The American Dream as it stands

Watch this video.
http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-Americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact-2
Ok. Now you know. And if you suspected you are working harder for less you are right. The thesis of Rocket Man and every novel dealing with the American Dream is that it is really a phantom. Take Gatsby. Jay Gatsby had rightly figured out that the American Dream was ultimately to be wealthy. Fabulously wealthy. And he attained it but then he was literally crushed by the forces that be. The Tom Buchannans. The one percent of his time.

Gatsby had tried to crash the gates and had been found wanting. He really didn't understand the forces against him as we know now. Income inequality. Even if you are doing fine you still have to be staggered that one percent of the population owns forty percent of the wealth. Or twenty percent at the top owns eighty nine percent of the wealth while the bottom eighty percent  (us) have 11 percent of the wealth! That is what we divide up. Think about how about the fact that one percent owns fifty percent of the stocks while the middle class own less than five percent. Think about that. These numbers are staggering.

Look around. People are working longer and harder for less. They literally look unwell. People have aged dramatically in the last ten years. Their clothes are older. Their cars are older. These all point to the shrinking pie. What is it...four hundred families own more wealth than one hundred and fifty million Americans! Clearly the American Dream has become one of unloading before the next catastrophe.

I would say the new American Dream is one of downsizing now. Not getting something bigger, but something smaller. It is something unheard of in the march of our country. It was always forward. Now it is one of trying to jettison property before someone loses their job. The American Dream is now simply one of finding something we lost along the way.

Rocket Man...the American Dream upside down

 

Selling Fiction in the Brave New World

It is huge. Where do you begin? And if you have a good publisher and a good book it is even worse because you have to deliver. You could just slough it off and say it is too hard but that wont do you any good here. You know you have come too far to give up now while you are in the final turn after years of rejection and hours of crafting and now that book is sitting on your table and you have to sell it and you have to get it reviewed and more than that you have to get people to read it! None of this is easy of course but you dig in on the side of the mountain and just begin.

And what is that mountain? Well it is the Internet and all it's attendant modalities. There is no clear path. Getting reviews is one aspect of the selling process but there are many parts. And so you become more of a techno geek and what is your book really about anyway so that SEOs will pick up on it. And if it is a book like Rocket Man then it is about right now, the American Dream. the inversion of that dream. The whole upside down thing of middle class America. It is about the forty seven percent and the power grab of the one percent.

It is about bringing up a family and trying to survive. It is about individuality in a land of mass conformity. It is about vanishing youth and increasing responsibility. It is about the pressure to succeed while questioning the validity of the concept. It is about the weirdness of parent child activities and how great it is. It is about the whole banana, but how do you get all of that into press release or uploaded into one of the many search engine protocols?

So you do what you can. You must do what you can and you know the odds you are dealing with. Oprah is not an option. A big movie is not an option. Your only option is the push you can exert against that big uncaring world. Maybe that is enough in the end. Maybe it is all you have.

www.billhazelgrove.com
Rocket Man...the novel of the upside down generation

The Peril of Excessive Individualism

The historian Page Smith cited in his history of the United States the "disintegrative effects" of rugged individualism on society. His contention was that all these people acting as independent units was not good for society, but that was exactly what America trumpeted as her most celebrated virtue. Sister Simone Campbell of the Nuns on the bus cited excessive individualism as our greatest peril now when confronted with Bill OReillys rant about giving money to poor people. The sister later told Lawrence O'Donnell that rich people like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney prove the dangers of excessive individualism. Rich people who want to pull up the gate behind them while the poor drowns.

And that is Paul Ryan of course. The Atlas Shrugged rich boy whose father died and he hardened up with a view of the world not unlike Charles Lindbergh after his baby was kidnapped and murdered who then  went to Nazi Germany and sung the praises of fascism over democracy. He saw the lack of control in America as a reason his baby was murdered and formed America First. He turned a cold heart on humans and saw them as dangerous creatures to be controlled right up to Pearl Harbor. And Ryan seems to have that same cold heart.

Against women's rights. Against welfare. Against Medicaid. Against Medicare. Calling progressivis, a cancer when he was on the Glenn Beck show. Against gun control. Against student loans In favor of tax breaks for the rich and tax increases for the middle class. His budget is a bitter old mans blueprint of Victorian severity. Spare the rod and spoil the child.  He is Scrooge who becomes bitter after the death of his sister and declared, " the world is a cold hard place Mr. Marley and one must steel ones self against it." Certainly Paul Ryan, the scion to millions, steeled himself against the world after his father died and decried the world was a cold hard place and only those worthy should survive.

And I am sure he sees himself in that mode as he eviscerates Medicare and pensions. A man who has done what he had to do. The individual is pre-emient in Paul Ryans world of practical austerity and goverment has no place. Excessive indiividualism is indeed the chemotherapty to the cancerous progressivism. And only the strong shall survive.

Or the rich.

www.billhazelgrove.com

Zuccotti Park

Quiet since the protesters were roused from their sleep and the park deserted. The OWS movement still rolls along but there is that feeling that the nexus of the movement was in the damp sleeping bags and sterno stoves and mountain pod tents we saw on the news. People were doing something and this was exciting. My generation rolled along under the quiet blanket of a party headed by Duran Duran/ Talking Heads/U2. Our rebellion was more cerebral, if not artistic. Nothing that couldn't be settled with a snoot full of blow.

