Up against the wall mother... of invention

John Rich singing "Shutting Detroit Down", (hat to Forensic Economist)

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The American Dream is based on the extraordinary idea/fantasy/vision of an endless horizon, of unlimited possibility, of infinite social mobility, of ceaseless, all solving invention, a place where everyone has/had a chance at "the Diamond as Big as the Ritz".

This vision explains the unique phenomenon of a country where simultaneously the word "elitist" is an insult and the wealthy and the famous are worshiped.

However the dream has its cut-in-stone rules, its iron logic. Those rules, that logic are being violated.

My daddy taught me
In this county everyone's the same
You work hard for your dollar
And you never pass the blame
When it don't go your way

Now I see all these big shots
Whining on my evening news
About how their losing billions
And it's up to me and you
To come running to the rescue
"Shutting Detroit Down" - John Rich

There is hell to pay.

Running out of road, discovering limits, this is the nightmare of the right, that is why, for example, that they react so virulently, so insistently against the clear danger of climate change. Global warming means finding limits.

Ideally, America's vision of capitalism is like a version of musical chairs where new chairs are being added constantly. Everybody imagines that they'll finally get a seat.

However in a Global warming scenario the music stops and instead of a chair being added or one chair being taken away as in the classic game, most of the chairs are removed and unless the remaining chairs are shared fairly, most human beings will be left standing for eternity or rebel and take the chairs for themselves from the few who posses them.

For a long time, despite stagnant salaries and purchasing power, easy credit - mostly loaned to Americans by foreign savers - has allowed this peculiar game of musical chairs to continue. Now even the piano is being repossessed.

In a real sense the American Dream itself may be turning out to be a Madoff style Ponzi scheme.

One of my favorite practices is to put quotes next to each other and see how they resonate, the same way that musical notes form a chord: the resulting sound is more than the sum of the parts.

Here are two, that juxtaposed, drip with zeitgeist, brim with the writing on the wall.

It has been odd, over the past six months, not to have the gospel of success as part of the normal background music of life. You go about your day, taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs, and only gradually do you become aware that there is an absence. There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around. There are no new how-to-get-rich enthusiasms. There are few magazine covers breathlessly telling readers that some new possibility — biotechnology, nanotechnology — is about to change everything. That part of American culture that stokes ambition and encourages risk has gone silent. We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended. The public culture is dominated by one downbeat story after another as members of the educated class explore and enjoy the humiliation of the capitalist vulgarians. David Brooks - New York Times

Socialism is an ideology founded on optimism - the hope that the world could be a better place if its relations are rooted in co-operation rather than competition, and solidarity rather than insularity. But for much of my adult life the opportunity to apply those principles has been rare. Gary Younge - Guardian

I suppose David Brooks would count John Rich, the author of "Shutting Detroit Down" among members of the educated class that "explore and enjoy the humiliation of the of the capitalist vulgarians".

What I don't see yet is how we get from Brooks to Younge.

What I don't see yet is a charismatic, working class politician in the line of a Huckabee or a Palin saying, like Gary Younge, that "the world could be a better place if its relations are rooted in co-operation rather than competition, and solidarity rather than insularity". I don't hear a down home voice like a Huckabee or a Palin talking, with the angry, Woody Guthrie-like passion of a John Rich, about nationalizing General Motors to save those jobs and pensions.

I opened with John Rich, so I'll close with Cole Porter,

"Use your mentality, wake up to reality"

The day that happens, the entire world will change overnight.

I am enough of an American exceptionalist to believe that, as America is the cutting edge, the vanguard of capitalism, it is "only in America" where capitalism will be finally tamed, if it ever is. DS