Red Rich Blue Rich – Red Poor Blue Poor

One of the great and possibly deciding questions for the coming decades of this new century is how the rich and the ultra rich will evolve and behave - and how the desperately poor adjust to a new and no doubt harsher reality – the new reality being that the ultra rich will continue to acquire obscenely greater portions of the collective pie – while the poor cannot optimistically seek both protection and influence in a return to communist revolution or even collective bargaining, no matter how great their desperation or longing for nostalgic solace and solidarity.

Looking eastward, It seems highly unlikely the growing hundreds of millions of landless and jobless in China are ever going to band together again and demand reprints of Mao’s Little Red Book. Nor will they organize strike after strike, or gather in new Long Marches until they over-run the new Mandarins in Beijing. No, the central government has all the tanks, missiles and bombs it needs for putting down rebellions there, and all paid for with American dollars, and the new Mandarins have a firm stranglehold on food distribution as well.

Equally, on the windy steppes of Mother Russia are the tens of millions left behind in dire poverty by the insatiable and glitteringly ostentatious greed of the kleptocracy likely to cry for a sequel to Lenin’s October putsch and Stalin’s decimation of every group with any power, affluence or influence? Only the die-hard relics over the age of eighty there seem to have any lingering nostalgic dreams of socialist utopias and class revenge.

So what then will be the coming roles of the very rich and the very poor?

Perhaps some of the answers can be found in the examining of the different kinds of rich people – for there are vastly different types and behaviors – just as there are with the poor.

In America, for example, we can, as an aid to general understanding, divide the rich into two groups. Let us call them the Red States Rich or Red Rich for short, and the Blue States Rich, or the Blue Rich. The same can be done with the poor, Red Poor and Blue Poor. (These labels have more to do with mentality than geography – but geography decides voting trends.)

Let’s begin with the Blue Rich. The Blue Rich are exemplified by the likes of Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Jeff Bazos. These are men, often born and raised in liberal Blue state areas, well educated in renowned colleges, heirs to no great fortunes or blue blood families, but basically self-made billionaires in young new-tech industries - men who also care about poverty, the environment, the big questions of the age and above all shaping a better future for the world and mitigating real problems.

The Blue Rich are fans of Obama, the Clintons, Oprah, vacationing in Tuscany, going back stage to say hello to Bono. They buy Segways and Priuses for their friends and junior family members. They support gay, minority and women’s rights and shudder at the thought of getting their information from Fox. They contribute to refugee relief and fighting cholera in Haiti as well as the global fight against malaria and polio. They espouse (..at least publicly..) the belief that we’re all in this together and we must think of future generations. The Blue Rich are softies and never speak of the need for tough love, steely realism or the dangers of greedy organized labor or the madness of social security “entitlements.”

For that we have the Red Rich, represented by Bushes down through the last four generations, the Coors family in Colorado, the oil-rich Hunts and Basses and Kochs of Texas. These family dynasties, built on old glamourless meat-and-potatoes industries, have shown little concern for health care iniquities, for the environment, for social justice and minority rights, or the least bit of sympathy for the down-trodden at home and especially abroad.

They and their ilk embrace a me-first and a the-government-can-get-out-of-my-way-unless-I-can-bribe-it-to-do-my-personal-bidding philosophy. They feel that as members of large families, with dozens of lazy dependents, incompetent nephews, dull-witted sons, grasping sons-in-law, leech-like brothers-in-law, vindictive ex-wives and demanding mistresses, that their obligation to their fellow man is being more than tested daily locally by the parasites in their own families. Charity begins at home and often dies there, is their experience.

Besides being weighed down and drained and demoralized (..the perfect word!) by blood-related moochers (as, of course, are most Blue State Rich), the Red State Rich are also often highly annoyed that they get so little credit from educated Blue State snobs for creating blue collar jobs and tenaciously keeping the wheels of industry turning.

“Why,” they complain, with a great deal of justification, “does a man like Steve Jobs get all the praise and publicity, while the men who dig for minerals and drill for oil get nothing but condemnation and scorn? Why is Apple sexy and Haliburton thought to reek of sulfur and Hades?” (Geez.. with obvious good reason, I would venture..)

