The Fantasy Years

FOR MILLIONS OF AMERICANS, the more they spoke of freedom, the more they were estranged by it. Every job Mike worked gave him less independence. Instead of leaving one city and arriving in another hauling his load, bringing it in by a deadline set by his company, and choosing his route and managing his time and budgeting his stops and putting some of his own wits into the task, Mike now had to account for gaps between his deliveries to kid almost half his age.

Now, Mike had to return to the warehouse with his manifest, hand it to the dispatcher – always some college kid, almost always with a goatee, it seemed. Never a gray hair in it.

Mike would take a half step backward, shuffle a little while the slick college kid would ask aloud, “An hour between the Red Lobster and the Bennigans on MacArthur?” And Mike would have to look at him and explain himself like a kind of schoolchild: “There was a traffic jam on the access road.”

“Oh, well. Okay. I just wanted to know,” the kid would finally say. For Mike, the issue wasn’t the kid’s doubt; everyone knew Mike was honest in his work. For Mike, it was the fact the kid even asked the question.

Mike just wanted a decent-paying job where he didn’t have to answer to some snot-nosed college educated kid who wants to talk about “delivery efficiencies.” Mike’s dad supported a family of five working in sheet metal for 20 years. But that kind of life was out of Mike’s reach. That kind of life seemed to belong to the time of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Gerald Ford. The kind of easy American life belonged to blurry snapshots of people in bellbottoms and pork chop sideburns.

A term Mike heard on the radio helped him put his employment outlook in context. His job situation, like so many other problems of modern life, was his “own personal responsibility.”

Rush Limbaugh repeated the phrase about personal responsibility constantly.

The think tanks ringing Capitol Hill peppered their reports with it.

The pundits groomed in chairs funded by rightwing foundations repeated it. And who didn’t like “personal responsibility”?

A lack of personal responsibility conjured images of stew bums drinking their way through a perfectly good life until they hit the curb.

A lack of personal responsibility beckoned thoughts of homeless people. A lack of personal responsibility plagued drug addicts and single mothers, people who blamed others for their predicament. For people who wanted handouts.

A lack of personal responsibility was for welfare queens, for hobos, for crackheads, for bra-less prostitutes wandering sun-baked oil-stained parking lots dotted with trash. A lack of personal responsibility was for the defiant knuckle heads handcuffed and spitting at the camera from the backseats of a police car on the TV show Cops. A lack of personal responsibility was for liberal economists who thought the state should pay everyone just to be a citizen.

And so the phrase “personal responsibility” helped the American people understand their place in society, in the world. The notion of “personal responsibility” helped Jenny wake in the morning to face the nearly insurmountable difficulties of working full time, while raising two boys and managing her family’s volatile finances.

Jakob and Joshua were five now.

Each blonder of hair, lankier of leg, louder of mouth.

The awesome responsibility for their care became clearer the bigger they grew. Jenny returned to work full time now that Jakob and Joshua could go to preschool.

It was a sense of personal responsibility that spurred Jenny to take the initiative and manage her 401(k), a task with which she was empowered with “choice.” So at the end of the day, Jenny opened up the handful of literature, the prospectuses 60 pages long of 4 point type printed on onion skin paper. And she did her best.

And it was frustrating. But Jenny made her under informed choices in the market just as any fund manager in Wall Street made decisions about stocks to invest in. Just as any asset manager made decisions. The only difference being that Jenny tried to fit in the task in a few hours every six months or a year, had no pervious experience in the matter and confessed she didn’t really know what she was doing.

The asset manager on the other hand acquired more market information on his forty minute train ride from Glenmont to Grand Central than Jenny ever would. He knew the nature of investments in nuanced and granular detail. He was a sponge for market data, absorbing data that could help him enjoy strong profits yearly.

And there was a term describing this system too: “the free market.”

And who, in America didn’t like freedom? The talk radio hosts wanted to know. Who? And so as with “personal responsibility” it was with “freedom.” And in Scottsboro, Alabama, one tow truck driver to another:

“I’m not too politically correct to say it. Welfare encourages poverty.”
“Welfare is a threat to freedom.”
“Welfare creates poverty.”
“And the Democrats need poverty to stay in power.”
“But we’re going to change that.”
“We’re going to fix welfare once and for all.”

Rush huffed. Rush puffed. His audience squealed. They frolicked at the feet of his awesome rhetorical power, lobbing softballs questions via call-ins. How shall we think of today’s topic? They asked. How shall we approach the events in the news today? Calls were screened for dissenters and Rush never had to face a true ideological foe who could stump him. Rush, instead, armed his listeners with the arguments to use in their discussions in their own lives. Rush only had to get up in front of the mike and riff for three hours, and the Dittoheads would put his genius to use on their own. And so, in Garden City, New Jersey.

“I’m not too PC to say it. Welfare keeps minorities down.”
“Nonsense.”
“It pays the poor to have children.”
“Bullshit.”
“Sure it does. LBJ signed it into law.”
“So?”
“LBJ was racist. I heard tapes of him on the radio.”
“How?”
“He used the n-word constantly. Who uses the n-word without being a racist?”
“But…”
“JFK didn’t use the n-word.”
“So?”
“So LBJ was a racist and welfare was his racist plan to keep poor minorities down so they’ll vote Democrat. Only a PC liberal like you can’t see it.”

Rush crooned. He raged. But surely just the fact that Rush crooned and raged to his listeners didn’t mean his listeners parroted everything he said. Surely, there had to be something in it for them. There had to be something in it for the sheet metal worker in Sheboygan who winced in disgust, threw up his hands and said to a buddy: “The PC thought-police are ruining the country! Just look at OJ!”

“Look at him!” his buddy said.
“Here’s a guy who murders his ex-wife and people are talking like he should get off!”
“Because he’s black.”
“Because it wouldn’t be PC for him to be found guilty—which he is.”
“This is how the PC culture is ruining our society. A murderer going free!”
“Oh, but you forget: to liberals it’s not guilt, it’s just being ‘justice-challenged.’”