Could it be the that the best hedge against being hit too hard by any present recession is to live in an area that never recovered from previous ones?

I made it. I drove  nearly three thousand miles (Well, I didn’t do the driving, but I was a passenger for every one of those miles!) and am now ensconced in a poolside apartment complete with central air-conditioning and a patio. It’s a veritable paradise compared to what I was living in before (an absolute dump for which I have yet to receive my security deposit. The filching hand of East coast casual criminality strikes again). Nestled at conjugal nexus of two glittering freeways, this apartment made of Chinese plaster and drywall awakens vague memories of middle-class luxury, the first of such memories I’ve had in years.

Despite the boxes scattered everywhere (I didn’t manage to throw away nearly as much of my Scottish woolen skirts and Swiss balance balls as I intended), I feel at home in this shoddy stucco box in the desert in a way that only someone who has given up on the future can. At night the gently aggressive hum of engines of speeding cars lull me to sleep, the vapid giggles of boozy sorority girls home from last-call hookups wake me in the morning. The sun beats mercilessly through my vinyl blinds every day without fail. Towering clouds gather ominously on the horizon but never deliver themselves of cooling rain, being held at bay by a dome of heat that rises from miles upon miles of concrete. Some might call my living situation hellishly empty, but I’m unabashed enough to admit that I haven’t experienced such creature comforts in years. An in-unit washer and dryer can do much to soothe the modern soul.

But when I gather the courage to walk out into the blazing heat my sense of peace — which, I’ll admit, springs from defeat — is disturbed. While doing time in my dumpy New England city I had read reports of how the recession blew apart the desert oasis of inflated real estate prices and strip malls where I now reside, but I couldn’t quite comprehend what such economic destruction looked like. For I was living in a city that never climbed out of the recession of the seventies. For four years I lived with potholes, dead malls, deader industry, and limited city services. My life was colored by economic dysfunction, liberally garnished with malfeasance and graft, which I realized only on an unconscious level which periodically manifested itself in a certain churlishness and despondence that would surface from time to time to the dismay of the people closest to me. When the big meltdown happened in 2008 nothing really changed in my postindustrial Nowheresville. There were just as many unemployed sitting on stoops and potholes in the too narrow roadways as there ever were.

Signscars and Stripes: Foreclosure Nation southwestern style.

My return to the West, however, has been a shock to say the least, because I remember this desert megalopolis being so different. When I was last here, everything was enlivened with quickening elixir of easy credit. Strip malls sprouted overnight. Entire housing developments appeared within the span of a week. People were drunk on the belief that their characterless, indifferently constructed houses were ATMs with ever increasing balances. It was a bad way to conduct one’s life, to be sure. But it was bad in a way that wasn’t scary. In fact, it seemed kinda fun, with everyone thinking they were going to end up some kinda of bazillionaire by flipping houses and buying stocks.  A lazy optimism filled the air. Jobs were a dime a dozen and debt accrued to subsidize your cut-rate education or overinflated lifestyle that could always be paid off sometime in the distant future, at the point when you landed that perfect job or, even easier, when your house appreciated in value. It was kinda like being at a really fun party really far from home. You’re having a ball, downing the Polish vodka, doing lines, and talking up a storm, but with that faint nagging reminder at the back of your mind that you’ve got to somehow drive yourself home again. But the party’s too fun and you’re too damn witty, the vodka too perfectly chilled (and free), and the coke too perfectly perfect, so you continue to drink, all the while stacking the metaphysical cards in favor of a fiery three-car pile up on the interstate sometime later in the evening.

This city now resembles that three-car pile up, bloody and blown out on a grand scale that only accidents on the freeways of the Old West can be. I have yet to drive past a strip mall that doesn’t have at least one vacancy. My third day here a bedraggled woman in second-hand business casual approached me in the parking lot of Fry’s Supermarket with her phone number written on a pink Post-it note. “Please give it to whoever might need the services of someone trained in accounting,” she pleaded. On the freeway I pass rows of billboards advertising bankruptcy by phone, for-profit universities, casinos with all-you-can-eat buffets and strip clubs. Heat-weary, underfed toothless men fly past on pilfered mountain bikes in the meager bike lanes,  expertly dodging SUVs with black-tinted windows and “Stop Obama” bumper stickers. Advertisements warning against the nefarious powers of identity thieves and credit card fraudsters litter sidewalks still in good repair. Entire subdivisions lie unfinished along the freeway, and their streetlights look blindly on roads never paved and lots never built upon and crumbling piles of imported drywall and uprooted cacti.

Sometimes I wonder why I came back to this city. Luckily the heat makes most of this seem like a fever dream, and I have ensconced myself in the most liberal and enlightened neighborhood I could find. But there is also a part of me that delights in the prospect of being situated at the epicenter of the recession. I suppose if I’m going to document the economic implosion that is to take place in this country over the next ten-twenty years, I might as well be where all the action is. According the recent unemployment reports, it looks like the situation is only going to get more interesting. Bloomberg reports that the U.S. economy is contracting again, with the unemployment rate expected to exceed ten percent (of course, we all know that it is well above that).  And the Arizona Republic expects that prosperity won’t be riding the range for another six or seven years.

Perhaps by then I’ll be handing out my own pink Post-it notes (or I’ll have moved on to California). But until that time I’ll be your heat-prostrated reporter from the land of ghost malls, racist demagogues and eternal sunshine.

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Does the old saying, “The things we own end up owning us,” have a more solid ring of truth behind it than we unfortunate subjects of consumer culture are willing to admit?

Every five years or so, I move.  And it’s torture. I’m suddenly reminded of how, despite my best efforts, I’m a slave to all those ephemeral impulses that advertising loves to fill us with till we’re fit to burst. I’m surrounded by boxes upon boxes of things I don’t even think I need. It’s going to cost me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to transport these things, and I ‘m not even sure anymore how half of them came into my possession. Scottish woolen skirts and kettle balls and European board games and Norwegian dictionaries and swim paddles and dutch ovens and bread machines and Laughing Buddha bookends — they all are scattered around my apartment or tossed in a box and I don’t know why.

I suppose at one point I liked the idea of all those things. I liked the idea of wearing Scottish woolen skirts, even though they make me look like a fuzzy hippopotamus. Certainly the swim gloves filled my head with visions of toned upper arms and sun-browned skin, even though I don’t have access to a pool in my dumpy New England town. I wanted to learn Norwegian at one point; hence the dictionary. But that never quite panned out (it could, however … someday). I always thought it would be fun and quirky to develop a passion for European board games; it seemed like the type of hobby a cosmopolitan misanthrope would take up on rainy days. Too bad those games are so dreadfully boring and time consuming.

Each and every one of those items made me feel my life was a series of doors hanging slightly ajar, each one promising  excitement and psychic renewal at any moment. The idea that I could use any one of them at any time convinced me that they were useful. I never used them, though. I just led the same life I always led, with a few deviations here and there. But nothing so dramatic as to make me start playing Carcassonne every Friday night while wearing a plaid skirt hand-sewn in Edinburgh.

