbang drones). Second, because the entire sitting political class – almost without exception – has indentured itself to the corporate monies piped to them through the PACs.

What happens to democracy when the government has a huge interest in folks not really getting a clear picture of how badly it has frakked up? If you think ‘advocacy journalism’ gave you a skewed ‘reporting’ on all the various happy-face ‘reforms’ of the past 40 years, wait til you see an entire government and elite apparatus that is advocating to make sure it doesn’t get kicked out on its well-padded collective behind.

What happens to the independence of The People when they are distracted by the intensifying urgencies of just putting bread (and I don’t mean that figuratively) on the table? Bad enough that the civic competence of the Citizenry has been eroded in divers ways over the past 40 Biblical years in order to neutralize debate and dissent as to the numerous ‘reforms’ of the Identity Age. But on top of all those Impossible Things the American taxpayer was expected to believe before breakfast, there is now the crazy-inducing requirement that Americans not-notice just how bad things are getting and that there’s nowhere to run and no place to hide (not even at the mall).

We are all poor now. The old cry of ‘social justice’ takes on a whole new meaning when you yourself are trying to raise a family and make ends meet or build a reliable future for yourself when the entire ground of the American experience has been allowed to take flight and leave you a groundling in Fly-over Land.

These promise to be interesting times. And this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with Destiny that will beggar the challenges that faced the Greatest Generation in 1941. Fifty years after he said it, JFK’s “long twilight struggle” has become, implacably, the American Reality.

NOTES

*I relate this little story again: the same philosophy was deployed against the US military in the heady days of ‘de-masculinization’: the loss of a certain amount of war-fighting efficiency was perfectly acceptable in order to achieve diversity and empowerment. One highly-accomplished US Naval Academy graduate, invited back to address the cadets in the early 1990s, was told by the Academy’s command that he was welcome, but that he could not discuss Personal Achievement and Excellence, Leadership and Command, or Violence (as in war-fighting) … the Academy was now training team-players who would cooperate and be tolerant of each other. The officer wondered just why in hell they had invited him then. Whether this has anything to do with the current Navy’s disturbing record of command-removals and accidents, or to the overall military’s inability to achieve ‘victory’ in recent activities … is a question worth considering.

And all of the Politically Correct impossible-things-that-must-be-believed-before-breakfast may also help to explain why the military is losing so many mid-grade officers; see this article in the same issue of ‘The Atlantic’, which – alas – refers directly to “politically correct write-ups” that are “in abundance now” in the annual evaluation of competence process each officer must undergo, but then quickly moves on to other things.