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It's no longer possible to maintain the pretense that the U.S. economy (or global, for that matter) is healthy. Everywhere I go (and I live in a small town), I feel the temperature rising. People are not acting like themselves. Domestic violence is up. People who appear clearly mentally ill are wandering the streets. I can see the anger just in the way some motorists are driving. Crimes that were unheard of here four years ago--including racially motivated crimes--are beginning to materialize with alarming regularity.
I was re-reading portions of "Understanding Power" this morning and the following seemed especially timely:
"But I do feel this period is a kind of turning point. I mean, you can see very clearly where policy is driving people, and you know exactly what its goals are. The only question you can't answer is how the population is going to react as they get slammed in the face--and they are getting slammed in the face... But the country is very disturbed.
"You can see it in the polls, and you can certainly see it traveling around--and I travel around a lot. There's complete disaffection about everything. People don't trust anyone, they think everyone's lying to them, everyone's working for somebody else. The whole civil society has completely broken down. And when you talk about the mood of people--well, whether it's on right-wing talk radio, or among students, or just among the general population, you get a very good reception these days for the kinds of things I talk about. But it's scary--because if you came and told people, 'Clinton's organizing a U.N. army with aliens to come and carry out genocide, you'd better go to the hills," you'd get the same favorable response. I mean, you can go to the most reactionary parts of the country, or anywhere else, and a thousand people will show up to listen, and they'll be really excited about what you're saying--no matter what it is. That's the trouble: it's no matter what it is. Because people are so disillusioned by this point that they will believe almost anything...
"So, to answer your question, I think it's very much up in the air what's going to happen in the United States. See, there's an experiment going on. The experiment is: can you marginalize a large part of the population, regard them as superfluous because they're not helping you make those dazzling profits--and can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people, with the fewest rights, in the most flexible labor markets, for the happiness of the rich people of the world? Can you do that? Can you get women in China to work locked into factories where they're burned to death in fires, producing toys that are sold in stores in New York and Boston so that rich people can buy them for their children at Christmas? Can you have an economy where everything works like that--production by the most impoverished and exploited, for the richest and most privileged, internationally? And with large parts of the general population just marginalized because they don't contribute to the system--in Columbia, murdered, in New York, locked up in prison. Can you do that? Well, nobody knows the answer to that question. You ask, could it lead to a civil war? It definitely could, it could lead to uprisings, revolts."
-- Noam Chomsky, "Understanding Power" ("Disturbed Populations Stirring", pp. 395-396)
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