It’s strange how we can fall in love with the idea of an item’s luminous utility.  It’s only when we are forced to unburden ourselves do we see the folly of our mindless consumerism. Each day  brought me much sorrow as I was forced to lug box after box of junk (Yes, I said it. All those things were indeed junk.) to Savers and the Salvation Army. But once I dropped those boxes off and headed home again, I found I had forgotten what items exactly I had donated. Yet I’m still surrounded by piles of junk that threaten to suffocate rather than liberate me.

Maximizing futility: the telos of a consumption economy.

I fancy myself a frugal person. I shop at thrift stores. I take up hobbies (like soap making) intending to save hundreds of dollars by making everything myself. I discovered, however, that frugality sometimes gives us an excuse to shop compulsively at a lower price point. I fear I spent more money being frugal than just … well … being.

“The movement of commodities on the market, the birth of their value, in a word, the real framework of every rational calculation is not merely subject to strict laws but also presupposes the strict ordering of all the happens,” the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács writes in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics.

The atomization of the individual is, then, only the reflex in consciousness of the fact that the ‘natural laws’ of capitalist production have been extended to cover every manifestation of life in society; that — for the first time in history — the whole of society is subjected, or tends to be subjected, to a unified economic process, and that the fate of every member of society is determined by unified laws.

Certainly I feel as though the commodities I’ve purchased have ordered every aspect of my life. I must be out of my apartment on Saturday, but there is still so much to give or throw away. The burden of my belongings has never felt so heavy. But the powers that be say that this is the only way to save the United States. We must spend ourselves into the grave to keep the engines of commerce humming along and (supposedly) spreading wealth hither and yon. Only now do I see how mentally ill I’ve become as result of this onerous ideology. It’s work, this buying and caring for things. And it’s work that makes me wish I was unemployed.

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As the Obama administration’s much-touted “Recovery Summer” reaches its zenith, one is led to ask, At what point does economic recovery become simply a more gently modulated decline?

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most — that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least. — Eugene V. Debs

A heat wave grips New England, making the days downright tropical. Thunderstorms, which come daily, bring no relief, only a kind of steamy weight and closeness. Air becomes almost too heavy to breathe. Everything is obscenely green, bringing to mind those films Werner Herzog made with Klaus Kinski in South America.

Under such estival oppression my mind drifts to — and lingers over — perverse themes. I find myself wishing for something Conradian: a glimpse into the heart of darkness; a confrontation with nature redacted to its essence, stripped of the borrowed finery of civil society.

Whither tarries, I wonder, the “Summer of Rage” predicted for this year, as it was for last? Some malcontents in France seem to have gotten their blood up in a reprise of the riots of 2005 (the 2005 uprising inspired this tract by The Invisible Committee, a collective of ultra-Left Jeremiahs intent on pricking the consciences of complacent bourgeois Ninevites), but nothing so piquant loomed for us stateside. Extreme heat dulls keener emotions and turns even the slightest action into a chore. But wilting under the sun is not just the person cursed to live in a home without air conditioning; opportunity shrivels also, the much touted “Recovery Summer” now appearing more as “Recumbency Summer” as budget crises bring rumors of rolling closures of firehouses in Philadelphia, as well as California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s threat to bust state workers down several pay grades.

The menace of minimum wage is an extraordinary gambit on The Governator’s part, one which could only be hazarded in extraordinary times. Labor standards are in flux, and when they finally settle, the resulting new norms will resemble more the conditions of the labor market of the nineteenth century than those of the twentieth. Already one sees this happening. The blog Poverty in America over at Change.org featured on July 12, 2010 the article, “Want to Be Poor? Work One of These 8 Jobs.” The story’s lede puts the current labor predicament in no uncertain terms: “Post-recession job creation is coming, the experts say. Unfortunately, many of these jobs will pay less than $10 an hour. Yeah, it’s an honest day’s work, but if it’s not enough to live on, much less raise a family and maintain a home, what’s the point?”

The baleful economics of the starvation-wage economy is well-trod ground, so I won’t go into empirical particulars here. I will, however, offer some comments distilled from my own experience. These will, I hope, add some texture and vividness to what is too often treated in abstract terms. As someone who had to subsist for several years at minimum wage or just barely above, I think myself qualified to offer a sense of what low-wage work really entails.

Indeed, after working a minimum-wage job long enough, I began to consider my absurdly inadequate income the least among the various indignities visited upon me; because the fact is that, depending on the size of the reserve army of the unemployed in the area where you work, without clearly defined statutory limitations governing labor practices with the force of law behind them — such as those secured after long years of union agitation in the past century — you become as flies to your employers. They bat you about for their sport.

A minimum-wage job means a job with crazy hours and crazy shifts. A minimum-wage job means your days off can come consecutively, or fall four days apart. A minimum wage job means working until 10:00 or 11:00 PM, and then having to report to work the next morning at 6:00 AM. A minimum-wage job means having a work schedule that’s never the same one week to the next, and that’s a melange or morning, day and evening shifts calibrated for maximum exhaustion. A minimum-wage job means being hired part-time but working full time hours — without, of course, the benefits conferred upon full-timers (such as they are). A minimum-wage job means kiting rent checks to the landlord of the roach-infested studio apartment that you can’t afford. A minimum-wage job means epic commute times, because a car is out of the question, and public transit is your only option (to anyone not in New York, Boston, Chicago or Washington DC, this means a schlep on buses which seem to run with ever decreasing frequency). A minimum-wage job means anomie of a most soul-crushing sort, as you look up from your abased position in the bilge of the great ship of Capital. A minimum-wage job means entertaining heterodox thoughts about honest pay for honest work that, while perhaps not the most spectacular or “creative,” in Richard Florida’s sense, is nonetheless socially necessary. (Burgers can’t flip themselves, after all.)

Gypsies, tramps and thieves: unemployed Americans "re-train" during Recovery Summer.

It’s easy to see, then, the nature of the choice Schwarzenegger is presenting to California’s state workers: Pull down a minimum wage in the relative ease and comfort of your current position, or earn it in the private sector by flipping burgers, cutting lawns or bagging groceries.

Of course, apologists for the neoliberal status quo are quick to point out that in the vast majority of cases, a minimum-wage gig is just a sort, albeit unpleasant, station on life’s way. Ceteris paribus this observation might be true, but it overlooks, I think, the fact that plentiful opportunity, an indispensable prerequisite for mobility out of this wage stratum, is not constant, but fluctuating, shrinking and contracting concomitantly with the overall economy. In an economic environment where work — any work — is difficult to come by, the suckiest jobs achieve an added luster. This July 8, 2010 story over at MoneyTalksNews seems to support this assertion. In it is quoted one Mimi Collins, a spokesperson for the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a body which recently conducted a survey that found that “average starting salary offers to [this years crop of college grads] are down 1.3 percent vs. the average of those offered to the Class of 2009.” Collins says, ““It’s just a simple supply-and-demand result of what’s going on the economy right now. You just have fewer opportunities all the way around.”

The current salary squeeze mentioned by Collins is given a bit more body in this June 25, 2010 story in The San Franscisco Chronicle, which, though it focuses on advice to current workers for their retirement, does make a salient point about current career realities. “A generation ago, students who earned a college degree had a reasonable assurance of earning a good living from that degree,” the article states.

