The Great Society

I write these words knowing full well that they will not be read, and even if they are read, they will not be believed or else they will not be tolerated by those who feel threatened most by them. These are the people who will have the most to lose by the change in policy of the current status quo of the system. 

Though I've been systematically kept out of the information loops of our Great Society, I would say that as an anthropologist I am equal in intellect and capacity to any professor in any university who has the hubris and conceit to think of herself as superior. I would say that in spite of our disenfranchisement from the American system in any but the most minimal and marginal levels, the perspective I have adopted is as legitimate, and even more valid and realistic, than those being entertained scholastically in the highest think tanks in America.

Nothing I can say or write will matter, or will make any difference. My words will fall on deaf ears. And this fact has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of what I may say or their relevance to anything in reality. Their received denial is purely and indirectly a function of my status identity in my own society, or what I should more correctly say, the complete lack of identity, as a human being, as an anthropologist, as an American, in my own society. 

Status identity in the modern world has taken on complex forms, much more complicated than they were even 30 years ago. Even more, money is the almost exclusive measure of the person. In this, especially in the United States, the spurious and ideological notions of race have largely been allowed to assume an unrealistic importance in the determination of people's status and therefore of their lives and condition in the United States. These complex identities become the political trump cards in elections and in policy making. 

To put it another way, to assure equality in the world, there should be only one question asked in an employment application or in a census survey. Are you an American citizen or not? And if you are not an American citizen, then exactly what is your business here anyway?

I write these words regardless of their negative reception in the world because I have nothing to gain or to lose by them. We have been dispossessed of everything--a job, a home, an income, an identity or a life. This disenfranchisement did not happen over night. It started 30 years ago. It was done deliberately, concertedly, cumulatively, and self-righteously. Now that its affect has had full impact upon the lives of many Americans, there is a resulting need to revise history, to disguise the truth of the victimization that was systematically carried out against the American people by their own government.

I write these words because I know I am not alone. Though my case is perhaps extreme in some ways, it is a shared and common experience of many poorer and increasingly dispossessed white Americans in their own system. I give voice to the feelings and experiences of many, even most white Americans across the United States, though I claim to stand for nobody but myself in the world. Cultural experience is just that--it is cultural, shared, collective, common. It is not just psychologically idiosyncratic as a form of social deviancy, though many in the system would try to label it that way. But culture is also about history, about being and becoming, and being made and making in turn. It is a construction and a contract, one that can be violated by either party.

I write these words because they are a catharsis and because they are a reaffirmation of the only thing we, as poor white Americans, have leftover in this system. This is the freedom and independence to think and act by ourselves, without referring  or answering any arbitrary authorities. Today, in our hyped up multicultural world, the white Americans are the only ethnic group not permitted to form their own solidarity groups, even when every other ethnic group is encouraged to promote there own. Not all poor white Americans are uneducated, prejudiced and haters of nonwhites. We are not all planning white supremacy or dress at night in white robes. On the other hand, there has been a growing sense among a great many white Americans that the system of their own doing is no longer serving their best interests in any sense, and in fact, is systematically serving to hurt their interests in many ways. This is neither an inaccurate nor a biased judgment--in fact it is a realistic assessment of a long term situation that was derived by much experience and silent, voiceless suffering.

I write these words because I know I am not alone in the world. My experience has not been an individually marginal result of my own abnormality, though many would like to make me believe and accept this. It has been the result primarily of my class and racial identity as a white American from a working class background. It determined ultimately that no matter what we did, whether we achieved degrees in higher education, or served our nation in the military, would make any net difference in the outcomes of our life. The only way open to us was to become a Bill Gates look alike. It determined that for our kind, the American dream was dead before many of us were even born. We have been systematically replaced, mostly by foreigners, and now, increasingly, by their offspring.

In fact, the American dream was not dead, but we were lead to believe by our leaders that it was no longer possible for us to achieve in life. The most we could hope for would be a construction job, a factory job, or, worse, a job at MacDonald's. At the same time, larger and larger slices of the American pie were being carved up by our own leaders and their administrative minions behind our backs, to be sold off to fill impossibly deep pockets.