“..and why are all things imported and exotic, decadent and perverse, atheist and profane, preferable to our good old-fashioned American Puritanism and fear of the foreign? For God’s sake, for the first two centuries of our existence America had been amply protected from contamination by our two great oceans, and now we find our soft underbelly being infiltrated by those leaf-blower-bearing beaners from below the border – and how many languid Latino landscapers and lettuce pickers do we need? If that damned Obama wants to start some kind of public works program why not build a new canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific right along our border with Mexico and make it a mile wide with banks a mile high? Along with that, if we can just stop those gays from living monogamous family lives, keep Spanish language signs from being displayed in our airports and motor vehicle bureaus, label Christmas nativity scenes as such and promote the teaching of Creationism in our schools – then we’ll be safe and thrive and remain masters of our own fates!”

Similarly the differences between the Red Poor and the Blue Poor reflect the aspirations of the poor to resemble the rich. The white rural poor aspire to resemble the Red State Rich, while the urban poor look to Obama and Oprah as examples to aspire to. But while the rural and the urban poor are different in many ways they do share one commonality – the fervent hope the Lord Jesus Christ will show them mercy and a life of plenty and pleasure in the next world. (If not him, then the Lottery.)

(We Liberals generally mock the rural whites for their fundamentalist religion – while forgiving black church-goers for their equal fervor – no doubt because we like their music better, black superstition being of a more joyous celebratory nature while white superstition seems so sour, repressed, vindictive and anemic.)

America is an astoundingly unusual country. It is perhaps the only country where the poor (whites) consistently and conservatively vote against their own interests. The rural white Red State residents’ intense dislike of interfering government, unions, collective bargaining, international cooperation or organizations like the United Nations – and especially do-gooder groups like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, stems from a general and seething skepticism. Because their primary – indeed sole – interest is self, they cannot even minutely understand or believe that anyone else cares about anything else than the self. “They are liars, deceivers when they say they care!” is their sour response. “Nobody really cares. All they want is attention and praise for being do-gooders. Look at all those phonies in Hollywood with their gala benefits. And that damned Sean Penn in Haiti. You can bet he gets his bottled water first! Nobody ever helped me or gave me a thing!”

(..do we need to wonder why???)

The rich Red and the rural poor Red agree that government help is distant, ineffectual, unreliable, bureaucratic, and resembles the DMV at worst and the Post Office at best – and while the government used to be good at keeping the blacks down it now seems more concerned with keeping them alive.

“What’s in it for us?” they bellow when confronted with government social programs and altruistic organizations. Of course they choose to ignore Medicare, Social Security, Interstate Highways, pure food and drug laws, primary education. To hear them talk you’d think all they need to thrive and be happy is the Pentagon, Fox News and the NRA.

But now that so many millions of the rural state residents have lost their jobs perhaps we’ll be hearing less of “You big government liberals can try to pull the pink slip from my cold dead hand..” and more of “Maybe Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch aren’t my best friends after all?”

As for the follies and the foibles of the Blue Poor? While the Red Poor hate taxes because they fear the government might take away too much should they ever come into money (..How? ..a generous settlement from the insurance company when the Lord Almighty blows away their trailer?) the minority Blue Poor have no such illusions nor fear of excessive taxation. They know they live in unattractive areas with no jobs and that will likely never have jobs, and they know they have no money to relocate to suburban areas where there might be jobs, nor do they have the funds to buy land in rural areas and return to the farming of their ancestors. Part of the reasons for the great migration to the north was their inability to buy sufficient land in the south or to farm without harassment. The Blue Poor feel trapped where they are and can see no viable alternatives. They feel boxed in, and, if not deliberately isolated by the white world, than at least marginalized and doomed to a subservient and second-rate life.

Would most of them vote for a black candidate merely for the color of his skin? Yes, no doubt. Just as many white voters thought and continue to believe that the pale ninny from the far north is a far wiser leader than a brainy black man ..and she shoots things!

Can this rough categorizing of Red and Blue rich and poor be applied internationally? To China, India, Russia, Brazil?

