Contrived Contrition, Concealed Conceit

It doesn’t take a lot of spine to fly a private jet to a congressional hearing and ask for 25 billion dollars for your belly-up industry. But it takes balls to drive there two weeks later and act like everything’s peachy because, well, now you know what it’s like to be a chump. Hey, whatever works–leave the rental at Reagan and skeedaddle in the Cessna back to Flint. Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.

Never mind the jingo about the suffering middle class or their jobs or mortgages or blah, blah, blah. This entire economic meltdown has never been about the middle class except when it uses them as a moldy totem to enlist (read: finagle) their complicity in the massive Wall Street bailouts or, this week, the Holy Trinity bridge loans. And fuck the poor. We haven’t heard about them since…well, Jesus; even Obama knew well enough to stay away from that powder keg. Apparently, we’re dumb enough to believe that a jet-setting executive can be harangued into seeing the error of his capitalist ways, thereby enabling us, via our government, to provide him with the means to continue his capitalist ways–except this time with hybrids, please.

It’s game time for Detroit, and the players are playing; but if they really wanted the money, they should have gone Greyhound–that would have blown open the coffers. They might as well have ridden horses to emphasize their commitment to turn-of-the-century industriousness and go-get-’em. It doesn’t matter, however, because regardless of how they made it to Washington, and whatever image they’re trying to manufacture–it’s all bullshit.

Haven’t We Seen This Before? or, The Schizophrenic Messaging of Late-Stage American Hegemony

The answer is yes, and we don’t have to look too far into the past to find coincidence with the present. September 11, 2001, was defined (perhaps wrongly) as the turning point for American relations with the world; additionally, it carried the promise of dramatically restructuring the country from the inside out. And regardless of any continuity in the historical narrative suggesting that the terrorist attacks were nothing more than a spectacular event in a continuum of America’s hegemonic iterations throughout the 20th century, the perception was that from the rubble of the towers we, as Americans, had a unique opportunity to substantially shift paradigms. In fact, it appeared imperative that we do so.

The pressure for creativity was probably too intense, however, or the costs to those holding the scepter were too high. The option of pursuing a tightly-focused, limited and effective routing of a small band of cavemen appears to have been tabled even before the news channels stopped running the footage of the collapsing towers. Instead of heeding the calls for a 21st-century reaction to the attacks (such as addressing the root causes of terrorism, rather than merely pursuing the actors), the Bush administration opted for 21st century rhetoric draped over 20th century gung-ho. This was Daddy’s war in more ways than one. The consequences of our reaction to the attacks are at least twofold:

1) instead of committing to a creative and specific plan for eradication of the real perpetrators of the attacks (for instance, limited surgical strikes based on reliable intelligence intent on immobilizing Al Qaeda), the administration committed to delivering dubious intelligence that was all bells and whistles, meanwhile preparing for and instigating wars that were neither creative or specific, ensuring hundreds of thousand of deaths (at least), billions of dollars of debt and destruction, and unquantifiable damage to the natural world.

2) Furthermore, the rhetoric of this “American awakening” to the world (from what, we never asked) not only served to fulfill the profitable mission of “exporting democracy,” as always, in bullets and blood; it also obscured the fact that after September 11 nothing had changed; if anything, we find ourselves even more entrenched in the same paradigms we had on September 10, 2001: growth-based capitalism, overbearing nationalism, xenophobia, exorbitant defense spending, and on…

But What I Really Wanted to Talk About is…

The very same framework of rhetorical progress vs. traditional operation is in play during this so-called economic crisis. I’m not so cynical to suggest that the CEO’s are the only ones suffering–in fact, I won’t suggest that they’re suffering in any true sense of the word at all. As always, the consequences of the pathology of our brand of capitalism will be dumped onto the middle class and the poor. The rich won’t suffer at all–unless you consider “only” having a million dollars when you used to have ten million suffering.

A few people have asked if the banks and auto industry are worth saving–a good question, but they’re asking it for the wrong reasons. Their objective is to save or let fail based on whether or not their actions will help to stabilize our economy; for people invested in this economy, this is, of course, a reasonable question. But there is another question that isn’t being asked, but should be: is our economy worth saving? I don’t expect CEO’s to ask this one, but workers should.

Denouement, By Way of Short Example

There is an atrocious movie starring Keanu Reeves in which he plays a hip, scraggly scientist who has solved the cold fusion problem. This is obviously a big deal, and as such, certain people in powerful places want him dead and cold fusion out of the picture (cold fusion, in this scenario, would solve the world’s energy/climate change crisis by providing free and clean energy to everybody). Heinous shit ensues, Keanu saves the girl, etc., etc. Overall, forgettable. But there is a line of dialogue, spoken by Morgan Freeman, that I thought pertinent to our current economic conflicts, not to mention September 11, health care, and myriad other struggles that we face today. Here’s the paraphrase (I watched it once, I’m not watching it again): Morgan says to Keanu,

We are addicted to oil, our economy is an oil economy, the global economy is an oil economy. Do you know how much havoc would ensue if suddenly everybody had access to free energy? Governments would collapse, stock markets would crash. The world isn’t ready for free energy.

It’s been said that the sound of Morgan Freeman’s voice comes closest to that of God’s, but the only heights this pronouncement descends from is the penthouse offices of the Sears Tower. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m pretty much fucking ready for free energy. I’m pretty much ready for a little less rich people and a little more doing-pretty-good people. I’m pretty much ready for a whole hell of a lot less military and a lot more peace. The only people who would say something like that–”the world isn’t ready”–are the ones who would be taken down by the monumental change that they’re trying to stop.

So here we are once again: a crisis of capitalism that we’re trying to alleviate by keeping the rich satisfied and the not-so-rich and the poor scared for their homes. And we’re not ready for this to change.

And Finally…

Lest you think that I’m just blowing off steam and there’s nothing but angry adjectives to this post, let me present a couple of ideas. First, as regards the auto industry: pitch it, retool it. We have plenty of cars, and plenty more left to buy. Let’s buy the car companies and retool them to produce wind turbines, solar panels, buses, trains–all the sorts of things we need to move away from oil consumption and towards energy independence. We’ll let other countries build cars; we’ll build freedom from cars. Michael Moore said it on Countdown the other night; I said it first, but regardless, it needs more saying.

Second, in regards to the economy in general, we should seriously investigate steady state economics–here’s one place to do that. I don’t know a whole lot about it, admittedly, but sustainability and prosperity for everyone, and not just a few, sounds decent to me.

Obama seems prepared to do a bit of deficit spending in order to right the turmoil of the last year, but why spend to save an economy that got us, well, this economy? Fixing it well means discarding it for something better, and if that means that a few more owners have to become renters just so that the rest of us don’t become homeless or jobless–well, I’d call that better.