There is no respect for real learning or an appreciation of the effort it takes to understand things. No doubt diehard fundamentalist religious beliefs function in a similar manner. As substitutes for thinking. I know from my many years of teaching undergraduates that the typical U.S. college graduate must certainly be the least knowledgeable in the world. The right-wingers rail against all the left-wingers on campus, but they have little to worry about. In the United States thoughtlessness rules, and bar talk is king. And in the meantime, the rich keep getting rich, with wealth that would have put john D. Rockefeller to shame. They flaunt their riches like the robber barons of yore. We met a man at my book talk in Santa Fe (at Garcia Street Books, where we drew a good crowd, thanks to the good pr done by owner Ed Borins—a real gentleman—and Monthly Review intern Scott Borchert) from Johnstown. He knew all the old streets, bars, and names I knew so well from my thirty-two years at the college there. He had been a teacher, but he eventually got into financial planning. He and a friend generously took us to dinner, and he told us some interesting things about money. He travels to Washington DC each year and stays in a hotel there. He has noticed over the past couple of years that hotel prices have skyrocketed throughout the city. He began to ask hotel managers why. He was told that the huge sums of money being devoted to anti-terrorism are the main culprit. National security firms and consultants are on the public dole, scamming the government, no doubt in collusion with public officials who will probably soon be on their payrolls, and they go about their thefts, staying in fine hotel accommodations in such numbers that hotels, wanting to get in on the action, jack up their prices. Then the contractors submit a cost plus 20 percent bill to the taxpayers. Makes you feel more secure, doesn’t it? Our new friend also told us about some of the extravagances of the rich he had discovered. It is very difficult to buy the most luxurious automobiles (Certain models of Ferrari and Mercedes Benz, for example) unless you are prepared for a two or more year wait. Their order books are overflowing. The super-rich are buying enormous private jets, and their less wealthy class-mates are leasing planes, often in club-like arrangements, with yearly fees just to belong running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I suppose the jets are badly needed, since I read recently that the rich now send their kids to summer camp in them; bus rides are just too traumatic. There is a growing market for truly gigantic ships as well, sometimes complete with “shadow” boats, refitted tugs in which the larger ships crew can bunk down. You can’t have the help sleep in the same boat as the hired hands. Meanwhile the U.S. labor movement won’t get out front in a campaign for national healthcare. And parents keep saying that their kids who died in Iraq were “doing what they loved.” I’ll bet the contractors staying in hotel penthouses cry themselves to sleep every night.
Let’s all just work our crappy jobs, come home, flip on the TV, drink and medicate ourselves to sleep, and tune in the bedside radio to Art Bell.
Michael Yates