Rough Beasts
I write in my sleep. It’s hardly restful. Since I mostly remember what I write, I’m never quite sure if I’m really asleep.
Recently, I’ve been haunted by the nocturnal question of whether things in America are deteriorating or whether I am ageing and just living through another cycle of the more or less steady-state human condition. I worry that we re-living the beginning of the last century when the halls of government were awash in the money of powerful men until Teddy Roosevelt, himself wealthy and powerful, began his signature trust-busting and brought the monopolists of his day to heel.
I’m afraid we’re reliving that past now that free speech and money are one and business is free to spend virtually unlimited amounts of money engineering elections, bribing congressional officials, inhibiting regulation, profitizing government functions, and managing tax policy.
President Obama, for all his good intentions, is not Teddy Roosevelt. He is a centrist when, as Yeats said, “the centre cannot hold.” And I wonder if we’re now beyond the reach of good intention.
I worry too about what eludes us, the slow cultural shifts that shrug off corruption and the corrosive impact of a two-tiered criminal justice system in which the doctor feel-good loses “privileges” for selling drugs and the rich teen suffering from “affluenza” gets therapy while the barrio kid gets 25 years. I’m alarmed when a working family loses their home in a mortgage crisis brought on by financiers who may lose one of their several homes – but get a raise.
Many who were once in the robust middle class now count themselves among the working poor. The self-absolving interpretation of Jesus’ phrase, “The poor will always be with you,” gains credence in the land and we accept growing poverty as a new normal, or worse, the just desserts of the indigent and entitled.
Our own attention spans shrink. We read headlines and watch “segments” on TV. Long-form news and books, however, detract from entertainment. We stay au courant but miss the gradual deterioration of our democracy, the predicate of which was once that we are all equal under the law.
It’s easier to lay blame elsewhere. We dig in our heels. We blame progressives, tea partiers, foreigners, one another. Conflict becomes entertainment and yet it’s our democracy that’s at risk. And we are its guardians.
Business, markets, and trade are indeed the nutrition of a good democracy but their profit is created by the labor of millions of citizens. If their voices are lost in the halls of government and only the whispers of wealth and power amplified by money are heard, then we have indeed lost the center. And in the words of William Butler Yeats, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence in drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
4 Responses to “Rough Beasts”
I love metaphors, even mixed, as in what we might be witnessing with the killing of the goose that laid the golden egg, and the Pandora’s Box that ensues with all the externalities and blow back implied by taking too much out of an overstressed and broken system. There is so much to be learned for those who would take the time and make the effort to read, but we seem to be few while the rest of the crew stares at Dancing With The Stars and listens deafly to the latest commentary on CNN, or CBC. I wonder how “witting” the cooperation might be of those media mavens everywhere. I think I’ll go plant some tomato seeds.
Spot on, Bill. The only answer, I believe, is to do as you’re doing: keep writing, keep altering perceptions, one reader at a time.
Ok. So, I’ll wear the Yeats badge of dishonor: “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” With pride, and here i go.
While the erosion of the middle class is nowhere near the suffering experienced on the front lines of true poverty,locally or globally… I will submit that our state and our nation has arrived at a new normal of middle class “work and suffering”.
Look at higher ed now – those of us who have to send children to college in this bubble-to-burst higher ed climate that smart, hard working people simply cannot afford. And here’s the worst part.
The schools want them, recruit them… The funding buffers are no longer there to support our families, unless we are at the very very low end of the spectrum of federal support….
The middle class is a big big bucket term of nonsense…there is no middle class….
I’m mad about it.
Diane,
You have indeed hit the nail on the head. There will also be far too few jobs to sustain a middle class.
Bill