INTRODUCTION

For Readers With Intellectual Pizzazz

As the author sees it, I have grown up in two worlds, a full-fledged citizen of neither, a stranger in both. The clash is primarily one of culture, listening to Johnny Cash or Sarah Brightman, scoffing up Miller Light or Milwaukee Beer or sipping on Ketel One or 18 year-old Glenfiddich, ordering the $9.95 blue-ribbon special at the local diner or choosing the fixed price menu (with wine, tax and tip) at Le Bernardin or Daniel- per couple which is equivalent to the annual earnings of one third the world’s inhabitants.   

I have come to know the world outside of heaven and hell, in an upper-class bubble in Winnetka (IL) and Manhasset (NY), as I once lived in a working-class bubble in some tiny town on which is known for nothing, except possibly for its beach.  This is where the ocean waves rose 25 or 30 feet high and met the bay in September, and where rats and weeds out numbered people and trees. It was a teeming peninsula, sunny and somewhat stormy, that always seemed about to slip into the ocean. Of course, it would have been nice to have grown up “prosperous,” “affluent,” or just “plain rich,” but that would have been vaguely undemocratic; moreover, I would have not known, cared, nor understood what afflicts most Americans today, nor how it feels to have a boss or big business devour your family when you’re a child.

Always in exile in Winnetka, I returned after 32 years to the place where I grew up as a child, when I came back to New York in 1999, just in advance of the bulldozers. The journey to my old neighborhood, Arverne, was not easy.  It was always a small town, trapped by time and going no where, but it had a collective conscious, a center to provide benchmarks and values—a place where youthful dreams could be born and old-timers with modest means could spend their winter years on the beach or by the water front.  The homes were now tied and bordered up, the trees were crooked and lifeless, and the streets were beaten and broken. P.S. 42, my alma mata, was partially in ruins – five floors high and still towering over a sea of surrounding small and shanty-looking bungalows.

In the lost world of the 1940s and 1950s, growing up in a small working-class town had dignity; it was an age of innocence when the future seemed bright. What happened to that lost world, my class of 58, with names I have forgotten, old friends and old memories.  Alas, I remember my hero Jackie Robinson – stealing bases, fighting the odds, and paving the way for Martin Luther King and thousands of black athletes. Now, my hero is Johnny Cash – singing about the common man’s plight, about being alone on the road, waking up on a Sunday morning, hung over with unarticulated thoughts and unexpressed emotions, about dead-end relationships, broken lives, lost memories, about getting older but not necessarily smarter.

Perhaps I’ve seen too many leaves fall from the trees, or I’m a little too angry because of the scars of class warfare, which started for me when I was about six years old and made my first hour-long drive to K-Mart to shop with my mother for lower prices and start school.  Maybe I’m all mixed up – slowly drifting from reality –what the Polish poet, Czelaw Milosz, another one of my heroes, calls “moving away from the fairgrounds of the world.” Ah, age has a way of creeping up on you - sometimes clouding your thoughts and stealing your mind; or, sometimes making you aware of the thicket of history. Here I would like to think of Cicero, the ancient Roman orator was right: “old age especially an honored old age, has such great authority that it is of more value than all the pleasures of youth.”

Today, we live in a tragic world where, as the Greeks knew, there can be no easy answers. We are surrounded by poverty and human misery, by inequality and injustice, by greed and materialism. The genre of tragedy points to centuries of human folly and suffering which defy rational thought and religious philosophy. By historical accident and geography, Americans have been spared much of the world’s problems and poverty, and there are fanciful phrases describing our land as the “new Athens” and “new Rome.” But these words mask our approaching decline, the dark hole in which we find ourselves, slipping downward as a nation and people. Like all great civilizations that have declined before us, we are a nation that needs to reexamine its values and social and economic institutions. 

For all the citizens of the world, class reaches back to antiquity and stretches across the globe. It is a defining element throughout history, shaping political, economic, and social attitudes and behavior. Class is the foundation of understanding human thought and the human condition. The choices are vividly portrayed in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: whether you are willing to steal a loaf of bread or use the law to put someone in prison for trying to survive  whether you are the Jean Valjean’s of the world, one of billions who are hungry, poor and/or desperate—or Inspector Javier, just another ordinary person following the orders of the rich and powerful. For myself, class serves as the great divide: People like Jean Valjean (lower- and working-class people), Inspector Javier (middleclass bureaucrats) and those who the Javiers work for (the rich and powerful).

