Crossroads

Having just finished Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington, I have really been thinking about where we are going in the country. I'll need to brush up on my Chomsky before really delving into it but taking courses on both revolutions and conservative intellectual history this semester I feel like my head is about to burst. Somehow, I need to remember where I stand.

Third World America is kind of a wake-up call, even though I've been reading Kevin Phillips for years now and he has implied more or less forcefully that that is where we are headed. Extreme inequality has rendered democracy or even marginally representative republican government almost moot because the obscenely wealthy individuals can just buy politicians and incredible propaganda to hammer their interests home. Huffington sprinkles the stories of many regular Americans into her polemic to convey just how often people are being ruined through almost no fault of their own. Responsibility really is a reflection of how much power you actually have, our society is too-interconnected for anyone to be truly self-reliant unless they want to live in a cave and eat roots and bugs.

She makes a great observation I think that really helps me understand the contradictory attitudes of so many teabaggers and their sympathizers, I'll have to paraphrase but she argues that America today is like a middle-aged man who looks in the mirror and still sees himself at 25. Like the baldspot and beer belly, bad knees and high cholesterol, our country's infrastructure is decaying and falling apart in so many ways but instead of actually trying to fix things we combover and suck in our guts and try to ignore the latest bridge collapsing.

I am pretty sure we really are locked in now, the only thing that could revitalize society and our democracy is mass organizing that really gets at them, but despite having unprecedented access to information and in many cases due to outrageous unemployment, time to utilize it and reach out, we don't. The atomization is complete, look how much effort and money by the kochs it took to organize the cranky cretins to do things they want to do so badly. Civilization is hard work, so is raising a family and paying the bills, and there is just no energy or spark left in the broad mass to even think or imagine better.

I'll go out on a limb and say something really unpopular, "it's gone and it's not coming back" the American Dream of progress that is. Every dollar you spend chasing it only tightens the screws further, the nice house, car, retirement, convenience foods, clothing, job security, good schools for the kids. The fix is in. I wish the obscene amounts of money spent on the political campaigns didn't have the effects they do, but after fleecing us all these years the elite has practically unlimited clout to bash us over the head with how great life will be if we just extend the bush tax cuts or whatever. We need to reformulate society where we don't work so hard for some boss just to get paid enough to finance our credit cards and mortgages for things that we don't really need but have been programmed to want. Let go, life is about more than possessions and as they fleece us coming and going it just gives them more money to rewrite the rules and destroy anything good left in our society.

What I've discovered so far in studying revolutions is that they inevitably are beaten by money, it may mutate from feudal and aristocratic privilege to capitalistic, but exploitation is just a fact of life. Unless people are willing to fight to build or maintain a decent society, tyrants and demogauges will always wait in the wings to snatch it away.