The Bush Depression, My Hair, and the Life of Riley

I hereby dub thee: The Bush Depression. Because there’s no doubt, since certain people are already doing it, that they’re going to try to blame it on Obama. Because somehow, magically, everything is Obama’s fault, even retroactively. Let’s hope it catches on. After all, if we’re not going to send Bush to jail for ordering torture and illegal wiretapping, then he ought to at least get this legacy named after him.

(I have no right to dub it, it seems, say the some 22,000 hits on Google.)

I need to get my hair cut, but I can’t afford it. Not until I get another paycheck. My roots are all dishwater blonde instead of red, and … I really ought to just wear scarves and forget about it for right now. Cutting it myself seems rather desperate. But I’m also afraid not to go to my brilliant but expensive hair stylist. It’s worse since she’s a friend. If she wasn’t I would change up and never look back. (In fact, I once tried to quit, but her talent is like a drug. I use her to keep me from looking too much like the 40-something housewife I feel like I’m becoming. Or am, duh.)

Here are some more quotes from The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel:

From Bruce Bendinger (Terkel calls him an “advertising wunderkind”):

You have the knee-driven underclass, which we continue to market sugar and salt and alcohol and nicotine to. We make a good amount of money off of them. You’ll find black America still drinkin’, still smokin’ a lot of cigarettes, still spending a high percentage of their cash on this. You can understand this in terms of what their options are. Much more concerned with short-term gratification, for reasons that are sad but obvious. Marketing things like potato chips, salty snacks, may seem innocent. If you’re black, chances are you will retain a greater percentage of salt and be more prone to high blood pressure. Take a look at the mortality rates in black America, you’ll find one of the side effects of these consumption patterns. They are fueled by the […] type of marketing, which contributes to—I don’t think you live as long. [….]

Bendinger

There’s a new kind of poverty in America. It’s time. All the people makin’ all this cash, you know what they don’t got? And I’m one of ’em. They don’t got time. The time-poor. Both of ’em are workin’. They’re workin’ hard, makin’ all this money, fifty, sixty hours a week. Mom isn’t home makin’ the tuna casserole. They both come home beat from their jobs. They’re gonna go out, they’re gonna order pizza. They don’t have time to make dinner, to do a lot of things. It’s really changed the way a lot of America lives. My lawyer says every couple in business together needs a wife, because there’s no one who’s cookin’ the dinner, who’s cleanin’ the house.

Another way that’s reshaping America is the move from parenting to child management. You don’t have mom raising the kids. She gets ’em till it’s time for Montessori, then she’s back in the work force to make the money to pay for Montessori and the designer kids’ clothes.

[From The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel, which was published in 1987.]

I guess I get to this point: At least I don’t eat bad food. At least I have plenty of time to live in my house, love my family, and be in the present instead of being stuck looking ever toward a mythical retirement. At least I have time to read books. At least I have time to drink tea and look out the window. At least going for a walk in the woods isn’t outside the realm of possibility.

I live the life of Riley. Not being able to get a haircut is way down on the list of things that ought to cause me any stress.

A Few Quotes from The Great Divide

Mary Gonzales (community organizer):

There’s another isolation: within ourselves. We feel incompetent. I lost my job at Wisconsin because I’m worthless. If I had more skills…Instead of saying, It’s Chase Manhattan that created Wisconsin Steel’s closure, it’s not you. So we turn to alcohol, drugs, and television. So we live in the world of … daytime soaps, in a world of fantasy. So we don’t have to deal with the real world.

Carolyn Nearmyer (a farmer):

Whenever the deputy came out to take our stuff away from us, I asked him, “How can you go home and face your family?” I happen to know he has an eight-year-old girl too. I said, “How can you sleep tonight, knowing that someday this could be you?”
…
He said, “If I didn’t do it, somebody else would be here. To me, it’s just a job.” Auctioneers at foreclosures say that, too: “If we don’t sell ’em out, someone else’ll get the profits. I just as well do it.” to me, that’s heartless people. I wouldn’t do that to somebody just because I needed the money. Money to me is just not that important. If we can pay the light bill and the phone bill and have food on the table, that’s it.

