I was there mainly to see if I could catch a glimpse of the same spirit I saw in the marchers last spring and to pass out flyers for the upcoming World Can't Wait rally. It was the discussion part of the meeting and my intention was to listen only. But somehow I became involved. Putting my coffee cup down and standing up from the square bean-bag thing I had been trying to sit in on I made this comment:
Republicans appeal to everyone's darker nature. Many Democrats don't have the strength of their supposed convictions to offer a real alternative. Most Americans, actually presented a choice, prefer a society that helps neighbors in need. That's because despite a societal structure firmly based on greed, most Americans still possess the strength of character of their better nature.
Part One--Economic Crisis, The Thing, Identity Crisis
I was one of many gathered that evening in the little store-front cafe to hear plans for making National City a sanctuary for recent Mexican immigrants. To those attending I might have looked and sounded like an adventurous white suburban interloper playing hero activist or maybe even some bohemian wannabe out of his depth and element trying to wing it or fake it.
Truth be told it was just one of many times I've sprung my thoughts on an unsuspecting audience.
The first time I was in jail for illegal lodging, lying in my bunk on my back looking at the ceiling and reflecting on recent events--specifically my arrest and incarceration--I noted to one of my cell-mates: "good people are not always fair".
That one set off a mighty round of hysterics throughout the entire top tier of the jail module.
So people think I'm either naive or joking. I can be hard to define.
In the not so distant past, it seemed easier to define who I was by simply telling others what I do; I was a staff accountant, a college student, a paper boy. Recently it has occurred to me, If 'who you are' is 'what you do', and 'what you do' disappears and with it all the social notions, connections, associations and material possessions tied up with that idea--who are you then?
According to Adam Bagdasarian in his book "The Forgotten Fire":
"Time takes everything. Your home, your family, your work, your strength, the women you love. Everything.
Do you know where your real home is? Who you are and what you believe in is your real home, the only home no one can take from you, the only home that will last.
There is nothing your hands can hold that is worth having. They cannot hold the moonlight, or the melody of a song or even the beauty of a women. They can touch her face, but not her beauty. Only the heart can hold such things."
Only the heart can appreciate or hold the love of freedom. What happens to the heart of a prosperous nation when time begins to take away its economic "magic"? (Krugman)
The Economic Crisis:
In the early 70's government's long in place restrictions on capital movement, financial speculation and attacks on currencies were broken. According to Noam Chomsky's "Failed States" the historical effect those specific government restrictions had as part of the Bretton Woods Agreement allowed:
"a form of "embedded liberalism", as it is sometimes called, in which social democratic policies could be pursued. The outcome is often termed the "golden age" of capitalism (more accurately, state capitalism) with unprecedented economic growth that was also egalitarian, and enactment of significant welfare-state measures to benefit the general population."
"[I]n the Bretton Woods System limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures. With the dismantling of the system from the 1970s, substantive democracy is reduced, and it becomes necessary to divert and control the public in some fashion."
Also in the early 70's, the U.S. economy, by all accounts, stalled--"the public was angry and dismayed; and politicians were looking for answers." A snake-oil salesman was happy to tell people what they wanted to hear. "Supply-side economics happened to capture the mind of a consummate politician" and he in turn captured the very heart and soul of the nation. (Krugman)
Reagan would go on to usher in a new force in American politics--an amalgamation of concentrated power, distorted Christianity and "voo-doo" economics.
The Thing:
In the wake of the economic downturn and break-up of the Bretton Woods agreement the stage was set for change--for the worse. A conflation of conservative ideology, Big Business and Evangelicals brought to life an abomination of unfettered power, self-interest and zealotry. In the spirit of William Cobbett I'll call it `The Thing'.
As if out of the depths of some filthy festering special-interest lagoon The Thing climbed out of the business sector to stomp into the civic arena. It was hungry and ready to grow. And it grew, and its hunger grew until its appetite was no longer sated through conservative backed remuneration, corporate welfare or outright bribery. To survive, The Thing became a predator. Among just a few of its kills and intended prey; it gutted the chapter 11 Bankruptcy Law of its "general good" organs--devouring them whole! Its stalks cute family watchdogs like "Sox" and it has the temerity to attack our Judiciary.
