The Right Wing Rationale: II

As the counter-revolution continues, we see a dramatic degradation in the quality of life. Cheap goods from China flood the market. While the slick magazines that cater to the ruling class are thick with advertisements for $30,000 wrist-watches (the ones you don’t own but merely take care of for the next generation of the obscenely rich), $500,000 baubles and billion dollar homes, the American masses are induced to drug themselves in a consumer frenzy (when they are not actually drugging themselves) of shoddy merchandise and even shoddier entertainments. Well-meaning missionary of blonde suburban Chicago housewives Oprah Winfrey—in a gesture out of the pages of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust—gives free cars to everyone in her audience. How America has changed! Where else could a poor, abused little Black girl grow up to give out free cars to white folks like birthday party favors? Seventy-five percent of Black children are born out of wedlock to single mothers who will then listen to themselves abused and degraded by their fatherless sons in a nightmare artistic and cultural phenomenon known as Hip-Hop which sees its practitioners killing one another with abandon while white lawyers and corporations reap enormous profits and shelter themselves completely from the social quagmire they have helped to create in all-white enclaves of the super-rich. A hurricane in New Orleans cracks open a window into the reality of the conditions of millions of Black Americans and their oblivious and uncaring rulers, but there is no longer a Martin Luther King to come to their aid, no Stokely, no Black Panthers to feed the poor, and the neatly clad adherents of Malcolm soon dispersed after his assassination. There is certainly no threat from the brothers making their bling in the rap business. While the descendents of slaves live more sequestered lives than ever before, their white brothers and sisters, living in equal isolation, lose themselves in a methamphetamine haze. For the fortunate few, there are the all-white suburbs, the smell of cut grass, colonial-style shopping malls and the tank-like protection of gas-guzzling SUVs. For the tiny percentage of super rich, there is the even greater isolation from the conditions they have created in sequestered estates and high rise urban luxury. Society magazines now speak not of multi-million dollar spreads, but multi-billion dollar spreads. Out of sight, out of mind. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And so it goes. Could there possibly be a rationale to justify this still evolving social order?