America's Middle Class, DOA III: "What the Middle Class Once Was"

Now here is where I began putting together that scary thought I was talking about. I did a little research:

The Federal Government’s Department of Health and Human Services has developed “poverty guidelines.” So if you aspire to officially escape poverty as they define it in America, you just need to keep your wages above those limits. For an individual, the amount is $10,210. (Where do they get that extra ten bucks, anyway? Why can’t they call it $10,250, or even 10,500?) Add roughly $3480 for each member of the family. A family of five is “poverty level” if their income is under $24,130.

Does all this mean a family making $24,130.01 is middle class today?

Business and industry leaders want the economic engine to be lean and powerful, so for a long time, American labor has been “ramped up” in efficiency. It has been starved of wages, stripped of “extra” laborers, and made to work more hours per week, and then more yet, and a little more, until we have now become the hardest-working people in the world.

Life in this country has been compared to a climb up a ladder. We don’t all start at the bottom, of course, but some do, and according to legend, all have the same opportunity to move up. Perhaps you’ve noticed, as I have, that the rungs on that ladder have been greased, and it is becoming more and more difficult to get traction on them. That sad fact is no accident. It is the result of profit-hungry business and industry leaders “restructuring” the workplace, reducing the workforce, and maintaining productivity, while at the same time enlisting help from the government to keep the economic engine purring.

But the economic engine has been forced to run lean for much too long, and now it’s starving of fuel. Americans are working harder than ever, but as a society, we’re not making very good progress. Retirement plans are disappearing. Investments by common working people have been hijacked by the rich and powerful. Too much of the money has been siphoned away and invested overseas, or it’s sitting in offshore banks, where it’s safe from the IRS. The nation ranks 34^th in the world in healthcare. The banking industry was allowed to sell the public some pretty shaky mortgages over the past several years, and now we have a credit crisis. People simply don’t have as much extra money to spend as they used to. Recession is imminent, and some fear that maybe it will be worse than a recession this time.

According to the myth, in the Land of Opportunity, success is limited only by an individual’s willingness to learn and work hard. Now, young college graduates, some with advanced degrees, are competing with former employees of industry, middle-aged, middle management types, for positions at information technology call-in centers, to work afternoon or graveyard shifts, for entry-level wages.

When they land those jobs and make $20,000 a year, are they really called “middle-class”?

I’m afraid I’ve always defined the middle class differently. For a while in my early years, before Dad lost his job, my family was middle class. My dad never graduated from high school and was not exceptionally literate, but he lived a good life. He was a very, very good man. His life was almost as adventurous as the lives of some famous characters from American literature. Like Huck Finn, he grew up without a mother and escaped his abusive father by leaving home before he was fifteen. Like Lennie and George in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, he spent his youth and most of his early adult years traveling from farm to farm doing all sorts of work. He used to tell stories of how he traveled the Dakotas, Montana, and Nebraska, sheering sheep for a few weeks here, picking potatoes there, harvesting, planting, and putting up hay. He learned skills along the way, rough carpentry, mechanics, and of course, farming and ranching.

He was a bit lonely at times, but happy on the whole. At the ridiculous age of 48, he got married. Then I was born, in 1952. He needed to find steady work, and he heard of jobs available in the iron mines of Northern Minnesota. He applied and was hired on as a common laborer.

Suddenly, we joined the American middle class. He worked at his job forty hours a week and came home with a paycheck. He had time to be with his family, get caught up with a few projects around the house, read the paper, sleep in, and even visit with me and my sister and brother, who came along in 1954 and 1956. He entertained us with many, many stories of his adventures. 

He and Mom rented a house, and later, bought a small farm. The bills got paid, and he was able to, in his words, “put some of it away” in savings. Dad didn’t own his farm yet, but he could keep up with the mortgage, and he had benefits: a good health plan, a retirement plan, and vacation time. With his financial obligations, Dad couldn’t buy a new vehicle, but he bought used cars one after another. He fixed each one up and kept fixing and driving it until it broke beyond fixing. He began to expand his “hobby” farm. Farming was his first love, and he wanted nothing more than to own his land and prosper on it. Dad spent every free minute away from work, including vacation time, building his dream. People had time to do that, back then.

Mom stayed home and raised kids. When we were a little older, she could have gone to work, but she didn’t have to. They had enough income from Dad’s job, so we milked the cows, drank as much skim milk as we wanted, fed what was left over to the calves and pigs, and sold the cream. There was plenty to do on the farm, and Mom took care of the animals while Dad was away working in the mines.