However, a bachelor’s degree now probably carries about the same weight that a high school diploma carried in bygone days. A master’s or doctorate degree is now required for many higher-paying jobs, especially those in the corporate or academic world. Those who choose not to obtain any type of higher academic or vocational education may find themselves earning minimum wage for much of their lives.

Thus it seems that the downward adjustment is complete: College diplomas carry as much weight in the job market as high school diplomas as yesteryear. And high school diplomas? Well, if you’re over age 35, you might just want to hang on to your grammar-school certificate of completion.

Opportunity knocks — like the engine of a 1978 AMC Gremlin. Neoclassical economists make much ado about dispelling what they call the “lump-of-labor fallacy,” the erroneous idea that there is a fixed quantity of work to be done in a given society. Though I’m inclined to agree that this notion is mistaken, I wonder if it may still be that case that there is a fixed quantity of labor opportunities to be had in a given society, particularly if that society is subject to monetarist economic policy, with its interest rate hikes and dips and debt-burdened currency whose velocity of circulation is directly determined by these hikes and dips.

Call it the lump-of-opportunity fact — or, better, Peak Opportunity. So if minimum wage is fast becoming today’s new standard, what will be tomorrow’s? As to what the future holds, let me just say, Goodbye fast-food nation, hello “ant tribe.”

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I can’t go on, I’ll go on. — Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

So I took a break (as did Rob and Anton). From all the news about finance moguls and oil well caps and dying shrimp and a dying economy. I took a break and tried to focus on things like the stars at night and interpersonal relationships and how, despite all the ugliness, the world is sometimes beautiful and how life is worth living even if you can’t get a job. I thought it would make me smarter and more engaging if I weren’t so doom and gloom all the time, writing about the resurgence of National Socialism and the end of history and all that fun stuff we don’t talk about over the World Cup and cheap beer.

But it didn’t quite work. I couldn’t take a break. Sure, I didn’t write. I neglected to send in my weekly submissions to Generation Bubble. Instead I went for walks in state forests and read German novels about ill-fated love affairs. But I couldn’t stop think about everything that was going on. I went to my futon each night with a head filled with the daily news and stomach full of bile. Cheap Spanish wine didn’t help, and neither did the latest pablum spat out by the usual suspects in the entertainment industry. I tried to shop at the local bonheur des dames, which is slouching toward “dead-mall” status, but even the now seemingly semi-weekly “doorbuster” sales  didn’t fend off the ennui eating at me. I thought if I just ignored the news long enough it would all come tumbling down and there would be something worth reading in The New York Times. But no, life drags on, only just a bit grayer because we are all slightly poorer….

That’s when I realized you can’t escape from history and its merciless repetitions. I am caught up in an economic depression and the fascism that is always the icing on the socioeconomic cake. These things grind slow and hard. Lloyd Blankfein isn’t going to have his head chopped off anytime soon. The streets aren’t going to explode in a heatwave-fanned plebeian rage. The New York Times isn’t going to start reporting on news that actually matters outside of Manhattan and the boroughs. It supposedly took the American Revolution ten years to get rolling. Sometimes, in my most fevered dreams, I imagine it will take twice as long for the American people to avenge themselves on the scoundrels, cheats and usurers that have grasped control of this country so completely. In fact, I know it will take at least ten years for that ball to get rolling. History lumbers along at its own pace, heedless of the truculent demands of our brains so agitated and dizzied by the instant gratification offered by Blackberries, iPads, Droids and whatnot. And with that realization comes the recognition that an entire decade of my life will pass in desultory strivings and fruitless ravings against a regime that dies hard — or, indeed, not at all.

Sic semper tyrannis: Still doin' God's work.

It’s hard work to muster the energy to complain day after day about a situation that doesn’t seem like it’s going to rectify itself (or explode!) anytime soon. You start to feel kinda stupid and whiny after awhile, like you should be living in your mom’s basement, playing Zork on a Macintosh breathing its last. But they’re necessary, these endless complaints. Retreat isn’t an option, I guess.  And neither is silence — unless, of course, you’re Jean Baudrillard.

We are capitalism’s captives. It’s a tenacious beast who knows it’s destined for history’s slaughterhouse. It’s bucking and lowing in anticipation of the electrified hammer, fully aware of its last moments to suck in the fetid air of this world before it meets the next. It makes us into writers prone to hyperbole. It makes us a little bit crazy.

Today I looked at The New York Times for the first time in months, and the headlines heartened me somewhat: Turns out BP has capped the oil leak and is confident that the damaged well will stay closed. And Europe is doing better. According to another article from The Times, Europe’s debt worries have eased, with some investors “treating it as the crisis that wasn’t.” Though, to tell the truth, I’m not sure how to feel with I read some good news, because even the good news isn’t that good. Usually it means that the current societal and economic  disintegration will  only occur at a slower rate, that the inevitable has been put on pause for a few moments. But it’s worth blogging about, I guess.

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Could it be that the fashion industry, which once rallied under the united colors of Benetton, has fallen in love with the idea of a master race?

When I was eight years old my family traveled to Chile for Christmas. The country was then under Agosto Pinochet’s reign of Friedmanite-directed neoliberal terror. The night of our arrival, we had to evacuate from the Santiago Sheraton because of a bomb scare. The next morning a major subway station experienced a severe explosion. All in all, it was an exciting trip — to say the least.

Two weeks into our Chilean idyll, my family decided to rent a car and head to the northern part of country. We passed through leper colonies, and through towns where most of the residents had tuberculosis. On Christmas Eve, a policeman flagged our truck down to hand us a card on which was written, “Merry Christmas from the police. We are your friend.”

Perhaps one of my strangest memories of that trip across the northern half of Chile was staying in a picturesque inn on a lake run by tuberculosis-stricken refugees from Germany. My mother groaned audibly when they handed my brother and I a bowl of hand-picked cherries in welcome. They were quite happy we had chosen to spend a few days at their humble inn, because we were Austrian, you see, and they, being German, were delighted to be visited by their noble Aryan cousins (that and it was black-fly season, so no person in their right mind would dare rent a cottage during such a pestilence). These Germans weren’t just regular old refugees fleeing mad dictators or the random pogrom, but Nazi sympathizers laying low in Chile until, as they explained in cheerful Hochdeutsch, “the Reich is reestablished and they can return home.”

Even as a child I found it strange that all those ruddy, coughing Germans still believed that the Third Reich would rise Phoenix-like and call its children home to fight for race and Fatherland. They seemed more than delusional with their belief in this macabre fairy tale. But against the otherworldly backdrop of a crystal blue lake surrounded by smoking volcanoes, it seemed possible that perhaps they were right, and we would once again be haunted by those dark, angular figures in leather overcoats brandishing Lugers and bringing slavering German shepherds to heel.

A recent New York Times photo essay on model scouts in Brazil reminded me of those exiled Germans who, for all I know, are still waiting, the hope of a resurgent Heimat beating in their consumptive chests. The photo essay depicts the wanderings of a model scout from São Paolo named Alisson Chornak, who conducts research into the ethnic composition of certain small towns in the Rio Grande do Sul region, which was colonized predominantly by Germans, in order to locate tanned, Teutonic young women to transform into fashio models.

