by Victor Davis Hanson in
PJ Media
Latifundia
Let me explain. All the farms in these environs that I grew up
with — 40-80 acres with a farmhouse and family — have simply vanished.
Where did they go?
I suppose when I meet someone with 5,000 acres that I am supposed
to think that spread represents the old, and now recombined, 100 50-acre farms
under new management. Yet where did the 100 farm households go — and what
replaced them?
When I ride around the rural landscape, I see the old skeletons of
farmhouses; but they are mostly rented to farm workers. Are the social
circumstances of renting a house and working on a 5,000-acre farm different
from 100 agrarian households doing it — in terms of local PTA, Little League,
the regional hospital board, or city council?
I leave it to you to decide. I can attest only that in terms of
agricultural productivity, today’s 8,000-acre almond operations look far more
efficient, up to date, and savvy than what 100 80-acre almond orchards used to
seem like: old barn, clunky tractors in the yard, kids out in the orchard not
up on the latest scientific approaches to fertilization, mom doing the books in
a way the computerized corporate whiz kid would laugh at, tight-fisted gramps
hobbling about looking for loose tire-popping nails in the alleyway while
giving sermons about avoiding a mortgage.
The Tech Ghettos
The new pyramid is not just agricultural. Go to Silicon Valley. In
all the old quaint homes of Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Palo Alto that I
remember visiting in the 1960s, there is only a small middle class. The houses,
true, are almost preserved in amber, appearing just as they did on the
tree-lined streets a half-century ago. But what is in them now?
Strapped $400,000 a year-income couples paying $10,000 a month in
taxes and mortgages for $800-per-square-foot old frame cottages are not what I
remember. Even a far greater number of residents are renting $2,000 a month
apartments, while a vast underclass of families in Redwood City and East Palo
Alto quadruples up in rented 1,000 square-foot houses.
A few tech and financing geniuses live in splendor in Woodside or
Portola Valley (well, not quite in splendor: air lift their multimillion-dollar
castles to Fresno or Merced and their square footages and design would suddenly
be considered no more than mere $500,000 nice, big houses).
What drives the new madcap California rush to the high-priced
coastal strip? The weather has not changed since 1960. Stanford is still
Stanford; Berkeley remains Berkeley. Is it the destruction of the old interior
muscular world and the new high profits of the cerebral coastal? Does one pass
up a $150,000 house in Madera to go into life-long debtor status to buy
something smaller for $1 million to escape the dividends of illegal immigration
and vast entitlements in the interior?
The small dry cleaner and his wife the teacher do not buy a nice
1,500 square foot home in San Carlos, start their 3-children family in their
twenties, and join the middle class. More likely the future bridegroom is still
single, living at home until he is 30. His would-be wife is still renting. And
at 35 they might marry and have one child with a $600,000 mortgage. There is no
room there for the middle-class family starting out youthful, with visions of a
ranch house, kids, good jobs, and upward mobility.
What Now?
What happened? The problem was not
that the U.S. ran out of oil and gas, good farmland, minerals,
or timber. We still have ideas and the Constitution. We were not wiped out by
disease. Nor did we lost the scientific expertise of our predecessors through a
new Dark Age. America was not invaded by Vandals and Goths, who
ignored the upkeep of aqueducts and plundered
civic buildings. Nor did we reach the end of history, with nothing to do anymore.
Our roadways are still not all that safe or all that clean. Our factories are
not running at full capacity.
So what is turning us into a social pyramid, with an elite pointed
capstone and a broad foundation of poor, as the middle in-between narrows
toward the top? You know the usual tune: postindustrial economies value new
Eloi expertise, not Morlock brawn. Globalization outsourced jobs. Expectations
grew even faster than reality, etc.
Maybe, maybe not.
The Attic Trap Door
I think three other reasons explain the present anomaly of our
bread-and-circuses culture. First is the attic-door philosophy of the cultural
elite. Once our urban elite became so wealthy and exempt from the conditions of
acquiring their wealth (inheritance, dot.com start-ups, and Wall Street
megaprofits can all do that quite suddenly), they began to dream of utopia, one
to be imposed on the less fortunate and perhaps less deserving.
Once you have a home in Carmel with a granite counter, you do not
like to see or hear the dirty mining of granite. A redwood deck
is nice; but not the cutting of redwood.
If your power bill is $500 a month, that is a fraction of your
weekly income, and so a small sacrifice to pay for the far more valuable
assurance that you sleep soundly at night, content with the knowledge that you
are not part of liquid fracking in the barren hills, or horizontal drilling
under the beloved Pacific.
If the grubby poor do not appreciate the sight of whales off the
coast frolicking on a Sunday afternoon, then why worry whether they have a job
drilling? In short, the mere reassurance that a distant spotted newt is
meandering in a Sierra stream is a far more ennobling thought than knowing that
a Deliverance-like logger has a job cutting a tree down. The former is
natural, cuddly, innocuous, silent, native, a symptom of a clean, healthy
planet; the latter is gross, loud, disruptive, and an interloper, and proof of
fallen man.
