I’ve been running into Indians a lot lately. Not subcontinent Indians, the American ones. Not actual American Indians, either. Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago, I was going through a roll of nickels, and I found one of the old-timey Indian head variety. The date on that particular coin is completely obliterated, which happened a lot due to the coin design being prone to erosion.
Also recently, due to various TV commercials and promos for programs, I ended up, in a one-week period, explaining to the same person, on three different occasions, about:
1. the significance of the “Keep America Clean” commercials that ended with a silent Indian with a silent tear running down his face as he saw how despoiled the land had become.
2. the smothering scene at the end of the movie based on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
3. an explanation (and assembly) of the ridiculously juvenile dirty joke that is available to anyone with a box of Land O’ Lakes butter, a pair of scissors, and the mindset of a 12-year-old boy. The, uh, novelty involves the package design of Land O’ Lakes butter: an infinite loop, each iteration at a smaller scale, of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter with an image of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter with an image of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter … .)
These three items were enough Indian-themed material to trigger that little thing in my brain that usually jams a song lyric into my head. I am amazed at the number of Indian-themed items that have been coming to mind for no reason: the Shawmut Bank logo, Go-Go Gophers, the Hekawi from F Troop, Apache Chief from the Superfriends, John Redcorn from King of the Hill, Chakotay from Star Trek: Voyager, the episode of Alice where Larry Hovis (Carter from Hogan’s Heroes) is playing Vera’s boyfriend and mentions that he is part American Indian, the Mazzola Corn Goodness Woman (“My people call it maize.”), all the Indian references in the Nicholson-Duvall version of The Shining, that episode of Star Trek where Kirk loses his memory on the planet populated by various Indian tribes.
Finally, it all came to a head. Last week, AMC wrapped up the current season of Hell on Wheels. The show is one of those great ensemble dramas AMC cranks out with frightening regularity. (A complete aside: Christopher Heyerdahl’s absolutely flawless performance is the finest supporting role this year. You’ll never look at a Norwegian the same way again.) The overarching plot of the series is the arrival of the railroad to the American West right after the Civil War.
Buried in with the various subplots is one about the end of the American Indians as a dominant culture. As a piece of drama, the subplot unfolds with a superbly just-right touch. It’s not too heavy, it’s not too marginal. Not too preachy, not too casual. And for the audience, it’s an odd bit of time travel. We all know what’s coming, and it’s such a sad thing to contemplate. Not so much for the individual Indians in the story because they could (possibly) survive, but their culture is ending. The railroad dragged the Indians to the end of the line, at least as a dominant set of cultures in America.
About 10 minutes from the end of the episode, the penny (the nickel?) finally dropped, and the thing my subconscious was trying to point out clawed its way to center stage: The Middle Class is now in the position the Indians were in 150 years ago. The end is coming for us, just as it came for the Indians. A small number of the Middle Class will survive, but the culture, all the things that made the Middle Class what it was will be swept away.
The question has frequently been raised: What will happen with the OWSers? How will the movement resolve? Will it succeed? You need go no further than how the American Indians were treated by the politicians.
One and a half centuries later isn’t that long. I can picture a 90-year-old Indian, sitting in a rocking chair, with a group of children. The old person was a child of 10 back in 1860 and would have lived through it all, arriving at 1940 at the age of 90. That old man or woman could have had ample time to tell the whole story to those children, some of whom would have been 10 years old themselves. Those theoretical children would now be 82. I wonder what sort of stories they could tell, if they would cast their memories back to their childhoods. It’s going to be the same sort of thing for the Middle Class. In a few decades, those few of us who make it to 90 will gesture the children over to us, and we’ll tell them stories. “When I was your age, I already knew that I would go to college. Back then, many people, not just the rich, went to college. And there were national immunization programs. No one got polio when I was a boy. And we had supermarkets, those are places where people would walk in, and there would be thousands, no, honestly, thousands of kinds of foods. Cookies, and ice cream, and fresh fruits and vegetables. I know, you all think I’ve lost my marbles but most people in the Middle Class could go to the dentist. People kept their teeth a long, long time.”
