Virek must have seen it too; he screamed, and Baron Samedi, Lord of Graveyards, the loa whose kingdom was death, leaned in across Barcelona like a cold dark rain.
- William Gibson, Count Zero
I miss Hunter Thompson. Always, but especially on days like today, where I’m contemplating what the Democratic leadership has done to the sense of relief I felt just a few short months ago when they retook control of Congress by promising to end the occupation of Iraq.
I think that today, as we enter Memorial Day Weekend bent on creating more memorials in Arlington National Cemetery, an argument I’ve been making for some time is more apt than ever. To wit, there’s a divide in America, but it’s not the Left/Right, Blue/Red, Metro/Retro, Conservative/Librul lie that way too many of us have been suckered into believing. Nope, the real divide is Have/Have Not, Top/Bottom, Rich/Poor. Or, as Pachacutec from Firedoglake has put it, Money vs. People. There are a number of ways of looking at the construction of the American political landscape, and the model he spelled out last November is one that’s useful to consider: DC/K Street Elites, Grassroots Theocrats, and Grassroots Progressives.
Thompson didn’t seek to cultivate anything like a scholarly demography, but he clearly got the elites vs. people divide. Here’s part of what I wrote for Editor & Publisher when Hunter died:
Although I never heard him say it in these words, Hunter S. Thompson I think understood the artificial Red/Blue, Conservative/Liberal divide that most Americans seem to have bought into for the cynical construction that it is – a rhetorical fluff job that turns Americans with common cause against each other and that serves the power elites in both parties to the detriment of the public they take turns fleecing.There was a divide, in Thompson’s world – no doubt about that – but it wasn’t Left/Right, it was Top/Bottom. He was a working man born in the borderlands of the rapidly (and sometimes violently) evolving mid-century South, and his reporting reflects an unfailing empathy for those who spent most of their lives scrambling for a foothold on the lower rungs of the political and economic ladder. The rich and powerful were usually cast as evil, soulless swine, and his sense of social and moral justice provided countless column inches to individuals and groups who’d been ignored or silenced by a society that cared way more about money than justice.
In short, Hunter Thompson was a champion of the common people. Yes, his reporting was so crazed at times that you couldn’t be sure if you were reading an eyewitness account or a drug-addled hallucination. But he remained to the end one of the most unswervingly ethical reporters of our generation, a man whose commitment to social justice and the public good trumped everything. (E&P text here, full-length blog rant here.)
The gap is worsening, and dramatically. In June of 2005 I wrote a little piece that looked at “Haves, have-nots, and the looming hyper-gap.” In it I noted some dire statistics that show how the people and the money are growing apart. Further, I explored the question that Fitzgerald and Hemingway used to kick around about whether the rich are or are not like us, and pointed to Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, whose Virek and Tessier-Ashpool characters seem say “never mind whether they’re like us – are they even human anymore?”
There’s much to be learned from good science fiction, especially when that sf is primarily concerned with the socio-economic instead of the purely technical, and cyberpunks like Gibson and Bruce Sterling are writing so close to the cultural bone that it grows difficult at times to see how what they’re writing is even fiction, let alone science fiction. And it’s always valuable to remember that sf is never really about the future.So what about the very rich? Well, people born billionaires tend to be fundamentally different from people like us. I mean, look at Paris Hilton. If you pay close enough attention, you begin to see that it’s not just the bottomless checking account, the jet-setting, etc. And while she’s dumb as a stick, it’s not regular dumb. It’s a refined, rarefied sort of stupidity that derives from the very character of her culture. She doesn’t know certain things because an animal of her species has no need of them. She has as much practical need of how to function in the world I live in as a gopher does of how to backstroke in the canals on Mars.
For a generation or so, these differences probably fall mostly in the nurture category, but once you in-breed the hyper-rich for a few generations, you wind up with something that’s genertically different. At some point we begin talking about a new species, don’t we?
What qualities distinguish homo sapiens from homo hiltonius, aside from the obvious? Well, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick marked empathy as the quality that made us innately human. You could program androids to fake certain kinds of empathic response, but in the end they lacked the essential capability to identify with other humans, to share emotional bonds of pain and joy, etc. Dick wasn’t talking about the rich, but it may be worth noting that the only very rich character in the story is Elson Rosen, the President of the corporation that manufactures the androids – hmmmm….
So is American society evolving a new breed of ubersapiens, a hyper-rich class of overlords whose wealth is more than simply beyond reach for a Regular Joe – it constitutes a difference of type so dramatic that even if you found yourself with that many zeroes to the left of the decimal in your bank statement, you’d still be inherently incapable of relating to others in your tax bracket? Maybe there’s value in examining the empathy we see in our business and political leaders and other assorted power elites. Ask yourself not just to what degree you think these people empathize with you, but to what degree they are spiritually, emotionally, and morally capable of doing so.
Somehow or another these things all fit together, and my apologies if the dots aren’t connected as well as they should be.
But as we enter Memorial Day Weekend, where we celebrate the sacrifice of those who have died in service to the country, I can’t help posing a question to our new Democratic misleadership: what species are you?
