We’re Fighting the Wrong War

by Jim Washburn

Rich People will Eat Your Babies if It’ll Remove Wrinkles

We’re fighting the wrong war.

Iraq? Afghanistan? They’re the only show in town, if you happen to be there. Otherwise, they’re just grisly sideshows to the real war, a war that’s going largely unfought by one side, while the warring side simultaneously is waging a PR war to claim there is no war.

Hence, it’s nearly impossible to mention the economic inequalities of modern American life without being accused of waging class warfare, by the same people who have been waging it without relent for decades.

I haven’t seen Capitalism: A Love Story yet, but I don’t much need to hear Michel Moore talk about pie to know that when 90 out of 100 people can work their asses off for their whole lives and never come up with the combined scratch that just one blessed person in 100 has, and when the system that skews such a disproportionate amount of wealth to that one person grows increasingly askew with each passing year, the fix is in, brothers and sisters.

Maybe they’re right. There is no class war, because it’s over. They won. They own the ball and they’ve gone home. They own the field, too, and the bleachers, concession stands and parking lots, plus the factory where you work, and your home and mortgage and they’ve probably taken out a policy on you, so they can on making money off you after you’ve died.

One person out of 100 in America does indeed control more wealth than the lowest 90 percent, lowest being an odd term here, since that 90 percent includes all poor people, the entire dwindling middle class, and many of the rich. And those who are merely rich aren’t doing so poorly: Though dwarfed in wealth by that one percent among them, the richest ten percent of Americans also hold a hugely disproportionate amount of our wealth. They must have good genes.

The rich have always been with us, Jesus said, but must they be so fucking gauche about it? Now, instead of seal fur, they wear entire nations, with senators dangling by their sides like overstuffed handbags. Back in the days of circumspect wealth, the rich kept senators quietly in their pockets.

How much more boldfaced can their hold get than when 65 percent of us Americans want a public option in health care; we want it, want it, want it, more than a chocolate malted we want it—that’s why we elected you clowns to a majority, remember?; yet in Congress it is off the table, on the floor, out the door, an unloved meatball, to be seen no more.

Aren’t these our representatives, there to represent us? I can understand quibble room when an issue is supported by a bare majority of Americans, but such an unambiguous number as 65 percent—and that after months of scare ads—would seem to leave little question as to how we wish our representatives to represent us. Instead, the star health care player is left sitting on the bench, while everyone wonders why the team can’t get a hit.

The fix is so very in. George W. Bush, bless his little obsidian heart, made an argument back in the 2004 election that John Kerry’s plan to tax the rich would raise taxes on the middle class instead, because, Bush said, the rich always find ways to cheat on their taxes, and we’d be stuck with their unpaid bill.

What a remarkable admission. He is telling the people he is sworn to protect that the President of the United States, at the height of his powers, with Congress and the courts under his sway, is powerless to stop the wealthy, of whom he is, wink-wink, one, from subverting the law. So don’t even bother voting for someone who claims to be a reformer, because the same families have been calling the shots since man lived in caves, and today they have things so wired that every shampoo on the market shelves is packed with GMOs that enhance the conductivity of your brain pan, so a stream of radio messages can better enforce your positive outlook. You don’t have an HDTV, schmuck, it’s just your brain telling you the picture’s enhanced. Your razor still only has one blade. Your iPhone? It’s a block of solid plastic: everything it’s done—your conversations; even the app that simulates a line of coke that vanishes under your straw—is just your enhanced imagination. And Obama? He’s an algorithm. Sorry, I shouldn’t have told you that. But it’s OK, the Internet doesn’t exist either; and you’re imagining this.

This too. Wake up already.

ants cultivating aphids

I’ve written about Bush’s moment of clarity before. It’s an important and little-remarked-upon moment that to me marks a turning point in our history, where those in the ruling class are now so secure in their power they feel they can flaunt it without consequence. Because who’s going to do a damn thing about it? Do ants care what an aphid thinks? No, the aphid’s going to get milked regardless.

