Unbelievable as it seems today, there was a time when such
people as doctors and lawyers did not necessarily live apart from the dirt
front yards and Saturday night domestic scraps of the laboring class.
The doctor who delivered me in 1946, the most prosperous in
town by all accounts, lived just a few short blocks from the rundown Kent
Street "white trash and nigger street" my parents called home. His
fee for dragging my screaming ass into the light was an exorbitant $100 -- and
for a Caesarian birth at that -- because the US Army was writing the check. The
good doctor lived close enough that my old man could walk a five-dollar payment
over to his house on payday, close enough that I could see his rooftop from my
upstairs bedroom window. As a kid, knowing such an educated, prosperous man
lived so near was somehow comforting. And at least it gave an example of what
one might possibly aspire to, given the education.
Not that the working people then generally aspired to an
education. In those days most folks could make a living without being very
educated, or even very bright. A high school education was adequate for the
jobs available in East Coast agriculture and manufacturing based towns like
Winchester.
As for the professions, our medical and legal needs were
meet by a handful of physicians and semi-savory lawyers ground out by the
University of Virginia, "men of tradition" who made much of
graduating from "Mistah Jeffah-sun's University," then went about
their business of real estate theft and keeping the bubbas out of jail. As for
teachers, nearby Shepherdstown State Teachers College provided the class in
between the bubbas ("Yore Honor, I
never meant to kill that guy with my truck, I was only trying to take out his
mailbox . . .") and the country club lawyers. But overall, life
required little education. Nobody was yet writing computer programs to put
multibillion dollar cybernetic nuclear dildos in outer space. It was just plain
American life in a plain American town. I know I'm sounding like one more
cranky fart lamenting the good old days, but hang on, it takes me a few licks
to get good and wound up.
While we of the sweating classes were straining the limits
of our educations to read the new fangled TV
Guide, the smarter bugs were swarming elsewhere to build colonies of their
own. People more relentless in the pursuit of actual intelligence -- the
cognitive elite, as they have been called -- were aggregating in universities,
scientific laboratories, publishing and financial institutions . . . Bright
folks who understandably enjoyed each other's company much more than beer drinking
and arm wrestling contests with the rest of us down South or out in the
lonelier reaches of the Midwest. Predictably enough, they married their own
kind -- everyone being smarter, better educated and having a reasonably
attractive number of remaining teeth -- and raising similarly bright children
in neighborhoods of other like couples. From that point all it took was social,
political and professional networking, and a diligent sex life of course, for
them to become a class apart from the majority.
In fact, they considered themselves the majority (and still
do.) When they looked around in their communities, they saw themselves. They
saw people who had read a good book recently, people who understood the
ramifications of compound interest, office politics and cheese fondue too close
to bedtime. There was not a bus driver or carpet layer or cop in sight. America
to them was Scarsdale or Brookline or a variation thereof, where everyone's job
consisted of fiddling around with some type of paperwork or other in as serious
a manner as possible, pursuits such as engineering, academia, advertising or
market research, or perhaps physics and engineering, developing resource
gobbling "modern miracles" of the suburban lifestyle such as central
air, and more currently, ominous ones such RFID chips for our driving licenses
as an intermediate step on their way into our necks.
But these were not real jobs mind you, not the kind that
made you sweat, but the fun kind the rest of us saw on television with pretty,
wise cracking secretaries who seemed to regulate traffic in riotously enjoyable
workplaces. The kind of workplace Dick Van Dyke had. And they sure looked like
they were getting smarter. And richer, too. I remember my family's amazement
when Laura bought a $40 outfit: "A clothes horse is what that woman
is!" declared my old man. But I'm sure he thought to himself: "Nice
legs though." These people, who invariably lived Up North somewhere, even
played tennis and golf and ate things like chicken a la king, whatever the hell
that was. They were definitely "holding the good end of the stick."
Here on the other end of the stick, places such as
Winchester, Virginia, and the Stockyards neighborhood of Cleveland and true
working class environs large and small, the opposite was happening. Hopelessly
stuck in the pre-war industrial working class tradition, somehow, we were
becoming dumber and more given to consumer spectacle such as stockcar racing.
Arm wrestling and the even Saturday night fights could no longer hold our pitifully
debased attention, in which television doubtlessly played some part. So speed
and stupidity were added to the mix, begetting NASCAR.
