Joseph Galasso
A Summary of the Day’s Events.
A unique moment I find myself in as I say “good morning to the night.” The neighborhood’s electricity has been scheduled to go out for two full hours (it turned out to be four), and so I sit with a night-light and a notebook on my lap with reflecting-pools swimming in my mind. In these dark hours, I’d like to sketch a postcard to my generation-a half-generation of people inevitably shaped by extremes of contemporary events which have helped define a nation. (We all know too well the decadent images now etched on our collective consciousness). On the downside, economics have shown that we as the tail-end of a generation have not been as prosperous in the accumulation of wealth as the first half of our baby-boomer brothers and sisters (1945-1952), and we certainly have never made-up the ground on our grandfathers’ rightly-called “greatest generation,” those who built America, fought a war, then rebuild anew the world. (The collection of wealth came so readily to them. It was certainly the golden age of prosperity). But our upside is an uncanny ability for introspection: those lucky enough to have been born between, say, 1957 and 1964, I salute you a good morning to the night.
We are a certain folk who occupy a unique place in time which transcends much of what we see unfolding in the streets today. We are old enough to compare notes of the emerging two-world view which now straddles this monumental time in history. We started writing college papers with electric type-writers, only to find that ribbon was no longer to be found upon graduation. We were forced to join in and go corporate-we reluctantly took our daily dollop of the IBM acronym and moved on, floppy disk in hand. At the same time, we kept a keen eye on the gradual encroachment of technology and how it would shape Generation-X, for better and for worse. Amongst our generation, we are both young and old enough to fully appreciate what would be gained and what would be lost out of the quick-pace change happening around us. We hold a unique historical perspective that specially allows us to read between the lines of the politician, the banker and the lawyer. We close our eyes and still see as children the two-finger spread of the peace-sign being waved at us by a wide-smiling Nixon just before he was air-lifted away (and I thought to another planet). We are Nixon’s pre-teens & teens who have been well schooled by the very man and the events which defined a generation: we were young and held quiet but the lessons we drew and conclusions we reached singed the deep recesses of our minds.
We can read and clearly understand today what is behind these new paradigm-shifting slogans such as “illiberal democracies.” Egypt grows hot again and she is a “democracy.” But a democracy which only seeks self-preserving power (Nixonian)-upon which it views its citizenry more or less with contempt (anti-intellectual hippies)-is tantamount to fascism, and we remember our grandfathers already fought that war. Top-down democracies hold little news to us.
Our trade leaders return to Africa today promoting “liberal democratic” investment. But what they really mean is that they are promoting a new model which continues to invest in international corporate profits while divesting in the very peoples of African nations. They have perfected the model here at home in America amongst their own citizenry. We understood long ago that the USA was a “club-med” of the IMF and that countries that could not hold their own (mostly due to stringent and unforgiving U.S. foreign economic policy itself) got swallowed-up by the leviathan of our country’s choosing. So, our increasingly unpopular government officials go off to Africa and give wild speeches about how the continent has to cut its dependence and reliance on timeless abiding American aid and how the world should foster new economic conditions so that these poor nations and their peoples can live meaningful and productive lives. Perhaps the IMF sees a new model for profiteering off Africa (one that can return even greater dividends). We dare say the IMF has always been about the opposite: in fact, about detouring African self-reliance and securing a dependence of revolving-door loans to corrupt governments. When you look closely, IMF is more about securing debt than about aid. True, this is bad publicity (no one likes to hear it), so all must be made much more subtle these days.
A 29-year-old American named Snowden has shown the rest of the world that “we-Americans ourselves are the enemy”-no news to my generation-and for that he must go into hiding. You see, he is the enemy. And just a month earlier Snowden was making $120,000 a year from the same private firm that makes a profit by spying on U.S. citizens. Too bad the megalithic spying apparatus failed to pick-up their own imposter. And so “Just how do we protect ourselves from ourselves?” has become the $64,000 question.
In Brazil, a current revolution seemingly sparked by a bus-fare increase might surprise the older generation, but not us who see that bus-fares go up so that Olympic stadiums get built and subsequent monetary receipts by the billions get pocketed by a select few institutions and an even fewer selection of individuals.