<blockquote>Before setting out in a pink S.U.V. to comb the schoolyards and shopping malls of southern Brazil, Alisson Chornak studies books, maps and Web sites to understand how the towns were colonized and how European their residents might look today.</blockquote>

The Times piece details how Chornak finds one promising specimen, a girl named Michele Meurer, who lives with her family on a tobacco farm. He takes her from her parents and whisks her to the big city to live with 11 other girls eager for their 15 minutes of fame. But the article reveals that loneliness and homesickness drove Michele home again, into the arms of her parents, who probably never really understood who they were handing their daughter over to.

In his search for young, tawny Aryans to stable as clotheshorses for the fashion industry, Chornak is really no different from the character of Abel Tiffauges in Michel Tournier’s 1970 novel The Ogre. Abel is a maladaptive French mechanic who, by happenstance of all sorts, ends up aiding the SS in collecting blond, blue-eyed children from Polish villages. His job is to find those children who appear to be of Germanic heritage and bring them to the SS training school in an imposing castle to be “repatriated.” The Ogre documents events that were quite common during World War II. Scouts really did search out children of Germanic heritage among the Slavs of Poland. And these children really were taken from their parents and housed in orphanages where they could be properly reared as true Germans.

She-wolf of the SS: South America as the last Lebensborn outpost.

The natural parallel between searching for blond-haired, blue-eyed models in Brazil (some of whom may have been the offspring of people like the refugees I encountered in Chile) and the dark work of Abel Tiffauges cannot be passed over without comment. It confirms my suspicion that the fashion industry and fascism are birds of a feather. Indeed, by designing the very uniforms that still enthrall Hollywood today, the fashion industry played a large part in promoting fascism in Europe. And, on the very same page as the photo essay featuring the model scout Chornak, The New York Times ran an article entitled “Off Runway, Brazilian Beauty Goes Beyond Blond,” which itself features careful closeups of glimmering, long blond hair and vacant blue eyes that bespeak of a dangerous fascination that still grips the Western world.

Certainly this argument is nothing new. In fact, it seems like most people know that fashionistas are also fascists, even if they can’t define the term. But it is interesting how we seem stuck in some eternal return of the same twentieth century horror. Whether it’s corporate fascism, or simply a Versace spread in a magazine, it seems we can’t get out of some infernal loop begun well over a century ago. To dwell on how fascism and fashion go hand in hand seems trivial nowadays, given the fact that one can longer deny that we live in a fascist state. It used to be fun to write things to that effect (“This isn’t the land of the free! We’re all enslaved! Now let me get back to reading my Orwell.”) while only half believing it, knowing you could still kind of trust the press to uncover wrongdoing and could still read what you liked. Now, however, in light of the fact that Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum have very conspicuously been given free rein over matters of state, it can only be written with a surreal sort of resignation that we really aren’t free anymore. Fashionable or unfashionable, we’re all fascist subjects now.

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I can’t say I was terribly surprised to read the lede, “A three-decade analysis of prior research reveals that American college students are not quite as empathetic as they used to be,” in this May 28, 2010 U.S. News and World Report article. The news hit me with all of the impact of a wet firecracker, to quote the Silkworm song. As someone who spent a decade teaching in universities, I could only react with the bemusement, experienced all too frequently in these modern times, that comes whenever a study is released which simply confirms what you’ve known all along. (“MIT researchers have published the results of a five-year study that has conclusively determined that rain is wet!”)

Still, the fact that I considered this announcement a foregone conclusion didn’t keep me from reading the whole story. I pressed on to see if I could glean any choice nuggets of insight. Statistic-laden details tend to give a certain weight to subjective impressions. Maybe the French philosopher Michel Foucault is right; creatures of an empiricism-dominated episteme find great solace in having their individual judgments bolstered by data.

The U.S. News and World Report article quotes study co-author Sara Konrath, who details the rate of decline in empathy among American students.

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000… College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Asked to speculate as to why empathy is in short supply among millennials, Konrath offers these musings:

“The increase in exposure to media during this time period could be one factor…. Compared to 30 years ago, the average American now is exposed to three times as much nonwork-related information. In terms of media content, this generation of college students grew up with video games. And a growing body of research … is establishing that exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”

That old cultural bugbear, popular media, rears its fearsome visage once again! You’d expect an academic researcher to be a bit more tentative, more circumspect, when it comes to such generalizations, conjectural though they may be; but Konrath defies such an expectation by suggesting that her millennial subjects might actually live up to the popular stereotypes of their age cohort.

“Many people see the current group of college students — sometimes called ‘Generation Me’ — as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history.”

Generational profiling thus seems poised to gain legitimacy if studies like Konrath’s pass muster among peer reviewers.

That the United States is a veritable laboratory for creating sociopaths of every strain and stripe is something I don’t think any sensible person can deny. But what happens when the creatures escape the lab and begin to wreak havoc on other countries and cultures? This is a question popular American writer, wit and raconteur Bill Bryson recently considered at the Hay Literary Festival in merry ole England. Bryson’s favorable opinion of the British, which he duly recorded in his 1995 book Notes from a Small Island, has apparently suffered diminution of late. A May 30, 2010 story in Britain’s Daily Mail (a scrofulous rag, I know; but as Madonna so famously put it: “Beauty’s where you find it.”) quotes Bryson as saying, “One thing that is different, and has changed here, is the self-absorption, not just greed.” This in Bryson’s estimation has led to a fundamental transformation of the British character, and not for the better.

“Everybody is in a hurry now and there is a ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ sort of thing. When I first came to Britain it really was all about fair play and queuing.”

Mad dashing about, cheating and butting in line may signal a crisis of the social order when it comes to Great Britain, but when it comes to the United States, such behaviors are de rigeur. Indeed, Bryson, himself a transplanted American, may be in a good position to offer such judgments; the way he describes latter-day Britons provokes for anyone marooned on this side of the Atlantic a certain horror of recognition. “America is about individual wealth and collective poverty and we [in Britain] have moved into that camp.”

The mirror of production: neoliberal statecraft as soulcraft.

Given present circumstance, however, “slum” might be a better word to use than “camp.” The former term is what Peak-Oiler paterfamilias and man of letters James Howard Kunstler uses to describe this burgeoning bivouac of greedy, grasping unworthies. In the latest post at his imitable weblog Clusterf*ck Nation, Kunstler, reflecting on his recent idyll bicycling around Berlin, writes,

America today is arguably a far less civilized land, and even more neurotic, than the Germany of the 1930s. We live in places so extreme in ugliness, squalor, and dysfunction that just going to the store leaves a sentient American reeling in angst and anomie. Our popular culture would embarrass a race of hebephrenics. We think that neck tattoos are cool. A lot of our pop music is overtly homicidal. Our richest citizens have managed to define a new banality of evil. Our middle classes are subject to humiliations so baroque that sadomasochism even fails to encompass the finer points. And we don’t even need help from other nations to run our own economic affairs into the ground — we’re digging our national grave with a kind of antic glee, complete with all the lurid stagecraft that Las Vegas, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue can muster.

