The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior

by Sarah Kendzior

We are passive subjects, held hostage to a vindictive minority divorced from public will.

Today the attack on the poor is no longer cloaked in ideology – it is ideology itself.

When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor.

The economic crisis is a crisis of managed expectations. Americans are being conditioned to accept their own exploitation as normal.

When the powerful condemn the medium of a marginalized messenger, it is the messenger they are truly after. Most recognize that in authoritarian regimes, the demonization of social media is a transparent play for power. Few who see themselves as advocates for justice support the condemnation of those who use it to fight for their rights.

In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems have no alternative but to matter - for they structure the limitations of their lives - are locked out of the discussion.

little millennial lost

Love this updated variation of "little boy lost."

That was the message of the Iraq war: There is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth.

In 2002, Ron Suskind, a reporter for the New York Times, met with an unnamed aide to George W Bush who accused Suskind of being part of the "reality-based community". The aide meant it as an insult: this was not the way the world worked anymore. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," said the aide, later alleged to be Bush adviser Karl Rove. "And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Ten years after the Iraq war, we continue to live in an era of hysterical panic about invented catastrophes and false reassurances about real catastrophes. We laugh bitterly at the "Mission Accomplished" sign raised nearly a decade before the war ended, but the Bush administration did accomplish something. They accomplished the mission of persuading everyday Americans that the unthinkable is normal. We see remnants of this created reality in the financial crisis - the ongoing "great recession" that, like preemptive war, has transformed what Americans will accept. It is normal for criminal financiers to receive record bonuses in an age marked by austerity, it is normal for professionals to work years unpaid in the hope of someday landing a job, it is normal for one year of college to cost more than the average median income. This is normal, they say - but if Iraq should have taught us anything, it is how easily and brazenly "normal" can be redefined.

If Iraq was launched on the illusion of invincibility, the financial crisis is abetted by the acceptance of powerlessness.

We lost more in Iraq than a war. We lost accountability and faith in our institutions, and most of all, we lost the outrage that accompanies that loss, because we came to expect it and accept it as normal. This quiet acquiescence is, in the end, as damaging as any lie we were told.