Finally my mother and I agreed on what is ailing the U.S. (and it wasn’t teacher unions or the military budget). We both agreed that the disintegration of the American nuclear family is at the heart of our current state of decay, and, that this decay was brought on by “credit” being extended to the American family while the U.S. got off the gold standard and onto the petro dollar. She agreed that Americans have been programmed to live beyond their means. I now hope to fill in the gaps of this leap in logic…
Giti has me watching the HBO series “Rome” (now on DVD): talk about parallels with the British, and now American, empires. Oh my! I’m waiting to see if the American mob will be as fickle as the Roman – when a Mark Anthony steps to the plate and incites the mob against those who have assassinated the American Dream.
Fiscal responsibility probably begins with maintaining a gold standard that backs your paper currency. As I understand the original intent of an ambassador – it was to make sure that the company you were hoping to trade with had sufficient gold backing in their national exchequer/treasury. Naturally – monarchs borrowed from other monarchies in case they didn’t have enough of the precious stuff to impress the visiting ambassador.
When countries could no longer “back” their level of trade with their existent gold – they needed to find more – and colonization for the purpose of gold extraction and the general raping of natural resources in “backward” lands began.
Whatever the U.S. government learned in Viet Nam, that caused Nixon and Kissinger to leave the gold standard in favor of the petro dollar, remains a mystery to me. Perhaps one of my enlightened readers will enlighten me. But from 1972 on – it seems like the U.S. started living on credit – which isn’t wise — because eventually you have to pay the piper (in our case, China).
Issuing the “credit card” to the common man (a.k.a. middle and lower middle classes) was a license to keep up with the Joneses, and, if we look at how the American government has consistently modeled fiscal irresponsibility – why would the Average Jones strive for fiscal prudence? If they’re going to sell it to you and ask you to make payments – why not go for it – and worry about the payments later.
Now this particular model works pretty well for a family with income…it even works pretty well for a working couple. But when divorce occurs (particularly when children are involved) – both parties become more impoverished (unless somebody has their sophisticated, capitalist model continuously churning out the bucks) and then…folks really start to ring-up-the-credit!
And now our latest American economic pundits are STILL telling us not to worry…so most-of-us march zombie-like to some inevitable financial catastrophe. They tell us not to mind Standard and Poor’s threatened AAA downgrading (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).
Well, at least my mother and I agreed (for-a-moment) that the American crisis is NOT the fault of teacher unions (or unions in general) – and that there have been far more insidious factors rushing us like lemmings off-an-economic-cliff…but she will shortly return to Fox News and begin calling my Aunt “a communist” again.
I should have titled this article: “American Zombie,” cuz one second they’re with you, and the next, they want to give you that zombie bite that has you craving the same thing they do: non-zombie, er, human, flesh…