Kunstler’s catalogue of grotesqueries American-style needs little added to it. I have to say that my own observations largely accord with his. Having observed teens and twentysomethings passing through my classrooms since 2000 (the same year, incidentally, that Konrath places the beginning of the decline in empathy among college students), I can only lament how thoroughly they are creatures of their debased culture. They had heads so full of Madison-Avenue platitudes that I despair for this country’s political future.

My former student are not stupid, however, nor are they dull. Rather, they possess a sort of animal cunning. They’re cagey and single-minded, (albeit also parochial and unenlightened) and they attest to saccharine dreams of affluence and seamless self-actualization. They’re the ones the Culture Industry so breathlessly panders to, the ones who inform media content. If you lool past their platitudes, however, you discover what they say about themselves in the lifestyle choices they make: They’re the MySpacers, the FaceBookers, the lappers-up of bloody delicacies proffered by the latest cinematic torture-porn, the freak-dancers, the body-obsessed, the compulsive exercisers, the blasé wearers of overpriced slave-sewn garments, and, most abhorrently, the tunnel-visioned enablers of the status quo.

My Generation-Y former students represent the undiminished legacy of the neoliberal 1980s and ’90s, the decades of their inception. They are all ripples and surfaces illumined by sparks of excessive self-regard. They are the people for whom life is one elaborate reality-TV show. More troublingly, they’re a generation for which the contortions of public relations have become a veritable habitus: Good is what nourishes the ego; evil is what you didn’t get away with. They’ll certainly profess to hold the interests of others as they’re own, when it’s convenient to do so, but the clichés with which they express these interests, and the utterly diffuse and noncommittal means they suggest to secure them (“I owe other people a friendly smile.” “The best thing I offer other people is the ability to listen.”) leaves you suspecting that they’re real desires are to drink and fornicate and speed in their cars and photograph themselves in bathroom mirrors.

Unlike people their age of decades past, my former students are not romantics; they opt instead for the treacly cynicism that is PC permissiveness. They’re infantile, and, if crossed, will rage and will seek revenge remorselessly. They are, in short, preening monsters of inconsequence.

So whether you choose to characterize the United States as a camp of cupidity, hypocrisy and greed, or as a slum of decay, vanity and dirty deeds, one fact remains: Slums, like camps are known for their lack of order, safety and sanitation.

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Have conditions ripened to the point where world revolution has become inevitable, or will the global financial elite save their bacon by throwing a few of their own to the angry hordes?

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two men, whose faces, as their long hair Rapped back when the whirlings of the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise. False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from the smear of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women’s lace and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through and through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in their frenzied eyes; — eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun. — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The author of a 2004 book on the French Revolution, British historian Simon Schama is well positioned to offer some illuminating commentary on current political and economic conditions in his native United Kingdom, as well as in Europe and the United States, which he does in a piece that appeared in the May 21 edition of The Financial Times. Certainly no alarmist, Schama remains circumspect on the issue of revolution — its potential and likelihood given the present disordered state.

Decorum notwithstanding, one cannot help but think that Schama’s historical comparisons assure his readers of one thing, which is best summed up in a famous statement by Mao Zedong: “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

Excellent, of course, if you’re among the put-upon majority who must now offer up a collective pound of flesh to cover the bad bets of a tiny plutocratic elite (whom writer David Rothkopf dubbed the “superclass” in an indispensible 2008 book of the same title); not so much if you happen to be … well … one of the plutocratic elite.

To date nothing on the order of out-and-out revolution has occurred — though the recent riots in Greece and the political ferment in Thailand represent two respectable efforts in this direction — but one senses, as Schama does, that the air is thick with dread and portent, particularly as “austerity” and “deficit reduction” have become watchwords for the precariously perched prevailing order.

Fumes are building, gases concentrating. Just one spark will set it alight.

“Far be it for me to make a dicey situation dicier,” Schama writes, “but you can’t smell the sulphur in the air right now and not think we might be on the threshold of an age of rage.” This certainly has a nice ring to it, “age of rage,” but when one hears “age,” it suggests a more or less permanent condition, an enduring situation, rather than just some relatively transient event. Is Schama inviting his readers to consider the possibility that the gathering clouds of unrest and upheaval signal the approach of not gale but a steady downpour of biblical duration?

Many thinkers who incline leftward would agree that this is precisely what Schama’s comments imply, and that, in fact, raindrops have been fallin’ on our heads nigh these many years. What we’re experiencing is not some setback on an otherwise forward path of progress and prosperity, but in fact simply a relatively more acute throb or palpitation in the long emergency that is capitalism.

The question becomes, then, not when the storm will begin (it’s been raging for some time now), but, indeed, when it will end. The long view of history — economic, social and political events fitted into “ages” (Schama’s preferred term) — suggests that in many respects the West hasn’t been the same since World War I.

This seems a plausible assessment, but one wonders whether the date for this regrettable turn might not be pushed back. It may just be that the West hasn’t been the same since 1848 or, indeed, 1789, those two watershed years of revolutionary hope and ambition. In the words of Bob Dylan, a hard rain’s gonna fall — just as it’s been falling for over two hundred years. After all, French king Louis XV, eerily foretelling the events of the revolution later to follow, is reputed to have said, “Après moi le déluge.“

Schama adopts a conciliatory tone, perhaps out of an awareness as to who comprises his audience (namely, the selfsame plutocratic elite for whom The Financial Times is their organ of dissemination). He takes the line that, once the public’s counterfactual impressions as to what’s happening achieve a certain consistency and momentum, facts themselves wither impotently before the onslaught of popular outrage. “Objectively, economic conditions might be improving,” Schama writes, “but perceptions are everything and a breathing space gives room for a dangerously alienated public to take stock of the brutal interruption of their rising expectations.”

One finds it difficult to subscribe to the notion that mere perception can drive a population to revolt, unless, of course, by “perception” Schama has in mind something like the fact that hunger pangs lead to the perception that one’s stomach is empty. Of course, in this instance the perception has an objectively real condition behind it. And so, one can’t thinking, does popular outrage. Things might be improving, to be sure, but the degree to which any of the unruly many have experienced this improvement is, it seems, a co-efficient of his or her proximity to the corridors of power in Washington D.C. or Brussels, or to the lending window of state central banks.

Schama seems to admit as much, albeit in a rather circumlocuitous manner. The fact that expectations for an increased share of the fruits of Capital have been thwarted “engenders a sense of grievance that ‘Someone Else’ must have engineered the common misfortune,” Schama continues,

The stock epithet the French Revolution gave to the financiers who were blamed for disaster was “rich egoists”. Our own plutocrats may not be headed for the tumbrils but the fact that financial catastrophe, with its effect on the “real” economy, came about through obscure transactions designed to do nothing except produce short-term profit aggravates a sense of social betrayal.

Why Schama places “real” in scare quotes is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he believes that the production of derivatives and of, say, grain amounts to the same thing. Most everyone else, it’s safe to assume, would prefer even the most ruthlessly processed fast-food burger to a synthetic security for their evening repast.