Filed under: Democrats, Iraq, rich/poor gap | Tagged: Hunter S. Thompson, Memorial Day, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson
Sam,
Although I share your frustration and disappointment, let’s not tar all Dems with the same brush. The guys I’ve always supported–the ones who showed real leadership against this stupid war, like Feingold, Sanders, and Leahy–did the right thing and voted against that craptastic bill.
Here’s the Gang of 14: http://www.thenewsblog.net/2007/05/80-14.html
We do have leaders willing to speak the truth and stand for the people, but they just aren’t enough. They’re lone voices in the wilderness, drowned out by the risk-averse, money hungry, and those who believe it’s more important not to upset Mr. 28% than it is to fight for their country.
Well, it might have been possible to classify Hunter himself as a separate species (something that would have pleased him, no doubt), but I see your point. Hunter knew from the start, as do most of our great journalists, that the real struggle is not between left/right, red/blue, what have you -it is haves/have-nots.
As for Paris Hilton being another species from – me, at least – I find that oddly comforting….
But I digress…I think that the Democrats are no more interested in my concerns as a citizen of this country than the Republicans – and the Republicans don’t care about my concerns at all…Why? I don’t have enough MONEY.
And I’d point you to the fact, as we enter the Memorial Day weekend, that the kids dying in Iraq for the benefit of American oil interests and the enrichment of contractors don’t have enough….
You know what’s the problem with blogs? You get nutjobs like me dropping by occasionally screwing with the accepted train of thought.
On this Friday, leading in to Memorial Day, my thoughts turn to my dad, who was wounded in WWII’s D-Day invasion on the second day. The grenade fragment didn’t kill him, but the deaths of the men he was with in that explosion took a good part of his soul.
My mind turns to a friend in Vietnam who dropped by my bunk one early afternoon and asked if I wanted to join him as a door gunner that day, since the other guy was sick. I wanted to sleep and said no and turned over and he went off into the air in that chopper and died.
And then I see this discussion above about the haves and the have-nots. It’s not a bad discussion, though on the surface, it has little to offer in terms of remembering those who have died. And it’s not off the mark, actually, in considering the idea of money motivating the politicians.
But the discussion fails to look at the truly responsible people. Us.
Wars stop when we, the people, feel the pain deeply enough to act against them. But we are not feeling the pain in this war. I know of no one, personally, who has died in the war. I don’t even know of anyone who knew anyone.
Why? A number of possibilities. The lower economic folk see the military as a possible way to improve their lives. So they volunteer. I don’t know that many people in the lower economic levels.
And, the war carries little personal threat. In contrast, I remember one day back in 1967 as a high school senior, looking around one of my classrooms wondering how many of us would be alive in two years. How many would be killed in Vietnam. The military draft back then randomly took a lot of lower- and middle-class kids who wanted nothing to do with the war, and killed them. The military is volunteer now. You figure out for yourself if that makes most of us less concerned because there is no random threat to our kids.
Here’s the point … it doesn’t matter if the government has us in Iraq for strategic purposes, for the oil interests, or for personal interests. The people who stop a war are the ones who live next door to us. And the ones who lock our doors at night from the inside. No matter why we’re there in Iraq, we, the people, are the ones who will call a halt to it. Not the politicians.
And we just don’t seem to be all that concerned right now. So, whoever is pulling the strings for whatever reasons, sees no scissors in their future.
Pachacutec – who I reference in my missive above – has just posted a related item of interest here.
Class warfare! Class warfare!
You know things are pretty far gone when the RICH are somehow able to get away with crying “class warfare” when someone brings up the truths you’re writing about. How the hell does that work? Every time Bush uses the phrase “class warfare” he might as well be saying “Let them eat cake,” but he always gets away with it.
No doubt about it, there’s a class war going on. Been happening for quite a while, too. And now, whenever you mention it you get yelled at for engaging in class war. Neat little circle. And somehow it’s never class war when the rich benefit.
If we’re able to separate out the ubermenschen, then we also have untermenschen that deserve their own differential treatment. The diffficulty is to always see the humanity in the opponent or antagonist. The rich suffer from the same emotions and wiring as the rest of us. Their circumstances and perspective is different, as are the consequences of their actions. We can find solace and amusement in the progress of their foibles, but it’s really only our own story, written with a larger, gaudier crayon.
I’ve always read Hunter Thompson as a realist documenter, using the only words that could make sense of the persons and circumstances he found himself among. He was able to make us see the grotesque derangement that power, lust and avarice create. He showed us the contortions that people and society undergoes in pursuit and avoidance of the consequences. He spared himself less than anyone else. And he let us laugh at it all so we could see it more clearly, feel it more deeply.
I don’t think the very rich are speciating because there are too few of them and the people they have children with are, often as not, nearly randomly selected, e.g. the Garibaldis.
What they are is atrophied.
Make up your minds, do you want more species, or fewer species? How brilliant, to create more species out of people! Surely we can recognize the beauty of top-of-the-foodchain predators. Let us be prey then for this glorious new type, the first true cross between the animal lineage and the slime molds.
Class war? I only see bullets coming from ONE side.
That’s not war it’s genocide.