We were middle class. Dad chose our lifestyle, which wasn’t the easiest, and to be honest, it was considered odd for the times, but our situation was steadily improving. Our family of five lived comfortably on one income. The breadwinner of the family sometimes worked a little overtime, but not too often, and hardly ever beyond fifty hours. The breadwinner’s job gave the family opportunities to raise its standard of living while providing Dad enough time off to enjoy the company of his wife and kids and pursue other interests.

It was not a perfect life. Farming in Northern Minnesota on little fields cut out of forests was hard work. We didn’t have a hay bailer, or even a good tractor. Our “tractor” was a doodlebug, a Nineteen Twenty-something Ford Model T engine and transmission adapted to a second transmission and rear end of a truck, vintage 1930’s, brand unknown. Dad and I mowed hay together. He pulled a horse mower, which I rode and operated. We raked it in a similar manner, with a buck rake that dumped it into windrows. We went back later with the rake, bunched the windrows, and then hauled it loose on a two-wheeled trailer with a hayrack on it. We used pitchforks to move hay and stack it in a fenced yard by the barn.

We didn’t have indoor plumbing or running water, so laundry day was a tremendous amount of work for Mom. She carried water buckets from a pump to the house, heated it on either a wood cook stove or a gas range, and then washed clothes in an old Sears wringer washer. We didn’t have a phone, either. That made us feel a little isolated at times, but comfortably insulated also, from the business of town life.

In the early 1960’s most people neither appreciated nor put up with such inconveniences, but country living had its beautiful moments too. Dad maintained two huge gardens, tilling them frequently and weeding them meticulously. They were located right beside the gravel road that ran by our place, one on the north side of the house, and one on the south side. When we didn’t have rain for long periods, we had to water the gardens, but because Dad was always afraid of the well going dry, we hauled water in fifty gallon barrels on a trailer from a river two miles away, and with pails of river water, we went carefully, gently, row by row, watering each plant. On the cool midsummer evenings, when the corn was getting tall and the beet rows and bean rows and carrots and peas and cucumber plants and squash plants and everything else was screaming out a glorious green in the twilight, and when bright blue little potato blossoms bloomed, we knew we were in a good place.

Mom had three brothers who visited frequently and behaved strangely. They were all veterans of World War II and worked as iron miners, like Dad. They’d grown up on a little farm not twenty miles from ours, and they would just come out at different times to walk around and remember what it was like. “How’s the old Model T running?” they’d ask. “We used to have a chicken coop just like this,” they’d say, or, “Our barn was made of logs too, and that’s just how we’d stack the hay.” At times, they’d even become a little emotional with sentiment, but that was embarrassing to them, so usually, they didn’t say much at first arrival. They just wore these dreamy little smiles and walked around a bit. Then they came in and visited a while.

Mom would fix a lunch for them, and maybe a neighbor or two would drop in, and maybe someone would bring a little wine. These kinds of visits were rare, but pretty regular. We kids would sometimes pause from our play and greet the people, but we learned that it was usually best to leave mom’s brothers alone when they were in that dreamy mood. Uncle George was particularly interesting. He used to come out just to lie down under a tree and take naps. He said the wind in the trees, the chirping of birds, and the buzz of insects gave him the best rest in the world.

Our nearest neighbors were a mile or so away. Another much less frequent visitor owned land on the adjoining forty. He wasn’t middle class; he was upper middle class. We’ll call him Mr. D. He didn’t live out there beside us, but he had a small hunting cabin on a forty-acre field that had been cut out of the woods. He owned a car dealership in town, much further off, about fifteen miles away, and we’d very seldom see him. He let Dad cut the hay off his field two or three times a year. He had a garden out there, too. We had a devil of a time keeping our cows fenced up and out of both his garden and ours.

Once your neighbor’s cows get a taste of garden plants, they look for any weakness in the barbed wires and pry their way under or over them if they can. If one staple pulls loose, they’re quickly out of the pasture and in the garden eating your cabbages. That’s when Mr. D. would come to visit.

Mr. D. was an understanding neighbor, though, and he and Dad got along pretty well. Eventually, after the cows had eaten Mr. D’s turnips and cabbages and lettuce a few times, we put four or five barbed wires, instead of the standard two or three, on the fence separating our properties, and the cows ceased to be a problem.

By word of mouth through the car dealer and my uncles, news got out about our old-fashioned little farm nestled in the trees, and you know what they say, “If you build it, they will come.” People actually took country drives, particularly on quiet summer evenings, to come and gawk. There was nothing special about our place from our standpoint, but many of the townsfolk were no doubt just as consumed by sentiment as my uncles were, looking at the ancient Model T, sometimes even seeing Dad or me cranking it up or driving it, backing the mower or rake or trailer to park it under the trees. They would admire the straight fences, the well-kept little lawn in front of the house, the huge round haystacks near the log barn farther back in the woods, the chickens running free, and the beautiful, fragrant gardens.

