I imagine myself a person of limited education with one of those jobs requiring a couple of years training – that is, a job that requires a very specific knowledge but no larger sense of a system, a set of skills that is not transferable, a set of skills that creates a mini-dictator insufficiently knowledgeable to move past the little box – making, say, $40,000 a year.
I then imagine that I have lost the job.
I further imagine that I get my news from Fox; I do not read, so make no effort to keep up on serious news. I watch football while drinking enormous soft drinks on Sunday afternoons with large groups of middle-aged friends who are quite overweight, many of whom have also lost their jobs. I go to church. We joke. The weeks pass. The savings go. I panic.
I cannot distinguish between the two parties. I have no job and the Democrats don’t have any plans to get me one. I don’t know anything about the obstructionism perpetrated by the Republicans because I only watch Fox. All politicians are equally bad in my opinion. I want to throw the scoundrels out, so I start to scream with the Tea Party. I don’t know who they are or what they stand for: I just want a job. I want things to be the way they used to me.
I just want a job. I want an income. I want a job. I want an income….
The very essence of making a pact with the devil is that we don’t know that we are doing it. Faustus is an exception, or maybe a metaphor – he represents that semi-conscious striking of a bargain. But the real horror is that we don’t recognize what we have done. Living in a world created by Fox news, we agree with the Republicans that freedom exists and that it means leaving the Bush tax cuts for the rich in place. We scream about activist liberal judges, Obama’s birth certificate, and we don’t notice that we have signed onto a world divided between the wealth and moderately wealthy on the one hand, and a mass of semi-educated, massively unemployed, un- or underinsured , sometimes homeless people. We have been turned into a perpetual underclass, easily controllable through religious platitudes, pulled into friendly complicity through gay-bashing, fear of immigrants. We can no longer pay for higher education; the lines are drawn forever.
This person I imagine is the person I would have been had I been born about a generation later, had my dad been born in 1960 where I was born, myself then pushed up later. My dad comes from a farm family of eight children. He never would have gone to university, which means that he would not have worked his way up into the middle class in my generation as he did in his. He would have been a foreman or some such thing, itinerant. His success is purely aleatory, nothing that he deserves. He worked hard, but that is not a trait that is valued. He works patiently within a box, dependent on the large father up there in charge, and the large father has no interest in him, no matter what a busy bee he is. My dad could not make it in this world.
I wonder if he grasps this in some primal way, and if this is why he is so furious at the usual imaginary suspects? In his old age, guided by Rush Limbaugh, he has turned into a raging anti-intellectual, a moronic repeater of the cyclical messages of hate towards the bogeymen against which the Right’s campaigns are directed. He is undoubtedly in love with Sarah Palin; he has no more ability to pick out a charlatan than he has to fly to the moon.
If his spuming anger is a latent recognition of his own helplessness before the forces that have overtaken the country, marginalizing him and his (our) kind, I feel a little better about it. I generally find it agonizingly embarrassing that my family so eagerly colludes with the Republican demagogues in their own destruction instead of just getting an education and trying to hold back the division of the country into a permanently divided over and underclass.
On the other hand, I have moved out of the underclass and am now firmly established in the upper one. Why do I care? Why should I pull my hair out worrying about the masses who will lose their savings to greedy purveyors of health care? It isn’t my problem – I have a job, I have health care. I don’t have to leave this place. And even if I do, it will be for an admin job with good health care. Philosophically, I do not spontaneously the position of “let them eat cake.” But they have acquiesced in their own annihilation. They needed to think a little and they punted. So this is not my problem. I quit anguishing about my lack of statehood and embrace my stats as cosmopolitan.
