For a while now, I’ve had the flickering perception of the US as more like North Korea: a country under the rule of the son of a former leader himself. A shabby, down-on-it’s-luck country that he convinced was the most advanced in the world while most of its people have suffered and died from being kept from decent food and medical care.
I started saying it as a joke, and then two winters ago, I heard stories of Vermonters burning their furniture to heat their homes. I saw people sleeping in their cars along the highways and a photo of what I thought was a home ravaged by flood in the Midwest, which was actually a house near me, in Massachusetts, looted after it a foreclosure.
Until recently, many Americans thought they lived in a place I think of as Richland, a nation of gated communities, mortgages, McMansions, and bling, populated with items that convinced their owners they were attached to a class called ‘the wealthy’. In fact, the cheap debt acted as a tranquilizer as first manufacturing jobs and then white collar jobs were outsourced overseas to cheaper labor markets.
Under the ‘cheap debt’ subsistence living created during the time — were you putting your bills and groceries on credit cards? This is what I mean — the remnants of the previous economy, one that had a more secure basis, were quietly destroyed.
Our transformation into a completely utilitarian society, the country as capitalist gulag, a nation of people harvested for successful performance as users of credit and useful only as long as they could purchase things, was nearly complete, and then we managed to vote out the Dear Leader (or rather, his term expired and we picked someone we thought of as different). Now we can see we’ve spent the last eight years subject to a laboratory experiment in which the richest robbed the rest of the country of its major assets via ‘financial instruments’, all while we voted on American Idol and watched televisions shows alleged to be the antics of ‘the rich’. Who would in fact never live that way.