The battle won, victory is sweet.

Dear George,

Wails and lamentations fill the land over the demise of America’s middle class. Teeth are gnashed and garments rent as pundits and commentators take note of its decline, which simply confirms that, when you get down to it, most pundits and commentators are dumb fucks

What is happening to the middle class is exactly what should be happening to them. The truth is that a healthy middle class poses a potential threat to the well-ordered state. Just look at history (well, in your case, have someone explain it to you). Anytime there has been a period of social unrest, you find an aroused middle class at the barricades.

The Civil War never would have happened had not middle class abolitionists raised so much hell about slavery. The Progressive movement at the close of the nineteenth century was a middle class conspiracy, and look at all it did: child labor laws, the breaking up of the monopolies and trusts, public ownership of utilities and the end of the spoils system that had served America so well. Then came Great Depression I and, with it, the fetters of the New Deal that played havoc with the bottom line.

Finally, we had the nightmare of the Sixties. And, where did the flower children, with their unbridled sex and their toxic drugs, come from? They were the coddled brats of the middle class, raised on too much television and too much Dr. Spock.

From the moment Ronnie was anointed, a decision was made: defang the middle class! It was simply too dangerous to be tolerated.

Any new movement must climb a learning curve before it becomes truly effective. The destruction of the middle class was no different. There were peaks and valleys. A major victory was the crushing of the unions. (Actually, the unions committed suicide when they failed to call a general strike when Ronnie fired the air traffic controllers.) On the other hand, a major setback was the antinuclear movement that sprang up in the early eighties, goaded on by such television shows as “The Day After” that graphically portrayed the effects of a nuclear holocaust. (Believe me, in the environment of today’s corporate media, such a show would never see the light of day.)

However, it wasn’t until the Clinton administration that the dismantling of the middle class really took off. And the architect of the dismemberment was none other than that Sultan of Stodginess, Alan Greenspan. Al knew that the quickest way to weaken the middle class was cheap money. As one writer pointed out, “Cheap money is the rich man’s method of social engineering; swift and lethal.”

Thus did we enter the age of asset bubbles, housing bubbles and a profusion of readily available credit. It was the credit that did it. Plastic allowed the middle class to maintain the illusion of prosperity, even as its income was either flattening or in decline. It plunged them into an orgy of consumerism in which they jetted down to Mexico for the holidays, brought $400 razor sets and replaced the family sedan with a gas-sucking SUV. The flower children of the sixties morphed into the “gotta-have” children of the nineties.

Now, it is all collapsing and the middle class, who in the past would have rallied the country to demand relief and reform, finds its soul atrophied by too much consumption and too many distractions. With their minds numbed by multiple hours watching “reality” TV shows, such as CNN, they are unable to respond to the financial disaster that is breaking over them.

Your kleptrocracy has won its final victory. No more will a pain-in-the-ass middle class rise up to thwart its multiple schemes. The class is too pacified and too benumbed to pose any sort of threat. As America’s kleptocrat-in-chief, the Treasury is now yours to do with as you please.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones