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There are a large number of US citizens, traditionally referred to as “Middle Americans,” who are engaged in small, private industry-jobs that have an uncertain future and that live and die on the prospects of a marketplace that is unhindered by taxes and government regulation. Even if they live in a rental unit, they live in communities dominated by the concerns of low-income home owners-people who do not know how to get along with more than $500 a month spent on housing costs-to whom the yearly property tax bill is a very big deal. They can’t spend too much breath decrying the expense of the local school system, or the roads, or the courts and emergency services-each of which provides them an obvious benefit. So what do they get mad at?? “Government.” Whatever that means.

Of course, they hate paying federal tax, too. And, as so many of these people have a poor interest in enriching their minds (beyond major leagues, NASCAR, tee vee drama, and so on…,) it is easy for them to imagine evil machinations that are conspiring to victimize them.

These people know they do not belong to the intellectual side of the debate, because they are not interested in truth. They are interested in winning a war against the other side. This is survival to them, not reasoned debate.

It must be understood: they have been losing for 40 years now, when they gave in their first concession by sending their homemakers into the workforce.  Since then, their doom has been further artificially delayed by deficit spending and tax cuts and personal debt.  It is the natural course of the system.  It’s not just them–the entire world is going broke.

The other side of the US political divide is a comfortable, clever culture of US citizens who are right. They have always been right, from McCarthyism to civil rights to Vietnam, from Watergate to the economy to Iraq. And you cannot argue abortion against one of these-I’ll call them “Liberal Americans” (kind of rhymes with Middle Americans)–unless you are prepared to take a very unreasonable stance (ie: holding up bloody posters of fetuses with huge type screeching: “ABORTION IS MURDER!”)

Their people are the cool people on the sitcoms, the television dramas. Their people know how to be funny, write interesting books, and their rich people are the very richest-so rich, they forgot how to be greedy (now, that’s rich!)

Their middle-incomers work for large industries and belong to unions. The urban poor belong to the Liberal Americans whether they like it or not, just as the rural poor are serfs to the Middle Americans, (as rural America is dominated culturally, politically, and economically by Middle Americans.)

The Liberal Americans have been losing money hand-under-fist, too, but not as much as Middle America (…I’ll get to that.)

After every election, there is a reassertion of dominance in this country. When Middle America wins, they run around like monkeys and try to unscrew all the jar caps and rummage through the sideboards for valuable trinkets. When Liberal America wins, they sit back like the dominant, silverback gorilla, resting on their laurels, trying to show by better behavior that they belong where they are-trying to validate their place with their high virtue so that they may never lose it again–while all the little gangs of Middle American chimps scamper around the bushes organizing groups for cheap-shot sneak attacks.

What about the unifying forces of God or Country, you ask?

Middle Americans would just as soon live in the USSR as they would in a USA dominated by liberals. And any reasonable assessment of their fiscal philosophy from Ronald Reagan on (deficit spending and borrowing,) would demonstrate clearly they favor their own frivolous enjoyments over their country’s or their children’s future.

And they do not even believe in God. It is an identity to be a God believer. They do believe they believe in God, but there is nothing about them that objectifiably demonstrates they believe in God, rather than that they are just playing a role. When they are sick, they may pray, but they find their way to the hospital. Though they may pray for good things to come, you won’t see them put any money on the results of prayer.

They believe in sports. That they’ll put money on.

And they don’t act more morally than, say, an atheist. Maybe they care, but there is nothing in their warmongering and capital-punishing actions that show they really do believe in the “sanctity of human life.” They may talk a lot of religious garbage against gay people and in favor of marital fidelity and against abortion, but there are just as many gays among them, just as many infidelities, and just as many abortions, as in other communities. They yap against pornography, but their highways are aswim in porno palaces and strip clubs. They thieve and cheat and shoot each other just like the rest of us. Here, in godless New York City, where I live, we have a very low per capita crime rate compared to absolutely anywhere you might choose for comparison in the Bible Belt. 

If Middle Americans really believed there was a god going to take a vengeance on them some day, do you really think they’d still act the way they do?? Abso-tutely not.

God-believing is a role. We Liberal Americans don’t see it, because we believe all people need to balance their identity with their rationality. Middle Americans do not do that. It is culturally impure to them for a person to question what he identifies with. They don’t ask themselves, “Do I really believe in God,” any more than we ask ourselves, “Instead of walking to the john, why shouldn’t I go take my next dump in the parking lot?”

