(10/10)
(This is the
second in a series starting with the essay “Scary Economic Stuff” and ending
with the essay “The Excrement Hits the Fan”)
I have an ex wife
who is English. We met in
Spain
many years ago and lived together in the States for about 4 years before the
bliss lost its luster and our erotic impulses led us back into the idiocy of
the human burlesque. She stayed on in
America
for another few years, living various and sundry adventures culminating in the
birth of a child and her return to
England
as a single mother fleeing
a disastrous second marriage. But the story has a happy ending.
Before
proceeding, it is relevant to note my ex does not come from a wealthy family.
As I’ll mention later in this essay, although there does not seem to be that
many really poor people in England, money is an issue and nobody is using it to
light the fireplace. In spite of this, and surely due to her own grit and
determination, my ex, with the help of her “mum”, raised a child, worked, and
went back to school.
Saying she “went
back to school” is a bit of an understatement. She eventually earned a PhD in
child psychology and has been holding down an important position at a large
university for many years. She has become a well known authority in her field.
She lectures PhD candidates. She collaborates and publishes with other renowned
researchers all over the globe. The English government pays for her opinions on
educational matters. What she is is a big deal academic. When we were married,
she was selling tickets for a numb nuts tourist attraction where I live, and,
although she was never a dim witted person, showed no inclination for what was
just described above (who does?). Her story made me ask myself the following
question: being that public education in the United States has been in a
downward spiral for many years now, its funding being less and less adequate to
maintain acceptable standards; and being that the cost of higher education
continues being less and less accessible for more and more people, could my ex
wife accomplish what she has in the United States of America, the so called
land of opportunity?
After a hiatus of
17 years, my ex got in touch with me last spring. We began exchanging E-mails
and she eventually invited me to stay with her in
England
, something I did for 2
weeks in July. It was a splendid visit and I’d like to talk about what I saw in
England
and how it relates to the economic “crisis” our financial-political elites
claim it is.
I’d been to
England
before
knowing my English wife and became more familiar with it during our marriage.
I’ve always been not just fond of this country in a visitor’s kind of way, but
impressed with its ability to bring some semblance of its economic success to
almost all its people. The early post WWII Labor governments created a social
safety net that is, in spite of Margaret Thatcher’s best efforts, still
primarily in place today. After about 15 years of absence, I was eager to see
this country in a post economic crisis world.
For one with the
intellectual curiosity to truly delve into the reality of a different place,
staying with my ex was a big advantage. To live
England
through a native’s
perspective, in a regular neighborhood, through the daily routine of someone
who lives there, is the only way to learn something about a foreign place. On
the contrary, in spite of all the guided tours and programmed curriculums, the
person who probably gets the most jaded, superficial, mistaken concept of a
strange place’s true reality, is a tourist.
Considering what
is going on in the
United States
right now, where we seem to be on the verge of a civil war between the forces
of light and darkness,
England
impressed me more than ever.
My ex lives in
the
Newcastle
area.
Newcastle
is a big city (its metropolitan area surely runs into the millions) whose
original fortune ran through Lord Grey and his tea empire. It eventually became
the focal point of the Industrial Revolution’s coal industry, some of whose
abandoned “collieries” can still be seen today. When coal became an outmoded
form of wealth accrual,
Newcastle experienced an
economic decline similar to
America
’s
suffering “rust belt” cities in
Ohio,
Michigan,
Indiana
and such. It is not unreasonable for the educated traveler to expect a
depressed, corroding, declining place in the face of
such history.
Nothing could be
further from the truth.
Before ever
meeting my English wife, I’d first been to
Newcastle about 25 years ago. Even then, with
the last dying embers of its coal mining past going out, it was well on its way
to somewhere new, well on its way to the vibrant, attractive city and
metropolitan area I found today. I’m not sure what kind of commercial
enterprises are fueling this vibrancy, but I do know this: public money and
governmental stimulus play a huge role in it.
