Nurture

Yesterday I put up a post about the Whacking of The Nancy that included this comment about the woman who was (depending on who you believe) either the éminence blonde behind the entire plot or an innocent wee slip of a girl betrayed by bad company:

"These were people who were just brutally...marginal; sad, hardscrabble fuckups who were often just one mishap away from being human trainwrecks, deadly combinations of barely-bright, poorly-educated, undisciplined-to-the-point-of-undisciplinable. In the Army we called these sorts of people "shit magnets". “Bad stuff” just “happened” to them; car wrecks, arrests...lost time, lost jobs, lost husbands and wives, lost lives. Tonya was a kind of patron saint for those people..."

This is and was a sad fact rather than an opinion; the world is full of such people, and the wreckage that their shit-magnetry leaves behind.

But I should add this:

It's important to distinguish between the effects of behavior and environment, between the hard work of fucking your life up and the good luck of having a life that's fundamentally hard to fuck up.

Unbolt the tits off Tonya and put the resulting body in an Andover and Yale sweatshirt and you pretty much get George W. Bush; an intellectually stunted, emotionally impaired, ethically flat-lined, greedy, egotistical peckerhead.

Tonya is a convicted petty crook. A substantive case can be made, based on the grounds upon which an international tribunal indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged Hideki Tōjō, that Dubya should be a convicted Class A war criminal.

Not just that little pecadillo binds the two together. Look at the pattern of their lives. One fuckup after another, one stupid decision followed by a period of complete nonreflection followed by another stupid decision. These two people made careers out of putting themselves in positions of public confidence only to do something incredibly boneheaded that made it clear that said confidence was utterly and disastrously misplaced.

So why is it that Tonya is living in an anonymous trailer somewhere east of Terrebone while Dubya is still booking speaking tours and lounging about the in-ground pool at one of the family mansions?

You know why as damn well as I do.

So, while it's popular and entertaining to sneer at the Tonyas of the world - hell, there's a whole business of trumping up television and movies and books - and even a gawdawful checkstand magazine sneering and leering at these poor mooks - the only real difference I see between them and the Dubyas and the William Kennedy Smiths and the Alice Waltons and the Kenny-Boy Lays of the world is what Ernest Hemingway supposedly said when Scott Fitzgerald told him that the Rich are Different:

They just have more fucking money.

So I don't want you think that I'm slagging off on Tonya. Yes, she fucked up.

But when she did she had nothing there to protect her from the consequences of her fuckedupitude. She got one shot and when she screwed it up she fell, like Lucifer, never to rise again.

Whilst here in the Land of the Free one of the great privileges of great personal or family wealth is the "right" to fuck up - over and over again - and never pay so much as a moment's regret or a day's liberty for it.

Missing the point

As I was thinking about blogging, the past year, and this one I realized that one of my least favorite pastimes had and has become both observing and commenting on the state of the Union here in the Land of the Big PX.

The simple reason is that what I see happening, and what I see and hear from all around me, are vastly different and cripplingly troublesome.

What I see as the single, comprehensive, massively important issue is the seemingly-inexorable slide towards the New Gilded Age.

This change affects everything in the United States - our politics, our economics, and our society - and in a way that as a member of the breaker-boy-and-match-girl segment of that society I find somewhere between appalling and revolting.

Somehow We, the People, seem to have lost sight of the fact that it is not in our best interests to vest an immense pile of wealth and, through that wealth, power, in a relatively small handful of people at the top of the demographic heap.

I don't see this as some sort of force of Nature or simple swing of the politico-economic pendulum. Instead I see it as a generations-long project driven by the greed and selfishness of the rentier-class at one end and propelled by the fuck-stupid ignorance and prejudices of the Duck Dynasty-class at the other.

The oligarchs are what they have always been; rapacious. In that rapacity they are also as they have predictably been; shortsighted. The lessons of 1789 and 1917 have largely faded far enough into the past for them to have forgotten why the Western democracies chose the welfare-state model in the first place.

While I don't particularly blame them for that I don't trust them, either.

