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Here’s a little academic meditation I thought I’d share. Before you read it, I think it’s interesting to consider the “logic” behind the current financial bailout. as i see it, it goes something like this:

1. we gave wall street our money. 401k’s, mutual funds, etc.

2. most americans have no idea where their money goes when they hand it to their investor. none at all. why? all they care about is that the magic flashing roulette wheel called the stock market is supposed to turn their money into more money without an iota of input from them. their portfolio could (and, in most cases does) include investments in industries that practice the worst kinds of environmental pollution and human rights violations. but we don’t care, cause we don’t see it. we’re americans, and our god given right is to make a profit. even if i’m really just some schmuck selling my labor-power for a modest wage, i should still be able to get something for nothing.

3. again, we GAVE wall street our money. in most cases, blindly. and they readily took it. and they gave us loans through their banks, and because we all want something for nothing, we took them. many of us shouldn’t have. but no one told us no. and everyone else is getting something for nothing. and the lights are so pretty and the colors so rich …

4. but then some sort of “reality” creeps into the picture. we can’t pay our debts. oops.

5. wall street loses our money. well, most of it anyway.

6. wall street says that unless it gets $700 billion more of our money it will certainly lose the rest of the money we have already given them. re-read that. we gave wall street our money. wall street lost our money (most of it). their defense is that they need $700 billion more of our money to maybe (?) stave off losing the rest of our money that they already have (and we freely gave them).

questions for consideration:

at what point do we cut our losses?

at what point are we in an abusive relationship and need help?

why would you give someone all of the rest of your money when they’ve already lost most of the money you already gave them?

at what point do we start to fear that there’s something in the water?

were we ever this stupid before?

***

In the introduction to her book, The Nation’s Region, Leigh Anne Duck looks at the complicated relationship between the United States’ openly aggrandized position as the world’s premier liberal democracy and the complicit relationship that it had in the past (and, I would argue, continues to have) with forwarding a very real system of apartheid within the boundaries of its own national borders. While preaching tolerance and national community out of one side of its mouth, the other side reduces the continual intolerant persecution of non-white, non-Christian, non-capitalist, and non-straight Americans as simply being the result of the regional biases of a degenerate southern culture. What happens “down there” is out of the nation’s hands; we all know they’re a bunch of backwards rednecks anyway. What can we do?

However, as Duck argues, having the south as the nation’s “bitch” (to borrow Dr. Henninger’s term from a few weeks ago … a rare, yet excellent use of frank, honest language in academia) allows the nation as a whole to perform work in a manner that helps the current power systems to continually reproduce themselves. “This ideological distinction between a nation of liberal laws and a region of racist practice depends on yet another distinction,” Duck writes, “which often serves to idealize regional cultures – the idea that the nation-state and its regions mobilize fundamentally different and temporally coded forms of affiliation.” If the nation as a whole can convince the population, through the reifying work of its cultural production machine, that the evils of society are isolated in a particular region, the nation can rise above the fray. The nation simply scorns the region, pities the region, prays for the region, and demands that the region catch up with the progress of the nation as a whole. The very real problem with this device is that, of course, the problems blamed on the south are in no way isolated in the south. Racism exists in New York City as sure as it exists in Birmingham. Minnesota has its fair share of white supremacists. You can’t swing a dead cat anywhere in this great land without hitting a religious fundamentalist, but I digress …

Besides the issue of racial injustice, we see this ploy in effect every day. Consider the use of the word “freedom” to mean “American” in each and every instance. From war to the financial markets, anything that impedes the march of freedom is un-American. For example, a non-capitalist apartheid of sorts is practiced in this nation towards anyone who does not subscribe to the religion of so-called free market capitalism. Anything that is not (on the surface anyway) purely capitalist quickly gets labeled anti-American, unpatriotic, socialist, or the work of the worst possible incarnation of the anti-Christ. Out of one side of their mouths, Wall Street wants the “freedom” to operate the markets however they want, legal or otherwise, because “free” markets must operate without interference. Crimes are committed, people lose money, and accountability is needed. But out of the other side of their mouths, they are allowed to beg for regulatory bailouts because Main Street (i.e. all us dipshits) would be devastated if the markets collapsed. This tragic fact would jeopardize the American life of “freedom” we have become accustomed to. They argue that they need more of our money to guarantee that they won’t lose the rest of our money that they already have (and was freely given to them, let’s not forget.)

The flip side is that whenever a socially minded policy like national health care is forwarded, the most effective deterrent to its success is to label the policy “socialized medicine.” “Socialized” is a receptacle for all things un-American. We don’t like socialized policies, because that evokes the Soviet Union, communism, and the end of days. Yet we just practiced the largest act of public subsidization (socialism) of the private sector that has ever occurred in the history of human life on this planet.

Having some place downhill where the shit get pushed (again, at least on the surface) has continually proven to be a successful hegemonic tool. Blame it on some backwards region. A region, of course, can be a physical place, like the south, or an intellectual space, like an economic philosophy that differs from that of the dominant regime. And the nation will always marginalize regions of all types in order to mask their most illogical power grabbing maneuvers. This Orwellian psychological device has been used throughout the nation’s history, and will continue to be used until the capitalists run out of bones to burn and float away into the abyss of melting polar ice caps.

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