255. ARE YOU BEING SERVED?

From the Archives. (September 2006) I loaned Dorothy Allison’s Trash to Danishgrrrl a few weeks ago and found myself flipping through this book about class, geography, and gender issues last night.

Allison articulates things about my childhood and shame and adult anxieties that I never even acknowledged out loud to myself before reading this book.

She also goes a long way toward explaining my anxiety about taking Danishgrrrl to SC to meet my family of origin.

Meanwhile, I have been shaking my head at the fact that Andrew Fastow is going to the slammer for a mere six years. I mean, think about what this guy did and its repercussions (not to mention the fact that he already received a great plea bargain agreement that reduced his sentence to just 10 years behind bars).

My question is, why not punish this man the way his crimes punished others and take away his retirement accounts and benefits and compensation and job, then force him to spend the rest of his days living on a fixed minimum-wage income?

The judge defended Fastow’s light sentence by saying that he had been persecuted and portrayed as a symbol of corporate greed after Enron’s collapse.

Aw.

(Excuse me but wasn’t his choice to perform criminal activities that led to Enron’s collapse the very thing that earned him this reputation in the first place?)

Maybe I am naive, but my impression is that most law-abiding citizens frown upon criminal activity, especially when the criminals rake in millions while leaving tax payers to bail out the people he bilked.

My understanding is also that justice is theoretically blind, but this articulate white sociopath with a is getting off way too fricking easy.

Question: does anyone believe for a moment that this judge would extend a comparable rationale to, say, a child molester?

Oh you poor man, your neighbors shunned and persecuted you and crossed the street when you approached and made you suffer so. Oh you poor, poor man. You have paid such a steep price already, So I tell ya what I’m gonna do. I'll sentence you to four years less than your plea bargain agreement because of your awful, awful suffering.

And inquiring minds want to know what exactly this guy’s “extraordinary steps toward rehabilitation” were.

Did he donate one of his MacMansions to the thousands of Enron employees whose savings he bilked?

Nope. Near as I can tell, the judge was referring to the fact that the poor man had to raise his two kids alone for one year while his criminal wife served her similarly minimal sentence.

Guess the judge doesn’t recognize that members of the law-abiding population struggle to raise their kids with limited resources and in single-parent homes too—and will have an even harder time of it now that we have to bail out these corporate crooks.

Unbelieveable.

Meanwhile, the Georgia branch of the Christian Coalition voted to leave this organization because it is just not conservative enough for them anymore.

Their stance is that the organization ought to be focusing solely on the core issues: criminalizing abortion and legalizing homophobia

(coz the Bible tells them so).

I suggest that they realign themselves with Fred Phelps so that everyone knows exactly what kinds of bigots we are dealing with.

No time right now, but I also made a mental note to research Republinazi pollster Frank Luntz’s materials. He’s the guy who provides speaking tips to the GOP and, apparently, his 160-page memo “The New American Lexicon” is the source of GOP members’ current insistence on using Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party.

LISTENING TO: George Winston’s “Summer”

READING: A fascinating article on fused participles (yawn). Last night, I also flipped through Great Lies for Adults to Tell Kids. (My personal favorite is “Wine makes mommy clever.”) Also Dorothy Allison’s Trash, which I will excerpt later.

SANG IN SHOWER: do your chain hang low? Do it rattle to the flo? (I curse Danishgrrrl’s teenagers for getting this stuck in my head!)

BEST-OF SPAM: Did you know that statistics say that sex makes you look 12 years younger?

119. REQUIEM FOR A (FUCKING DAY) DREAM

From the Archives

(June 2005) Has anyone else been following the New York Times series on class or the Wall Street Journal’s series on social mobility? Interesting stuff that is definitely limited by the writers’ own class perceptions.

Apparently, we operate under the assumption that the so-called self-made man can still strike it rich by pulling up those proverbial bootstraps, despite the fact that class inflexibility has grown steadily over the past thirty years.

The bottom 90 percent of American earners experienced a drop in real income from 1980 to 2002 while the income of the top 0.1 percent—the folks who earn $1.6 billion or more—rose 2.5 times before taxes. Add Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy to this equation and the gap is even larger.

Okay. You’ve read the facts. Now get this: a recent poll indicates that a whopping 39 percent of Americans believe that they are either in the wealthiest one percent of earners or that they soon will be.

Are these folks delusional or pie-in-the-sky dreamers or both (and does this finally explain who buys all those lottery tickets)?

I have worked with more than one man who announced, with utter conviction, that he could have been a professional football (or basketball or) player if he had chosen that path (even though he either never played the sport or never even made the varsity team). Yet, there they are, Exhibit A of America’s collective fantasy-driven personality type.

The Times poll is slightly less optimistic: only 11 percent believe that it is very likely that they will become super-wealthy, while another 34 percent believe that this is somewhat likely.

Sooooo ... in a country where actual class disparity is blatant, we have a populace watching Dallas and Life Styles of the Rich and Famous while poring over Billionaire magazine and running up credit-card debt so that we can share a little of that love ... and now we actually BELIEVE that our desire for the lush life will somehow translate into untold wealth?

Evangelicals assert that their God wants his followers to be rich, that he will reward his followers with riches (if only you, um, send their preachers your money). And maybe more people than I believed buy this line.

So what do you think? Are we suffering from collective delusions of grandeur? Have we opted for full-time fantasy? And where does the rise in fundamentalism fall in this mix? Is marketing to blame? Jingoistic speechwriters? Willful ignorance? Poor schooling?

And why do we keep spending money that we don’t have?

David Moberg of In These Times states the obvious when he notes that, when “the income from growth is captured by the very rich, as it largely has been for a couple of decades, this path to prosperity offers little to most people.”

He also notes that, currently, “the realm of freedom for most Americans remains constricted to the shopping mall, where they can buy their identities.”

(Hi. I’m patriotic. I wear Tommy.)

But “class ultimately has more to do with who has the power to make such decisions and [with] the powerlessness of the majority” (as Moberg points out). And he points out that what's missing from these 2 newspaper series is a critical looks at social, political, and economic power, the critical aspects of class.

His suggestion? The Times should run excerpts from Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro’s new book Death by a Thousand Cuts, which recounts

how the super-rich worked with ultra-conservatives to demonize and possibly eliminate the estate tax, which they renamed the ‘death tax.’ [But, as] William Gates Sr, father of Microsoft Bill, often argued on behalf of the tax, the very rich accumulate their wealth not simply because of what they did but because of the society in which they lived, and they have a debt to that society. And the heirs of such wealth are the antithesis of self-made men.

“The rich used their political power, their money and the right’s shameless, mendacious hucksters to protect their riches, at the expense of society” Moberg says, and this myth of the self-made man—“abetted by the feckless incompetence of Democratic opposition” makes too many ordinary people suckers for the right-wing pitch.

Damn it, class matters. And awareness of our actual place in this ever-more-rigid economy—divorced from the nice fictions and fantasies and those proverbial streets of gold—matters.

The Times notes that the affluent consistently refer to the choices they make—to take an unpaid internship or attend a university that best fits their goals or spend a year in Europe or a year playing the fricking kazoo and growing dreadlocks before returning to Duke for your Brooks Brothers MBA.

THAT’s what I never felt growing up and that's what most working-class individuals did not feel—that we had choices. Instead, we felt trapped and were always struggling, wondering what to put off and for how long while waiting for the other shoe to drop.