Wealth in the US - Opinions, Attitudes and the Desire for Reform

I'm always interested to find places where the diverse political opinions of large swaths of the US public overlap. You know: despite what one might hear, chances are no one is excited that BP's oil spill is going to effect wild life, the environment, or people's livelihoods for a long time after any "official" clean-up ends. No one wants our educational system to fail our children. Everyone wants the government to run efficiently, and to reduce wasteful spending. We all want these things, regardless of our political attitudes. We might differ about where to cut, where to spend, how to educate, who should be on the hook for an environmental disaster, but, it is the same sense of injustice that drives us in our thinking.

I'm not writing this to suggest we need some sort of reconciliation , because I don't know that reconciliation is desirable, or even possible. I say that, not to be polemic, or divisive, but just because, on a personal level, that's where I am right now. I don't think that the issues with education stem from the "pro-Islamic" nature of our text books (and I'll say this, outright: when Conservatives talk about liberal  "revisionism," what they're talking about is increased inclusivity. When they talk about correcting those "revisions" they are talking about reversing those inclusive trends. Also, we are a secular nation, period. If you believe otherwise, you've been intentionally misled). I don't think we need to figure out how to gut social programs to pay for more protracted, covert, potentially illegal, wars of aggression. Conversations about the "decline" of the American Empire (you'll note that these come from a socialist and conservative source, respectively... note the differences in tone, attitude, and perspective on this "decline"), are happening everywhere, and have been for quite some time.

But we all generally think something has to be done about something. Part of this malaise comes, I believe, from the increasing income gap that exists in the United States. In my neck of the woods, the Mott's Applesauce plant in Williamson, New York, just got away with a contract that is nearly criminal in it's alterations to the relationships between labor and the company. This means that Wayne County, an already struggling area, (median income hovers around $50,000, with nearly 10% living in poverty), has lost one of the last good-paying Union jobs extant there. So as the public discourse begins to focus itself on the potential expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts , against this backdrop of falling incomes and middle class erosion , another one of these points of overlap is coming more sharply into focus: Everyone wants income distribution to be equitable and fair. We disagree about how we want this to happen. But we want it to happen.


 My brother is a socially liberal, fiscal conservative. He and I were talking one time, while I shoveled chicken shit from his chicken coop, and he worked on one of his 5 (the number he tells his wife) or so International Tractors he owns.

"The problem," he said, putting it impressively succinctly, "Is money."
I nodded my assent. He continued: "If we could make the world run, somehow, without money, things would be a lot better for everyone. It just corrupts everything."

This made me smile. "You know that that's one of the ideas behind the Communist Manifesto, right? That Karl Marx suggested the system that would replace capitalism would be one in which money wasn't a  means of separating individuals or classes?"

This gave him pause. He is not a Socialist. He is not a Communist. Not in any overt way, anyway. But everyone shares this idea. It is in the background of what the literary critic Fredric Jameson refers to as our "political unconscious."(Essentially, our literature is an expression of our sense of the fissures and ideological limits of Capitalism, and an attempt to imagine the utopia that might exist after this system breaks down.) This, I think, was a little much for my brother to take; he lives, as much as he can, in the image of our grandfather on our mother's side: a staunch, conservative, truck-driving, gun-toting pro-American individualist. My brother is ex-military. An ex-owner/operator (I'm talking big-rigs: 18 wheels, and many thousands of pounds of freight). He is not, again, a Socialist.

So, I'll give him a little time to let this sink in. But it does say something, doesn't it, of the intellectual overlap that does happen among the large swath of us that can be considered middle class? We all recognize the issues. We've all analyzed the issues, and come to some of the same conclusions, though we call them different things. We all know this: there is something inherently problematic about the objectifying nature of money. It creates unequal relationships between people, and, as belief in the equality of people is part of our cultural history, we find this hard to take.

A few weeks after the conversation with my brother, I was riding in a car with my absolutely wonderful Mom. I asked her to tell me some things about Grandpa (I never knew him well). Thinking of the protest at the Mott's plant, she began talking about his attitude towards labor and economics.

"One thing about him," she said, "He had ideas about what was happening in the world. He said it years ago: there are only going to be two classes - the rich, and the poor."

I'll have to tell my brother.

The _____ are coming! The ______ are coming!

When I was a young boy, riding the bus to school with my younger brother, I experienced two things that have consistently stuck with me over the years.

The first was the constant harassment Evan (my now deceased younger brother) received based on the fact that he was sort of a weirdo. It was hard to understand who he was, and what motivated him. What I thought of, at the time, as just intensively abusive, I see now as a rhetorical strategy: The kids didn't understand him or who he was or why he acted the way he did, so they applied a category to him they thought they understood. They called him faggot. Gaylord. Queerbait. They heaped homophobic abuses on him as a way of categorizing and demeaning him. All of these young country boys and girls used these terms uncritically, and without much thought at all to what those words actually represented.

