The American Deal

Way back in time, hundred year ago, we was movin’ out across the broad prairie of mid-America, slappin’ them horse teams so’ they would pull them wagon out across the grasslands and the badlands, and then blastin’ our way ‘cross the Rockies and Sierras all the way to Pacific and the promised land of California.

And it was a helluva time gettin’ through all that but we managed to do it, with more than a few tragedies and atrocities along the way, but what can you say, history is full of ’em: travesties.

Troubles, wherever men go– travesties, trials and tribulations. That’s just the way it is in this world. If there’s a way around it, we haven’t found it yet.

  But there has been progress too, if you wanna call it that. Mankind on the upswing, everybody get’n more of whatever there is to get in this life, collectin’ more stuff, more goods, services, and sure ’nuff more money.

Movin’ along toward the greatest flea market in history, is kinda what we were doing.

Taming the land, transforming the planet into our own usages, improving, or so we thought, on God’s original versions.

After that great westward expansion transference/transgression, had been goin’ on for a good while, and a bad while now that you mention it, we Americans found ourselves high up on a bluff overlooking history itself. At Just about that time, them Europeans had a heap of trouble that they’d been brewin’ over there and they dragged us into it on account of we had become by that time quite vigorous, grasping the reins of manifest destiny and ridin’ along, as so it seemed, on the cusp of history, seein’ as how we had been raised up on our daddy’s Britannic colonizing, mercantiling knee.

Then long about 1914, them Europeans dragged us into their big fatally entreched mess over there and we went and fought the first Big War, fought them high and mighty Germans that first time and when we got done with it and got back over here the world was a different place.

I mean the world was a different place, no doubt about it.

For one thing, everybody in the civilized world was so glad to have a little peace in 1920, we just went hog wild.

Everybody got out there a-workin’, roarin’ ’20s zeitgeist, scrapin’ crops out o’ the ground, building great machines, skyscrapers. Edison had electrified us; Bell had sounded the bells of modern communication; Ford had tinkered us into a vast new world of mass production with a horseless carriage in every garage and a chicken in every pot and and we were skippin’ right along like a cricket in the embers.

‘Til ’29, when the big crash came along.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39RKRelTMWk

Some folks said that Mr. Hoover, great man that he was, was nevertheless clueless, and so the nation turned to Mr. Roosevelt for new answers. FDR, young cousin of Teddy Roosevelt who had been the father, so to speak, of American progressivism– cousin Franklin D., Governor of New York, took the bull by the horns and somehow managed to breed it into a donkey.

So from Teddy’s bullmoose progressivism there arose, through 1930’s-style unemployed populist cluelessness, Americanized Democratic Socialism;  with a little help from FDR’s genteel patriarchal largesse, the New Deal saved Capitalism, or so it is said among the theoreticians and the ivory tower legions who followed, and are still following, in Roosevelt’s wake.

Well, by ‘n by, between Lyndon Johnson’s grand Texas-size vision for a Great Society, Clinton’s good-ole-boy nod to residual crony capitalism, and then the 21st-century-metamorphosing, rose-colored proletarian worldview as seen through Obama’s rainbow glasses, and now the upswell of Bernie’s refurbished wealth redistribution wizardry– we’ve turned this corner into a rising tide of  flat-out Democratic Socialism.

It will be, quite likely, soon inundating the tidal basin inside the beltway as in 2017 we slog  into the mucky backwaters of full-blown Americanized Socialism, dammed up on the other side of the slough by that other guy whose oversimplified version of the nation and the world seems to want to land us in a brave new world of American National Socialism.

And who knows which way this thing will go; only time and the slowly softening sedentary, dependent American electorate can tell.

Looking back on it all, today, my 65th birthday, having lived through Nov22’63, April4’68, 9/11, yesterday’s disruptions wherever they may be, and everything in between, I find myself identifying with all the old folks whose weary outmoded facial expressions bespoke disdain,  while I traipsed errantly along life’s way. Here’s to all them ole folks who I thought were a little out of it, one brick shy of a load, peculiar, decrepit and clueless. Now, I can relate.

How I wish America could be back at real work again, like we were back in the day.

We’ve pushed through vastly extracted frontiers that yielded to massive infrastructure networks punctuated with skyscraping towers of steel and concrete. Now we’re lapsing into solid-state, navel-gazing nano-fantasies, living vicariously through celebrities in our pharma cubicles.

Maybe there’s a new frontier in there somewhere but I’m having a hard time seeing it.

But hey! let me conclude this rant with a hat-tip to the man–he happens to be a Canadian–who best eulogized the essence of that once-and-future great North American work zeitgeist, which seems to be disappearing into the dustbowl of history, because it looks like  there’s nowhere left to go.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjoU1Qkeizs

Well, maybe there is somewhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38bHXC8drHc

Glass half-Full

Dad Gummit and Daw Gonnit

Dad Gummit and Daw Gonnit were sittin in the tavern one Friday evening. It was about going-home time and they were tippin a couple o brewskies while discussin the state of the world.

Ole Dad Gummit was on a roll with his opinions about the way things are and the way they use to be. “The trouble with this world today is folks don’t know how to do anything anymore. Why, back in day when I was still wet behind the ears, we could crank out things on the assembly line like they was goin outa style. Then along came nafta and before anybody knew what the hell was happenin everything we use to make was comin outa China or Mexico or Bangladesh or some such place where people work for next to nothin.”