But the protesters in Zuccotti Park did not graduate into that world. Theirs was very different. We could hide because the economy while not great was not in the dire straits of the last four years. You could find a job and things started to really boom. Girls Just wanna have fun and so did everyone else. And we did. Wasn't much on the social activism side of the equation. But really, what was there to protest against? Not enough money? Not enough thin ties and pointy shoes to go around?

But I digress. Zuccotti Park required that people risk something. Even if it was just a night sleeping on the cold ground or the danger of getting maced or arrested. It has been a long time since anyone I know risked anything. It just wasn't in our lexicon. What is the big deal might sum it up. Or maybe people just wanna have fun. Until they can't.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one mans war against suburbia

Are there no workhouses for the ninety nine?

The one percent, a covetous, crotchety old one percent bent over his figures with only a candle for warmth while the ninety nine sits out in the tank scrounging for coal. Please sir may I have an extension of me unemployment benefits or me payroll tax for the holiday. Tis only happens once a year and we would like to make a little merry. The one percent rose up over his candle and looked over. And a fine thing for picking  me pocket with your social security and your medicaid and your unemployment. No. Not another scrap for you ninety nine.

And at that two men came in with their hats off and asked the one percent if they might tax him a bit to help the poor. Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons? There are sir and they are full of the ninety nine we are sad to say. Oh. I thought something might have put them out of their usual vigor. No. No. You will get no tax from me for those lazy beggars who haven't the gumption to do something for themselves. But sir, it is Christmas and the ninety nine already pay the tax and many will soon die from hunger. Then let them do it and decrease the surplus population! Be  gone you ninety nine scoundrels and leave me to my business!

At that his nephew approached. Uncle One Percent. What is it you ninety nine. I suppose you have your hand out too? I have come from Wall Street to wish you the one percent a merry Christmas. Why? Why? Would you do that? Because uncle, we are but fellow journeyers to the grave and there is nothing you can do for that. Then why are you happy? Why not uncle? I am young and poor and you are rich and old. One day you will die and decrease the surplus population. Then the world will change.

Bah Humbug!
So a Merry Christmas to you one percent!
Bah Humbug!
And a happy new year!

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Does Capitalism Work for the Many?

Should one human have a billion dollars at their disposal? It would seem an indictment of capitalism that such things can occur. But they do and now we have lots of billionaires. That kind of concentration of wealth into the hands of the few is unsustainable. Should an Oprah have billions and billions of dollars?Should a Bill Gates? Some would say the good provided is worth the payout,but in our wired world of five billion people and three and a half billion jobs, it just doesn't make sense.

Behind the OWS movement is a basic proposition: capitalism favors the few at the expense of the many. The few are people who game the system and make the billions. And why shouldn't they? They are smart enough to do that. But we are all on the same planet and just because one person can have the intelligence or luck to make a billion dollars should society permit that kind of inequity?

The problem is people don't share. Even if the President proposed a tax on billionaires it would never pass the congress because the billionaires can buy the congressmen. Even this rarefied world of billionaires could cry class warfare and say people are taking from them unjustly. We would like think that a sort of mega philanthropy would kick in for people at this leve,l but money has a nasty habit of staying in the same circles.

Capitalism allows anyone to become a billionaire in theory. But becoming a billionaire is largely a fluke in a system that allows one individual to prosper at the expense of the many. It would seem the many are starting to wake up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Occupy Chicago's rag tag band in the rain

Rain is hard in Chicago. It is a brooding dark city in the South loop anyway and when it rains in October and the people have gone away then you really feel that old Nelson Algren metropolis that seems so much like Gotham. Maybe it's because Chicago is a northern city that has to get through the long winters. But South Loop has always been strange and deserted at night and Lasalle Street is even more deserted with the closed up CBOT and the giant pillars of the Federal Reserve. And then in all that rain and dreariness is a small group of people with soggy signs and plastic slickers. They stand there on one corner looking like homeless people: Occupy Chicago.

You can't beat them up too much. Protesting in the modern age like everything else is derivative. I remember the huge parade of people going down Michigan Avenue when the Iraq war broke out. The first one. A lone black man said to me we goin to war. And then they marched down Congress and that was a large protest, but they too were swallowed up by indifference. The war happened anyway. What is interesting is that the Occupy movement is pretty small or so it seems and they are getting media coverage. But this too is on a time limit.

My buddy and I huddled in the CBOT doorway out of the rain and watched the protester's. One woman held up a sign: WE ARE THE 99 PERCENT. A few people honked as they went by. The rain came down even harder. The rest of the protester's talked as if at a really bad concert waiting for the next band. Somebody hit a giant drum. But other than that there was just the marble edifices of modern finance and the small motley crew of people. A cop pulled up and sat in his car, staring at the ad hoc tent of plastic someone had set up over boxes. Hooverville of the Depression comes to mind.

And then there was really not much to do. We were in the middle of the night in the middle of  a rainstorm watching people get soaked with a few soggy signs. No change it would seem here. It was almost embarrassing to watch. Maybe all movements start like this but television certainly glamorizes because this was just small and dismal. So we moved on and found a bar.

It was a yuppie bar on Michigan Avenue with a strange feel of 1985 for yuppies. But no one had told these people the party was over. Men in suits and women in designer dresses. Martinis all around. A wealthy man with long grey hair just down the bar. We order up and sit among the if not one percent then certainly the up and coming ten percent. Who knows. We were a long way from that ragged band of soaked people on a street corner.

So it is with all revolutions.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/