Rogue Columnist

Come to one of my book signings and 200 people might be in the crowd (or five people). Except for my de-facto bodyguard, maybe only a handful will be men. On a good night. Men don't read anymore. This is one of the most frightening of the many express-elevator-to-the-dark-ages changes that have happened to America in my lifetime. Of course there are outliers, on this blog for example, or the new head librarian in Seattle, a man who said he fell in love with libraries as a fourth grader. Men read technical manuals and comic books. But the well-read American male of the past is mostly gone. Although all Americans are reading less — one survey found that the typical citizen reads only four books a year and one in four reads none at all — men are the biggest drop outs. They account for only 20 percent of the fiction market.

I can't imagine living in this mental poverty. When I turned nine years old, one of the first things I did was get a card at the Phoenix Public Library (the earliest age one could qualify). Before that, the one pure joy of Kenilworth School was the well-stocked library. I grew up around readers and books. My great aunt had an especially impressive library, and it made up for otherwise dull visits to her acreage on Seventh Avenue. My childhood reading wasn't highbrow: I was especially entranced by C.B. Colby's military books (Our Space Age Navy, etc.). But I read. These included comic books, too, but by age ten or so, comics were boring (not so for people today). Books have taken me places I would otherwise never have visited, from Plato's Athens and hell with Dante, to the Battle of Berlin. Books changed my mind and made it changeable. I never intended to be a journalist or author. I just assumed that experience was one a well-rounded person should have. Books used to be sexy. Really desirable women expected well-read men, and reading to one's lover is a sensual delight.

No longer for most. Aside from the polls, anecdotal evidence comes my way constantly: My son doesn't read books…My husband never reads…I don't read books…Never did like books. Is it any wonder that this has accompanied our society's collapse into widespread anti-intellectualism and aggressive ignorance (because to understand that, one would have read, say, Richard Hofstadter).

The first modern social security program was begun by that notorious bleeding heart Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s. With it, the Iron Chancellor successfully undercut the socialists and communists, kept peace with the working class and helping Germany become a major power until he was dismissed by Kaiser Bill and the fuse was lit on the bloody 20th century. American Social Security began in the New Deal after a long fight with reactionaries and they've never let go of their dream of destroying it. Social Security is one of those "entitlements" we keep hearing about from our leaders in politics and business, as well as in the media, that must be "reformed."

I don't know about you, but I've worked full time since I was seventeen-and-a-half, paying for the Greatest Generation's Social Security. It is hardly an "entitlement," a word loaded with welfare for the undeserving. It is a social insurance program where younger generations pay for the retirement of older generations, and it's worked fine for 70 years. But no small amount of oldsters now want to break this foundation of the social compact. They got theirs. Now the dastardly baby boomers will "break the system." Well, no. Social Security is fine and needs, at best, modest modifications. Unfortunately, even President Hoover, the supposed leader of the supposed Democratic Party, accepts the premise that broad "entitlement reform" is a sine qua non of fixing America.

So went the famous 2003 quote from Gen. David Petraeus concerning the Iraq war. More about him later. But as the Great Disruption once again sends us further down the mountainside, it's an apt question for the American experiment in self-government, the economy, our society.

One way it doesn't end is with a great backlash against the extremism that now controls the Republican Party. Wisconsin gave its best shot with fierce protests and recall elections but failed. Reactionary Republicans still hold power in the home of Robert La Follette. When this week's recall contests were over, it was clear that corporate money will have its way. Not only that, but majorities in suburbia, which is most of the country, will vote GOP no matter whether this is in their economic or civic interests. Whatever the polls say about Republican unpopularity, not much will change in the next election. For that to happen, America would need a viable opposition party.

It doesn't end with President Hoover "finding his voice." The listless recitation of pleas for balanced approaches and bipartisanship we heard on Monday, as the stock market was panicking, is his voice. He is weak. He is passive. He is a creature of the Robert Rubin/bankster wing of the Democratic Party, which shares the dream of "reforming entitlements." He will not fight for the middle class, for jobs, for fair play. I think of the late Jeff MacNelly's brutally on-target political cartoons of Jimmy Carter, who became smaller and smaller in the presidential chair.

