Lech Walesa Is Not Walking Through That Door

Every couple of weeks I figure out what the root of The Problem is. It doesn't help that every time I do, it's a completely different root, but my hope is that if I aggregate all of my suppositions,* deductions and blind fliers, at the end** I'll be able to stitch together a patchwork quilt of reason enough to cover us all--and I do mean all--in the warm and cozy embrace of nonthreatening political apathy. You know, like we had in the late 1990s.

The Problem, as I think we'll all agree, is that everyone hates each other. Like, everyone. Hates hates. Every single other person. It's not simply a question of disagreement, but where disagreement is understood as an existential threat to the United States as a nation and the American way of life, as defined subjectively by each sub-group for itself without reference or leeway for any other.  And I'm not just talking about cockservative Repuglicans versus libtard Demonrats, although that's certainly the conflict writ large, in easily followable contrasting colors. At smaller, more personally vicious levels, Tea Party Republicans hate the moderates,*** Bernie Bros hate Hillary people, police hate Black Lives Matter, Chachi hates Joanie and nobody at all seems fond of Susan Sarandon. The only thing people can really agree on anymore is that Brad Pitt turned out to be kind of a posturing asshole.

I'm an historian by training, so much so that I use the indefinite article "an" in front of "historian." Who is the posturing asshole now, Pitt? Your move, sir. And it had better not be another goddamned scarf.

Being an historian means I've had lots and lots of expensive training (that I am still paying for, solidly into my 40s) to learn how to ignore the sparks and sparklers of the immediate view and pull back to see the entire burning world as a whole. Oh, and a writer's tendency toward poetic melodrama. So that's two things we learn.

So far, the things I've definitively decided are the cause of The Problem have been:

-Patriarchy
-The paucity of arts education in public schools
-Anti-vaxxers****
-Facebook
-That Iceland volcano
-Live-action versions of Disney cartoons
-Lead
-Bears
-Gluten
-Gluten deficiency
-Sass-talk
-Kids today
-The word "twitterverse"
-New World Order
-New Order
-The Real Housewives of [Embarrassed Location]
-Aspartame
-Obama

In retrospect, each one on its own falls somewhere solidly along the lines of the stupid-to-insane spectrum, but when taken as a whole, you have to admit there's... OK, not much really at all.

So instead I've decided this week that The Problem has been caused by... the collapse of trade union organizations in the United States. I'll be honest, I expected a funnier joke answer there. I was just as surprised as you were that appeared on my screen, probably moreso seeing as I was the one who unexpectedly typed it.

Seriously though, look at this fucking sick-ass chart, you guys:


Shit is upside down for the first time since the Great Depression, and we're at our lowest union membership since about 1950. How's that for some historical long-view?

What does it mean? Well, besides people are broke, and if you aren't already rich it's becoming less and less clear where Americans' prospects are for social and economic advancement as wealth continues to concentrate among a self-segregating and self-perpetuating self-appointed class of economic Calvinists who, oddly conveniently, have decided that them having all of the money and power is proof that they deserve to have all the money and the power? Probably nothing. It might be one of those accidental correlation-not-causation things. But I have to say I haven't been this excited about a socio-economic graph set since that one relating leaded gasoline to violent crime. The number of deaths indirectly attributable to the operation of the Ford Galaxie 500 alone are probably immeasurable.

So today I'm convinced that the lack of a social and political organizing structure to advocate for working Americans against an economic class positioned to strip-mine the country of every human and physical resource and then fuck off to New Zealand when there's nothing left but us mice fighting to eat one another to fend off starvation, never noticing the circle of fire closing around us all, is probably a net negative.

It's not that funny really, but don't worry, it won't last. I'm already gestating another theory that it's all that dickhole Zack Snyder's fault.

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*I like to think of it as one-man crowd sourcing

**and I certainly hope it's not The End, but you never know, with this North Korea thing, etc.

***The most shocking result of the Trump election is the rediscovery of the Moderate Republican. Now, this is a relative moderation where the pegged point of comparison are 1930s-style military parade enthusiasts, but it's interesting to notice they existed all this time, drowned out during the Obama years by the yap-yap-yapping of Birthers and the Successfully Terrorized

****Actually anti-intellectual anti-science poses of any kind, but a chance to kick at these delusional masochists is not going to be passed up by me. Measles is (are?) a real thing, dipshits.