Schama would do well to remember the remarks on financial crises that Karl Marx makes in the first volume of Capital. Specifically, Marx observes that

[i]n a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, becomes heightened into an absolute contradiction. Hence, in such events, the form under which money appears is of no importance. The money famine continues, whether payments have to be made in gold or in credit money such as bank-notes.

To Marx’s list one could add credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and the whole raft of exotic financial instruments whose value, had there been no bank bailouts, would be nil.

Heads of state: the "haircut" that awaits the world's financial oligarchs.

Indeed, Schama shows himself unwilling to break ranks with the establishment. Rather, he’s menshevik enough to recommend that the elite discipline its own ranks, as this ought to be sufficiently satisfying spectacle to dispel the rabble’s rage. “At this point, damage-control means pillorying the perpetrators: bringing them to book and extracting statements of contrition,” Schama writes,

This is why the psychological impact of financial regulation is almost as critical as its institutional prophylactics. Those who lobby against it risk jeopardising their own long-term interests. Should governments fail to reassert the integrity of public stewardship, suspicions will emerge that, for all the talk of new beginnings, the perps and new regime are cut from common cloth. Both risk being shredded by popular ire or outbid by more dangerous tribunes of indignation.

Faced with what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas terms a “legitimation crisis,” the elite should toss a few of the worst behaving among them overboard in order to preserve the prerogatives of the elite as a whole. Thus “the integrity of public stewardship,” would come to rest on the mere appearance of propriety. Schama’s remedy thus promises to do little more than perpetuate the entire worldview upon which latter-day finance capital depends — the appearance of integrity, of value, of profitability in the products and services financiers and bankers foist on the rest of the world.

Schama counsels choosing the least bad option. The institutions of Europe, Britain and the United States are corrupt, compromised, venal, and just generally corrosive, to be sure, but even so they are preferable to mob rule, dictatorship or — Heaven forbid! — something like communism or anarcho-syndicalism.

Schama adopts a position that French philosopher Alain Badiou would regard as cause for despair. No fan of parliamentary democracy, Badiou justifies his disdain by pointing out “the manifest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within the electoral system.” In such a system “preferences are duly recorded, in the passive manner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes any embodiments of dissenting political will.” Anything other than the most timid, tepid centrist agenda is doomed to failure from the get-go, meaning that an electoral system in fact functions only to perpetuate the status quo. Which is quite convenient for the electoral system, whose very existence (in it’s present form) depends on the status quo’s perpetuation.

Such an assessment as Badiou’s would be merely depressing if the status quo itself weren’t so malignant. Thus to tolerate its perpetuation as abiding “the devil you know” is to participate in slow collective suicide. Or so seems to be Chris Hedges’s position. In a May 24, 2010 piece for truthdig Hedges, aprópòs the recent Greek riots, writes,

What is happening in Greece, what will happen in Spain and Portugal, what is starting to happen here in states such as California, is the work of a global, white-collar criminal class. No government, including our own, will defy them. It is up to us. Barack Obama is simply the latest face that masks the corporate state. His administration serves corporate interests, not ours. Obama, like Goldman Sachs or Citibank, does not want the public to see how the Federal Reserve Bank acts as a private account and ATM machine for Wall Street at our expense. He, too, has helped orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. He serves our imperial wars, refuses to restore civil liberties, and has not tamed our crippling deficits. His administration gutted regulatory agencies that permitted BP to turn the Gulf of Mexico into a toxic swamp. The refusal of Obama to intervene in a meaningful way to save the gulf’s ecosystem and curtail the abuses of the natural gas and oil corporations is not an accident. He knows where power lies. BP and its employees handed more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The slogan, “Expropriate the expropriators!” never enjoyed more crystalline clarity than it does right now. There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.

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As the cup of wrath poured out in the Gulf of Mexico continues on its path of devastation, one is led to ask: Could it be that the apocalypse so long anticipated is a wholly natural consequence of humankind’s mere existence?

I’m back from my vacation by the Alabama shore, and I can happily report that nary a drop of oil drifted my way. Indeed, rather than tarry balls of bubblin’ crude, toxic clouds of dispersant, or gaggles of besmirched seabirds, naps on the beach, fishing trips and long walks along the shore filled my days. It was a comfortably bourgeois vacation, one where I could pretend all was right with the world if I but avoided the morning paper and nightly news. ¶ Yes it was nice. Very nice. But of course it was impossible to be completely happy. Beach houses standing empty, the only patent evidence of the larger problem bubbling up at sea, gave Gulf Shores a sense melancholy desolation. The beaches were devoid of people, the streets of traffic.

I felt as though I was a character in Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach, an apocalyptic tale that details the lives of everyday Australians as they await the arrival of nuclear fallout from a war waged on the other side the globe. They are the lingering remnant of a ravaged world, the residents of the only continent yet to be blasted by radiation poisoning. Their days are numbered, and they know it. Towns, seascapes, fields and forests take on an otherworldly character in the eyes of those awaiting destruction. Yet the duties of life continue to beckon, even in light of the realization that life itself won’t go on much longer.

Such was the atmosphere in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The guides conducting a dolphin tour I went on spoke of the possible destruction of their livelihood. “Tell people that the oil hasn’t come to Alabama yet,” they urged the sightseers, most of whom cared only to carom from lee to starboard to catch another glimpse of these doomed cetaceans disporting themselves in the surf. It was the same in restaurants and grocery stores. People expressed a disbelief and also a resignation. It was hard to believe, because everything still seemed so sun-kissed, so picturesque, so normal. But at night I’d go walking on the beach, counting the dead fish as I would encounter them — each one to my imagination the seafaring equivalent of a coalmine canary — and I’d be reminded of the fatal slick slowly oozing its way shoreward.

Walking along the beach in the evening, it was hard not to think that perhaps this would be my last chance to do such a thing, that I and my traveling companion were among the last to be able to appreciate the beauty of those stretches of sugar sand and blue water.

On a ferry ride across the bay I watched as pelicans dove into the water for their late afternoon meals. It was truly something to behold, their technique. They’d swoop gracefully upward and, at the apex of their flight, would fold themselves up and drop beak-first into the water. The economy of effort, almost martial-arts-like, was strangely affecting, and it made for a surreal juxtaposition when considered against a backdrop of oil rigs abuzz with the business of dredging up the earth’s vital juices to power more ugly, destructive machines.

Memento mare: the sea gives up its dead.

Destruction is a difficult thing to anticipate. It tends to catch us unawares. And when it finds us, it comes on like gangbusters. The week I was in Alabama news of the collapse of the euro made its way over the airwaves with alarming frequency. The stock market fell a thousand points in a minute in the now famous and unprecedented “Flash Crash.” Somehow all these things seem connected. And of course they are: they’re just the groans and creaks of a moribund economic and social order. And the symptoms grow ever more acute….

A May 25, 2010 Reuters story reports that more than 300 dead sea birds had washed up on the U.S. Gulf Coast. I can’t help but think their small rotting bodies represent a gruesome dispatch from a poisoned future, one in which oil spills and stock market crashes will probably be the least of our worries. The tipping point we reached long ago; what we feel now is the vertigo of zero G. We’re in free fall, and where — and how — we’ll land is anyone’s guess. But were I a gambling or investing sort (Who am I kidding? The two are synonymous.), I’d go short on humankind.

