In a comment on my recent diary regarding our chances of survival in the foreseeable near future ( A new austerity? Or a new coup d’état.) Gaianne wrote, among other things:
We are going all the way to the bottom. That is not the problem. The problem is, nobody knows where the bottom is, only that it is deeper than we think.
This makes it very hard to plan for.
This got me to thinking.
And this is what I thought.
Read on.
I do not think that we ARE “going to the bottom”, Gaianne. (Hip name, by the way…) Something tells me that we have already bottomed out this time and are once again on the upswing.
And the real bottom is VERY easy to define.
It is societal chaos brought about by real disaster. Not 9/11 disaster, not Katrina disaster, but real, generalized, coast to coast and border to border disaster. Collapse, no matter HOW it is brought about.
Why do I feel this way?
Mexicans.
Central Americans.
Koreans.
STRONG working cultures.
The working lower middle classes and striving poor of all races.
The young of this country, which have by no means unanimously surrendered to the mediocrity of the ruling class. I am in constant contact with real college age and sub-30 year old strivers in several disciplines, and they are BURNING.
The surviving black middle and lower middle class and its culture. Not the faux black, corporately sponsored, institutionalized gangster rap pop shit, but the real thing. Strivers’ Row, only everywhere in the United States. (The original Strivers’ Row was a neighborhood in Harlem where many successful…as far as “success” was allowed black people at the time, anyway… black people moved in the ’30s.)
The Caribbean cultures. No longer just Puerto Rican. Dominican. The Island people, Spanish speaking or not.
Our “leaders” are full of shit, most of them.
Just as it always was.
Shit rises.
The risen shit has clogged once again clogged up the system, and it is high time for a new flush.
Just like at the end of the Roaring Twenties and their resultant downswing, the Depression.
Just like at the end of the self-satisfied ’50s.
It’ll happen.
And the society will survive, refreshed once again.
We simply have too many resources…human and otherwise…to go down.
This grand experiment will continue.
As I wrote in another comment here:
Nasty.
Then I took a late night subway home to the Bronx. 1 AM in the morning there were more aware, capable people in the one car in which I sat than there were in the whole ballroom in which I had just worked, barring the help. (Including the musicians in that “help” category. “The artist is the elite of the servant class.” G. B. Shaw. Yup.)
So it goes.
We shall see.
Well, we SHALL see.
And soon.
“The generals” about whom we talk when we consider for whom John Murtha speaks are representatives of that working class, most of them. The working class that produced them 30 and 40 and 50 years ago. The days of scions of patrician families going to West Point, etc. are LONG gone. These “generals” speak through a tough, relatively unimaginative Irishman who came up working class and joined the Marines. I know him. Really. One of my friends as I grew up was named John Murtha, and this guy so resembles who he might have become that I had to go to Google to make sure it WASN’T him. Too old, wrong part of the country. But the same guy, if y’know what I mean.
So last night I played a concert in a small hall in NYC with a fine large jazz ensemble led by someone who spent 15 or 20 years playing with one of the real founders of the bebop movement…. jazz’s version of the greatest generation…and learned his lessons VERY well. It was sparsely attended, as is the case with almost all serious music in America that hasn’t sold its ass to Time Warner, and the band was great. Almost as good as it gets, which is pretty damned good. I packed up afterwards and headed out, and there was one well dressed 30-ish middle class white woman sitting in the lobby who was shaking her head ruefully as I passed by and said to me “I didn’t know. I just didn’t know how good this was going to be.” It was raining hard and I had been working all day and wanted to get home, so I didn’t stop and spend much time with her. But if I had, I would have asked her much the same questions that I have been asking on this blog and dKos over the past 10 months or so under a few names. (Jess Fine, Arthur Gilroy, Charleslives…I do keep trying…)
Basically…”WHY didn’t you know?”
And had I spent enough time, the answer would undoubtedly have come back along the lines of “The media didn’t tell me” with a minor in “I didn’t learn about this when I was in school.” And then I would have suggested some form of NEWSTRIKE!!! to her and she would have either heard me, immediately turned off at the flick of that particular button, or straddled the fence to some degree.
Just like on the blogs.
So it goes.
This DOES NOT HAPPEN WITH WORKING CLASS AUDIENCES OR WITH THE YOUNG.
They hear this music and they go nuts.
And they REMEMBER.
And come back.
Problem is…they have very little disposable income. And THEY are not told about it, either.
Well, the possibility of that particular “I just didn’t know” cop-out regarding Iraq and BushCo is just about over.
And again…the young and the working minorities DO know. INCLUDING the working white lower middle classes and poor. They go left or right for their solace, depending on their upbringing…but they know. When you are relatively talented, hard working and consistently broke…you know that SOMETHING isn’t working.
Problem is…they have very little disposable power.
But the middle and upper middle classes…THEY have some clout.
And the word is now out.
Something is rotten in BushCo Land.
It’s in USA Today, in Time and Newsweak, on the networks.
Hell, it’s in pictures on the front page on the NY Daily News. Tabloid heaven.