Of course it can, as every nation and nationality, every age has its Robin Hoods and Sheriff Johns, its Bill Gates and Al Capones, its Oprahs and its Silvio Berlusconis and Rupert Murdochs, its resentful rednecks and its snobby urban sophisticates. The future century will produce myriads of heroes and villains – and alas many many more victims of harsh and heartless economic inequality.

Rah Rah Raw

A joke that’s been making the rounds the last few years is this: Hollywood is high school with money.

Allow me my own variation: America is high school with napalm.

How do I justify this harsh assessment?

Recent reports that the combined costs of the Iraqi-Afghani wars have now surpassed 3 trillion dollars.

Now to get a better picture of what that kind of cash amounts to, consider this: The combined populations of Iraq and Afghanistan is about 60 million. If instead of the 3 trillion being spent on bombs, America had chosen to, it could have given each man, woman and infant 50,000 dollars.

The question springs to mind: why hasn’t America chosen the bribery route instead of prolonged and apparently ineffective bloodshed?

Well, cynics might point out that fear lasts a lot longer than gratitude. “If you want to make a man your enemy lend him money,” warn the knowledgeable.

Cynics also warn that if America started giving money to turn enemies into allies, more impoverished countries would become hostile in order to gain bribes to behave.

Perhaps.

But I still like the high school explanation.

Much of American mentality has been formed by high school and especially by high school football. “War” is ceaselessly waged between small towns, their teams venturing forth into enemy territory to bravely fight for glory and to risk humiliating defeat. Gridiron combat gets the juices flowing and entertains these small town warriors and their proud families. Uniforms and victory are intoxicating. The Red Cross and the Peace Corp are wimpy.

All this coupled with the constant drum beating that all things foreign are inferior and foreigners can never be emulated or respected, is the sound track to the American marching band.

There is also a very real practicality to this eternal zest for battle. After the first world war America reduced it’s armed forced to the point where its standing army was the 22nd largest in the world. When war clouds gathered at the beginning of the 1930’s America had to scramble to rearm. The second world war quite naturally taught America to always be muscular and ready.

And to insure readiness a healthy little war is required every single decade. You cannot have a generation or two go by peacefully, because you’ll end up with a military that has never fought a war. Eternal war has many positive benefits:

1 - On the job training makes military people better warriors.

2 – Bombs and planes and other weapons that have been used, have to be replaced – and with newer and better bombs and planes. This creates jobs in the homeland (What does America continue to do best? Manufacture lethal products) and weapon development insures that America stays several steps ahead of the competition, both on the battle field but also in the marketplace. American arms sales abroad equal or exceed money leaving the country to buy drugs. The “pushing” goes both ways.

3 – If America sent 50,000 dollars to every man, woman and child in Iraq and Afghanistan, most, if not all of the money would be spent to buy products made in other nearby countries. But when spent mainly on bombs American workers benefit.

In the British comedy, The Mouse That Roared, a tiny fictional country declared war on Britain, then immediately surrendered in order to receive aid.

Perhaps America might benefit from a fictional enemy, like the residents of Atlantis or Avatar’s Pandora? We could drop all our napalm in the middle of the Pacific ocean and tell our citizens we were hammering the enemy. New bombs could then been ordered, jobs secured – both in factories and in the Pentagon.

An absurd idea?

Isn’t that exactly what we did in Iraq?

Necessity is the Mother (and Father) of Invention

Although we're all sick to death of the Men-are-from-Mars/Women-are-from-even-farther-out psycho babble - and political correctness still dictates that it is socially dangerous to analyze either too seriously or too humorously any possible differences in the psychic make up of the two sexes - sometimes a simple observation is forgivable.

For example, no one can really take exception to the opinion that it was no doubt a man who invented the beer can opener. It was also, no doubt, a man who invented theme parks and Auschwitzes, brass knuckles and dirt bikes. And as for boomerangs, women would unanimously point out that, "What's the point of throwing something away if you want it to come back to where it started?!?"

And only men could have been cement-headed enough to invent something as invigorating and possibly eviscerating as bungy jumping.

But it was in all probability a woman who invented the sneeze protectors covering restaurant buffets. (We American men are satisfied with the germicidal protection afforded by the gallons of tabasco sauce we inundate everything with, from jello to strawberry shortcake and beluga caviar.)