Dad resented them a little. They didn’t mean any harm. They just knew of the place and went out driving on a pleasant evening to have a look. But once in a while, they’d sneak up on him. Maybe the wind would be blowing and the birds would be singing in the soft summer twilight, and he’d be squatting in the garden with his back toward the road, farting, spitting tobacco juice, maybe blowing snot out of a nostril once in a while, while picking beans or carrots, or watering, or weeding, and talking to himself, constantly. Then he’d stand up and turn around and see two cars full of people, not fifty feet away, sitting there gawking at him, engines idling almost silently. “Cheesus!” he’d say. “Dey scare da hell out of a guy! Ya, ya! Dey just come out to look. Dey t’ink it’s nice, but dey t’ink it’s all easy, too. Dey got no idea how much work a man does to keep it up!”

Dad milked the cows in the mornings, either before leaving for work when he was on day shifts in the mines, or after returning home from working nights. Mom and I helped. We did the evening milking and chores when Dad worked afternoons. We lived simply, but we ate well. Pay checks came in. When we needed medical care, we had it. I was personally hospitalized for tonsillitis, bronchitis, a mysteriously high white blood cell count, and whooping cough. But I survived all of that because of the good medical care available to us. Our lives showed promise. Soon we would have a new well, an electric water pump, hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, and a genuine septic tank. The farm was in operation, bringing in only small cream checks so far, but it looked like we would be able to continue our slow climb upward.

America's Middle Class, DOA II: "The Project"

A couple years ago, my stepdaughter came home from school announcing she needed a large Styrofoam ball, some bulletin board tacks with various-colored little barrel-shaped plastic heads, and some pipe cleaners, to make a model of a molecule for a science project. I think she also needed some “tag board,” or “poster board,” and a few markers. We found all of these items at one of those “Marts.” I was a little surprised that it totaled about $10.

At home, she assembled the model. She knew exactly what she was doing; she took only about five minutes to build it, and it was beautiful. She found some information and illustrations on the internet for the poster board display. Her mother, a librarian, kept an eye on her to make certain she paraphrased language and used and documented sources properly.

My stepdaughter also insisted on spending a little extra time on the poster board headlines. She selected an interesting font and multiple colors for the letters. She sized and re-sized several versions of the various headings and subheadings and printed them out a couple times to make them look just right. She used scissors and a tube of school glue to cut out and attach the illustrations, headlines, captions, and blocks of printed script. The poster, too was beautiful.

The total time spent on the project, including the trip to Kmart to pick up supplies, was about an hour and a half to two hours. The rest of the evening she watched some of her favorite episodes of Lost on rented DVD’s. Educational mission accomplished by a typical middle class American family. 

The whole experience planted the seed of a thought in me. It sprouted, took root, and spread. It is now an infestation in my brain! It is a frightening truth. This story is my best effort to gather it up, process, package, and tell that truth. 

This thought began with a memory from my adolescence when I had to complete a project of similar importance for my English class. I was about fourteen years old. We were doing a journalism unit and were instructed to find samples of different sorts of writing in various newspapers (editorial pieces, feature stories, entertainment columns, comics, and so forth), cut them out, paste them onto pages, label them, and write brief descriptions of them. I believe we had to find a minimum of three examples of each.

Times were not good at home financially. They hadn’t always been that way, but it so happened that things were particularly difficult then. Dad had been laid off his job in the iron mines. He was trying to make our farm into a paying venture, but money was scarce. If he had three and a half bucks in his pocket from cream checks, he would spend two and a half of it on groceries and put a dollar’s worth of gas in the car. That would sometimes boost the gas gauge needle very near to the half full mark. It was enough to get him where he had to go.

We didn’t expect Christmas presents that year, and then someone from a church who knew of our situation put us on a list, and we were given a box of groceries, some clothing items, and even toys for the younger two kids and me. We were all surprised and extremely grateful. We didn’t usually eat much ice cream or candy, and we didn’t go to movies during those days. We didn’t get a newspaper, but neighbors and relatives would drop off the Sunday paper after reading it. Sometimes we’d end up with two or three copies of papers brought over during the week. They were good for reading and starting fires in the wood stove. (That purpose for newspapers, along with wrapping fish and masking for painting projects, is not commonly found among the “seven purposes” listed in journalism textbooks.) Most of the papers were weeks old by the time I sat down to cut out stories, but that did not matter in the least.

I had procrastinated; I admit it. I could have started the project a couple days earlier, but I’d had other schoolwork too, and I really never realized how complicated this project could turn out to be for a kid in my situation. It sounded simple enough. I was confident I could finish this in one evening. I set to work finding the various items. I knew the virtues of brevity for a project like this one, and I sought out the shortest possible editorials, the tiniest cartoons, and the littlest straight features and news stories. I organized them and piled them up.

