Ron? Wow, that doesn’t seem to match, evidently I was wrong about you. I don’t get it.

Well, the covid/corona virus is real, the flu and common cold are real. But Covid-19 is not real Paul, and that’s what Dr. Martin proved. That needs to be clear Paul, so stop with the “virus is real” crap.

The 1970’s was in many ways the watershed decade for the radical transformation of the American economy and society, even more than the 1960’s (I lived through both as a young man). I have yet to read the definitive social-critical analysis of these years to explain the changes that, looking back, seem to have taken the country of my childhood right out from under me, gone forever, increasingly difficult to remember through the fog of nostalgia that tends to distort as much as to reveal.

Some of the things I do remember about this time include the PATCO (air traffic controllers) strike, very well. What is often not mentioned is that PATCO was attempting to do something that had not been permitted under federal civil service law, that is, bargain for wages as well as working conditions. Wage bargaining, PATCO correctly assessed, was the issue that made or broke unions and had enabled state and local public employees to finally begin to earn a decent, living wage beginning in the 1960’s (think the iconic Mike Quill and the NYC TWU). Reagan correctly (from his point of view) saw that to fail to break PATCO on this issue was to open the floodgates and turn the U.S. civil services into something akin to its European counterpart, with the possibility of general strikes and the rest. And of course to encourage private sector unions in their drive to organize and to change federal and state labor laws to strengthen the right to picket strike and organize.

What I also remember well however, is how little support PATCO was able to garnish from other unionized workers (and in many cases from union leadership as well). It seemed to me at the time that some of the strongest hostility came from rank and file of trade and utilities unions. Of course Reagan, following the Nixon playbook, shrewdly played the patriot-nationalist card, painting PATCO as a threat to national security as well as composed of a bunch of ingrates who should have been happy to have jobs. But by then the segmentation of the American workforce, a tactic that played right into the hands of the corporate-capitalist class was in full swing. The American worker lucky enough to possess a decent paying skilled or semi-skilled union job was being taught to see their situation as morally “deserved” and to see newer aspirants to similar positions, whether recently arrived immigrants or members of racial-ethnic groups previously suppressed by law, custom and prejudice as threats/dangers/enemies of their own recently won status.

I recall too that it was in the 1970’s that the threat of “relocation”, at that time mainly from the more heavily unionized north and northeastern states to the union-hostile south began to play a major role in the destruction of the power of labor. This was the beginning of the “globalization” factor and of the off-shoring of manufacturing jobs that has been commented on extensively and that took off a decade or so later. What is often not recalled is that unions and other pro-labor groups attempted to lobby Congress to amend the NLRA (National Labor Relations Act) and to appoint labor-friendly members to the NLRB to ensure that plant relocation would be a mandatory subject of bargaining and thus prevent unilateral (by capital ownership) relocation or the threat of relocation as a means to destroy the power of labor. They were, of course, not successful, and factories and business continued to move away from traditional centers of labor power and worker-protections, first to so-called “right-to-work” states and eventually to Asia.

And I remember the beginning of the financialization of the American corporation that I experienced on a “micro” scale, a kid lucky enough to have a summer job while in university at a large resource-extraction corporation’s HQ in NYC. I recall white-collar conversations about compensation and about how salaries had steadily risen over the past decade (the company was said to be doing “really well”). And I remember how towards the end of my summer stints more and more conversation was about stock prices and Wall Street favor and about the new executive managerial style brought in by “those young MBA”s”, and about (for the first time) worries of a “take-over” by “outsiders” (the company, although public, had had family leadership for many years).

And most of all I remember how gradually the material-economic components to the identity of the blue-collar and middle class worker were written out of existence. The great narrative, the myth that explains to us what it means to be “an American,” no longer included any hint of class solidarity, of the kind of work we did, the pay we earned, the common living conditions in the small towns and urban neighborhoods and “cookie-cutter” suburbs of America. Formerly the struggle of economic and material improvement was seen by most ordinary Americas as a struggle for certain necessary conditions to maintain, strengthen, and perpetuate a way-of-life in which the common core assumptions about the “good life” remained basically stable and unchallenged: family, stable job, residential security, public schools, public places — neighborhood bars, coffee shops, civic clubs, parks and playgrounds — where people could meet and interact as social equals.