In all the great
democracies of
Western Europe, the government
has always played a more active role in what we might call the “common good”.
American propaganda translates this into a loss of personal freedom, something
my extensive travels in this part of the world has not put in evidence. People
here express themselves, seek happiness, and go about their business in as open
and flexible a society as can be found anywhere. Perhaps the most basic aspect
of human freedom, that being the right to professional medical care when the
need arises, has been guaranteed to them for so long now, it is no longer an
issue. Compare this to the vicious slander and anxiety this issue causes in an
American society strangling in corporate self interest, and one has to ask just
who is free and who is not. In
Europe,
government is not considered an oppressive force limiting its citizen’s
possibilities, but a partner in promoting a more generalized well bring. Like
anything else, it does not always work perfectly, but that is the theory. In
America
, the
theory itself has been discredited by selfish corporate interests. In
America
,
we can’t even get to the point where it could be let to work.
The “common good”
can be seen in the vitality of the
Newcastle
area, a vitality surely spurred on by government infrastructure investment in
an area that had to reinvent itself when its coal tit went dry. The finest
example of this can be seen in the urban core of the city. For perhaps a 15
square block area in the city’s center, there is no access for private
vehicles. All the public ways have been beautifully turned into pedestrian
walkways that are totally integrated with the commercial enterprise and public
transport that unobtrusively weaves and wends its way through the city and
connects it efficiently to its outlying areas. All this conspires in limiting
automobile use.
My ex lives in
suburban
Newcastle
but works in this urban center. Her daily routine consists of a 15 minute drive
to a well maintained metro station where adequate parking is provided. She then
boards a train that takes her comfortably to her destination in about 20
minutes. This use of public transport helps minimize the stress and anxiety so
assaulting the American psyche on the clogged highways of their commute. I saw
nary a traffic jam in 2 weeks residence in this area, not because people do not
have cars, but because they’ve been conditioned to get about in a different
way. The infrastructure for this conditioning has been provided in an efficient
manner. All of it, including the roads for private automobile use, is well
marked, well maintained, and adequate for the purpose it serves.
About a month ago,
I was in
New York City
for about a week. The state of the extensive highway grid that serves the city
was so appalling that one of the taxi drivers I rode with knew where the worst
of the bumps and potholes were and chose his lanes in advance accordingly. As
usual, the traffic was depressingly dense, in spite of the fact that in just
New York City alone there could be more miles of limited
access, 6, 8, and 10 lane highway extravaganzas, than in all of
England
. In the
post WWII era, American socio-political policy so encouraged automobile use
(thank you Big Oil and Big Auto Co’s.) the demand has outstripped our ability
to provide the proper infrastructure for it.
One of the true
barometers of a country’s health is its infrastructure.
England
, not just in
Newcastle but wherever I’ve been, seemed more
than adequate in this sense. If I can give equal time to some negativity, it
would land squarely upon
London’s
Gatwick
Airport,
which was the same mish-mash of confusion and jury rigged “solutions” I’d always
remembered it for, as well as the local airport in
Newcastle, which seemed inadequate for the
volume of people it handled. But airports are at the top of the public service
food chain, something that affects less people less of the time. In the broader
context of massive public infrastructure --- roads, subways, buses, high speed
trains, schools, parks and common grounds, recreational facilities, etc. ---
England gets very passing marks.
But the social
safety net
England
has provided its people is a more direct influence on their lives. Without even
mentioning the access to medical attention all Brits are born into, there are a
varying array of housing subsidies and stipends, as well as livable pensions
for the enfermed and elderly, things that would be sneeringly denigrated as
handouts or “entitlements” by right wing fakirs and palm readers in
America
. But it
all depends on how you interpret these things.