I had to arrange these on pages, but I couldn’t find a clean sheet of unlined paper in the house anywhere. I did have an old notebook with about twenty empty pages of college ruled lines left in it. The corners of the pages were rounded, and I knew the lines and those corners, which reduced the size of the pages, would create a mess for my teacher as he put my project in the pile with the other kids’, but it was going to have to do. I tore them out, very carefully, and cut the torn fringes and holes off the sides of the pages as straight as I could.

The project required a cover page and a table of contents. We could use only one side of each page, and we were encouraged to arrange the articles in appealing ways. We were shown how to add a brief description. We were allowed to use terminology from out textbooks in describing the articles, but we were warned that plagiarism would be graded down severely, and that paraphrasing was essential.

We were also told to type our descriptions, or print very clearly, in black ink.

We had no typewriter, but I found three pens. The black ink pen was low on ink and skipped, so I couldn’t use it. The other two wrote in shades of blue, so I chose the one that wrote darker blue. It would have to do.

I set to work writing my descriptions. I began, as kids that age do, by reading the descriptions in the book, paraphrasing with synonyms inside my head, and attempting to ink draft directly to the page. When you make a mistake in ink, you have only a few choices: throw away and start over, use white-out, or erase carefully by putting a little drop of spit on the end of an eraser and rubbing softly, but be careful! Rub too hard or use too much spit, and you’ll make holes. 

I wore out an eraser and tore a couple of my limited number of precious pages and had to throw them away. I was more careful how much spit I used on the rest of them, and did a little better. Toward the end, I got much smarter. I began writing my descriptions out in pencil on other scraps of used paper, on the cover of the notebook, inside and out, on an old envelope or two, on anything, creating rough drafts first. Then I’d try to copy those onto my pages. I completed all of these brief descriptions, arranging them on the lower right corner of each page. I can’t remember how many pages the project required, exactly. I think we had to include ads of certain kinds, and I think news stories were subdivided into categories such as “local,” “state,” “regional,” “national,” and “international.” But it seems to me that the final project was about twelve pages long.

I decided it would be best to wait and paste my articles on the pages only after the descriptions were finished. Each page needed a heading, thus: “EDITORIALS,” “FEATURES,” “STRAIGHT NEWS,” etc. I wasted a couple more sheets of paper trying to write fancy, outlined, block letters and coloring them in with ink at first, but I gave up on that eventually. I had to rewrite the descriptions from pages I had ruined onto my dwindling supply of blank sheets of notebook paper, and just printed the headings carefully. They were poorly centered for the most part, not to mention clumsy and out of proportion. And they were in blue ink, but they would have to do.

It came time to paste the articles onto the pages. I might have used cellophane tape if we’d had some, but we didn’t. And we didn’t have “store-bought” paste, so I mixed up some flour paste. Now you see where this is going, don’t you?

Perhaps you don’t. Try it sometime. Put a little flour in a bowl and add water. Try to make the paste as creamy smooth as you can. Paste paper onto paper, let it dry, and see what you get. It will look something like the original copy of the Magna Carta, right after King John scribbled his name on it and crumpled it into a little ball before throwing it at the people who’d forced him to sign. It is a little known story, but thus was the Magna Carta forever disfigured.

Well, OK, I don’t know if King John did that exactly, but if he did, the Magna Carta, crumpled and re-straightened, is exactly how every single page looked when it dried out. That alone was enough to make a junior high kid cry. The stack of twelve sheets was going to be over an inch tall. I was a big kid, though. It was just going to have to do. I refused to cry.

But then I did when I pasted the editorials onto the page I’d painstakingly labeled “FEATURES.” It was three o’clock in the morning by that time. I sobbed. I couldn’t help it. So as not to wake Mom and Dad, I sobbed very quietly, but very, very hard, and stained a number of pages with spit and snot and tears, including the cover page of my un-crumpled Magna Carta.

After I gathered what little was left of my senses, I cut out my mistake and pasted it onto the last clean page of notebook paper in the house. And I labeled it correctly, and I copied the description again, and it looked pretty good until it dried. Then that page looked like the Magna Carta worked over twice. I cleaned up my mess and went to bed about four o’clock.

I was unbelievably fortunate back then because I was ignorant. But I’m not anymore.

When I saw the beautifully stenciled headings and the immaculate typing on the pages being handed in by the other kids, I was fortunate, because I didn’t know how their advantages, having a typewriter and white-out and many, many clean sheets of typing paper to start over on after they’d made mistakes, and good paste, and someone in the house to maybe type a couple of the descriptions for you after you’d drafted them, made their work much easier, so they could watch a little TV after dinner and get to bed before eleven o’clock.