Like British admirals, every generation or so they need a couple of heads on pikes to deliver the sharp encouragement to mind their civic manners and show some politesse to the proles. Instead they have been allowed to beaver away at the social contract here in the U.S. where it has become louche for even a Pope to remind these Mammon-fellating bastards that (if they are notionally Christian) by the very words of the text they profess to revere they can be rich, or Christian, but not both.

And the stupids are...well, stupid.

I can't exactly blame them for that, either, although it helps when the Stupid is directed towards despising the Idle Rich and their political lackeys rather than sucking up to them.

But the Teatards manage to be some sort of political Perfect Storm of Stupid; either too fatheaded to see ol' Sam Walton's kids waiting up there at the top of the chute with the humane killer, or too vitriolic in hating on the Niggers, the Queers, and the Lib'ruls to care, or both.

Between the two - the modern Bourbons at the top and the modern Australopithecenes at the bottom - we have managed to shove ourselves a hell of a long distance closer to the nasty conditions we last saw in 1929 than I would ever have thought possible.

And the third utterly rotten part of this is the degree to which our supposed press has managed to largely miss this entirely.

Instead - when we're not being simply fluffed with ridiculous nonsense - the news organizations have adopted the "both sides do it" nursery rhyme of "centerism" and the mindless stenography of reportage without ever managing to connect these dots of news into the larger point; our nation has become a vast Skinnerbox for maximizing wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful to the detriment of everything else for everyone else.

Wonder why the U.S. can stumble about into foreign expeditions seemingly without any sort of strategic vision?

Wonder why the U.S. can gin up vast, unaccountable programs of foreign and domestic espionage?

Wonder why the U.S. can increase defense spending while cutting taxes, prosecute petty drug dealers with life sentences while letting wealth financiers walk for laundering millions in drug profits, fret endlessly about who puts what in whom, where, and how often while whistling unconcernedly past naked acts of crony capitalism, environmental despoilation, and violent "law-enforcement"?

Look no further than the old Latin tag: "qui bono?"; "who benefits?"

Or, rather, "Who is harmed?"

None of the problems you read in the news harm, or really even affect, the Truly Wealthy.

Their sons and daughters aren't dying - either of boredom or land mines - in Southwest Asia. Their mansions aren't soaked in spilled petroleum or mine tailings. They are not desperately looking for work after losing their job to offshoring, downsizing, or mechanization. Their doors are not knocked down at midnight, their cars not pulled over, their careers not destroyed by prison. They could care less about abortion - if they or their daughter needs one they can get one; safely and silently - or homos, or guns, or public prayer. Their wealth is not tied to their work, so the relative decline of wages, or of work itself, does not touch them.

They're doing juuuuust fine, thanks.

So, to me, all the random ranting about farkling about in Southwest Asia, or some homo marrying some other homo, or who can't buy that nifty rifle with the bayonet lug misses the point, too.

There is only one real story in the U.S. right now; will we be ruled by our own wealthy or will we rule ourselves?

And right now the answer doesn't look good to me, or to you, if you're not reading this on the computer inside your 6,000-square-foot palazzo.

So, frankly, I can't see any point in my throwing out more posts about politics, or economics, or how society in the U.S. is going to hell for the next year. We know why those things are happening to us, and it's not because of the blacks or the queers or the muslims.

And after that the only question left for me to ask is:

What are we doing about it?

BASE Jump

I'm trying to give a shit about the "fiscal cliff" but the best I can come up with is a sort of vague irritation that my fellow lefties in D.C. are even considering "compromising" with the GOP on anything about this.

Because "compromise" for the wingtards (which is, functionally, what the modern GOP has become; a windsock for the gales of the unhinged reactionary Right) means "What's mine is mine and what's yours is also mine."

You might be able to compromise with a ravening wolf over a pork chop. You cannot "compromise" with the Congressional GOP; there's just nothing there but a reptile brain full of hateful shit and hunger.

I am pondering a New Year's Message post about the State of the Nation as I see it, but I wanted to take a moment at this point and just marvel that here we are, still mired in the Great Recession, and the Usual Idiots are fulminating and bloviating about deficits and all butt-hurt about raising taxes on the Uberrich.

Yeah, THOSE fuckers;

"That prompted a tall, extremely tanned blonde named Kay, from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, to ask Hassett, the co-­author of the 1999 book Dow 36,000, “So what do we do with our money?”

