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