Born Into This: The American Economy as Casino
In this essay, R.C. Roberts considers the notion that the driver of the American economy is 'luck', since the class system is now ossified.
Our Fidélean Republic watched, recently, as two billionaires put rockets 'into' space, much in the same way a teenage boy might make that claim after an awkward night of sex, when he goes back and brags. Many see the hilarity in these supposed accomplishments, as I do, and some have drunk enough of the plutocratic kool-aid that they see this as some kind of pinnacle in technology. But the numerous memes, articles, and jokes about the situation all missed the most important thing about the launching of these Freudian folie de grandeur; it was the most in-our-face proof that competition as a driver of economics in this country is dead. We no longer compete--did we ever?--, now we grift. We no longer cooperate, we use. We do not have friends, we have 'allies'. Every discussion of economics I hear from Americans makes me contemplate Charles Bukowski's poem Dinosauria, We, particularly this stanza:
"We are born like this
into this
into hospitals which are so expensive
that it’s cheaper to die
into lawyers who charge so much
that it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full
And the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools
Into rich heroes."
It should not surprise anyone that a poet addicted to gambling on the horses would be able to best grasp the au fond of the American economy; our economy is a casino. We are expected to play the craps table and put our fortunes against fate, with some dead-eyed hope at 'winning it all'. Like the casinos, the American economy is little more than an extension of animal husbandry; every week, you are enticed to the slots, clocking in at work to put your time in, hoping some kind of winnings come out.
On the weekends, we are encouraged to go to dim lit night clubs and sit in the dark watching movies on Netflix, or those who do not get weekends are convinced that the dim lights of a quiet building are reminiscent of The Office, where friendships and achievement are being birthed at the late nights when they could be anywhere else.
Oxygen--for Americans, this is called entertainment--is pumped into the nation like laughing gas. It keeps us awake, it pushes us to do more and more, even with the little time we are allotted. We are kept awake, if not by the desire to consume, then by the anxiety that we are not 'productive'. The weekends, our time 'to ourselves', are connected to a labyrinth of new shows, new clothes, new products, new commodities, that lead us right back to where we were before. We are always online, where the windows to the world have been replaced with funhouse mirrors, and we criticize everyone for their reflections; reflections that do not, really, reveal who they are.
And we are told, constantly, that someone is always winning; from the thousands of articles that evoke mendacious calligrams of people who 'make fortunes' while young or in trying situations, while later revealed that they had a windfall of money from parents or some legal case in which they sued someone or they were able to do non-paying jobs because they are the à la poulaine of this or that wealthy benefactor. Or one need only consider the press coverage over someone who has won the lottery, using it to remind people that they can 'make it big' in America. We are a people obsessed with chasing lights we can see but cannot grasp; I would compare Americans to cats, but I would rather not insult the cats. The only reason for these lights, these noises, a constant nuisance, is to trick us into thinking someone is winning. What Bukowski said of democracy, one can say of the stories of financial fortune and the American Dream; they feed us this shit to keep us from burning down the palace.
Our economics is a casino, and our fortunes and fatalities are the consequences of luck.
***
I find that the French were right to categorize their Republic by the number of times it has changed its Constitution; this is a view I have turned onto our own Republic, seeing our nation as having lived through Six Republics. We, of course, are not nearly as ambitious as the French; we do not change the Constitution, we merely add on to it.Where the genius of the American Constitution, as a matter of potential, is that it can change, we fumble with it just like most of the other ideas that we have imported. With our refusal to allow changes to a document meant to change, we are occasionally afflicted by the cosa nostra we call a government. Their particular type of crime is protean; it changes every time Americans grow a backbone--which we immediately relax after a short exercise--or someone finds the right way to lure Americans into doing the right thing. When the American people balk, the gangsters in office, often with the help of their corporate counterparts, will merely set up a new shell company to continue different crimes which have slipped the very narrow attention spans of the American public.
Consider the double slavery of we, 'home of the free'; we are wage slaves, and debtor slaves. We are not allowed to make enough, and we are not allowed to be without a master. America is currently acting out Bob Dylan's 'Gotta Serve Somebody', where the strongest bond of the populous is not a notion of kinship, collective goal, or shared history, but a shared master and its double love of low wages and deep debts. Everywhere the American people are unthinking conduits to the shocks of this electric system that powers our slot machines and the lights over our poker tables.
Our Sixth Republic, birthed from the miscarriage of the Nixon Administration but raised by the Reagan Administration, is the phase of our Republic that has constructed our current casino-capitalism through the treacle marriage of entertainment, debt, and wages. It should not surprise anyone, however; Reagan was an actor, the worst B-list production the entertainment industry ever forced upon us until the recent advent of Tiger King. It has been the strategic take of politicians, since our dark haired muppet-in-chief, that the American populous could be palpated by the mere movement of shadows and the appearance of bright lights, but unlike the operators before them, they have refused the need to at least pretend to be serious about their jobs. They are no longer governing the people, but cultivating 'followers'. They speak so forthrightly about idiotic conspiracy theories and intervene in controversial issues not because it is important to the government; they speak because they want their followers to hear them, to keep them from leaving the herd they have accumulated. They dance and prance, eat like troglodytes, and shit on the floor like one-trick ponies, and we keep showing up, if only to see who or what pulls on their bit and rides on their harness, jerking them this way and that.
When I watch the members of Congress of our era, I can hear the words of Tiberius reach my lips, and I speak with the shared irritation of that most eccentric emperor; the members of Congress are people fit to be slaves--and yet, they are supposedly our masters.