The financialization of the economy, indeed of social life itself to a great extent, meant the drive for the maximization of private profit and the pursuit of interests and ‘efficiencies” conceived entirely apart from any impact of the common good of society as a whole, and should have been seen as a grave threat to the very conditions of material and economic security, only recently achieved, that were the foundation of these other civic and social institutions. Instead, through a grand and diabolical deceit cynically promulgated by a mostly Republican capitalist class of privilege, but also aided and abetted by a “new Left” that increasingly postured itself as the enemy of this older and more traditional way of life, the enemy was reconceived as the new “elites”, the young, urban, hipster “Leftist” who despised the old ways and represented a singular assault on everything good about America. Meanwhile, steadily, relentlessly, the material conditions and hard-won economic improvements that had gradually made small town, urban-neighborhood, and inner-suburban life decent and livable were being destroyed by a class that paid lip-service to Capra’s Bedford Falls while at the same time endlessly working to transform it into Pottersville.

Hey, Dasein (btw, I like the Heidegger allusion in your handle!): Honestly, no, not aware of the Fitzgerald thing, not at all. In fact I don’t recall ever reading it, although given my memory these days, it is of course possible that way back some olden’ time I had. But I will now, thanks to your reference. Thanks for pointing it out… not a bad guy to write like, I would say.

And I suppose I am, Montefrio, like Maritain, a modern day New York version of a “peasant of the Garonne”, rooted in place, a lifer, holding on to what are left of the permanent things, all the while seeing, absorbing, sifting through layers of memories, an observer of the relentless dissolution of what came before, what used to be called our “patrimony.” Restless change having abandoned all attempts at continuity. The old white shut-in looking out her apartment window on Elderts Lane and seeing not what is, but what was and is no longer.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
and the jew squats on the windowsill, the owner
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger

(opening lines of “Gerontion”, TS Eliot)

Linh:

Your “letter” reminded me of some of my own reflections and a short essay I wrote on another occasion (my 70th b-day). Thought you might like it. And, by the way, your go-go bar description reminded me of my now-dead partner on the job who was a real strip-joint afficianado. Right on the mark. So, anyway, here goes:

If I were a contemporary Rip Van Winkle, having just awakened after, say, 30-40 years, I would not recognize my New York City. It would be not just the disappearance of the old buildings, Penn Station, of course, Madison Square Garden and its lightbulbed marquee on 50th and 8th announcing NYU playing St. John’s in the second game of a college twin bill, or the WTC, although I always thought of the latter as “new” until it went down. Nor would it be the disappearance of all the factories, foundries, and manufacturing plants including iconic Domino Sugar on the East River, the Wonder Bread factory with its huge neon sign, Swingline Staples in Long Island City marking passage to and from the East River tunnel on the railroad, and my beloved Schaeffer Beer plant in Williamsburg that along with Rheingold, Knickerbocker, and a score of others, made beer from New York taste a little bit different.

It would not be the ubiquitous new buildings either, the Third Avenue ghostly glass ones erected in the 70’s and 80’s replacing what once was the most concentrated collection of Irish gin mills anywhere on earth. Or the fortress-like castles built more recently with elaborate high-ceilinged lobbies decorated in a kind of gross, filthy-wealthy Versailles, an aesthetically repulsive style that shrieks “Power” in a way the neo-classical edifices of our Roman-loving founders never did. Nor would it even be the 100-story residential sticks, those narrow to-the-clouds skyscraper condominiums proclaiming the triumph of globalized capitalism with prices as high as their penthouses, driven ever upward by the Russian billionaires and Arab oligarchs obsessed by their desire to bury their wealth in Manhattan real estate.

It is not just the presence of new buildings and the absence of the old ones that have this contemporary Van Winkle feeling dyslexic and light-headed. The old neighborhoods have disintegrated along with the bars and factories, replaced by price and income segregated swatches of homogenous “real estate” that have consumed space, air, and sunlight while sucking the distinctiveness out of the City. What once was the multi-generational home turf for Jewish, Italian, Polak and Bohunk families is now treated as simply another kind of investment, stocks and bonds in steel and concrete. Mom’s Sunday dinners, clothes lines hanging with newly bleached sheets after Monday morning wash, stickball games played among parked cars, and evenings of sitting on the stoop with friends and a transistor radio listening to Mel Allen call Mantle’s home runs or Alan Freed and Murray the K on WINS 1010 playing Elvis, Buddy Holly, and The Drifters, all gone like last night’s dreams.

Do you desire to see the new New York? Look no further than gentrifying Harlem, full of luxury apartment renovations and Maclaren strollers pushed by white yuppie stay-at-homes on Lenox (sorry, I forgot it was renamed “Malcom X Boulevard”) and 123rd. Or consider the “new” Lower East Side, once the refuge of those with little material means: artists, musicians, bums, drug addicts, losers and the physically and spiritually broken, my kind of people. Now tenements are “retrofitted” and remodeled into $4000 a month apartments and the new residents are Sunday brunching where we used to score some Mary Jane.

