Friday, May 8, 2009

There are no classes in our classless society except those we ignore.

It’s a real gas pretending to be what we aren’t while denying what we are.

It is a privilege to live in a classless society in which class divisions grow by the day. Because, how can we have class divisions in America when we’re all middle class? As Scott Tucker puts it, “Like a magical incantation, the phrase ‘middle class’ served to submerge the general public in a warm bath of classless solidarity.”

Since we are all middle class, no child goes to bed hungry; we have no homeless sleeping in the doorways of our shuttered stores. No parent frets over a fever racked child because they are without health insurance. No family has a kitchen drawer full of maxed-out credit cards because they are desperately trying to keep up the appearance of a comfortable middle class lifestyle as their standard of living slowly sinks with the setting sun.

In our classless utopia, there is no racism. We are a land of equal opportunity for all who are well heeled and well connected. Endless prosperity is ours even though our deserted factories rust and decay. But, who cares as long as we can continue to charge cheap imports made in the sweat shop of countries that are torn by class divisions.

And overseeing our classless dreamworld is our oligarchs, snug in Kafka’s castle hidden in the mist atop its mountain.

There is one exception to this classless world of ours. Our oligarchs live in fear of class consciousness but do all they can to fan the flames of class resentment. The more poor whites look down of poor blacks and poor Mexicans, the less the chance that the poor will, some day, realize that they’re all in the same boat and become pissed off enough to march up the mountain towards the castle with torches blazing. This resentment is especially important as more and more of the middle class join the ranks of the poor.

Class resentment paralyzes, which is why the traditional wedge issues like gay marriage and illegal immigration are such powerful weapons. Our oligarchs want America to remain a corporate state. As Tucker says, “There is a world of difference between class resentment and class consciousness. Politically, this is indeed one of the sharpest dividing lines between fascism and socialism.”

The American public has been properly conditioned to view socialism with such abhorrence that they will rush to embrace fascism if given the choice, which, of course, they never will since that would be too democratic and be too reminiscent of a classless society, which we are even if we aren’t.

--Belacqua Jones

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