There were exceptions among the workers. Some blue-collar
people managed to get advanced degrees and flee into more upscale realms, where
they presumably mowed their lawns in Madras shorts and anticipated their 6 PM
highballs. But most of us stayed here, or moved to similar places following
employment, and continued to breed our own sturdy-if-dull stock in an atmosphere
where the values of labor, actual hard physical work, prevailed, mainly because
we had a lifetime of it before us.
One is forced to contemplate what effect, if any,
generations of flight of the brightest from blue-collar America had on the vast
working class gene pool. It may even help explain the popularity of such things
as snowmobiles, Garth Brooks and hot chicken wings. Or the inexplicable
willingness of people to wear foam rubber cheese wedges on their heads and
display threatening tribal sports slogans on exposed beer bellies in freezing
weather.
Whatever the case, today, we are unarguably looking at the
uncurried jowl of a white underclass. One far, far larger than is acknowledged
by our media, which are obsessed with the Latino and black portion of the
underclass, mainly because color coding the class struggle enables even the
ditziest airhead anchor person or insulated urban liberal to connect the dots.
And let's face it, street gang killings make for better TV ratings than Cousin
Ronnie cooking a weenie on his bug zapper for amusement. For those interested,
cooking time is measured in seconds, and NEVER try a chicken breast. Still, as
my sainted father used to say, "Ignernt is ignernt. Some people just never
amount to nothing and he's one of'em!" While most of the underclass may
not be chortling in the glow of a bug zapper, enough ignernce prevails to
sustain the heartland's delirious happiness with the Wal-Martization of
America. An underclass exists and has become the biggest class. Don't be fooled
by the discount Dockers and the polo shirts.
You can't smell the
rabble from the putting green
The potential genetic implications of
class-flight-as-selection are something liberals refuse to even consider,
though I cannot imagine why, given their enjoyment of moral and intellectual
superiority over any kind of majority. But when it comes to the possibility of
people, especially black and brown people, being possibly born dumb, their
minds snap shut. Being born dumb is a special category reserved mostly for
Southerners (not that Southerners don't make every effort to prove them true).
Such liberal denial is likely the result of now-calcified liberal dogma
developed over many years, and created in a time when society was better mixed
and the divide was not so great nor so firmly established.
Once we subscribe to the idea that all people are born
geniuses, the solution becomes easy: Affirmative action and more computers in
the classroom. I want to go on record here as not being against affirmative action, despite that it has blessed
us with the likes of Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas, thus proving that some
people probably shouldn't be educated no matter what color they are. But it's
the computers and technology in white underbelly classrooms which has not
panned out as expected. Nevertheless, cognitive elite Democrats, who themselves
have no problem at all setting up a spreadsheet or a digital video conferencing
program, believe ever more computerization of the classroom will somehow make
underclass kids prefer Immanuel Kant to cruising the mall and smoking dope. A
laptop on every desk simply enables them to cut and paste written homework
assignments faster so they can get to the mall sooner. At best, under the
current system, it prepares them for a life of data entry in the Empire's
electronic plantations. The bottom line is that they can't read. Feel free to
blame anyone you want here, except the free market system's extreme preference
for dim-witted consumers. Most people blame the teachers, who don't have much
say in any of this, but what the hell, they are close to the crime and easy to
hit.
Ultimately these kids will join the millions of adults who
cannot read because: 1. They do not have the necessary basic skills; 2. it's
not entertaining enough to compete with the electronic stimulation they are
constantly subjected to; 3. they cannot envision any possible advantage in
reading, the advantages stemming from extended involvement; never having
practiced such, the benefits are understandably beyond their comprehension; and
4. their peers do not read as a serious matter, thereby reinforcing the
original premise that it's obviously not worth the time and effort. On
underclass planet, it's a reasonable assumption.
Nevertheless, members of the educated American overclass,
liberal and conservative, assume we are all equally capable of learning new
ways of doing things, and need to learn exactly those sorts of things they
perform daily in the service of the Empire that rewards them for managing its
educational, financial and technical affairs. "All are created
equal," runs the mantra. Every last one of them knows it's not true. Not
in the society we have created. But it's vital that everyone keep up the
pretense that Cousin Ronnie's flabby 220-pound 16-year-old, who recently
speculated on "how they manage to grow spaghetti so straight," has an
equal chance in society with the kid in private school purposefully taking his
SATs three times in order to get the highest score possible. Equal or not,
somebody has to muck out the Imperial stables and fight the corpocracy's wars.