He recommended investing in real estate in another country, maybe in Central America somewhere. A woman to Kay’s right wrinkled her nose: How about a Western country? “Okay, if Europe is what you want, go to Poland,” he said optimistically. “Go to Krakow, buy a house for $50,000, and it’s going to be like Paris in a few years.”

The unchanged and unchanging reality is that while there are probably several truly wealthy Americans who are deeply committed to this nation and its democracy that the vast majority have no structural reason to be so.

The Rich have always been able to afford their own Nation.

The rest of us need some semblance of a functional polity to have a decent, non-Hobbsean existence. We need police and firefighters and we need to know that they are relatively honest and devoted to our community as a whole and not to its oligarchs. We need a relatively square deal from the legal system and its arbiters; we need to believe that when we come before a judge that what will weigh will be the matters of our case and not our origins or the contents of our purse (although this is already well in doubt - you needn't look hard at the U.S. judicial system to recognize that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor).

We need a government that cares whether we eat clean food, drink clean water, and breathe clean air because we have neither the breadth of information nor the depth of wealth to fight back those who would befoul all three.

For the wealthy all this is a frippery. They don't need this "government"; they can purchase access to safety, to health, to cleanliness. They are free to roam the wide Earth in search of places to make their monies; we are, most of us, tied to where we live now. If that place goes to hell we are trapped in Hell; our plutocratic Lords can flit away as easily as a camel may leap through the eye of a needle.

So I gaze with scorn and loathing upon the gyrations of the Powers that Be along the Potomac now so fretfully aquiver over the notion that our domestic satrapy might be forced to wring another penny or three from their bulging moneybags.

Whilst in the streets the jobless stand in endless lines and below the overhangs and beneath the bridges the women and children stare with empty eyes at the pitiless rain that washes their future away before it.

Go over the "cliff", then, goddamn it.

Let us leap out into the unknown before we "compromise" so much as one more wretched cent to the grasping Midases we have already so wrenchingly enriched.

In Case I Wasn't Clear

Here, from Matt Taibbi, is a little chart showing the top donors to the current GOP frontrunner as well as the the last two presidential victors:So now...is it all that surprising to understand how, regardless of who gets elected, we seem to be governed with the intention to comfort the comfortable and, well, afflict the afflicted?

In all honesty things WOULD have been worse under a President McCain. But it's a difference is degree, and right now for those of us not in the two-yacht family the boat seems to be foundering - slower than we'd have gone down with Captain Crashboom and the Half-baked Alaska at the helm, but, still - the ocean looks damn cold, and awful deep, and the prospect of a steamship on the horizon looks awful dim.

Topsiders, Duct Tape, and the National Dilemma of Wealth

I finally broke down and got a new pair of shoes last week. The old ones had become so worn that the sole had actually come loose and was flopping around like one of those clown shoes and had to be held in place with duct tape.Now here's a funny thing; when I was a college kid the whole duct-tape-on-the-Topsiders was considered the height of studly cool in some quarters.

Specifically, preppy quarters.

Remember "preppies"? There was a whole little cottage-industry of preppy-this and preppy-that in the late Seventies and Eighties, if I recall correctly. The whole plaid-skirt and penny-loafers for women, khakis and Lacoste shirts for men (and crew-neck sweaters for both, of course...) was the popular image of the thing. Labrador retrievers were involved, too, I think (or maybe Goldens. It was a while ago, c'mon).Now I was no different than many young people in their early twenties. I had just outgrown my childhood but was fitting badly into adulthood. I was turning and tapping bits of myself to try and see how to make them fit. I invented bits of this and lies about that to try and make myself seem...cooler, more interesting, different, more exciting.

But what I more than anything else wanted was to fit in. To be part of the accepted center of my then-life, a small, undeservedly-snooty Eastern liberal arts college. And a huge proportion of the "accepted center" of that place were the young people who had come from the private schools of the U.S. Northeast.

I don't really have any sense of the breed today, but in the Seventies the products of the Peddie School, Deerfield, and Lawrenceville Academy were the most upper of upper-middle class America. They had spent a dozen years acquiring not just a private-school education but a private school "manner" and part of that manner was the clothes they wore.

