This post from Paul Krugman got me thinking. The post features a youtube of Al Jolson singing Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, with lyrics penned by Yip Harburg, who went on to pen the words for The Wizard of Oz.
The song tells the story of a the working men who served in World War I, worked hard throughout the twenties, and then bore the brunt of the Depression created by the bankers and stock manipulators who created that Depression, pretty much like they created the one we are in now.
Our official unemployment rate is inching toward 10%, but the government has been gaming those statistics for years by excluding huge numbers of the actual unemployed from the official unemployed. There’s a lot of real suffering going on out there, which more than bears comparison to the Depression, and, due to everyone’s refusal to face the reality and address it properly, bodes fair to last longer than the Depression and leave this country a second rate economic power.
Unless I’m grossly deceived, songs like Yarburg’s were not unusual during that period, nor was the fact that so many people were suffering totally ignored by the artistic community or what we would now call the major media. I realize that lots of what Hollywood put out then was escapist, and I can see the need for exactly that. But the fact that people were out there suffering was more front and center than today. Where are our Harburgs, or Woody Guthries? Where are the pictures of the unemployed? Who is writing the next Grapes of Wrath? We have a surplus of Father Coughlins, but the parallels seem to stop there. Our media pretends that the crisis is simply a mathematical abstraction, caused by forces that cannot be controlled, the effects of which we cannot remedy. Weirdly, our politicians, particularly the Democrats, follow suit, afraid to do anything while their electoral prospects deteriorate and we face the prospects of a Republican Congress composed of people who have promised to do worse than nothing by bringing back the policies that got us here.
We seem to be in denial mode. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this Depression coincides with the precipitous decline of the Empire we never acknowledged we had, while the last Depression occurred when we were still comparatively innocent.
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