Stuff to Read

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First 0ff — Facebook has locked me out “for security reasons” and is not providing me with a reasonable way to get back in. Their test for proving I am who I am requires me identifying a number of Friends from their photos, but most of the photos are of babies or political candidates and I have no idea who they belong to. And, of course, a lot of people I have befriended on Facebook I don’t know in person and cannot recognize from photos. If you have access to my Facebook page could you please let people know that Facebook has bounced me and given me no way to appeal. I can’t even contact Facebook without logging in. Thanks much.

Here are a few things to read together —

First, Paul Krugman writes about the growing mortality rate among working-class whites in America:

If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.

For one thing, rising mortality is a uniquely American phenomenon – yet America has both a much weaker welfare state and a much stronger role for traditional religion and values than any other advanced country. Sweden gives its poor far more aid than we do, and a majority of Swedish children are now born out of wedlock, yet Sweden’s middle-aged mortality rate is only half of white America’s.

You see a somewhat similar pattern across regions within the United States. Life expectancy is high and rising in the Northeast and California, where social benefits are highest and traditional values weakest. Meanwhile, low and stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated in the Bible Belt.

As I wrote last week, the rising mortality is mostly from self-destruction. There has been a huge spike in deaths from drug overdoses among working-class American whites, followed by an increase in suicides and in alcohol-related diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver. Among black and Latino Americans, who suffer the same if not worse economic stress, you don’t see the same trends. Krugman continues,

So what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.” That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we’re looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.

In my book Rethinking Religion, I wrote about psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980) —

In Escape From Freedom, Fromm said that while people want freedom in the abstract, when they actually have it they can find it isolating and bewildering. Like Freud, Fromm was a psychoanalyst — although he didn’t always agree with Freud — and he looked deeply at humans as creatures of culture and society and also at the irrational and subconscious forces that drive us.

Among other things, we humans have a deep need to belong. We need to feel that our lives have some significance in the great scheme of things. We need to feel we have a secure position within our in-the-flesh social network. We need to feel related to the world, somehow. And we will grasp desperately at just about anything that will give us what we need to feel.

“Religion and nationalism,” Fromm wrote, “as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.”

Quoting Fromm:

[M]an, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an “individual,” has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work, or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.

Via Washington Monthly, here is a page about a documentary on divisions in America. One of the filmmakers writes of a scene in which an unemployed southern white man grapples with the reality that he’s one of Those People who need government assistance.

James’ personal need is in terrible conflict with his political beliefs, his sense of self, and a story about America, I’ll call it the Confederate South story, that he had being using to make sense of life.  …

… The basic story gives us a constant framework for understanding most of what happens in the public sphere and where the public and private intersect: these are the good people; these are the bad people; these are our values; these are their values, etc.

In short, a whole lot of Americans are living inside a conceptual framework that is utterly out of step with reality, and they don’t know how to adjust. IMO this is made worse by the fact that their political “leaders” are manipulating them to get votes rather than try to help them.  No good came come of this.

Here’s a scene from the documentary:

 

22 thoughts on “Stuff to Read”

  2. The American Dream has been morphing into The American Nightmare for well over 40 years now, thanks to the Modern (pre-Civil War) Conservative (bowel) Movement and mentality.

    The Silent (aka: Stupid) and Moral (aka: un-Christian) Majorities have brought this on themselves – and, on all of us – by voting conservative sociopaths and psychopaths into every level of government. And they’ve been, and still are, cheering on the downfall of “the others,” without realizing that in the eyes of the wealthy that conservative politicians serve, we are all “the others” – just human bugs of different colors.

    Fox, talk-radio, and conservative Op-ed writers, have served as the bright shiny lights that distract the stupid/ignorant masses from the ever-growing morass of the misery that, unwittingly, they bring on themselves and others.

    In the future, while the wealthy Overlords laugh, the last conservative American yahoo, dying of liver and heart disease, will claim victory for Conservatism, because all of the Libtards and “the others” are already dead.

    The only consolation for the rest of us as we’re dying, is that the Overlords laughter will be short-lived.
    They too will soon succumb to the global weather changes that they themselves have helped to accelerate.

    I want to amend an old saying:
    ‘People will never be free until the last King and fossil fuel tycoon, are strangled with the entrails of the last Priest.’

    And, fat chance of THAT ever happening!
    :’-(

  3. As I wrote last week, the rising mortality is mostly from self-destruction. There has been a huge spike in deaths from drug overdoses among working-class American whites, followed by an increase in suicides and in alcohol-related diseases such as cirrhosis of the liver.

    A few years ago, I read some excerpts from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges:

    Three years ago, Pulitzer Prize–winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco set out to take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. They wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the searing account of their travels.

    I was shocked by some of the stories. And now the data is in.

  4. most of the photos are of babies or political candidates and I have no idea who they belong to

    The Frankenstein jack-o-lantern is me!

    (And, as is customary, I intend to leave it out on my “Facebook front step” until around New Year’s.)