Women invented deodorant. Men invented tiny voodoo figures handcrafted from toe jam. Men invented pornography. Women invented babies in wicked response.

Women, I venture, also invented shoes. The fairer sex's notorious infatuation with foot clothing could well stem from the fact that back in the days of our cave people forefathers, men wandered more in search of food, and therefore had more thickly callused feet. Women wandered from the cave less frequently, burdened as they were with progeny, so their feet were relatively more tender and in need of relief.

But remembering our caveman days, men invented TV and remote controls. (After all, what does a TV screen resemble more than a cave opening? For millions of years we men huddled in the mouths of caves, looking outward, alert and constantly on watch for danger, our families thus protected further back in the cave. And what did we hold in our hands? A spear, a tool which enabled us to better control our destiny. And from a distance, albeit short.)

Yes, we men are only truly happy and secure when we're holding something pointy and potent in our hand.

Women, no doubt, also invented mirrors. My evidence for such an ungentlemanly accusation? Men's magazines are full of beautiful women. Women's magazines are full of beautiful women. Nobody, except homosexuals, really wants to gaze intensely at men, unless the men in question look like Brad Pitt. (Put a long blonde wig on Brad or Leonardo and they'll look like a Baywatch Babe, proving the axiom that all male sex symbols have something feminine about them, and all female something masculine.)

And it was most certainly a woman who invented the yellow light (you know - the light that flashes briefly between green and red, and which tells women to prepare to stop, and men to floor it.) No man would have thought up this symbol of hesitancy and caution. Stop dithering, we reason. Screw this transitory indecision!

But one debate currently taking place, is between a majority who believes that it was oppressive men who invented and have forced middle eastern women to wear the veil, and a less certain minority who point out it could well have been women who invented the device in days long past to protect themselves from lustful gazes of (..or to further inflame?) men. Conversely, it was probably an altruistic man who invented the push up bra in order to make mountains out of molehills, as we men are wont to do.

Women invented leg and bikini waxing. No Marquis de Sade could ever have been so inventively cruel. And if women hadn't invented the cotton ball-make up remover, there would have been no need to import 3 million slaves from Africa!

And speaking of unforeseen and unfortunate consequences, couldn't the blockheaded men who invented the birth control pill have guessed, that along with greater access to women's bodies, we men would now have to subject ourselves to being measured and then compared with other men, our sexual performances judged and ridiculed by the formerly innocent and inexperienced sex? Why couldn't these rational researchers have fine-tuned the recipe and added knock out drops to the subscription?
If women are going to lie there anyway, they may as well catch up on their beauty sleep.

And, oh, yes - men invented sleep. So that we can, if only briefly, get out of having to listen to incessant chatter. (Adam probably deliberately invented the apple pie, thereby inviting aging and death for the same reason. Thanks to Great Gramps an eternity of yammering was thusly made preventable.)

Mother Nature is a Cold Hearted Bitch

Okay, I suppose the title is a bit harsh. After all She creates rainbows. Rainbows and hemorrhoids. Orgasms and earthquakes. And a baby’s laughter and AIDS both result from putting your pee pee in a place that initially seemed inviting.

But I don’t wish to discuss Mother Nature here in her entirety. Let us forget the judicious spin of electrons or the beneficial tidal effects of the moon. Let us instead confine ourselves to biology, to living things and the things Mother Nature seems to command us living things to do – whether we like it or not.

More specifically violence and competition. The distressing thought occurs that Mother Nature’s favorite son might be much closer to Adolph Hitler than to Jimmy Carter. For in nearly every mammalian species – and reptilian as well – Mother Nature insists that males engage is nearly constant, brutal and deadly battle for dominance and the right to spread their seed.

Mother Nature seems to love bad boys.

If we men are indeed put on this planet primarily to battle and to muscle ourselves to the front of the pack by whatever means necessary, might it be some sort of sacrilege to protest or to resist?

Who are we but puny individuals? Who are we to say that Mother Nature is clumsy and primitive and that sharing and universal brotherhood are a much better way generally? For if universal brotherhood were indeed a better way in the long run surely Mother Nature would have discovered that somewhere in the last 3 billion years. But She has not. On the contrary She continues to arrange things, hormones and claws, so that we males continue to invigorate ourselves with blood before we expel semen.