It won't be that kid with the huge book bag lugging his laptop around.
Some part of it is not pretense. Some of it is the ignorance
of educated elites, who will take umbrage at the term and swear up and down,
"WE ARE NOT ELITES DAMMIT!" Ensconced out there in suburban cupcake
land, or perhaps Manhattan, they seldom if ever encounter this class they
inwardly loathe but claim to care about. Someone needs to tell them that loathing
is not only legal, hell it's okay with the loathed. We don't much like them either. It's the pretense that
galls we the ignernt. Which is one reason so many of us mutt people see the
highly educated as arrogant phonies. This is by no means entirely true of
course. Educated phonies are heartfelt and genuine by their own peer standards.
But still, phoniness and arrogance, the two biggest sins by working class
lights, are the only terms we have in which to conceive of and counter the
inherent insult posed by the overclass pretense of equality. We ain't all
equal, and a hundred more years of affirmative action will continue to liberate
only the brightest among us, who will then promptly move into the American
overclass, if they are lucky, and join in the unacknowledged loathing. Maybe
they'll become the producer of My Name is
Earl, therein being highly paid for expressing their loathing by painting
the underclass as untroubled petty criminal philosophers, living happily and
hornily one step out of the jailhouse and one step ahead of the bill
collectors. Louis XIV staged the same sort of illusions of a na�ve, ribald,
content underclass -- milkmaids, bold sexual bumpkin cowherds, and such -- for
his amusement. Lacking the mass hypnotic capabilities of television however, his
overclass fantasies never got outside his gardens.
Conservatives, on the other hand, entertain no illusions
about computers in the schools or anything else. Instead, they stick by the
bootstrap myth, and free marketism as the course to personal and national
success. We have over 200 years of evidence strongly suggesting that America's
favorite theological premise, Adam Smith's "unseen hand," like the
gravity defying bootstrap theory, is a sorry thing indeed for any sane person
to hang his ass on, given that both are endorsed chiefly by the smuggest, the
greediest and richest among us. Most working folks would simply prefer an even
start -- a fair break for everyone without depending on bootstraps or unseen
hand theology crafted by a man who offered that the self-interested pursuit of
money somehow made men more altruistic. Despite modern apologists' assertions
to the contrary, Smith also believed the unseen hand was actually that of God,
"whose wisdom works itself through competition for wealth," and that
"providence rightly divided the earth among a few lordly masters." He
disliked government except when it was clubbing down "the vice ridden and
slothful poor." Property is government,
he said, and "Till there be property there can be no government, the very
end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the
poor," thereby writing the Republican Party platform a full 89 years
before the party was even born. Even allowing for the times, the guy was a
bloodless prick. But then, so was Ronald Reagan, yet we are forced to suffer a
similar deification of his addled free market cowboyisms. Feel free to hold
your head and scream.
Us? An overclass?
You're nuts!
By now you have asked, "How can the largest class be an
underclass?" Simple. The few can indeed fuck the many (Shock and horror!
Who would have guessed?) even here in the shadow of Lady Liberty, who lifts her
lamp beside the Golden Arches, beckoning cheap labor, Arab oil and Chinese loan
sharks willing to participate in the global Ponzi scheme known as the Federal
Reserve Bank. Again, it's the pretense, the utter refusal to call a spade a
spade, that allows the overclass to deny its advantage. But if the bright
cognitive elites are standing on the throats of an unacknowledged majority
while setting up a college fund for their little Cameron, then they are an
overclass. If they go off to the office to write the deep psychographic
marketing campaigns that make Ronnie and Tracy believe they need to buy a Dell computer on
overstretched credit cards for the educational benefit of their kids, despite
evidence to the contrary ("Oh boy, now I can print out pictures from
rotten.com!") then they are an overclass. And if they are financial
managers of the extractive economic schemes that bleed ole Cousin Ronnie to
death by a thousand tiny cuts hidden in his utility bill, and if the same
bright elites own portfolios of non-union industries that pit Cousin Ronnie
against Malaysian villagers living on 1,000 calories a day, just to keep his
job soldering worthless gewgaws on an assembly line, then they are an
overclass. And if they send him off to Iraq (all the while swearing they are
dead against the Iraq War, but what the hell, it's just redneck Ronnie, and his
sort actually likes that kind of thing, being dumb crackers and all) to defend
their investments in Halliburton, or IBM or ConAgra, then they are an
overclass. It isn't numbers that define an underclass. It's which end of the
screwjob you are on. It's not about money. Some of the underclass, such as coal
miners, earn surprising wages. It's about inherited advantage and never having
to dodge IEDs in Iraq but selling insurance policies to those who do.
