DOCTOROW DOCTORS THE RECORD

In Doctorow's Ragtime, the novel, "Younger Brother said, '...You are a complacent man with no thought of history. You pay your employees poorly and are insensitive to their needs.... The fact that you think of yourself as a gentleman in all your dealings... is the simple self-delusion of all those who oppress humanity.... You have traveled everywhere and learned nothing, he said. You think it’s a crime to come into this building belonging to another man and to threaten his property. In fact this is the nest of a vulture. The den of a jackal. He put on his coat, ran his palms over his shaved head, placed his derby on his head and glanced at himself in the mirror. Goodbye, he said. You won’t see me again.'"

So he says, but I think we will see the likes of Younger Brother again though the fictional Brother dies in Mexico fighting with Zapata. Younger Brother is a man, a character in Doctorow's novel, RAGTIME, who has been radicalized by his experience in early 20th Century America just as so many of us were radicalized by our experiences in the 1960s and 70s. Now, we all believe we have passed beyond those times and are entering a new Century, but Bush will bring a new depression down on our heads with his ideological and farfetched desire to destroy the last of Roosevelt's reforms.

How else can we explain a man under whose leadership the mentally ill, the wheelchair bound and children are being abandoned and left behind? Under his economic policies, the system which lifted so many elderly out of poverty is being destroyed. More people are in poverty now than were in poverty before he began his regime. And Bush does not seem to care or even to acknowledge his failures. According to Bush, he has made no mistakes.

It's to Bushites that Younger Brother now speaks, to Bush and to his cronies, to his oil men and his Cheney's. It won't be till a generation or so has passed from the earth before this speech will arise again onto the lips of new generations. But mark my words, unless we repudiate the direction Bush is taking us, our children and grandchildren will have to say these words and die saying them as the children and grandchildren of past generations have been forced to say them. And future governments will be so adept at spying and eavesdropping that the rebellion to displace them from power will be bloodier than any humanity has known before. We can do this peacefully or we can do it with blood. Future generations await our decisions at future ballot boxes whether we will save them from bloody rebellion or no.


READING RAGTIME I REMEMBERED

. . . the conditions again in 1906 which made many city dwellers into socialists. Two generations back—recent immigrants of the first two decades of the 20th Century and the Depression generation—knew poverty first hand and hardship and personal failure no matter how hard they tried to succeed at the American dream. They experienced the impartial grinding down that poverty does to the human soul. So they wanted to help one another to get a fair shake, an even deal. They wanted to level the playing field for everyone before they asked them to compete. And they felt that government was the only tool to break the capitalistic chains which held so many of them down in the valleys of the uneven playing field. They voted their consciences and for one another.

This current generation which sells the weakest among them to the lowest bidder is spoiled and are easy marks for the shills and cons who populate the televangelist dream world and the canyons of Wall Street. Reaching for the fast buck, they swim into the lobster traps set for them by the clever cons who lurk within the chimera of the American dream. So that one in a million can get rich, they doom themselves to social and economic inequality rather then all living in reduced but comfortable circumstances. Pursuing the dream that only a very few will achieve, they make life for themselves and others into a grinding, unhappy endless toil, driven by fear and pain. These current Americans, always ready to escape to the "burbs", are spoiled and selfish and divided. Divided, in conflict with each other, they are easy marks for the cons swimming in the dream between their ears.

Rah, rah, rah boom-ti-e!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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"He who looketh upon a woman loseth a fender." —sign in auto body shop