A Gilded Cage

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

Perception is everything. I don’t know who said it first, but they stated the obvious. Decade after decade, the majority of Americans have been washed in the blood of nationalism masquerading as patriotism and American mythology pretending at populism. As the communist and socialist movements of early last century — brought to these shores by an energetic cross-section of immigrants — faded into complacency, Americans fattened themselves on rewards of productivity and middle-class comforts. It’s always easier to remain discontent with an empty belly.

Those good times came with a powerful new medium, television, and we became avid consumers of political spin, propaganda, and public relations. It started out gently enough, buzzwords tucked into commercials and endorsements from movie stars, but you can’t accuse corporate consciousness of failing to exploit a good thing: our television fare is now about 99% reality-free. I’ll make exception for the occasional pay-channel or PBS offering, but even that would disappear in a heartbeat if the conservatives had their way.

There’s another popular word for propaganda and PR, of course: truthiness. That’s Colbert’s construction, describing what we want to believe as opposed to the truth. It’s a useful term and very Neptunian, I think, speaking to the illusionary internal landscape we adopt rather than acknowledge discouraging and often harsh realities. You will find examples of this kind of thinking on FOX News, if you need them, but be aware that they pop up everywhere; even in our own conversation. We’ve been well-schooled in bullshit.

You really can’t blame the sleepers, they came by it naturally. Our many errors had a logical sequence, going back to the time TV switched from black-and-white to color. After a decade or two of corporate influence disguised in Howdy Doody, I Spy and My Three sons, we were perfectly groomed to pick a beaming Ronald Reagan with his optimistic belief in American exceptionalism over a dour Jimmy Carter, urging us all to conserve energy and become pro-active consumers. At the time it seemed an easy enough choice between ice cream or spinach (or broccoli, as Ron’s successor, G.H.W. Bush, would have it) and we, of course, selected the empty calories.

Ron was a beloved son of that new medium we’d all become addicted to: the host of the nostalgic western series, Death Valley Days, the avuncular spokesman for GE who “brings good things to life.” Well, hell! How can you fight that? We ALL wanted good things, especially when no down-side was ever reported. So what if Ron broke the back of unions, began systemic deregulation and danced too close with dictators? So what if he dismantled the laws we’d carefully placed in the way of corporate marauders and oligarchs. He made us feel good about ourselves.

Reagan was master of the fine art of truthiness and the new science of psychological manipulation, embracing the stultifying paranoia of Hollywood’s black list and cold war rhetoric, flipping from union leader and Democratic party member to Republican stalwart. Back then, suddenly fearful of mid-eastern power and shaken to find ourselves lined up on odd/even days for a tank of gas, we wanted someone to kiss it and make it better. Enter Ron, stage right, to chase the boogieman away.

Let me segue a moment. Long ago — in 1900, the turn of the last century — there was a popular song entitled “She Was Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage,” a sentimental Victorian ballad about a beautiful young thing who married for money, trapped in a loveless union but financially secure (we’re supposing a LOT of money, think Anna Nicole without the drugs and paparazzi.) That was during the LAST Gilded Age, when the difference between the well-heeled and the piss-poor was defined by a living standard straight out of Dickens (and easier to imagine now than at any time in the last fifty years.) That the song itself lasted to this writing is testimony both to its pathos at the time, and quite possibly to Warner Brothers who — I seem to remember — featured it in one of their cartoons starring Bugs or Daffy or both:

“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,

A beautiful sight to see.

You may think she’s happy and free from care,

She’s not, though she seems to be.

‘Tis sad when you think of her wasted life

For youth cannot mate with age;

And her beauty was sold for an old man’s gold,

She’s a bird in a gilded cage.”

I’m not moralizing about the lovely young thing trading herself for security. Here in the Pea Patch, I see it every day. Sex for favors has been a woman’s currency since patriarchy reared its ugly head, an era or two ago. It’s an old survival skill women have employed for centuries, especially those who think they have few other options. The Eagles gave us a similar plotline with “Lyin’ Eyes” in 1975, which is proof enough that three-quarters of a century didn’t shake the tree too much. It will require a renaissance of Goddess energy to heal the misperceptions of gender inequality, and we’re anticipating one. Without it, human progress stalls; with it, we finally come to balance and functionality.

As with most everything, there’s a back-story about the writing of “Gilded Cage.” It was originally penned about the Birdcage Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona, where the ladies of the night rented “cribs” above the saloon floor to ply their trade. The original pretty-young-thing was a “soiled dove,” driven to exchange her sexual favors for money, but to suit Victorian prudishness of the times, a few lyrics were changed (and we should note, damned few.) It became one of the favorite songs of that year, so obviously, more than a few citizens could relate to the circumstance that would drive such a bargain.

