PAGE 4
«
G. MOSS
FIN de SIECLE AMERIKA
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
"Government is best when closest to the people. "
-THOMAS JEFFERSON
The manner in vtfiich great powers decline is wild
extravagance at the top and misery at the bottom. The United
States is a spectacular example.Two Americas have developed,
one rich and privileged, the other exploited and heavily taxed,
with separate sets of laws governing each. As the importance of
wealth, no matter how acquired, assumes greater influence, the
social inequities between the wealthy and the not so wealthy are
accentuated.
At the present time the wealthy 10% of the population
owns about 66% of the nation's net worth while the bottom half
has only 4%. Legalized deceptions allow wealthy individuals and
the richest corporations to escape with little or no tax payments
w4iile the shrinking middle class and the poor pay punitive taxes
to make up the deficit; and their taxes pay the huge bailouts of
expensive fraud and mismanagement by these same high-roller
entrepreneurs and corporations. The biggest crimes in a nation
haunted and infuriated with crime are not committed by poor
blacks as politicians claim to frighten the electorate but by wrfiite
businessmen wrfio steal billions of dollars of public investments.
The plutocrats who control the country's major political
parties claim that the economy defines the nation more than its
ideology; money is the nation's ideology. What they mean by
their strict interpretation of the "economy" is their own personal
domination of the nation's wealth. Narrow monetary policies that
singularly benefit the upper layers of society draw money from
less w«ll-off levels wrfiich keeps them less well off and always
CANNON BEACH
BOOK COMPANY
132 NORTH HEMLOCK
CANNON BEACH
436-1301
under pressure to pay what is demanded. Releasing public
money (most of it pried from middle class and blue-collar
workers) to businessmen and the wealthy elite is considered
good, even essential to the economy. Feeding the poor or
providing them adequate shelter and medical care, or even
educating them, is regarded as uneconomical and a drain on the
nation's treasury.
In theory everybody has an equal chance to make a
buck and live the American Dream in pursuit of happiness, but
of course some are more equal than others in intelligence and
capability or just plain luck (or cupidity). A few of these happy
fortunates share their good fortune but the majority hog what
they accumulate and increase it at the expense and labor of
others vtfiom they prevent from equally sharing in the worth of
their production, and such notions of equity are dismissed as
socialism or politically correct. Yet the real purpose of the
American experiment is that human beings should be able to
coexist as equals, not necessarily in wealth or advantage but in
basic rights and liberties and equally share in power, and that
none should be denied these whatever their wealth or advan
tage.
The imbalance that has rotted the core of our demo
cracy has produced mendacious mediocrity at the upper levels
of governance. We are governed by pious hypocrites who are
mostly white males in a nation in which women are the majority
and the great variety of races outnumber Caucasians. Women
have made it into the middle level of politics, as have a few
blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans: but for the present and
probably beyond the end of the century the top national
positions are closed to all but a small club of white males,
a minority of upper class men who strain to hold onto power,
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART AND OPINION
PUBLISHED MONTHLY IN ASTORIA,
OREGON, 955 24TH STREET 97103
MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
clinging desperately, defiantly and ruthlessly to their peculiar
form of country club apartheid.
The recent collapse of the Democratic Party has left a
black hole in the center of American politics. The Party's own
center has fallen out, deserted to the Republican Superparty,
leaving disenfranchised minorities clinging to a disintegrating
corona. Perhaps like the Soviet Communist Party its ruins
should be abandoned, the surviving fragments reformed into a
new party or a multitude of parties that might at least reflect the
disparate new majorities that have moved into the American
electorate but so far have not gained real or representative
power.
The Democratic Party is traditionally the party of
working people and minorities. Though its history is hardly
glorious - in particular its advocacy of Southern apartheid a
century ago - the Democratic Party usually, though reluctantly
and always narrowly, encompasses a mixed variety of ideas,
philosophies and cultural styles that would otherwise find
expression in other parties, which generally have little chance
against the prevalent two party system. Jammed uncomfortably
into this single political party alongside a now virtually vanished
core of strict constructionists are liberals, leftists, trade unionists,
environmentalists, minority groups, feminists and others who
might be regarded as free thinkers and heretics.
While the Republican Party generally represents the
aspirations and pretensions of wealthy Tories and plutocrats
and would more likely include proto-Nazis than fuzzy-headed
liberals, the Democrats switched their antebellum loyalties at the
end of the last century to embrace the hordes of impoverished
Mediterranean and Eastern European immigrants who were
imported to work in the rapidly expanding American industrial