As I write, the Dow is down 350 points and the stock market has given up all its gains for the year. Never fear: The rich have already moved into safe havens — and those with some exposure are a little less rich. Everyone seems to agree that "the game is up," as one financial analyst told me. But which game? That America and Europe are "broke" and must dismantle their "lavish public sectors and entitlements"? Or that crony capitalism, imperial overstretch, failure to invest in education and job-creating infrastructure by the richest nation in history is the losing game? The former have won the argument with barely any resistance from President Hoover and the Democrats. The results will be a catastrophe. The Tea Partiers are cleverly, or stupidly, claiming this austerity doesn't go far enough. That way, when it fails, they can claim victory and demand more ideological purity, rather like the apologists for Soviet communism.

We may not be looking at another recession. We may be in a Depression. For many, if not most, Americans, the recovery was chimerical. Their troubles began in the '00s, with stagnant incomes and the worst record of job creation since the real President Hoover. When the housing bubble crashed and the stock market followed, the were financially ruined. Now 24 million are unemployed or under-employed. And that was all before the federal government embarked on an austerity plan that might please Robert Rubin but otherwise guarantees more recession.

So how will Depression 2.0 be different from the Great Depression?

As the planet warms faster than the most fearful scientists predicted, as peak oil stares us grimly in the face, as the full faith and credit of the United States government is put at risk in order to bring down that (black) man in the White House, as the middle class craters and all the good in the America in which I grew up is looted, profaned and destroyed, McDonald's will make Happy Meals more healthy. The right moves in disciplined lock-step, seeking and winning a few large victories. The "left," such as it is, remains distracted by innumerable enthusiasms. So the health Nazis win one and gay people can marry in New York. Smokers, but not extremists, have been made second-class citizens. What does this matter compared with the real game that is taking place horrifically before our cow-like stares?

As expected, President Hoover and the corrupt/enervated Democratic Party gave away any tax increases in the debt-ceiling stand-off. The results of this "balanced approach" will be years, if not decades, of economic and social destruction. The Republicans have a partner in their cherished ambition to dismantle Social Security, the Great Society and the New Deal in the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As with the 24 million un- or underemployed Americans in a nation of 301 million, the damage will begin at the margins and not be fully felt for years.

The dysfunction in Washington may be felt much sooner, if the debt ceiling is not raised. Count on the fearsome deficit and debt to go away the moment that President Romney or Bachmann is sworn in. And depend on the right to have ready-made explanations for the chaos and destruction that are now guaranteed whether we get a deal or not. Their superstition and dogma will call for even more government cuts. Unions and public workers are the problem. Business isn't hiring because of too many regulations. Climate change is a hoax. All this will be dutifully reported by the media as if it is a perfectly legitimate response.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. — Franklin Roosevelt

It's true I give a good speech. What can I do? — Barack Obama

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism. — Herbert Hoover

We do not need clairvoyance to predict the general outcome from the protracted and ugly debt-ceiling negotiations between President Hoover and the House Republicans. This is because, contrary to the the mainstream media narrative, Washington is not composed of equal parts of hardcore conservatives, hardcore liberals and centrists, with the only trick being for them to get along and "stop acting like children."

In reality, one of the two major parties has become totally captured by extremist ideology that would make William F. Buckley turnabout his sailboat and head for France. The other party, the Democrats, are leaderless, captured by corporate interests and lacking any major liberal lions. Liberalism is essentially dead in America as far as governing is concerned, a development with far-reaching and unexamined consequences. Over all this, and interlocked with the right-wing machine, is unprecedented corporate control of the government, from the statehouses to Washington, D.C. More than $50 million has been spent this year alone in lobbying Congress to further weaken regulation of Wall Street and the big banks.

Finally, President Hoover is not willing to fight, much less for liberalism or for the American middle class. He seems desperate to grasp at virtually every "deal" that floats daily before his finely chiseled face. The latest, according to Talking Points Memo, is that good ole "grand bargain" that would involve massive spending cuts "set in stone," with maybe "revenues some time in the future." Whatever the final settlement, this is the trajectory. It's time to consider how this will play out.