I apologize for my use of Hillary’s campaign phrase, but I believe it an apt one. Besides Ronald Reagan’s touting of the popular rationalization for greed in the latter 1980s, called “Trickle-Down Economics”, and H W’s prolonged falsetto of that chant, we have George W’s revisiting of the breach immediately after the 2000 elections, with calamitous effects in the real estate and finance industries by 2008, and now Mr. Trump’s own panacea of similar promises to the working class that, largely, just elected him to the highest position of economic power in this land.
“A rising tide lifts all boats” you say? Maybe, in terms of an external force. But in terms of buoyancy, some, usually larger, boats are already riding high in the water, while others, smaller and with heavy cargoes, are about to be swamped by the seething waves around them. It’s a matter of hull ballast and load, as well as wind and water turbulence. And let’s not forget gyro-balance and especially the pilot’s steering. Appointing Wall-Street moguls to top economic positions in his cabinet is Trump’s first step toward neglect of these more vulnerable sea-craft.
The first time I remember hearing that phrase “trickle-down economics”, in the late 80s, I thought back to an earlier time, to the summer of 1971. A 22-yr-old, nine months out of engineering school and only six months employed, I had been engaged in a drunken Friday-night celebration after a long work week pretending to be an engineer at a nearby power plant construction site. Given the responsibility for the size, type, and routing of conduit for the wiring of warning beacons atop two 400-foot smoke stacks, I had spent much of that week pouring over a Standard Electrical Code handbook but had conjured little confidence in my abilities. On top of this, I was worried about my draft deferment.
I needed relief from anxiety that night, and found it in the company of tequila, beer, and two old friends who, like me, had grown up on local cotton farms in the Mississippi River bottomlands of the MO Bootheel. Why had I returned here after graduation? Why hadn’t I simply traversed the job-interview process a year earlier and landed a position in something and somewhere else? I felt stuck in the area’s squelching mud already. And I needed a lift.
Like so many young people here, Larry, Johnny, and I found ourselves at the old “slab yard”, next to Bunge Elevator’s walled-in soybean silos, not 50 yards from hundreds if not thousands of the concrete pallets strung together with rebar that held together the river bank and kept much of it from being washed away. I had worked one month a few summers before at this pallet manufacturing facility, spread out over several acres of concrete-strewn land and, especially now that it was closed, a favorite haunt for drunken youth and other ne’er-do-wells. Up against the willows that marked the border of the drop-off to the riverbed below was a graded-up pile of broken concrete at least 30 feet high. It was a challenge that both Johnny and I couldn’t resist, though Larry, the most sedate of our group, remained behind and simply watched his foolish buddies.
Johnny, a “tunnel rat” recently returned from Vietnam, was declaiming about the whores there in a steady effort to shock Larry and me. He reached the summit of this steep concrete mountain first, falling only once and bleeding from his hand, and I soon joined him, panting from exhaustion and lack of fitness.
As we stood at the top peeing into the night (in chiaroscuro silhouette in the last vestiges of sunlight, I like to think now), I wondered whether any of my urine would reach the bottom of that pile of destruction. Or would it simply be absorbed by the myriad nooks and crannies, and the millions, if not billions, of irregular sucking surfaces coated with limestone and dirt?
When we climbed down I did not even bother to look–it was fully dark by then–but took a couple more swigs of tequila before suggesting we get back to “riding the loop”, a route around our little town “in the middle of nowhere”, as we liked to say.
When I came back from my reverie after hearing that phrase “trickle-down economics”, I set the memory aside, only to revisit it much later, in 2016, while searching for a metaphor for a blog post. When I found it again I was struck by a kind of deep despair that made me analyze its meaning. Johnny, at age 49, had been burned alive after being told by a crew foreman to fire up his welding torch and climb down into an oil-coated barge hull they were repairing at our local Trinity Industries shipyard. The young black man with him, burning, pulled himself onto the deck but failed to reach the river. They both died. At his funeral I discovered Johnny had won several medals for his service in Vietnam.
Larry, after working at our Brown Shoe factory until the mid-70s, attended college at Southeast MO State in his late 20s, and became an art and social studies teacher. Upon retirement he focused on teaching private art lessons to rich elderly ladies and the commissioned-portrait painting that had earned extra cash for five decades, even painting “The Rock” (Dwayne Johnson), his father, and his son in one of the efforts. I called it “Boulder, Rock, and Pebble”. He also painted Hoda, of the Today show, from a photograph I found on the internet, but did not sign his name to it, instead allowing one of his patron-students to claim the credit. I guess you’d call that “ghost painting” instead of ghost writing, and I’m reminded of Mr. Trump’s Art of the Deal and its own ghost writer.
