They Only Wish They Were Pretti Good

 

A Substack page I read regularly, The Contrarian, wrote “Sadly, a larger swath of Americans — white men and gun-owners, for example — might only have been stirred when the victim turned out to be someone who closely resembled themselves and people they know.”  Sadly, I object to this analysis because I live in rural Minnesota and, other than gun ownership, there is nothing about Alex Pretti that resembles many of the white people here in the outback.  Mr. Pretti was educated, adventurous, liberal, generous, and courageous.  I know a few people here who fit that description, but I was surprised and disappointed, when I moved from the Twin Cities to Red Wing, to discover that “Minnesota Nice” mostly applies to the urban areas. 

I have lived in many of Trump’s favorite “shithole” states and counties from Kansas to Texas to Nebraska to southern California to Indiana to Colorado to Minnesota and worked with and around racist, ignorant assholes from Florida to Alaska.  Up to taking a cabinet-making class in Winona, MN in 2015, I thought the rural southern goobers I knew in Dallas, Texas in the late 60s were the worst people—the most racist, ignorant, most violent and dangerous, and flat-out-evil—I’d ever imagined meeting.  Think the murderous Deliverance butt-fuckers for reference and you’ll almost have a feel for how vicious and awful our first Dallas neighbors were.  The ignorant, intolerant, fascist rural boomers filling the Winona State Cabinetry Lab night class were so benignly awful that I felt like I’d accidentally wandered into a KKK country club.  As wonderful as the huge Minneapolis anti-ICE crowds have been, it’s important, even critical, to remember that just a few miles outside of that fantastic city the countryside is sparsely filled with goobers who are just as awful as any ICE goon, Alabama Klan member, Michigan Proud Boy, or January 6^th seditionists. 

I don’t believe, for a second, that the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti are waking these awful people up with some deeply buried and suppressed sense of compassion, community, decency, or empathy.  I imagine that the majority of rural fascists are church-going and that the churches they attend are led by pastors and priests who are just as awful as the people they “minister” to: selling hate, prejudice, and racism like it’s some kind of “get out of hell free” pass for fun and profit.  Minnesota’s claim to decency comes almost exclusively from the progressives in the major cities (Minneapolis, St. Paul and the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Rochester, Duluth, and the state’s college towns) and that is about two and one-half million of the state’s four-million, eight-hundred-thousand people.  A not-insubstantial percentage of the Cities’ suburbs are uncomfortably transplanted rural goobers who are exactly the same miserable souls as their rural misfit and unfit relatives. 

I would love to believe that the majority of rural Minnesotans were stirred to action or even empathy because the two murdered Minnesotans “closely resembled themselves and people they know,” but I’m not that gullible. 

Things We Do and Say At the End

In 2009, a long-time friend who had always made herself valuable, by being totally no-bullshit, received what, three years later, would be a terminal cancer diagnosis.  We had been having a long email dialog about a variety of personal subjects and, out of nowhere, she sent me a blistering, hyper-critical “never write or speak to me again” email.  I don’t have a lot of friends and I, usually, go to foolish extremes to hang on to the ones I have and, after a few days of letting that percolate, I wrote back to her.  I apologized for whatever it was that had set her off and asked for some clarification about the awful thing I had done to deserve it. 

After a bit, she wrote back and told me about the cancer diagnosis and made it clear that she did not, ever, want sympathy for her situation.  She had decided that she’d rather be friendless than to have to listen to sympathetic and sorrowful outpourings from her friends.  Like me, she didn’t have a lot of friends and even fewer family members who she was close to.   This was a tough, tough lady who had been independent since she was 16.  When she was married, she was her family’s sole income source until her husband found a younger substitute, when their son was about 5-years-old.  So, from then on I started every email with a joke about death.  As a life-long atheist, I tend to think concerns about death are funny-to-hilarious, so the jokes I picked were pretty ruthless. And we continued to communicate until her death three years later.

Our friendship began, slowly and weirdly, when I hired her to be a manufacturing engineer for a small audio company where I was the manufacturing engineering manager.  She not only hadn’t done a lot of electronics manufacturing, but she didn’t have any sort of engineering degree or even a high school diploma.  She did have a terrific track record with past employers and interviewed brilliantly and, critical to my situation at the time, she was cheap.  Early on, I discovered that she was hyper-conservative and very, very Christian; all negative flags for me, personally.  So, we began to argue about that stuff, off work and for the fun of it.  She was my first experience with a Christian conservative who never, ever, resorted to logical fallacies: Ad hominem, Ad populum, and an appeal to authority are the ones I most often experienced with conservative or religious people,  Philosophically, I often felt like I was falling on my face when I had prepared myself for the kind of irrational response I’d consistently experienced for my first 40 years of life and, instead, got a rational, fair-and-open-minded, well-considered rejoinder. I am a bit autistic (or a lot, depending on your opinion) and a stutterer, so I have always had to mentally prepare my replies in advance to keep from sounding totally mentally deficient.  When a response is completely unexpected, I have to reformulate my thoughts, rewrite my response, mentally practice forming the words, and, eventually, say something.  Arguing with her was a LOT more work than practically anyone I had ever met.  More rewarding, too.