But modern man has attempted to fool Mother Nature. He uses flowers and chocolate and jewelry instead of rape. He uses credit cards and sports cars instead of hand to hand combat or healthy little wars. And worst of all he uses condoms and other forms of birth control in order to have his jollies without issue, thereby short-circuiting totally Mother Nature’s ultimate purpose for creating him!

While Mother Nature intended us males to have sex with as many females as we can gain access to, She never ever intended males to shoot blanks. At least not to deliberately do so.

And for those who maintain we need to get back to nature, to live in pact with nature, I wish to point out that the whole history of humankind has been that of using the artificial to outfox, subdue and civilize nature. We made spears as the artificial extension of fangs. We learned to weave flax and fibers to make clothing, and even the previous wearing of animals skins to ward off the cold was an artificial contrivance to improve on nature. Everything we have and everything we do has been an improvement on the harsh limitations of Mother Nature. Our laws, our countries, our customs, our schools, our hospitals, our taxes. Nearly ever moment of every day is spent countermanding the demands of a cold-hearted Mother Nature.

So if you find yourself condemning Tiger Woods for having sex with dozens of women, praise him for his restraint. For Mother Nature would have allowed and encouraged him – as the leader of the pack – to have sex with many thousands.. as long as he didn’t use a rubber.

Give and Take

It's often noted that many people make the transition from Liberalism in their youth to Conservatism in their more mature years. The quip, often attributed to Churchhill as well as others, that, “The man who is not a liberal in youth has no heart, and if he is not Conservative when he matures he has no head,” is the most famous example of this.

It is also remarked as being strange that few people move from Conservatism to Liberalism. Why is this? Why does it seem to be only one-directional?

Well, the most simple reason might be that when we are young we are used to getting an allowance from our parents – and thus we utilize and praise a system that takes care of us. But when we mature we have to subsidize our own brats with money – and we rarely receive either noticeable gratitude nor better behavior from our reluctant hand-outs. In other words, payback is negligible.

At its most extreme, some youths and liberals do believe Big Daddy or Big Mama should provide everything for their children, so that those provided for can lie back without a care in the world and do nothing to contribute other than spend the money that magically rains down like manna from heaven.

And the most extreme form of Conservatism does consist of bitter, cynical misers who will contribute to police, prisons, teargas and concentration camps – as long as their contributions are voluntary and someone is horribly punished – but they won’t willingly contribute to much else.

These extremists on both sides may well be many in number but they are of little interest once mentioned. Of far more interest is the average citizen who lives in perpetual confusion, vacillating between being the loving, giving sharing individual, and the hard-hearted and hard-headed rugged individualist primarily interested only in his or her own happiness. A quick way of describing this majority might be “I genuinely want to help others.. but only when I feel like it ..and I only want to help those I choose myself.”

This feeling, whether conscious or subconscious is understandable. But it’s no way to run a sophisticated society. If our government, in its folly and its fear of the populace, allowed each of us to choose what should be supported from the common treasury, we might find that public libraries might cease to exist along with orphanages, charity and veterans’ hospitals. Voters already, in their bizarre logic, often vote for longer prison sentences for criminals while voting down bond initiatives for building more prisons!

Americans must and need to live with the painful fact that Washington is, in fact, often more sensible and far-sighted than the average citizen while at the same time being more corrupted, as this sensibility and far-sightedness is largely motivated by the politicians’ desire not to kill the goose who lays all those golden eggs.

The average voter seems to be eternally waving an ax, threatening to kill the goose for any number of selfish private reasons.

You know your reasons and I know mine.

But remember, while your tax dollars go for my Medicare and college scholarships for my kids, my tax dollars go for your prisons, B-2 bombers and napalm. So shouldn’t we all be happy?

P.S. Remember that Truman spent billions to revive war-ravaged Europe and save it from communism with his tax payer funded Marshall plan. And his successor, Eisenhower, did the same for Asia - while at the same time building the Interstate Highway System that mainly benefited rural America in the west with money mainly originating in the urban north east. Socialism or practical farsightedness? Call it what you want.