Motivated by the arbitrary death of my cousin Mike, an 18-year-old marine in a personnel carrier that had rolled over a mine in 1968, I managed to avoid Vietnam–even with a draft lottery number of 9 out of 365–for almost two years after college graduation. But I wasn’t proud of the “hardship deferment” given to me by the local draft board because of my partial support of my parents and younger sister, who lived in one of our town’s government housing projects. When I was drafted, in 1972, after a layoff from the construction company, I was allowed to join the MO National Guard, our local MP company, and I went to Basic Training a few months later, in early 73. At that time we were training to quell the riots expected in the wake of Nixon’s Vietnam policy. But I was discharged for medical reasons and returned to a job in R&D at an elevator manufacturer in Memphis. I was never happy there.
In the summer of 74, during the remaining Watergate-filled days of the Nixon Administration, I made what I now think of as an existential choice: I would go back to school and become a teacher; I would become a sort of “catcher in the rye” for the disillusioned youth around me. Which I did, and after grad school I taught English and math in local high schools for ten years, then moved on to a low-paying adjunct position at a nearby community college, for nine years, before becoming director of our own town’s public library. Of course, with a family, I had to supplement these jobs, did so by working part time as a carpenter and housepainter. Two or three evenings a week, over a 20-year period, I tutored at least 30 to 40 students, mostly from relatively wealthy families.
Why had I made those choices? I think now it was largely a response to the class prejudice and neglect my sister and I experienced as children in local schools. Larry and Johnny and I had all been in the same boat, so to speak, but we had each responded differently: Johnny had been faithful and dutiful, Larry had been acquiescent and forgiving, and I had been radicalized. I became what I conceived of as a “class warrior”. But we were just pawns, really, of the irresistible power structure that governs the lives of our nation’s people.
Recently I found a graphic on Wikipedia entitled “Pyramid of Global Wealth Distribution in 2013”, so I searched for a corollary representation for the United States only. Strangely enough, I found nothing equivalent to the first graphic, but did find two other eye-opening pyramids, both reminders of the famous centered-eye-on-pyramid image on our very currency.
https://kassander4ppp.wordpress.com/2015/12/26/three-pyramids-of-financial-whorness/
The global wealth pyramid, with the traditional rectangular base and triangular sides, didn’t seem quite “real”, though. For one thing, the vertical scale increased logarithmically (powers of 10), and I realized this was necessary to maintain straight sides and have the area (2-D) or volume (3-D) of each section represent the number of people in each wealth category (net worth = assets minus liabilities). The actual pyramid, however, must have concave sides that are almost-logarithmic curves tending toward an infinite slope at the top. Many individuals at the bottom have a negative net worth because of monetary liability, so, preferring a circular base, I began to visualize a Hershey’s Kiss, melted at the bottom, with convex sides just above, quickly turning into concave sides for most of its total height. In other words, a kiss so extruded that it nears its breaking point. The rich get richer…
How does one resist the force of a man whose id sits on his right shoulder directing his every strategy, tactic, and move? A man whose self-created public image of worshipped wealth supersedes all considerations of character depth and verbal profundity? If I were still teaching in public schools, I don’t know, frankly, how I could explain the potency of his tweeting rhetoric to my students. All compass bearings–evidence, logic, values, and, most of all, truth– have been twisted 180 degrees on their axes, directly into the unrelenting waves.
How could even a large boat withstand the wind arrayed against it–decades of FBI investigations, with hardly a shred of reliable evidence presented to the public? Dr. King withstood an earlier onslaught, in his own way, that tried to paint him communist, but that was before the age of social media, reality tv, Russian hacking, and phony news, often manufactured in Third-World countries like Macedonia, some of whose youth have turned to false witness in the face of a 25-percent unemployment rate. This “news” is, of course, sold indirectly to fake-news outlets–websites and talk-radio–in our own country. I spent two years responding on one such site, D C Clothesline, so I’ll have to disagree with Joe Scarborough about its efficacy in our recent elections.
How many more small boats will crash against that heap of concrete rubble, constantly graded up in order to secure wealth and privilege for the very few? The Mississippi rises often and erratically in this place, and many never see it coming.
We’re told these days, by the Republican establishment and some journalists, that we’re not supposed to take Mr. Trump literally. I hope that my figurative taking of him here doesn’t offend anyone.
duckworthsam 