Rip Van Winkle, Jack Reacher and Me

by Enceno Macy

Editor’s Note: In March, we began posting the work of Enceno Macy, an inmate in a US prison. Enceno’s articles are sent handwritten, then typed and edited by a trusted editor. Comments typed into the response area will be sent directly to Enceno. Thanks for reading and for the warm response he’s received each time. –efc

In the old story, one night before the American Revolutionary War was even dreamed of, an amiable drunk named Rip Van Winkle passes out after boozing it up on a mountain. Old Rip sleeps for 20 years. When he wakes up, his faithful dog is gone, his hunting gun replaced by a rusty wreck. Thinking he’s only been asleep for one night, he goes home to find his wife long dead, his children grown and gone. King George is a dim memory, a new nation celebrates itself, and the population is in the throes of election frenzy. No one in the village remembers him. Poor Rip thinks he’s gone crazy, no longer sure who the hell he is.

A person who’s done a lot of time is in a similar situation when he gets out. If he was young when he went in, the changes on the outside can be beyond comprehension, even if he’s had access to television and movies. For example, a 15-year-old kid sentenced in 1995 to 20 years, say, will get out in 2015. At age 35, he will never have used a cell phone or the internet. He won’t have a clue how to use a GPS, iphone, Blackberry or other device. He will never have had a driver’s license. He will never have voted. He will never have had a bank account or credit card, will never have bought a car or rented a home. None of his former friends will remember him. His dog and all of his grandparents will have died, as well as a number of other family members.

Our modern Rip Van Winkle walks out the gates into a totally alien Brave New World with no preparation or training other than card-sharking, con games, gambling and fighting that ensure survival in prison. Not only does he not know how to operate the machinery and devices of modern life, he doesn’t have the most basic experience in taking care of himself, like cooking, shopping, paying bills, doing laundry, fixing a drain, building a table. The only way to avoid going back to prison is to play a very fast catch-up game in pursuit of the American Dream, his sole chance of redemption and security. Not many of us make it, for obvious reasons. Maybe it’s sour grapes, but I look at the stats and start wondering about that American Dream.

What exactly is the American Dream? Jeremy Rifkin defines it as “every person has the right and opportunity to pursue his or her own individual material self interests.” The idea is “that market forces, if left unhindered by government, would guarantee every person the opportunity to improve his or her station in life.”

That sounds good, except reality turns out to be very different. It is the very nature of human beings, Rifkin says, to be “materialistic, self-interested, and driven by the biological urge to be propertied, autonomous, independent and self-sufficient, and sovereign over their own domain.” Indulging those urges, people — individually and collectively — lose or abandon self-control and become dangerously irresponsible.

The American Dream promised limitless wealth and limitless resources available to a limitless population. It was never more than it called itself — a dream. As George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it.” Yet somehow this slogan became the operating principle of our entire society, economy and political system. Huge financial empires grew on the principle that they could go on growing forever.

So what happens when the markets or firms “too big to fail” collapse? The American public is very much against its government interfering with the open market, yet when things go wrong the first thing we do is blame the government and demand it to solve the problem. When government attempts a solution it will always be attacked as unfair: stimulus packages for the filthy rich without fines or punishment, or stimulus packages for the poor and disabled who don’t deserve a hand-out. Either way, we get upset but at this point, barring an entire revolution that would send the country into a chaos it would never recover from (at least for many generations), there is only so much the people can do.

Because of the American Dream — an illusion built on debt and fraud — the population is now incapable of challenging the government’s indulgence or collusion in lies, fraud and corruption. People cannot afford to strike, riot or attempt to take out whole corrupt sectors. In pursuit of the American Dream, most citizens have absorbed themselves in the creation of their ideal lifestyle. They do not have the time or resources to challenge a government paid with ever-increasing taxes to fight off its own citizens’ attempts at reform.

What is your American Dream? A house, two cars? Two and a half kids? A job with a pension and some hope of promotion? A wife, a husband, a pool and maybe a picket fence? How much is all that going to cost? At the least, 95 percent of your income and eight hours of your day minimum go toward monthly payments to sustain that life, plus interest. Take away the cost and hours required to get to work, and you have few or no hours left for family and non-work responsibilities each day. Not only can most people not afford to challenge their bumbling government, they rarely have enough time or energy to pay serious attention to what’s going on and therefore cannot make any informed opinions. Instead they swallow catchy sound-bite rhetoric without thinking. It is easy for them to be fooled by big media when they barely have time or energy to catch the nightly news, whose agenda reflects whatever party or industry is paying the broadcast bill.

