pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- REQUIEM FOR A (FUCKING DAY)DREAM Has anyone else been following the New York Times series on class or the Wall Street Journal s series on social mobility? It's interesting stuff—although limited by the writers' class perceptions—and, in many ways, a good reminder to spread the word about my best pal Filmgrrl's latest film about Enron and corporate greed. Apparently, a majority of Americans still assume that the so-called self-made man can still move up in our country. Our reality, however, is that inflexibility between classes has burgeoned in the last thirty years. The real income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell from 1980 to 2002 while the income of the top 0.1 percent (those making $1.6 billion and up) rose 2.5 times before taxes. Add Bush's tax cuts for his chums and the gap grows even larger. Yet a recent poll indicates that a whopping 39 percent of Americans believe that they are either in the wealthiest one percent or will be soon. What?????? Do they really all believe that they're the next Donald Trump or what? The Times poll is slightly less optimistic and indicates that only eleven percent of us believe that it is very likely that they will become super wealthy, while another thirty-four percent think that this is somewhat likely. So let me get this straight: In a country where class disparity has grown substantially in the last twenty-five years, nearly half of us believe that we are either already included in or will soon be counted among the wealthiest 1 percent? What the fuck is going on here???? This goes a long way toward explaining why the Republicans are in bed with all those prosperity preachers and why so many people buy lottery tickets despite the incredible odds stacked against their ever winning anything, but I still wonder how people could possibly believe such impossibilities. Are we suffering from collective amnesia? Consumer culture-enhanced delusions of grandeur? Or did most of us never learn how to think critically? We live in a culture in which working-class shoppers purchase the magazine Billionaire and watch Life-Styles of The Rich and Famous and, somehow, convince themselves that they will themselves be in those pages soon. Meanwhile, the actual glimpses of luxury that they experience are often funded by high-interest-rate credit cards that rob them blind? Maybe they don't teach much about European economies (or class wars) in history classes anymore. Otherwise, how do we account for the fact that, in a world in which growing chasms exist between the incomes of the haves and the have nots and policies that protect the wealthy are already in place, we continue to believe that we will be the ones who break on through to the other side? As David Moberg of In These Times notes, when the income from growth is captured by the very rich, as it largely has been for a couple of decades, this path to prosperity offers little to most people. Policies that favor the rich and cut benefits to the poor and working poor rip resources out of the hands of children and all but ensure that most of us will struggle harder. These realities put me in mind of a conversation I had with my little sister recently. She is convinced that, even though our country is at war and even though the military is desperate for warm bodies, SHE will not be going to Iraq. NoSireeeBobtail. She is not like those other soldiers. Nope. So she will remain right here on American soil and pay off her student loans. Maybe so few of us can identify good options for our lives anymore that we must cultivate fantasies about them in order to get up every day and keep going. So we ignore the math and put our faith in get-rich schemes or so-that promise to deliver the good things to us despite the odds. Moberg also notes that, currently, the realm of freedom for most Americans remains constricted to the shopping mall, where they can buy their identities ... [but] .... class ultimately has more to do with who has the power to make such decisions and [with] the powerlessness of the majority. The crucial aspects of class—social, political, and economic power—are largely absent from these series, which explains why Moberg suggests that the Times add excerpts from Graetz/Shapiro's new book Death by a Thousand Cuts, which recounts
how the super-rich worked with ultra-conservatives to demonize and possibly eliminate the estate tax, which they renamed the "death tax." [But, as] William Gates Sr., father of Microsoft Bill, often argued on behalf of the tax, the very rich accumulate their wealth not simply because of what they did but because of the society in which they lived, and they have a debt to that society. And the heirs of such wealth are the antithesis of self-made men.Moberg also suggests that the prevailing myth of the self-made man is aided and "abetted by the feckless incompetence of Democratic opposition," which makes ordinary people suckers for the right-wing pitch. Because, damn it, class matters. The NYT series also notes the fact that the wealthy consistently reference the choices they made that shaped them—their decisions to take an unpaid internship or attend a university that best fits their goals or attend a high school that guarantees their entry into the university that best fits their goals or to spend a year in Europe or to spend a year playing the fucking kazoo and growing their dreadlocks before returning to Harvard for that MBA or law degree. Choice is what I lacked growing up. And that's what most poor and working-class people lack. Instead, a lack of adequate funding leaves us trapped and always struggling, waiting for the next shoe or the next tire to blow or the next trip to the dentist to wipe us out. • In other news, a friend suggested that perhaps the Ginger cancelled my Verizon service. This doesn't seem like something she would do, but she's the only one I know who could figure out my user name and password and, unless Verizon is lying, SOMEONE said they were me and canceled my service. I'm trying to straighten all this out, but I am goddamnit NOT changing my phone number, especially because Filmgrrl is in the Adirondacks and is supposed to call and let me know when she's arriving here on the fifth! 11:38 a.m. - 2005-06-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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