The great Canadian media scholar, Marshall McLuhan, observed way back in the 1960s that Americans viewed life through a rearview mirror. We live in Bonanza-land, he suggested. He was right then and nothing has changed.
We nurture the myth of rugged individualism and decry "Big Government." Today, the Tea Party blasts "Obama-care." But the 2010 federal health care legislation is only the culmination of an 80-year process of constructing a social welfare system not unlike the systems that exist in all the Democracies of Western Europe as well as in Japan. Forget so-called "American exceptionalism." We have done during the past eight decades what all civilized, compassionate, developed democracies have done. It began with the New Deal: Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act (minimum wages, overtime, an end to child labor), the National Labor Relations Act and the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act (which together made unions viable).
We knock unions. But unions in their heydays of the 1950s and 1960s made it possible for tens of millions of American workers and their families to enter the middle class. Are non-union "sales associates" at Wallmart better off than the auto workers and steelworkers of 40 or 50 years ago? Are you kidding?
We knock public education. But it was the other great enabler of middle class status for millions and millions of ordinary Americans. Today, on one hand a phalanx of new, conservative governors promise to slash public higher education. They propose to continue to undermine --- believe me, my colleagues in public universities assure me their institutions are already cash starved and stripped to the bone in many, many cases --- one of the greatest assets ever built in this nation: the great land-grant state university systems.
Meanwhile, for-profit universities propagate the myth that they are more efficient providers of practical education. Oh, really? Fact is that, take away the federal titty --- federal student loans ---and most of these for-profit schools would close their doors within the year. Worse still, the repayment rates on these loans are abysmal, suggesting that these schools are not fulfilling their federal statutory mandate of providing their alumni with "gainful employment." Furthermore, the fines that some of them pay as a cost of doing business, and the investigations that have been conducted recently by the US Department of Education, indicate that their recruitment/admissions practices are fraught with fraud. But still we buy their hype that they are the better alternative to the great public and private, non-profit colleges and universities, which are in fact one of the few sectors of the economy where America remains --- but not for long, folks --- the best in the world.
McLuhan got it right more than 40 years ago. We live in Bonanza-land, a mythical place of American exceptionalism and rugged individualism, that hasn't existed for a century or more. And because our heads are in these mythical clouds, we buy the bologna peddled by Palin and her ilk. They are getting richer by keeping their taxes low; by gutting organized labor; by starving public education and fostering for-profit private education in its place; by attacking and, where possible, blocking social-welfare legislation, such as mandated health care for all Americans; by blessing sky-rocketing compensation for CEOs while stripping pensions and health care benefits from minimum wage workers; by allowing Wall Street piggies to get rich while our retirement funds plummeted, and to get still richer when Uncle Sam baled their firms out. They tell us to make government smaller, while their army of lobbyists in Washington just keeps getting bigger... a shadow government numbering in the thousands.
So long as we buy the myth of Bonanza-land, we'll continue to be blind to our own self-interest... blind to the laws and institutions that actually were responsible for the creation of the great American middle class... to the unique phenomenon of America in the second half of the 20th century, when we were the envy of all the rest of the world.
Here's some suggested reading for those who might want to follow up on some of these early-morning thoughts:
A Century of Service: Land-Grant Colleges and Universities 1890-1990
Colleges for Our Land and Time: Land Grant Idea in American Education
Democracy's college;: The land-grant movement in the formative state (American education: its men, ideas, and institutions)
The 1980 Land-Grant Colleges: A Centennial Review
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