http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW9TIKrxT18&feature=related
Looking back, this was almost the right question to ask in 1974. It wasn't just exactly the right question, but we can answer the one they posed.
My vote is since August 15,1971 when R. M. Nixon demolished Bretton Woods. That's quite a while, if you happen to be a human. It's been forty years, or about half a human lifetime, since Tricky Dick did away with the gold standard and our economic world started inflating it's way to nothingness.
I was a young man back then and my thoughts were of family, career and making a fortune in some sort of financial adventure. Back then I was not smart enough to realize civilization had just come to an end, but then again, neither did a lot of folks, most of whom were much smarter and more savvy than I.
At the time I was more interested in listening to a guy named Blaine who convinced me, and a bunch of other guys, to invest in a broken down TV station that operated out of Tacoma, WA.
The company he was pushing also had a bunch of cheap land in the area and his pitch boiled down to "Don't you think it makes a lot of sense - owning your own TV station to advertise your land?" It did make a bunch of sense to a 26 year old wet behind the ears kid who was busily involved conquering the known world. I had read about Alexander the Great and was sure I could do the bit in another year or two.
So I gave him everything we had and took out a loan to buy even more of the paper stock certificates he was handing out. He was gonna make all of us rich - remember? Well, Blaine, I do remember. It didn't happen - all that happened was the whole thing went belly up and I paid off the loan plus interest over the next five years.
All things considered, it was a cheap lesson as these things go. It was a lot of money back then - but not even as much as passes through this retired household in a good month these days. It turned out to be a really inexpensive education and I'm happy I paid for it back then. It saved me from learning about smiling faces and pretty paper later in life when it would have been harder to recover.
And, we did recover - from the TV/Land deal Blaine pitched to us while wearing a custom made Western cut suit. But not, it seems, from the thing ol' Tricky did to pay for Lyndon's war that same year. Even though only a few very educated men of the time realized what was going on, it's taken only forty years for that one act to destroy the value of our American dollar. It's hard for me to believe, but it takes less money than what slips through my fingers every nine or ten weeks today to pay cash for the house I bought that year.
It's true. We don't live all that much better now than we did then - not at all. We did not get rich, as I had planned to do, the dollar just is worth much less than it was back then. And worse, it now takes the income of two people to provide what one income used to provide.
Our politicians, in collusion with the bankers, have done this to us. Inflation, and the lack of wages keeping up with it's steady increase, has taken the heaviest possible toll on American workers. It, and the people who allow it for their own ends, have taken from us the most valuable commodity we own, our time. The time one parent used to spend raising children is now spent in the workplace just so the offspring can be fed and clothed. Because they take so much of our labor in the form of fees and taxes, the well connected and well heeled have caused our children to raise themselves.
The children have grown up dumb and mean. There is little respect for life itself among the poorest and least advantaged of them, and now they seem to have realized they can take what ever it is they want or need by force. All it takes is a large enough number of them and they can overwhelm the order in our society. It's happening all around us now in 7-11 markets and retail stores.
Soon enough, it will happen in the homes of the folks who have caused our society to crumble. The Lords of our nation will pay dearly for the toys they now enjoy.
I'm afraid we're going to enter a dark time in our history, and not just the history in our country, but around the entire world. We will be lucky if civilization survives.
This thing has been going on for forty years. And it may last another forty before it explodes. But, make no mistake - it will explode and, in my view, sooner than later. Forty years is a long time for a human, but not for a dark age.
The song at the start of this page asked "How long has this been going on." I think a better question is "How long can this keep going on?"
Like the man says, Forrest, if something can't go on forever, it won't.
ReplyDeleteI do have some hope. Back in the '20s, people thought that everything that happened to you was your own fault. If you couldn't get a job, couldn't eat well, couldn't feed your kids -- it was because you were a "bum." Morally deficient.
But a few years later many of those fine people who had the world on a string found themselves on the streets, without work. And the people who were still doing okay were calling _them_ bums. And they said to themselves, "But _I'm_ not a bum." And a light bulb went on; when the game is fixed, it gets harder to win no matter how hard you try. And when enough people figured it out, the game was unfixed; and that lasted 45 years or so.
It's time to learn the lesson again; and unfortunately it won't be learned without pain. I don't know why this is so, but as a species we have to feel the pain before we really learn the lesson. I just hope it doesn't last any longer than last time.
Rhumba, my wife, thinks that nothing fundamental will change for a long, long time. I tell her I have to believe in something better than that or why get out of bed in the morning?
We'll see. I don't think we'll have to wait forty years for the current system to come apart, either.
Holy cow, Forrest. While I'm cruising at 30,000 feet deer hunting with Jesus, you're writing like a banshee. All great posts! If you keep writing at this pace, you'll have enough for a book by the 2012 Election ... which will determine the direction (if not the fate) of our country. If dumber-than-GW wins, we're doomed; if Mitt the Mormon wins, it won't matter because we'll all get our own star; and if the current prez wins, we may have a chance if those pesky tea-baggers lose the hold they have on the GOP folks. Just to be on the safe side, I may start stocking up on SPAM to supplement the potatoes we grow and the crab and fish we catch. (By the way, I'm loving the book. Joe is such a good writer. I'm thinking of buying some extra copies and sending them to people I know ... anonymously of course.) Keep at it, Steinbeck!
ReplyDeleteA book? ME??? No, you must have had too much Gin on the plane. Besides, most folks I know buy paperweights at Hallmark Stores and any book I wrote would not be weighty enough...
ReplyDeleteBoomer - I hope she's right and we're wrong. But, I think not. All I'm asking for is another six years. That will allow several situations in our lives to work themselves out, and I'll be on a very slow airplane - you know what I'm saying?
ReplyDeleteI'll be passing very close to the coast you are near - you two wanna join me? Trip of a lifetime, my fried - and maybe the safest place to be is in the middle of an ocean for a while.