I think the average white American is pretty tired of the racial rhetoric, which at least implicitly blames the whites for everything that is wrong or happened in the world. The fact of the matter is that there is no group, of any color or denomination under the sun, who has not at some time in history been guilty of some atrocity or another. The purpose of history is to forgive but not to forget. It is not the point that we should have to be punished perennially for the misdeeds of our forefathers committed long before we were ever born and over which we had no control. History in an objective sense cannot be served well as a science or a humanity if it cannot grant a blanket pardon to all past deeds in the name of objectivity of worldview.

The fact of the matter is also that white Americans had already paid a very heavy price tag for the sins of the system. Mostly, it was they who fell on the battle fields of the Civil War, and all the wars fought afterward in the name of freedom. 

Watching the O. J. Simpson trial unfold on television, to the tune of several millions of dollars of tax payer's money, there was a clear sense that O. J. Simpson could do no wrong, only because of the color of his skin and the fact that he was wealthy enough as a sports figure and a somewhat fallen culture hero. There was a clear sense, in a way that was obvious to the world, that justice no longer mattered when it was really made into an issue of racial justice. It also disguised, very thinly, a very blatant hatred and even violent antipathy against all whites, but especially against white females.

I read this morning critical skepticism voiced by city authorities themselves over the accuracy of published national census records. I would corroborate this overall lack of reliability and integrity of the numbers and information now being put out by governmental agencies and authorities. At the same time, very detailed and accurate information is being regularly gathered and updated by the same agencies, but this information never gets to the press, but lands up on the desks of a privileged administrative elite whose primary social function is one of maintaining arbitrary control over the social system, and in this regard, in an age where information can be critically decisive, there is much deliberate and I believe, unjust  information control.

What is lost has been the naive sense of trust and confidence by the American people in their own government to serve their best long term interests or to protect or promote these interests. Americans have woken up to the contradictions of their own system, as blatant and obvious as these contradictions are, and they have come to the realization, or should I say disillusionment, that all is not the way it should be with the domestic state of affairs.

The consistent and undeniable experience of Americans has been to witness perennially over the years the deflation of the value of citizenship as the price-tag for citizenship is inflated for the highest bidder, or else given out in blanket amnesty programs to those who implicitly flaunt the significance of citizenship. In other words, what it means to be and become an American now is primarily and mostly an economic value of being able to pay the door fees to the right people. We have put American citizenship up to sale to the highest and lowest bidders. Average Americans have been forced to compete, in almost every sector of the economy, with foreign labor from virtually every part of the world. And anti-discrimination laws that work against white Americans in favor of any minority, regardless of their place of origin, serve invariably to promote the interests of foreigners over those of native-born Americans.

The expectations placed upon white Americans are that they are all by definition wealthy and successful, and if they are not, then it is entirely their own fault. Therefore almost every screen of opportunity, whether through schools or through government supported agencies, have been systematically denied to white Americans, especially lower class white Americans who lack the class connections and old boy networks of their wealthier and established cousins.

They have been forced by circumstances into adopting a mode of marginal productivity, even as marginally productive groups increasingly seize the reigns of resource control at local levels to appropriate resources for themselves and their own kind, especially at the expense of white Americans. Associated with this marginal mode has been a negative status or a stereotyping of such people as by definition genetically prejudiced, ignorant, hateful and jaundiced to the world.

The fact of the matter remains that, statistically speaking, the average white American is neither rich nor prejudiced. They are among the most tolerant and well behaved group in the world, and though they are regularly coerced by circumstances into marginally productive modes and niches, they remain very resilient and independent.

White Americans are waking up to the cold hard facts that not only has their own government, which they support with their taxes, failed consistently to protect and promote their own interests, but this same government is increasingly selling itself, and its people's interests, out to the highest bidders in the global market place, including Hispanic, Chinese, Asian and other interests. They realize that the interests of their posterity are not necessarily being best served by their own government's actions, and these actions, in a collective sense, and especially as these are administratively arbitrary, are being construed as increasingly self-destructive of the American system.

