Book Review: Rendezvous with Oblivion by Thomas Frank

Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society is a collection of essays from 2011 to the present that provides a travelogue of the downward journey of the US. Not that it starts at the top of the hill, because for the bulk of the population that’s been forbidden territory for several decades—only the nobility gets to occupy the castles.

That’s sort of the metaphor used in title of the first set of essays, “Many Vibrant Mansions,” and the subject of the second piece, “The Architecture of Inequality.” Describing his trek through the world of the McMansion, he observes they are “houses that seemed to have been designed by Stanford White after a debilitating brain injury.”

Those unfamiliar with Mr. Frank’s work should consider reading his earlier books The Wrecking Crew and Listen, Liberal! before joining him on this trip. The former answers the question many who only became politically involved during the 2016 election keep asking, which is “What are the Republicans doing?” The latter explains that it isn’t just the Republicans, and why.

In politics, of course, the scam and the fib are as old as the earth itself. Even so, the past decade has been a time of extraordinary innovation in the field…Millions of Americans came to believe that everything was political and that therefore everything was faked; that everyone was a false accuser so why not accuse people falsely; than any complaint or objection could ultimately be confounded by some clever meme; that they or their TV heroes had discovered the made-up argument by which they could drown out that still small voice of reality.

So, the first part describes how we came to accept escalating inequality, encouraged by politicians on both sides of the aisle who lied and obfuscated to ensure we stayed convinced there was really nothing wrong. That if the benefits of the tax cuts and the trade deals and the bank deregulation somehow missed us…well, it was our fault for not working hard enough, or for making bad choices, or not getting the proper education. Supported by news media and TV and movies that bombarded us with the message that the billionaires were the above-mentioned heroes we must needs struggle to emulate.

Meanwhile, the first African-American president, who promised us hope and change, saved the banks and the Wall Streeters while millions of the middle-class lost their homes and/or their retirement funds.

The one percent got the of both [“a brief experience with deficit spending” then President Obama’s “famous turn to austerity”]: not only were they bailed out, but the also chalked up some of their best years ever under Barack Obama, taking home 95 percent of the nation’s income growth during the recovery.

And speaking of not getting the proper education, that’s the topic of Part 2: “Too Smart to Fail.” This section covers the encroachment of neoliberalism on campus, which has led to a decrease in the number of tenured professors and an increase in the number of adjuncts most of whom can’t live on what they’re paid and don’t know from one week to the next if they’ll even have a job. In fact, a writer I know who works as an adjunct had a class he was counting on to pay his living expenses cancelled four days before it was scheduled to start, with no compensation.

And then there is soaring tuition, which more and more goes to pay inflated salaries for legions of unnecessary administrators while services (and those tenured professors) are cut back. Four-year college graduates are re-entering the world carrying a massive load of debt, which is not just stressful but a major drain on the economy both because wages and salaries have stagnated or actually declined in the last four decades and because money that goes into the vaults of lenders isn’t being spent in the economy.

[E]very democratic movement from the Civil War to the 1960s aimed to bring higher ed to an ever widening circle, to make it more affordable. Ours is the generation that stood by gawking while a handful of parasites and billionaires smashed it for their own benefit.

Part 3, “The Poverty of Centrism,” traces the path by which, beginning in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and continued unabated by those administrations that followed him, the rich got filthy rich and the 90% were tricked into believing keeping them that way was good for us. 

To a Washington notable of the pre-Trump era, a team of rivals was a glorious thing: it meant that elections had virtually no consequences for members of the consensus. No one was sentenced to political exile because he or she was on the wrong side; the presidency changed hands, but all the players still got a seat at the table.

The only ones left out of this warm bipartisan circle of friendship were the voters, who woke up one fine day to discover what they thought they’d rejected wasn’t rejected in the least.

In this section, Mr. Frank also talks about the role the news media have played in enabling this mess. I don’t share his admiration for the Washington Post, but I have to wonder if his informal analysis of the way they undermined Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primaries wasn’t a bit painful. Or even disillusioning. He also seems unwilling to admit the collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign and the news media to achieve that goal; he avoids referring to the email leaks that revealed just that, and sadly, he seems to at least partly believe the so-far unsupported insistence on “Russian influence.”

