Collapse is in the eye of the beholder
“Don’t
call me a whore!” a friend wrote me angrily. She was correcting me, explaining
that her current work was not true prostitution because it only involved
massage and hand jobs. I hadn’t paid attention to precise nomenclature as I was
trying to convince her to quit. My point was that by working as a
prosti…prostassage therapist she might severely limit her future employment
possibilities. She was furious that I had lumped her in with women who walk the
streets.
Nomenclature
means a lot to our pride. People take offense if they are told they are living
in a collapsed culture. Collapsed implies over. Collapsed implies hopeless.
Collapsed implies that we have failed. But at some point we have to look at
people like my angry friend and admit that we are failing—on many, many levels.
My friend was once a middle-class woman with a college degree and a profession.
She raised children on her own after her husband died. And as she tried to push
forward, her career started moving backwards. And then somehow, eventually, it
came to a point where she was willing to do work of questionable legality to
pay her bills and keep a roof over her head. The horror that awaited her if she
were to became homeless was arguably much worse than the controlled environment
of the massage parlor, even taking into account the occasional police raids.
Our
culture is such that half of Americans probably think “If the money is good, so
what?” There is no thought given to the proper way to live and to relate to
people. There is no thought given to what such work does to the soul of this
woman. The American thinking process jumps to the bottom line of the financial
transaction, and declares victory if cash has changed hands. The woman is
“richer” so for them she is better off. These same people see the American
economy as rebounding. People are spending. Some people are getting rich.
What’s the problem?
When
everything is calculated in a purely financial light, we start to lose any
sense of decency or community. I saw the end result of this process when I
recently visited Philadelphia to look at properties. There are houses there
under $10,000. While checking out the neighborhoods where these properties are,
I made an astounding observation. Almost every block in these neighborhoods has
at least one abandoned home. These homes are impossible to miss because of the
state of disrepair they were in: porches or parts of roofs are literally
collapsed. As if there could be any question as to their status, the city posts
large warning signs when boarding them up. The visually offensive chartreuse or
neon orange signs warn that “trespassers” could end up spending two years in
jail. I wondered which the city had more of—abandoned houses or homeless
families. Sadly, I actually saw an occasional homeless person wander through
the area. I was tempted to go purchase them some tools and hardhats, and
organize a take-over of abandoned buildings by the homeless.
I got in
contact a friend who is well-connected in Philadelphia politics. I pressed him
with the obvious question: shouldn’t the city be teaching the homeless how to
fix up these abandoned eyesores that litter the urban landscape? His answer was
a resounding “No.” Apparently the city has to protect the rights of property
owners, who are hoping to turn a profit on these places. I wondered what kind
of financial alchemy could possibly turn a profit on ugly houses in depressed
neighborhoods that are in need of serious labor. It must have something to do
with “quantitative easing.”
At one
point during my Philadelphia adventure I walked toward an old abandoned factory
which, in a better city, would have been turned into hipster lofts, and I saw a
bookstore. I was overjoyed. The bookstore seemed like a beacon of light in this
dark ghetto—right until I got close enough to read what was painted in huge
letters on its wall. “We ship to prisons! Ask inside.” I didn’t. I already knew
these clever people were doing very brisk business. In the early 2000s I would
occasionally volunteer for Books Through Bars, an organization that sent donated
books to the incarcerated. Back then jailed people seemed somehow more distant.
As the end of the decade approached and I returned to America after living
abroad, the prison system seemed much closer. I lived with my mother
temporarily, and I would ride the bus to work. Every day, on the bus, I heard
men loudly discussing their parole officers on their cellphones. What I might
have overheard whispered in hushed voices in my childhood was now a subject the
transit riding public could hear about loud and clear, whether they wanted to
or not. Nor did the women seem any more reticent, as they discussed what they
were planning to do with their food stamps and benefit money. Even if I wore
earplugs I would not have been able to avoid hearing these people, or smelling
the drugs they occasionally lit in the back of the bus.
All life
seemed to revolve around the trifecta of prisons, handouts and drugs. Every few
days a van would park directly in front of our house before visiting “friends”
across the street. “What are they doing?” asked my mother angrily. “Dealing
drugs,” I would explain flatly. Based on their shiny new van, the dealers were
certainly doing better than I was. I was waiting to be credentialed as a
doctor, and worried about being unable to afford my bus rides to work. They
were making so much money they could eat endless restaurant-cooked meals in
their van and leave the trash on my mother’s front lawn. “I don’t know why the
police don’t do something about the fact… they are littering, LITTERING!!” my mother
would start screaming indignantly. “The police are in on the action,” I
informed her.
On a
recent trip home I noticed that the drug delivery van has left the
neighborhood. I wondered whether it was a sign of the times getting better or
worse. Are they getting better prices somewhere else? Have drugs finally become
an item for the middle class? Had the neighborhood demographics tipped it
toward prescription drug abuse? Sadly, one of the least probable possibilities
is that the police had actually done their job.
When
looking at a country as large and complex as the USA, one can make any number
of contradictory assertions and still be factually correct. The economy doing
extremely well, and the economy is going to hell. One need look no farther than
the banking industry to figure that out: the banks are bankrupt and require
bail-outs; the banks are doing well and making healthy profits. American banks
are in every way typical of American corporations: they are corrupt, reliant on
the government to subsidize and support them, and produce mind-boggling riches
for those that run them. At the bottom of the bank hierarchy are the tellers.
The polite, well dressed tellers wear conservative new clothes and jewelry.
They exude the kind of stability and class that reflects well on the banks. Yet
about a third of them earn little enough to qualify for public assistance. They
have joined the ranks of retail workers, restaurant workers, hotel workers and
other service industry personnel who must rely on the welfare system in order
to work. I suspect they will be joined by more and more recent college
graduates who can not actually earn a positive sum after subtracting their
student loan payments.
But rest
assured that from each and every payment or delinquency notice or collection
activity someone somewhere is making a profit. In this economy every action is
monetized, even our very socializing. As you randomly clicked around the
Internet to find this article, you generated income for tech companies. At some
point, as every last penny was pushed or pulled out of your pocket, you began
shifting from consumer to producer: you became a prosumer… and the machine that
is American capitalism milked more profit still from your existence. Your
eyeballs and clicks generated income based on some strange calculations by
marketers. American-style capitalism now has you in debt and producing for it
even as you consume, but that is now a middle class privilege, and no one is
forcing people to make these choices.
At the
bottom of the food chain are the forced producers. Those people are so broke
that they have become superfluous to the normative economy. They seem to be
channeled in one way or another into the prison system, where they become the
ultimate producers. Their very bodies create profits for prison corporations
simply by existing in prisons, while their arguably forced labor is compelled
at pennies on the dollar to produce cheap consumer goods. The American economy
seems to be succeeding at monetizing everything while producing fewer and fewer
goods or services of any real value to anyone but a few rich people profiting
off the entire system.
America’s
political economy has changed incrementally enough that many people have not
noticed what is really happening. It’s over for most of us. You can call it
collapse, or you can call it restructuring. You can even call it a recovery.
But you cannot call it sustainable, or pleasant. The overall trajectory is
toward decline, decay, destitution…
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