  7. “…I guess..I just realized I am judging people I don’t even know…” Yeah….the minute you find yourself in “their” predicament….all of a sudden you realize how stupid and vicious you and your ilk are with respect to the attitude you have taken with people of color…..voting for socio-paths to implement policies YOU KNEW would harm those you deemed “beneath” you…..I am sorry Maha…but fuck that guy and fuck his father…and fuck the White South. I hope they all burn slow in the knowledge that they did this to themselves.

  8. Tough. I have no sympathy for these people because they don’t stop at destroying themselves, they (1) also try to destroy other people, and (2) they were blind to the fact that their way of life was already not working for them in the 1960s.
    I grew up working-class in the South. I only got out and made a decent life for myself because of some upper-middle-class relatives who helped me. And I got out in spite of the working-class white Southern relatives who did everything in their power to keep me in the same place they were. They could not stand the idea that somebody might want a life different from the one they had. They used any method short of physical abuse to stop me finishing high school and getting a college education. They actively wanted me to stay working-class, with a high school diploma or less, the same kind of rotten job they complained about because it offered only low pay and no prospects, and a miserable marriage just like they had. (I said my own relatives stopped short of physical violence but that wasn’t true for a lot of Southern girls I knew in elementary school. I knew several girls who, when they didn’t want to drop out of high school, were told they were uppity and getting above themselves and got beat for their disrespect for their parents’ wishes for them.)

    And for all of the economic issues that are quite real, a lot of this damage is self-inflicted. I’ve got a number of relatives who decided not to bother with finishing high school. They could have. They certainly did not go get jobs. They just didn’t like school intruding on their time to go fishing. Needless to say, their prospects are grim. And they want everyone’s prospects to be grim too.

  10. What’s the FB page? I don’t know if I can contact anyone thru my account or not, but I will try.

  14. Maha… I’d approach that request with an abundance of caution. Something doesn’t sound right.. sounds phishy to me. I can’t even imaging how a photo ID would have any relevance unless you’re physically standing in an examiners presence for them to make a comparison of the ID and the person presenting it. It’s a bizarre request..I wouldn’t be in a rush to get back to my facebook page if I felt I was being lead into an unknown snare of sorts by way of frustration. Be careful..from what you say it doesn’t sound like it’s on the level. Nigerian flavor?

  15. The rub is that the people they vote for to do harm to those they’ve been taught to hate as the source of all their problems, really could give a rat’s behind about them after their votes are secured. They’re more than collateral damage; they’re targets as well. Historically its always been that way.

    In modern times this con has been running strong for the 35 years since Reagan told them it was “morning in America.” You wonder what its going to take for these morons to wake up

  16. Maha, that usually happens on Facebook when someone reports your account. Probably a political enemy.

    I’ve managed to avoid Facebook for ten years now, and gods willing I’ll never have to curse myself with its surveillance and data collection. And capricious disregard for identity and privacy.

  17. I have read a few article like this one lately. I guess another way to put it is a large number of white, formerly middle class (or not quite middle class) people are disappointed that the brass ring they have been promised is so far out of sight that they will never be able to grasp it. The key seems to be that they have become aware of that reality and they cannot cope with it.

    People have been voting against their own economic interests for years now because they have been offered the vision that they will hit it big and win the lottery. Back in 2004 it was “Joe the Plumber”. He wasn’t a plumber and his name wasn’t Joe, but he was convinced that if only Barack Obama hadn’t been standing in his way, he would have been able to buy that business opportunity for the $250,000 that he didn’t have, if only taxes would be lowered on the top 1%.

    Yep, people really believed that sooner or later they would be able to take advantage of the tax loopholes for which they were voting in advance. That when they finally made their fortunes those advantages would be in place and they would automatically become richer and more successful.

    They are bitterly disappointed to find out none of that is true.

  19. People have been voting against their own economic interests for years now because they have been offered the vision that they will hit it big and win the lottery.

    I’ve been using what I call the Colonel Sanders fantasy as a coping mechanism. The idea is that I’ll overcome poverty in my golden years by pulling some sort of a financial rabbit out of my hat. It seems I’m hoping against hope..but it does take the sting out living a life of economic disadvantage.
    Fantasy is the cheapest drug out there!

  20. Actually, there’s a historical parallel no one has picked up on. After the Soviet Union crashed, the male population of Russia went into a cultural tailspin. Alcoholism (still high) was epidemic. When I visited Russia in 2001, nearly every management position was filled by a woman.

    A disproportionate number of men in Russia wanted to marry ‘a nurse with a purse’ – a woman who would enable their drinking and pay the rent. The populist success of Putin echos the Trump brag – ‘great again’ . The racial superiority of the viral Russian male was crushed by the collapse of empire. The American crash of the WASP perception of natural superiority was fed by the FOX-fed narrative which preys on fears.

    A last thought on the subject – When Orson Welles did the hoax broadcast in 1938, a lot of people believed that monsters from Mars were here. The fear-mongering by the right has been more subtle and the slow poison of factless conviction harder to ascribe to a single broadcast. The stats are there – IMO, the direct result of propaganda in a culture that has learned to spurn facts.

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