Joe Bageant: 'The beauty of the system'

A tale of shipping, blackmail and slow death in the lost Cul de Sac

Joe Bageant

America is a dark half continent of grotesque notions made manifest, such as
Scientology, the GOP and the MacDonald's "Big Bowl" meal. Americans seem to
possess psychic flypaper that attracts strange unsavory notions. Worse yet,
we act upon them.

One notion we got into our heads right after World War II was that each
generation must live better than the previous one. Not such a bad idea at
the time, considering the number of folks in the previous generation who
grew up during the Depression and knew what it was like to scratch with the
chickens to survive. Consequently, the post-war generation was more than
satisfied with a 900-square foot home, a refrigerator, a television, a car
and presentable clothing--any of which beat the hell out of drafty outhouses
and scarlet fever. Throw in the GI bill entitlement for vets and you're
looking at a pretty nice package for the post-war generation who brought us
the baby boom and the two-ton, 17-foot 1954 Ford Customline 8 sedan. Further
excess was inescapable. As Cotton Mather might well have said, had he the
benefit of blasting down America's new interstates with a Chesterfield
dangling from his lips and a cold Pabst in his pale Protestant claw, "BRING
IT ON!"

And so here we are sixty years after the Big War with an expanded American
sense of middle class entitlement. Ramcharged by extreme American capitalism
and abetted by the carnie barkers of Madison Avenue, everyone in the middle
class now feels entitled to the full-blown suburban lifestyle, every last
digitized, lowfat, high density, energy sucking bit of it. It all starts
with a college degree. Then in return for knocking down those hard earned Cs
in university business or technical schools, the children and grandchildren
of people who thought a big closet was one so deep you could reach your
entire arm into it ("That sucker must be two feet deep Helen! Now THAT'S
storage!") feel entitled to 3,000-4,000 square-foot houses. And forget the
lone old family wagon. The suburban middle class expects a car for every
family member, not to mention an investment portfolio, several household
cell phones, multiple television screens, (36 percent of buyers under age 35
rated having a "home theater" as important or very important in their lives,
according to National Association of Home Builders), multiple baths, central
air conditioning, DVD players, washer-dryer combinations, laptops, iPods,
answering machines, MP3 players, patio furniture, outdoor gas barbecues,
digital cameras, car audio, security and navigational systems, microwave
ovens, camcorders, HDTV receivers, satellite systems, VCRs, Xbox
controllers, water purifiers, coffee/espresso maker combos, closet
organizers, software, mountain bikes, camping and hiking equipment,
software....

Phew! I can remember a time when my wife and I felt upscale because we
bought a Sunbeam blender--one of those solid chrome plated babies with the
heavy glass 34-ounce jar. Hoooweee! Invite the neighbors. Banana smoothies
for everybody!

At any rate, Americans now have entire rooms specialized by appliance such
as entertainment systems, home computers, and exercise equipment... It was
not inevitable that we would arrive at such a point. It took a helluva lot
of public greed and capitalist sucker-bait to make us the very spoiled and
dangerous porcine folk we have become, people whose lives under the Empire
constitute the most extreme material luxury and wealth the world has ever
known, and the most oppressive and nihilistic one from a global standpoint.

Still, it's not easy being an upscale suburban white middle class American.
There is a certain amount of guilt involved. (Cut to forty million black
Americans laughing hysterically.) Waking up to suburban life's true global
cost is like finding out that you have a hundred slaves in some unseen place
on the other side of the world making your clothing, working in your mines
and harvesting your Gevelia coffee. It's more than a conundrum. It's a moral
confrontation with real justice and values. Jefferson had the same conflict
about his slave ownership. He never came to grips with it either. Old Tom
never freed that piece of side action, Sally Hemmings. Nor are we about to
demand freedom for the sweatshop slaves who turn endangered nyatoh
rainforest trees into Sears "classic and timeless patio furniture." Who is
gonna turn down an Everyday Martha Stewart Stockbridge 5-Piece Bistro set
for a hundred and fifty bucks? "Fuck the eco-kooks, what they need is a good
bath and a character-building hitch in the Marines, preferably in Iraq." Of
course we never say such things. We never even think them. We don't think at
all when the in-laws are coming in from the West Coast and we need that
patio set for entertaining. The renunciation of earthly goods is no easy
thing if your father-in-law fought his way across Italy I the Big War, then
came home to work 70 hours a week building up a business so you could "have
it better than we had it," and is damned proud of the way his kids and
grandkids are flourishing in what he considers a consumer paradise of goods
and opportunities. What's to renounce? "Life is good here in Brambleton.
"Hell, why don't you kids get a Hummer? You have the children's safety to
think of, you know." "Yes dad, we thought about a Hummer, but we're holding
off for GM's new Huey commuter model helicopter gunship."

