Long Division

Madame:

This Beck thing brings us back to “the early days” (lol) of this blog, where we looked at books by Beck and Obama.  Readers may find that archive search instructive.

You mention that Limbaugh and Coulter will not have even the tardy bit of introspection that Beck seems to have had.  It brings to mind what I heard an “old” and “liberal” radio talk show host say about a lot of the “conservative” commentators, because he has known most of them personally from their beginnings:  they are smart, they only believe part of the things they say (and rarely to the level that they take it), and they are knowingly exploiting for financial gain the willful, emotional ignorance of their “followers.”

Interestingly enough, that particular talk show host was canned by the station he was on for not being “hip” or “progressive” enough (but was probably also canned at least partially because he didn’t march in the all anti-conservative, all-the-time parade).

As I travel the country, I encounter this division theme, which seems to be a familiar one but which few REALLY want to make a determined effort on: As we’ve mentioned, it serves those who hold the semi-hidden power.  How else could one explain so many PRESENTLY middle class people who are in denial and diversion about the reasons for the economic changes around them.  Who ignore and make no connections about all the older cars on the roads (and the autos in need of repair, sometimes appallingly so); of the faltering (and sometimes missing) infrastructure; of the increasing scarcity of certain skills and experiences that used to be basic; of the young who ARE the future but far too many of whom are either unprepared or lacking any real economic opportunity—and who will BE the future, for good or ill; of the formerly middle class people who have spun out of it into what USED to be the “working class,” but which is now in many respects the lower class, an often part-time and hard scrabble existence; of real poverty right in our midst, not even counting the homeless.

Only a populace that had been psychologically conditioned (the cynical would say brainwashed) would accept the disconnection, a disconnection that permits denial, permits the fiction that because THEY are “all right” for the moment, that things must be okay, and the “sensationalist media” and “bleeding hearts” are “enabling the moochers.”  Who, if they even acknowledge its existence at all, refuse to see Robert Reich’s documentary “Inequality for All, ” terming it “b.s. propaganda from another liberal who wants to kill jobs and the American Dream.” 

Good on Reich for soldiering on.  Just like the women suffragists who were ridiculed, harassed, or dismissed by so many of their fellow women, but had truth on their side, uncomfortable truth is present here as well.

Income inequality, and the plight of the middle class (which had been suffering in one fashion or another throughout most of the decade) is almost precisely where it was in 1928.  I hope I don’t need to remind everyone what triggered off economic calamity that next year.   I am NOT predicting economic calamity next year (and fervently hope it doesn’t happen), but I AM saying that, in Rush’s (the group, not Limbaugh) words, “if you choose not to decide, you’ll still have made a choice.”  Meaning that, denial only delays decision and reckoning, it does not evade it.  We can choose both not to see our problems and not to deal with them, but eventually they will deal with us in ways we will have little control over.