Turn and Face the Strain

One of the things being laid up with the Mighty Joe Young of all colds puts to the test is one's house and one's affinity to it. When you're stuck in that limited space for that long, especially when even books seem beyond you, you'd better like where you live.

I'm happy to report This Old House passes the test. Special thanks are due to Turner Classic Movies and its (their?) 31 days of Oscar--nothing like one great movie after another--I had never seen the old Richard Dix version of Cimarron--but if I didn't start having Eraserhead dreams from this long a coop-up [which has happened in other venues], I guess I must be settled. content. 

Home.

And now that I'm only moderately sick, it's got me thinking about what this here election is all about, where we are, and what's wrong with us, if anything.

Now it's a commonplace of environmental discussion that Americans consume more energy than anybody else on the planet. This is arrived at by calculating the total output and dividing by the population. Not illegitimate--except when you turn that average around and make it an individual moral failing. The mountaintop mining, the clearcutting, the towering office buildings and wallpaper-like strip mall corridors with the same megastores every four miles--that gets averaged in to the American consumer's sin. 

There are two things that happen as a result of this: the first is that the resentment and resistance to the indictment/analysis feels like it has more reason on its side, and the moral attack is seen as unfaiir, elitist, etc. And the second thing is that the solution to the consumption problem becomes more and more sweeping, vague, and impossible.

But while Americans love the freedom their cars provide, they don't enjoy most of the driving they do. While they like having a wide variety of food year round, they don't enjoy tennis ball tomatoes and styrofoam-like Red Delicious apples, tasteless chicken and atrocious margarine. They don't love elaborate packaging. They don't love the mountains of advertising  thrust in their way every single day, and they would rather have beautiful well-made things rather than cheap things that break. But that all goes into the average, and the burden of sin, too.

Now the fact is that Americans will sit still for all that, and that's a long way from innocent virtue.  And they will buy monster SUV's and Baconators at the drive-thru and shower brightly colored plastic objects interspersed with sugared cereal upon their children. But that's also a long way from theearth-destroying gluttony that's laid in their lap by their more virtuous brethren.

Get past the styrofoam peanuts to what Americans really want and you get to a fulcrum from which things can change.

Let me switch to a negative example: during the Sixties, what white Americans wanted came under attack. At the core, the principles sounded OK: security, stability, community, pride. But the wave that came over them was a big one. Suddenly (it seemed), they had to actually, finally accept black people as equals. They hadto actually,really acknowledge that women were equal. And they actually had to admit that the USA could wage a bad war.

There was no way around it:  these were real hits. This was not getting into the college; it was getting turned down cold by the boy you liked; this was discovering that everyone called you Turdblossom because you smelled bad. And that anger, that sullen resentment poured immense power to the Republican Party who were eager to capitalize on it, it pushed back against the ideals of America that, in theory, everybody agreed on--and forty years later, there are still whinings about blacks, about feminazis, and about the dolchstosslegende that lost us the Vietnam War.

We liberals and progressives have to realize that the hits white America took were real and palpable to the way ordinary, basically good people wanted the world to be and wanted to think about themselves, and even though it was done for the best reasons in earth as it is in heaven, the resentment, and the reaction, was real, not manufactured,and the weakened position of progressives was an inevitable result.

Now, though, the actual desires of America are again under attack, only from the other direction. Suddenly there is no security, no stability. For the longest time, at least back to the legendary Eisenhowerland, if  you had a good job, the only thing you had to worry about was losing that good job. It went through modification that required that both parts of the couple worked, but be that as it may, you could have a house (security), a car (freedom) and your kids could go to college.

But that compact has been broken. A good job doesn't mean squat if you have to go to into the health care system. a pair of good jobs won't get you a secure house, but rather  an ARM with a fatal balloon payment, and two good jobs won't get you the freedom of a car if it gets 12mpg on $4 a gallon gas. And pride in our nation when we didn't save New Orleans?

In this election, the Republicans are running on those old wounds to white America's self-image. A great opportunity, no? Woman, Black Guy? and that global warming stuff that will make us lose everything, bike to work, throw away our TV's and make us eat our vegetables? 

But they just don't get it, because they don't want to see the damage they have done to what Americans really want. Some of it is that there's a couple of generations that have grown up unscared of  neeegroes and feminazis, and who couldn't show you Vietnam on a map--but that's not most of it. Most of it is that the threats are deeper and less concerned with image. And the Republicans are saying nothing about the real fears. 

The environmentalists can go farther towards change by speaking to the real desires of Americans: better homes, more security; better cars, in the service of freedom and not compulsion.Beaautifully made stuff that you don't have to drag to the curb twice a week. Security, stability, community, pride: speak to that and all sorts of stuff can change.

But if you damage security, stability, if you break thecommunity, and if you make us ashamed, youcan dress it up in all the NASCAR colors you want and tout it all overthe TVandradio--the reaction will be heavy, and fierce, and will last for generations.