Class is a metaphor for exploitation. Today’s workers in some respect are indistinguishable from yesterday’s sweatshop workers, the medieval serfs who tilled the soil, or the Greek and Roman slaves. They are the same people that fight all the wars from time memorial. They are the world’s workforce, the common people, the unknown names that built our railroads, bridges, and tunnels, that built the great churches and castles for Charlemagne, Peter the Great, and King Arthur, that built the Acropolis and Coliseum, and before them pushed the stones uphill to built the Pyramids.  Sadly, we do not know one of them by name, despite they number in the hundreds of millions. They are the faceless people of the earth who for centuries have survived through seat and toil. Alexander Hamilton labeled them the herd. Marx called them the proletariat. Eugene Debs organized them as union workers. Ben Wattenberg, more recently, referred to them as the silent majority. I call them the “massline” and/or “multitude.” 

Class on a worldwide bases invokes the transformation of the landscape into unnatural categories of inequality at the expense of fairness, tolerance, and morality—an assembly of peasants and workers in farms and factories trying to put food on the table.  Class in America has come to mean a setting aside of the political and social order in ruthless pursuit of profit, a rigged economic system based on money and subsequent privilege and power, an exploited and dislocated mass population, and a random disorder of moral priorities.  To be sure, this nation needs to be healed, and to be healed it needs first to find its political center.

Everything is mighty fine so long as we don’t have to think about or deal with poverty and human misery around us, or why the vast majority of U.S. high school students cannot locate Laos, Rwanda, or even Iraq and Afghanistan on a map, or why U.S. workers cannot compete on a global basis, or why the world is increasingly antiAmerican. It’s a wonderful world in a rich man’s world. Everything is “AOk” so long as dad can get you into Harvard or Yale, that is if you are a member of the privileged and powerful club. It does not hit home that the middle class is struggling and shrinking, not if you drive around in CL 600 coupe Mercedes (cost $125,000) or carry around a Fendi handbag (cost $5000). 

It’s “peachy keen” if your mom or dad manipulate markets and prices in business posts and live the life in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Everything is “sunny” and “rosey” in the wonderful world of Ozzie and Harriet and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, the latter which my contemporaries grew up on. Its great to live in Kansas and recall July 26 is “Turnip Day” and travel on the yellowbrick road, searching for brains, heart, and courage. It’s a little like a Billy Graham or Pat Robinson Sunday sermon - talking about the mind, body, and spirit. On a secular basis, its a little like Rag Time, people coming to America with hopes and dreams and clawing their way from bottom to the top. Perhaps the best antidote is escape: being old and overweight and cruising the Mediterranean Sea on a luxury liner, eating and drinking to your heart’s content - or being rich and spoiled and sunning on the Hampton Beach or French Rivera - forgetting the world we are leaving our children and their children.  No wonder why so many people feel indifferent to the plight of so many other people within our borders and across the oceans.

I rather be less sharp elboed and more hopeful, and think about the sensual pleasures of youth—and not that Ciereo was assassinated at 63 (and I’m 65 years). I rather not think that Class Counts or some other book about the struggles of the working and middle class. I rather believe in a fictionalized world: War is over, there was no 911, and there is no person in charge with a questionable IQ who can wreck the world. I rather think of Mozart and Michelangelo and thank Gandhi, King, and Pope John Paul II for tying to make a better world. I rather believe that we are a community of people who can take care of one another, especially the less fortunate, and we can take political action to resolve our economic and social problems. I prefer to believe that through education great minds and hearts are nurtured, the world we live in can change for the better, and the soul can be reborn.

As in life, the meaning you find in the books you read depends on the author’s social and political lens and whether he writes as an advocate (subjective) or scholar (supposedly objective).  Here I profess to be more concerned about people than property which makes me somewhere left of center on social and political issues. My writing is fairly charged and is not meant to be neutral, nor taste or look like vanilla ice cream.  But readers must understand that no one lives with a calculator in his hand or a camera strapped to his head for research purposes.  My writing is also abrasive and critical of people, pundits and politicians who fabricate different statistics and sound bites, and who are governed by a different sense of truth, than mine.  Just how abrasive or critical the reader judges my writing will depend on his own experiences and echoes of time, for they do influence the reader’s social and political lens and judgment.

Although I believe my book is stuffed to the brim with facts and figures, my writing is slanted and breaks scholarly conventions.  Thus, I am well aware of the potential for criticism from my academic colleagues, and from people who fall right of center and are intent on preserving their prosperity—or the social, economic, and political world we live in.  However, my aim is to appeal to a larger audience: What was once called the common people or plain people, and now called the working and middleclass people.