According to Richard Sennet, the breaking of the Bretton Woods agreement resulted in a shift in power in the business world; from managers to shareholders, from long term to short term and from human to automation.
That fundamental cultural change was depicted, hilariously, in Michael Lewis's "Liars Poker". According to Paul Krugman in "Peddling Prosperity" Lewis
"attributes this shift to the opportunities brought about by changing technology and deregulation, which created a favorable environment for those who embodied the new "money culture"."
I suppose it would have been fine if the "money culture" stayed in the business arena but again according to Sennett:
"changes in the business world became a model for institutional change: big governments and civic institutions have tried to dismantle their institutional past following this model. "The very image of large, stable bureaucracies providing long-term predictable benefits horrifies political reformers. Why should a business model attractive to a short-term Saudi oil magnate appeal to them? Here culture again enters the picture, in the image of the idealized self which can prosper in the leveraged buyout world."
The ethos of The Thing--the at-work reality--would replace
traditional civic and individual values, decency, fairness and ultimately the very idea of common sense. As management consultant David Noer observes in Ehrenreich's Bait & Switch:
"Organizations that used to see people as long-term assets to be nurtured and developed now see people as short-term costs to be reduced...
[T]hey view people as "things" that are but one variable in the production equation, "things" that can be discarded when the profit and loss numbers do not come out as desired."
Whoa! Wait a minute--back up, "they view people as things"... are we The Thing?
20 years after Reagan, The Identity Crisis:
Traveling America in the footsteps of Tocqueville Bernard-Henri Levy wrote in "Democracy in America":
"No large modern nation today is as uncertain as this one, less sure of what it is becoming, less confident of the very values, that is to say the myths, that founded it; it's a certain disorder; a disease; a wavering of points of reference and certainties; a vertigo once again that seizes the observer as well as the observed..."
Last time I traveled back east to visit family I stayed with my closest sister and her family of five. Transitioning from just days before sleeping on the sidewalk to feeling the sanctity and security of a caring home and hearth was a dizzying experience and a lesson in of itself.
Another lesson was seeing just how a precarious economic situation--my sister's husband had been recently laid-off from his employer of over 18 years--put a terrific burden on yet another marriage and family.
Apparently the company my brother-in-law worked for prefers to be "lean and mean" as opposed to the "old paradigm". (Ehrenreich)
What I had trouble figuring out was the seemingly passive acceptance exhibited by everyone including my brother-in-law regarding his termination which was without cause from a financially prosperous and stable company.
Where's the outrage!? Where's the will to act collectively, to organize fellow laid-off coworkers, to engage the community to foster change? After all, my sister and her husband have been active in the local church and community for years.
In his book "The Corrosion of Character" Richard Sennett asked a downsized white collar worker
"why didn't you protest, why didn't you fight back?"
The response he got was
"Sure, I felt angry, but that doesn't do any good. There was nothing unfair about the corporation's making its operation tighter. Whatever happened, I had to deal with the consequences."
`It's our individual responsibility' this seemed, astoundingly at the time, precisely the approach my sister, her husband and everyone else were taking. No need to protest--the company had not been unfair. Everyone was going to be `realistic' and `flexible'.
`Flexible' in that now my brother-in-law would go off on a Christian retreat instead of marching forward. When he got back he would perform pretty much the same entry-level job he started out with in the company eighteen years ago. But this time the job would be on an assignment by assignment, short-term basis with another company in the same industry. He would be the "Everyman for our times"--a flexible free-lancer without benefits or job stability.
And the `reality' was that this upright, honest, hardworking family, through no fault of it's own, was now inhabiting some kind of nether world, a vague, border zone between employment and unemployment where the day to day uncertainty of supporting and keeping healthy a wife and three kids is as ludicrous as it is considered to be realistic by everyone.