The other, much less important thing, was a radio personality on the local country music station. I forget what his name was, and I don't feel invested enough in him as a topic to search for it. What I do remember, is that he would "say it like it was" (speak plainly, satirically, about the issues of the day), and then sign off with the following catch phrase: "Wake up, Uhmurica!"

What brought these anecdotes to mind? A few news stories. Perhaps you've heard that a gay blogger was told on his blog that "all faggots must die." And that, when someone traced the comment, they found that the computer from which the comment was written, was located inside the office of Senator Saxby Chambliss. Further, the comment came on the heels of the Senate's failure to get the votes it needed to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, the military policy that makes it possible to legally discriminate against a group of people based a categorical distinction that lawmakers, military officials, and citizens think they understand.

These stories, and this information, began, in my mind, to coalesce with some other things I've been reading lately about the series of far-right Tea Party darlings moving in on Senate and Representative seats this November. On Salon, Justin Elliot reported on an ad put out by North Carolina Republican Senate hopeful Renee Ellmers, in which Muslims are blatantly, and probably consciously, equated with "terrorists." Meanwhile, unapologetic racist, Chuck Paladino [NSFW] is inching closer to Cuomo in the NY race, and Delaware is dealing with its anti-masturbatory Tea Party favorite, Christine O'Donnell. The same Christin O'Donnell whose aides write stories about Obama's secret adherence to Islam, and who is alleged to have illegally spent campaign funds on everything from her rent to 19$ worth of bowling games. Salon also covered the story of a GOP hopeful named Jim Russell, who wrote, in 2001 (not 1901-- focus on that, OK?) about how destructive miscegenation was to Western Civilization. The GOP is now doing damage control on that last one, distancing themselves from Russell.

Reading this, I thought to myself that America should wake up. They should recognize these patterns for what they are: adherence to rhetorical norms that have given conservatives the upper hand in almost every public policy debate from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror. When I say conservatives, I'm being extremely inclusive. I'm not talking about the Republican Party. I'm not talking about Karl Rove and George Bush, I'm talking about cultural traditionalists, who have been found in every party, at all times.

Joe McCarthy did it. Early labor unions did it. Regean did it. It is this: utilizing cultural fear and economic uncertainty (check out the book Working Towards Whiteness by David R. Roediger, or At the Hands of Persons Unknown by  Phillip Dray) to ignite waves of the most reprehensible sorts of "populism." The kinds of populism that define an "Us" and a "Them," between which no reconciliation is intended or desirable.

The Formula for stoking such cultural anxieties is simple: 1) Identify a social problem. 2) Identify a target group. 3) Claim that before the recognition and acknowledgment of that target group by the institutional United States (Schools, Churches, Governmental bodies, etc), the social problem in part 1 did not exist. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat(these stories - Jan Brewer claiming that there are "beheaded bodies" in the desert, Newt Gingrich claiming Obama has a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview, and a random poster on the anti-feminist Spearhead blog blaming "the fall of Western Civilization" on the 19th Amendment, all rely on this logic: These groups and individuals cause these problems through their mere existence... through their mere inclusion in our political discourse). The result is that even those people who don't believe such things to be true, are defending their position in the terms of the debate as you've set them. The upper hand is lost.

That's why, some twelve or 15 years ago, on a bus traveling past the apple orchards (picked clean by immigrants legal, and illegal) of a small town in New York, my little brother had to make the case that he wasn't a "faggot," instead of being able to expose his accusers' homophobia for the problem it was. That's why we have to defend Islam as not inherently evil, rather than asking why some people are convinced that it is, and why we have to defend the president against claims that he is an Islamo-Fascistic-Kenyan-Socialist rather than focusing on the actual results of his actual policies.

My point is this: the kids on the bus are still screaming "faggot" at the top of their sexless, prepubescent, ignorant, lungs. You can deny it, and implicitly reinforce their homophobic fear, or you can confront them and label their fear mongering for what it is: absolute bullshit.

How long will fear work as a party platform? As long as we let it.

First, introductions.

Hi, I'm Eric. Let me just begin by talking about my decision to begin: I'm not a person who writes blogs. My ladyfriend, who graciously supplied the photo for this venture, has been urging, prodding and pushing me to start one for some time. She seems to think that my disagreeing with almost everyone I meet about almost every topic under discussion, should be reason enough to section off a corner of the internet and mark that space as my own. She felt, and I feel, it might be good for me to let off steam in a more productive, hopefully interesting, way.

So here I am. My own place to rant, rave, and wail in a way that is public enough that I know I have an audience, and private enough to not have that audience recognize me in the real world. The spectacle: on display for anyone to stumble across. Is this self indulgent? Is it Pretentious?

I think so. But, hopefully, it will also be cathartic.

I won't keep you much longer.


Biographically speaking, this is me: An adjunct professor of English teaching for the first time ever; the son of a garbageman and a factory-working woman; the brother of a dead boy and a trucker. A relative to people I hardly know, and a partner to a lady I really like.

I'm irreligious, irreverent, vulgar, and often obnoxious. We all have our faults.

Nice to meet you. See you later.