A year or so before I left California, she had become a lead manufacturing engineer for a large medical devices company and she had arranged interviews and a pretty good offer for me with her company.  I was grateful, but had no interest in living in the southern California desert (where her employer was located), even for a six-figure salary.  After I left California, had lived in Colorado for five years working for a medical device company, and ended up in Minnesota working for another medical device company, we discovered that we were employees of the same conglomerate.  We restarted our email correspondence and I was surprised to discover that she had become a far more radical, much more angry, atheist lefty than me.  She and several other manufacturing engineers started a consulting company.  Her income bumped up against seven-figures, her lifestyle was international, and she was regularly published in the Journal of Manufacturing Engineering as an international quality expert.   

In 2007, a medical condition wrecked all of that.  Her ability to hyper-focus and work insanely long hours uninterrupted by sleep, meals, or rest turned out to be due to a Graves Disease variation that began to unravel her life.  Pre-ACA, she was dropped by her health insurance company and could only find coverage for $10,000/year with a $50,000 deductible.  Her medications cost nearly $500,000/year and she was unable to work.  The Great Recession and her medical situation cost her nearly everything, but she was able to manipulate the total disorder of the last year of the Bush II administration into freeing herself, with bankruptcy, from her expensive Riverside County, California property, her medical debt, and she ended up owning, outright, a small acreage in the desert hills of San Jacinto, California.  She turned that into a successful organic farm, where she grew heritage tomatoes, in buckets, that approached trees in size and a variety of herbal remedies that she sold at farmers’ markets and through her website.  And that lasted until her cancer took away the physical ability to maintain her farm and business. 

One of the last emails I received from her, a few weeks before she died, contained her list of “Things I have learned and learned to accept in this life”: 

•       Bad things happen to good people
•  Good things happen to just horrible, even evil people
•  No good deed goes unpunished
•  Mercy is preferable to justice
•  Keeping up with the Jones’s is a symptom of insanity
•  Degrees & diplomas are not worth the paper they are printed on, but are handy to light a fire.
•  If you are angry or bitter, you forget how to be happy
•  It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty - who the fuck cares? The point is to DRINK.
•  Humility gives clarity to a natural state of gratitude that generates real happiness.
•  Fanatics, on all extremes, are not worth listening to - they are confused and in pain.

She was about a decade younger than me and died at 51 years-old.  Now at nearly 78, after the past six years of one fucked up medical issue and lost capability after another and feeling my mortality pretty strongly, I can relate, strongly, to her urge to avoid sympathy at all costs.  Sympathy and pity are not helpful and the words are, usually, more depressing than encouraging or comforting.  Those of us who are introverted and a bit (or more) antisocial are more likely to want to die like an old cat, with “a quiet, unaccompanied acceptance of mortality amidst the recurring, cyclical, and violent destruction of human civilization” (from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.).  At its best, this life is hilarious and violently nonsensical, punctuated with brief moments of compassion, love, and loss (lots of loss, seemingly mathematically impossible with what feels like more loss than initial gains).  Someday, I hope to have a friend who sends me occasional jokes about dying when I am in that state. 

Here Is Where We Are in History

 And who we are imitating.

 

As proud of this comparison as the MAGA fascists are, the most embarrassing part is that the Nazi executioners had the “courage” to do their murders in plain sight, mask-less.  Trump’s “Gazpacho” is so certain that they are criminals, likely before imitating “law enforcement,” that they go nowhere without their disguises in position.  Even as degraded and corrupt as the ICE goons are, they are not proud of this moment in history and their part in it.  That may be the only normal thing about the moment in history that we are witnessing.  Otherwise, this is the US equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989.  Two years later, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) broke into 15 independent countries. 

Today, it’s certainly not hard to imagine the United States’ lower 48 dissolving into Colin Woodard’s “11 Nations” plus Hawaii returning to independence and Alaska being battled over by Russia, China, and Canada.  Republicans have long been “the party of unintended consequences” and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is very likely to have a totally different outcome than their “plan.” 

Outside of The Far West, the Deep South, and Tidewater, most US citizens would have a hard time surviving under a king or a dictatorship and a “racially pure” society.  And those places, without the moderating influence of the democratic state would quickly devolve into 3^rd world status and feudalism.  The only argument I have with Woodard/s map is that, if The Far West did split off from their more progressive and productive Left Coast benefactors, I suspect the Left Coast would claim, by force, a lot more of the California, Oregon, and Washington territory. 

While Cheeto Benito would likely be the dictator the South and Tidewater worship, I doubt that climate-exposed area will be much more prominent in world politics and power than Italy or Greece is today.  Scraping away diversity and returning to a primitive patriarchy is a formula for cultural decay and economic stagnation. 

