Here in America today, Old White Guys tend to be rather angry at the way things are going — but theirs is not the generation that should be getting truly pissed off. The OWGs are doing fine financially. They have nothing to complain about.
Their walkers and scooters are paid for by MediCare.
Their pensions come regularly in the mail.
Social Security buoys them up, they have lots of savings left over from the good times, they have home equity to fall back on and they don’t have to worry about finding a job.
All that these Old White Guys have to do nowadays is take an occasional cruise to the Bahamas, enjoy their golden years and bitch about how hard life is — until they die and can buy themselves a fabulously expensive new coffin. They got theirs. Why the complaints? They should be as happy as pigs in a trough.
It’s the youth of America who should be really pissed off.
Their sweet little old grandfathers have just sold them all down the river without even a second thought.
“Hey, Grandpa! Where’s my education, where’s my job, where’s my clean air, where’s my future?”
“Sorry, sonny. I bought a war with that money instead.”
You bought a war? A war? I mean seriously, grandpa. You didn’t just splurge on one or two occasional wars. You bought a whole bunch of wars. “World War I, World War II, the Cold War, the Korean war, the Vietnam War, the wars on Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror….”
And now, Gramps, you are happily buying your grandchildren a war on Social Security.
“I got mine, sonny-boy. And now I want yours.”
If I was a member of the American generation that is just graduating from high school right now — if you are even that lucky — I’d be out screaming in the streets, “I’ve been robbed!”
And then when the police come and ask for a description of the felon who robbed me, I would say, “It was an old guy, looked a bit like Alan Greenspan, about as tall as Ronald Reagan, sort of bald like Dick Cheney, appeared at first to be my friend like Barack Obama, shed crocodile tears like Rush Limbaugh and lied to me like Rupert Murdoch on Fox News….”
Don’t trust anybody over 50.
PS: Speaking of being robbed, Princeton professor and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges tells us exactly how this “Looted Generation” heist-of-the-century has been pulled off. In his recent article in TruthDig entitled, “2011: A Brave New Distopia” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/, Hedges lays it all out.
“The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s ’1984′ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.’” And as we head into the greatest dysfunctional dystopia the world has ever known, who will be right? Huxley or Orwell?
“Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.”
Then Hedges goes on to pretty much describe you and me — and Gramps. “Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.”
I just love quoting Chris Hedges. Here’s some more of his stuff: “The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ to Orwell’s ’1984′. The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity.”
PPS: I also really like Stephen Colbert’s new satire, “Jesus was a Liberal Democrat,” http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/368914/december-16-2010/jesus-is-a-liberal-democrat, wherein Colbert jokingly implores us not to end up like Jesus, who mollycoddled the poor. “Actually, we shouldn’t be talking to the poor at all. They’ve got Unemployment Cooties!”
And America’s “Looted Generation” has the most unemployment cooties of all. Good job there, Grandpa. Thanks a lot.
The Tattlesnake – East Coast Blizzard Buries Snow-Job Political Futures Edition
Your Tattler remembers well the Chicago blizzard of 1979 that buried the city under several feet of the stuff, along with the political future of Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic. Days after the snow stopped, the side streets were still not plowed, main arteries were narrow two-lane ruts in the snow, and parking was a matter of driving into a snow bank and digging your car out the next day. If that was not aggravating enough, Bilandic had the chutzpah to go on TV and assure Chicagoans all was well and that things had been plowed – including designated public parking areas – that were not. The anger of city-dwellers reached the boiling point over those jaw-dropping pronouncements and, in one of those incredible political miracles, Daley Machine inheritor Bilandic lost his sure-thing nomination to Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary, and Byrne went on to become Chicago’s first woman mayor.
New York City’s independent ‘No Labels’ Mayor Michael Bloomberg apparently forgot the lesson of Bilandic, if he ever learned it. Yes, voters often have short memories, but not when it comes to the tangible physical and mental stress engendered by a massive snowstorm. Seeing your expensively-attired billionaire mayor, appearing dry and comfortable on TV, braying that everything is fine, all that can be done is being done, and to stop complaining, is not the message snow-besieged proles want to hear. I think this stunt finishes Bloomberg’s future in politics, just as NYC Mayor John V. Lindsay’s presidential ambitions were plowed under by his failure to adequately respond to a Big Apple blizzard 41 years ago.
Next door, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the GOP’s emerging Golden Boy already declining in popularity back home from his managerial incompetence – he lost $400 million in federal aid for state public education due to bumbled paperwork, for one – and obsessive Republican addiction to cutting any program, including state pensions, that benefits the ‘little guy’ while protecting his wealthy benefactors from economic pain, will likewise see his political future melting like a Newark snowball in June, as the clueless Guv has remained on vacation in warm and sunny Disney World in the aftermath of the crippling storm. Christie has, as yet, made no public announcement or curtailed his vacation in order to deal with his state’s weather crisis – perhaps an acknowledgement that his blustery Tony Soprano style of governing may intimidate some, but not Mother Nature.
Massive blizzards demonstrate the need for full-capacity city and state services during a time of crisis, the very things manic cost-cutters like Bloomberg and Christie have put on the chopping block; and the need for leadership that understands what’s happening on the ground, even when that ground is covered with snow; something these conservative budget-balancers forget, to their political peril.
President Bloomberg? President Christie? Fuhgedabouit!
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.