I was ignorant enough not to recognize any of that. So I was very fortunate to feel, not angry, and not even jealous of the other kids’ advantages, but merely ashamed.

Some lunatics today would tell you that I was fortunate for other reasons, that my experience was a true learning experience; that, in fact, I learned more than the other kids because I was forced to work independently and use my imagination and ingenuity, while they were not. Some would even tell you that, even if I’d given up and quit and never handed the project in, I’d still be ahead of them all because I’d have learned more, and that it wouldn’t have mattered, because life is not about a grade or advantages enjoyed by some. Let’s extend this stupidity: The lunatics would say that, as long as you engage in quality learning, even if you don’t graduate from high school, you’ll be fine.

People who say so are lunatics indeed. Life in this country is all about advantages and disadvantages. It’s all about grades; it’s all about graduating. Most importantly, it’s all about self-respect.

When I was asked to pass my work forward, I decided I just wouldn’t. I didn’t want the other kids seeing what a mess I’d made of my project. I thought about taking my work out of the room and throwing it in the nearest garbage can, but I hung around at the end of class, after most kids had left the room, walked up to Mr. Hall’s desk, and handed my paper to him. “Thanks,” he said.

That response is a remarkable detail to me now. He just took my work and said “Thanks,” with absolutely nothing further. I don’t know why he didn’t joke about the Magna Carta styled parchment. He must have known. He must have been aware of my poverty and my lack of resources and the efforts I was making. Maybe he’d been poor once. Maybe as a young kid, he’d found it necessary to use a little flour paste himself. I was lucky to have Mr. Hall as a teacher.

The following week, the projects were handed back. There was a little red “B-” written on the front cover, in between a couple stains. I wonder if Mr. Hall ever guessed the origin of those stains.

My stepdaughter’s project was a mild inconvenience for a middle class household. She did beautiful work. I was glad for her, and glad for myself, too. I was a middle class parent. I had been a long time getting there. (I count my arrival in the middle to have occurred only recently, incidentally, within the past five years or so.)

But I also thought to myself, what do the poor kids do nowadays when an extra dollar or two in the family is always spent on essentials like milk or bread, and there’s no computer or printer at home, and the library is a mile or two away, and it’s five below zero outside? And, from among the teachers and other professionals that claim to be part of today’s so-called “middle class,” who really cares anyway?

America’s Middle Class, DOA I: “More Jobs”

Take an imaginary trip back in time with me to about 1960:


Well, here we are! Andy Griffith isn’t even on TV yet. Gunsmoke is, though. It’s a simpler time. Something’s going on in a place called “Viet Nam,” I hear. Damn Communists, I guess. Kennedy is the president. I’m not asking what my country can do for me, I’ll tell you!


It’s a time when the average American is a member of the Great Middle Class, the pride of the nation. It is rare for a woman of the times to be allowed a middle class career, but if she is permitted to take part as a man does, she can afford to purchase a brand new automobile on a third of her yearly salary. The typical workingman can buy a comfortable home for a single year of his salary. That’s right. One year. My dad did it! Tell ya more about that later, but not until Act III.


In the 1960’s, a man’s retirement program is fully funded by his workplace, and once he’s vested, it’s “guaranteed.” She works around forty hours a week, occasionally more. He does the same, takes maybe a little more overtime when he has the opportunities, but he still has plenty of free time at home with the family. On her salary, she can support a spouse and children. Day care is an option, but usually not a necessity. Fortunately, he doesn’t need specialized skills or a degree to find work. Multitudes of factories, mines, construction companies, and other industries are producing both goods and services. Unfortunately, she needs to know someone of influence, or she must have extraordinarily good fortune, to find a middle class job; but man or woman, a member of the middle class who works hard and responsibly and remains loyal to the company (and labor union, of course) can depend on a living wage and opportunities for a steadily improving standard of living.


American society is not separated into classes, exactly. Instead, it is often compared to a beehive. At the top, there are very few filthy rich people. That part of the hive is little. At the bottom, there are also very few of the destitute. In the middle, there’s a fat part, representing the vast majority of people who live and work in the country. They are the people who support its businesses, industries, and services.


She takes out a loan on that new car. He withdraws a large portion of his savings from the bank (where his money has been earning perhaps 5% interest per year), puts that money down on a new home, and signs for a mortgage on it. She pays for gasoline and car maintenance and repairs, purchases groceries, and picks up all sorts of home supplies. Medical expenses are not all covered, but his employer’s excellent health plan makes it easy for him to take the kids to the dentist and the eye doctor for regular check ups during some of his free time. She buys items for home improvement and upgrading the comforts of their home. While the kids are little, one of the parents stays home. (It’s almost always the mom.) But health care remains secure; the bills get paid. Maybe they don’t save much money, but they can save some. They don’t enjoy too many luxuries yet, but wages will go up, and for now, the basic needs of daily living are easily met.


