Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Put the River in Reverse

Listening to the radio today, I heard Elvis Costello’s new song, “The River in Reverse,” produced by New Orleans’s own Alan Toussaint, with its refrain “Wake me up, with a slap or a kiss.” A melodic and sinuous tune, it seemed to me to obliquely convey harsh, heavy, of-the-moment echoes of Hurricane Katrina, and of our present hell of idiotic terrorists and their perfect counterpart, the overbearing weight of our own freedom-compressing, reactionary overlords. The song is very present-tense.

Next up was Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey.” This song evoked for me both the early 1980s when I first discovered Van Morrison, and the early 1970s when he recorded it and I was a young child. Coming as it did after Costello’s quick musical soaking in our present moment, the disjunction I felt was striking.

Of course, Tupelo Honey is a finely crafted piece of sweet love emotion, a feel-good thing any time. Like any good song you love, it opens up a personal matrix of feeling-memory-evocation. But the juxtaposition with The River in Reverse brought, for me, something more. Immediately I felt the frame of history rising around this song, Tupelo Honey, this artifact. I felt the memory of a time when a rockin’ pop song could still rise above our background cynicism and dread, and just feel good.

Okay… that’s still possible. But not, for me, in this instance. This song, which I have cherished, now seemed to me like a piece in a museum of modern art.

(And I suppose I suddenly seem old enough to have been contemporaneous with the art of the generation now passed, recently acquired into the permanent collection.)

Tupelo Honey is simply a love song, but it reminds me of a time when, yes, there was war, and mistakes, and bad judgments, and poverty and pollution and all the rest. And it reminds me of a time when there was a terrible enemy, and uncertainty about whether our world would survive intact. But above all, what I heard today was the echo of the many years now past when we could hear Van sing his song, and feel that love-vibe in his craft, the art of our time, a pleasure we could all share, somehow unknowingly reassured that our nation is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, sometimes sublime, sometimes despicable… but on balance, healthy.

Nowadays that simple reassurance is gone for me. We hate to look around us. We inextricably plunged ourselves into an international catastrophe, the complete rupture of a poor but proud country into a pit of violence with no escape, initiated by our relentless, senseless, unnecessary bombing of a capital city millennia older than our own. We blithely started a high-stakes game, the outcome of which was fore-ordained as, at best, barely tolerable, and, at worst, a total loss.

At home, the powerful use fear as a tool to beat us down has won, and we, once proud Americans, are now just bobble-headed, overworked, blinkered, compliant debtor-consumers. We are lied to, and we expect it – some of us even think it’s good for us. Neither media nor government cares to discuss or investigate serious charges that our electoral system is being rigged. We are saddled by a national debt so enormous that it will hang around our necks until I am beyond retirement and heading for the grave. The era of rising wages and expectations, a signal chord of the time of Tupelo Honey, is gone: only a difficult struggle against a global race to the bottom lies ahead. Recently I saw the global warming movie, An Inconvenient Truth. No one can leave the theater without knowing we are responsible for what is coming, the end of nature’s magnificent equilibrium, and still we are doing nothing. I fear, heartsick, that the city of New Orleans, home of my alma mater, is starting to fade into the history. In the long term, the Crescent City doesn’t have the future that Baghdad has.

Sure, there are villains abroad. But they don’t matter so much to me as the question, what about us? What is our deal? Because now, as not back then, in the 20th century, we are unavoidably implicated in things that are terribly, irretrievably wrong. And I look around me at the good, intelligent people I know, and what I see is that it seems we are impotent to act to make right. I am an optimistic person. But it’s hard, any more, for a simple good love song to feel so good.
"Bush has borrowed more money from foreigners than all prior presidents COMBINED"

Ordinarily I do not do this, but the facts are as stark as any voter could possibly imagine, so I am quoting verbatim, Robert Freeman, July 5, 2006 on CommonDreams.org

"Bush has borrowed more money from foreigners than all prior presidents COMBINED. To fund his own record debts, Bush goes, hat in hand, to borrow more than $2 billion a day from the rest of the world… The national debt—the cumulation of all deficits since the founding of the republic—was $5.6 trillion when Bush took office but now approaches $9 trillion, up a breathtaking 50% in only five years…

"More than 100% of the growth in Gross Domestic Product over the past five years is attributable to the expansion of debt. GDP is up $2.8 trillion since 2001. But government debt alone is up over $3 trillion for the same period. Add in the explosion of home mortgage debt at over $5 trillion, and a cumulative $3.5 trillion in trade deficit, and you get a Real Economy that is literally going backwards. The illusion of affluence is only sustained by selling off the family china. Working Americans know this all too well…

"Real average hourly earnings are 14% below their 1973 post-War high. Real median household incomes are still 4% below where they were in 1999. Employment in the communications equipment industry is down 43% since 2000. Semiconductor employment is off 30%. Electrical equipment has shed one quarter of its industry’s jobs. Textiles, off 40%. These are the high-wage jobs on which the American middle class—the American standard of living—once rested…

"This evisceration of labor and labor-based income comes at a time when corporate profits are at their highest level as a percent of national income since 1947 while labor’s share is at its lowest level since 1946. The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting dramatically poorer…

"As onerous as they are, the deficits… constitute only a small fraction of the total indebtedness of the U.S. economy. The official “national debt” is approaching $9 trillion, as noted, a substantial figure, to be sure. But the government’s “unfunded liabilities”—obligations it has committed to pay but for which there is no known source—are estimated at an incomprehensible $58 trillion. Add in revolving consumer debt, mortgage debt, and corporate debt, and the nation’s total obligations exceed $90 trillion, more than seven times GDP. At the time of the 1929 stock market crash, total debt stood at two times GDP. These obligations will never be paid.

"The reason is that the job drain from the U.S., while it looks like a torrent now, is still only a trickle. Though the U.S. won the Cold War, it is rapidly losing the Cold Peace, which began when China ended its communist isolation and joined the world market. The average wage in China is $.57 per hour. China has more than half a billion workers meaning the drain of good jobs from the U.S. to China can go on indefinitely—and will. …As many as 56 million U.S. jobs are susceptible to outsourcing...

"But this is exactly what Bush and… fellow “conservatives” intend… Globalization means liberating capital from all obligations to national well being, freeing it to pursue only the highest returns it can find, no matter where they may lie. That means seeking out the lowest paid labor and shifting all possible jobs there. That is China. Or India…

"[The new Treasury Secretary’s] job, then, is to arrange the write down of debt that must accompany the effective bankruptcy of the U.S. He will have to promise an IMF-like fiscal austerity to foreign lenders to keep the funding flowing until there is nothing left to take. This will mean draconian cuts in social spending, no tariffs, and the removal of all remaining controls on the mobility of, and returns to, capital. The dollar will be precipitously devalued with the consequence of massive inflation and stratospheric interest rates. These will only accelerate the decline. A new international reserve currency, based on a basket of currencies including the Euro, the Yen, the Chinese Yuan, and the dollar, will be devised…

"The U.S. worker and the U.S. economy will be left to their own devices. All social safety net systems must be dismantled for, given the colossal debt, they can no longer be afforded… The only government programs of substance that will be maintained will be police and military systems…"

- Robert Freeman, July 5, 2006 by CommonDreams.org