Mr. Scruff’s song Keep Movin’ gives me memories of 1931, and it’s in the background as I write.
There’s been something of an economic recovery (so the White House says), and the business cycle doesn’t stop. But it looks like we’re on top of a hill and going down just a little on this scary roller coaster ride. It won’t be as bad as September, 2008 but it still isn’t going to be very pretty.
The Tea Party people have fielded their candidates locally, and the small right wing conspiracy is alive and well. Many of them are trying to look like Republican moderates, but they’re still wolves in sheep’s clothing. And their political platform sells the sizzle of imaginary jobs created by “secret plans” and the wonderful unleashing of the free market. They don’t advertise their proposed tax breaks for the rich and huge relaxations of developmental and environmental standards. To a political hack like me, this means walking the hastings, delivering campaign flyers and soliciting voting opinions for the politicos who legitimately espouse progressive values. It’s my version of selling Bibles in America.
You see all kinds of people when you’re assigned part of a random precinct that needs to be walked in August. I see lots of little homes with their American flags, and there are those little crosses that have been made into doorbell plates. An elitist like me might be inclined to mock them. Are they trying to tell other people that they’re not Canadian? This is a facile and glib answer, and it occurs to me that one of the reasons why people have their flags flying and flag decals is their neighbors.
Now and then you’ll see a really scary house, and you avoid it like the plague. As an example, it will have a high cyclone fence all around the property, with more than one sign referring to Smith and Wesson. But scariest of all are the Confederate flags. I make no mistake about where the sympathies of these people lie. And it’s easy to free associate to Hells Angels motorcyclists and meth labs from there.
When you walk around you quickly discover that people have their lives, and that’s all they have and no one ever has any more than that. 99% of the people in America just want to get along with their lives. They’re not really interested in politics. They’re worried about their kids, or what and where their next paycheck is going to be coming from. In August, they pay attention to the University of Oregon’s training camp for football far more than they do to a State Senate race or County Commissioner.
The only significant conversation I get into while doing a lit drop is talking with a teacher at a garage sale. I tell her about the state and local budget deficits that are eating up any economic stimulus from the federal government, and how our state is in the middle of the crosshairs for dramatic and painful budget cuts due to a loss of state revenue from the recession. The teacher tells me that she’s concerned about taxing the rich too much, as they’re responsible for all of the jobs. And if we raise taxes on them, they’ll turn around and pass those raises on to us. I try to explain to her that financial capital is not equal to business capital, and that reducing taxes on the rich merely increases the amount of money that they stash away in their mattresses. It’s eggs and apples, and she doesn’t get it.
America is a land of contrasts, and sometimes it’s hard to envision class conflict in this country because the classes don’t conflict. Hell, they might as well be on different planets. Joe is a case in point. Joe bears an uncanny resemblance to Karl Marx, but I guarantee you that he is not. Joe and his wife stayed at our house for a few days on their way up to a wedding in Seattle. They spent three and a half years sailing until they finally landed near Fort Lauderdale, where they settled. Once Joe was in an obscure part of the bond business in New Jersey and New York. Now he’s semi-retired and serving as a behind the scenes investor in the cement business in Haiti. I can’t figure out whether he’s doing good or just ripping them off. The answer to both is probably yes.
We get into a rambling discussion of many things from Goldman Sachs to government regulation of the bond industry to conditions in Haiti and back to the economy. I try to tell him about the benefits of government spending in promoting the economy. Joe has put forth the proposition that all wealth in a country comes from the sweat and initiative of entrepreneurs. I discuss the multiplier effect of defense spending, and I lay out the case that the U.S. Government could more productively goose the economy by leaving a giant stack of $100 bills out on any street and letting ordinary people take as much as they want. When gasoline costs $150 a gallon on the ground in Afghanistan, and a huge percentage of that cost goes to corruption along the way, or when $8,000,000,000 in American money just goes missing on pallet loads in Iraq, he begins to see part of my point.
He puts forth a weak defense of global warming denial, and I tell him about the high school science experiment that the BBC showed on its website. I tell him that it’s a proven fact that CO2 has been shown to increase atmospheric warming since 1836, and I tell him to look it up on Google. I may not have changed his mind, but he thanks me for providing an alternative source of information on some things.
The problem right now is that there are too many people on the right who are advocating some of the most extreme and barbarous political opinions that I’ve seen in my entire life. I’m old enough to remember the ghastly campaign of George Wallace and his American Independent Party in 1968. And as much as the old Wallace was a demagogue, he was an absolute gentlemen compared to the anti-immigration zealots proposing to deport 12,000,000 Mexicans or messing with the 14th Amendment. And the recent Ground Zero Mosque controversy is the clearest case of highly publicized religious bigotry I’ve seen in the United States.
Fearful old white people are getting very scared about their world slipping out from underneath them, and a rationalist and skeptic has to wonder just where the crazy will all wind up. And so it seems to me that a whole lot more rationalists and skeptics will have to become Bible salesmen this year if we are going to try to prevent a bad situation from becoming worse.
And 1931 continues to play in the background.
Karl Eysenbach | Contributor
Karl Eysenbach is a retired government administrator and teacher. He is the author of a novel,The Story of the Century, and he lives in Eugene, Oregon and middle Baja California. Watch for his blogging as old new lefty at open.salon.com.
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