The Age of Incompetence Chapter XXXI

Learning to live with the pain of losing a country
February 13, 2010

Bob Herbert       George Orwell

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a piece in the New York Times this week reassuring his readers that the U.S. is not lost, that there is still life or a pulse in the body. I wish he was right, but all my instincts tell me he is wrong.

Bob Herbert, who is not an economist nor Nobel Prize winner, but who also writes for the New York Times, often about the statistics and human cost of this Great Recession, wrote a column the same day and began with these words: "There is a great tendency in this country to refuse to see what is right in front of everybody's eyes."

I sense American democracy is dead based on what might be called the Stalingrad Theory. Late in 1942 the German Army was engaged in a kind of life or death struggle with the Russian Army for the city of Stalingrad. The German high staff had attempted to tell Hitler that their supply lines were overextended, but the bunker mentality in Berlin was in full operational mode. Anyone who was too strong in opposing the Fuhrer's opinions risked not merely demotion but prison. But by January 28, 1943 it was all over. General Paulus' 6th Army was surrounded and had no means to resist. Although the war drug on for another two and a half years, for the Germans it actually ended at Stalingrad.

It proved that a war or a country can end but still stagger on for years, as if it still had life. I think when the real American history is written of this period the banking collapse will be seen as to American democracy what Stalingrad was to the Nazi empire.

Just as the boys in Berlin in 1943 never mentioned Stalingrad to the German public and continued all their blather about the ultimate victory, once wounded soldiers came home the size of the catastrophe couldn't be hidden. The bank meltdown showed how dead American democracy is.
The American public was overwhelming against the bank bail out. And at first Congress voted it down. Next the bunker mentality ratcheted up to scare the public: if we don't get the money then the economy will be worse than 1932. Then Congress caved in.

After the elections in November, team Obama came on board and let it be known that they didn't object to the current bail out plan. This was the critical moment for team Obama to show they were different than the loot and scoot mentality of the Bush gang and that change meant a clean break with the past. It was a harbinger of things to come.

Barack Obama is now damaged goods. He's been exposed. He frittered away a kind of windfall inheritance of good will from the general public merely because he followed in the wake of George Bush. He's now like the man who received an inheritance from some distant relative but instead of using it wisely blew it all in Las Vegas. Andrew Jackson remarked, "One man with courage makes a majority." General George Patton said it another way, "In war men are nothing, one man is everything."

Winning wars, either political or military, so often comes down to the leadership of one man. In 1940 for Britain it came down to Winston Churchill.

Obama's first 100 days was a classic study of waffling and weaseling. He cozied up to his supposed enemies and scorned those

who brought him to power. Behind closed doors all the forces which had conspired against the interests of ordinary Americans must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when they discovered Obama had no stomach for a showdown. No doubt they couldn't believe their good luck.

It was as if a gang of rowdy school kids were huddled in the principal's office in a cold sweat fully expecting the well-known paddle to be used (recall the scene in the film Dead Poet's Society) and instead the first kid to come out of the office is all smiles and holding a bag of jelly beans courtesy of the head master. Naturally all the hooligans in the school from that point on run amuck and the school staff are thoroughly demoralized feeling they have been stabbed in the back.

That's where we are today in America. In 1943 after Stalingrad the German troops started retreating back toward Berlin. It was just playing out the drama for the war had already been lost. So from my point of view the great American experiment in democracy ended with the great bank heist of 2008. It will be a long hard, often brutal, slog now toward the end in the American bunker. The times called for a Teddy Roosevelt or Harry Truman, a gut fighter because the forces opposing ordinary Americans are also gut fighters. They take no prisoners and eat up people like Obama for breakfast. So today we stand stark naked against anti-democratic forces.

In Bob Herbert's most recent piece he revealed some eye popping statistics about who is suffering in the Great Recession. Those in household incomes of $150,000 or more the unemployment rate is 3.2%. Those in the range of $100,000 to $149,000 it is 4%. But those at the bottom of the ladder with incomes of $12,499 or less the figure is 30.8% which is worse than it was during the height of the Great Depression. For those in the $12,500 to $20,000 the rate is 19.1%, still a wretched figure. Clearly there is class warfare in the home of the brave.

It reminds one of the ending to George Orwell's Animal Farm. You might remember the war between the animal farm and the

human farm ends when the head human farmer, Mr. Pilkington, says to the head pig Napoleon and the other pigs, "If you have your lower animals to contend with, we have our lower classes!" They understand each other perfectly then and this cements their new alliance and friendship. So it is with the banking class and the political class in America. You can decide which class are the pigs or most like pigs.

So many people in Europe during the 20th century endured losing their country. Here in the Czech Republic some are still alive who remember 1918 when the country was born and then lost in 1938 to the Germans, then started again in 1945 and lost again in 1948 to the communists putsch, then born once again in 1989. The Spanish lost their democracy in a civil war to the fascist in 1939. And so many more, Poland, Holland, France, Hungary. Almost all lost their country to an invasion from the outside.

But history will record Americans lost their country to sloth and laziness and greed and most of all ignorance. For how can one overlook that today in America the very people who brought about this catastrophe now admit no responsibility for it and no contrition. And millions of Americans believe them! (Hello tea baggers where were you from 2001 to 2008?) That is like Stalinists claiming there was no KGB.

As a man of literature I know that life is a long series of adjustments to loss. In childhood one must face losing their first pet to death. In teenage years one must learn the sting of losing a first love. Then there is the loss of the first job. Then there is the inevitable loss of our parents. These are universal losses we all must suffer and all must adjust to. But losing a country has a pain quite unlike any other. That is what I am discovering. Each day I get up thinking the worst pain is over and I find I am wrong. So far I have not adjusted to it. The feeling grows I never will.