“Puttin’ People on the Moon”
Mary Alice had a baby and he looked just like I did
We got married on a Monday and I been working ever since
Every week down at the Ford Plant but now they say they’re shutting down
Goddamned Reagan in the White House and no one there gives a damn
***
Another joker in the White House, said a change was comin’ round
But I’m still workin’ at The WalMart and Mary Alice, in the ground
And all them politicians, they all lyin’ sacks of shit
They say better days upon us, but I’m sucking left hind tit
And the preacher on the TV says it ain’t too late for me
But I bet he drives a Cadillac and I’m broke with some hungry mouths to feed
As anyone blessed with the internet, a television set, or even a crumpled months-old USA Today is aware, the entire mother-lovin’ USA is in the midst of a cruel poverty spasm that will likely end our very way of life and do mean things to a sack of puppies before leaving town. The end is not merely nigh – it’s drunk, in our very own homes, and likely making a nasty mess in the corner of the living room. Menacing acronyms abound. The rabble has been seen gathering pitchforks and torches. Fox News is wringing-hands over the possibility of a full-scale Helter Skelter outbreak. In short, bad juju.
Is this really anything new though? I’m not denying that the fear and the lingering specter of want might be new to some folks – professional folks in cities and upscale suburbs who lived, until recently, in a secure cocoon of never-ending good times. Nor am I making light. I know people who’ve wound up with the gilded boot of capitalism wedged squarely up their asses. But why are the tough times for real only after they set up shop in the land of “nice things?”
There’s been a whole lotta America been gettin’ the shaft for quite some time, with nary a news crew in sight. Sure, towns like Flint, MI are national tragedies. And the generations of squandered promise and dead ends in many inner city neighborhoods are massive institutional and social failures. But it’s not just these established blights. Middle America – that mythical “main street” – has been quietly rotting for years. Highway moves five feet to the right and the whole town dies. The one remaining plant burns down and no one bothers to rebuild it – the jobs just pack up and scurry across the border under the cover of night. Flood hits a town and people decide it’s best to simply pack up and leave because there ain’t nothing worth rebuilding save for the KFC. I know these examples read like hard luck bunk from the Grapes of Wrath discard pile, but they (some poetic license aside) are things that happened to a number of communities in southeast central Illinois. In fact, a number of them happened to Watseka, IL – the county seat of Iroquois county where my grandmother lives and where my wife Catherine and friend Matt spent sizable chunks of their childhoods.
The beige cloud of lowered expectations has been stretching itself across much of my native middle west since as long as I can remember. Of course, Chicago is a major exception and a success story – a city that actually works. However, what you don’t often read about is the blighted, failing suburbs around Chicago. When all us ex-suburbanites flocked to the North Side, we abandoned the family-friendly suburbs of our youths – leaving nothing but empty strip malls and heavily fortified gas stations in our wake. Still, at least the suburbs have density and proximity to jobs and attractions and transit in their favor. Many of the all-American small towns down state have little more than a defunct Dairy Queen and a sign that says “30 Miles to the Nearest WalMart Super Center.”
What’s frustrating about the current ever-present emergency is that this on-paper panic is mostly pretty well-off folks carping about the loss of imaginary wealth that came from over-valued, often un-tangible assets. It’s not like some dust bowl took a crap on the national food supply. Credit went bye-bye. The silo full of consumer confidence was eaten up by mice. Basically, the only thing lost was the idea that we were all rich and getting richer all the time. Of course folks are really losing their jobs now because the imaginary things that made their employment possible were discovered as the farts in a jar they always were. Pipers must be paid. And real people getting kicked around for imaginary problems tends to strike most people sideways. Hence all the ill-tempered “populism” making the news of late. The newly pissed feel that someone should pay for their discomfort, and the folks who’ve been getting the business for years agree that heads certainly should roll. The stage is set for some serious pay-per-view guillotine action. Predictably, the politicians and media folks – who were shooting bunny rabbits and rainbows out their behinds back when everything seemed peachy – are now hitching their wagons to the rage train. We’re all socialists now. Or populist insurgents. Or fucking pissed off. Or something.
Of course once we all wish hard enough that the magic markets can get back to making imaginary wealth and justifying imaginary jobs for those seeking employment in titanic corporate bureaucracies, all will be forgiven. Enough of the people will be fooled enough of the time that nothing much will change. The glittering sprawlopolis will once again have their needs met – flavored lattes and high-speed HD video on demand. The folks in the crumbling, fashion-crippled Meth Belt will be left to their own devices. And no one will give a shit anymore. Maybe we’ll think about rural rot a little after undergoing the routine colonoscopy necessary to score some OTC pseudoephedrine. But we sure as hell won’t think about how narcotrafficking links poor folks in Mexico with poor folks in Mattoon, IL. It’ll be back to soul-sucking employment for some, soul-sucking idleness for others. Crisis averted. Normalcy from sea to boring sea.
As we all run around like idiots worrying about what fell horrors await us as part of the Great Depression 2: Hardtack Boogaloo release party, we must remember that – not to make light of Americans’ troubles – everyone here has a relatively sweet deal. Not only do poor people in America have televisions, they have food. They aren’t eating dirt just to feel full. Americans don’t have a hard time getting at drinkable water. Our nation’s legacy of exceptionalist rah-rah bullshit makes us all sensitive (myself included) to any suggestion that we should be happy with “good enough.” Our inner Teddy Roosevelts would have us carrying big sticks and hitting the line hard and forever striving to be the corpse at every funeral and the bride at every nuptial. Still, people are actually and really hungry out there – not lacking organic pine nuts and access to affordable brie, but really hungry.
Peter Singer, “America’s Shame: When are we going to do something about global poverty?”
Despite the recent economic downturn, we are nevertheless living in a time that is particularly opportune for reducing extreme poverty worldwide. The first decade of the 21st century has seen the proportion of people unable to meet their basic physical needs shrink to less than it has been at any time in history, and perhaps at any time since human beings came into existence. At the same time, the proportion of people with far more than they need is also unprecedented. Those in affluent societies work an average of only six hours a week to earn enough to buy an adequate amount of food.
Most important, rich and poor are now linked in ways they never were before. Real-time moving images of people on the edge of survival are beamed into our living rooms. Not only do we know a lot about the desperately poor, but we also have much more than before to offer them in terms of better health care, improved seeds and agricultural techniques, and new technologies for generating electricity. More amazing, through instant communications and open access to a wealth of information that surpasses the greatest libraries of the pre-Internet age, we can enable them to join the worldwide community — if only we can help them to get far enough out of poverty to seize the opportunity.
