Oligarchy: a five part series

Michael Ventura is one of my favorite columnists. He's erratic and unpredictable. Sometimes I think his insights are brilliant. Other times I'm not really that interested in what he has to say.

He writes Letters at 3am for the Austin Chronicle, and I've just caught up on what has been on his mind this year; in particular, a five part series on what he describes as America's descent into oligarchy.

There are likely paragraphs you'll disgree with, or which will make you cringe, or even elicit whatever knee jerk reaction fits your own personality. I experienced all of that.

But there are also some truths in there, especially in the second column of the series in which Ventura argues that we're all responsible for what America has become:

The growth of the American Oligarchy has been building for decades, and we've been its enablers.

When I was a boy in Brooklyn we shopped at Jack's Delicatessen. Jack was someone we knew and liked. When we ran short of money, Jack let us buy groceries "on the tab." He knew us. He trusted us to pay that tab. Most of us were good for it. Jack lived where we lived. He was our neighbor. Money spent at Jack's stayed in the neighborhood, and Jack and his kind had a stake in keeping our streets as decent as possible.

Then a shiny big supermarket came to the neighborhood with a bigger variety of products that cost less. Not much less. A nickel, a quarter. We didn't know who owned the supermarket, and we didn't ask. They didn't run tabs like Jack did, but it was all so shiny, and it was a little cheaper. We abandoned Jack, who'd been our friend. To save nickels and quarters, we abandoned him. Oh, we still went to Jack's, but not as often. Small businesses have slim profit margins. If customers come in "not as often," there goes the profit margin. There goes Jack. Now our money leaves the neighborhood. There goes the neighborhood. We "saved" our way out of the possibility of community.

By the 1990s, Wal-Mart was doing that to whole towns. Barnes & Noble and Borders did that to independent bookstores. Whole Foods did that to small health-food stores. Chains like McDonald's and Starbucks did that to Joe's Diner and Sally's Breakfast Nook. (Starbucks didn't even have to sell cheaply; it merely had to be convenient.) Detroit automakers invented "warranties" to have your car serviced at their outlets; indy garages went broke. Agribusiness did it to family farms. And each time we buy an item online when it's available at a local store, we're doing it all over again.

With every local business we abandoned, with every dime or dollar we saved, we bought into a system that had no need of community. No need of us, except purely as consumers. Once that system was established, we had nowhere else to go. We still need what we need, but when we buy it our money is siphoned to a capital-"E" Elsewhere that, over time, became capital-"O" Oligarchy. With globalization, the biggest firms not only no longer needed our communities, they no longer needed our country.

So while it would be easier to a) not read any of this, b) dismiss it out of hand, or c) attempt to rip it to shreds, you might then wonder, isn't that how we got into this situation? If you're not happy about how things are, would it be worth your time to consider another point of view?

I'm reminded of the great sociology course I took in Las Vegas with Jane Heenan in 2008. Every one of us walked into that classroom with the belief that we saw our world pretty clearly. I'm pretty damned sure we all left at the end of the term with a new perspective on what might really be going on. But to get from here to there, we had to be willing to give up some of our certainty about the assumptions we'd been living with.

The point is not to read this and simply agree with it. The point it to think and ask questions. As Ventura notes in the first of these columns, quoting Thomas Pynchon from Gravity's Rainbow, "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

Here are links to the whole series:

1. 'Oligarchy' is a big, bad word that defines the country we still call a republic
2. The American Oligarchy has been growing for decades, and we've been its enablers
3. The isolation of the Professional Tier is the single most destructive element in American society today
4. 'Am I my brother's keeper?' is the fundamental question of government
5. Society is created by a mass of individual choices