In his 2009 book Empire of Illusion Chris Hedges writes, “Our elites manipulate statistics and data to foster illusions of growth and prosperity. They refuse to admit that they have lost control since to lose control is to concede failure.” I think all signs now point to total capitulation, even among those who attempt to prop up illusions of unlimited prosperity. To attempt to spin more illusions points to an absurd madness that the dullest minds can’t help but recognize.

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My attitude toward consumerism was indelibly marked by my having grown up during the cold war, when the conflict between East and West was popularly depicted as a struggle between a deliriously joyous consumerism and a gray life of deprivation and standing in lines to secure soap and crusty bread. Throughout my years in junior high and high school, I can remember hearing repeatedly about how jealous youths in the U.S.S.R. were about Americans owning multiple pairs of blue jeans and how a pair of Levi’s was worth as much as a car over there. The shopping mall was in its ascendancy, commonly touted as an air-conditioned paradise, the architectural triumph of consumerism, offering an ideal civic space for contemporary times that could and should make dangerous urban city centers moribund. Suburban neighborhoods in the U.S. may have been boring and isolating, but it didn’t matter because the mall was where you would go to meet friends, fetishize a panoply of goods, stock daydreams with branded luxuries, cram down junk food and generally become who you really were. ¶ But there were no malls behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, we learned, there were state-run depots from which goods were issued to the demoralized population, who could ask no questions nor offer suggestions about what sort of things they actually wanted. Everyone was forced to have the same stuff, because no one was allowed to be different and it was a crime to think of yourself as an individual.

Hence the portrayal of Russians in cold-war-era films as monotone robots who humorlessly executed the Party’s marching orders. That’s why in 1985, Sting could think to sing the idiotic line, “I hope the Russians love their children too” and have it regarded as a profundity. Obviously if the Russians didn’t believe in God or have malls or let their kids become individuals, they may very well not love them and may be eager to see them all martyred to the nuclear holocaust in order to secure a future where there’s no class system, as well as no ambition, free enterprise, pluck or spirit.

In the U.S., we were taught that people in the East who had to stand in lines and who had no choices in department stores (let alone of department stores) were simply not free, in the most obvious and visceral of ways. Freedom is consumer choice, which is the choice to acquire the things with which to construct your real self. As we were made to see them, the poor souls in communist countries were a featureless mass of lumpen people with no individual identity. They weren’t allowed to express themselves, and the censorship extended beyond what they might have said or created — with no consumer markets, no cornucopia of cultural products, what did they have to talk about anyway? — to their very identity itself. Everyone was the same, and it was supposed to be awful.

Trapped in the angst of my teenage isolation, perpetually and simultaneously paranoid about both being sufficiently unique and being included in the right cliques, such homogeneity didn’t seem all that awful. I suffered from what seemed to me a kind of surfeit of identity, or at least a surfeit of potential identity. Every trip to the mall was punctuated by a feeling of emptiness and confusion about what I really wanted; regardless of what I bought or how many french fries I ate, I left dissatisfied. Every mundane choice about what I would wear or what music I would listen to or what I would write on the fronts of my notebooks seemed pregnant with obscure significance about who I was becoming, about what I was supposed to live up to, even though I desperately wanted not to care about any of it. I was sick of being judged. I wanted to be in the endless Eastern queue, waiting to be issued the standard package, my mind free to think about the things that mattered. I wanted to read Marx and grasp the totality, not parse the meanings of the clothing brands in the young-adult section of Macy’s.

That was a conveniently rebellious attitude to have, anyway: Prosperity was a burden, and bourgeois conformity a crushing worry precisely because we weren’t all issued Mao suits to wear. Being a teenager pretending to comprehend Marx was no less of a pose than being a teenager with rolled-up Girbaud jeans. Still, it was a relief to know the Iron Curtain countries were out there to offer a fantasy alternative for me, to serve as an anchor for resistance, even if in the last analysis they represented an alternative no American kid in their right mind would have chosen. Despite the optional paralysis, the hedonic treadmill, the invidious comparison, the ubiquitous anxiety-inducing marketing and all the rest of the palpable vicissitudes of capitalism, I still wanted more stuff, not a one-way ticket to Leningrad. But nonetheless, it was comforting to know there was an entire bloc of nations committed to establishing a limit to consumerism, even if nothing about American life made it seem possible that consumerism could be stopped. The communist countries offered the promise that consumerism was reversible, not merely the natural, inevitable way of life. They proved that people were out there who were still invested in the opposite ideal to consumerism, people who believed that we shouldn’t spend our lives doing nothing nobler than competing to have better cars and clothes. Because of the Eastern bloc, one could dare to imagine really existing egalitarianism. One could imagine a place where one could stop worrying about oneself.

Reading Slavenka Drakulić’s early-1990s essay “A Communist Eye, or What I Saw in New York,” about encountering the pressures of consumerism amid Western poverty, reminded me of my youthful fantasies and, to a degree, vindicated them. It turns out that people from the East actually did absorb an egalitarian ideal and actually were invested in a different way of life. Even if they were force-fed a utopian ideology by a totalitarian state that made them surrender their innate wish to be better than their neighbors, they didn’t experience it that way. Reflecting on gap between America as it is marketed and the reality of life as it is seen on New York’s streets, Drakulić observes

There is a deeper reason why the poverty sticks to us, why we recognize beggars, homeless people, bums, petty thieves, drunks, the sick, junkies, why we take it all so personally, why it hurts us. It’s because we have a communist eye. Like a third, spiritual eye placed in the middle of one’s forehead, this eye scans only a certain type of phenomenon; it is selective for injustice. Even if the socialist states have fallen apart, the ideals of equality and justice haven’t. They are still with us, built in like a chip. We remember them from school, from our movies, from literature glorifying the idea of justice, as well as from the clean, beggarless streets of our cities.

The communist eye sees misery and injustice where those schooled in capitalism tend to see differentials in “effort” or “merit.” In the East, the repressive state channeled its people’s ambition toward achieving the freedom defined by its own ideology, in which equal opportunity for all translates into a full flowering of every individual and the waste of nothing each has to offer to society. In the West, already putatively free, we never considered that we owed society anything or that our efforts had anything to do with society. Our ambitions were turned subtly toward unfulfillable fantasies of self-aggrandizement in the name of sustaining endless economic growth. Prosperity replaces material deprivation with a psychic inadequacy that can’t be meliorated.

Touch of gray: the allure of monotony in Cold War era Eastern Europe.

In this n+1 essay about childhood in communist Czechoslovakia by Jana Prikryl are some hints that these differences in orientation may persist. She notes a UNICEF report that claims children fare better in the Czech Republic than in the U.S. because there’s less comparative poverty, despite the U.S. being much richer in absolute terms. Prikryl explains that “the only economic advantage to being a child in the Czech Republic is that your peers are all about as poor as you are.” Drakulić had noted something similar: “In socialism, we were not used to thinking of ourselves as poor,” she writes. “The communist principle of uravnilovka (leveling) made us all live more or less under the same conditions. There were no ways, no means, not enough goods to establish a real, visible, palpable class distinction between poor and rich.” In the U.S., virtually nothing is visible but such ways, means, and goods. Mastering through consumerism the constantly refining subtleties of the distinction between classes presents itself as the meaning of life.