Is this heaven Paw? No, it's Brambleton

The above dialogue may be a parody, but Brambleton is a real place. And
today I am passing through it under the slowly arching mid-morning sun,
which seems to be the only moving thing today in this development Northern
Virginia development. There is not a human or even a car in sight down the
long wide streets, just a crystallized silence occasionally nicked by the
chirp of an unseen sparrow. My rusted out 18-year-old Toyota truck moving
slowly along the streets, with its oxidized paint and a dead air conditioner
sticking up from its bed gives all the more impression of some post
apocalyptic scene from a not-quite-nameable film. A distinct eeriness
pervades the sculpted green landscape and its too-bluish precast artificial
stone retaining walls and artlessly placed trees, as though it were a movie
set about to be torn down any minute, an illusion created for the moment.
And in a way it is. Even something as timeless as a tree becomes a prop in
places like Brambleton; they will be landfill in a few years because several
feet of top and subsoil were scraped during site preparation. Trees won't
ultimately survive in what's left, no matter how much mulch, fertilizer and
watering is done. But they look OK now in a place where the average house is
six years old, in a planned community with no communal memory, no sense of
time's trajectory in which one can sense a future, or a common weal except
through changes in real estate prices. CNN Money has called this place, 29
miles west of Washington D.C., one of the best places to live in America.

The cost of living in Loudon County's Ashburn, of which Brambleton is but
one of 60 such communities, is 76%% above the national average, with houses
running between $600,000 and $1.2 million. Which is why I commute to work in
Loudoun County from Winchester, for a $40,000 a year job so I can live in a
town that is only 41%% above the national average, according Forbes (or 2%%
below average if you believe the local Chamber of Commerce.) Still, Forbes
calls Winchester one of the "best places," despite that the median household
income is only $34,335, and 13.2%% of the population is below the poverty
line. Evidently, Forbes and CNN Money give a helluva lot of weight to the
Washington Redskins and the contemplative benefits of sitting in snarled
traffic twice a day.

They may be right about the latter. Sitting in jammed traffic ignoring chest
pains offers me time to speculate on the lives in these 4,000- and even
15,000-square-foot houses with four- and even six-car garages. For example,
often as not, one entire side of these houses are windowless or nearly so.
What the hell do they do in those windowless spaces? Entertain themselves,
surely, but how? I imagine all sorts of strange sexual devices at play,
though I'm sure it comes down simply to darkened rooms with entertainment
centers and big plasma TV screens, the kind that have built-in cooling
systems of their own. What the hell kind of television needs its own cooling
system? "Holy fuck, it's a plasma meltdown! Heather! Call 911! Get the kids
into the shelter!

Or I speculate on the sheer number of shopping centers in Ashburn alone--Old
Ashburn Square, Cameron Chase Village Center, Ashburn Farm Village Center,
Ashburn Farm Town Center, Ashburn Village Center, Broadlands Center, Truro
Parish, Broadlands Village Center, Ashburn Town Square, Loudoun Valley, Old
Town Shopping Center, University Center... and more under construction.
Ashburn has only 50,000 people for god sake. And Loudoun County has dozens
of other centers besides Ashburn's.

It's a shopper's dream all right. There is a Buddhist principle to the
effect that the dream also dreams the dreamer. And that's what happened with
the American Dream, which is why we are all sleepwalking through this
escalating nightmare of meaninglessness, unable to shake ourselves awake.

How much unnecessary and meaningless shopping is humanly possible under the
spell of The American Dream? Obviously a lot. Enough at least to make it
"one of America's top national pastimes." According to the Roper Center for
Public Opinion Research--whores to the last man, I can tell you from my
magazine work experience, but nevertheless pretty straight in their broader
national reports--66%% of Americans see mere browsing as an important leisure
experience and 73%% prefer to shopping at shopping centers to catalogues, TV
or online. Roper recommends that stores further reinforce shopping as a
leisure activity as a hedge against the current economic uncertainty.
Americans continue to be optimistic about their futures--almost
three-quarters (73%%) expressed general optimism about their personal
futures--but optimism about the economy is down slightly (off five points
since February). This is the time to build and strengthen relationships and
loyalty, just in case the economy does continue to weaken."

In other words, three-quarters of Americans actually believe that if the
economy goes to tits up they won't be affected. So marketers and retailers
are advised to keep luring them in and blowing smoke up their asses as long
as the wind holds out.

Middle class consumers will bend over for the smoke job. Face it. There
seems to be no defense whatsoever from shopping when it comes to the
suburban middle class, except the direst sort of poverty and bankruptcy. Now
I consider myself a socialist who tries to avoid needless consumption. "Yea,
sure buddy. And Godzilla is a vegetarian." But if you are living in America,
even the implied material modesty of socialism will not save you from
shopping. Even foreign-born citizens raised in nobler, more ascetic creeds
go down under American consumerism like wheat before the scythe. Ever watch
a naturalized Indian matron with that black dot on her forehead when a blue
light special kicks in at K-Mart? "Set of three Country Floral Kitchen
Towels, just $5.99!" I'm here to tell you dear hearts, Mama Abja's sari
bursts into a furious orange blur and you'd best get out of her way.

Not that I am any better than Mama Abja. When I pass a music store with
guitars in the window, I need at least a set of strings, despite that I have
10 new sets at home. A sale on men-with-big-beer gut trousers at the mall
can also nail me. Like the folks in Brambletom, I'm fucked, though on a
smaller budget. This desire to buy stuff, just about any kind of stuff,
seems to be universal. Last spring I watched a Mayan woman in full native
costume at a Belizean flea market buy a used Bun and Thigh Max, doubtlessly
an American castoff. Whatever did she need that for? She packs those baskets
around on her head all day, chops wood or totes kerosene to cook every
damned tortilla her family eats, surely walks a few miles a day in the
course of village work life. And she needs a Thigh Max?" The detritus of
American junk capitalism seems to be coming down just about everywhere on
the planet.

All of this has reshaped America politically. For starters, these tribes of
the consumer savannah lands are never liberals, regardless of their claimed
political allegiances. Certainly not here alongside Washington DC at the
heart of power, influence, financial regulation an lawmaking and the defense
contracting business. They have benefited immensely from the
"financializing" and militarization of our economy. These are the winners of
the in the national "lifestyle" game, and they will vote for whoever looks
most likely to keep raw materials and goods flowing from the far-flung
corners of the Empire, even if it must be done at gunpoint (which is known
as establishing democracy around the world. They don't need no steenking
global sheriffs to preserve social justice or anything else. They need a
"strong leader" who will spread democracy and protect the American
Lifestyle. As George Bush has said repeatedly, "the American lifestyle is
not negotiable." We might add that neither is global warming. Having the
highest per capita number of bathrooms on the planet will not compensate
form the Atlantic Ocean creeping into the hollers of Kentucky. Just a hunch.