Skip ahead a generation plus five years. It’s 1985.


This is different! Hard rock, what was that all about? Bell bottoms? Leisure suits? Where did they all go? What’s on TV? I stopped watching when they took Archie Bunker off the air.


The average American is still a member of the Great Middle Class, the pride of the country. That’s why we loved Archie Bunker. He reminded us of ourselves. He was a crusty bigot, but we could laugh at his bigotry and ours. We were invited to ridicule our narrowmindedness back then rather than to glory in it. Archie had a soft side too. He dearly loved Edith. He was still able to earn a living in 1980 or so. But Americans began working a little harder by 1985, after Archie went off the air.


How are people doing nowadays? Well, she has better chances of getting into that middle class, but it’s still not exactly easy. After (and if) she gets in, she can’t afford to purchase a brand new automobile on a third of her yearly salary the way her parents could, but she can drive a good used one. She needs to have a car in order to get back and forth to her job. He can’t buy a comfortable home on a single year of his salary the way his dad might have done a generation ago. But if he doubles his salary, he can probably afford an average home. He tries to save for a down payment in the meantime, though it hardly pays to keep money in the bank anymore. They charge you a “service fee” for it, and they don’t offer you much interest.


She works forty-five hours a week, sometimes more. He almost lives at work, but he needs all the overtime he can get in order to maintain their standard of living and maybe gain on it a little. Neither of their salaries alone can support a spouse and children at their current level of comfort, not that they waste much of their money on comforts. Most money goes to necessities, one of which is day care. OK, maybe it’s still not absolutely a necessity, but if she didn’t take advantage of it and work outside the home, they would never stand a chance of getting that down payment put away. He still doesn’t need specialized skills or a degree to find a job, but without them, obtaining a career that pays a living wage would be very difficult, and he has both. She’s fortunate to be employed by one of the disappearing American automotive parts factories. If she works hard and responsibly and remains loyal to the company, there’s a good chance she’ll have a job for years to come, and maybe it will even provide opportunities for a steadily improving standard of living. Labor unions? Well, there are still some around, but they aren’t really necessary in this day and age, are they? The middle class isn’t as fat as it used to be. That beehive looks more like a cylinder now, only, the bottom third is starting to swell up a bit.


Middle class Americans spend much more money and time than they used to supporting the businesses, industries, and services of the country. With luck, though, he will be able to afford a mortgage someday. She holds down one full-time job and a part-time job, pays on the credit cards she uses for gasoline and car maintenance and repairs, and tries to keep enough money from the bill collectors to purchase groceries and supplies to last the month. He doesn’t have much free time, but they somehow get the kids to the dentist and the eye doctor once a year. Good thing she has a health plan. It doesn’t cover everything, and he worries constantly about what they would do if they had serious health issues. They borrow money to fix the transmission in the old car so she can keep going to work. She puts something in the freezer so their oldest child can make supper after school. She gets the pre-school kid from daycare at 5:00, during her break from her part-time job, drops him off, and hurries back to work. They cycle through the bills at the end of the month, deciding which ones not to pay in full. Mom and the kids have a modern TV and VCR, so they partake in the newest form of entertainment: They stay home and watch rented videotapes. The kids might go to a Sunday matinee once in a while.


Add another twenty years and a few more, and we arrive at the present day, closing in on 2010. We still rent movies, but lately, they’re on DVD’s, and it won’t be long before our old TV’s will be obsolete. Those videotapes are practically a thing of the past, but not to worry; we don’t have much time to sit and watch anyhow.


Although a lady can now get what’s called a “middle class” job much more easily than ever before, she’s still too poor and too busy to feel any pride about the fact. Nobody in the world works harder than the average American. If the median wage earner saves every penny of his salary, he might be able to afford an average home after three years. If she saves a third of it, she might be able to buy a really, really good used car. “Career” is no longer the operative word. Today, you go after one of those “More Jobs.” “More Jobs” is the mantra and crown jewel of the current “Go, Go, Christian” Administration. You hear it sung all the time (“More Jobs!” “More Jobs!”), backed up by tunes such as “The Global Economy,” “Free Enterprise,” “Make Those Tax Cuts Permanent,” and “Ain’t that Small Business Community Great?”


