Categorical Aperitif

When you have a chance, peruse this piece by Sara Robinson. She's been mining the literature on revolution to see how Bush's America stacks up against historical predecessors, and she finds that all the traditional ingredients for radical upheaval are in place—or are being steadily put into place by a heedless, greedy, hubristic elite. Excerpt:

And here we are again: Conservative policies have opened the wealth gap to Depression levels; put workers at the total mercy of their employers; and deprived the working and middle classes of access to education, home ownership, health care, capital, legal redress, and their expectations of a better future for their kids. You can only get away with blaming this on gays and Mexicans for so long before people get wise to the game. And as the primaries are making clear: Americans are getting wise.

Our current plutocratic nobility may soon face the same stark choice its English, French, and Russian predecessors did. They can keep their heads and take proactive steps to close the gap between themselves and the common folk (choosing evolution over revolution, as JFK counsels above). Or they can keep insisting stubbornly on their elite prerogatives, until that gap widens to the point where the revolution comes -- and they will lose their heads entirely.

Right now, all we're asking of our modern-day corporate courtiers is that they accept a tax cut repeal on people making over $200K a year, raise the minimum wage, give us decent health care and the right to unionize, and call a halt to their ridiculous "death tax" boondoggle. In retrospect, their historic forebears might have counseled them to take this deal: their headless ghosts bear testimony to the idea that's it's better to give in and lose a little skin early than dig in and lose your whole hide later on.

Will we take the hint Michael Moore dropped repeatedly in Sicko and move America in the direction of the sane, humane social democracies of Europe, staving off violent upheaval by building a society where all feel enfranchised and empowered? Or will America continue down the path toward becoming the biggest, baddest-ass banana republic in history, making Jack London's vision of fascist oligarchy coming to Gilded-Age America in The Iron Heel turn out to be a century ahead of its time, until, as Marx might put it, the elite produce a big-enough, desperate-enough, angry-enough mass of their own gravediggers?

I don't know what the future will bring, but thanks to jules, I hear Brian Eno playing in my head at times like these: "It will come, it will come, it will surely come."