09.19.13
Failed State (continued)
I exploded this morning after reading Los Angeles Times reporter Ricardo Lopez news piece on the American Community Survey conducted by the Census.
“New census data released Thursday painted a grim picture of the economic recovery in the United States,” read the lede. “Still there were bright spots in California.”
When confronted with the volume of data on misery in the census report, a thinking person doesn’t interpret minor statistical up-ticks as “bright spots.” More likely they’re anomalies, noise, or meaningless when viewed with the whole.
I got angry and wrote him a short e-mail. I don’t expect an answer, you never do from the swells. But this puts it in a nutshell:
Me: You had to look pretty hard to find anything good in those census statistics. And that may increasingly be part of the problem. You and your peers are not really in touch with it. If more writing these small bits of news, trying to pan gold from the sluices of horrendous crap, had to pick up bread from the pantry once a week or be faced with the job opportunities in the new economy, perhaps like spending the day on Amazon Mechanical Turk getting 50 cents or less for various “tasks” in hopes that you’ll be able to move eight dollars into your account after a week of it, you’d write it a little differently.
But then you would have to be unemployed and in poverty and you wouldn’t be getting it published.
Lopez is not the only reporter to cover the matter at the Times. Gale Holland, a more senior member of the staff, and a colleague, also looked at the statistics.
There wasn’t anything good in what they wrote:
Poverty continued creeping upward in the Los Angeles area last year, long after the declared end of the recession, new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show.
The numbers are another sign of continued suffering after the economic downturn: More than 17% of people in the Los Angeles, Long Beach and Santa Ana metropolitan area lived below the poverty line last year. That number rose year by year since 2007, when roughly 13% lived in poverty …
“What is significant and new is that poverty is not rising and falling with the rest of the economy, it is just continuing to rise,??? wrote Bill Parent, associate dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “This is a terrible ‘new normal.’”
This blog used to be a lot about national security issues. I find it very difficult to write about them now. They’re trivial in comparison to what is reality in the country, on the ground.
And so you’re not going to see much of the national security thing.
By example, anyone who thinks cyberwar is a significant problem compared to what afflicts a very visible portion of American lives daily is a fool worth only your contempt.
If you’re still sane it’s impossible to take someone like NSA director Keith Alexander at all seriously, for patently obvious reasons.
Anyway, why would I call this country a failed state?
Well, the problem in with traditional thinking is that the concept of a failed state adheres to a professional definition. That doesn’t take into account countries that devolve in a way that stems from their unique nature.
The United States, being the wealthiest country in the world with the most powerful military on the planet, would not be expected to be a failed state in any sense of a state department or CIA geo-political fact book definition. It would not be expected to fail on a trajectory comparable to historic examples of empire from the past.
Instead, it’s making its own special way, or case: A country that can’t be governed, with no way to see progress, capable of swinging a mighty stick at designated enemies, yet with a growing population in poverty, an ocean of misery that’s over 50 percent the population of Germany, a bit over two-thirds that of citizenries of Britain and France.
The tragedy of it, and this is known to people who study poverty and who are in it, is that everyone not afflicted turns away. You lose everything, you get uncoupled from society and you can’t get back.
And a big society where millions and millions of people are left to rot is certainly one where many of the disenfranchised can angrily view having work and economic viability as a privilege for those who are the most fortunate.
Today words are of little value. Five years ago I had a readership and could get published. In the intervening span that was annihilated.
For someone who, over the major part of a lifetime, has come to define himself by the word, by the ability to speak clearly, being involuntarily separated from what one is good at is a heavy blow.
So, you know, art, music, busking.