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UNRAVELING THE KNOT
ALLAN G. JOHNSON'S BLOG
Hijacking the Middle Class
Posted by on Wednesday, March 2, 2016
The recent news that the middle class is no longer a majority of the U.S. population, makes me think of the Eifel Tower.
Because the Nobel Laureate economist, Paul Samuelson, once figured that if you stack a child’s blocks to make a pyramid of the distribution of income, with each layer being $1,000, the wealthiest would be far above the 1,063-foot Eifel Tower. And almost everyone else would be crammed within just 3 feet of the ground.
Not even room to stand up. And that was 1948. A half century later, things were so much worse that he switched from the Eifel Tower to Mount Everest. But I have a nice picture of the tower, and it makes the point pretty well, so let’s stay with that.
Somewhere in that compressed mass of humanity, a foot or two off the ground, is the so-called ‘middle class.’
I don’t need my Webster’s to tell me that ‘middle’ is halfway from one point to another, and I make out the middle to be somewhere between the second deck and the champagne bar at the top, which is a long ways from pretty much everyone.
The simple fact is that the middle class is not and never was, middle. And, just for the record, if you ask people to describe themselves in terms of class, in the 43-year history of such research, ‘middle’ has never outnumbered those who identify as working or lower class.*
Still, we recognize the term and imagine it to be the middle of something. Which raises the question, of what, and why should we care.
Two things come to mind.
The first is the hopeful boost that ‘middle’ gives by suggesting as small a distance to the rich and powerful up there as to the poor and struggling down below. Which, of course, it is not, not even close. I would provide a picture of Mount Everest for effect, but something of that magnitude cannot be captured by a camera. This gives some idea of the scale of what we’re talking about, which the ‘middle’ in ‘middle class’ serves to obscure, and is why we’re encouraged in its use.
Still, even though most people identified as middle class are only a divorce, a layoff, or a serious illness from not being middle anymore, so long as they can look down at the demonstrably destitute, the struggling, the disposable, and not see themselves, they can identify with what they see when they look up, which comes tantalizingly close to imagining that they matter.
Which brings me to the second reason for a ‘middle’ class—to name that in-between place where you don’t want to be when it looks like there’s going to be a fight.
While the top of the pyramid is taking the lion’s share of income and wealth, everyone else is left to compete over the rest. This means a sizeable portion of the population always winds up with some degree of not enough. And for the wealthy to protect themselves from the demands of ‘those people,’ the unruly masses, they need a counterweight, a buffer, to keep things under control.
In other words, someone in the middle, whose belief in the status quo gives them reason to keep everyone else in line.
They need teachers, for example, to instruct kids to be good workers who show up on time and do as they’re told. They need bureaucrats and lawyers, managers and administrators, bankers and realtors, police, judges, soldiers, the FBI, not to mention politicians and professors, journalists, doctors, economists, engineers, psychologists, therapists, social workers and a whole lot more to hold it all together.
This is the middle class that politicians wax rhapsodic about bolstering and strengthening, as in keeping a levee or a dam in good repair. It’s not that the wealthy care more about the people in the middle, but that there is a middle, a solid and dependable in-between to prop up the appearance of democracy, to enforce the law and bust the unions, to suppress dissent and manage the poor, and to pathologize, therapize, and anesthetize the human inability to stand it anymore.
In short, the middle class has been hijacked by the interests of wealth and power—the power elite, the upper class, the ruling class, the oligarchs, the one percent, all of the above, take your pick. The middle has been coopted and groomed to affirm that everything is decent and fair—look at us!—encouraged to congratulate itself for its steady habits and respectability that elevate it, if nowhere near the top, at least far enough from the bottom to note the difference, as if those below, the lower and working classes, the majority of the population, are unworthy losers who have only themselves to blame.
Being superior, however, does not mean being less disposable, not to be ignored along with everyone else when push comes to shove. Because, after all, from the champagne bar atop the tower, not to mention the mountain peak, all those tiny figures near the ground look pretty much the same.
And now the data show that the ‘middle’ is being ‘hollowed out’ as the wealthy continue to enlarge their share of the pie, there being not much more to take from everyone else. A few are rising, many more are falling, shocked at how close they have always been to the ground. A recent Federal Reserve study found that if they had to come up with $400 in an emergency, 47 percent of the population could not, including many who identify themselves as middle class.
Middle schmiddle.
There are two class systems in America. There is the one contained in the first three feet off the ground, a game of musical chairs to decide who gets to eat and who has a new car and are you better off than the person in the checkout line and does that let you feel a little better, if only for a while.
But in the other, at the top, as they jockey for window seats in the champagne bar, income and wealth are not really the point. How many houses, after all, can a person live in? How many cars can they drive?
What matters at the top is the power to act with impunity, unaccountable, as if they own the world. Because, as far as such a thing is possible, they do.