Rex Winship (a futures trader):

“Christ, if you can’t outsmart one little government staff, you shouldn’t get to work in the morning.”

“Unless you have losers, you cannot have winners.”

[From what again? I’ve been reading The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel. It’s an oral history documented in 1987.]

Long Live Imagination

I’ve been reading The Great Divide, by Studs Terkel. I long ago read Hard Times, and I’ve got it sitting here in front of me, so I’ll probably re-read it after I’m done with The Great Divide.

What’s interesting about The Great Divide is that it was written in 1987. When you read stuff on The Great Depression, it is easier to distance yourself from what happened then, because things were so different. We don’t really expect to see hobos knocking at our doors and asking for work (I suspect they’d be afraid of getting shot at, nowadays, or getting arrested), or hoards of people in broken down jalopies heading off for other states or the big city looking for work.

I was talking about how some bigwigs are already calling this the beginning of a Depression in a history class I was subbing for. And a student got a sort of shocked look on his face, and replied that it couldn’t be because there weren’t breadlines and people starving. I simply pointed out that we are not living in the 1920s. Nothing will look the same as it did then, but that he shouldn’t forget that food shelves and soup lines still exist. (And are reporting record demand.)

In any case, we are at the beginnings. We really have no idea what’s coming, or how bad it might get.

But reading The Great Divide is interesting to me because it could have been written right here and right now. The only difference I’m really noticing is that we aren’t reading much about the disappearing family farms and the crises in rural areas because it already happened back then in the 80s. The family farm is essentially already dead.

(When I drove by myself to L.A. about five years ago, staying strictly off the big highway system, I kept imagining I could put together a picture essay called Dead America, because so much of rural America has been abandoned.)

In the introduction, Studs quotes from a speech Galbraith gave on Dec. 5, 1987:

Markets in our time are a totem, a symbol of our secular religion. They can do no wrong. To find flaws in their behavior is both theologically and ideologically incorrect. And we could not put our rich fellow citizens at risk by saying that they and their much appreciated tax relief contributed to the debacle. The responsibility had to be removed from Wall Street.”

Are we as Americans still protecting the sanctity of Wall Street? Or are we finally seeing the thieves for what they are? Certainly no one has really objected much to the fleecing of the Treasury this time with all the bailouts. Maybe we’re too exhausted and trying to figure out how to weather the storm ourselves.

Studs also quotes Sherwood Anderson, who took a trip across the country in 1934, writing Puzzled America. “Anderson found, ‘a hunger for belief, a determination to believe in one another, in the leadership we’re likely to get out of democracy.'”

Just in the next paragraph (p.11), Studs talks about the “sanctity of the military, union-busting beyond precedent…” and how “reflective conversations concerning these matters have become suspect, or at best, the avocation of odd birds, vestigial remainders of a long-gone past.” It made me think of how often people who live like I do are called “damned hippies,” though I’ve never been all that comfortable in long hair and was born in 1967. Also how little has changed in 20 years.

He then goes on to quote an unnamed woman from Appalachia: “We’ve gotten away from our imaginations. The reason we’re image-struck is because we don’t like who we are. The more we get over this fake stuff, the more chance we’ve got to keep our sanity and self-respect.”

And he informs me that LONG LIVE IMAGINATION was a banner carried by the rebelling students in 1968 Paris.

I like that a lot. It is what we’ll need a lot of in the next couple years. And we already see it happening, of course. Freecycle is one such simple act of imagination that comes to mind. All of a sudden, the free store idea popularized in the 60s by the hippies has been embraced in an even more radically decentralized way than it was back then. And by people who are anything but hippies, from what I’ve seen.

The generosity you see on your local Freecycle board should inspire anyone. (And yes, I do encourage anyone reading this to join their local list.)

And I think that for all the apocalyptic thinking that people like to indulge in—that if the economy collapses that you’d better get a gun to protect your food stores, and form ridiculously dangerous local militias, for instance. For all that, I look forward to seeing us step up and be the kind of people we have the potential to be, ones with great imagination and a renewed sense of community that leads to a better future.