I’m pleased to know several of the rich. They’re the working rich, and are far too busy running their businesses to be devoting any effort to oligarchy-building. Their idea of Mission Accomplished involves weekend, weed, headphones and Trower.

So when I bitch about the rich, I more precisely mean the wealthy, the ones with so much money they haven’t seen cash in six generations, who have so much concentrated wealth that continents could be fed off it. And even with them, I don’t know if they’ve got some master-plan Illuminati hijinks going on, or if so much massed worth achieves a destiny of its own, a black-ink hole, sucking ever more wealth into its maw and rendering all else worthless, while humans are mere pawns in its accretion.

Last year, the median income in the U.S. fell 3.6 percent from the year previous, wiping out whatever scant gains workers had made in the previous decade, which weren’t gains at all given that health care costs and other expenses soared like the bluebird of happiness. Speaking of soaring, of all the new wealth generated in the US since 2001, two thirds of it went to that top one percent.

I live in the town of Costa Mesa, adjacent to lovely Newport Beach, the birthplace of the frozen banana and current world leader in jumbo frozen lips. It’s like they’re injecting pudding right into their lips, for that rounded, succulent, somewhat Angelina, somewhat immobilized look. There’s your Newport Beach then-and-now postcard: moribund lips sucking on a frozen banana.

Costa Mesa can only aspire to that. If Newport is Gibson, Costa Mesa is Epiphone, the affiliated budget brand. When Newport zones-out group recovery houses, they relocate to Costa Mesa.

Yet even adjacent to paradise here, there are big-city woes. Students at Vanguard University did a recent count of the city’s chronically homeless population, and came up with 100 such souls, four of pre-school age, which just shows how early some people start in on their lazy, shiftless ways. Aged four and already a bum. It must be the genes.

In case your college decides to conduct a similar study in your town, here’s the methodology: Have your students approach potentially homeless persons and ask them to purchase a bottle of Captain Morgan from yonder liquor store. If they agree to be an adjunct to underage drinking, they are clearly desperate and homeless. If they offer to split the bottle with you, they are your sociology professors.

Children living on the street, in my town! The homeless in Las Vegas living in drains under the casinos—it’s raining gold! Former communities in the East now untenanted ghost towns while families crowd back in with their folks. And the rich keep getting a bigger piece of the pie.

Yet, instead of taking to the streets over that the way Americans did a century ago, you get people who’d be dead without Medicare out protesting government administered health care. They’re angry dammit, despite their federally-purchased Cialis.

How do we get angry? You know that look Glen Beck gets, the one where he goes bug-eyed and his face puffs out like he’s just had two warm pints of Rush Limbaugh’s saliva squirted up his manhole? Is that the sort of angry we need to become, before our voices get heard on the floor of Congress, where, whether you’re 65 percent or 99 percent, it just won’t do?

After the Bush years, when the biggest war protests in history couldn’t stop a needless war, maybe people have given up. Christ, it’s hard enough just keeping the electricity bill paid; who has time to fight the power? Yet change never happened without focus and sacrifice. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.

Yet somehow that doesn’t sound like fun. As Emma Goldman famously asked, “What good’s a revolution?”

This ain’t no disco, but all strife and no play does rather take the point out of living. We need to learn a few things from countries that are more experienced in oligarchy, such as the ones in Central and South America where the people have resisted privatization of their water and other power grabs, and have responded to decades of murderous autocratic rule by electing entertaining leftists and former prisoners of their countries’ despots, tyrants aided back then with your and my tax dollars, because the wealth and power in our country likes to hang out with wealth and power from other countries, so they can compare trophy wives.

But what’s happened in those countries, and what seems so impossible here, is that citizens erected some well-placed roadblocks, someone sang some solidarity songs, someone brought tortillas, someone the beans, someone brought the water. They hung together the way miners here used to, the way people did back then in Capra movies, someone brought a harmonica and the 99 percent prevailed. The rich in those countries are still rich. They still own almost everything. But for today, and for the fight tomorrow at least, they don’t own the whole damn pie.

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