Joe,
I picked up your book at Barnes & Noble on Sunday. Read Deer Hunting with Jesus front to back. I spend a lot of time in the I81S corridor from Chambersburg, Pennsylvania to Herndon, Virginia. We are in Winchester frequently. I hail from a similar background, having grown up on Main Street in a similar town in Pennsylvania, not far from Winchester, so I certainly understand the culture.
We have been sold out by Corporate America and I am horrified by what has happened inside the Republican Party. Your description of average Americans as debt servants is exact. And overall, the country is in one hell of a mess.
However, all I read in your book was a blistering, contemptuous, critique and saw no suggestions, so I am not sure what you prescribe as an alternative? I have spent considerable time in Europe and I saw little work, mostly eating and drinking. The people were healthier but did not seem happier. 85% of the people on the planet would immigrate to the U.S. if they could get a visa. Those poll numbers are only slightly diminished since the war in Iraq. What do you suggest as an alternative? Stronger labor unions and restrictions of overseas manufacturing? That won't work either, much too late for that.
There are other options, the most immediate being energy independence which we could have now and could have had 20 years ago if not for big oil. What liberals really want however, is control of the proletariat. They want to kill the American car culture (and the independence it brings) and force us all back to the cities, (as in Europe) where we can be more readily controlled and "enlightened". This is not a charge of the far right, I read the suggestion myself in a book by a very liberal university professor.
With respect to the war, the U.S. liberal media is to be as damned as the administration.
When you hear an idiot president use the term "weapons of mass destruction" a dozen times in a single speech, surely we have to recognize propaganda, but the media went along with it. Now media types are pretty smart, they are mostly liberal democrats and hate George Bush. So why the accommodation? Why didn't the New York Times print the facts early in the game, that the terrorists were mostly Saudis and that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
Reason? There were only two possible beneficiaries from a war in Iraq: Big Oil and Israel. Big Oil would get the oil and the Middle East would be made safer for Israel.
There is not one liberal Jew I know (and I know many) who was not insistent (at the time) that this war had to be fought. Now, me being a Republican, a conservative, and yet one quite capable of independent rational analysis, I had to ask myself, "Why am I having extreme reservations about this prelude to war with Iraq?" -- while my normally, quite pacifist, anti-military, Jewish friends say Saddam has to go. (AIPAC pressure on the White House was intense during this prelude, it has been documented).
The answer is simply that Israel and American Jewry saw Saddam as a serious threat. They did not want him expanding his oil fields via invasion and since he had already lobbed Scuds at Israel and mocked chemical attacks, he had to be dealt with, and in this case, by PROXY! The Jewish neo-cons who surrounded George W. Bush and the Bush family's oil holdings in the Middle East made for a perfect concoction.
You can rail against the dense patriotism which permeates this area of the country, but in a sense these people are victims of much larger forces. We were not getting the straight information from the media, at the time when it could have made a difference. The normally rabidly anti-Bush media went along with this war like sheep. They endorsed it.
As for your railings against the evangelical protestant political movement, your statements are exaggerated. I come from this area of the country.
Yes, there are holy rollers. I even have a fundamentalist on my payroll and he does not espouse the claims you make in your book. Moreover did you ever stop to think that the constant assault on conservative cultural values from the far left has triggered this reaction by the far right? 25 years of affirmative action and of celebrating diversity (as long as it doesn't cost YOU your job) promoting homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle, encouraging interracial marriage, the gun control thing. Hell! Liberals have been baiting conservative America since the 60s and it simply goes against everything these people value and the liberals know it. Infiltration of the government by fundamentalist Christians as a subversive strategy? Give me a break. Liberals have been masters of this game since the Vietnam war. They are now simply getting a taste of their own medicine AND THEY DON"T LIKE IT! Quid pro quo.
Notice, however, how our political system does police extreme swings, to the right or left. The next election is for Hillary Clinton to lose. If she maintains the center and does not go wacko left, she will fare well. It is what the country needs. She will certainly purge all of Bush's cabinet and restore the Clinton era White House. The Democrats will then control Congress and the White House, and honestly, things are so bad, if they focus on America, they may improve things. However, I feel that both parties are so corrupt and so in the grip of special interests and lobbyists, that nothing meaningful for the average American will take place.
A culture of unrestrained greed drives corporate America more so than small business. We are very generous with our employees and value their commitment to the business. I told them as long as the corporation is profitable, they will have job security and that is about the best I can do. I lecture them constantly about hyper materialism and the myth of the home mortgage. Turn off the damn TV and read, read anything but read. I loved your comment about mortgage debt, that those people have less than zero. This needs to be explained and taught. Nothing of any value is taught in high schools any more and business classes can't teach morality and ethics, that also has to come from within.