People are both blinded and crippled by the American Dream. The few people with time and motivation to challenge the status quo are easily discredited by propaganda, finger-pointing, scapegoating and hollow promises of better days. The challengers simply become a face for the mob to focus their hatred on. The little noise a small minority are able to raise on occasion is easily quelled, and the real villains go back to their war room to devise new ways to continue business as usual. The average Joe, who is the ultimate victim, along with the next generation, would end up poor and in the streets if he or she discontinued pursuit of the Dream, having invested so much into it already.

Maybe those average Joes know deep down how fucked they are. I suspect that’s why fictional heroes like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher are so popular. Reacher’s another kind of Rip Van Winkle character, born and raised and spending his whole career in the military, then suddenly downsized and out on his ear at age 36. Without a clue even how to do his own laundry, he hitches and bus-rides around the country, surviving without credit cards, driver’s license, bank book, or ownership of anything save the clothes on his back, getting into scrape after scrape when he jumps in to help the victims of the American Dream’s nightmare dark side. The very first book is a dead-on metaphor for our economy: it takes place in a picture-perfect, American Dream town created and ruthlessly controlled by a vast counterfeiting operation that is too big to fail.

In order to make the necessary changes, many Jack Reachers and many average joes would have to break from the dream of the perfect life. They would have to spend more time riding buses, sacrificing for change, and less on self-interests. They would have to set aside their materialism and devote their spare time and money to organizing, collecting information, equipping others with the necessary tools and understanding and creating rival networks for communication. In reaction, business and its government enablers would take any means possible to paint the challengers’ goals as preposterous and impossible. Would I have the balls to abandon my own Dream? I don’t know.

Then there is the big question of what change will produce. A change in personnel? Because what we call democracy is tailored to meet the demands of capitalism with its inherent corruption, would potential revolutionaries have the foresight to change our form of government? No matter how solid or righteous the individuals we elect to our current form of government, so long as corporations can directly or indirectly influence them, money will always prevail. Businesses “too big to fail” mean endless amounts of money to control government and public opinion.

But then real change such as a revolution may be inevitable. Thanks to the failure of government to recognize or do anything about society’s inability to curb its excesses, things that are “too big to fail” will, like the Gulf of Mexico, become too big to save. Before enough people wake up to the truth, peak oil may throw the majority of America into the semi-dark ages. Sadly, they are so caught up in the American Dream, they are unprepared for disasters — natural or otherwise — that will reduce our resources to the point that government is forced to take over and regulate. From that point, government will become more and more involved at higher and higher levels because neither people nor society can any longer take care of themselves.

“One should not underestimate the likely consternation of many American citizens when their fossil-fueled and consumerist lifestyle is in serious jeopardy,” says Jörg Friedrichs, lecturer in politics at the University of Oxford.

Many empires and ‘advanced’ nations have failed for waiting to implement adequate changes until times became so dire that change was the only alternative to immediate social and political chaos. Societies that preserve a lot of social glue and traditional knowledge, Friedrichs says, are more likely to make it through in the event of a collapse. “It’s not so much a problem of the West (America), but of a lifestyle. When social glue and traditional lifestyles have eroded, they are not easily recovered.” If our only social glue is consumerism, we’re in serious trouble.

But do we not consider ourselves advanced compared to failed nations of the past? Doesn’t that include philosophically advanced, as in logic and reason? So why do we not begin change before it is too late? Are we too busy chasing the American Dream to see that it’s just that, a dream? Maybe this blind-eye mentality prevails because society would rather be blinded by the hope of a blissful life. People want to believe the buy-now-pay-never sound bites, happy not to worry about the negative consequences their reckless democracy perpetuates. Whether afraid or carefree, they continue to let the dream of utopia distort their logic filters, like beer goggles in a bar full of unappealing inhabitants. Believing lies that built houses on the head of a pin, people are oblivious to impending failure.

Whatever we do, we must do something. Being an advanced society means we should be able to learn from the failures of past empires. Since society is incapable of seeing how the hole it is digging for itself will bury it, maybe more government regulation is the answer, particularly regulation that focuses on restraint of corporate power. If all humans are created equal, then all resources and opportunities must be equally available to them. Those who want to continue the self-destructive path can leave on the next space probe.

I have had my own dreams, of course — of being free physically, of having some value to the community, of being successful and free of debt, with enough put away for the future. I dream of motorcycles and a job, a home and family and a dog, trips to the mountains and the beach — dreams no more attainable outside than inside the wire. Sometimes I resent the fact that by the time I get out, all hope for my few dreams will be extinguished in the collapse. But what is the use of pursuing a dream that by its very achievement ensures its self-destruction? Is that not a pursuit of futility? And what is the alternative?

As usual, I don’t have answers, only more questions.