It is, I would say, as a cross-cultural anthropologist, a case of cultural competition for resources, played out in the market place and in government controlled arenas, which include the military, bureaucracy, academia, the media and a few residual sectors. This cultural competition is ethnically disguised in racial rhetoric that provides a smoke screen for the true political intentions and racial prejudices of those who promote and profit from this status quo. But it must be understood, that multiculturalism as an ideology is mostly only spurious in an anthropological sense. Where ever one looks in the world, multiculturalism is marked by radical pluralism and deep irreconciliable cleavages between groups as they compete for resources and opportunities. Invariably radical pluralism, if not rigidly controlled by heavy-handed government, leads to interethnic violence.

To naively bring this kind of rhetoric home and to foist it upon the American people at their own expense is historically speaking to do a grave injustice to the collective well being and interests of the American people. The sad part of this was that from the beginning it was largely an unnecessary state of affairs, unnecessary from almost any point of view. Mexico, for instance, had to date no intrinsic problem of over-population. What it did have was a problem of endemic poverty that was the result of an unjust and corrupt government. As long as American labor markets served as an escape valve for social pressures building within the Mexican system, there was no need for the Mexican government to reform itself to alleviate its own problems of poverty. The American system now faces the prospects of overpopulation, largely by the uncontrolled growth rate of one group alone, which is increasingly stressing and straining social service systems nationwide, but particularly in California, when the country of origin of these people has no intrinsic problem of overpopulation yet. 

The interests of poor blacks and native Americans was never served by bringing in unlimited and uncontrolled foreign labor at any level. Private industry, namely Bill Gates, pressured the US government into lifting quotas on the immigration of a quarter million Asian professsionals who had the immediate training to serve the growing needs of the information technology industry. Now that IT stocks have crashed, a year later, the immediate reasons why this many foreign computer techies, all leading middle class American lifestyles, was never really asked or answered. Why couldn't Americans be trained for the same jobs, whether the Americans are white, black or any color inbetween. In fact, they could be, and they would be equal or superior to their foreign competitors, except that the private industry does not want to invest in the training of these people for these jobs. Foreign governments can train many more people much more cheaply for American industrial interests and needs. But the impact of bringing in a quarter to half a million new computer techies does not stop in the IT world. Everyone of those techies would eventually bring in their families, and thus, what starts as a quarter or a half million new Americans living at a middle-class lifestyle, suddenly becomes from 1 to two million new Americans all demanding their pieces of the American pie. The bottom line is that we are not feeding the worlds poor by these double immigration standards. These people do not come on freighters through Ellis Island. They are flying economy class through LAX and the other International airports, often to be picked up and escorted away at the airport within an hour of their arrival. America does not serve the interests of its domestic minority groups, mainly poor blacks and Native Americans, by bringing in two million more first-generation Asians, mostly Japanese, Taiwanese and Indian, in order primarily to assume immediate middle or upper-middle class status within the American social system l. In other words, such immigration policies are both unnecessary and in the long run harmful to American's interests, especially when the US is now facing prospects of overpopulation as a result of these same misguided and myopic policies.

In other words, the American government and the American people ought to expect a bigger commitment from all industries to the collective interests in the American people that goes beyond cost minimization and profit maximization strategies. It should include retirement plans and security for the bottom as well as the top. At the same time, the American government should not acquiesce to the demands of any powerful private interest group merely to service the immediate needs of those groups at the long term expense and collective interests of the American people. 

For American domestic or foreign policy to align itself so closely with economic interests and fiscal policies of elite private interest groups, many of which are by definition foreign, is to commit these policies rooted in the collective interests and well being of the American people to intrinsic constraints they should not have to bear.

One major lesson of Reagan's tickle-down, deregulation approach is that government cannot take no hand in guiding and constraining the activities of private industry. Industry is not intrinsically responsible to the American people, but is by definition self-serving. This lesson was unnecessarily relearned in the energy deregulation policies of California. If the government fails to regulate and limit industry, in terms of collective security, labor laws, environmental regulations.

No society or nation state on earth can remain strong if it fails to secure its territorial sovereignty or to protect and promote its own national interests as a distinct ethnocultural grouping of humanity. In other words, it is not such a bad thing to be a WASP, and in fact, being WASP is unique and special in the world, in spite of criticism by elitest and authoritarian academics who are mostly self-righteous and self-serving.

