Second only to the fact that there is no comments section, my favorite part of reading history books is how eerily familiar they are. Change the incidentals of a few major plot points and update the proper names and linguistic conventions, and history could easily serve as a primer for the evening news.
I’ve always been interested in U.S. history. Maybe it’s because I was born in this country and will likely die here. Take the Civil War, for example. The assumptions, the psychology, the schemes – they’re all breathtaking, really, twisted and convoluted in a way that would engage even the most ardent reality television devotees.
Even with all of our so-called sophistication, here’s something quite simple from history that endures: the people with the power, the money and the control can always rely on those beneath them – those they exploit – to do their bidding. Before the Civil War, the poor whites who did not own land or other humans aligned not with the slaves, with whom they had much in common in terms of money and influence, but with the masters. At the corporation where I used to work, the support staff – “the admins” – didn’t band together to protect one another from an abusive “senior exec” who made 10 times what they did. They took each other out as a brutal show of loyalty to their “senior exec” instead.
And last week, guess who led the cheers over the news that the Dow had reached and surpassed 10,000 for the first time in a year? I logged onto Facebook – my deactivated account still grants me access – and was shocked at the number of exclamation marks and smiley faces on behalf of the stock market. Many of these cheerleaders lost their jobs last year, when their employer decided that the bonus pool was more worthy of preservation than their position. Many of them are borrowing money to make payments on mortgages that are worth more than their property. Many of them have foregone health insurance in the past six months. Many of them are contract workers for big, global companies, “at will” employees who receive zero benefits. Many of them are on the receiving end of the dirtiest trick ever played on this country’s middle class: their 401k accounts could disappear at any time, with or without warning. In fact, many of them lost more than half the money they thought was theirs for retirement.
Many of these people – myself included – are not wealthy. We do well, we have enough for now, but the truth of it is that our demographics could skid in an afternoon. Those of us – myself included – who have fooled ourselves into believing we’re members of the middle class need to take a truth pill. When it comes to cash, we have a lot more in common with minimum-wage earners, whose paychecks are being adjusted downward to accommodate inflation, than we do with Wall Street, where record-breaking salaries and bonuses are being handed out just in time for the holidays. I for one don’t care how many bottles of champagne are popped by the men and women on the news who have the audacity to wear baseball caps with “10,000 2.0” printed on them. I say audacity because as the Dow rises, so too do two other numbers: the national unemployment rate is about to tip 10 percent, and we now are now spending a trillion dollars that we don’t have. Apologies for my premature bah humbug, but I don’t think the wealthier using public cash to get wealthier while the rest of us don’t is cause for celebration. Even Diane Sawyer asked if perhaps a “quiet revolt” was brewing. Then Karl Rove came on and explained that excessive salaries aren’t the issue. The issue is that Wall Street saved the day and if it hadn’t received government money, many people would have lost their jobs and small businesses would have collapsed. The Obama people shouldn’t be trying to dictate how much money goes toward salaries, he explained. That’s not how the system works.
Comparing the excitement over this week’s Wall Street surge expressed by those who will inevitably be damaged by it to the poor whites siding with plantation owners in the pre-Civil War South isn’t a perfect analogy – I’ve yet to see one that is – but it’s close enough for discomfort.
I’ve always been interested in U.S. history. Maybe it’s because I was born in this country and will likely die here. Take the Civil War, for example. The assumptions, the psychology, the schemes – they’re all breathtaking, really, twisted and convoluted in a way that would engage even the most ardent reality television devotees.
Even with all of our so-called sophistication, here’s something quite simple from history that endures: the people with the power, the money and the control can always rely on those beneath them – those they exploit – to do their bidding. Before the Civil War, the poor whites who did not own land or other humans aligned not with the slaves, with whom they had much in common in terms of money and influence, but with the masters. At the corporation where I used to work, the support staff – “the admins” – didn’t band together to protect one another from an abusive “senior exec” who made 10 times what they did. They took each other out as a brutal show of loyalty to their “senior exec” instead.
And last week, guess who led the cheers over the news that the Dow had reached and surpassed 10,000 for the first time in a year? I logged onto Facebook – my deactivated account still grants me access – and was shocked at the number of exclamation marks and smiley faces on behalf of the stock market. Many of these cheerleaders lost their jobs last year, when their employer decided that the bonus pool was more worthy of preservation than their position. Many of them are borrowing money to make payments on mortgages that are worth more than their property. Many of them have foregone health insurance in the past six months. Many of them are contract workers for big, global companies, “at will” employees who receive zero benefits. Many of them are on the receiving end of the dirtiest trick ever played on this country’s middle class: their 401k accounts could disappear at any time, with or without warning. In fact, many of them lost more than half the money they thought was theirs for retirement.
Many of these people – myself included – are not wealthy. We do well, we have enough for now, but the truth of it is that our demographics could skid in an afternoon. Those of us – myself included – who have fooled ourselves into believing we’re members of the middle class need to take a truth pill. When it comes to cash, we have a lot more in common with minimum-wage earners, whose paychecks are being adjusted downward to accommodate inflation, than we do with Wall Street, where record-breaking salaries and bonuses are being handed out just in time for the holidays. I for one don’t care how many bottles of champagne are popped by the men and women on the news who have the audacity to wear baseball caps with “10,000 2.0” printed on them. I say audacity because as the Dow rises, so too do two other numbers: the national unemployment rate is about to tip 10 percent, and we now are now spending a trillion dollars that we don’t have. Apologies for my premature bah humbug, but I don’t think the wealthier using public cash to get wealthier while the rest of us don’t is cause for celebration. Even Diane Sawyer asked if perhaps a “quiet revolt” was brewing. Then Karl Rove came on and explained that excessive salaries aren’t the issue. The issue is that Wall Street saved the day and if it hadn’t received government money, many people would have lost their jobs and small businesses would have collapsed. The Obama people shouldn’t be trying to dictate how much money goes toward salaries, he explained. That’s not how the system works.
Comparing the excitement over this week’s Wall Street surge expressed by those who will inevitably be damaged by it to the poor whites siding with plantation owners in the pre-Civil War South isn’t a perfect analogy – I’ve yet to see one that is – but it’s close enough for discomfort.