There are “More Jobs” around now than ever before. Glory Halleluiah! You can take one of those “More Jobs” at Wal-Mart, Sta-Mart, K-Mart, Econo-Mart, Pet Smart, Smart-Mart, Small Mart, Look Smart, Feel Smart, Smell Smart, Farmer’s Mart, Old Navy, New Navy, Good Gravy, Kohl’s, Buck’s, Starbucks, Big Bucks, Big Lots, Little Lots, Lotsa Luck, Tom’s Bar and Grill, Dick’s Grill and Bar, Harry’s Grills and Buoys, Sam’s Bar, the Sand Bar, and numerous other bars, marts, and shops from that glorious segment of American society called the “Small and Medium Sized Business Sector,” named with singular and possessive nouns, or not, followed by “Inc.,” or “Co.,” or not, for just a little more than minimum wage, or not.


A very large portion of the “More Jobs” are part time, so they’ll only let you work 39 hours a week, but you can get two of those “More Jobs” and work as much “More Overtime” (without overtime wages) as you want. In most cases, you’ll have to forget about retirement or health benefits with these “More Jobs.” If you’re intelligent and educated and skilled, you can bypass the “More Jobs” and land a career with a real company that will hire you at entry level into a “lean” workforce that operates at peak efficiency for the benefit of shareholders, meaning, they keep you at entry level wages for as long as possible and work you like a horse. They string you along, putting a carrot in front of you and stick behind you, and dribble small raises at you that never quite get you where you want to be financially, until you drop dead or quit.


Dispite their efforts, middle class America today can no longer support the businesses, industries, and services of their own country. On her way to and from her two part-time jobs, she pays for gas by abusing a credit card and prays that the car doesn’t break down again during the time she has skipped two oil changes. He took out a mortgage on a house. It was a special deal. He didn’t need a down payment, and so far, they’ve been able to afford the monthly payments, but it’s going up in a few months, and he’s not sure how they’re going to cover it. He opted out of paying for the deluxe health plan in this new economy, where the modern American breadwinner is free to make decisions about benefits such as that one and retirement, because they’ve been all but surgically removed from the picture, and he might start a 401K someday, but right now, he’s too busy earning the damn bread, and he’s got to pay full cost for his blood pressure pills every month. She pays for gasoline and car maintenance and repairs, purchases groceries, and picks up toilet paper. They haven’t seen a dentist or eye doctor for years, and nobody visits the hospital unless it’s an emergency, because that’s what his health plan covers. They cycle through the bills at the end of the month, deciding which ones they can put off for another month. Their home is a mess because nobody’s home long enough to clean it. They can’t afford day care, but they have to pay for it, and when both kids start school, the kids’ll learn to daycare themselves.


Being “middle class” just “ain’t what it used to be,” as my dad might have said, if he were still alive. “Hain’t no middle class no more.”

Election 2012: Onslaught of the Redemopublicrats

The political party currently in power, as well as the one wreaking havoc upon it - just call them all the Redemopublicrats - are lying to us again. They’re lying by promising us lives of ridiculous misery without telling us that they’re going to make our lives ridiculously miserable. What they do say is that they’ll give us “more jobs.”

We have heard the “morejobs” lie before. A “morejob” is another entry-level, nine or ten buck an hour job without health benefits or pensions, in other words, without “get ahead” power. Call them healthless wealthless headless morejobs.

You’ve got to take them.

Yes, there are alternatives. They’ll tell you that. Yes, you can get really smart and learn to write code for computer programs, or borrow lots of money and go to school and learn something else so you can get hired doing one of the tens of thousands of jobs currently available, a job with few if any benefits at an entry level, a job where you sit all day in front of a computer screen (or in front of some other object), performing physically inactive, high-skill work requiring incredibly long hours of attention to detail. And eventually, they say, you’ll get promoted to another job and “come up the hard way,” like they say you should.

But forget about laboring your way up the “old fashioned way.” There simply aren’t enough factory jobs to go around, and you can’t earn too good a living at them anymore anyhow. So buck up! Go to school, become a child not left behind, and take one of those entry-level sitonyourassallday jobs, because that’s the only star you can hook up to and swing on nowadays, Baby, and that’s the rest of the whole truth, which, of course, the Redemopublicrats don’t tell you. They tell you the parts that sound good, but the real heart of the truth is like a rock they can’t bust up. They’re not talking about the heart of it, and not talking about the heart of it is a lie.

We’ve got millions of unemployed. That's the heart of it; so, like it or not, millions of Americans are going to have to take a healthless wealthless headless morejob anyway, because even if every child didn’t get left behind, and even if every last unemployed worker in the USA spent his or her last solitary cent to get smart and take one of those high-skill mediocre wage sitonyourassallday jobs, there would still be millions of unemployed left over, and the only jobs left would be healthless wealthless headless morejobs.

The Redemopublicrats tell us another lie, that these are desperate times for everyone, and that we of the one-time middle class need to take the healthless wealthless headless morejobs or leave them.