According to Sennett:
"What's peculiar about uncertainty today is that it exists without any looming historical disaster; instead it is woven into the everyday practices of vigorous capitalism. Instability is meant to be normal, Schumpeter's entrepreneur served up as an ideal Everyman. Perhaps the corroding of character is an inevitable consequence. "No long term" disorients action over the long term, loosens bonds of trust and commitment, and divorces will from behavior."
Just like our Dad, my sister has an Irish temper. I'd rather her see her blow off some steam by cursing and fighting The Thing than to stifle, shut down and switch to "compassionate" compliance mode.
As for her husband getting angry or becoming bitter, today's employers can demand one kind of personality--an upbeat, likable and endlessly compliant worker. Apparently the only `realistic' thing to do is to adapt to this rule and grin and bear it because "As one web site I quoted warned, "if you are angry with your former employer, or have a negative attitude, it will show." The prohibition on anger seems unlikely to foster true acceptance or "healing", and it certainly silences any conversation about systemic problems. The aching question--why was I let go when I gave the company so much?--is cut off before it can be asked." (Ehrenreich)
Commenting on former community workers and leaders who he has known that have withdrawn from civic involvement Sennett laments:
"If my neighbors have taken responsibility for their life histories, that ethical act has taken their conduct in a particular direction; they have turned inward."
Part Two--The importance of Prey
Three thousand miles away on the opposite coast people are likewise focused only on the choices individuals make to the exclusion of being active in the kinds of choices society makes.
In her article "The Border Is Wide" Cecilia Balli tells how a sixteen year old named `Claudia' is separated from her parents while attempting to enter the US from Mexico without a passport or authorization. In the custody of the Border Patrol , Claudia is brought to the Mariposa Port of Entry which is a multilane inspection station linking Nogales, Arizona to it's Mexican twin, Nogales, Sonora. She is made to make the reverse march across the border with dozens others who had also been gathered up.
"The Border Patrol catches around a million would-be immigrants every year and drops them off at places like Mariposa, where agents shoo them past lanes of eighteen wheelers ferrying tomatoes and circuit boards produced in Mexico for further refinement up north." (Balli)
Claudia finds herself not in Mexico or the U.S. but in a kind of purgatory.
"Nogales was neither the Mexico Claudia knew nor the United States she had imagined. It seemed, instead like some vague third space, some vague place where she was stuck with no family and no idea of what to do next" (Balli)
Vega, like Claudia, also finds himself in Nogales. He was captured in the U.S. after living there with his wife and American born daughter for six years. Balli describes Vega as experiencing an "existential shift". Vega wants to return to the U.S. because he doesn't "have anything in this country--my country" but also believes "The United States is a country with a double morality. After so much time! I've worked so hard! And still, I don't have a single right."
Accompanying the border agents out on patrol Balli describes how despite all the advances in modern surveillance technology sometimes the most effective tools an agent can possess are old fashioned cunning, tracking ability and the hunters instinct.
By sneaking up behind a line of unaware and or sleepy-dehydrated immigrants like a pride of stalking predators, the border agents quietly pick them off one by one without alerting the entire group. According to one agent
"Confusion can make humans behave in remarkably obedient ways and the whole operation gets executed elegantly."
A state of purgatory is not a final judgment or necessarily an indefinite existence. In fact, any sharp lawyer would recognize purgatory for what it really is--the place to make an appeal; an appeal to our founding principles and ideals. An appeal to the eudaemons of our better nature.
Americans can shake off their `confusion' and reclaim the true identity that is part of American custom and American history. According to James K. Galbraith
In the mixed-economy America I grew up in, there existed a post-capitalist, post-Marxian vision of middle-class identity. It consisted of shared assets and entitlements, of which the bedrock was public education, access to college, good housing, full employment at living wages, Medicare, and Social Security.
Americans can stand up and take an active role in determining what choices are in accordance with the kind of society America wants. Or America's democracy can share the same fate as those powerfully bracing New England Winter seasons come March; in like a lion, out like a lamb.