Wikipedia has a jim-dandy entry (none of which I can vouch for the veracity of, but it’s free, and almost no one got paid for it, so what’s not to like?) that applies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz
If you still can’t figure out how it’s going to end for the Middle Class if we don’t wake up, that should help you connect the dots. I wonder what the nickels will look like in 150 years. Perhaps Ted can draw us all a picture.
4 Comments.
According to Marx, most members of the middle class (petite bourgeoisie in Marxist terminology) will return to the lower classes (proletariat in Marxist terminology), except for a tiny minority who will rise to bourgeoisie. Economics says, ‘maybe, depending.’
If government ensures adequate demand (as happened after the threat of a Marxist uprising in the ’30s frightened the bourgeoisie leadership into sharing the wealth), the supply and demand for labour will be in equilibrium, resulting in full employment. Then, those who are middle class will (mostly, except for the self-destructive) remain middle class, and many from the working class will rise to the middle class, and the middle class will expand.
If government ensures inadequate demand, as was the case when Marx was writing, and is the case today, then almost everyone except the bourgeoisie will see their economic positions fall, and most of the middle class will fall to the lower classes, while the situation of the lower classes steadily worsens.
As of current date, there is no threat of Marxism to frighten the bourgeoisie leadership, Democratic or Republican, and the voters seem to vote for the current system to continue, until the upper 0.1% have it all, and the rest of us are returned to serfdom.
But, since that’s what the majority of the voters want, it’s just democracy in action.
So the assertion of this post is that the American middle class will soon be systematically exterminated, have their culture destroyed, and eventually given small swaths of land to call their own (reservations) for the few remaining survivors. Am I understanding this correctly?
Ted, please …. I beg you.
Oh fer crying out loud.
Ex, the item in question is an analogy. ANALOGY. It is NOT a direct, one-to-one correspondence. NOT A DIRECT, ONE-TO-ONE CORRESPONDENCE.
The American Middle Class is not going to be handed smallpox blankets, nor is it going to suddenly open up a bunch of casinos a couple centuries later. The linkage I make is to how cultural dominance ends. The Indians went from being in control of this continent to being marginalized. The Middle Class is watching as all the foundational aspects of what makes the Middle Class identifiable are being eliminated or weakened: unions, stable jobs, housing, education, retirement.
In the case of the American Indians, their dominance ended because another culture was able to remake the landscape by force. In a similar — repeat, SIMILAR, I am NOT saying it is EXACTLY THE SAME — way, a new culture is remaking the landscape by force now. The force now being used is economic, rather than military. But the end result in both cases is similar.
Quite a few tribes depended on the buffalo to sustain them. So the people trying to “settle” the West started killing the buffalo in huge numbers. When the Indians started resisting, in came the military.
The Middle Class depends on stable jobs to sustain them. Every aspect of the Middle Class culture devolves from stable employment: going to college so that you can get a stable job, working that stable job so that you can buy a house and take 30 years to pay for it, bringing up a family in that house with the economic stability that comes from a stable job, etc. Now the 1% are outsourcing jobs and eliminating the social safety net and all the rest of it. When the Middle Class starts — in its half-assed way — to resist, in come the police.
The foundations of the Middle Class are being destroyed by the policies that enrich the top 1%. Just like the buffalo were slaughtered. Of course the end result is going to be quite similar in both cases.
Please, Ex, I realize you’re the result of the current education system, which has been spiraling down into the hated dark for years now, but stop just dashing off these shallow, non-thinking responses. In fact, let’s do it this way: Why don’t YOU write something. You know, show us all how it’s done.
@Alex: Stop wasting your breath (or rather keystrokes) on exkiodexian, he is just corporate water army. Admittedly he is a much more involved and intelligent variety then the usual suspects, but he is still here only as a paid troll and to try to (in this case very subtly) tow the corporate line. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t wish, but I assure you your keystrokes are going nowhere no matter how air tight and perfect your argument or reasoning could be when addressing him.
There are a large number of major indicators of my claim, but one of the smaller ones is one you have started to notice: he purposefully never contributes. One of their standard operating procedures is to criticize everything they come across nonconstructively, while defending such behavior via practically copy/pasted arguments that were actually made for defending useful and constructive criticism.