Who
doesn’t want to think that they are a good human being? That they are a person
of good intentions, clear conscience, fair-minded, generous, loving, and
merciful? On the other hand, who wants to be a loser?
The
current political predicament in the USA has America’s winners turned losers
and the consequent pain of that flip-flop has propelled the new designated
losers into a fury of moral indignation. The deplorable Trump insurgents were
supposed to be put in their place on November 8, 2016 — stuffed back into their
reeking WalMarts — but instead, their champion with his gold-plated hair-do
presides over the nation in the house where Lincoln, The Roosevelts, and
Hillary lived. “Winning…!” as the new president likes to tweet.
What a
revoltin’ development, as Chester A. Riley used to say on “The Life of Riley” TV show
back in 1955, when America was great (at least that’s the theory). Riley was an
original deplorable before the concept even emerged from the murk of early pop
culture. He worked in an aircraft factory somewhere in southern California,
which only a few decades prior was the mecca of an earlier generations of
losers: the Oakies and other Dust Bowl refugees who went west to pick fruit or
get into the movies.
Chester A.
Riley supported a family on that job as a wing-riveter. All the male characters
in the series had been through the Second World War, but were so far removed
from the horror that the audience never heard about it. That was the point: to
forget all that gore and get down with the new crazes for backyard barbeque,
seeing the USA in your Chevrolet, enjoying that healthful pack
of Lucky Strikes in the valley of the Jolly Green Giant… double your pleasure,
double your fun… and away go troubles down the drain….
As
Tom Wolfe pointed out eons ago, the most overlooked feature of post-war
American life was the way that the old US peasantry found themselves living
higher on the hog than Louis the XVI and his court at Versailles. Hot and cold
running water, all the deliciously engineered Betty Crocker cake you could eat,
painless dentistry, and Yankees away games on Channel 11, with Pabst Blue
Ribbon by the case! By 1960 or so, along came color TV and air-conditioning,
and in places like Atlanta, St. Louis, and Little Rock, you barely had to go
outside anymore, thank God! No more heat stroke, hookworm, or chiggers.
It
was a helluva lot better than earlier peasant classes had it, for sure, but
let’s face it: it was kind of a low-grade nirvana. And a couple of generations
beyond “The Life of Riley” the whole thing has fallen apart. There are few
hands-on jobs that allow a man to support a family. And what would we even mean
by that? Stick the women back in kitchen and the laundry room? What a waste of
human capital (even for socialists who oppose capital). The odd thing is that
there is increasingly little for this class of people to do besides stand near
the door of the WalMart, and if the vaunted tech entrepreneurs of this land
have their way with robotics, you can be sure there would be less than nothing
for them to do… except crawl off and die quietly, without leaving an
odoriferous mess.
What
political commentator has failed to notice that the supposed savior of this
peasant class is himself a sort of shabby version of Louis XVI, with his gilded
toilet seats, brand-name pomp, and complex hair? A happy peasantry needs a good
king, and that is the role Mr. Trump seems to have cast himself in. I assume
that he wants very earnestly to be considered a good person, though all his
efforts to demonstrate that have been startlingly clumsy and mostly
ineffective.
The one
thing he has truly accomplished is driving his opponents in the overclass out
of their gourds with loathing and resentment. (The term, overclass was minted, I believe by the excellent
essayist Michael Lind.) It’s a wonderfully inclusive term
in that it describes basically everyone who is not in the underclass — that
now-dreadful realm of tattooed diabetics moiling in the war memorial
auditoriums and minor league ball parks for their hero and leader to descend
like Deus ex Machinain the presidential helicopter to remind
them how much they’re winning.
Meanwhile,
the class of former winners-turned-losers — the Silicon Valley executives, the
Hollywood movers and shakers, the Brooklyn Hipsters, the Ivy League faculties,
the Deep State guideline writers, the K-Street consultants, the yoga ladies of
Fairfield County, Connecticut, the acolytes of Oprah Winfrey and Elizabeth
Warren — resort to righteous litigation in their crusade to restore the proper
order of rule in this land. When they come to power, the shining city will be
at hand….
I
kind of doubt it. The truth is, all current winners and losers are living in
the shadow of a financial system that doesn’t really work anymore, because it
doesn’t represent the reality of wealth that is no longer there. The
consolation, perhaps, is that there will be plenty for all those who survive
the collapse of that system to do when the time comes. But it will be in a disposition
of things and of power that we can’t possibly recognize from where we stand
these days.
Save the Date: Sunday, Sep 16th from 10am-4pm
Place: NYC Seminar
& Conference Center, 71 West 23rd Street, Suite
515, NYC
Join
me (JHK), David Stockman, Chris Martenson & Adam Taggart in New York City
for an intimate 6-hour discussion primarily focused on our forecasts for the
Economy and the financial markets, with special emphasis on the biggest threats
that could trigger a major correction, as well as the key crash indicators
we’re all watching most closely. We’ll also explore the many growing Energy,
Environmental and Social Disorder risks in today’s world — as well as provide ample
time to address your most burning questions.