[Peace-discuss] Is Iowa important? (II)

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Options in America: Kill Yourself or Have a Baby
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Time made Vladimir Putin its Man of the Year. Chalk it up as nostalgia 
for the cold war, when America was great, and a working man in a state 
like Michigan had two cars, a nice house, a country cabin, a health 
plan, a pension and a wife who stayed at home, canning fruit and batting 
her eyes at the postman. These days he has two lousy jobs, she has three 
and they have negative equity in their home, no health plan and no pension.

A couple of indices of how down many Americans are feeling about the 
future: The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans has reached its 
highest point in at least 25 years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention recently reported.

The rate rose by about 20 percent between 1999 and 2004 for U.S. 
residents ages 45 through 54 ­ far more than among younger adults, whose 
own suicide stats are also on the rise.

In 2004, there were 16.6 completed suicides per 100,000 people in the 
45-54 cohort, the highest it's been since the CDC started tracking such 
rates, around 1980. The previous high was 16.5, in 1982, a year when 
there was a terrible farm crisis in the Mid-West.

These days it's the health care crisis. People can't even afford to get 
finished off respectably by a doctor or a hospital, so they have to do 
it themselves.

The second index of desperation is a sudden spike in teen pregnancies, 
particularly among young black women. As R.F. Blader wrote a few days 
ago here on this site, "When we believe in our opportunities, we 
safeguard our futures. Conversely, we behave self-destructively when we 
have no hope. For many teenagers in America, the options aren't 
heartening. In a society where opportunities are scarce and life is 
getting harder, getting pregnant puts a positive spin on a vote of 
no-confidence." Indeed some argue that having babies early is a very 
rational choice for a young black teen, since her support network of kin 
are still alive, and her own body not wasted by the toxins associated 
with low income neighborhoods.

In less than a week America will start trudging through the endless 
months of Campaign 2008. Worthy Iowans, their quadrennial season in the 
limelight at its apex, will cram into the caucuses and kick off the 
horse races. In all the torrents of rhetorical hot air thus far 
expended, it's hard to find a single sentence from any politician that 
could give any comfort to that suicidal 50-year old or the teen with a 
toddler as her only solace. There are gestures to populism by the 
Democrat John Edwards, but I've not met anyone who believes that there 
is the slightest chance of substantive reform of health care or a 
reversal of soaring trends in inequality. The bad guys have a lock on 
the system.

The default option these days is fantasy ­ a trend in American politics 
kicked off in this epoch by Ronald Reagan. Reagan knew how to keep 
things simple. When Reagan died a Pentagon official told me that when 
Ron became president in 1981, and thus "commander in chief" the Joint 
Chiefs of Staffs mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for 
him, replete with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in 
simple terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed 
off. The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists. 
The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature, 
with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on their 
launchpads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shrivelled in their bunkers. 
Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the joint chiefs wanted 
to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them to the effect that "we need 
more money". Reagan really enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked 
for repeats.

Reagan set the bar for the level of national political debate. They 
called him the Great Communicator and no one has moved the bar since. So 
who cares if his great contribution to the national fantasy "missile 
defense", aka, "the strategic defense initiative" aka "Star Wars, is now 
scheduled to consume 19 per cent of the defense budget even though it's 
well nigh universally admitted the system is useless. The system is 
impregnable to reform and everyone knows it.

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