philippic

Living in this cosmopolis, I’m in daily contact with folks from all over everywhere. This has the effect of rubbing America in my face. The simple fact is that the lives of our ordinary people have much more in common with those in Russia or China than they do with those in any of the similarly wealthy fairylands scattered across northern and western Europe, aka “real countries.” People from real countries believe the purpose of a government is to boringly provide useful services for its citizens. People from the aforementioned named countries and most others may or may not believe this as well, but the point is generally rendered moot by a powerful overclass controlling the machinery of government to keep their money and fuck everybody else.

And that’s where a unique feature of American politics comes into play. A unique feature. You know, like a giant melanoma on the tip of the nose. Our political narrative is that we could have ourselves a fairyland, but choose not to, because that would violate the sacred right of the overclass to fuck over whomever they wish. And, on the one hand, we talk in hushed superstitious awe of that being the natural order which cannot be transgressed, and, on the other hand, we’ll boldly proclaim that order is something we must uphold. Looks to be a paradox–upholding a natural order–but it is not. It’s an illustration of the belief that we’re God. The God we’ve come to worship anyway, crafted in our image, with a penchant for letting people live in poverty and get sick and die as a means of upholding His order. A lazy God who can stay home and watch TV, content in the knowledge that everything’s going according to plan.  You ask most Americans, God made the natural world, kicked back, and cracked a non-alcoholic beer.  I don’t know where they got that.  It’s not biblical.  It’s not even Genesis.  It’s some pagan caricature, maybe demonic possession. (My take on the bible is that the act of Creation was like opening Pandora’s jar, and God’s been just barely keeping pace with the fallout ever since; an artist who’s taken on a project that very well might be too much, but He’s still trying.  I mean, how many holy books have sequels?)

Anyway.

It is no longer Right wing pundits that get my blood up. It’s my friends. It’s the idea that there exists a “smart” conservative politics, opposed to the sensational rabble-rabbling of talk radio. It’s also the toothless heartless mutant bastard hybrid son of the granola fringe and Ayn Rand. It’s Ron Paul. It’s “small business.” It’s “grassroots.”

If there’s an American Left, a real American Left, devoid of lip-service to our carnivorous holy cows, I have not encountered it outside the person of my mother. My mother does not have the vocabulary to articulate her sensibilities. She’s well-educated, but she never learned the words because she’s impervious to bullshit. She won’t get in some debate involving lots of reified concepts and obscure proper noun ambushes and cliches and axioms at the mere mention of which one should kowtow. No, she smells the gas and holds her breath. She sees problems. She sees obvious solutions, i.e. not invoking magic. No trickle-down anything. No this-leads-to-that. The Babel noise of her peers flies past and her only response is “we’re being robbed.”

A friend recently said, “I’ve known you for a number of years and I still wonder if you have any convictions.” I replied, glibly, “Just outstanding warrants.” I felt guilty later, because he’s right. It’s about time. So here’s a conviction:

America’s sin is cowardice. We love football and action movies and military adventurism but we’re terrified of real fights. We’ll hang out with bullies and laugh and say “good one!” every time they slap us in the face, just to make it absolutely clear that, you know, we could have done something, had we minded, but we didn’t mind. We go ahead and hate each other for the same reason, all hanging out with the same bully, bully smacking our friends, us sticking up for the bully. And as our family members age and fall into pitiable conditions, we can direct our anger at them for not doing better, for putting us in the position of caring for them when we lack the means to care for ourselves. Our buddy comes by to smack us for not doing better. Hey, good one.

The secret of American politics, what makes all of it so pious, is that we don’t actually want to know if we can change anything. We don’t want to know what happens if we hit back. Better to live with the illusion of power than the reality of helplessness. I should say, the reality of violence. Real fights for real reasons.  That we can lose.

There will be no return to some former age of righteous prosperity. The old wages for labor departed with the times and nothing so artificial as to bring them back can have any tenure. It is the advance of technology which places both the means and the gains of production into fewer and fewer hands. The benefits of our system are still out there, we just lack access to them. Our standard of living has always been zero-sum. The current balance for most of us continues to plunge red, while a few live better than monarchs of old could have dreamed. It is in this light that I suggest the piety in your approach to providing for you and yours is misplaced. There’s no fruit left on the tree; somebody made a machine to pick it all.  Good on him!  Yes.  Now.  Will you be a monkey, clambering to higher and higher branches? You’re a hell of a burden, every time you fall. Will you fight over what little the other monkeys have managed to pick?

I think the first step from here is to go ask the guy with the machine to share. Politely. We should probably all go together and ask as a group. I know, I know, that looks threatening. But I think it’s a lot less threatening than what will happen when we’re starving. We will rip each other to pieces faster than that guy can throw us fruit.  Somewhere on the tail of all that, if anybody’s left alive, come the guillotines, and everybody loses, the end.  Maybe we could have a little losing and a little winning up front instead.

The counterargument to this invariably relies on sanctimony and metaphysics, is invariably reducible to “but that’s forbidden.”   I’m ready to respond in kind.

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