Nothing is for
free. Everything has to be paid for. Almost everyone receiving these benefits
has paid in. They’ve generally worked all their lives. They’ve either been
taxed, paid in, or both, for these
safety net services. Every time somebody buys something, they are paying taxes
as well as providing revenue for others that will be taxed. It is a huge pile
of wealth all working people have not only paid into, but helped to create. You
can turn “entitlement” into a dirty word, as it has been in
America
, but
everyone, in one way or another, has paid in. You can divide this huge pile up
any way you want. If you choose to divvy it up so more people at the bottom
have less and less to live on, you can. You can divvy it up so that a few
people at the top have more. You can make a lot more people desperate and a few
more people richer. But, with few exceptions, we’ve all paid in. In the end,
the country that divvies it up in a way that rewards more people is the better
country.
It is incorrect
to judge a country by how many rich people it has. A more accurate reading as
to well being is to examine how few poor or desperate people it has. This is an
indication of a good foundation and you don’t build a durable, strong house
from the top down. If the foundation at the bottom is strong, the wealth at the
top will take care of itself. The converse is not true. A rotten foundation
will not support that ostentatious bloom of wealth at the top forever. Its
existence is always in peril.
England
, like
anywhere else in the world, is far from perfect. There are still class
distinctions that could have more flexibility. Surely there are people that
play the system shrewdly who exact public funds they don’t deserve. But ---
I’ve traveled far and wide through the
United
Kingdom
in my life and can hardly remember seeing the
large swaths of socio-economic dysfunction seen so routinely, especially in
urban areas, in the
United
States
. It’s hard to find places with
dilapidated, substandard housing. It’s hard to find educational facilities
unfit for children to attend. It’s hard to find neighborhoods you’d feel unsafe
in or that you would not want to enter. It’s hard to find the kind of gangs and
lawlessness, the kinds of violence and sadism, the kinds of family breakdown
and disrespect for authority and education that so permeates so many places in
the
United States
.
England
has a good foundation, but
there are people trying to undermine it, just like everywhere else in the
neo-liberal, capitalist world.
And now we get to
the scary part.
Although the
disease is more acute in the
United
States
, the global corporate-financial
elites at the tip of the economic pyramid have the same agenda everywhere. Their
primary target for destruction; the bulls eye for their selfish greed has
always been this wonderful social safety net that has done so much good in
Western Europe and whatever concept of it that exists in the United States. They
do not like it. They never want to pay their fair share in. They do not like
the idea of a Social Contract. They want neither worker organization nor
governmental refereeing in an attempt to protect the weak from the strong. They
want unlimited power to pay what they want, both in wages and taxes. They want
no supervision of business practices, environmental stewardship, competitive
mechanisms, or anything else incumbent on how they go about their business.
They argue the “market” will correct all negativity, a concept so
ludicrous for anyone paying attention, I won’t delve into it here. In short,
butt out! Just watch our commercials on TV, it’s obvious, we are wonderful.
Hang on; I’m
getting to the scary part.
In the 2 weeks I
lived with my ex, I saw a goodly amount of media information, mainly from the
BBC. And it was like a steady, monotonous, Ringo Starr drumbeat; it was like an
Ohm-like mantra or hypnotic swinging pendulum --- we must cut spending, cut
pensions, cut subsidies, tighten our belts, reign in services, get ready, we
are all in this together, do your part, help us get through this, suck it up,
cooperate, take it up the ass, like a good Englishman, because we can’t, we
can’t, we can’t ---
And I could feel
it sinking in. Yeah, we can’t, we can’t --- And I thought, y’know, these
bastards, they finally have us just where they want us. Their reckless greed
destroyed the global economy and now, after the rest of us saved their asses,
they are using it as an excuse to finally destroy the #1 target on their hit
list, this Social Contract safety net they’ve been trying to destroy for
generations. And they are trying to destroy it just when we need it most,
because they screwed up so
bad! And they keep drumming away: we can’t, we can’t --- and the people start
to think, we can’t, we can’t ---
It’s scary.
But, as that
great sage Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ‘til its over”. And that brings me to the last essay in this series, “The Excrement Hits
the Fan”.
