Pastorale Americana

Saturday, December 1, 2012 Pastorale Americana ll The first time I visited Detroit was in 1967, just weeks before the riots. Detroit was a happening place, and the freeways were choked with the cars that had made her great and workers going to and from the gargantuan factories where those cars were built and countless trucks ferrying car parts from one factory to another. I had no clue about the seething resentment that lurked beneath that veneer of prosperity.Visiting Detroit forty-five years later is a different kind of trip. Where did Detroit go?In 1967 resistance to the Viet Nam war was just hitting its stride. Fast forward forty-five years. America has been at war in Afghanistan for over a decade. Resistance has yet to begin. This past week’s announcement that “withdrawal” from Afghanistan at the end of 2014 would entail leaving 10,000 US troops there was met with a collective yawn.Americans are a far more passive people than they were a half century ago. They have been bullied into submission by their plutocrat overlords and the apparatchiks in Washington who get rich doing their bidding.Fifty years ago, the UAW was a force to be taken seriously.Today they are an emasculated shadow of their past, a labor organization that gratefully accepts whatever crumbs the bosses leave on the shop floor, or whatever shop floors the bosses deign to leave in America.America’s precipitous industrial decline coincided with the rise of the buccaneer capitalist. Not that they weren’t always there, but over the past fifty years American culture has made them icons. America certainly didn’t lack for business icons before, but in the past the captains of industry generally contributed something to the broader society.As the share of GDP derived from industry constantly shrank and that of finance capital grew, the new business icons were men who made their fortunes by destroying the common good. Sending American industry offshore was deemed brilliant management. Throwing entire communities out of work in the name of “efficiency” was met with accolades from the business press and obscene bonuses at the end of the year for the brilliant managers.Then came the hedge funds. An entire industry devoted to squeezing every last possible penny out of every last vestige of the old economy and what was once considered the commonwealth. Corporate responsibility? What’s a thousand jobs in Kansas or Illinois compared to a handful of rich people getting even richer?Corporations are people too, after all.Every four years the two parties who represent the plutocracy put on a great bit of theater for the voting masses who have watched their standard of living steadily erode generation after generation. It’s the greatest show on earth, and the apparatchiks never tire of congratulating one another on how great the American democracy is.And it is great, for the plutocrats and their technocrats, the hedge fund managers and the corporations, for the senators and congressmen who keep the whole charade running smoothly, and for the intellectuals and think-tankers and media folks who run the propaganda machinery that makes it all possible.But by my count there’s about 99% of Americans missing out on the good times.What puzzles me is why they put up with it.