In the 2006 motion picture V for Vendetta, Great Britain has apparently survived a global upheaval mostly intact albeit an Orwellian right-wing dictatorship. Little is known of the fate of the United States except for a glimpse offered during the TV monologue of the state-sanctioned talking head Lewis Prothero who notes:
“So I read that the former United States is so desperate for medical supplies that they have allegedly sent several containers filled with wheat and tobacco. A gesture, they said, of good will. You wanna know what I think? Well, you're listening to my show, so I will assume you do... I think it's high time we let the colonies know what we really think of them. I think its payback time for a little tea party they threw for us a few hundred years ago. I say we go down to those docks tonight and dump that crap where everything from the Ulcered Sphincter of Arse-erica belongs! Who's with me? Who's bloody with me?”
The imagery of an impoverished and desperate America ironically laced with references to the original ‘tea party” seem apocalyptically too close for comfort as America’s unresolved battle to raise the national debt ceiling now looms barely 72 hours from this writing. But many economists are now saying the simple fact that our fractured political system allowed the debate to reach this far has already resulted in irreparable damage. According to some, the global community can no longer look at the United States as somehow above the storms that have frequently rocked lesser nations and all but destroyed others.
The grand promise embodied in that notion which came to be known as The American Dream was rooted in the infallible assurance that each new generation of Americans would live in a better, stronger and greater nation than the one their parents were born into. Today, most would argue that it takes not only blind idealism but an unrealistic degree of optimism to truly believe that this historical dynamic will survive or even if in fact it has survived. Have we reached the tipping point where the salvation of a legacy of national greatness can still be achieved or has the tipping point occurred? Has our center of gravity shifted so far over the abyss of mediocrity that no force in the universe exists to save us from the fall described by the fictional Prothero?
To answer that question, NEWSNAC requested interviews with several leading historians who also have occasionally shared the label of ‘futurist.” Most declined, one accepted but did request anonymity. We have assigned him the simple name Lewis in honor of the character from “V”. The nearly verbatim content of that interview follows.
NEWSNAC: I think our readers may wonder why someone like you, a historian, author, and lecturer would feel the need to have anonymity on the subject of the downfall of America? Can you speak to that?
LEWIS: Well (laughs) until such time as it all really goes to shit I have to earn a living and doing what I do is very much like politics. I may speak at five separate events in one week and if you were to get all five groups in one room there’d probably be one huge fist-fight.
No, seriously, I discuss this topic all the time but I’m always careful to leave a kind of Hitchcock ending like in the Birds when you don’t know what happened and perhaps…just perhaps…somebody catches the hail Mary pass as the clock hits zero and the underdog wins…or maybe the birds ate everybody on earth and that was that,
NEWSNAC: So first, has America lost all that made it great?
LEWIS: Without question, yes. I was a kid in eight-grade back in the mid 60’s when the Gemini missions were happening and it was so exciting. We’d all smuggle transistor radios into school and hide them in our shirts so we could listen to Chris Craft’s reports from Mission Control. I remember one day, I think it was when we were doing the first space walk, and everyone was so excited. It happened on the same day that they sold the old US Savings Stamps in School. You could but stamps for a nickel and then when you’d filled up a book you could trade it in for a bond. I remember Mr. Holt our Social Studies teacher doing this long lecture on how buying those stamps paid for that space walk. I gave up lunch that day and bought Saving Stamps so I could feel like I was part of it. And I always remember that was the first place I heard the term “backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.” I kept thinking back to that day last week when the manned space program ended and all the debate on the debt ceiling. It was like finding out there was no Santa, no Easter Bunny and no Tooth Fairy all at once…except in this case, I knew that at one time, they all had existed. It’s like they were killed in a place crash or something.
NEWSNAC: So was it the space program that made America great.
LEWIS No, no, that’s the big picture point people always miss. The space program was one of hundreds of examples of where we, America, solved a problem. We weren’t the first in space but we really did some things after we got there, like repeatedly go to the moon and back and the Russians never even tried. We built the Panama Canal and the first railroad that spanned a continent. We split the atom and invented the telegraph, telephone, airplanes, light bulb, movies and computers. We clearly won every war we fought until Vietnam. You can read countless history books and you can’t find something where America said “we’re going to do this” and then we got frustrated and gave up.
Our politics never got in the way either and even the rancor in Washington today is nothing. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1786, Benjamin Franklin and a few other delegates were quietly trying to lobby for amendments to bar Jewish immigration, some even wanted to bar Catholics. There’s plenty of documented history of threats of violence, drunkenness, and delegates having to be rounded up from some of Philadelphia’s more distinguished whorehouses. The popular romantic notion that our so-called Founding Fathers were a collection of pious conservative Christians devoted to democratic principles is total revisionist bullshit! Some wanted to go right back to a monarchy and have Washington crowed the first king for godsake!
What made us great was very simple, whether you were a pilgrim landing in Virginia in the early 1600’s or an immigrant Italian or Irish landing on Ellis Island in the early 20th century, you mostly came with just the clothes on your back but with a wide expanse of opportunity. The first thing everyone had to do was take responsibility for their own survival and use their wits, be creative be inventive. When a person does that for so long, then even after they get a little comfortable those same energies would drive them and that’s what made us a nation of problem solvers and that’s what made us great.
NEWSNAC: So when or where did we go wrong?
LEWIS Well, now you’ve touched the nerve of why I’m not comfortable having my true identity known if I’m going to be perfectly honest and flatly answer that question. We went wrong in 1980 with the Presidency or Ronald Reagan. To some degree, the current crisis is part of the on-going legacy myth of Reagan’s trickle-down tax-cut economic theory which has been shown to be totally disproven. Remember when Bush-41 was running against him in the Republican Primaries he called it ‘voodoo economics.” Tax cuts don’t stimulate job growth, it’s just the opposite. If you have a business and you hire people and pay them a salary or buy new equipment, you don’t pay taxes on that money! You only pay taxes on what you want to keep, so tax cuts for the rich don’t make them hire people, it just lets them buy bigger houses, bigger yachts and take more high-priced vacations. But it wasn’t tax cuts that really killed us, it was when Reagan said we needed to convert America to a “Service Based Economy” This is what I call, “Coconut Economics.” See 1980 was the beginning of the real exodus of traditional good-paying American manufacturing jobs to countries like Korea, Japan, China and Mexico. Big business loved it because labor costs plummeted and profits soared, Reagan loved it because he hated unions, even though he’d been the President of the actors union at one time…and a Democrat.
NEWSNAC: So why do you call a service based economy Coconut Economics?
LEWIS Ok, let’s start with the simplest example of how wealth grows. Every American household exports work in the form of the jobs of the working adults living there and the value received for those exports is measured by the dollars in the paychecks they receive. Equally, every American home imports goods and services like the electricity, the mortgage, groceries, clothing, etc. As long as the value of your exports, your labor, exceeds the value of your imports, expenses, your wealth has to grow. When you grow your wealth you can use it to do other things like add a pool or an addition to your home.
Here’s where we get into the coconuts. Let’s say you and I move to an island where there are just the two of us and we establish a sovereign nation. This island has two things, coconuts and sand dollars. Now some days I don’t feel like collecting coconuts so I pay you some sand dollars to collect them for me. Some days it’s the other way. So we have this nice little service based economy with a back and forth of sand dollars. But once a month, there’s a cruise ship that stops by the island and both of us decide there are things on the cruise ship we’d like to buy..but they don’t accept sand dollars. So we decide to start making little souvenirs from the coconuts and selling them to the tourist on the cruise ship to get hard currency we can use to spend on things we want to buy from the store on the cruise ship. As time goes buy we get really successful and before long we’re both sitting on a pile of dollars. But then something happens. We got lazy and tired of all this work of making these trinkets out of coconuts so we decide to go back to a simple service based economy. Once a month you’ll come over and cut my hair and once a month I’ll cut yours and then once a month we’ll both go to the cruise ship and buy our goodies from the store using the money, the wealth we amassed. It works fine for awhile but eventually, with a service based economy, we wind up right back with nothing but sand dollars and coconuts.
See, the only way to build wealth is to win in the import/export game. When America was first settled, long before it was even a nation, it was all about the exports, tobacco, cotton and lumber. Then, as the industrial revolution kicked in we not only exported our vast array of raw commodities but our labors. Then, as we added invention we also exported cars, and planes and locomotives and all kinds of technology. We built wealth because we had more of what the world needed from us than of what we needed from the world. The entire premise of a service based economy in a global marketplace is flawed because the only way to build wealth is by exporting a raw material, like OPEC, cheap labor, like China or technology, like Japan.
Look at the story of MBNA, a small specialty credit card operation started in a Delaware supermarket in the early 1980’s. It eventually built several sprawling business campuses around Wilmington, DE including the total remaking of several whole city blocks in the downtown. A few years back it was purchased by Bank of America and most of those “service based economy” jobs shipped to India.
Japan was the epicenter of cheap labor for many years until their economy imploded in the late 1990’s and now it’s moved to China. China will take a little longer to mature than Japan because the population is much larger but eventually the people there will want all the trappings of successful middle-class and the global manufacturing center will move elsewhere, like Indonesia or South America. Who knows, eventually things may get so bad here in America that it eventually finds its way back here, but it won’t be the America that existed when it left.
It probably won’t be, or I hope it won’t be Lewis Prothero’s “Ulcered Sphincter of Arse-erica” but it’s gone too far down the road to ever come back to what it was. Whether we default or don’t default is academic at this point, it’s kind of like the first time you and your wife actually have a conversation about divorce, regardless of what comes afterwards, things are forever changed from that point forward simply because the topic came up.
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