Companies do not want to hire employees because payroll taxes are so high. They are murderous. For every $1,000 in payroll that I write, I have to fund the account with $ 1,200. You may not be aware of this, but there are also wrongful hire and fire statutes on the books. An employee may sue his employer for just about anything. It is risky hiring people. Even riskier hiring women and minorities. Hiring "independent contractors" and reporting their income on a Form 1099 is much safer and less risky. The government has made it so.
I am certain that economic collapse is in the very near future and we WILL be forced out of it through sheer necessity. No one is getting raptured. Floating up in the air, naked with Jesus -- what a hoot!
One of our employees teaches Revelations classes on Saturday mornings and is a part of the Rapture Cult. Those poor kids will never be right. I tried to tell him that. He replied that he feels compelled to teach them about what is coming.
I would love to have a beer with you in Winchester. I know where that bar is. We would have to get a corner seat and keep our voices low.
Howard
Pennsylvania
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Howard,
You have not said one thing here I cannot agree with. Not one. Except maybe the term "liberal media." I've worked in media for almost 40 years and from what I can see now, political views are about equally distributed throughout, except maybe at the top, where one would expect corporate leaders to be rather conservative. In any case, our vapid, sensationalistic media is to be damned for failing in its primary mission to provide truth to the citizens and letting them decide for themselves.
The fundamentalist infiltration of the government is very real. The Joshua Generation has come of age. But again, I am not saying it is completely successful, but that it is a dangerous trend. Same goes for fundamentalists in general. There is a lot of difference between the rank and file fundamentalist and its religious leadership making all the noise and doing all the plotting.
As for offering a "solution," a way out of this mess in which we we find our nation, I don't have one and I don't believe anyone else does either. Despite that, an America that has the idea that citizenship and civic responsibility consists of making the right consumer selections, one does not "shop" for national solutions or a decent society. One finds personal solutions -- because a good society is merely the result of countless aggregated individual personal decisions -- whether we take care of our elderly and poor, or whether we pretend we do not smell the smoke from that crematorium called Iraq, in much the same way that the citizens of Weimer Thüringen swore they never noticed one goddamned unusual thing about Buchenwald for nine whole years, despite that many of them were employed there or had children serving in the military there much as ours serve in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For me personally, the "solution" rests in making one's life a walking example of doing the right thing as best as possible. (I'm not saying I do it, but that I seriously attempt to do it.) I see no motivation or incentive for most Americans to do that at the present. In fact, I feel fairly certain we will have to experience a collapse before anything new and realistic can be built. In other words, when we are forced to do so out of sheer necessity. To believe any one person can come up with a solution to anything of this scale is purely dreaming. Americans love this sort of delusion (and have even rewritten their own national history, populating it with bigger than life figures so as to reaffirm it) because it alleviates them of any personal responsibility except voting, which of course does not really work anymore because our choices are limited to an elite political class that now dominates our system
If there is a solution, it is in each person taking real personal responsibility (and not the phony George Bush kind either) for his or her daily actions, both morally and materially. That means being as sincerely dedicated to the plight of our fellow man both as neighbors ands across the planet, as we are our own dismal little selves in our grasp for material success and insulation against the rest of the world. Republicans of course believe this is impossible. Democrats, while they ballyhoo the principle, hope to hell it never comes to reality because they like their overblown lifestyles as much as the richest Republican. (Indeed, the last time I checked, Dems seemed to be a tad wealthier in general than Republicans, even with a few million low income blacks pulling down their numbers.
A grim assessment? To my mind it is simply realistic. Together, we all either grow into a realistic, relatively moral and responsible nation -- against the efforts of powerful men and corporations hardened societal institutions -- or we all go to hell in the same screaming gaggle. As you point out, I may well be an alarmist. .Seems to me I can smell more sulphur and brimstone in the air every day.
I'm up for that beer any time you are. And if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination, I'll need and extra one just before I go home to hang myself.
Like you said, most Americans need to be told what to do. About three years ago I used to correspond with a fine old lady (god rest her soul) whose father was one of the founders of the Nazi Party in Germany. She said the Germans of 1938 were far more independent thinkers than Americans are today. And she was not at all one for hyperbole.
Upon considering that, I'll change my order to a double shot of Old Grandad, please.
In art and labor,
Joe