It is EVERYWHERE.
Something is rotten in BushCo Land.
Delay, the Libby indictment, the continuing bad news from Iraq, Murtha, the Reid closing of the Senate, Fitzgerald’s NEW grand jury, Rove under the gun and Cheney not far behind, Bush running into locked, padded doors to get away from questions wearing what can charitably be described as an idiot face (I had to do some research when I first saw that image to make sure that it hadn’t been photoshopped. It hadn’t.), and all the rest of it…it’s out there, now.
And “I just didn’t know” simply won’t cut it anymore.
We HAVE “bottomed out”, Gaianne. Hit the bottom of THIS particular curve, anyway. It only remains to be seen how far up we go. Maybe far enough up to get some air in our collective lungs before we dive again, maybe not.
Like I keep saying…we shall see.
Only the efforts of those among us who see this big picture in a possibly positive light will serve to propel us high enough to survive the next dive.
Or the one after that or the one after that or the one after that, etc.
Eventually we are going to dive into chaos if we continue to allow the bottom line corporate interests to define our national agenda, and after that it’s going to be everyone for themselves. Take cover, hunker down and wait for the shitstorm to subside.
I would rather that did not happen.
We shall see.
But this time…
THIS time “I just didn’t know” simply won’t cut it anymore.
We are headed UP now.
NOT down.
How far up?
We shall see…
Later…
AG
lives on tips just like bartenders.
And on recommendations as well.
A good comment is always useful too.
Please…
Thank you.
AG
AG,
It’s always a pleasure to shoulder to the front of the line to give you a 4 and a recommend. It’s the least I can do.
I hope to have something more coherent to add in a bit – feeling a little under the weather today; coffee refused to jump-start the brain. 🙁
Probably why I was in “Eeyore mode” last night, LOL.
Problem is…they have very little disposable power.
Problem is, they don’t understand the amount of power they have. Name, address, phone number, sign & date, “decline to state”, mark the “x” on election days. Too many fail to fill out the form because of the mistaken belief that a few votes more or less don’t matter.
In a strange way, the off-year/special elections taking place all over the country drive the point home. Fairly isolated to local districts, the campaigns nonetheless generate national coverage. Taken in small steps, those campaigns seem to be generating higher levels of participation than the massive – and overwhelming – national election cycle.
Yeah, we’re coming back. It’s gonna be a wild ride from here to next November.
On the one hand, RBA, you’re right, on the other, lots of people basically vote “none of the above”. I pretty much vote in most elections available to me now, but there was a time in my life when I refused to make a lesser-of-two-evils choice, and, for me, that meant virtually every election I was eligible to vote in. Perhaps I’m now less “purist” in my old age, but, I mean, if your choice is to vote for a Lieberman or a Republican, that’s a choice? If that were a choice I were confronted with (luckily, for me, it is not), I’d choose to stay home and drink beer. I think a lot of people feel that same way.
If you want people to vote, then get good candidates for them to vote for. Voting for jerks just because they are not Republicans doesn’t cut it for me.
If you want people to vote, then get good candidates for them to vote for
That was my (apparently unclear) point: locals are choosing candidates who truly represent them, whether or not they happen to be big “D” democrats. The Cegelis & Pennacchio campaigns both challenge the “D” machine politics.
Like I’ve written too many times before, I think the time to fish or cut bait will occur in the ’06 primaries. The slightest hint that local choice candidates are being undercut by State or National committees will blow the doors wide open. May very well create viable “other-than” candidates.
Blessings become curses when candidates are selected by ordination, rather than popular vote.
You write: “Blessings become curses when candidates are selected by ordination, rather than popular vote.”
Let us pray.
AG
While I would very much like to agree with you, AG, and hope to hell you are right, my instinct and experience tell me that we haven’t hit bottom yet. We are witnessing — and, truth be told, have significantly enabled — THE worst presidency this country has ever experienced. There will be massive consequences that will be paid for that, that we will experience as a nation (and a planet) regardless of whether the Dems retake the congress next year, or even if we impeach the whole Bush administration. Yes, people are starting to wake up, but it’s kinda like the drunk driver who wakes up after his car has already plunged off the precipice.
I hope I’m wrong. But I believe that we are on the verge of a massive shift in power, from those whose wealth and power has been based on control of fossil fuel resources to…. I don’t know who. The old guard, I believe, understand that their time is coming to an end, which is why they have become so blatant in their attempts to hold onto the power they currently have. These kinds of massive power shifts never seem to come off without substantial chaos, upheaval and violence. I don’t see any reason why it won’t be the same this time. The big difference is that for the first time, the human race has the ability to totally destroy the planet on which we live.
We might very well do that in the process.
“The big difference is that for the first time, the human race has the ability to totally destroy the planet on which we live. “
Yeah leftvet. You are right.
And “we”…the European, American and Pacific Rim developed world…may well be taken down in the process.
I hope not.
But WHATEVER happens…I do not believe that humanity is through. I actually do not believe that we have even scratched the surface of evolution yet.
