The Fantasy Years

THE FREEDOM WAS ALSO FOR MONEY. Because in the reengineered language of the 1990s, the point of “freedom” was “wealth.” And if money wanted to drift upward into the hands and pockets and wallets and accounts of those who had it already, well then, who were the American people to stand in its way?

If money wanted to amass itself in enormous piles held by powerful individuals while other Americans went deep into debt paying for college or healthcare, well there was a term for this too: “personal responsibility.”

It was the personal responsibility of those going into debt to pay for life’s necessities to earn more. After all, the rich managed their finances successfully. What was wrong with everyone else?

“What’s wrong with me?” Dennis asked himself, surveying his cluttered apartment; -thought Jenny, putting the family’s groceries on the credit card, -thought Brandon, trying to estimate the cost of diapers, wipes and baby food on his budget and Mike and even Don, as they tried to make sense of their finances.

People everywhere were going broke, just living their normal lives. But the liberals, using the language engineered by right-wing think tanks, didn’t have the words to describe the reality. They didn’t talk about dollar and sense issues. No, the liberals were occupied answering the charges of their accusers. The liberals, facing a wall of accusation followed by a wave of wagging indignation, could only offer up meek, evasive quips.

“Yeah,” the liberals would concede, talking about economics “government bureaucracy is less efficient than business…”

And the Dittohead would strike, “More like government is always less efficient than business.”

“Well, you have a point but not everything is black and white,” the liberal would offer with a shrug.

“Principles matter,” the conservative would say, his jaw tight with exasperation for all that liberals didn’t understand. About principle.
“Yeah, but…”

And the mere concession of the “yeah, but” was an invitation for more accusation from the conservative accuser. After all, if the accuser was partly right, then the liberal was being a relativist. If the liberal was a relativist, it just proved that the accuser was right: nothing was concrete with liberals.

Jenny, Rick and family entered the Costco for the first time. They’d driven forty miles to get here and hoped it was worth the trip. The store was enormous, the carts were super sized liked they were at the Sam’s Club. The selection was amazing. But the store was laid out differently. There was more space at the front. The first thing you saw was row after row of electronics. Stereos, TVs, Walkmans, all stacked in their packages. The boys, almost like bird dogs, ran ahead.

“No, wait. You two get back here.”

But they’d found a woman in a Costco-uniform and hairnet giving samples of chicken and cheese-stuffed sausage. They stood bashfully before her.

“Look at them,” Jenny said to Rick.

They laughed watching their boys. It was obvious Jakob and Joshua wanted the free sample but were too shy to ask. “I’ll go,” said Rick.

Jenny pushed the cart through the aisle as the items turned from electronics to gifts, vases, and glassware sets. Jenny turned the corner into the snack food aisle. Bags of Doritos as big as pillows for the bed. Cheetoes. Lime-flavored nacho chips. Pretzels. Hot-flavored chips.

The boys pointed, Jenny relented, and they put some bags in the cart.

Around another corner came sodas, Coke, Pepsi, ginger ale, Sprite. In every sizeable denomination you could find. Stacked clear up to the sky.

Rick pulled down cases of Diet Coke.

Then came the prepackaged foods. The flavored rice packets, the stove top pasta packets, sold in lots of twenty. The frozen foods next. Boxes of 25 frozen burritos. Boxes of fifty frozen egg rolls. Bags of frozen chicken filets, of wings, of breasts.

Frozen shrimp. Frozen seafood.

The possibilities were endless.

Jenny knew it would probably go over budget but they could put it on plastic. Even if she was putting too much on plastic, the rationalization went like this: I’m buying groceries for my family. If I can’t afford what I need at the grocery store on the money we make then—then, she got distracted by the angus ground beef burgers. 40 for $30. The boys saw another free sample station and ran ahead. It looked to Jenny and Rick like grilled chicken.

“Well?” Rick asked, a smile on his face. “Should I run after them?”
“I think they’ve got the hang of it.”

Jenny and Rick walked together down the packed aisle and for some reason, she wasn’t sure why, she leaned up and kissed him. He smiled. And they strolled together arm in arm.

Rush fans knew liberals. Rush fans could identify liberals. They knew liberals better than liberals knew themselves. A voice in San Diego: “Liberals have no sense of humor.”
“The liberals are whiners,” he said.
“They’re weak.”
“They’re effeminate.”
“They’re Poindexters.”
“They don’t even know how many men make up a football team.”
“Yeah, well, I’d rather have a brainy liberal in charge of this country than a senile actor or his vacuous sidekick”, a third voice added, razzing the two, then walking off.
“Listen to the hatred,” said the one.
“The bitterness, said the other.”
“Why are you liberals so angry at the world?” The first voice called out.

The accusation, the knowing disregard for liberals electrified the land.

The radio hosts rasped into their microphones and their words issued from the mouths of their listeners days later. The imaginations of millions of Americans took in the ideas and spit them back out. The American language itself slowly froze the liberals out of the vocabulary, as their ideas became discredited or redefined.

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.’”