And will, so long as there is a middle to hold it all together.
Which reminds me of the poet, William Butler Yeats, and how things fall apart when the center cannot hold.
____________________________
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. . . .”
Excerpted from William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921).
*In 2014, for example, the breakdown was lower class, 9%; working class, 46%; middle class, 42%; upper class, 3% (less than 1% gave no answer). Source: National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago.
The Truth about ‘Preaching to the Choir’
Posted by on Wednesday, February 3, 2016
Having been invited to speak at a university on the subject of men’s violence against women, my heart sank when I found myself standing behind a podium at the front of an enormous auditorium—it must have held a thousand seats—in which was scattered an audience of maybe thirty people in all.
I could blame my host’s lack of skill at turning out an audience, but there was still the struggle not to take it personally, and then the challenge of filling so large a space with the energy of so few, the bulk of it expected to come from me. And then, of course, there was that old feeling of here we go again, another audience of the dedicated, the ones who always show up.
And those stalwart few will complain that the ones who ‘really need’ to be there, the ones you’d give your eyeteeth to change their minds, are not.
“You realize, of course, you’re preaching to the choir.”
I’m glad to say there are frequent exceptions—the crowd of more than a thousand in Milwaukee, when the subject was race, and standing-room-only in Oregon, New Hampshire, and Maryland. But, still, it is a challenge getting people into the room to focus on difficult things.
Except, of course, for those who are drawn to sing.
I used to share their disappointment and frustration, but lately I’ve come to change my tune.
I’ve been considering, for example, the longing for all those people who ‘need it most’ to show up. I think it’s based on a misplaced belief in the power of conversion, that can suddenly persuade someone into a completely different point of view. I suppose it does happen, but if I tried to recall a time when someone just sat me down and talked me out of a reality I was invested in, I don’t think I could.
My worldview, of course, has gone through many changes over the years, but it’s usually a slow and messy business—two steps forward, one back, sometimes three—and it needs something to shake things up enough to loosen my death grip on old ways of seeing.
That something is rarely a speech in an auditorium, unless much else has happened to prepare the way, which leads me not to count on persuading those with no interest in being persuaded. At best I will insert a grain of sand into the oyster, that may someday down the road irritate it just enough to produce a pearl.
But, for that, they must be in the room, and I suspect the disappointment I detect in members of the choir, is that more people do not manage on their own to overcome their shyness or disbelief or fear or whatever else it is that keeps them away. But this is not the kind of species we are, in my experience. Generally speaking, we are not that visionary or brave. We need someone to help bring us along.
Let’s be optimistic anyway, and imagine that we draw not only the choir, but a small group of wannabes and the sufficiently curious. A somewhat larger choir, perhaps, but still, the choir.
What I’m coming to see that I haven’t before, is that this amounts to more than we may think. In fact, most of the time it may be exactly how it’s supposed to go.
That those who most need to be there, and are most needed, are the ones in the room.
The choir, after all, shows up when it’s not convenient, when they have other things to do, make time to rehearse and do the singing, whether the tune is testimony and persuasion or argument, protest, and demand. The choir does the heavy lifting and takes the risks, to speak what others will not, to stand their ground and block the door or fill the hall, staying up into the night to analyze and strategize and organize.
To do that, they must be fed and inspired. They need to hear their voices joined together to remind them who they are and that they’re not alone. They need to learn and practice new ways of understanding both the world and themselves that they have not imagined before. To be encouraged by example.
Because they are walking into a stiff wind as they sing toward a world that does not yet exist.
A while ago, I came to speak at a large university, and the evening before, I met with a group of faculty and grad students and activists from the community. In the room was a young black woman who spoke of her anger and frustration, every day coming up against the wall of white racism, inertia, and indifference. She did not know what to do with all that anger, and was afraid of what she might do that she’d regret.
As I listened, I could feel how young she was, struggling to form and contain and direct the power and intelligence so evident as she spoke. Afterward, as people lingered in knots of conversation, she came up to me and we talked for quite a while, brainstorming things she might do in those difficult moments, such as with the white professor who is clueless on the subject of race, but convinced that he is not.
The conversation was lively and I remember her smiling and even laughing as we strategized and fantasized our way from one thing to another.
And, I think, in the lightening of her spirit, she was beginning to see not a particular solution, but a range of possibilities, that she was not helpless after all, that her anger was a form of power that she could harness and measure for effect, and I remember how energized she became, not because of me, but what was happening between us, the old man in the choir and the newly emerging voice.
I think you could say we had a good time.
And yet, at the start of that meeting, there had been the familiar sight of people looking around to note the friends and colleagues who had not shown up in spite of being invited.
But, in a way, I realize, it did not matter, because whatever she got, it will be multiplied many times over in the course of her life. And for me there was one more reminder of why we go on.
