The New Classism

Yesterday I met two guys who work for the Montana Department of Corrections. I figured they'd be "lock 'em up and throw away the key" types, but actually as we started talking about what they do, one of them said, "Correction is the one thing we don't do in the prison system. The only difference between those guys and me is those guys got caught." He said that 80% of the women and 60% of the men are non-violent, and these people aren't getting better inside, they're getting worse. I said that sometimes in California you're walking in the countryside and you see some gorgeously architected, brand-new building with spires and interesting colors. You think it's a school until you see the high fence and the gun towers and you realize that the only brand new buildings we have in California are prisons, not schools.

But anyway, the point we agreed on was this: I think that racism is subsiding, slowly to be sure, in the U.S., but it's being replaced by classism. Increasingly, we feel that poor people are deservedly poor, we're buying into the concept of bootstrapping. All the rich corporated interests and lobbyists and politicians in power like to pretend that they're self-made, when indeed the bulk of them (at least the ones who most strenuously pretend to be ranchers and entrepreneurs)are endowed with old money. It's the great myth. I told these guys that my feeling about politics today is not entirely driven by party lines or liberalism, it's about the erosion of true representative government. That's what happening with globalization--it's the next stage. No longer are the maquiladoras and migrant workers and blue-collar folks the only ones who have no voice in the global business machine, now it's gone to the next level: professionals, writers and software programmers and transcriptionists and accountants and lawyers. These are the people who took it for granted that their government represented them. These are the ones who must wake up.

The question is, how do you get through to them? I think subtlety, or brilliance, must be the answer. I saw part of the Matin Scorcese documentary on Bob Dylan the other night. It's interesting how good he was at capturing the essence of pacifism and civil rights and injustice in America. Yet according to the TV show, he really was not a political person at all, even though political activists seized him as their poster boy. Apparently, he was incredibly naive about socialism and the various doctrines that were swirling around the left--or, as one of the interviewees said, incredibly wise.

I guess it just shows once again that some artists have a gift for communication that is so powerful because it's so universal, simple and clear. It speaks to people, even if the artist himself meant something entirely different. It's transcendence.