The widening affluence gap aggravates an already existent
class system, though neither class is willing to acknowledge it. The national
mythology holds that we are a "nation of rugged individualism," the
implication being that there are no classes, no masses, just 300 million
rugged, freedom loving Daniel Boone/Marlboro Man types completely in charge of
their own destinies. And on rare occasions when class is acknowledged by
working Americans, they express the simplistic consumer state induced view that
class has entirely to do with money, and say they are all "middle
class" in a country that is pretty much divided into only two classes. An
astonishing number of families in the $30,000-per-household bracket believe
they are in the top 10 percent, according to some surveys.
Regardless of media-manufactured underclass hallucinations
as to class, only one class is paying half a week's wages or more for a single
doctor visit to a member of the other class. Only one class is counting on
Social Security for its entire retirement income (at least 64 percent of
Americans and rising, by last count.) Yeah, yeah, more than half of Americans
are invested in the stock market through 401Ks, etc., we are told. But only at
a few thousand dollars per household. When it comes to the much-ballyhooed
stock market, 10 percent of Americans split the national hog between themselves,
tossing the ears to the other 90 percent. At this point bona fide pinkos may be
excused from reading the next paragraph. You've heard it a million times, but I
just can't help myself, comrade.
Cometh the old familiar numbers so oft heard, but worth repeating
in hope that their meaning may by mysterious courses known only to God, take
spark in the football besotted minds of my fellow underclass mutts: The richest
10 percent of families own a little over 85 percent of all outstanding stocks,
87 percent of all financial securities, and 90 percent of all business assets.
If you throw in assets such as homes, checking and savings accounts, CDs and
money funds, and pension accounts, then 20 percent of Americans own 83 percent
of all wealth. The bottom 20 percent have no assets, no net worth at all. Put
simply, the top 20 percent eat the cake, the middle 60 percent eat the crumbs
and the bottom 20 percent get to lick the plates while they do everyone else's
dishes.
Most true liberals know these numbers by heart. So do
conservatives, although conservatives these days seem to take perverse glee in
them. They usually explain them in terms such as those of Michael Medford, who
cherry picks Will and Ariel Durant's pop history books for gems like:
"Concentration of wealth is a natural result of concentration of ability
and special attributes [one immediately thinks of George Bush and Paris Hilton]
. . . The rate of concentration varies with the degree of economic freedom,
democracy and liberty . . ."
I would not argue that it may derive from a concentration of
abilities due to the aggregation of the brights into a clear-cut self-serving
elite who make the rules, and author bills (such as the one passed by the House
this very morning which would raise the estate tax exemption for couples up to
ten million dollars.) They're bright, they're tight and out of sight. It's the
"freedom and democracy" part that stinks up the conservative
argument, as if Republican logic were not already rancid enough. It's to be
expected though. The bullshit misuse of the terms freedom and democracy has
ever ripened the hubris of the rich and near rich of the business class. But
for the hell of it, we might ask exactly what abilities and "special
attributes" are being concentrated in America these days by the gilded
classes of government, business and media? Paris Hilton's are clear, attractive
even. Jack Abramoff's are obvious as hell. George Bush's talents are genuinely
astronomical, in the same sense as those astonishingly energetic gamma rays
from outer space -- they are unobservable.
In any case, Adam Smith lived in a time when money was
described in terms of its effect on human beings, breathing entities who
encountered one another on the streets even as chamber pots of both the rich
and the poor were being emptied in the gutters in plain sight of all. He lived
in what cyberheads now call "meatspace," a place where most of the
things that governed life were out in the open and fairly obvious. Money simply
meant gold. Now money consists of digits coursing through the
telecommunications satellites of a global financial system that manages teeming
humanity for its own perpetuation, hollowing out the common classes in a new
financialized feudalism, although preserving a smaller carriage class necessary
to administrate and preserve the system for a handful of unseen global lords in
New York, Zurich and Beijing. Calculating bastard that Smith was, I doubt he
would much like what we have today.
