by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show I really wanted to watch last night, and which came on
at 10 p.m. after episode three of Emerald City lurched to its close, was an episode of the long-running ABC-TV series
20/20, hosted by Diane Sawyer,
rather awkwardly titled “My Reality: A Hidden America.” It’s actually the sort
of thing Bill Moyers used to do back when PBS still allowed him a forum, before
his private funding dried up and he was forced off the air (a development Fox
News star Bill O’Reilly welcomed with unrestrained and unconcealed glee:
instead of hailing Moyers as a talented journalist whom O’Reilly could respect
even though he disagreed with him, O’Reilly basically saw Moyers as yet another
scalp on the wall of an increasingly Right-wing media, yet one more liberal
voice silenced and one more bit of competition ended — these people are sore
losers and even sorer winners!): a series of interviews across America with
people who either once had middle-class lifestyles and have lost them, or were
raised to believe a middle-class existence was something they could attain if
they worked hard and played by the rules, only to discover the rules have
changed and the game has been permanently rigged to benefit the top 20 percent
of Americans. The people we meet include Chris Smith, a firefighter in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania who has to work three jobs, one as a firefighter and two as a paramedic,
to make ends meet and support his family; Maryland school aide Tracey Coleman,
whose husband used to have a good-paying unionized job and now scrapes together
however much money he can fixing air conditioners; Kathy Bessey, who moved into
the neighborhood where the fictional working-class icon Archie Bunker once
lived and has watched the price of those little row houses we remember from the
All in the Family credits rise to
$800,000; California resident Martha Smallens (I think I got her name right), who has to piece together a
living from four, count ’em, four
part-time jobs and who is scrambling to cover a 30 percent rent increase;
Ronnie Turner, also a Californian, who’s 55 years old and has to commute for
four hours each way to a job at Stanford University, where he’s a contract
employee who handles the shipments of food for the students; Terence Wise of
Kansas City, who works 16 hours a day at two fast-food jobs (one at Burger King
and one at McDonald’s) and after working at Burger King for 16 years still
makes just $8 per hour; Karen Thomas, who works 120 hours a week in health
care; the workers who clean the buildings where the big Silicon Valley
companies like Google, Apple and Facebook have their headquarters, some of whom
make so little they literally
sleep in their cars parked near the buildings where they work because they
can’t afford housing in those communities; Michael Johnson, another contract
worker who said he used to get
vacations, holidays and sick time until his employer took those benefits away
from him, one by one; 62-year-old Irma Alvarado, who has spent 28 years as a
janitor at Visa; and a segment on Americans who make all or part of their
livings by literally selling
their blood for plasma (mostly to foreign-owned companies who come to the U.S.
because the governments of their home countries have banned paid blood
donations).
What’s most amazing is that there is very little sense among most
of these people that there is anything they could do collectively to help their
own situations; the guy with fast-food jobs at Burger King and McDonald’s
joined the Fight for 15 movement to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per
hour, and the guy who was sleeping on an air mattress in his car outside the
Silicon Valley campuses he maintained was part of a union organizing drive, but
aside from those two exceptions all
of the people interviewed fatalistically accepted their lot, read self-help
books (at least the ones with the time to read at all), and still buy into the
American dream that if you work hard and strive as an individual, you will
succeed. One of the biggest political questions in this country’s history has
been why the American creed of
self-reliance and individual effort is so resilient that so many Americans
believe in it even though they’re being screwed over by an economy increasingly
run by and for the richest Americans. A related issue is why so many Americans
revere wealth and buy into the bullshit that the rich are rich because they’re
simply better than the rest of us
— many of Donald Trump’s voters cast their ballots for him because they figured that he’s a multi-billionaire and a
business success and therefore he’s possessed of greater intelligence and
sagacity than the rest of us peons and will be able to use his superior
mentality and brilliance to solve this nation’s problems. Diane Sawyer and her
interviewees did a good job chronicling how America has ceased to work economically
for a majority of its citizens, and a lousy job offering any solutions: in her
final segment she said that the people who will save the American dreams are
the capitalists (who, in real life, have moved so aggressively and persistently
to destroy it), pointing to people like Paul Jones, billionaire investor and
founder of Just Capital, and Mark Brabham, CEO of Aetna, who supposedly was
shocked when he actually talked to one of his janitors and realized just how
hard the guy was working for so little money. The idea that somehow capitalists
will grow consciences and be the solution to the problems they’ve created is at
least as old as Max Weber, who in books like The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism argued similarly
that the bad aspects of capitalism would be tamed by the capitalists’
collectively growing a social conscience (indeed one could trace it back even
further, to Charles Dickens, who wrote A Christmas Carol largely as an appeal to the moral consciences of the
capitalists of his time to be less greedy and more philanthropic). But the
logic of capitalism militates against altruism (though one could argue that a lot of the real world’s
capitalists have followed Ebenezer Scrooge’s career trajectory, spending the
first half of their lives viciously and greedily building fortunes and the
second half giving them away), and even if Jones, Brabham and the other
examples Diane Sawyer depicts are as good as she says they are, they’re going
to remain outliers.
If anything, this program shows just how totally the game
has become rigged, in which the ultra-rich have created an environment in which
not only the government is run the way they want it to (in order to get elected
at all, politicians have either to have or raise so much money that they never
are confronted with the concerns of the non-rich) but businesses themselves increasingly cater
to the most affluent consumers and really don’t need to address the needs of
anyone else. One statistic in the program is that American home ownership is at
a 50-year low because builders are constructing exclusively for the most
affluent buyers, and local governments are writing zoning laws in such a way
that only the affluent can afford homes — and whenever anyone tries to build affordable housing, they’re often met with
opposition from well-to-do “NIMBY’s” (“Not In My Back Yard”) residents who
lobby city councilmembers and community planners to deny permits on the ground
that lower-income people will bring dirt, disease and crime to their neighborhoods
and lower their property values. The simple fact is that America has become a
country that worships greed; instead of being shocked by the boorishness of
Donald Trump and the garish bad taste of his residents and developments, all
too many Americans look at him with awe and say to themselves, “That’s what I would do if I had his money.” Today’s American
ruling class has what all ruling
classes throughout history have wanted: not only a system rigged to make them
richer and more unassailable, but a population largely enculturated to regard
the system as it stands as the way it has to be and even (as Trump’s election demonstrated) with a blind faith
that the super-rich who are screwing them are the ones who will make it all
better.