She makes me think of the young woman boldly challenging the president of the University of Missouri to define systematic racism, an exchange that not only led to his undoing, but, more important, created another opening for the kind of larger, critical questions that writers and activists have been working for so many years to bring to a culture that cannot see past the individual.
I ask myself, how did she come to that moment? To know what she knew? To have the courage to speak, to focus the power of her anger with such clarity and purpose? What were those times when she decided to show up, to engage in the conversation, to come to the event or enroll in the course or read the book someone mentioned the other day?
There she is, fifth row back, sitting with a friend she persuaded to come. And while others might be wondering about the empty seats, that’s not what’s on her mind.
I think about her and that moment when she confronted the president of a university and, then, in such a loud, clear voice, how she did sing.
Mondo Bizzarro: Choosing Sanity in an Insane World
Posted by on Wednesday, January 6, 2016
I remember the day, teaching about race, halfway through the term, the student coming into class, shaking her head.
“This is nuts,” she says. “Race doesn’t make any sense. Racism is crazy.”
What could I say?
Except to wonder, with her and the rest of the class, who, in their right mind, would dream up such a thing.
Oh, this is a good idea—let’s pretend you can tell who someone is, what they’re worth, their intelligence, their morality, by the color of their skin! And let’s have a story where God creates different kinds of human beings just so one can feel superior and treat the other like shit . . . .
I could go with ‘crazy’ or ‘nuts,’ although delusional also comes to mind. Anyway, it is worrying because there’s so much of it going around.
Like telling ourselves that across the vast cosmos and billions upon billions of years, we, the human beings, riding our infinitesimal speck of dust, are the point of it all.
Now, tell me this, if I can’t claim to be Napoleon or Jesus or Janis Joplin without coming under serious professional care, how do we get away with that?
Or the idea that we know what we’re doing, that we’re in charge, that we can control the earth, not to mention death. That we can frack and drill and change the climate, blow off the tops of mountains, drive species to extinction, but, hey, don’t worry, we know what we’re doing, it’ll be okay because, worst case, we’ll figure something out.
Or we’ll just keep growing, because growth is always good and there’s no such thing as too much of it, whether it’s the human population or the GDP. Did we miss the part in Alice in Wonderland where she eats the little cake and winds up wearing the house?
How do we imagine a divinely ordained natural order by which we are meant to convert the earth’s biosphere, bit by bit, into human beings. And all the rest is nothing more than fuel or ‘raw’ material. For us. And we think this will work. That we should teach it to our kids.
Come to think of it, ‘delusional’ may be a bit too tame. How about wacko, bananas, bonkers, mondo bizzarro.
Speaking of bizarre, the former chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, said just the other day that the economy is doing pretty well. He didn’t mention that our infrastructure is falling apart, including schools, or that, at any given time, upwards of half the population either has nothing to lose or lives in chronic anxiety over losing what little they have. But ‘we’ are doing fine because somewhere else ‘they’ are doing worse.
What stood out to me was that the interviewer didn’t swallow his gum or burst out laughing. The telephone switchboard didn’t light up. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, it’s not as though Mr. Bernanke said something that was crazy meshugena off the wall. You know, divorced from reality.
Like the idea that prisons actually work, that punishment and fear and putting someone in solitary confinement for decades, even teenagers, is how you get people to act more like human beings. This is why we encourage parents to lock their children in dark closets for as long as it takes to make them good.
Because violence, we know, works. And it is good. Which is why we celebrate men’s capacity for violence as a mark of true and virtuous manhood, from football to war, and, somehow, miraculously, we think we can do that without bringing abuse and murder on ourselves and our children, because that would not be good.
Did you know that in World War II, widely considered a ‘good war,’ waged and fought by the ‘greatest’ generation, 50 million people lost their lives? Not to mention the uncounted millions, no, billions, of non-human lives that were blown, burned, and starved into oblivion.
This we call success. Victory. Triumph. Our finest hour. To this we make speeches and erect monuments.
I tried explaining that to my dog, Roxie, but she kept looking at me funny, cocking her head, pulling back her ears, then burying her nose in her paws and making little moans. I think she may have been a little worried.
Actually, come to think of it, it wasn’t the only time it’s occurred to me that she was wondering why it is that humans are in charge. At least in our current condition. As in, is it safe to depend on a species that, to judge by what they do, are, quite simply, by any reasonable standard, out of their minds.
Who do we imagine that we are? By what mass psychosis do we think these things we do are not insane? Stark raving mad.
I’m not kidding. These are not mere figures of speech. I am not being metaphorical.
We may think that to be crazy you have to scream and foam at the mouth and bang your head against the wall, but if you consider the results, hands down the worst kind of insanity has a calm and collected demeanor and speaks in measured tones with a good vocabulary while they tell you about the ‘real’ world and what is ‘normal’ and right, and aren’t you a little strange for thinking otherwise.