There is the “Brooklyn brand”, synonymous with “hip”, and old Brooklyn neighborhoods like South Brooklyn (now absorbed into oh so desirable Park Slope), and Bushwick, another former outpost of the poor and the last place I would have ever imagined would be gentrified, full of artists and hipsters driving up the price of everything. Even large sections of my own Queens and the Bronx are affected (infected?). Check out Astoria, for example, the neighborhood of my father’s family, the location of my daughter’s apartment, with more of the old ways than most but with rents beginning to skyrocket and drive out the remaining working class to who knows where. Even Long Island City, long a down and dirty factory neighborhood that once made things but now a sea of new residential high rises.

Gone is almost every mom and pop store selling real things satisfying real needs, candy stores with their egg creams and bubble gum cards and the Woolworth’s with their wooden floors and cramped aisles containing ordinary blue collar urgencies like thread and yarn, ironing boards and liquid bleach, stainless steel utensils of every size and shape. Where are the locally owned toy and hobby stores like Jason’s in Woodhaven under the el, with Santa’s surprises available for lay-away beginning in October? No more luncheonettes, cheap eats like Nedicks with hot dogs off the grill and paper cone cups of orange drink, or Kosher delis with vats of warm pastrami and corned beef cut by hand. Gone (I almost can’t write this without tears) as well is the sacred neighborhood “bar and grill” that alas has been replaced by what kids who never knew call “dive bars” if we’re lucky or “sports bars” if not, the detestable simulacra of the real thing, slick rooms of long slick polished mahogany, a half-dozen wide screen TV’s blaring ubiquitous sports 24/7 and not a single old rummy in sight.

Old Rip searches for these and many more remembered haunts, what Ray Oldenburg called the “great good places” of his sleepy past, only to find store windows full of branded, high-priced, got-to-have luxury-necessities (necessary if she is to be certified cool, hip, and successful), ridiculously overpriced “food emporia”, high and higher-end restaurants, and apparel boutiques featuring hardened smiles and obsequious service reserved for those recognized by celebrity or status.

Rip notices too that the visible demographic has shifted, and walking the streets of Manhattan and large parts of Brooklyn, he feels like what to him walking in Boston always felt like, a journey among an undifferentiated mass of privileged preppy metro-sexed 20 and 30-somethings jogging or riding bicycles like lean, buff gods and goddesses on expense accounts supplemented by investments enriched by yearly holiday bonuses worth more than Rip earned in a lifetime.

Sitting alone on a park bench by the river, Rip reflects that more than all of these individual things, however, he despairs of a city that seems to have been reimagined as a disneyfied playground of privilege, offering endless ways to self-gratify and philistinize in a clean, safe (safest big city in U.S., he heard somewhere on local TV), slick, smiley, self-satisfied urban paradise, protected by the new centurions (is it just his paranoia or do today’s combat-ready police seem to be everywhere?). Old ethnic neighborhoods are filled with apartment buildings that seem more like post-college “dorms”, tiny studios and junior twos packed with three or four roommates pooling their entry level resources in order to pay for the right to live in “The City”. Meanwhile the newer immigrants find what place they can in Kingsbridge, Corona, Jamaica, and Cambria Heights, far from the city center.
New York has become an unrecognizable place to Rip, who can’t understand why the accent-less youngsters keep asking him to repeat something in order to hear his quaint “Brooklyn” accent, something like the King’s English still spoken on remote Smith Island in the Chesapeake, he guesses.

As our billionaire former Mayor proclaimed, New York City is the world capital of financialized commerce and all that goes with it. “Financialization”, you see, is not an expression of an old man’s disapproval but a way of naming what an old man sees, hears, feels, laments. It is a world transformed, unrecognizable in the ways that matter. It is wealth and capital becoming gods, the pursuit of riches as an end in itself, and an economy functionally separated from producing real things. It is market rationality, a way of thinking about literally everything that matters exclusively in terms of costs and benefits, means and ends, efficiencies, calculating how to achieve without every questioning what it is we want to achieve. It is “real” actually changing its meaning, another topic more interesting still. It is growing wealth and income inequality, something about which Aristotle had some wise and cautionary words in his Politics. To us ordinary folk it looks more like exotically placed bets-on-credit in the casino than ways to grow real-world business, jobs, wages, and income and to keep our great good places alive.