So why do I bring up this obscure song? Simple — because it applies to us and the walls we’ve built around our national dishonesty. It would be rude to suggest that we sold ourselves, but — well — we sold ourselves, paying for our naive sense of well being with inattention and self-absorption. We made a Faustian bargain for safe harbor, even if we had to exchange our freedom for it. It’s an age-old trap, thinking we have to make a pact with the devil to get a leg up above the rest. If we’d leave our national self-justifications behind for a moment, we’d recognize unethical bargaining to be as American as apple pie. We made such a pact when we landed at Plymouth, deciding that the land was up for grabs and the indigenous population not worthy to keep it (or to stay alive, for that matter) and it’s been downhill since. We all know how to erect a chart; you can’t start that way and end differently. Now, steeped in financial inequity and ethical decay, many of us seem to be looking for another grand bargain, another hedge against the hard lessons of responsibility.

Some truth about our national persona has intruded, of course. We’ve always thought rather well of ourselves, only now coming to realize we aren’t the solid pillars of society we imagined ourselves to be. And now that our nation’s resources are tapped out — global replacement suddenly out of reach, our illusions of justice and equality trashed, average citizens shamelessly blamed for their own dire circumstances — it’s slim pickin’s here in our gilded cage. Many of us are finally willing to let the illusion of security go in order to escape the stilted prison of our mythologies, but with fully half of the nation still desperate to be rescued from responsibility, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we find our cage door rusted shut. Some still prefer the perceived safety of a gilt-worn cage to the rigors of remaking our democracy, but the shaking of those bars is setting up a harmonic resonance.

As an Aaron Sorkin fan (A Few Good Men, West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War) I’ve been following his new series, The Newsroom, on HBO. It’s been met with cool response from members of the press, perhaps because it’s THEM being trashed as yes-men and corporate shills. Sorkin calls it fiction, reviewers calls it preachy and sexist. Dan Rather recently weighed in to say the portrayal of a modern newsroom was spot-on and gave it his resounding approval, and as Dan doesn’t have to tow the company line anymore he appears trustworthy on the subject. In the first episode, Sorkin’s news-anchor character tells us a bit of unwanted truth: America is no longer number one in the world, not superior to other nations, and surely not the “shining city on a hill.”

OK, that’s a an ‘owie’ to our nationalism, a hit to the ego, a thumb in the eye — but hardly news, is it? Apparently to some it is, and those are the people who think Mitt Romney has a financial plan out of meltdown that doesn’t look like bankruptcy sell-off, a moral calling to replace the black guy, and a PR machine (funded by brothers Midas would envy) that will eventually buy its way into a new Republican era.

I’m betting they’re wrong, but it’s hard to get through the defense of people who think Gawd Almighty (evidently both a capitalist and Christocrat) gave them the edge. Granted, one can only be influenced from one’s own frame of reference. You and I, for instance, might be appalled that Dick Cheney has heartily endorsed Mitt Romney as his pick to drop the bomb on Iran, should it come to that (and to Dick’s mind, it surely will.) Others, who require a stern Daddy at the helm, policing policy with a growl and a big stick, might swoon with approval at the endorsement, perhaps even changing their mind about the veracity of nobody’s favorite, Mitt “My-Nose-Is-Growing” Romney. (Can this man tell the truth? I’m beginning to wonder.) Perhaps they can convince themselves that if he’s good enough for Uncle Dick, he must be tougher than he looks and brighter than he sounds. Perhaps, but I think that’s going to be a hard sell. Too much reality has seeped in to spoil our mythologies, too much truthiness has proven to be lies.

America has functioned very much as a gilded cage for a long while, now. We have had a level of plenty that the rest of the world has envied, and we’ve traded awareness of our nation’s dark side in order to achieve it. We’re like the little girl with the curl: when we’re good, we’re very very good, but when we’re bad … well, you know. When a nation rises to the level of superpower, its citizens have responsibility for the backroom deals and greed. How many of us, I wonder, have dared to read Howard Zinn’s history of America? We made our bargain to sleep through ugly truth and allow inequity, unwilling to shake up the system in order to fix it. Now that we have no choice but to face our own culpability, now that we can no longer pretend to be unmarked by the suffering around us, what will we do next? We can’t go back to sleep.

Preferring the cage to freedom is forgivable, it’s the path of least resistance that humankind has so often taken, but if we don’t want to be the canary dropping over in the coal mine, we’ve got to get serious about our politics. Surely we can all agree that it isn’t just the headwinds of the political system we’re bucking now, it’s very wealthy people with dark intent who are working overtime to see to it that power remains in their hands. They cannot win, ultimately, but they can waste precious time and resources in a race to the finish. Take a moment to watch economist Robert Reich’s YouTube about what’s at stake in this election. If perception is everything, then let’s lay out the choice in stark terms — and let’s pass it around.

The conversation really isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats anymore, although when you vote, remember who is so thoroughly in service to the 1% that it takes no concern with denying children food or health care. No, now it’s about escaping the cage, all of us together. It’s about breaking the dysfunction we’ve come to think of as comforting, with dependence on materialism to distract us from our bondage. It’s about a level of freedom we’ve long denied ourselves — it’s about remembering how to fly.