Now I was too callow to understand that a dozen years at the Peddie School would do more than teach you how to wear a polo shirt inside a button-down shirt under a crew-neck sweater. But that fashion was the only thing I could understand, and so it was the fashions I aped.It is more than thirty years since I left that place, and my sense of person has expanded to fill the inside of my head since then. I no longer feel any particular need to dress, or be, anyone to please anyone other than myself, my bride, and my children - all the public I need at this point in life.

But some things linger long after the reasons for them have fled, and I still find the Topsider shoes the most comfortable and easy to wear of any men's footwear.So when my old shoes finally died it wasn't a huge surprise that they were made by the folks at Sperry, or that I jacked some tape around them to hold them together before they went to their reward. If it worked in 1977...But I got to thinking, as I painfully parted with the cost of new shoes, that the people whose style I still walked in would have thought little and cared less for the expense.

And that really means something.

Because for most of us, for most Americans, for most people, life centers around the arithmetic that Dickens describes as "Income twenty pounds, expenses nineteen pounds, eleven shillings, sixpence, result; happiness. Income twenty pounds, expenses twenty pounds sixpence, result; misery."

I'm not saying that most of us are poor. What I'm saying is that most of us need to watch what we spend and what we save. We have to worry about things like getting sick. Or getting fired or losing our jobs. Of our roofs leaking, or our cars breaking down, or our taxes being screwed up and costing us penalties and interest.

And the one thing I've noticed now - especially this election year, but for quite some time now - is that the people our political class has chosen to "lead" us seem somewhere between somewhat to utterly clueless about that life.This year's poster boy, of course, is Willard Romney, who can and did talk about "firing" his insurance company.

That's really all you have to know about "Mitt" (a preppy nickname if ever there was one and, sure enough, Willard attended the Cranbrook School in Michigan [his wife prepped, too, at Kingswood]). Most of us don't "fire" our insurance companies; we hope instead that we don't get sick enough that our insurance companies don't force us into bankruptcy and then fire US. That Willard thinks such a thing tells you that the man had lived his entire life swathed, wrapped, bathed, and laved in what in the Army we used to call "fuck-you money".

And you know what?

Damn near all the other pols I can think of are, too. And that's no surprise, because for all we like to pretend it's not true, it's nearly impossible - and by that I mean 99.94% impossible - for a poor or even a modestly wealthy person to run for high office in this country.

Because I've thought about running for office. I'm a pretty smart, well-informed guy. I speak well, I write well. I understand the principles of this country and I think I have a good sense of what is in the best interests of most of its people.

But I can't afford to run.

I can't afford to lost the time I'd need to spend schmoozing the local Democratic Party, volunteering, getting to know the Thrones and Dominations. I can't afford to spend the money I'd need networking, or the lost work time in commuting to Salem or to various meet-and-greets. And if I GOT elected I'd have to constantly fundraise because I couldn't then afford to lost my government job and go BACK to my work as a geologist; I'd simply be too old, too disconnected, too...well, I'd be unemployable. So I'd have to slime my way back to Salem, or D.C. as some kind of lobbyist. Or think-tank scum. Or "consultant"...And that's really sad, and wrong.

Looking around it seems like we're beavering away trying to institutionalize not just bad governance (although God knows we seem to be doing that) but bad, clueless, craphanded, entitled governance. The kind of governance that fusses about "Islamofascism" but not unemployment, about deficits but not bankruptcy, homelessness, and civil rights.

And it may be a coincidence - but it seems unlikely - that it also seems nearly impossible to find anyone in, or running for, public office from local to state to federal who is intellectually anything other than a Lacoste-and-topsiders-or-plaid-skirt-and-pearl-wearing-variety, clueless, craphanded, entitled preppy asshole.And then we wonder why it seems like the world wags towards them and not towards us.

A Thousand Words

Just in case you're wondering why the 90% top income tax bracket, regulation of credit default swaps, an end to offshoring and downsizing, a public option for health care reform and a swift end to foreign filibustering aren't going to be coming around anytime soon.

(crossposted at Milpub)