What Americans have been waking up to increasingly are the long-term consequences of these naive and short-sighted, but high-minded notions of universal equality. They should not be blamed if they are desiring to put their children in parochial schools or to home school their children, when they see the value and quality of public education systematically undermined and short-changed by these same sets of policies. If white Americans are increasingly turning to religion as the voice and forum for the expression of their own ethnicity and solidarity, they cannot be blamed for this either, as this is one of the few legitimate avenues left open to them as an ethnocultural grouping of humanity.

Universal equality should not be rammed down only the white Americans throats, just to be treated like a dirty joke to everybody else in the world. What Americans see, and what is historically undeniable, has been the non-reciprocal nature of race relations and inter-ethnic policies as these have been promulgated and supported by the American government. A reciprocal system would have tolerated, even mandated, a more balanced jury at the O. J. Simpson trail, and would have given far greater weight to the profuse blood evidence and far less credence to accusations of police tampering due to white prejudice. White Americans are expected to give and yield at every instance, but they are not expected to receive equally in return.

In fact, a completely reciprocal system of "racial" equality would make no distinctions upon race at all. There would be no quotas, and no double or even triple level standards. The tests people would take would be fair and the same for all, and the standards people would have to live by would be, nationally speaking at least, one and the same for all people. And if one bother's to look closely at what whites are increasingly saying, it is not that they want "reverse discrimination" in favor of their own group for a change, but just to do away with discrimination laws, and counts, and all the hypocrisy that attends these institutions, of any given form.

California has been a classic example of the contradictions of affirmative actions and reverse racism of the American government. The state pays hispanic students to attend college, just by virtue of having an hispanic surname. I, for one, had to serve in the Marine Corp four years in order to obtain the G. I. bill. No such similar service is expected of latino Californians. This is a very clear cut case of racial bias in the system that favors one "inherently disadvantaged" group over another. Of course, most whites who enter the military are largely from lower and working class backgrounds, and many latinos now being paid by the state to attend the colleges and universities there are in fact from wealthy and middle class backgrounds. But in this case, as in so many, racial justice remains blind and oblivious.

If the American government wants to foist on white Americans and upon the rest of the world a false consciousness of the white man's burden, most white Americans are pretty fed up with having to play this role or being told what they have to do or think and feel, especially when it increasingly seems to be against their own best interests. They say, and think to themselves, let people pull themselves up by their own bootstraps like we are having to do and have had to do in the past.

It is perhaps inevitable that I would eventually turn my anthropological and authorial sights upon the problem of understanding American society. Any anthropologist involved in comparative research must sooner or later attempt an explicit frame of reference that is drawn from his own society and background of experience. Making explicit such a framework of understanding permits rendering the reflexology and parallax of doing comparative work, both scientifically and humanistically, more realistic and objectively available for comprehension.

I have undertaken writing this set of essays thematically grouped around a central theme concerning contemporary American society, its past, present and future prospects, and, in particular, my own place within this continuum of social change as an American. I treat a diverse range of topics, from class and racism, to affirmative action, multiculturalism and the white man's burden, ethnicization and hispanicization of American society, hatred, systematic disenfranchisement and social-structural discrimination of poor whites, overpopulation, administrative authoritarianism, political corruption, academic mediocritization and capitalization, media manipulation and misinformation, medical capitalism, a stilted, short-sighted foreign policy that serves foreign interests at America's own expense, the conflict between capitalism and democracy in American social life and the corresponding loss of values, sanity, ethics and morality in American social relationships at all levels. I do so mostly from an anthropological perspective that has been tempered by my own life experiences.

In so doing, I have many axes to grind in these essays, and I do not have anything to hide or hold back from in this regard. The last quarter of a century has witnessed many growing contradictions in American social life and policy that were unnecessary except that arbitrary leaders and administrators foisted them upon the American people. We live now with a sense of history that has been foisted upon us, regardless of whether we would have wanted it or not. As an American, I resent and am tired of being told how I should think and feel about the world, and about the implication of my own status in it. I resent not being allowed a choice where there should have been one all along, by rights of our own constitution.