Op-Ed liberal writers amongst us pen opinion in typical flamboyant fashion and ask “How are these times different?” We remember how our fathers and grandfathers worked in companies with huge visible production activities. There was a physical presence of a central company which fostered a strong moral work-ethic between employees, not to mention the fact that such a large physical presence of a company laid the foundation for our emergent middle-class. Just speak to former NASA employees today and ask what their jobs surrounding the space-shuttle meant to them. Not only will you get the economic run-down on how these national closures hit their local communities, but you’ll also get the emotions of what it meant for such people to work alongside one another to build something with mutual interest. In my generation, GM had more than 400,000 employees (counted in an earlier time of a relatively smaller overall national employment to population work force). To such workers, they will tell you it was never just about the building of a car, but rather about the mutual work which brought people together. The car was an artifact of the relationships with others. And for the American soldier, they will tell you (they have personally told me) that it was never just about the battle (the battle was an artifact), but it was rather almost entirely about their comrades who fought alongside them in war. Just as we are our own enemy, we too are our own heroes. But sadly, it is becoming increasingly more opaque in seeing how to separate the two. As for the U.S. worker, we can no longer define the U.S. manufacturing spirit in these terms. Gone are the hay-days of such relations.
Today, rather, our generation sees the internal machinery of the new “forward-looking” industry-our sons and daughters are happily hired-on by Apple (by the thousands). As we step into the glossy showrooms making-up the heart of the American mall, we spot a wealth of human capital spread across the brightly polished floors holding gadgets in their hands. They are decked in their blue shirts, unabashedly smile-happy, fresh out of high school. They have been well trained in swiping American Express cards through their hand-held devices. But it’s our generation who knows to ask “Who’s behind the scenes?” Where are the real employees and what are their relationships? Who can earn enough salary to sustain a family? Well, there are the executives to be sure and the top tier, albeit few and far between. But where does the Apple go to find the employees who manufacture the devices, like those before us who made the ubiquitous Buick? It seems today the question doesn’t even enter into the collect consciousness of our youth (they seem too content with their hand-held devices), and the older generations have given-up the plight of globalization altogether-they have learned that mindless things can’t be so easily checked. But what of policy? Certainly all is a deliberation based upon a policy. So, where are our policy-makers today and what has come from their good-faith deliberations? What exactly has happened to our middle-class workforce? What efforts have been made for the sake of the common man? These are questions that only our generation can ask and solve. Otherwise, for the youth (and the old), it seems for them the hidden workforce behind the shiny gadgetry is as elusive as the very function of the gadget itself. It’s all about brand and functionality of design. The ghost of the GM workforce of 400,000 bore a face of the middle class. These hidden-apple employees rather seem to be vanishing disposable units.
So, the question as our half of the generation sees it is: Has America reached a tipping-point in terms of manufacturing a middle-class wealth? Have we hit a ceiling in our productivity of human capital? In other words, is much of what we see today in our economic environments more about a disposable workforce along with disposable products than about stability and sustainability? As I close my eyes in the dark I vision grocery-store shelves stocked with men’s disposable “five-blade” razors (we are told that one blade was never enough for a man to shave-the advertizing goes). I see bottled vitamin water with added color (of your choosing). We sip five-dollar-a-cup coffee. Such are the products of a stagnant imagination-what we below will call a “right-wall”.
I feel for our college students (the future) who pay extreme interest rates on their school loans which have been shamelessly dished out by private banks which secured their same loans for free from the government. Why is it that our policy-makers don’t have the imagination to envision the same free-borrowing cost to put people to work in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure? What is to account for this lack of vision? I peer into the creep of a second double-loop housing bubble-which may be even more impressively designed than the first bubble which brought our economy to its knees. Then what? I wonder will these same banks again profit at the expense of our roads and bridges, not to mention the human cost of millions of families being cast out yet again from their foreclosed-upon homes. I read about the employee-to-population-ratio as low as the lowest point during the 2008 crash. We have not made-up any ground.
We are in a unique position to see all that is unraveling before us.
The clever analogy that comes to my mind is the “right-wall” of human limitation. A right-wall develops whenever qualitative measures of human progress no longer hold their trajectory along a horizontal cline of advancement [↔,↔,↔]. We are sure to be approaching the right-wall when we begin to see quantitative vertical stacking of past advances [↔,↔↕] (a so-called “right wall”). But in this sense, it’s not only an emergent right-wall of productive human capital, but also a right-wall of the spreads of economic prosperity. Have we reached our human limit? Are we now doomed to (the stacking of) five-six-seven-blade razors? Is the Apple and its hidden manufacturing as far as we can take our dwindling labor force-no questions asked? It seems likely to be the case, at least until the next major creative/innovative breakthrough (if one is underway at all in the short to medium term)-and any likely breakthrough still looks to be more quantitative than qualitative which may entrench the right-wall even more so.
I’ll close my postcard with some lyrics of my generation: to the second half of the baby-boomers. I hear Elton John in my imaginary background sing: “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”…These words suddenly come to me as I sit quietly in the dark, with reflecting-pools swimming in my mind-I see reflections of who we are, of how we are reminded of the unfolding of the world’s events:
While Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters
Sons of bankers, sons of lawyers
Turn around and say good morning to the night
For unless they see the sky
But they can’t and that is why
They know not if it’s dark outside or light.
joseph galasso/july 4,2013