Is that any less dismal than the empty shops and the threadbare private selves of communist Europe? Drakulić’s essay vividly captures the way opulence and palpable inequality is oppressive in a different way than eastern grayness had been, an oppressiveness that in our own way we in the west were not permitted to admit. In our case, the proscription may have been more psychologically damaging because it was largely self-imposed, inculcated not directly by the State and by transparent propaganda but by what we voluntarily took in as entertainment, by what was directed at us from all sides by the existence of unnecessary goods we were invited to imagining possessing as our right. We conspired with the culture to make luxuries into necessities in our minds and to frankly enjoy the dubious pleasures of consumerism as though they didn’t entail a sacrifice of an alternate ethical ideal.

In a passage about being dizzied by shopping at Bloomingdale’s, Drakulić grasps much of what is unsettling and confrontational about consumerist ideology once it’s made material and manifest in the commercial infrastructure — invasive institutions of everyday life in the west that Americans cannot help but take for granted:

After a certain point, my eyes refuse to look, my mouth becomes dry, and I start to have a headache. I recognize this particular tiredness,… the feeling that it is just absurd to look at so many things and so many kinds of one thing, as if one is enclosed in a room with mirrored walls that endlessly reflect each other. It has to stop somewhere — you think — this multiplying, this plenitude doesn’t make any sense. Coming from the world of shortages, one’s idea of plenty is mainly of fruit, meat, vegetables, of shampoo, soap, or toilet paper. Here, you are murdered by variations on each of these and by the impossibility of distinguishing the differences. First you discover an immense greed, a kind of fever, a wish to buy everything — the primordial hunger of consumerism. Then you discover powerlessness — and the very essence of it, poverty. Moreover, you start to realize that Bloomingdale’s for you is a museum, not a real store where you can buy real things for your real self.

And in that account of an afternoon’s dislocation, Drakulić sums up an ideological education that Americans have drummed into them their entire lives. Americans learn that “real things” and “real selves” only exist as potentialities, though we are obligated to always pursue them. We are obligated to be discontented with what we are — to become someone else — and search for our true selves at the same time. Is this in effect any different from the communists’ insistence that the collective took precedence over the self, that the private self didn’t exist? We are never who we are in a consumer society; instead we have an identity defined negatively, by what we lack and what we yearn for and what we fear is being said about what we have and what we display to the world.

Not that Drakulić regards communism as a lost golden age, or its ideology as faultless. In another essay she criticizes what she calls “the egalitarian syndrome” — regarding others’ good fortune as an insult to society. Her ambivalence reflects the ongoing debate about income inequality. That debate essentially deals with these alternatives of a collective impoverished identity and prosperous but anxious selves. If we accept that well-being is fundamentally linked to our ability to manage our identity, then those alternatives translate into the question of whether well-being is better promoted through leveling at the expense of economic growth, or whether growth enables the general prosperity to obscure the misery of having less than some peers and the insecurity and intermittent guilt at having more than some others. No political system seems capable of embracing both possibilities. Can there be egalitarian autonomy? Or will the concepts continue to be pitted against each other politically, so that the existing drift upward of wealth and power can continue unscrutinized?

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Sometimes I’m sad the bubble burst. Fortunately, Americans’ bubble-butts endure. ¶ The age of lenders pushing jumbo mortgages gave rise to eateries pushing jumbo portions — The Cheesecake Factory, as well as Claim Jumper, which I remember fondly from my salad days in Arizona (and when I went I was about the only one eating salad in the place). A California chain famous for its obscene portions and Gold Rush theme, Claim Jumper opened its doors in 1977. Its website promises that “when you step inside a Claim Jumper you will discover an environment that is warm and comfortable.” Which is quite true; patrons are greeted by roaring fireplaces and over-sized booths of  soothing faux mahogany. The lighting is low, and the exposed woodwork makes you feel as though you happened upon some Teutonic hunting lodge nestled deep in a fairytale forest.

The machinic din of masticating mandibles dispels all illusions of comfort and relaxation, however. Dining at Claim Jumper is work. The portions demand the utmost intestinal fortitude — and elasticity. Sandwiches like “The Motherlode” require that you consume pounds of ham, roast turkey, tri-tip, bread, pickles and Thousand Island dressing. The “Honey Blonde Fish and Chips” looks like half the seasonal haul of Portugal.

But taking the cake is … well … the cake: the “Chocolate Motherlode” is six shortening- and sugar- laden layers of chocolate cake, chocolate chips and chocolate fudge nearly a foot in length.

Let them eat cake: Claim Jumper's "Chocolate Motherlode" feeds the uprising.

It was always good fun to visit Claim Jumper on a Friday night and witness a porcine couple grimly eating their way through a Motherlode. The determination on their faces was almost melancholy, as though they were backhoeing all that bleached white flour into a spiritual void they knew they could never fill. You just knew they were trying to reward themselves for 70 hours spent working in a featureless cubicle or behind a cash register. Perhaps it was during one of those visits that I came to realize the bubble had to burst, that such lugubrious excess couldn’t last forever. At any rate, visits to Claim Jumper proved object lessons in unsustainable consumption.

Claim Jumper is still in business. But it might not be for long, if bailout after bailout augurs austerity for the hapless homeowner now bedeviled by negative equity. Perhaps the place could trade down, swapping the fool’s gold of Velveeta for oozing Cheddar, say, and in this way survive. This would, however, mean a diminished gustatory experience, to say the least.

An alternative to adulterating Claim Jumper’s kingly fare is simply to opt for humbler but no less liver-throttling dishes. My candidate for the downmarket substitute to the Motherlode would have to be that breakfast of champions, the slinger. During my oats-sowing days, no bout of pounding dollar pitchers on The Landing, Saint Louis’s riverfront bar scene, would have been complete without the pre-dawn ingestion of the vaunted slinger, that last-call, mega-calorie manna which makes the city’s famous greasy spoon, Eat Rite, unique.

Boozers throughout “The Lou” clamor for this gutbomb, whose ingredients are eggs, hash browns, a hamburger patty, Cheddar cheese, onion and chili.

Rogues' calorie: The Saint Louis slinger a budget option for gluttonous resistance.

More alimentarily adventurous types can opt for the super slinger, which tosses a beef burrito or tamale on the peak of that delicious mess.

But whether you stay regular or go super, you will be pleased at how it gives your bed-spin-induced chunder greater body and texture. And don’t worry, the slinger’s Everest-high fat content means its self-lubricating action easily scoots that inevitable uh-oh! down even the most anemically flushing toilets.

I recommend a fifth of Jägermeister as the aperitif best suited to bringing out the slinger’s (or, indeed, the super slinger’s) many complexities.

I present these dishes as a public service intended to raise awareness of good ole American-style overeating, which might just prove the most effective mode of home-foreclosure resistance; because it’s one thing to throw someone out of his house, but to have to cut him out is another thing entirely.

Indeed, Americans’ gluttony, long an object of derision throughout the world, may prove their greatest weapon of resistance.

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