The writing of these essays comes as a form of catharsis for myself. It is a release of a lot of pent up feelings and expression of basic attitudes that affect us, as Americans, most in the world. My family and I have suffered greatly for these kinds of reasons, and I know that I have not been alone in this kind of suffering.

My motivation for writing these essays has been a fundamental and stark sense of discrepancy between my own sense of self as a human being in the world, and my social status identity in American society, which has been mostly one based upon systematic discrimination, denial and prejudice. In my adult life, I've had to confront almost irresistible social pressures and larger historical forces that have served to consistently make us third class citizens in our own country. During this same period, I've seen many foreigners come in, often illegally or with dubious credentials, and race ahead with their lives.

At the same time, as an American, particularly as a white middle aged male, I am left to feel almost voiceless and hence quite helpless to do anything about the deteriorating social conditions that have been superimposed upon our lives at almost every turn of the screw.

Though I've been almost completely isolated within American society, I know without doubt that I am not alone in my predicament, but that many other white Americans of my age group feel and have long suffered a similar fate and destiny. I also know that the fundamental sense of discrepancy that exists is not intrinsic to myself, but is rooted in the context in which we reside in American society, and is part of a larger sense of denial and deceit that is played out daily in American social life and that is unfortunate for the larger disenfranchisement of the American people within their own system.

Looking beyond all the rhetoric and hype, seeing through the veils of illusion that are part of a media campaign to both dispossess the Americans of their pieces of the pie and at the same time to keep them complacent about all the social trends, entails an understanding of the degree to which information is controlled and manipulated by elite interests and administrative authorities for the sake of duping the American public into a shallow sense of satisfaction and complacency about their lives and life-styles in American society. The net loss has been both of basic human value in American society, a qualitative loss of potential opportunity and quality of life that is almost impossible to measure in any materialistic or quantitative manner, and a loss in the basic trust and confidence of the American people for the policies and politicians who make the policies that affect their lives.

To a great extent, the average American, who so far remains a white middle-aged American, of a lowering class standard, is expected to work, pay taxes, vote and otherwise voice no protest in the affairs of the American state, and yet they are largely being deceived, uninformed or misinformed, and otherwise used and manipulated by the politicians and their lobbyists, chauvinistic ethnic groups and powerful private interests who only want to drive most Americans into debt for the sake of enormous windfalls of profit.

The unfortunate consequence of the general trends in American society for the past quarter century has been one of increasing revisionism that has infiltrated American social life and the systematic stifling of basic freedoms of speech and protest against government, administrative and public policies that have largely been foisted upon the American people without either their consent or their approval.

I write these essays believing that the pen remains mightier than the sword, and knowing that the Information revolution can serve the interests of the American people through the exercise of freedom of speech to say what we believe without fear of recrimination or systematic discrimination. An increasing number of people the world over will come to read these essays, and will come to better understand the reasons and motivations for their being written, whether there is consensus or agreement or not.

I would say in general that those politicians who want to continue with the status quo, business as usual policy mongering in American public life, should heed a clarion call that the contradictions they have laid  in the American social system in the last twenty-five years will come back to haunt them and their constituencies in the next quarter century. History teaches us, without its revisionism, that indeed public figures never ever get their cake and eat it too, though they always seem to believe the world runs that way.

President Bill Clinton was the latest example of a public figure whose fall from grace with the American public was both unnecessary and unfortunate, not for the Clintons, but for our shared American heritage and the future integrity of American society. Those, like myself, who voted for the man in a naive faith that genuine changes were around the corner, were the most disillusioned and disappointed to discover the deliberate deception and the defiance of the trust of the American people. We watched the White House become the private domain of what amounts to unreformable white trash and the Clintonesque funk that allowed this symbol of American leadership to be soiled by the world's crassest and most corrupt elite.

I believe that Bill Clinton can now join the ranks of people like O.J. Simpson. They can form their own salt and pepper multicultural team, and go golfing together.