The Politics of the comfort zone

Meanwhile, what we have stretching from this computer screen all the way to
Washington D.C. are a couple million people, citizens clustered like ticks
on the spotless suburban belly of an allegedly fat republic. Strangers in
the lost cul de sac squinting at one another briefly as they get into their
cars. In the super-burbs there are no places where residents encounter
people unlike themselves, or encounter people at all once the garage door
has dropped shut. Only that inside the fuck boxes and the roadside world
seen during miserable commute to DC or The Beltway "where the money is." For
the most affluent here, that commute will soon be made easier by the
installation of "Lexus Lanes," in which the highest rollers can pay a toll
and escape being in the same lane with anonymous me and my rusted out truck
with the dead window style air conditioner bouncing in the bed.

I say anonymous because, generally speaking, there is no way I can meet them
without significant extra effort (which I suspect is how they prefer it.)
Even if I go to them, there are no civic or public spaces where we are
likely to encounter one another. Not even in passing on a sidewalk because
there are no sidewalks out there in the beautiful system. There is no actual
town center to these places, although most retain some vestige of the
community they engulfed, a gas station, a hardware store, and here in
Virginia there is usually an old feed store, a barn or two, refurbished as
businesses, so they can display "quaintness" to visitors. But moreover there
are just the malls and schools supported by money beyond the comprehension
of core urban dwellers, schools with a lacrosse club, rowing, tenth grade
class trips to France and Italy...

These people do not consider themselves rich, or their families particularly
elite. Yet their kids, after finishing expensive educations, will eventually
take the reins of the administrative class, university deans, government
bureaucrats, financial mangers, publishing and electronic media people, etc.
Then they will continue to put the schnickle to the other four fifths of
Americans, not to mention the world, without flinching. And they will
continue to consider themselves quite ordinary Americans, and expect their
children to do even better. Though it is no where near the middle
demographically, this is the true middle class in America, the group that
meets the criteria we are trained to associate with the term "middle class."
In truth they only represent about 10%% of the population. Maaaaybe 15%%. The
dangerous 15%% in my opinion. Not that they ever ask me. Or you dear reader.
The typical progressive person reading this is, most likely to be, let us
say, a schoolteacher or a computer programmer, someone of similar stripe.
The planetary and societal criminality of the three quarter million dollar
fuck-box crowd are not your fault. Or mine.

Not entirely anyway. But if we were talking about American consumerism and
its global criminality, then you and I get to hold at least one end of the
turd. Right now I am sitting at the keyboard clad in only in my underwear
and a $60 Ernie Bauer fishing vest doubtlessly made with sweatshop labor,
while my usually shaggy dog, Bingo, sports his $50 summer haircut as he
pants patiently alongside me in a 2,600-square-foot house, occupied by only
two people. And here I am talking to you about consumption while the cost of
Bingo's haircut alone would buy one family a month's groceries on half of
the planet. I never said I was a good example of what I blather about (or a
pretty sight while writing.) The best defense I can muster is that if you
live inside the Empire there is no escaping the Empire's rules of pay to
play.

Early next year, spirits willing, I will be able to extract myself from the
Empire--or the worst of it anyway-- without losing a wife and a family in
the process. But for now it's me and Bingo sitting here doing the best we
can until then. Time is required for love and marriage to triumph over
consumer capitalism, so deeply has it penetrated all of lives so deeply,
both here on my ancient street in Winchester and out there in the
super-suburbs. Things must be worked out ever-so-carefully to escape the
system's exquisite blackmail of its own people.

But you promised us blackmail too

American extreme capitalism's blackmail is based upon basic human
need--especially health care. For example, my wife is on my employer's
insurance. She works for a local public library which grants insurance, even
crappy insurance, only to a select few because the library never knows when
its funds may be cut , now that the need for depleted uranium artillery
shells has superceded the need for children's books in the national scheme
of things. So its board, in all its wisdom, keeps costs so close to the bone
the marrow shows. That means employees with no benefits or insurance. Thus,
I must keep my job creating military magazines --the pervasive symmetry of a
military-industrial consumer-based economy never ceases to amaze me--so we
can both have insurance, even though I could give a damned about insurance
for myself, despite my lousy health. The day-to-day consequences of
cooperating with the beautiful system's insurance-as-blackmail racket are
staggering, and most surprisingly, lead to increasingly poorer health. It's
quite literally killing me so I can have the insurance that is supposed to
keep me healthy. Smothering me to death, actually. It's like this:

