HOW TO SAVE AMERICA

by Joe Shea

American Reporter Editor-in-Chief

Nov 24 1997

The Denver-are police alert concerning skinheads is not to be taken lightly. Whether the groups have killed 37 people or 370 is immaterial; what matterS is that they have gone from a relatively harmless to an active mode, and the "street war" cops say they're seeing in Denver can easily spread to other cities. That is a fire that must not come. But why has even a spark been struck?

There is an essential lie abroad in America, and that is that this is a nation recovering its former prosperity. In fact, millions of people have fallen out of the middle class into low-income lifestyles as a result of the consolidation of the nation's largest corporations and the subsequent unemployment and offshore manufacturing that has followed.

Everything about this Administration and the American media denies that any such event has taken place, but the fact is that there are now millions of poor families where once there were millions of middle class families, and their desperation wants a voice.

For some, tragically, that voice is the rage and alcohol-and-drug -induced excitement of the skinhead movement, a choice of lifestyles that has its own music, its own art, its own heroes and villains, and an abundance of hatred -- against Jews, blacks, Asians, homosexuals, Latinos, and even white people who fail to agree with them. All they lack to be a verifiable national force is an army, and in Aryan Brotherhood prison gangs and motorcycle clubs, they've got the start of that.

No one can tell whether the recent events in Denver -- the killing of one cop and a West African refugee, and the ambush of a second police officer Thursday -- is really the start of a "street war," as lone law enforcement official termed it. It may be a statistical anomaly or it may be a revolution. In millenial times, anything can, and does, happen. What is clear is that it cannot be taken lightly, because if they are the fuse, there is plenty of explosive capacity at the end of it.

America is living in a '50's style, low-or-no inflation economy where Bank of America checking accounts offer two percent interest on your money, where minimum wage jobs are deceptively deflating the unemployment statistics, and the prospect of a vast currency rout like the one in Asia may seem remote, but in reality is as close as the next devastating blow to our confidence.

We approach the Millenium with a stable government that is nonetheless becoming steadily more corrupt, and a rotting urban infrastructure that relies for its safety on the imprisonment of a vast number of people, and the school-and-media-bred ignorance of even more. We have learned so well how to lie that we treat the lie as the invention of a superior being to whom we attribute its goodness. But the lie is the lie, and sooner or later it will fall away to reveal an unpleasant, and perhaps unbearable truth. All the technology of the lie -- the broadcast media, the movies and music industry, the politicians, the wire services, and very soon, the Internet -- is in the hands of a tiny and utterly compromised group of people. They tell us everything is fine except for a few aberrations that are temporary and unalarming.

Skinhead violence and racism tells us something quite different. It tells us that some people who used to believe very strongly in America no longer do; they now believe in a fictive past, the real 1950s, the era of white everything when the word "minority" meant the losing side of a stock proxy dispute. The past becomes ever more attractive as we reel into the Millenium, ozone-holed and El Nino'ed, downsized and outsourced, in a country where Chinese money helps elect Congressmen and the stock markets fall on bad news from Hong Kong.

These are precisely the Americans who fought their way out of Appalachia north to the assembly lines of Detroit and on out into the cookie-cutter suburbs; now, there are no jobs paying nearly as well for them, and the unions they might have believed in have been busted by the government, the corporations and the press. Their jobs are going to Mexico, their kids can't read and are wearing tattoos, and whatever hope there once was for a green lawn and a pond and green woods beyond has vanished in the blazing sun of an integrated international economy where the poorest of the poor get all the work they want at a day's wages that are too low to pay for a shoeshine in Hollywood. If history is any guide, the poor white trash and the fallen middle class are the vanguard of loss; those who have money now will soon join them, however remote that prospect seems while we are still near the heights of a 8,000 point Dow.

Who will they blame? Some other poor sucker, that's for sure. Whether it's the Mexican family down the block that's living eight to a room to make ends meet, or the young Asian "A" student who's cracking the books six hours a day and working six on top of that, or the gay guy who's just getting out from under a lifelong hegemony of heterosexuality, or the single woman who is proud to wear a suit and take job her father couldn't get, it will not be the tiny handful at the top who call the shots for corporations and political entities that are rapidly moving beyond anyone's control. They don't live in the city, after all, and it is the city where the explosion, if it comes, will take place.

How can the explosion be delayed, or even better, defused? It will require an immense act of will on the part of Congress aimed at fundamentally reforming the corporatist structure of our economy. Monopolies and near monopolies must be chopped down; free trade must have an absolute tit-for-tat equality on both ends of the deal; broadcast time for political campaigns must be free and equally available to all comers; prison managements must be forced to create rehabilatory regimes; the courts must be unclogged, and justice become both swift and just; and in our political life, corruption must equated with treason, as a poisonous and unforgivable betrayal of our hopes for a fair democracy.

The only agenda for the next Millenium that we see forming is a Babel of techno-hype; we need ordinary citizens, not special interest mavens, in public office, and from them we need a vision all the people trust. It is time, when we are threatened on one side with the rise of fascism and the other with overwhelming corporate power, to raise a new generation of leadership, a populist, fair, and honest group of leaders who can point us down the road with confidence and shoulder the frenzied aside.

Where will they come from? Well, that's not so hard to find out; we just have to ask ourselves where they are now. If we don't recognize them among our neighbors, colleagues, friends and acquaintances, they do not exist. That is to say, if we do not recognize those people in ourselves, they are not out there. But if we do, our democratic franchise is saved, and this, our American enterprise, can be triumphant at last.

The American Reporter "The Internet Daily Newspaper" Copyright 1997 Joe Shea, The American Reporter All Rights Reserved

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