Since I’ve been asked to discuss life as a Blue Collar Brotha, and because the economy is something that is very much at the forefront of all our minds, I thought I’d kickoff today’s round of posts (I’ll probably put up two or three today as the spirit moves me; poop on the idea that a blogger may only blog once a day. Heh!) on the state of our fiscal situation, how we got here, and what the future will look like. If you haven’t already figured out by now, here at The Obsidian Files I am very keen to surround myself w/truly Extraordinary Gentlemen-Outside the Box Thinkers, or “OTBs” as The Fifth Horseman, owner of the blog The Futurist, would call such Men-and I’ve always been one to look at life through a door instead of the proverbial keyhole, Occam’s Razor at the ready. Of course, like the mythical Odin, who gave up one of his own eyes so he could have the gift of foresight, knowing and more importantly, speaking the Truth does cost. But you’ll never hear me complain.
So here we go:
Those who followed me over at Roissy’s and In Mala Fide will know well my love and admiration for the crime drama, HBO’s The Wire. Critically acclaimed as one of, if not the best show ever done on television, The Wire tells the story of the American City at the dawn of the 21st Century. And that story is not a pretty one-the brainchild of Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, The Wire is Simon’s “Angry Letter” to the powers that be, a searing, gritty, in your face tale of greed, incompetence, cover your assism, and how no matter what the organization or institution-be it the school system, the political system, the police department, the labor unions, the news media or the even the drugs trade underworld-how it can and will BETRAY YOU when you need it most. Each season focused an aspect of the city, in this Baltimore, and in each season it showed how some key member who truly believed in the ideals of the institution to which he belonged, gets thrown under the bus in the end.
That The Wire also focused on a primarily Black city, also wasn’t pretty or endearing to a mostly White viewing public, and hence the rather low ratings it got throughout its first run on HBO. Simon himself has said on more than one occasion, that he believes the reason why The Wire never became a broad popular hit was directly due to the fact that it mostly depicted Black folks-and let’s be clear here-NOT of “The Cosby Show” variety-but of the “Left Behind” type of Blacks, the kinds of people we try to cordon off from the rest of polite White Society-and it is not a pretty sight. With the notable exception of Season Two, something I’m gonna focus more on in a moment, nearly every week The Wire showed the senseless, brutal deaths of Blacks at the hands of other Blacks. Talk about keeping it real? The Wire was about as real as it gets for ANY crime drama-NONE of the Law & Orders, CSIs, or NCIS’, comes anywhere close. They do, however, show Beautiful White(r) People acting like hardened, grizzled cops goin’ after the bad guys, all of whom also happen to be Beautiful White(r) People.
As mentioned above, The Wire plays out more like one long movie than a one-off episode format, where at the end of the show, everything is tied off neatly into a nice bow and then everything is “rebooted”; rather, The Wire unfolds carefully over the course of its run, and from season to season, focuses on a different aspect of Baltimore. Of all the five seasons The Wire ran, my hands down favorite season was Season Two, which focused on the Death of the American Working Class-and which featured more White folks than any other season of The Wire in the whole of its run.
Season Two of The Wire, like all of The Wire’s season’s talked at length about the excesses of Capitalism, but Season Two really brought it all home for me, being a Blue Collar Guy and Union cardholder myself, and I suspect it really hit close to home for many other viewers as well. More than any other season, Season Two showed just how the Working Class was decimated by people who didn’t know, understand or care about them, who all too willing to shuffle them off to the side in the name of more profits-for themselves. The very last scene of Nick Sobotka, looking at his old job through a chain link fence, and crying, was a powerful image indeed.
In an extensive interview with Bill Moyers, Simon says that The Wire shows everyone what happens when Capitalism is allowed to run rampant with no controls on it whatsoever; moreover, he says that in the “new” configuration of things-the manufacturing sector all but dead, etc, and with the focus on everyone going to college and focusing on “services”-the system is inherently rigged. By design, only a select few can ever “win”, and just because you got the brass ring today, doesn’t mean you’ll wake up with it tomorrow.
