Shoot that Duck

The new Will Ferrell film, Anchorman II, is one of the silliest I’ve ever seen, but embedded in the gags and bits is a commentary about our popular culture, namely, that the dumber it is, the more people will clamor for it. When the major American media consolidated a couple of decades ago, and print, TV and radio outlets fell into fewer and fewer corporate hands, programming honchos figured out that dumbing things down was a sure-fire path to sustained profits, and in short order real “news” was ditched in favor of high-speed car chases, celebrity weddings and breakups, features about cuddly animals, salacious murders, fashion, kidnappings, and stories of survival. Television shows about television shows sprouted like mold.

I had never heard of Phil Robertson or Duck Dynasty until the recent dustup over comments Robertson made about homosexuality, when his bearded face began appearing all over the Internet, from Facebook to the New York Times. The A&E Network briefly suspended Robertson from Duck Dynasty, then, under pressure from viewers and right-wing luminaries like Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum and Bobby Jindal, relented. Robertson will be back at the head of his clan.

Curious to see what I was missing, I watched five minutes of a Duck Dynasty episode on-line; that was enough -- celebrating rednecks, no matter how wealthy or colorful -- isn’t my idea of entertainment. I read a comment from one dedicated Duck viewer that he loved the show because the Robertson clan celebrates “Christian” faith and values. Well, that seals the deal for me.

My wife tells me I must reconcile myself to the fact that pop culture is a celebration of stupidity. She can watch an episode of The Real Housewives of (enter name of city here) with serene detachment; the inanity of the show doesn’t make her apoplectic or homicidal; I can’t muster anything but contempt and vitriol for rich, self-absorbed, Botoxed women, and the same goes for pawn shop owners, hoarders, real estate junkies, fashion designers and chefs. All they do is make noise and create drama where none exists. Why people care about Phil Robertson escapes me – honestly, I don’t get it.

It’s not surprising to me that a majority of Americans believe in miracles, angels, fairies, or that the earth is only 6,000 years old. We celebrate dumbing down at every opportunity and our appetite for crap and schmaltz is as insatiable as it is profitable for its purveyors; money is the only reason A&E executives put the Duck king back on his throne. They’re not going to slice off their nose to spite their face. The Duck man will be around until he says something truly over the top.

I was thinking I might write something uplifting and hopeful as we approach 2014, but I’ve succumbed to the blues once again. Sorry, folks. I thank all of you from around the world for reading this blog; I suspect some of you stumble across it purely by accident, but for those who step up and sit a spell, I thank you and wish you all the best in the new year.  

  

Working Class Scapegoat

You went to work for the City every day for thirty-seven years. You worked in the heat of summer, the bitter cold of winter, and every weather condition in between. Co-workers who were grizzled veterans when you started your career have long since passed away. Mayors and city councils have come and gone, some good, some corrupt and incompetent. Very few people now can remember when the City was flush with tax revenues, though abandoned office buildings, empty houses, and ghost factories speak of a more prosperous past. Your everyday reality for the better part of two decades has been cutbacks and reductions, layoffs and unpaid furloughs. Through it all, you kept reporting for duty, doing more with less when that became the new mantra. As the budget cuts slashed through the thin layer of fat and down to the bone, you watched the quality of services decline. No surprise, of course. Equipment designed to last twenty years was prodded and coaxed to last for 30 or 35; one worker now did the work of two, even three. Maintenance for the City’s infrastructure was deferred, deferred, deferred. Raises for you and your co-workers were also put on hold until some date in the future when the City was back on firm ground, when the pendulum swung and better times returned; next year, or the year after.

You saw the For Lease signs appear downtown, a few to begin with, one corner of a familiar block, but before long the disease spread and became an epidemic of entire blocks; plywood covered many windows. Broken streetlamps remained broken, potholes went unrepaired. Trash service became sporadic. Homeless people slept in doorways and on abandoned bus-stop benches. Still, you held on, this was your home, after all, and watching it die a slow death was painful. Although the politicians down at City Hall talked endlessly of attracting new businesses and sparking a renaissance with this or that initiative, it never came to pass. More and more people threw in the towel, packed their worldly possessions and set out for the suburbs or Florida or North Carolina or Texas; a trickle became a flood. It seemed like the only people left were those without the means to escape. You considered it, but your job and home and pension and memories were all here, in this declining city. Your fate and its fate were joined, for better or worse.

Local political bosses and Chamber of Commerce types laid some of the blame for what had happened to the City on the federal government’s doorstep, but they also blamed workers and their unions for setting the bar on wages too high for too long, and they made it seem as if paying a worker a middle-class wage was not only ridiculous from a business point of view, but morally wrong. Everyone talked in the language of the market now, nobody talked about justice or fairness.

Your turn to call it a career finally came. You were an old timer now; a survivor, and your co-workers said you were lucky to be getting out before it all went to hell. You put in your years, contributed to your pension, and it would almost be enough to live on if you were frugal and nothing went horribly wrong; the pension was your right, secured by your service to the City and guaranteed by the laws of the state. Nobody could take it away.

You were five years into retirement when the City declared bankruptcy. Once so proud, the City leaders were forced to kneel before an appointed Emergency Manager who was handed unprecedented authority to restructure the City’s financial obligations in whatever manner he saw fit. No clumsy, tangled democratic pretensions would get in his way. The Emergency Manager proclaimed that he was not bound by promises made in the past; the City was destitute and desperate and promises carried no weight. The pension you sweated for – and contributed to -- was fair game.