“That’s just the way of the world,” Daw Gonnit explained. “It’s free enterprise. Companies that manufacture things are always tryin to get the price of their goods down to make ’em more affordable for the average guy– regular people like Joe Sixpack and Joe Blow, John Smith and Jane Doe.

“So companies got to find employees who’ll work for less money. But folks in this country are relatively rich, compared to the rest of the world. Companies wantin to get their costs down relocate their production facilities in other countries where people can afford to work for less money, because they don’t have the big cars and trucks to keep on the road, and they don’t have the big mortgage payments and the refrigerator and the dishwasher and the microwave and the range and the mixmaster and the blender and the washin machine and the dryer and so forth and whatnot that go along with the vehicle and the house and the lawn and so forth and whatnot.”

“I hear ya,” Gosh Darnit chimed in. He had sat at the table and had been listnin to their spiels. “But that’s nothin new. This has been goin on for hundreds of years. Why, there was a time, back in the 1900s, when most of our clothes came from England, because the limeys were the first ones to figure out how to mass produce textiles and clothing. They made the fabrics and the finished goods in places like Manchester and Lancashire and sent ’em over here on boats so’s we Americans could buy ’em with our up n comin’ dollars.

“After a while, we yankees figured out how to do it, and so we set up our own plants in New England and started crankin out similar goods (maybe not as high-quality) that were cheaper because Americans worked for less money than the highly skilled limeys did, plus we didn’t have to pay the transportation costs of floatin’ them pants and shirts and dresses and so forth and whatnot across the big pond.”

Then Dag Nabbit, who had ambled in, threw in his two cents worth. “I catch your drift, Gosh. But then after awhile, there were upstart mills down south, in places like the Carolinas where folks were workin for less than the New Englanders, and so a lot of that textile and clothing work went down south.”

“Yea,” Daw Gonnit agreed. “And nowadays, with so much manufacturing goin’ to Mexico and the like, it’s just more of the same pattern as before. Owners and bosses chasin’ after lower labor costs. It just all keeps goin’ south.”

“Or east,” Gosh Darnit pointed out, “. . .even across the Pacific ocean. like the Japs did with cars while Detroit was snoozin and countin their assets. After awhile the big boys in Michigan couldn’t get their innovative assets in gear any more, so the Japs and Koreans started crankin out lean n mean little econo wheels after the Arabs ran the oil prices up with their embargo and folks was waitin in line to fillup their tanks and so forth and whatnot.”

“I hear ya,” quipped Dag Nabbit. Things that had been changin at freeway speed were  changing all of a sudden at the speed of light. Then, as if that weren’t mystifyin’ enough, Gates and Jobs started crankin the silicon dreams out on the west coast and before you know it everybody was lookin at the world through new windows and takin a byte outa the good life. Between Redmond and and Cupertino electronic techie prosperity was leapin like blue blazes. But then Steve and the guys started farmin out the manufacturin work to the Chinese and the Sings and Bangalores and so forth and whatnot.”

“You fellas got that right,” said Dag Nabbit. “Most of the American manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, and so now service industries are taking over in American employment venues. Now folks are doin haircuts and pedicures and uber and pizza delivery and so forth and what not.”

“Flippin’ burgers, pitchin’ fries, waitin’ tables, detailin’ cars, sweepin’ floors, with the car-wash blues, recyclin’, mass transit, interior designin’, website designin’, programmin’, unstoppin toilets, flippin’ real estate, things like that,” said Old Dad Gummit.

“. . .not to mention lawyerin’ and doctorin’ and bankin’ and financial consultin’ and day-tradin’ and mortgage brokin’ and so forth and whatnot. The service industries are not all on the low end, y’know.” quipped Dag Nabbit.

“True dat,” agreed Old Dad Gummit, nodding his head slowly as if pondering on the essence things. He was thinking of what Sun Yat-sen had said about looking into the nature of things. “The world has sho’nuff changed since I was a Nehi,” he mused.

“Yeah, but you know what?” queried Gosh Darnit. “When you get right down to it, every person needs their shot at makin’ it in this world. . . makin’ somethin! whether its goods or services, high multiplier or low multiplier, whether they’re in America or Greece, or Asia or South America or Africa, in Shenzhen or Pleiku or the Outback of wherever place on earth. Everybody wants to get a piece of the action; everybody wants a slice of the pie.”

Dad Gummit looked strangely content, as if he was about to slip into another realm. “Everybody gets born with their own little window on the world, and desirin’ to get a byte outa the big App,” saith he, thoughtfully.

Daw Gonnit mused, “You so right, boss. Everybody git to take a shot at life, even though they’re born into times and maybe circumstances different from what their mom n pop were born into. And I guess they got to work with whatever they got–whatever they’re born into, wherever they be borne into it, whether they’re in Peoria or Seoul or Bangalore or Timbuktu or wherever.”

“But sometimes I catch a glimpse of the big picture, and I think it’s all on a long, downhill slide into hell,” Gosh Darnit opined. “. . .what with the perpetual wars, and terrorists and riots and police shootings and oppressions and so forth and whatnot. . .”

Ole Dad Gummit straightened hisself up; he looked around the establishment as if he wanted to say something profound, which he did: “As long as God Dammit don’t show up, I think we’ll be all right.” He drained the last of his IPA, then looked at Daw Gonnit in the eye.

“Maybe that’s what’s needed,” said the younger man.

“Could be,” crooned Dad Gummit.  He smiled, stood up. “Catch you boys on the flipflop.” And with that cloture, he strode out like a cricket among the embers.

Glass Chimera