And I am sorry if I have rained on anyone’s NYC parade. Speaking of which, what once was the glorious NYC Patrick’s Day Parade…no, we won’t go there!

As someone who grew up at 16th and Moore in the neighborhood (mainly just referred to as “South Philly” back then), I find your stories about streets, dives, and neighborhood hangers-on fascinating. Keep it up.

I haven’t lived in Philly since 1998 when we sold the family home on 16th Street for the incredible sum of $50,ooo (talk about declining property values!). The house was impeccable, the product of 3 generations of South Philly Italians painting, scrubbing, and polishing the wonderful hardwood moldings that these “working-man’s row houses” almost all had. But by the time it was sold, the neighborhood was on its last legs. Almost all the old corner bars, owned and operated for years by local families — father behind the bar, mom in the kitchen, children running throughout after coming home from parochial school — were gone, as were most of the bread bakeries, delis and pork stores, etc.

I find it ironic that 20 years after we left, having lived through the gradual creeping decay that seemed to descend block by block from the north (we would measure it year by year through the late-80’s and 90’s by cross-street name, as in, “well, I see ‘they’ (meaning, of course Blacks and Vietnamese) have moved south of Wharton or Dickinson or Tasker”, gentrification seems to be coming from the same direction as the decay. Interesting.

Of course we were still young then and didn’t think through what was happening in all of its socio-economic roots: the absentee landlords, the poverty of the newer arrivals and the massive transformation of what had been a neighborhood of private, family owned homes, into chopped up rental units with their avaricious slum landlords and the almost complete lack of upkeep (rent extraction). All we knew is that our world, intact since the 50’s and even before my time, was going to be as extinct as the do-do bird in a few more years. By 1998, when we left, we were one of the last old families to depart, although, down around Snyder and below, the “old world” was still trying to hold on (in fact many who left Point Breeze simply moved further south, trying to retain what, alas, was a dying world.

I don’t think it is simply old(er) age that motivates me to say that the world of South Philly in those days, right up through the 1970’s and even into the early 80’s, was in many ways almost idyllic, at least for those of us who loved the close-knit, semi-European feel and flavor of the neighborhood. the front door was always left unlocked so that friends and family, almost all of whom lived within walking distance, could drop by unannounced. The corner bars were true neighborhood “great good places” (in Ray Oldenburg’s meaning), civil, vibrant, family watering holes. And the place where you could bet the “numbers” with the local bartender. Remember the separate entrances for women on the side that led to the rear where the bar area could be bypassed and a wonderful home-cooked bracciole or sausage dinner could be had for a few bucks at one of the 4 or 5 tables, nicely set and presided over by Mama or Nona?

The world that Linh seems to dimly perceive and yearns for existed, and lasted for several generations. It was a good time in which to have lived. Take my word for it.

This Rove quote is great… and very, very true. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

As long as the cabal continues to control the international banking system (fed reserve, bank of china, bank of france, bank of england, etc.) – they will continue to wield the incredible power of inflation to buy anything and anyone they want. As we red pill slaves focus on 9/11, sandy hook and the cabals other notorious false flags they continue to hire the most talented individuals the slave class have to offer to continue to execute their master plan.

Like a school of fish – as we react to one thing, they will dodge and parry to another direction. Like the agents in the Matrix.

Even if 35-50% of the slaves woke up tomorrow it really wouldn’t matter.

The elite are the actors of history. In the past, the red pill eating slaves would have had our heads on pikes on the london bridge. Now that the media is so directly controlled, one slaves voice really doesn’t matter. Not even 10,000 slaves voice matters.

In addition, the slaves never had it so good. The elite ARE sharing the wealth. Most slaves have (GMO poison) food to eat, a cheap house, free vaccines (to kill their children’s minds) and low interest rates on their foreign made car. It is just what used to be a million dollars is now worth 10,000. Inflation. That is the magic that pays for all the chaos.

Until the slaves wrestle control of the inflation machine – we will be powerless to stop it.

And that is why when Trump talks about auditing the fed, he is speaking a dangerous game. And even if they audit the fed – you would still need to audit the bank of china, bank of england, bank of japan etc. etc. at the same time. And who would the auditors be? Deloitte?! hah hah!!!

In my experience, the elite allow us slaves room to make changes to the system just like Neo at the end of the matrix. You need to understand how to matrix operates. Only then do you have an opportunity to hijack it and use it for your own purposes – FOR GOOD.

The whole war machine/police state use of the matrix is just old school sink for the inflation cash. There are entire new industries being set up that use the inflation cash for good purposes.