What got under your skin, beside the gross injustice, the broken promise, was how the power brokers hinted that the City’s collapse was somehow your own fault, as if, for each of those thirty-seven years, you had taken more than you gave in return. As if you were the greedy one. That you upheld your end of the bargain meant nothing to them; your pension was a liability on a balance sheet, an abstract number, and an obligation to settle for pennies on the dollar. You, and others like you, had ceased to matter.

Descent into Madness, Part II

 “The great and terrible irony of capitalism is that if left unfettered, it inexorably engineers its own demise, through either revolution or economic collapse.”            

Robert Scheer, author, The Great American Stickup

Business leaders became Gods. Lee Iacocca. Carl Icahn. Jack Welch. Ivan Boesky. It was a decade of relentless mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buyouts. Remember Michael Milken, the junk bond king? In 1987, the Oliver Stone movie, Wall Street, came out. Gordon Gecko, the swashbuckling and utterly corrupt corporate raider, announced, “Greed is good” and ever since greed has been our ethos, and we have taken it to heights Gordon Gecko only dreamed about.

The rhetoric of the 80’s and early 90’s was all about Capital and the rights of investors. Labor was a drain on profit that had to be reduced by any means necessary. The assault on organized labor from right-wing think tanks and academics on corporate payrolls picked up steam. American workers were too expensive and demanded too many benefits. To be competitive with the rest of the world, American CEO’s needed the freedom to move production wherever cheap labor could be found. Taiwan. Malaysia. Mexico. Vietnam. Entire industries packed up and departed, abandoning communities and regions they had been tied to for decades. States began competing with each other to lure corporate jobs, offering enormous tax breaks and myriad other concessions if only Boeing or GM or 3M would locate a plant within their borders. States with right-to-work laws on their books did better in this zero-sum bidding war. Why pay union scale wages in Illinois when you can pay just above minimum wage in Alabama?

The American auto industry continued its decline, despite endless concessions from the United Auto Workers. That was the game – wage and pension and benefit concessions for continued operation of this or that plant. If workers refused, management said, fuck you, we’re moving the whole shebang to Mexico.

Compared to his dingbat son, George Herbert Walker Bush was a reasonable man; he spoke of a thousand points of light and a kinder hand. The first Bush was a typical Chamber of Commerce type Republican, a man who rode the family fortune and extensive political and corporate connections through the CIA and the Vice Presidency.

But come the election of 1992, George was ousted by the man from Hope, Bill Clinton, the “new” Democrat who bragged of a Third Way to govern the nation. In essence the Third Way was the recognition of which way the wind was blowing: it was money, not ideas, that won elections, and the place to find reliable sources of campaign money was in corporate boardrooms. With the right messaging and PR tactics and votes on legislation, Democrats could go after the same donors that historically supported Republican candidates and causes. Nobody was better at this shell game than Bill Clinton, the Ivy League educated good ol’ boy, skirt chaser and snake charmer.

Clinton signed NAFTA into law. Clinton pushed a brand of tough welfare reform that made Republicans salivate. Clinton signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, eviscerating the Glass-Steagall Act that had protected the financial industry from itself since the 1930’s. With a stroke of his presidential pen, and the enthusiastic backing of neoliberals like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, Bill Clinton planted the seedlings that became the thorny vines that strangled the economy in 2008.

Of course, George W. Bush and the GOP tended those vines, watered and fertilized them, fed them Miracle Gro and steroids, while the right-wing machine flooded TV and radio and academia with its messages of “individual” responsibility, and a twisted mix of free market tributes, Christian fundamentalism and militarism. W and the people around him pushed a harder, crueler, and unforgiving vision – an American Nightmare built on the bones of the American Dream.  Every “public” aspect of American life has come under intense attack: teachers, firefighters, and public servants of every stripe are painted as parasitic drains on government treasuries. It is classic class warfare, and it continues to this day, with cries from Paul Ryan and his ilk for steep cuts in Social Security, Medicare and even food stamps for the neediest citizens, primarily children.  As in any authoritarian regime, the military budget and funding for the national security apparatus are sacrosanct.

The danger of any revolution is that it will go too far, lose sight of its initial aims, and gather a perverse momentum that spells its own demise. This is what happened with the Reagan Revolution: it created too much economic inequality and too many zealots eager to sacrifice common sense and moderation for their ideology.  The zealots speak of freedom and democracy as they toil to degrade both. Freedom must mean more than the freedom to shop, to consume, to acquire and accumulate worldly goods; democracy is hollow if it consistently ignores the will of the governed. 

Hyper social Darwinism, every citizen on his or her own, a gladiator in the economic arena, competing for survival against implacable foes that view mercy as weakness and moderation as a sin. As philosopher Alain Badiou has described our twisted age:

“Privatize everything. Abolish help for the weak, the solitary, the sick and the unemployed. Abolish all aid for everyone except the banks. Don’t look after the poor; let the elderly die. Reduce the wages of the poor, but reduce taxes on the rich. Make everyone work until they are ninety.”

Is this the ethos we want to organize our society around? If so, count me out. We can’t continue like this because it’s not sustainable for our society or the planet on which we depend. We desperately need new social movements and a new economic arrangement that tempers greed and establishes a multiple bottom line that takes the welfare of workers and the health of the environment into account.

Unfortunately, the hour is later than we know.