Or so Dimitri Orlov wants us to ponder. It’s not a new idea, but it is an idea that doesn’t get much play in the media and in our discussions with neighbors. We are told over and over that voting is the patriotic thing to do. People died for the right to vote. We get little flag stickers to put on our coats like the purple fingers of Iraqi voters. Very conventional wisdom. So why do so many Americans sit the elections out? And at the same time, if Americans do participate why do we hear over and over from pundits and comments on the blogs that those folks in Kansas and other reddish places just don’t get it. “Why do they vote against their own self interests? ” progressives ask. The wags note that these voters are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders. But on the other hand, vast numbers of people including women and minorities vote for the blue team and get nothing substantial out of that too. So what’s up? And yes, why do they even vote at all?
Orlov is a linguist and an engineer who has a blog called Club Orlov. He has also written several books, one of which, “Reinventing Collapse”, I am reading for advice on how to survive such a collapse besides our two month’s supply of Nalley’s Chili and two generators. He emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-Seventies and made several trips back to Russia during the Soviet rule and then after the Soviet collapse. He believes that there are many lessons we in the U.S. can learn from the collapse of the other late 20th century super power. That there are more similarities than differences between the two super powers, as Orlov describes them, gave me pause. It’s always interesting to look at a common question through a different set of glasses.
Both the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. derived their identities from being either capitalist or communist and the “extreme adherence to one or the other” as opposed to healthier countries that mix it up is what Orlov believes led to the doom of one and the coming doom of the other. Ideologies are all well and good, he says, if they actually work. But when it becomes clear that the average working citizen is not doing so well, the legitimacy of the rigid system begins to unravel and finally collapse. He points out that Albert Camus made the observation that the two superpowers were more alike than not back in the 1950s. Camus said that a specific failure of both systems was their inability “to provide creative, meaningful work.” This Orlov says leads to mass depression.
The chief reason why the U.S. is still hanging on, he speculates, is that the ruling elite and their spokespeople keep the people thinking that the system is legitimate by hawking that old chestnut “The American Dream”. He actually calls this idea of working hard and playing by the rules getting you a good chunk of the pie as “a pathological fiction” promoted by the media. “Masquerading as hope, it gains its effectiveness from a perversion of pride, a psychological trick people use to play on themselves to obscure their powerlessness”. They can sense that they are oppressed and so their last prideful stand is to pretend that their failures are of their own making, even if they have been most conveniently arranged for them by their oppressors.
And so half of them thinking it’s their own damn fault anyway get sucked into the games called elections because people can further obscure their powerlessness by picking a team or picking a horse in a two horse race, wearing their team colors, plastering their cars with stickers and then cheering on their favorite. The Soviet Union, Orlov points out
had a single, entrenched, systemically corrupt political party, which held the monopoly of power. The U.S. has two entrenched, systemically corrupt political parties, whose positions are indistinguishable and which together hold a monopoly of power. In either case, there is, or was, a single governing elite, but in the United States it organizes itself into opposing teams to make its stranglehold on power seem more sportsmanlike…The Communist Party offered one bitter pill. The two capitalist parties offer a choice of two placebos. The latest innovation is the photo finish election, where each party pre-purchases exactly 50 percent of the vote through largely symmetrical allocation of campaign resources and the result is pulled out of statistical noise, like a rabbit out of a hat. It is a tribute to the intelligence of the American people that so few of them bother to vote.
Interesting times call for interesting ideas and interesting discussions. Not same old, same old. In the small community I now live in, anybody that disagrees with the free market idea of economics is a “socialist” or is “Russian”. Time to ask what is the difference between their grey boring slabs of concrete towns and our strip malls and industrial parks? What’s the difference between their former Gulags and our prison system? How do our bureaucrats differ from their apparatchiks? Why are we now emulating the Soviets tight control over information and technology when our tinkerers in garages were the envy of the world?
There is more than one political system out there. There is more than one story humankind out there. If you belong to the “game is rigged” gang, don’t worry about being a tad depressed about that story. Orlov says that depression is a sign of unconscious rebelliousness. If you are powerless in the present American system, why legitimize it even more by participating, says Orlov.
In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans act any differently with regards to Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants?
