Surviving Capitalism

By Alexander Chee

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.

Years from now, I fear that Americans living in the mid-21st-Century will look back on us from their homes in the loose archipelago of islands known as Appalachia, Sierra Nevada and Klamath, and that we will be regarded as a people who fought fierce battles over cultural issues of very small moment while our environment and our populations died of very real diseases, and our coastlines disappeared until islands were left where there were once fields and cities.

That studies will show how, in order to avoid some very real problems, we engaged in an act of shared national psychological transference. It seems to me these Americans, which is to say, us, will be thought of as more than a little strange for how they risked certain death if they were to become ill from some basic diseases and accidents, should they be unable to afford the healthcare they had to pay exorbitant rates for, and which was provided less readily than the ‘cheap debt’.

As a country right now, we are sick with a healthcare system that has us currently perform as a different kind of luxury goods consumer if we get sick. We are asked to afford health. If we are rich enough, when we get sick, we trade these expensive gated communities for hospitals more expensive per night than any luxury resort, and treatment regimens that outstrip the cost of any kind of bling.

And as the world’s most high-paying patients, the health care we receive is remarkably poor in quality, and the point for us to get well again seems lost, replaced by expensive treatment regimens and legions of side effects that are just as debilitating as the diseases they are meant to treat, and so need adjustment, from still more medications. We let ourselves become the victims of a cycle of product that polluted the environment and made us sick, and then when we needed to get well, we had to go buy health. And the people selling us products on both sides of that equation were and still are making a fortune.

When I look at the Swine Flu pandemic, I think of the first one, which I was alive for at age 9, when I feared living in a world where it would be too dangerous to go outside without wearing a protective suit. I also keep contrasting it to the beginning of AIDS—also a flu-like symptoms disease, of mysterious origin. But we are acting quickly now as we never did with AIDS, because it’s children who are patient zero, and not adults.

Meanwhile, H1N1, as it is now called, is already rebranded, to prevent more events like Tuesday’s slaughter in Egypt of every pig in the country. This to protect the hog-farm industry. The picture I keep seeing at the edge of my vision is of what is always protected in America: profits. And so it seems to me what we have is not a pandemic, but a media story meant to show that we have a system that cares about children and public health, when we don’t. Not just yet. But we want to.

I see us now more like the humans on Caprica, from Battlestar Galatica, escaping the Cylon “hospital” and running for the hills. Not sure of what is out there or what the answers are, but no longer willing to be where we were. And the curious way the mood of the country has lifted, reported in the news this weekend, despite the fact that joblessness is up and layoffs continue means that I think we know we’re on the way to where we need to be.

Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet and English professor. He is the author of the novel Edinburgh.