Fear and Loathing In Lost Wages

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His ‘Sacred Democracy’ columns are archived at readthedirt.org.

First off, a caveat: while you are likely reading this in December, I’m writing it in October, counting down to Halloween. This means you already know the outcomes of these nasty elections. I, on the other hand, will have turned this in on my deadline, several days before ballots are counted. Thus this dispatch is a kind of mini time capsule, or a message to the near future. And, ironically, not knowing the results may be an advantage.

Regular readers know I expect these elections to be pivotal in at least our near future, regarding how government is conducted, and I’ll have more to say on that in their aftermath. What I wish to say here, though, in this final column of 2014, reflects a larger question that should be on our lips no matter who wins this time around. Yes, fear and loathing in our society may be here to stay, but fear and loathing for whom? It’s easier to answer this at election time. Yet as I consider the question counting down to the ballot, I see not knowing the outcome as a metaphor: for it not being about this election anyway.

What I’ve called “trickledown polarization” has hold of the hearts and minds of our country’s most-dependable political base, the cult of Republican voters. And as the country’s most monolithic bloc, they’re also the least discerning—as monolithic blocs tend to be. What does it take to cause Americans to fear fellow citizens to the point of such loathing? It helps that they get their moral instructions from upstairs, where trickle-down begins. It’s “what’s the matter with Kansas.” We can’t bite the hand that feeds us.

Not even if we’re fed empty calories, though? It doesn’t just mean junk food, but junk ideas, history, science and religion. Junk is what folks can increasingly afford these days, given the lessening, or loss of their wages. But junk is what we are conditioned to desire as well: tasty, addictive and totally detrimental to our health. Meanwhile, a diet of nutritious ideas, history, science and religion (the wages of a living democracy) is harder to find. Folks at all levels are suffering the loss of self-certainty—losing their way, really, either personally or as classes of people—no longer seeing themselves as useful contributors paid a fair wage for an honest day’s work. In a culture of judgment by labels, what prouder label can there be than our work? It’s natural to think we are what we do. And without our wages, what are we? More and more people are discovering the answer.

Whether we believe we have a salary, or investments, or property, or a pension, or an inheritance, or just good old Social Security, it’s all just wages. And we’re learning that our claims to these entitlements are as fragile as the outcomes of our elections.

Chalk it up to the capitalist machinations of a corporate empire, including those agribusinesses feeding folks and their families a menu of unnatural edibles. Processed “foods” are by definition unnatural, with additives that are chronically inflammatory. Yet we’ve known since Edward Bernaise that we can be fed toxic information as well, which chronically inflames our fears and loathings. Consumers aren’t addicted only to sugar and other processed chemicals, but to feelings and thoughts of contempt. Junk facts, ideas, and promises stir our attitudes to a fever pitch. Who wouldn’t be fired up for some fear and loathing if one day they’d up and lost their wages? Our wages and the withholding of them have become weapons being used against us. But who is doing the withholding?

Workers who lose their wages rarely wonder how it came to this in the first place. They want only to get their wages back, which is perfectly natural. The history of money and who controls it is the last thing most of us should need to know. Just tell me whether there is employment a person is qualified to perform and does it pay a living wage. Isn’t that all a citizen should need to know? Well, sixty years ago, maybe. And forgive me for waxing nostalgic about the late fifties-early sixties, but on entering the working world then you could do nicely on eighty bucks a week, and you hadn’t mortgaged your future wages for your college degree. This isn’t the sixties, though. How do things look now?

You mean, when the answer to those questions is a scarifying no? Aren’t people hurting everywhere? And of course they are, but let’s hold on for a second and ask a more important question. Shouldn’t we be a bit more judicious with our loathing? Shouldn’t the profiteers of injustice be taking the blame, and not our fellow sufferers?

Behold the vicious cycle: Capital squeezes labor by downsizing, outsourcing, bankruptcy and union busting. Middle class workers enter the ranks of the jobless with growing dismay. Fear and fury boil the spleens of the newly underemployed, spawning resentment for others they’re competing with over scraps. Then soon, bits of additional emotional re-direction are engineered by media-savvy money-moguls, slickly shifting responsibility for our woes to the “liberal elite” pulling the strings to an “over-reaching” government, which grants entitlements to unworthy “takers” in the name of their socialist, Kenyan-Hawaiian-Indonesian “president”. Naturally, loyal bloc-members spring quickly to action and cast their vote for some robotic, ALEC-member, Koch Bros.-funded climate-change denier who thinks just like Michelle Bachman and is proud of it.

Meanwhile the counterparts of these cultists on the political spectrum are either liberal voters disenfranchised by electoral trickery, or else they’re disaffected liberals, registered Democrats who’d have voted progressive if they had. They’ve forsaken the search for an honest politician, though, and thrown in the towel on our Democracy. They believe that votes should only be rewards. But shouldn’t they also be challenges?

And shouldn’t abstention be the final option, given what looms on the national horizon? Perhaps avoiding the ballot box was a less destructive gesture back in the day, but right now it is throwing in the towel. Or, a bit less figuratively: it is forking over our democracy to the corporations. Have we thoroughly thought out the consequences of surrendering all branches of our national government to the Republicans, who are the political functionaries of the would-be slave-owning class of the 21st Century? (Let’s not mince words here.) And let me say it again, it may well be too late to stop them anyway.

If the Republicans take the Senate this week, not to mention lots of state houses, it will be a critical loss in the one-sided war between David and Goliath. Yet it will hardly have slowed down the advancement of the enemy. Because Goliath controls the wages.

So I don’t need to know who won this time to whimper, Good luck, America.

Because what happens in lost wages, stays in lost wages.

Just thinking…