LAST SUNDAY IN THIS SPACE, I discussed the value of continuing to read local newspapers, not just the NY Times.
But I also see value in trudging one’s way thru the Cadillac of American newspapers (i.e., it’s bigger than the others and weighted down with more luxury features, though it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train).
F’rinstance, Paul Krugman’s Sunday magazine section think-piece on America’s immensely growing economic inequality, and how it’s polluted politics, health care, foreign policy, social discourse, etc. etc.
It’s good to see something this honest in a paper that’s long (actually, just about always) been the voice of the economic elite. (I vaguely remember a writer (I don’t remember who it was) complaining a year ago that the NY Times Sunday magazine section’s editors rejected a piece he’d written about the homeless, asking him to make it more upscale.)
The backward distribution-O-wealth toward an increasingly out-of-touch Overclass isn’t exactly an untold story. But it is undertold. Or rather, when it is told it’s in a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees manner.
Anyone who regularly peruses the “alternative” press knows about the symptoms of an Overclass economy:
A Republican Party whose “ideology” is just a ramshackle structure of excuses for big-money butt kissing and power-grabbing.
A “New” Democratic Party concerned solely with preserving its own institutional existence, by striving to become just as big-money-friendly as the Republicans.
A “conservatism” prescribing authoritarian brutality to the downscale, libertine excess to the upscale.
A “liberalism” with plenty to say about recycling but little to say about luxury lifestyles that produce all those wastes; that abstractly worships M.L. King as a courageous leader (a sort-of civil-rights CEO) but ignores most of the issues he fought for; whose favorite “minorities” are upscale white women and upscale white gays.
A ‘radicalism” centered parimarily around issues friendly to the “rebel” kids from affluent families (the fates of plants, animals, and “exotic” humans who conveniently don’t live on the same continent).
A corporate society built not around making stuff, or even around profitably selling stuff, but around supporting the insatiable material demands of top executives by propping up the Almighty Stock Price.
An urban environment defiled by smoggy SUVs.
A suburban environment defiled by minimansions, ever larger and ever further apart.
A dumbed-down “mainstream” media in which only the big-money boys’ side of any issue gets mentioned, in between lengthy pieces about entertainment celebrities.
A dumbed-down “alternative” media in which politics is reduced to demographic target marketing (“Oh how much more englightened we are than those mainstream dorks”), in between lengthy stories about “alternative” entertainment celebrities.
A “digital age” that was aggressively hyped as a tool for expression, empowerment, and equility; but which, in its pre-stock-crash form, generated even more obscene levels of stock-price and luxury-lifestyle nonsense, contributing to real-estate hyperinflation and massive demographic cleansing in many cities.
The Overclass economy might have carried the seeds of its own fall from grace. Between certain CEO scandals and a depression that’s made millions aware of their own precarious fiscal states, it’s at least a little harder this year to make excuses for giving the ultra-rich every damned thing they want.
But a fall from grace ain’t the same thing as a fall.
The U.S. economy might not currently even know how to reform itself toward greater equity, despite experts’ warnings that middle-class consumer confidence might be the only way out of this slump.
Most politicians are deathly afraid of doing anything that might threaten big-money campaign donations.
Most media outlets don’t even want to think of showing or printing anything that would tarnish the upscale image they sell to advertisers. (When I interviewed for a job at the short-lived local mag Metropolitan Weekly, the publisher’s first statement was the minimum average income he wanted his readers to have.)
No, the way out of our socio-political-economic mess won’t come from the systems and institutions that helped us get into the mess.
It can only come by developing viable, inclusive, true alternatives to those systems and institutions; forcing those systems and institutions to adapt or die.