But Simon goes a step further-he says that not only is the new “game” (a word that plays prominently in The Wire, especially among its Black actors on the street; the word actually has several meanings) inherently rigged, but that there are too many “players” on the field-in other words, as D’Angelo Barksdale so aptly shows his underlings by teaching them about the game of chess, that the Pawn always stays the Pawn. Simon says that we have a human surplus of about 15-20 million people in the United States, much of them locked in urban ghettos like Baltimore’s Westside. And, since White folks of a certain class tends to act more along implied rather than implicit lines, the wink and nod way of dealing with this is by basically doing an Escape From New York move, leaving the wasteland to the Left Behind, and hopefully they’ll off themselves and save us the dirty work.
Let me say right here, right now, that EVERYTHING Simon has said in these regards is 100% TRUE. I say it’s true because I’ve seen, witnessed it, lived it, firsthand. And when he says that lots of Black kids “get it”, again, he’s spot on. Wanna know why so many young Brothas scoff at college? Do you really, really wanna know?
If you wanna know why Brothas are so seemingly uninterested in “higher learning” as a group, so cynical, so deeply antithetical to polite American society, you need go no further than HBO’s other hit drama, Mad Men. Set in early 1960s America, Mad Men takes a look at life in the advertising world’s heyday, through the eyes of its central character, Don Draper. In so many ways, he is the perfect metaphor of the American Middle and let’s be honest, White, Class-it can be encapsulated in one simple phrase:
Fake it till you make it.
Draper is a kind of media creation-it’s not his real name, nor is the past he’s either carefully constructed or carefully avoided, depending on the situation. He’s a pathological liar he’s so smooth his bullshitting ability makes him among the best Ad Men on the scene. He’s a serious womanizer, has a killer fashion sense, and drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney-and, as one episode so clearly showed, he doesn’t actually produce anything.
Mad Men is in my view, the flipside of The Wire-whereas The Wire shows American life and how its changed and mutated “on the ground” if you will, Mad Men shows the same thing from the view of the much vaunted Middle Classes. Draper is in every way a self-made Man, especially in comparison to the other guys in the office, but he too, perhaps more than anyone else, knows that he gives nothing of import to society, and has to keep a lie going just to maintain the illusion of living the high life.
Which, going back to the realworld, is but one of the many lessons our society has been taught in as many years. How many of us are truly living beyond our means? How many of us sling out our job titles as if that means something at the end of the day? How many of us actually produce a good or a service that people actually need? With our bare hands? That they cannot do without? How many of us well, bullshit for a living? Hmm?
I’ve done a lot of jobs in my life. Had a lot of ups and downs. But in em all, I can honestly say, without fear of rebuke or reprisal, that I can see a clear line between what I did and its results, that what I made with my hands, or sold with my skills of persuasion, was to a person who actually wanted what I had to offer. Real goods and services. Real results on the bottomline. I’ve seen literally millions of dollars pass through my hands over the past few years alone. People ate everyday because of me, which included having the wherewithall and giving a damn enough to be sure that no one died of E-Coli or other bacterial infections like the one gripping most of the Eastern seaboard right now. Five will get you ten that the majority of the hands on workers in that upstate New York food processing plant will have Hispanic sounding names. Wanna burger?
Which brings us to the big point-WHY did the Working Class in America die such a slow, inglorious and undignified death? How did it happen? Who brought it about?
The answer to that question, dear reader, is closer than you think. You only need to take a look in the mirror.
We, collectively, killed the Working Class. Because it’s considered “low” work, to be relegated to the Niggers and Spics. Poor White Trash, too, although they’re in an odd place, bein White but not being accepted because they have all the other markers of being “less than”. The reason why the trades and other hands-on work is so derided, neglected and ignored in America, is because no one wants to do that work if they can help it. To do so marks you as less than, a loser. So this is why we were only too happy to shuffle off our manufacturing and import Hispanic folks. They work for cheap and keep to themselves-away from us. It’s a win-win for errbody.
That is, until the bottom finally dropped outta the system, which we all saw earlier this year, with the literal death of General Motors-and with it, the final nail in the coffin was driven into the American Working Class, the Blue Collar salt of the earth. Toyota is now the Number One carmaker in the States, possibly the world. Chrysler again is on lifesupport, and Ford is hanging on by a thread. The Big Three are all but extinct. In just about a century.
