CONTOURS: EDD DE 1101 I

There are so many metaphors for being unemployed. My preference is a burial scenario. You are being buried and the earth keeps getting piled upon you deeper and deeper until you eventually stop trying to dig your way out. It becomes your early grave. Might as well just stay in there. When the economy eventually does improve, 43% of those 13.9 million long-term unemployed Americans may very likely remain buried as the new sidewalks of hope are poured right over them. The new armies with stars and dollar signs in their eyes will blindly stagger along going in and out of gold-plated doors, making their way around the Monopoly board until the next recession—roughly every ten years.

You know what I’d rather write about? Listening to Ryan Adams play an acoustic version of “Wasted Years” by Iron Maiden. Then I listened to Iron Maiden’s original. Now I’m listening to the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia.” There’s one we all know and love. They’ve actually got some nice tunes that seem like they could be the soundtrack for the class warfare that’s being talked about.

That’s right, class warfare. It was relevant back then and it’s relevant again now. The Republicans don’t like the term because it insults their friends, the millionaires and billionaires, the supposed “job creators.”

As to the music, it’s actually relevant, too, because the late-seventies was when the middle class began to notice that their line on the graph was flattening out while the line for the top tier was dramatically turning upward. What the current economy reveals is that the fiscal practices and policies begun in the late-seventies have severely weakened the base upon which capitalism depends: an economically-viable majority…as opposed to an unstable, vulnerable majority, which is what we have now.

The concept of class warfare becomes relevant whenever the gap between the top and the bottom becomes too wide. Historically, Americans have always been able to tolerate dramatic and obvious divisions between classes. And the lower and middle classes have usually been willing to go along with the status quo, or at least, they’ve been forced to go along with it. Until it becomes unsustainable, which is what we are seeing now. You know things are bad when the usually comfortable white people are out protesting! Americans can tolerate it when the poverty divisions are along racial lines, but sadly, when enough white people start to fall to the bottom, that’s when you start to see a fundamental shift.

Generally, large numbers of people of any color protesting makes people at the top very nervous. Interestingly, Republicans have been quick to accuse Democrats of waging class warfare when it is suggested that the top economic tiers pay more in taxes. But by definition, class warfare isn’t waged from the bottom. Class warfare is what the top, in collaboration with the politicians they bought, have been waging against the bottom for the last thirty years. And for another musical reference, this is why disco gave way to angry punk rock.