Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
It’s hard to escape the fact that American life, and the political life which reflects it, seem to be getting more brutal, crueler, month by month, even as the official rates for serious crimes fall. Black Lives Matter and the #Me Too movement both have their horror stories of the powerful regularly abusing the weak. And their different nominations for the causes of our troubles. We are stamped, and desensitized, by the now ritual of mass shootings, and just this past few weeks we have seen a tape of police pounding a helpless, hand-cuffed prisoner, and this capped off by the wails of young children separated from their parents and clamped in detention camps by the bully in charge, President Trump.
Will conservatives tolerate this under the heading of “tough love?” I hope not, because the damage to those children will be severe and long lasting. (And to the prisoner, which if I may paraphrase the incredibly insensitive jacket just worn by the First Lady — “Who Cares?” ) Which is why mothers get to stay with their young children when they are hospitalized. But the hard Right is trying to teach us a lesson — the left and the future immigrants before they leave - that there will be a lot of pain inflicted.
This lesson teaching, in the best American anti-intellectual tradition, ignores the real drivers of immigration: the disintegration of the societies of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (and before them, Mexico, which I have called a failed state) under the forces of conservative governments and the power of drug cartels and gangs. And former President Bush’s commerce secretary was on CNN last night, June 21st, making the business case for continued immigration, saying that given the state of the American economy, booming with jobs going unfilled — the worst of the jobs and the worst of the pay — this will hurt our economy. Drowned out in this slant is the fact that in our Darwinian economic system, there was bound to be a white working class reaction to our porous borders, just as there has been to the rise of China, which has uprooted manufacturing jobs from Latin America and the Caribbean and rural America and planted them in Vietnam and Bangladesh. We are being served the white populist nationalist response, but progressives have yet to come up with a convincing left nationalist response, which does not destroy globalization but reforms it. Yanis Varoufakis is talking about that, in books, speeches and interviews. Most of my neighbors in Western Maryland have never heard of him, and he is shunned by Paul Krugman, despite his having a laudatory back jacket quote from Martin Wolf of the Financial Times for his 2016 book, “And the Weak Suffer What they Must?...” a title which nicely captures the mood in our country, and what follows here below.
Then I came across this New York Times’ Op-Ed by Lovisa Stannow, www.nytimes.com/... detailing what many of us already know: the violence in our prisons, including rape so rampant that a federal law was passed, but which is proving ineffectual. The article is understated and non-ideological, not mentioning that most prison guards are white — varying by region, of course — and the majority of prisoners are black and Hispanic, no mention of Mass Incarceration, privatization, although the incidents and white washes detailed come from private prisons in the deep, deep South, specifically, Mississippi.
The article moved me, as did the prison work of Chris Hedges, but perhaps not in the way Ms. Stannow intended. I wanted to deepen, and broaden the “why” of the violence that surfaces in prisons. And so I posted a comment at the Times and they chose it as one of their “Times picks,” which doesn’t happen very often for me, since I am to the left of the Times in most economic matters.
Maryland June 21Times PickThere is a deep, powerful current of violence that runs under most of American life, and has since our founding. Given the politics of the nation since Nixon, especially, the chef who was so good at stirring our simmering pot of resentments, is it any wonder that prisons are the distilled essence of these ugly facts of American life?
And condemn me for life for criticizing the American Dream, but its competitive aspect, and the devil take the losers, is also part of the distilled vitriol that condenses in prison life, where in the minds of the Right and the prison personnel, the worst of the losers get what's coming to them, as the saying goes. One even reads, and hears the comments about white collar criminals getting a taste of this prison justice...the bitterness of American life is so strong it rises through all the social layers.11 Recommend
The fallout from the American Dream, the hyper competitiveness and disdain for the Willy Lomans losers, is not a constant, it varies with the deeper conditions of American economic and social life, the rise and fall of inequality, from the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties to the Roaring 1990’s...to the New Deal and failed deeper, needed reforms of the Obama years. And always complicated by the American racial story, and now gender and sexual equality… And all of this in our “Age of Fracture” the title of a fine book by Daniel T. Rodgers, which no one else out here in rural red state Western Maryland seems to have heard of...but which helps explain why it is so hard to “put things back together” again, in the way the New Deal did for our “golden decades,” 1945-1971 (Nixon began tearing that economic world apart when he took the US off gold backing the dollar, August 15, 1971), decades which, despite being objectively the best of economic times, also had their deep and powerful sub-currents of racial and gender misery.
And isn’t “The Valley of the Ashes” in the Great Gatsby the least referenced part of the still greatest “American Novel,” the place where, for its working class, pushed around residents, important sub-notes to the plot surface, later to emerge in violence, murder, doing in the murky symbol for the flaws of the Dream, none other than Jay Gatsby himself.
Maybe I should sign off from here on as “Nick Carraway,” and not billofrights.
best,
billofrights
Frostburg, MD
PS I’ve covered the topics of special concern here, today, which Paul Krugman’s glosses over in his NY Times’ column: no discussion of conditions in the immigrant generating countries, and what caused them, nor why the American working class might, because of its economic stagnation if not descent since the 1970’s, be more susceptible to the type of demagoguery Krugman describes, visited historically on the Jews and now by Trump on various groups, but especially immigrants. Here’s Krugman’s column: www.nytimes.com/…