We already know we’re desperate! We don’t need to be told. We know the really rich people are really rich and the rest of us aren’t. We’ve heard the 99% talk it to death, and we’ve seen Occupy Wall Street occupying it, and the Tea Party having their party over it, but they’re all beginning to look a lot alike. They start out expressing brilliant ideas about how they’re going to create wealth for everybody, or not, or pay taxes, or not, or eliminate government, or grow government, or reduce government, except allow lots of Big Bank lobbying, or limited lobbying, or no lobbying, or do a combination of many things, and by the time they’ve finished politicizing their ideas, they’ve sifted out the big stuff that they really don’t want to deal with, and their plans amount to the same original lie: morejobs. And the Redemopublicrats pick up the finely sifted story there and tell us that’s all we’re going to get out of them.

Their lie about us having to “come up the hard way,” just like “they” did, is shameful. Most Redemopublicrats have been “up” for so long that they don’t remember what it means to be poor, and some of them define “hardship” as having to sell something, so they find it necessary to choose from their yacht, their house in Florida, their house in California, their lodge in Colorado, or their little bungalow in Paris. Must be awfully tough.

Back in the 80’s, the last time the Redemopublicrats had it so tough, they got this great idea. The idea was, Eliminate the Middle Class. Steal their wealth. Slash benefits. Cut jobs.

But they didn’t use those terms publicly. They used lies: “Outsource,” yeah, that’s the ticket. “Reduce waste.” That meant reduce wages. “Put America to work.” That meant use the middle class.

So the Redemopublicrats started to “use” the middle class hard:

“Use the middle class! Use their pension funds!” they cried. “Use them to make risky investments. Trim those health benefits. Enhance profit margins. Drive share prices up! Buy low and sell high. Give the rabble a few bucks’ savings in taxes - it’s a paltry savings when they’re not making much money in the first place - but keep telling them, ‘Here’s the advantage we’ve given you. Now you gotta come up the hard way, like me!’ Then aim a mortgage at their heads and say, ‘And here’s an easy mortgage for you. Take it or leave it. Make my day.’”

Nobody aimed a gun to our heads, you say? That’s a lie. If you work at a healthless wealthless headless morejob, and Redemopublicrats start telling you to “come up the hard way,” and they aim a mortgage at you and say, “Here it is. Take it or leave it,” well, that feels cold as a gun barrel. Sounds like you don’t have too much choice. Take it? Leave it? A chance at having your dream? This must be the opportunity. This is it. Take it! This is how you get ahead. This is the way you “come up the hard way.”

So people buy those mortgages, and they surrender more of their wealth. The Redemopublicrats begin to invest what the middle class is forced to sacrifice, arranging it so they're risking as little as possible of their own wealth.

"Now you do the same," they tell the Middle Class. "Invest what you have left of your wealth, if you happen to have any, at tremendous risk. Create new wealth after our example; ride the wave of investment to prosperity and happily-ever-after land."

They tell lots of fairy tales and lots of lies: "You must invest. You're not really having your government entitlements cut; you're getting the opportunity to control all that money and invest it the way you want! Watch your investments carefully, and then maybe you’ll be able to come up the way we did.”

Most of the middle class are far too busy working two or three healthless wealthless headless morejobs, getting kids off to school and figuring out which bills to pay and which not to pay, to watch their investments! They don’t even know yet how thoroughly they’re getting used.

And that is how the Redemopublicrats became extraordinarily rich. And when the bottom fell out of the whole mess, they still saved a very tidy share of the wealth they’d gathered. The rabble middle class didn’t. They lost theirs because they trusted the Big Banks to invest wisely for them. Besides, they were so busy doing their healthless wealthless headless morejobs that they didn’t have time to pay attention to the way they’d been used. And then the Redemopublicrats told the people who were once middle class that they had to pay for the disaster.

And how do we pay?

Why, no doubt the process will involve taking some of those “morejobs.” The Redemopublicrats are reminding us again, these are desperate times, and we don’t have much choice, not now. Same as before, feels like a gun to our heads. No lie.

So we get off unemployment and take any healthless wealthless headless morejob available in order to be doing something. We add another healthless wealthless headless morejob if we can find one and if we have any time left to work. And the Redemopublicrats reassure us that if we can keep working at those healthless wealthless headless morejobs, the economy will improve and we’ll reduce the national deficit and the national debt, and maybe, if we’re willing to scrimp and save for the future, we poor people will be able to invest, and if we are really careful, and if we watch our investments with vigilance this time so that the Big Banks don’t play those risky games with our money, then maybe the rest of us will prosper just a little, maybe. We might even become middle class again, maybe someday.

But for now, we’re not middle class anymore. We’re poor, and we’ve got to “come up the hard way,” like the Redemopublicrats.