The Surly Bartender – How Much Freedom Can One Man Stand

As happens every now and again, the Surly Bartender needs to take a few weeks off from his perch behind the bar. Thankfully, La Cuadra has a rolodex full of Surly pinch hitters for such occasions. Our bench is deep, but without a doubt, our “go to guy” for vitriol and wisdom is none other than Joe Bageant. Below is his take on the current state of affairs in the United States, both externally and economically and internally and spiritually for the volk who pretend to live full lives within its ever more restrictive borders.

Thanks, Joe. It’s a hell of a read.

The Editors

Freedom comes in many forms in America, and new forms are constantly being created. The latest has been freedom from basic financial security. The weakened economy has given corporatists an excuse to, as they say, “let workers go.” Which sounds as if companies are granting employees some sort of freedom: “Go on George, twenty years on the job is long enough, so git outta here. Have yourself a ball!”

By that measure, there have never been a more free people. Now benevolently relieved of their job responsibilities, millions are free to do almost anything they choose, go fishing — or take up the banjo. At the moment 14 million Americans have been granted freedom with another three or four million expected to be pardoned before the economy “levels out,” meaning more people will lose their jobs, but at a slower rate. Of those 14 million liberated souls, six million are so free they can even take the family on a year-long round the world trip, if they so choose. They need no longer report in at the (un)employment office because their benefits have expired. One little suggestion for their trip abroad: visit the guy in Asia who now has your job. With a little effort, I’m sure you can get over the barbed wire topped steel mesh fence enclosing the factory’s “attached employee housing compound” in Sichuan Province.

But luckiest of all are those American workers who get to have their cake and eat it too. According to the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an additional three million adults over age 25 have both jobs and unprecedented leisure time. These are the working Americans living on “unintentional part time employment.” This term carries overtones of some sort of accidental consequence of something the worker did. As in: “Oops, silly me! I didn’t realize that I cannot support a family on 17 hours work and $120 a week. So now I must spend all my newfound leisure time seeking more “unintentional underemployment.” One must admire government speak for its subtlety. Intentional or not, these working folks are experiencing unprecedented new leisure time opportunities as Americans. Whoopee! Sleep in four mornings a week!

Depending on how you look at it, the American people are either freer, or simply getting better at what we have always represented to the world — a bunch of powerless and unquestioning mental midgets. My money is on the latter.

Midgets can seldom see over the fence. Consequently, we see the world from inside the fence and on such small terms as paychecks and families, and no farther. We cannot identify even with a national level struggle for the same things we want, much less the global one for human dignity and fairness in labor. Exclusive devotion to family is the chief virtue here, along with maniacal devotion to the closest football franchise. Moreover it’s the only responsibility a man has, the sign of a good man, a real man. Accepting “personal responsibility” for the credit card bills. That one’s personal responsibility might also extend to the larger world is incomprehensible.

Meanwhile union workers at downsized Sony and 3M plants in France hold CEOs hostage and threaten to burn down the factories, resulting in larger severance packages and raises for those not made redundant. That’s the downside of mental midgetism, every fence is a tall fence. Knowing stuff is too much work. Then too, the fence was made quite a bit taller by the American media blackout of the French union action. I mean hell, J.T., those unions are communist!

My friends abroad tell me it is pitiful to watch such unquestioning bovine Americans. I tell them it isn’t much fun to watch from the inside either.  Swamped in the manufactured spectacle, fear and distractions we call American culture, few among us notice what our nation has become – a slickly packaged totalistic and authoritarian state of a type new to history. That there has been any loss of self agency among the people is incomprehensible. Two subsequent generations to mine never knew what life once was in America. While not perfect, it was not so thoroughly policed and minutely administrated. For most now, present conditions are like the atmosphere or the weather. Just there. Just the way it is.

The condition among adolescents makes me want to cry. Passing through school metal detectors is a part of life. Being subjected to a piss test to join the chess club, or sniffed by a German shepherd police dog while being lined up against the lockers along with the rest of the student body? Paramilitary terrorist drills in high schools and middle schools? A kid being led out of study hall in handcuffs? Don’t even think twice about it. It’s just the way it is. And, if I may ask, exactly what is it? Well, one New York State school board calls it “Parental freedom from fear.” The Columbine shootings provided the excuse to embed these things into society. Nine-eleven provided the authority to implement them anywhere and everywhere. So now it’s just the way it is.