The secret story revealed in this book is that government plays a big role in America’s class structure and whether the American dream runs on or off track.  The story involves more than just tax rates, minimum wages and medicaid benefits, but which political party is in power—which philosophy or doctrine controls human services and safety nets for people- whether the party supports and protects labor or business, and what kind of policies and regulations govern finance, technology, and globalization.  We would like to think that we are alive and well and we have it all under control, and the stuff we overlook or cannot control doesn’t matter.  But it does matter!  It’s just that we don’t realize it or don’t want to face up to it.  We would like to think there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans, between liberal and conservative thought.  There is a difference, and it is bigger than most of us think.  What we need is a government that cares more about people than property, more about rising inequality and the shrinking middle class than denying it or arguing that what is good for the rich is good for the country. 

The meaning you find in this book also depends on where the author chooses to start and stop, and what is omitted from the passages.  This story has a welldefined beginning, but a blurry ending because it is still evolving as the coming decades unfold.  I start the message with the Greeks and Romans, then journey to the New World with the American spirit, and the founding of a small number of outposts for European countries that 400 years later has become the richest and most powerful nation. This is the story of America: Class Counts and it has always counted; it counts more today than yesterday, and gaps are growing between the rich (top 10%) and super rich (top 1%) and the rest of us (bottom 90%). The principles of democracy, the very foundation of America, is being threatened by increasing inequality and a diminishing middle class. Moreover, education is no longer the great equalizer, as it used to be. We have reached the point, the economic divide, where education cannot compensate nor overcome economic inequality.

As the most affluent society on the face of the map, we have reached the zenith of our military and economic power. All roads now lead to Washington D.C. and New York City. When we hiccup, the rest of the world hears and feels it. America has been exceptionally fortunate in the past centuries, but the years ahead will be more difficult. Under the guise of protecting or spreading democracy, we have become the most militaristic nation in history (a hard pill for some Americans to swallow). Might makes right in the world of realpolitik, but it inspires world opinion to resent and even despise Americans. Our 2005 military budget was $460 billion (not counting the war in Iraq and Afghanistan) and represented 50 percent of the world’s weaponry spending. These costs are unsustainable and result in curtailed spending for real social and human needs.

As we barrel ahead with unaccounted military spending we are being threatened by: hyper economic competion from Asianrim countries and resource nationalism and energy intimidation from Russia, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries; U.S. corporate downsizing, layoffs, and outsourcing of jobs; consumer and government overspending, and huge budget and trade deficits. Adding to our problems, giant corporations dominate the American political and economic landscape and supersede the interests of the people. Society is being divided into separate estates, and catch phrases harshly sortpeople into “winners” and “losers,” suggesting a struggling and shrinking middle class. A growing gap between the rich and the rest of Americans has been fostered by a newly imposed tax system designed so that the children’s children of super millionaires (the top ½ to 1% of the population) have the chance to become billionaires while the masses shoulder the monetary burden. As we squeeze the average American household (earning approximately $46,000 in 2005), we are transforming American democracy into a financial oligarchy.

The American people are in denial, swayed more by cultural warfare and bluered voting patterns than economic issues, and whether our President was reborn and found God or is he right or wrong when he calls freedom “a gift from the Almighty.”  We are at the crossroads of American society and, as we look at the facts, there is only one conclusion. All directions point to difficult and bumpy roads ahead. There is no rule, no formula for predicting the level and rate of decline. An American trait is the yearning for a new President as the Moses to lead the people out of troubled waters and through turbulent times, to find the way toward the rising sun. But America has had its day in the sun. it reached its belle epoch, what the French called it, during the Cold War period (when Europe and Asia were in shambles). Since post 911, however, it has witnessed the emergence of new economic powers, China and India, and oilrich nations, all challenging U.S. power.

Bogged down by disagreement with our European allies and in Iraq, and consumed by antiterrorist measures, America doesn’t even have a viable climate control and energy policy which in the long run will have more influence on the economy than terrorism. Unquestionably, we are faced with a host of dilemmas and choices, and as we face the future there seems little chance to escape an inevitable decline in military and economic power and prestige. As the twentyfirst century marches on, we must accept the fact there will most likely be a redistribution of wealth on a worldwide basis—from the U.S. to other industrialized and developing countries.