There’s Always a Little More Toothpaste in the Tube
That’s a quote from the late Bill Bryson that resonates on so many levels today. Bill was a much-loved American humorist and travel-writer who wrote with a great feel for British trains and the places they went, many of them on time.
But the toothpaste thing works on so many different levels, from Trump’s indictment to climate change and what the hell is the writer’s strike all about. I’m a little ambiguous about how much paste is left in the environmental crisis, but the rest of life is a piece of cake as long as you don’t kill anyone or frighten the horses.
The American Congress has taught us a thing or two about toothpaste
Those crafty little buggers in Washington keep trying to change the flavor and every election cycle promises us whiter teeth and a smother smile. But it’s mouthwash all the same and we’ve come to expect that. Shame on them, but shame on us as well.
We seldom send a young person to represent us and, when we do, they take a look at the steep hill to leadership, get told to hush as if they were children and wonder if it’s all worth it. The average age of a member of the House is 57 and the Senate 64, with chairmen of both houses in their 70s and 80s. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) was 30 when first elected to the House. Is it any wonder she took a look at the seniority system for advancement and very nearly decided not to run in her last election?
America can’t afford to shut their young people out of politics.
For social media we are the toothpaste and they are the tube
Ever since America stopped actually manufacturing stuff, we have become a consumer society, which is pretty easy to explain. 1) The super-rich own the stores and become super-richer by the year because what they sell is made with (comparative) slave-labor from China or other 3rd world Asian countries. 2) What was once the American middle class (you and me) are now consumers, toothpaste in the tubes of the super-rich shopkeepers—folks like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Nike. 3) When the powers that be trashed our unions and sent America’s manufacturing off to the lowest bidder, capitalism changed as well.
Something called Surveillance Capitalism arrived in America, defined as a concept in political economics which ‘denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations.’
You and I, along with our parents and children have become ‘a concept in political economics.’ How droll.
How charmingly comical for the engine of our economic power to be quietly slipped out from under the hood—capitalism with a surveillance twist. So that’s what Google, Facebook, Instagram and all the other little nooks and crannies of social connection have been up to. Rosie the Riveter, hero of World War Two American manufacturing, is being surveilled.
And we actually worry if Joe Biden or Donald Trump are going to win in 2024. They are simply the tubes in which we are the toothpaste. Who gives a shit?
Well, we better begin to give a shit, and quickly, or it’s all over for the American Dream
There was a time, not all that long ago, when America ran like a fine-tuned Cadillac. We paid our taxes and showed up to manufacture those Cadillacs, so our country had the money to run itself and our kids could go to college to do better than their parents. A single family wage earner, usually but not always a man, could do all that and still take his kids fishing on weekends.
I kid you not. I lived through those times and was there when everyone knew who Rosie the Riveter was.
The living memory of the average American male hardly begins until he is 18 or 20 and all those hormones have quieted. Then he’s momentarily pissed off, but there’s the job to think about, a new (or newer) car, if his girlfriend or wife is pregnant, why he can’t seem to survive outside his parent’s house and who’ll do his laundry if the whole deal collapses. Biden? Trump? Jesus, man, who cares, I’ve got a life to live.
And who can blame him?
But if you know anything at all about history, there’s a thing called ‘bread and circuses.’ “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt” is a line from Juvenal, a poet during the decline of Rome. Food is the bread and entertainment the circuses, which is dangerously close to what the wealthy give us today while they scrape up our personal likes and dislikes. Free movies, free sports and TV while food costs are subsidized to a minimum. Strawberries in winter. A little more toothpaste in the tube.
And yet it seems not to be working
Conspiracy theories abound, America now has 340 million citizens and 360 million guns, youngsters are shamed to the point of suicide on social media and celebrities live in fear of a ‘me too’ moment. The mentally ill have been turned out into the streets (no money for that), homelessness has grown to the rate where we have found a new word for it. The ‘unhoused’ sounds so much less deathless.
But the octogenarians who proscribe our laws and the Supremes who weigh their legality in black robes never tread the streets where the homeless sprawl. Nor have they ever touched one, much less sat down and heard his or her story. They are not stupid these poor souls without shelter. They know the rich are not paying their way and the law (as Anatole France once noted) “in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
Ah yes, what goes around comes around. He said that in 1894
Makes sense today as well until, of course, the music stops.