The universe is still expanding. This is a fact, proven by massive scientific data. The sun is still a relatively young star, so there is no immediate danger of it flaming out. If the truth of the statement “As above, so below” holds…and it has been my lifelong observation that it does…then this solar system is still in an evolutionary state. And Earth’s present evolution occurs on the level of life as we know it.
With me so far?
If you grant the truth of these ideas…and NOT granting it is quite understandable because there is a certain leap of faith involved in accepting this argument (Of course, “faith” is what has sustained mankind’s growth for all the centuries of our history and probably quite a bit longer.)…but if you DO grant that truth, then currently, in the evolution of the Earth mankind is the TIP of that growth.
Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ” is driving US. A blade of grass or a tree branch grows at the tip, and we are that tip here. Nothing has appeared to replace us, so far as we know. So our story will continue.
That’s MY story, anyway, and I’m stickin’ to it no matter HOW badly they torture me. And if I am wrong in my lifetime, then the last thought that will pass through my mind will be something along the likes of Saturday Night Live’s Rosanna Dana saying…
“Nevermind.”
If you can’t get with this idea…
Well…nevermind.
But one way or another…keep the faith.
It’s all we have to go on.
Lower animals do not understand the existence of death.
Not really.
Pain, yes.
Death? I think not.
Maybe the higher mammals. Elephants, aquatic mammals like dolphins and whales.
MAYBE.
But we do.
For SURE.
Once we have bitten from THAT apple…then it is only a longer view that keeps us going.
Because otherwise, all of our efforts are in vain.
Keep the faith.
It’s all we’ve got, really.
Later…
AG
AG, I keep the faith. I got two kids, eight and ten, that I hope I can bequeath to a world substantially better that the one I got from my parents. Talk about setting unrealistic goals!
On the super-macro level of your above post, I would argue that the very relative “youth” of our solar system is a good reason for the human race not to feel too smug about our continued existence. Yeah, the evolutionary potential of the human race is staggering. But who’s to say that God, nature, fate, the crumbling cookie — whatever you might believe controls our destiny — might be pretty fed up with the human race right now, and might be thinking, well, good try, but too many fatal flaws in the design. Let’s cash it in and start over. Several tens of millions of years of a setback in the evolutionary process pretty much means nothing.
I have to say if I was in charge of the universe — or even just this small corner of it — I might be seriously tempted to let those crazy humans destroy themselves, and start over with a clean slate.
Maybe the world is lucky I’m NOT in charge.
But I do think we are facing real problems.
One of them is food. In America today it takes ten calories of oil to grow one calorie of corn. This is not sustainable, and we will have to learn new ways of growing food. This is certainly possible, but not easy, as everything in our political economy is working against it. Organic gardening is certainly showing possibilities, but the Permanent Government doesn’t want it, and not enough people are doing it . . . yet. In the city where I live, community gardens are common. Can they be scaled up to become the significant source of food?
Another is transportation. The US has designed its entire transportation infrastructure around automotive transport, which inherently consumes a great deal of energy, while it deliberately got rid of its previous, more efficient, rail network. Worse, it has made long distance travel a routine and necessary part of daily life. Small, hybrid cars will help, but they are only a short-term ameliorative. The automotive infrastructure will have to be undone–and it will be–but it will not be pleasant or easy. It need not be smooth, either: There could be a good deal of chaos. This is the whole point around whether Americans are willing to give up their cars.
A careful look at our civilized infrastructure reveals numerous points where energy shortage will have an unhappy impact–practically all economic activity of any sort will be affected. Of course this gives us the chance to design a more “ecological” economy, but there is as yet no sign that we intend to do so. It may yet happen by surprise, but we should be thinking about serious ways to bring about this surprise.
Consider this: There are now clear signs that the Permanent Government is ready to get rid of the Bush regime, and this is good, but those same signs indicate that the plan is for a more competent imperialism that can successfully claim the world’s oil. But this is just a dead end, literally, and will interfere with the task of adapting our civilization to the new physical circumstances of our world.
Our future world will indeed be a sustainable one. That is not even a choice. But the question is how much destruction of resources and life we contenance–and how much we lose forever–before we choose to actively create it.
“There are now clear signs that the Permanent Government is ready to get rid of the Bush regime, and this is good, but those same signs indicate that the plan is for a more competent imperialism that can successfully claim the world’s oil.”
This has been the major point of my writing on the net, Gaianne, and I agree with your observation completely.
Read my reply to leftvet above for my own bottom line on this idea.
I do not know how we are going to get past this hurdle, nor can I guarantee my own safety or the safety of my loved ones and the civilization in which I live.
But we…humankind…WILL get past it.
And on the infinitesimally small level of my own power (Which is not THAT small when compared to the power of say a Rockefeller if you compare the power of a Rockefeller to the power of the entire universe…it’s all a matter of scale at that point, a comparison of different sized grains of sand and pebbles.), I will do every damned thing I can humanly do to help us get past it..
Keep the faith.
AG