What happened when the president used “empathy,” one of the most central personality characteristics of Middle America’s professed god, Jesus Christ, when he proposed the characteristic he most sought in a new Supreme Court justice?? They responded like rabid dogs.

Have you ever seen a people to whom moral suasion holds less sway? It has so little effect on the reasoning of Middle Americans that we don’t even try it any more. When was the last time you heard a Democratic leader reason that we should have health care to take care of our fellow citizens who have none? Nooooo. It’s to save money. That’s why we need it. So Middle Americans can have more MONEY.

Why shouldn’t we torture people, President Obama?? Is it because it is unloving and cruel?? Noooo. You’ll never even hear the word “cruel” pass his lips. We don’t torture because if we do that, they will lose respect for us and organize more gangs of evil against us and then Middle America will be less safe.

Middle America does not fear God.

I’ll tell you what Middle America fears. Middle Americans are rightly scared of losing control over the government’s benefaction to private industry. Private industry is suffering right now and is on a steep downward decline (as is the world economy, regardless of the media’s recession recovery hype.) The Liberal American base is an integrated interdependent system that supports major industries, union jobs, and the urban poor alike. The cities must function in order for major industries to function. Rural industries and communities can suffer and no one will ever know or care, but them.

Middle America is yearning to extend a dying lifestyle, and there is nothing we can do to show it compassion, but encourage exodus to the cities. A lifestyle where a guy drives a hundred miles to work every day, by himself, in an SUV is not sustainable. Even if his wife works, too. It is just too wasteful. And then they have some kids and they grow up and expect to do the same. In a world where babies starve and billions pray for a drink of clean water, they expect to afford a college with a health club and football team and apartment-style dorm living. Then, soon after graduation, they expect to gather the resources to build a house made of a hundred thousand dollars worth of materials-each individual component having in its production its own dire effect on the environment-and then drive all over the place in their air-conditioned gas-guzzler shopping for mall junk to fill up the house on their weekend respite from jobs that are a hundred miles away.

It is not sustainable. How clearly can I say this? Capitalism requires growth! Capitalism requires GROWTH! Remember Bill Clinton’s mantra?? “Growth, growth, growth!” In a capitalist system, without growth, you wither and die. The Earth is a closed system. It cannot sustain growth. Eventually everything is owned and exploited and growth must end.

When you get to the end, you must hope (and pray, if you are one of those people who identifies as a God-believer,) that there is still enough time and resources available to make it possible for you to convert to a society based on harmony rather than growth, something you probably will not be able to do without first controlling world population and waiting for a huge number of people to die off.

The ascension of the Middle American lifestyle has gone, and it ain’t coming back.

You can only feel so much compassion for people who are deaf to moral suasion and who are so anti-intellectual that they are always wrong.

Just as we were their little Dr. Scholl’s inserts for the last eight years, I say let us wipe our feet on them. In the crapper with cooperation. This is a war they will not stop until we are all dead, and the time has come that we assert our dominance, now that the cities have grown to overpower Middle America in national politics. To hell with all this middle-road pap about incrementalism-giving the health care industry the great booming profits of increased member rolls, and then waiting for the next time to make them honest.

If we are going to subsidize these industries so as to have a national employment program, instead, let’s let all these Middle Americans lose their jobs-as HMO clerks and drug company administrative assistants-first, and then hire them to construct cooperative self-supportive living communities.

To hell with paying people to junk their cars by subsidizing their purchase of new cars.  Instead, pop a heavy tax on gasoline and use the money to revamp mass transit. Enough bending over backwards to support wasteful, self-defeating Middle American lifestyles.  Pay for their bus fare one-way to any major city. 

And as for health care, damn incrementalism. If they will not give us national health insurance, let ‘em swing for another four years of health care price hikes and let another however many millions of ‘em lose their mortgages to medical costs and let ‘em spend another four years paying through the nose for hospital emergency room care of people who are too poor to afford a doctor’s office to visit. If we don’t have the votes for national health care, we need more votes. Maybe by next election there’ll be enough squalor in Connecticut that they’ll finally vote out that Lieberman creep. I’d say with all their financial crises, Florida is a sure bet to tip blue, as are half of the states still left with Republican and wishy-washy Democrat senators. They need to suffer first.

Actually, on that point, I may be very wrong. It may be a poor assumption that just because a state suffers financially it will turn left. Do US politics provide what people want or what the political institutions are willing to offer? All these Democrats and not enough votes for national health care. It’s disgusting.