Someone Look behind the Sofa and See if You Can Find My Lost America

The country I grew up in has gone missing and I’m not all that sure where to look. Let me try to define it. Our founders called it an experiment, but it seemed more real to me than that as a young man.

But I’m an old man now and old men tend to look backward rather than forward

I remember the last truly altruistic event in our post WWII history. That was the Marshall Plan, the first (and last) time a conquering nation would foot the bill to rebuild what it had destroyed. I wonder if one man in a hundred could tell you today what it was or who it helped.

We were different then. My dad set aside his landscape business to work at Douglas Aircraft, building DC-3 interiors. Young men went to Europe for the second time in twenty years to save what had been crafted as a free world. My mother saved bacon-fat for munitions and everyone tended a Victory Garden. When our soldiers came home the government sent them to college for free and all we wanted was to drop the weapons, get a job, raise a family and get on with life.

Who could know that the threat to our Republic had only just begun?

I was twenty years old in 1955 and the future seemed to offer every possible advantage. There were a mere two billion people in the world and America had the last industrial base untouched by war. What could possibly go wrong?

What began to go wrong occurred so slowly that it was like watching kids grow up. No change day-to-day, then suddenly the kids were adults. It began with small government lies and then not so much lies as a tad less truth and then a whole lot less truth in a rush. Kids are like that, which is why they need discipline and, like Auntie Mame said, “life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

While we Americans were distracted by the luxuries of the ’59 Cadillac, color television and putting a down-payment on a new house, our government was laying the plans for ‘organizing’ a world order that put profit just a step or two ahead of ethics. After all, with a world in tatters, someone had to pay attention to the design of the fabric.

Colonial empires were out, but globalization was in

Yeah, language does matter. If you can produce a car, a toaster, a Caterpillar tractor or a pair of sneakers for ten-cents on the dollar in a far Eastern country, why the hell not? And, going just a tad further on that premise, if those countries lean toward communism because capitalism is so damaging, we have plenty of left-over bombs and napalm and jet aircraft to adjust their thinking on those subjects. It’s all about dominoes. You remember the domino theory?

And here’s the interesting thing

Even though we weren’t winning those wars against the evils of communism, they opened the door to an entirely new kind of diplomacy---and, by god, they were profitable. Eisenhower’s military-industrial-complex guys were hip-deep into something that would soon absorb 52% of our national budget and the profits of endless war beat the shit out of toasters and tractors. Not only that, but an international state of possible wars were more profitable than the actual thing. Saudi and Israel alone kept the guns-instead-of-butter machinery greased.

Bye, bye middle class

Hook all that up with breakup of American unions and the globalization of products we once manufactured here at home and you can easily see why our middle class disappeared. If you hadn’t noticed, it popped up again in China of all places. All the thanks we got for that is China’s support of Russia in Ukraine. Go figure.

So now, in the interest of ‘following the money,’ let’s see what we have wrought

Remember, the America I lost track of may possibly be behind the couch, with all that dog-hair, loose change and a key or two that no one knows fits where.

But Wall Street and the banks fell in love with war, as well as the promise of war and Nike running shoes produced at ten-cents on the dollar. And Wall Street is a force to be dealt with.

Pause a moment to realize that all those easy profits created a class of billionaires, world wide. Just as we’d become accustomed to a class of millionaires, these new dudes multiplied that by a thousand. And, of course, those billionaires need a place to invest their billions, so they won’t actually have to work for a living.

And America happened to have the most stable (what a laugh) currency on the planet, so all that dough migrated here automatically, like migrating birds on a wire.

Ergo, our best-dressed representatives of democratic government in Washington proved themselves up to the task of keeping that money flowing—much of it into their own pockets

Your and my Democrat and Republican Senators and Representatives had their heads busily nosing about deep in the troughs of payola for the past forty years—and probably more—at least back to Reagan. Marvel of marvels, America is one of the only nations in the world that, by law, allow no greed or corruption. They agreed to allow lobbyists and Political Action Committees, to channel funds directly into their unusually deep pockets.

It's been that way for a long time. So when Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk need something done (usually some irritating little union matter or a startingly large government contract), they know who will pick up the phone when they call.

So, if one peeks behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz, one might actually find the America I have lost track of (and, yes, I know I shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition)

Maybe it’s not actually behind the couch at all, but at least I got to vacuum and tidy up a bit back there. What was it Franklin said, when asked by a woman what kind of government he had given us?

“A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”