As bad as me

It's greed and fear, but also something else

Most of the political stuff that goes through my head these days boils down to a few simple questions of the sort I’ve been asking for years, only now with greater urgency, such as “Can you believe this shit?” and “How the fuck can we stop these scumbags from murdering us?”

But even sophisticated people like you and I have at the back of those questions even simpler, in fact childlike questions, such as What makes them like this? That is, we know conservatives and Republicans are terrible, but in our exasperation and despair we may find ourselves asking God or the Universe what makes them so incredibly terrible, even in comparison with other people at the same level of privilege as they are. We expect their kind of viciousness from the mentally ill, or from desperate criminals raised in poverty to believe life is cheap. But people like Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Susan Collins et alia were never going to starve or be killed in a streetfight, yet the disregard (in some cases criminally reckless) for human life shown by their policies is stupefying, considered by the standards of normal psychology.

I generally don’t bother to pursue such questions, because 1.) it leads to bootless long-distance analysis of the specific mental illnesses of these politicians, which I’m against on principle; and 2.) it’s kind of like speculating on the motives of the wild-eyed guy coming at you with a knife — a waste of time better spent trying to keep from getting stabbed.

But as it has done with a lot of things, the public health emergency has made me think again about this.

There is always plenty to say about the role of greed in the motivations of conservatives. From top to bottom, from the ceaselessly self-dealing Trump to the little criminals who follow him, the grift is paramount, an article of faith, the highest value. Fear plays a part too, though that’s mainly for the rubes, whom the big boys terrify with tales of black or Mexican or Muslim or Fill-in-the-blank interlopers; if the big boys are afraid of anything, it’s that the rubes will catch on.

But an element that gets overlooked, and which the pandemic brings back to my mind, is the conservative devotion to a corrupt and broken system that clearly makes everything worse for everyone — even in at least some sense for the top cats who profit the most from it.

Take a look at what Spain’s doing in response to the pandemic: They’re working on a Universal Basic Income scheme. Lose your job? La Patria provides. Britain, even under the scumbag conservative government, is paying laid-off workers 80% of their incomes. Yet in our own country, a nation of vast natural resources and commercial innovation — the richest country in the world, some people like to call it, grading heavily on the curve — we have a Rube Goldberg stimulus that basically shovels hundreds of billions of dollars to already-rich companies and pisses out a pittance for hard-up Americans.

Sure, greed explains a lot. Top politicians and top donors insist on the lion’s share and when they get it they insist on more — and with no real political opposition (RIP Sanders 2020!), who’s gonna stop them?

But you have to wonder who, with any choice in the matter, would want to live in a country where it was possible for most if not all people to have a decent livelihood, a country the rich could be proud of their part in creating, without materially reducing their own advantages — for our rich could still have their every need met and then some even if they endorsed a decent social system.

Sure, greed is unreasoning and always wants more. Sure, “The future, Mr. Gittes!” But these people aren’t totally stupid, most of them. A few of them have even figured out that a decent life for the masses is no skin off their nose. And God knows some of the less-rich conservatives must see it too. Yet they persist in turning America into a third-world country. And their supporters persist in letting them. Why?

Again, it may just be what it looks like, but the pandemic has put me in mind of something I saw on the TV show “Cops” years ago.

It was one of those perp interviews where you don’t see much of the cops and the perp is high or drunk or just raving because someone at last is listening to him. In this case it was a skinny hillbilly sort of fellow. I forget what he was in for. But he got to talking about his son, a pre-teen as I remember it, and he sounded pretty proud of the kid, and then he threw his arms out and said, cheerfully, “An’ you know what? He’s gonna be as bad as me!”

Some of this you can put to braggadocio in the face of the law — a fuck-you-pig unto the next generation. But I recognized and still recognize something in what he said from my own working-class childhood: The idea that if you can’t get something better, then you’ll just go all the way bad. It’s an easy thing to believe when your surroundings enforce a feeling of hopelessness. And though it’s the worst kind, economic hopelessness is only the root of it; it reminds you every day, in every encounter with the world, that you’re at the bottom, and after a while you take it to heart. You might be given to feel that you could try to be a better man or better father or a better anything, but who are you kidding, look around you, what you see everywhere is what you were born for, now get your head out the clouds and get back to being the piece of shit that you are.

I think this is, or at least is getting to be, part of the American DNA. I know Trump has been trying to make exposure to other countries difficult since he got in because he wants Americans to fear and despise foreign cultures rather than be pleasantly surprised by them. But let’s not kid ourselves: Americans already know that their demographic equivalent in pretty much every other Western country has it way, way better than they have it here. And they still don’t insist on it — even though they know there’s enough money for them to have it. Why do you think that is? Do you really think it’s because they’re worried about losing their heritage — that if they could count on making a living, if the government really would hold them up when they fell, that they would be, I don’t know, less American? And if so, then what does it means to be American? So lazy that they’d stop working if someone guaranteed they wouldn’t starve? So stupid that they couldn’t figure out how to use that security to better themselves and their families?

It does look in a certain light — the light of other countries reaching out to support their citizens, illuminating how badly our country is fucking us up — that a big part of being American is affirming that it has to be shit, that you’re shit, and that your boy is gonna be as bad as you.