Even so, his criticism of the Democrats was apparently sufficient to get him blackballed by those major news media he tries hard not to accuse of bias.

The final section, “The Explosion” addresses the why of the election of Donald Trump and why it was the direct result of the Democrat Party’s refusal to accept that they could no longer take their traditional working-class and minority base for granted. Which brings us to this year.

Trump succeeded by pretending to be the heir of populists past, acting the role of a rough-hewn reformer who detested the powerful and cared about working-class people. Now it is the turn of Democrats to take it back from him. They may have to fire their consultants.

As I said earlier, I wouldn’t recommend this as an introduction to Thomas Frank’s work. The broad scope of the subject matter is easier to take in context if one has a background in what he’s written at length. For those familiar with that body of writing, these essays are sharp-tongued snippets of the history of the last seven years, with reference to those that preceded them. They do require personal honesty, in that we who allowed this mess to come as far as it has must take the responsibility for not paying attention and staying informed.

Well done, Mr. Frank. May we please have some more?

Book Review: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

If you’re part of the 1%, you’ll hate this book. If, on the other hand, you’re wondering how it is that the rich are getting richer while the middle class gets poorer, this is the place to start.

The Shock Doctrine is an historical review of how the brand of no-holds-barred free-market capitalism advocated by economist Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, with the able assistance of the CIA, the IMF and the World Bank, have systematically destroyed budding democracies worldwide, brutally murdering and torturing those who would challenge them, in the name of profit.

“Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms.” (Page 11)

From the 1950s, when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected president of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 on false pretenses, the steady erosion of democracy both in the US and worldwide has brought us to the present situation where 1% of the world’s population controls half of its wealth. To aid in this imperialist campaign, the CIA has trained hundreds of well-paid “revolutionaries” in the methods of torture the world got a firsthand look at with the exposure of Abu Ghraib. The official story was this was a case of over-zealousness. It wasn’t. It’s standard procedure. It’s happening right now at Guantanamo and likely in any number of “black sites” in distant and not so distant places.

As we speak, a group of billionaires, including Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and the Waltons, are spending millions to destroy free public education. The GOP and neoliberal Democrats have been trying to privatize Social Security for decades. This isn’t just ideology. It’s a well-planned agenda for eliminating all government-supported programs.

“The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state – in effect, to privatize the government.” (Page 15)

That agenda is moving forward using “… The policy Trinity – the elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending…” (Page 18)

With each incursion into eliminating the possibility that people who have suffered under one form of colonialism or another for centuries will manage to take ownership of their own countries, the Friedmanites who ousted the Keynesians responsible for the New Deal and the development of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have replaced popularly elected governments with well-financed thugs willing to sell their countries’ assets to the highest bidder. If a few thousand peasants die or are murdered in the process, that’s of no concern to anyone involved. As long as the corporate shills follow the rules, they can live in sybaritic luxury as long as there are wire transfers and suitcases full of cash to be had.

“First, governments must remove all rules and regulations standing in the way of the accumulation of profits. Second, they should sell off any assets they own the corporations could be running at a profit. And third, they should dramatically cut back funding of social programs…. Taxes when they must exist, should be low, and rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate. Corporation should be free to sell their products anywhere in the world, and government should make no effort to protect local industries or local ownership. All prices, including the price of labor, should be determined by the market. There should be no minimum wage. For privatization, Friedman offered up healthcare, the post office, education, retirement pensions, even national parks.” (Page 69)

This book came highly recommended by several people, and if the current disaster that US democracy is becoming matters, it’s essential one read this book to understand the mindset of those seeking to destroy it. Where the neoliberal agenda has been imposed, the only ones to benefit are the corporations, the wealthy, and the thugs they recruit to carry out their plans. Most frightening, much of the logistical functions of the US military have been handed over to private corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, which are training enough mercenaries to create private armies with the full cooperation of Congress and, apparently, the judicial and executive branches of the US government.

I never studied economics, and while I’ve broadened my knowledge base in that area a fair amount recently, I still appreciate when an author can present important and necessary information in a way that’s accessible to the amateur. Ms. Klein does that very well, and having finished her book, I can only hope it’s not too late to save ourselves from the plutocrats who want to turn the world into a corporate oligarchy.