Our Congress is a three-ringed circus; operators, new class, and the anomie. The new class, which I extensively defiled in my article Pond Scum and Monsters: Considerations of the "New Class", are little more than placeholder representatives; they come in, open wide, and pleasure businesses until their usefulness is undermined, either by them or by others. These are the people who, once finished in office, join firms, like the way Bill Shuster went to Squire Patton Boggs or Lamar Smith and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen went to Akin Gump, or consider how most of the former Obama Administration is currently working for Silicon Valley tech firms or other assorted 'firms', financial, legal, or tech. These people often cycle through the Fox News-CNN-MSNBC merry-go-round of mentiri. People who think TV is too censored are not paying attention; we view mindless masturbation 24/7, and these are the people who take part in it.
In the second ring, we have the anomies, a term I steal from Émile Durkheim, are the more recent members of Congress who appear different from their counterparts; they appear to be out and against the norms and customs of our Congress. Be it 'The Squad' and their usage of the term 'socialist' or local yokels like Majorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, they appear to be very different from the members we have had before. Populists without the silver dollar, and constantly in search of the golden cross our Nation wishes to crucify us on, we get to witness something less akin to the rise of revolutionary politics and more akin to a food fight in a middle school production of High School Musical. We have early 30s to late 40s adults, newly trained by the advent of social media, to be their own PR agents, attempting to use high school style debating points and TikTok to 'dunk' on their fellow members, while getting absolutely nothing done. Their 'populism' is not about the populous but about popular culture, and thus the American people are no longer merely assaulted by special interests and lobbyists, they now must contend with artificial, manufactured cyber-popularity. Populism, of course, has always had this Achilles' heel, where popularity took the place of governance; they say, in different ways, that apocryphal quote given to Ledru-Rollin, "There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader." But they do not chase the people, the populous; they chase popularity. It changes from 'We the People' to 'We the Popular' all too easily.
This gets me to the last part of the circus; the operators. If the first person you thought of was Mitch McConnell, I will slow-clap your lack of imagination which just happens to be true. Our Sixth Republic was built by these operators, who look at the new class as useful idiots and the anomies as ungrateful kids who just don't understand. They're the owners of this casino-capitalism, marketers of our Hell who tell us the old post-Cold War line that 'this is as good as it gets'. Consider, for example, Joe Biden, our president and one of the many operators of our system. He was, to borrow from Alexander Cockburn, 'a creature of the banks of Delaware who wrote the bills that compel people into bankruptcy', who also sponsored the infamous Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and has voted for raising the minimum wage, but once in office had to be pressured to do so. He created this system of debtor-slaves and wage-slaves, and even if he is not the auteur, he was its executor. He is an operator. He, and the other operators for that matter, are not evil masterminds controlling everything; I am not a gullible conspiracy theorist, nor do I find the current conception of the phrase 'hive mind' to be all that impressive. As Gore Vidal said, these people do what they do because they all think alike. The reason the operators are in the circus is because, unlike the immature Popul(ar)ists and the cum-stained new class, they are the true believers in our system, because it benefits them so much; when Biden gives a speech about the greatness of our military, the wonderful essence of capitalism, and speaks fondly about the history of this Republic, he means it.
He loves the casino he has made for us, and he expects us to enjoy ourselves. And as for those who put their fortunes against fate, only to come out losers, with no money for the slots? Too bad Jack, this is the best we can do.
***
Jean Paul Sartre once asserted that, sometimes, the truth is too simple for intellectuals. I am not sure if we have intellectuals anymore, but I do know that in their place we have spawned a new class of 'thinkers' who, by and large, call themselves theorists. Some call themselves critical theorists, some call themselves political theorists, and many others have many different titles that point towards, or suggest, that they take a theoretical look at life. I once aspired to be these sorts of people, holding the world away from yourself, always at a distance; the guy who controls the magnifying lens while everyone looks through it. But I looked behind the magnifying glass, and I saw that the burning of ants was not necessary, and in fact that it was cruel; often, the theorist will tell you 'how things must be', and truly it is only so by way of their distant, distorted thinking.
When theorists discuss American economics, I see the ants, and I see the burning light; people not only become props for the theorists, they become subhuman. The theorist does not look out their window to see how people move; they know next to nothing about accidents, which is the main driver of economics. Everything, to them, is a secret sign of the divine; if I buy milk instead of orange juice, I must wonder about the dialectic or about the invisible hand of the markets, as though I am a puppet in the stage play with Jim Henson's hand up my ass.
The inability of people to look upon reality at eye-level gives us ideas that magnify some things and not others; those who would reduce our relations to racialized motives or mere class analysis miss several things, and do not ask many questions. In fact, what Irving Stone said of William Jennings Bryan, you can say of our 'theorists'; their minds are like soup dishes; wide, shallow, and able to hold a small amount of anything, but upset it even slightly and the contents end up in someone's lap. I appreciate that, unlike most people, their dish can hold at least some things, but I must speak softly to them, lest they spill their contents all over me.
Theory is wonderful, when it organizes information and patterns, but as of now, our current ‘theorists’ do not such thing; they talk about us, to us, without observing us. I am, to them, a product; a product of this class, a product of this race, a product of this sex. They forget about the alienated being beneath; one whose ideology is merely the confusion of language, whose class imposes a stale obscenity of neuroses, and who is free but not liberated. That, perhaps, I am not a product of these things, but that I was born into these things.
All I can advise one about their analysis of American economics is that it requires the same thing that a cheat does at the poker table; you need to be watching the player in order to understand what they're doing.
Otherwise, you're just blowing on dice, and hoping for the best.