Looks like Americans who still believe in a mom who bakes apple pie rather than one who packs a Luger participate in the sedative called elections. And those who acknowledge their depression by proclaiming that the hunger game is rigged are the rebels that we need when collapse comes. It will be their skills in working with alternatives to this rotten system that will be of great use.
Further information on Orlov’s “Collapse Party” and its platform and practical info on how to survive collapse is in his book.
My Mother Made Me a Commie
My mother and I watched lots of old movies in the 1950s on a tiny TV screen in our tiny winterized screened in breezeway. My mother knew all the supporting players by name. Her own sisters had been MGM contract players. She was never political and always voted Republican except for George McGovern. But without her knowing it, the movies we watched left a deep impression on me. They reinforced the idea of “getting in other people’s shoes whether they were worn out with holes in the bottom or velvet ones studded with pearls. I could feel for the “down and out” while coveting the lacy ball gowns, crystal goblets, and fox furs. It nurtured my love of contradiction that persists to this day.
The economist, Milton Friedman, was right in one respect. He once said, “When a crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas lying around.” This statement became the basis for Naomi Klein’s frightening book “The Shock Doctrine.” In it, she chronicles the ways his followers jammed his free market ideas down the throats of citizens in various countries when a crisis, man made or natural, occurred. Some of the ideas lying around during the 1930s and 1940s that produced movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) were often anti-capitalist, labor friendly and surprisingly saturated with feminism. I watched “It Happened on Fifth Avenue” (1947) this past Christmas. It’s about a hobo who occupies (YES, Occupies!) a rich man’s mansion every winter when the rich guy goes to his winter home in Virginia. The hobo wears his clothes, smokes his cigars, and drinks his wine. Year after year nobody noticed anything awry.
One day on his daily stroll through Central Park. The hobo happens upon a homeless WWII vet (YES, veterans are always treated like crap even after [1]“the good war”.) Against his better judgment the hobo takes in the veteran. The daughter of the rich man runs away from her snooty college and decides to hide in her father’s mansion. She overhears the hobo confessing that he’s a hobo to the vet. She decides to pretend to be poor so she can stay there too and cuz the Vet is cute. Turns out that the vet has a bunch of ex GI buddies and their wives and kids who also need housing, so, somewhat reluctantly, the hobo takes in all of them. The vet and his buddies then hatch a plan to purchase an army barracks and turn it into communal housing. Well there are many more complications when the rich man (who started out poor) comes back to New York to look for his missing daughter. When they finally meet, the spunky girl confronts her father. She tells him that she doesn’t understand why they should have big empty houses when there are people who need them. Then she convinces him to disguise himself as a bum and join the merry band of people inhabiting his mansion. And soon her divorced socialite mother joins up disguised as a poor cook.
Other movies of that era also have spunky females like Barbara Stanwyck in “Christmas in Connecticut” (1945) who writes a Martha Stewart-like column in a NY newspaper about her Connecticut stately farm. Truth is she’s a poorly paid journalist who lives in a one bedroom flat in NYC. “Holiday Affair” (1949) is about a war widow raising her son and trying to find a good father while trying to maintain her dignity and independence. “My Man Godfrey” (1936) is my favorite film. Filmed at the height of the Depression, it opens with a bunch of rich people going on a scavenger hunt. One of the “items” they must find is a “forgotten man”. So they go to where all the homeless are shacked up tin order to find one. And audiences loved these stories of people struggling together in an often dog eat dog world. They still do if given the chance. “The Devil Wears Prada” is in this tradition, but not quite as subversive as the old movies.
Besides giving people work on sewer systems and dams in the 1930s, the WPA funded writers, artists and photographers. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to have another WPA type deal in order to have writers and artists come up with other ideas. Margaret Thatcher once famously said about financial capitalism aka Milton Friedman’s“free market” that “there is no alternative,” referred to as TINA. But there must be. There were other ideas not so very long ago. Time to dig them up and repot them. We need to “imagine” a better world that we can actually Occupy rather than watch on the TV. I was lucky to watch old movies with my mother. No, she didn’t make me a Commie, but she did help make me a Contrarian.
[1] “The Good War” was the name of the 1985 book by Studs Terkel. It is composed of first hand accounts of veterans of World War II.
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Posted in film and book reviews, Flics Worth Ropin', Social Commentary
Tagged capitalism, class warfare, cultural values