It is a Tuesday in July and I am driving to work, down, down past the
sprawling geometry of the DC exurbs. At 7:30 AM the thermometer has already
hit 80 degrees on a code orange air alert day--meaning the polluted air is
especially dangerous to those with breathing disorders. I gasp for breath
most of the hour-long commute because I have COPD, cardio obstructive
pulmonary disease. I drift off the road onto the gravel or into the next
lane at 60-70 miles per hour at least twice a week. A word to the wise: If
you ever see a 1988 red Toyota truck coming your way on VA route 7 some
morning, PULL OVER INTO THE DITCH! Jump the median strip if you have to,
because whatever you do will be safer than being within a hundred yards of
that truck and me. Nevertheless I have always managed to arrive at work in
one piece to drag myself out of the truck, then try to hit the office with a
fake spring in my step and a smile that says: "Godammit yall! I am
deliriously happy to be here!" And I am. Hell I survived another commute
didn't I? And so the old guy blanks at his work station, sucks on his rescue
inhaler, and pushes through another day in the system.

At home he wheezes and bitches and the family shows sympathy for the
struggle, but are terrified of the possibility of the old guy abandoning the
struggle. Better to die early with insurance than die happy and probably
healthier without it. Family and even good friends are so conditioned they
will literally watch you die piecemeal before their eyes, feel for your
misery, confident that the beautiful system will provide whatever is needed
when you fall off the crapper some morning with congestive heart failure.
"Be glad you have insurance. COPD is expensive." And every morning you get
up alive is another morning to reassure themselves, "See, the old guy is
still here. It can't be that bad, can it?" I have come to realize they are
as helpless as me to change the system. What else could they say? And so
life goes on. And the carpets need shampooing and the house painters are
coming tomorrow and the McCabes want to have drinks after work on Friday.
The same obliviousness and denial maintaining Brambleton's equilibrium
operates here too, maintaining the consumer state's productive momentum.

With a couple drinks in me, I often rag about how the Empire's beautiful
system is not only killing me, but a skillion others across the globe we
don't even see. And I talk about simply leaving, going someplace to write
and rot. Just leave like so many others have done of late. And they look
around and see that there are millions of Americans still here, people just
like themselves, and the think to themselves, "Things can't be as bad as Joe
makes them out to be." What they don't see is the couple million Americans
who had sense enough to flee the system as its shadow grew increasingly
ominous, not to mention unworkably expensive. My best friend Ken in France
says, "Joe, your photographs look so unhealthy. You are killing yourself for
a house payment." And he's right. But what does a man do? Just run off?
Leave the wife holding the bag for the bills and the dogs hopelessly waiting
to jump on the bed with me when I get home from work?

Ah yes, home from work. At last. Again. Can't catch even half a breath. No
air anywhere, especially in an old non central air-conditioned house. As
always, the mail is piled on the kitchen table, and in it is a letter from
the Democratic Party announcing that they are putting the heat on the
administration. I stumble upstairs and turn on the bedroom window unit air
conditioner, suddenly struck by the thought that even in Brambleton there
must be similarly blackmailed husbands/fathers coming home in the same sad
shape, equally aware of the global injustice involved in their lifestyle,
yet equally cowed by the brutal consequences of deviating from the system's
prescribed order. And I fall upon the bed to watch an old CSI... to watch
Catherine Willows step within the yellow crime scene tape marking the sacred
spot from which the ritual of our collective revenge for some make-believe
injustice will proceed... And the cool air blows across the bed, and Bingo
is licking my fingers and for a few moments at least, I am suffered up unto
the sheer anesthetic bliss of the beauty of our system.

Joe Bageant is the author of a forthcoming book from Random House Crown
about working class America, scheduled for Spring 2007 release. A complete
archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working
Americans on the subject of class may be found at www.joebageant.com. Feel
free to contact him at: joebageant@joebageant.com.

Copyright 2006 by Joe Bageant

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson