When Everyman Became Superman

So that went as predicted. All Hail the Chief! Joe is the last man standing in the contest to see who has the privilege of attempting to save the citizens from themselves. The guessing game of who will be his VP choice will go on in force, and our President will start a relentless assault on anything and everything Joe, true or not. But it’s over. If you are still out there parsing a path for Bernie, save your energy. You may need it over the next few weeks or months.

Moving on.

No matter how safe Joe makes you feel, we have to get through ten months before that has any relevance in our lives, whether it in fact will have any at all. Is it too late for a saviour?

For those who love to celebrate our classless society, we are about to see the opposite on display. Can you afford to stay home for two weeks with no compensation? How about two months? Here’s a surprise. A small percentage of Americans can. They have the resources to ride it out at home, crushing the Netflix stock. It is an enforced stay-cation and not much more of an inconvenience than that.

So far, the relief that was passed by the House, crafted between that body and the Administration, is hitting resistance in the Senate. The idea of giving away money to the people is repugnant to every fiber of their being, completely incomprehensible to them. This is going to turn into a negotiation. You and I are what is at stake, and we are a negotiating tool, both prize and pawn. Who will be saved? Who will be prioritized? That is the current political calculus.

I am afraid to tell you that there is no telling which way this will tip.

They just might not vote for us.

In the end I think they will. A bailout of the population is in the works, and the political damage of standing in its way will be catastrophic. This may be the very moment that the Senate was flipped. As the crisis grows and even the “hoax-ers” are forced to face their ignorance, there are GOP senators who still think this is a political opportunity, a chance to show how their opponents just want “free stuff” and don’t contribute to the country as a whole. When the idiocy of this hits home as all the useless, lazy masses stay home and cripple the largest economy in the world, their value to the big picture will materialize in a very graphic way, and the danger of the Right Wing ideology will be revealed, highlighted and underlined.

Ronald Reagan had it exactly backwards. Business is not the solution. Business doesn’t even ask related questions. Leaving the social fabric of America in the unfettered, unregulated hands of industry is, and has been, one of the most misguided policy directions that have ever been devised, creating an enormous lower class of survivors, or “losers” as the President would call them, and an upper class that is so bloated and privileged that they are convinced that they have been chosen, not created. Many of this economy’s “winners” honestly think this is how society should be ordered, with the masters of the universe pulling the strings and the rest of us being used as soldiers to their agenda. The folly of this worldview is coming home to roost.

Now the soldiers are at risk, and when they are at risk, American business is at risk. It ceases to become us/them.

Without us masses, there’s nothing. Nothing at all.

That truth is coming home with this virus. It will not be something that can even be argued. We make the whole machine grind away, even as it grinds us into dust, but dust doesn’t make the machine work. Living, working, dependable labor, human beings, make the whole thing work. The value of that is on display right now, the essential nature of the everyman revealed in a devestating way.

That revelation is political power, folks. It is the fulcrum that conversation turns on. The value, the absolute necessity of the little guy is inarguable and they may not choose to be ignored in the future. The bailout will reveal that they CAN be prioritized, they can matter in a national discussion of the economy, they MUST matter in a discussion of the macro-economy.

People love to talk about inflection points, and that never seems to pan out. But this may be a sea change for the direction of the country. The Pauls and the Gohmerts in the Senate will become dinosaurs, relics to be examined as vestiges of a crueler time, a time that judicial, legislative and executive decisions were made based on stock tickers and quarterly reports. It will seem curious, unbelievable, that we were so stupid. We will look back at our former selves much the way the world looks at us now in our fight against universal health coverage. Impossibly myopic. Shockingly stupid.

Another corrosive era in American history to be examined and to learn from. The moment it all changed and became of, by and for the people.