Lest I sound unnecessarily mean spirited here, I must give
the America overclass its due. Say what you want about the overclass, but
godammit, they love us to death. We may not get a kiss when they rape us, but
we seem to have the undying affection of perps. Liberal or conservative, the
overclass professes belief in and affection for "the people." Then
they do everything humanly possible to assure their families will never be
exposed to them. Not that they know any of the underclass personally, but they
know they do not want to be around them and definitely don't want them anywhere
near their kids. Visions of venereal warts and crystal meth, I suppose. Yet,
about the worst that could actually happen, should we all be forced to live in
the same condominium, is that all parties would be mutually bored to death.
Affection aside, the screwjob continues to escalate. Now
you'd think the screwees would rebel. Hell, illiterate Indians in Chiapas are
doing it and getting results -- finally. It all comes down to awareness and the
way the awareness of the classes are purposefully cultivated and manipulated by
the cognitive elites who run media and education. Take health care for example.
Were there cultivation of underclass awareness of the health care industry,
every doctor in America would be strung up by the nuts. Spell out how Citibank
actually makes its money and no banker in America would dare leave his house.
So far though, bread and circuses (produced by, guess who?) seem enough. That,
plus a steady deluge of cheap electronic crap. Having sprung from a tool and
artifact producing labor culture, the underclass LOVES gizmos, however crass.
Then too, we cannot discount the value of the overclass' lush affection for the
people.
So what is to be done to establish at least some semblance
of an equitable society in which all or most members operate on a reasonably
common plane, rather than compete by claw ant tooth? One in which mutual human
respect dominates because long denied classism is exposed, then, over time,
dissolved? To put it more practically, what is to be done about kids such as
Cousin Ronnie's?
Liberals, bless their hearts, do know the answer to that
one. But it will cost more than 10 Iraq wars, so they never will demand it.
Most of what needs to be done needs to be done before first grade and over
generations. Things like universal health care and purposeful husbandry of
security and love in the homes where children are raised, because these things
are actually allowed to flourish in the home. Flourish because mom and dad are
not clawing their lives away in the Darwinian Survival Working Class Reality
Show. Hillary Clinton pays lip service to it. So does the Black Caucus. But
nobody has the ass to demand an American makeover that will cost, at the very
minimum, maybe ten trillion dollars over at least two or three generations. And
besides, the money is no longer there and never will be again. When empires die
they die broke.
Meanwhile, there is the overclass itself to maintain.
Honestly speaking, most of them work harder these days than ever before and few
of them underestimate their own replaceability as they watch the early stages
of the hollowing out of their own class. But somebody has to keep on paying
lest they, god forbid, be forced to drink boxed wine. And money must be
extracted from the system to pay for their kids' education, and quickly too,
before the housing bubble bursts, evaporating all that digital fiat dollar
equity everyone knows is not really there. Nothing for the members of the
financial overclass to do but design new hidden charges into Ronnie's credit
card debt, which will indirectly pay for their kids' enrollment at the
university's academic summer camp so that he can compete and remain in the
overclass in which he grew up. No wonder Ronnie's kid smacks the snot out of
"the rich kid" after school. Somewhere down inside he grasps the
truth of it all.
This morning I watched an upscale mom and her two kids get
out of the Nissan Maxima at the Smithsonian Naturalist Center next door to the
office complex where I work. As the big tinted plate glass door flashed in the
sun, then swallowed them into its serene quiet realm of mysterious bones and
flies sleeping off eternity in amber, I noticed that both kids were armed with
notebooks and digital cameras for their "unique hands-on museum experience."
I couldn't help but think of Ronnie's kid and his straight spaghetti theory of
botany. It's a laughable thing. Even Ronnie laughed at it. But it was the kind
of laugh meant to hide family shame.
Acknowledged or not, it is also our national shame, this
denial of the existence of class. Ultimately, it is denial of the one truth
held common by every enlightened civilization existent:
We are our brother's keeper.
Copyright � 2006
Joe Bageant
Joe
Bageant is the author of a forthcoming book from Random House Crown about
working class America, scheduled for spring 2007 release. A complete archive of
his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the
subject of class may be found at: www.joebageant.com.
Feel free to contact him at: joebageant@joebageant.com.