We have inherited, we are living in, we are reproducing as we go, a form of collective insanity. And part of that is having no idea. In fact, we think we are the peak of evolution, the gold standard for intelligence and reason. Dogs should be so lucky to be us.
Not to mention those ‘primitive’ indigenous peoples who actually believe that to be human is to be embedded in a world of relation, without which we do not exist. And that the cultural ideal of the autonomous, self-sufficient ‘individual,’ contained inside their little ego, may be the loneliest, not to mention the craziest, idea of all time.
Well, we do have some idea of our condition. If we did not, we wouldn’t go around shaking our heads and muttering what a crazy world it is, with that way we have of rolling our eyes so as not to look it square in the face and know that we’re not talking ‘crazy’ as in ‘go figure’ or ‘wild and crazy,’ but the kind of insanity that would freak us out for sure if we considered for a moment that’s what it really is.
Instead, we talk about it like the weird uncle you just gotta love because, well, he’s your uncle.
You might be thinking I’m one of those pessimistic malcontents who hates humanity, but I’m not. It isn’t that I’d rather be a dog. All I want is to understand what it means to be a human being, and to live by that among the humans.
But the norm of insanity is to be absorbed into a kind of collective autism, a state of isolation and disconnection that comes of an inability to live in relation to other beings, to the earth, to the consequences of what we do. It is to sit in the corner and rock back and forth, humming to ourselves in our obsessive, almost frantic preoccupation with things that do not matter, while being oblivious to where we are, the texture of the ground, the color of the sky, the expression on the face of the person across the way, the fact that someday we really really are going to die.
No wonder we’re so crazy afraid of death. As if it’s not supposed to happen. As if life would be possible without it. We might as well be afraid of food, or water, or touch, or the ground. Or sleep. Afraid of life itself, that, without death, has no meaning, makes no sense at all.
Martin Luther King once claimed it as a point of pride to be maladjusted to a world that creates so much injustice and destruction and suffering. He didn’t mention insanity, but I doubt he would have minded my adding it to the list. He went on to propose an international association “for the advancement of creative maladjustment.”* I’d like to know where to sign up for that. Then again, maybe I already have. Perhaps the belonging is in the doing.
Because to choose sanity in an insane world is to maladjust ourselves. It is, in its fullest expression, an act not only of self-preservation, but of conscience, of resistance, a withdrawal of consent. And to be sane in the midst of insanity is also a radical act of love. Love in affirming our humanity and the worth of every being, and radical in daring to challenge the power of systems whose insanity is driving us toward extinction and oblivion.
But in mondo bizzarro, sanity does not happen on its own. Not that I have an antidote to our condition, only what aids my creative maladjustment.
Like trying to minimize my exposure to the toxic flow of mindless stimulation—email, the internet, the ‘news.’ And rush-hour traffic and big box stores where I monitor myself to get out before it’s too late, like those horror movies where I want to yell to the unsuspecting hero, “Run! Run!” Except it’s not a movie, and it’s me.
Because sanity loves company, I read a lot, especially Native Americans working to regain the sanity that was taken from their people, whose traditional ways of thinking have much to teach us about what it means to be a human being.
Including that sanity can be surprisingly simple, even when it takes a lot of work.
I spend time with other maladjusts, who remind me that it isn’t crazy to be sane, which is easy to forget.
I create pockets of silence that draw sanity from the stillness, like water from a well, moments to sit quietly and do nothing.
I go with Roxie into the woods, to visit with the trees and the water in the stream, to watch the sun breaking above the ridge. As it has for billions of years, for trillions of beings. Roxie wants me to throw a stick. She stamps her feet. She knows what matters. And when I forget, she will remind me. That it’s not the stick, it’s the game.
I write. And when I’m in the world, I do my best to not be crazy, which includes not to worry about what people think of what I say and write. And when I encounter the insanity, I try to remember what it is, what it can do, and with compassion, and knowing when to engage and when to give it a wide berth, like I would a raccoon cantering sideways in the middle of the day.
Through it all, I try not to fall into the trap of thinking myself superior. As sane. Because among my sanest moments are those when I’m most aware that I’m not. Which is not as easy as it sounds.
It snowed last night. Awhile ago Roxie came in from Nora throwing the frisbee and the ball and then came down to keep me company while I write, as she does every day. She sleeps on a little bed beside my chair, her paws twitching as she runs through a dream. Or at least that’s what I think it is. She doesn’t say.
She opens an eye to look up at me. I think she knows when I’m writing about her. Then again, maybe not. Maybe she just wants to be sure of me.
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*From a speech Dr. King gave in London in 1964, on his way to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize. You can listen and read at Democracy Now.
UNRAVELING THE KNOT 