I would say that American public interest has been largely prostituted by private interests and their public servants who are supposed serve two sets of interests simultaneously but who know what side their bread is buttered on. Many of these interests are de facto foreign interests that have, in the long run, the overthrow or undermining of the US interests in mind and at heart. But of all our enemies, at home or abroad, the worst enemy that the American people must face is the one in the mirror, especially when it comes to our sense of collective complacency, conformism, correctness and compliance with the status quo that we have chosen by default of a lack of choice and a failure to make clear choices.

The wake up call came to myself as a decontextualized American, especially during my latest round of fieldwork experiences that put me in the Big Brother world of communist-controlled China. I learned what it means to be an American not at home, but in the face of a foreign society in which many basic parallels were all too frighteningly close to home. I returned to reexamine my own society from a critical perspective, having known first hand what it means to lose the things that are most precious about American life, the freedoms, liberties and rights that we so often take for granted.

I would say that in our quest for the almighty dollar, we have lost a collective sense of what is most important about being American. We have allowed powerful credit card companies to dictate our schedules and our family life, or lack of family life. We have become the lackeys of automobile manufacturers and even more powerful oil interests.

There is for me a great catharsis in writing and publishing these essays. I gives me a place to put a great deal of pain and frustration that I've had to quietly endure for twenty-five years. I've had to endure an adult life-time of prejudice and discrimination from almost every direction I've ever turned, and I have seen many other's interests promoted before those of my own family. I can only think that if the color of my skin were any shade darker than white, or if I spoke in any other accent that standard American English, my predicament in life would have turned out differently with even less work and commitment and sacrifice that I've had to give in my life. And yet I think now to myself, I am an American citizen, I have rights and interests, I am a veteran, I am deserve a place in the system. I value my American heritage, and I do not need to feel ashamed any longer because of the color of my skin or the success of my own kind of people in the world.

The aim of these essays is not to please the politicians and the almighty administrators or to appease the "minorities." It is to give a voice to the voiceless, to give a place to those who have become most displaced in American social life, and to reaffirm the identity and legitimacy of those who have been most denied by all the change policies that have been perpetrated upon the American people. I am not a white supremacist or a racist. I see myself as an relatively average white American who is probably in fact more left center and liberal than most, even more than many minorities.

There are some basic lessons that I have learned in my life time that I believe are a propos to the thematic spirit of these essays. Some of these bottom-lines are:

1. Charity starts at home and sometimes one must ball up the knuckle bone to take care of one's own.

2. A nation that cannot defend its borders or protect its territorial sovereignty lacks legitimacy or respect in the eyes of foreign governments or their peoples.

3. A country that cannot control its population growth in the long run undermines the social stability of its system and the collective interests of its people.

4. Jobs, opportunities and resources in any society are by definition limited and unequally distributed. It does not serve any country well to give jobs to foreigners at the expense of their own citizenry.

5. Citizenship should not be bought by and sold to the highest bidders.

6. A truly democratic society does not run well on double standards. There should be a single set of standards applied equally to all people.

7. One country does not sweeten another country's pot by poisoning one's own well.

Finally, I am proud of being both an American and a wasp. American culture had two hundred years in the cooking pot before the American revolution, and, all the multicultural rhetoric and revisionism I find in my daughter's text-books on American social history, this was mostly, almost exclusively, a WASPish kind of thing.

What is most valuable about being an American? It is having one's freedom and independence to think and act for one's self without having to be told by others. It is the opportunity to build one's own life free of the chains of bondage imposed by others. It is having the protection under the law that is equal and serves human rights first and foremost, at least in principal if not in actual practice.

What I argue for is a single set of standards applied equally to all Americans and for legal limits reinforced to what extent citizenship and residence in the US can be sold or otherwise devalued for the sake of private profit. I argue for a total throwing out of all racial categories of ascription as a-scientific and as inherently anti-American. I argue for a realistic and more responsible middle ground in America that can tolerate foreign peoples, and yet that can simultaneously not only protect, but promote, the interests of its own people for a change. The Mexicans have fought and earned their place in Southern California and in the rest of the Southwest. As far as I am concerned, they can have it all. My own family is half-hispanic. But Americans must sooner or later draw a line in the dirt, and declare to Presidente Fox and all his henchmen, thus far and no further.