Adrift in an Imaginary: America the Beautiful

So, in one of the most colossal whoops-a-daisys of our time, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has admitted to being wrong about government regulation being the big, bad enemy of the market.

I believe this is what’s known as a pyrrhic victory, no?

While being questioned during a hearing on the role of federal regulators in the current financial crisis, Greenspan declared: "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms" (The Financial Crisis and the Role of Federal Regulators, preliminary transcript, pg 34, ln 768-772).

Well, stop the presses! Is Greenspan actually suggesting that the folks who work with money and finances—other peoples' money and finances—actually need to be monitored? Their SELF-INTEREST won't keep them honest?

Huh.

Ok, but still, maybe Greenspan and all the other "invisible hand" devotees are on to something; maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss this notion of self-interest being a positive guiding force--

How about we get rid of all those pesky referees and other sports officials—just let the players, coaches, and trainers call all the games? Or the fans, should it be the fans? The owners? No? Or wait, jeebus, what am I thinking? "Call" the game? Hell, no! Let’s just toss out all the rules! Pure and simple deregulation folks—let the folks who play the game decide how to run the game. Maybe they’ll choose to honor the old rules, maybe they’ll make new rules and stick to them, maybe they won’t—but surely they know best; I mean, they have their self-interest to guide them.

A weak parallel that may be, but still, the shrill attacks on government regulation really do seem to me as ridiculous as the notion I present above. I mean, how many times and how badly does deregulation have to fail in order for it to quit being touted as a viable economic strategy?

I also cannot help but wonder just what it is about businessfolk in the first place that created the perception that they were capable of policing themselves. It’s not like this is a new notion, either; government has been sucking business’s cock for years. I mean, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, government frequently extends to businesses and corporations the sort of hand-outs and immunities that are seen as blasphemous when given to individual citizens in need. Of course, in turn, government uses business and corporations to spread American influence beyond our shores.

And so, yeah, I recognize how the incestuous relationship between capitalism, government, and business has coalesced into a blunt instrument that is used to manipulate and bludgeon most of the American citizenry into a flaccid, placid, docile mass of overworked, underpaid, underinsured, exhausted drones, just as this instrument has been used to “sell the American Dream” on a global scale. I mean—I see that reality, and I even understand why the people with money and power have made the decisions that they’ve made; what I cannot and will not ever understand is how the tiny minority of folks who benefit from that costly brand of United States democracy and capitalism have gotten the remaining, massive majority to be the protectors of a system that exploits and dehumanizes them.

Capitalism is brutal and vicious, with a vociferous appetite for flesh and blood. How else to describe a system that cannot exist without a class of people ripe for exploitation, a system that devours those who are used to perpetuate it?

In the article I read at Mother Jones, David Corn writes that Greenspan’s testimony sends "decades of Ayn Rand down the drain," and oh, my, the ire that this statement raises among the Randites who comment on the story.

What-the-fuck-ever.

Greenspan and Rand had a decades-long connection that began when Greenspan was a young man and joined Rand's salon, where he became a fierce believer in Rand's notion of Objectivism, a radical philosophy of individualism and self-interest built upon a framework of unfettered capitalism. I have never read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, but I have read interviews with Rand, and I think she is vile—her ideas about feminism and homosexuality, her glorification of the individual over the collective, her notion of rational egoism …

No, thanks.

And see, I didn’t say a thing about the rape scene … Or about what a truly awful writer she is.

But this wasn't supposed to be about Ayn Rand or Alan Greenspan, even, beyond my using his confession as a springboard to something that I just can’t seem to get at here...

I wanted to write about … how lost we are, we Americans, we pilgrims, we beaten-down rebels, we dreamers of dreams …

But here’s the rub: we have always been adrift, fumbling toward a more perfect union, grasping for the promise of our greatest thinkers and of our most-exalted documents—we have never truly been the "America" that exists in patriotic imaginaries.

The America that real people move through, each and every day, has always been harsh, uncompromising, and unjust, and though we have had both the blueprints and the wise words of brilliant thinkers to guide us, for more than two centuries, now, still we fail, as citizens and leaders, as comrades, as humans.

America's sun has never shone evenly on all her citizens, and a great many toil daily even while staying faithful to this dream that has more than likely left them out of the fold. Looking nostalgically toward a mythological America that fulfilled the promise of its framers is naïve and wrongheaded—that America has never existed. From the very beginnings of this project we call "these United States," this land has been populated by both the free and the chained. Think of it—if we were to revert to our exalted founding fathers' earliest vision, only white, land-owning men would have the right to vote—and no Catholics, Jews, or Quakers, either, white and propertied or not. I mean, this country has not even existed for 100 years with full suffrage for its citizens. And, with dirty polling tricks still in existence, I really don’t even feel comfortable using the phrase "full suffrage" to define the United States in its current incarnation.

Can our government do better for its citizens? Can we move closer toward the ideal that thus far has existed only on paper and in our collective yearnings?

Absolutely.

But not without our urging, our demanding, our clamoring.

And still, even with a government that functions in a just, even-handed manner, there will be those who stumble, there will be those who fall, out of sight, and without hope. This, where even good government fails, is where we must step in ourselves and lift up our brothers and sisters.

Because this is America, and we are kindred.

Aren’t we?