And don’t even get me started on the Unions. They’re all but dead too, today’s unions are made up largely of pencil pushers and the heads of the Blue Collar ones, what’s left of em, are Ivy League college grads, who studied the Labor Movement. What a joke!
The idea that errbody could get a collee degree and work while sitting at a desk was even more ridiculous than other ideas to come down the pike for reasons that should by now be painfully obvious to everyone. And of course, it’s woefully unsustainable, too. The bottomline is no society can exist without people, almost always Men for the most part, willing to do the dirty work. Take a look around-our country is literally crumbling apart-the next time you cross that bridge may be your last. Well, that’s because taking care of bridges and the like ain’t…sexy. So, we get what we pay for. Maybe Don Draper can fix it.
If it sounds like I’m a Sour Grapes Hater, let me disabuse you of any such notions, not just for me, but for most Blue Collar types-we are often too preoccupied with things like, keeping the lights on, to be spending too much time hatin’ on our ostensible betters. The real deal is, that it has always been said “betters” who’ve always hated on US. They have the time, motive and means, to do so. Don’t believe me?-then I invite you to take a whirlwind tour of the HBDsphere. There, you will find countless discussion of how “NAMs” are ruining our country in countless ways. Of course, NONE of these jokers ever, talks about those who really were responsible for the fucked up situation we’re in right now. No, that would be too much like right.
Earlier, I mentioned a scene out of The Wire where D’Angelo Barksdale explains to his crew the rules of Chess. For the most part, Pawns are fucked, but, every once in awhile, one can make it down to the other side of the board and become a King. It’s an interesting metaphor about the story that is America, where anyone can come here and become a Horatio Alger. Of course, for anyone of African ancestry, a big huge asterisk had to be tacked on to said story, but who’s counting?
Anyway, the point he was making, and which I wholeheartedly agree, is that today, there are increasingly fewer avenues through which an Horatio Alger can even happen. In fact, we consider such a person today a Don Trump or a Dubya-people who were already born on third base but thinks they hit a triple. Name me a true rags to riches story in 2009 and I’ll instantly respond with names like 50 Cent or Jay-Z, because that’s perhaps the only few remaining avenues left for most such people to truly “make it”. Anything else and the people involved had a huge leg up.
Final point. We’ve heard a lot about the Mancession-but that’s only one part of the story. Like Simon said, we do have a surplus of people-but he only told a part of he story, too. The real deal is, that we have a surplus of MALE PEOPLE. And not just “NAMs” either, not even just of Poor White Trash Males-if you’re reading this and you’re a White Male and PWT, it means it’s very likely, that your number could be called, too. Men are living longer, in a time of fewer wars, occupational deaths and the like. And with the Death of the Working Class, it also means more Men having fewer things to do, mainly uh, work. Simply put, we don’t need as many Males as we have presently. And how to deal with this remains to be seen-although if the Mancession is any indication, there won’t be any attention paid to this, much less any meaningful solutions.
So, here’s how The O sees it all goin’ down:
The economy is in free fall, and will not be coming back. Entire sectors of the economy are dead. The economy, such as it is, will continue to shrink, with a kind of cannibalism among the White Collar Class continuing apace. “Careers” won’t even be 5 years long anymore-try more for 2, maybe 3, before people see the handwriting on the wall and jump ship, hoping that the next gig will give a sense of “security”. For a select few, and I mean a few, they’ll be right. For errbody else in that cohort, they’ll be nothing more than a cog in the wheel, and as soon as its time to cut expenses, they’ll be out the door post haste.
It is difficult to see any “green shoots” here. For the few who are truly creative, innovative and daring risk takers, they’ll be able to survive the bloodletting. For everyone else, God bless their souls.
For me, I’m no stranger to hard work or hard times; I WILL survive. And in a sordid, sadistic way, am enjoying the show. I can think of no better comeuppance to the powers that be.
Please pass the popcorn?
The Obsidian