If your house is nice and in pleasant circumstances, why worry
whether thousands of out-of-work Californians might wish to rush to the hills
to salvage a billion-board feet of burned timber? For what purpose? To build
ugly affordable condos on the 280-corridor for the Kia-driving class that does
not recycle? To offer “jobs” so that loggers can play video games at night?
Zombie Government
All our regulations, prohibitions, and caveats about developing
the world about us have ensured that the world about us is too expensive for
most of us. In California, a million loggers, frackers, horizontal drillers,
miners, and farmers are not on the Montecito or San Rafael agenda. 101 is
crowded enough without another 100,000 new SUVs racing about between Wal-Mart
and Costco.
The growth of the federal government also has ensured two, not
three, classes. The huge expansion in entitlements not only discourages
incentives to labor (will one work two jobs to buy a house and get braces for
his kids’ teeth, or stay home and reduce his [reported] income to qualify for
free food assistance, housing credits, legal and educational aid, health care,
and disability insurance?), but also discourages those who still work.
The government has either directly handcuffed the individual or
created laws that force the private sector to
handcuff him. In the last few weeks, in addition to the normal property and
irrigation tax bills (always up, never static, much less declining), I have
received the following: a request to fill out a federal ag survey, a notice
about a new federal ag regulation, a ballot to vote for candidates on a public
board, a water-user fee to shield me from lawsuits about collective water
quality, a government inventory request on things on the farm, a notice about
changes to my health insurance, a bill to pay fire insurance to a state-wide
agency that replicates my current fire-protection taxes to local districts, and
a broad increase in the cost of my liability insurance.
The problem is not just that we pay for those to think up these
regulations, or that these regulations hamper commerce; but also that we
despair at the myriad of useless forms and busy work of the otherwise idle
bureaucracy. Psychologically, we reach a state where inaction is preferable to
audacity: we join the body snatchers.
Electronic Dope
Finally, technology is bifurcating us as well. Smartphones, the
Internet, video games, iPads — the whole technological inventory indispensable
even to the
welfare recipient — have discouraged the age-old idea of self-improvement.
Advancement was always predicated on greater education and experience. Reading
literature, mastering grammar and syntax, improved diction, training the mind
for such mental gymnastics — all that is antithetical to communicating at the
speed of light on Facebook and Twitter, to announce each minute while walking,
driving or talking, “Whatsup?” “I’m OK, you?” and other critical exchanges of
knowledge. Sending a picture of yourself driving has turned the inane into the
essential, and something great and noble was lost in that bargain. Sometimes
danger follows — like yesterday when a 16-wheeler on the 99 swerved in and out
of the left lane, while the driver was texting vital commentary on Dante’s Inferno
or a new insight on the Federalist Papers.
The underclass is hooked on electronic dope. They are not fracking
or building houses. And they are not on idle evenings scanning the Internet to
discover what Venice looks like or to learn the etymology of democracy or even
to learn how to tile or do wiring, at least not normally. Instead it is a sort
of addiction to images, graphics, and the sheer speed of communicating. How can
you advise a youth that improving his computing skills, his language, his
demeanor, and his work ethic is essential to social mobility and the general
collective tranquility and stability of society, when you are competing against
Grand Theft Auto and Tweets, or, for
that matter, the therapeutic industry reassuring the unemployed that someone
somewhere did this to him?
In sum, our Al Gore elite climbed into the tastefully empty
observation cupola, pulled up the trap door, and now gazes at the view. It does
not always like what it sees interrupting its majestic vistas, and so shouts to
those below on the too crowded ladder that the way is barred, to climb down and
stay down.
Government has become a paramecium, an amoeba whose prime
directive is to grow and consume and multiply without knowledge of what it is
supposed to be doing other than expanding. Or maybe the better metaphor is the
zombie. The groping state smells those still alive and then plods and claws
itself toward the few remaining living, in a mindless effort to incorporate or
devour them. The zombie likes best the scent of the pizza franchiser or masonry
contractor, not the welfare recipient or the Facebook executive.
Finally, poverty and the underclass are now disguised with an
electronic veneer. Watching Oprah during the day with access to free food while
tweeting, Facebooking and video-gaming is not quite Dickensian London, and
therefore the elemental struggle to climb out is far harder. It was always more
difficult for wily Odysseus to escape the Lotus-eaters than the Cyclopes.
Physical deprivation and hunger are one thing; the poverty of the
mind and psyche is quite another. Crashing Costco to find bulk beans and
rice is not the same as flash-mobbing for Air Jordans and iPhones.
How odd that our cultural elite and our dependent poor are
somewhat alike, in a symbiotic relationship in which the latter guilt-trip the
former for entitlements, with the assurance that the top of the pyramid is safe
and free to fritter about far from those they worry about. No wonder those in
between who lack the romance of the poor and the privileges and power of the
elite are shrinking.
We are entering the age of the bread-and-circuses Coliseum:
luxury box seats for the fleshy senatorial class, free food and tickets
for the rest — and the shrinking middle out in the sand of the arena providing
the entertainment.
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