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Fools or Bastards?

A while ago, I wrote in this space, “Trump’s beloved rural “uneducated” are overwhelmingly the base for the dumbing-down of the Republican Party and they are undeniably the people Trump can ‘fool all of the time’ in any subject. Based on their current ownership of the Republican Party we should all be calling them “the Know Nothing Party,” because they proudly know nothing of use about any subject and their wishes and dreams exactly mirror the ‘policies’ of that mid-1800s political movement/religious nonsense.  You might notice a conflict between #1 and #10 in their platform which also includes  ‘Americans must rule America’ (and they don’t mean native Americans), states’ rights (except when the states disagree with the Know Nothings), increased naturalization obstacles, and the usual goofy white male ‘supremacy’ (aka “white mediocrity”)  crap.  Living in rural America has biased me toward believing that the majority of the Trump and Republican voters are inbred morons and unknowing Know Nothings.

Closer to the Edge, a Substack page that I follow regularly, had a different take in an essay titled “The Idol of Rot”: Trump “does not lead his followers; he reflects them. Every jeer, every chant, every violent outburst is the sound of America talking to itself through a mouthful of glass. They don’t worship him—they worship the permission he grants to stop pretending they care. He offers absolution for hatred, indulgence for cruelty, and calls it patriotism. He is the unholy child of greed and grievance, the mascot of a generation allergic to shame, the influencer of an empire addicted to attention. He takes their hate, repackages it with a logo, and sells it back to them at a profit. And while the cameras roll, democracy gasps for air, dying not with a bang but with a brand deal.” I recommend that you read the whole essay and if you have a different opinion, I would welcome hearing it. 

I’m not sure which perspective is more harsh: 1) Americans have downbred into a nation of gullible fools or 2) we’ve finally shown ourselves to be the vicious, heartless, greedy sons-of-bitches the rest of the world has always known us to be?  And if you don’t believe the rest of the world has long despised, feared, distrusted, and even hated what the United States of America has come to stand for, you don’t get out much. 

Trump’s 2024 election cemented those feelings from one end of the globe to the other.  countries that might have once imagined the United States had a chance of being something at least a little bit of what we’ve claimed, now think we’ve lost the formula.  As Rufus Wainwright sang in “Going to A Town,” “You took advantage of a world that loved you well. I’m so tired of America.”  After World War II, it seemed, from outside of the United States (and less so from the inside), that we might become a role model for the parts of the world that still needed role models.  From the inside, our fascist countrymen started working immediately to dampen those hopes.  Joe McCarthy was the poster child for driving that disappointment, but Donald Trump’s vicious mentor, Roy Cohen, kept at it his whole life and he had plenty of help.  Nixon and that branch of the Republican Party made treason into a political tool and those same awful people populated Ronald Reagan’s pack of incompetent criminals and started the disassembly of anything resembling democracy and progress on those “American Way” ideals. 

G.W. Bush set new records in political corruption but he was a piker compared to Trump I and, now, Trump II.  Today, corruption is the primary function of all three branches of the federal government and they have plans to expand those activities into every aspect of life in this country.  If The Mob had taken over Washington, D.C. the effect would be no different than what Republicans have done. 

As a friend of mine observed on November 5, 2024, “The country will never recover from this or be the same place, at least in our lifetimes.”  Someone at NASA said the mass, uninformed firings at that institution were “an extinction event” for American space science and much of Musk’s damage to the FDA, CDC, and the rest of the federal government’s scientific and healthcare agencies would take several generations to repair, if we were inclined to be a serious nation again.  The damage to our national security and national law enforcement agencies has to make the country’s enemies practically delirious with the possibilities for terrorism and cyber-crime, and China is moving quickly to replace the US as the dominant world power.  Catching up would take a concentrated national effort and I don’t think we have that in us today. 

The question I wanted to ask with this essay was “Are we a nation of fools or evil bastards?”  Thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that is a false choice.  We could be both. 

We had it so good?

 A recent article about generational wealth stated that “reasons listed in the report for higher boomer net worth include how this generation was in the ‘right place at the right time.’ By definition, boomers were born after World War II, allowing them to enjoy the economic boom post-war: falling tax rates during their lifetimes, generally healthy stock market with rising values, relatively affordable housing prices, and since the 1980s, falling loan interest rates. In contrast to pre-boomer generations, boomers have benefited from 401(k) retirement plans and associated tax breaks.”  When I read crap like this, I wonder what world the author is living in.  Boomers lived through at least 5 recessions, including a “Great” one that bankrupted somewhere between 6 million to 10 million households who lost their homes to foreclosure and millions more who emptied their savings and sold their possessions to avoid bankruptcy. 

That so called “World War II boom” lasted until most of my generation were about to enter the job market in the 1960s.  First, the Vietnam War draft removed 2.2 Americans from beginning of their work lives to pump up the wealth of that group of Robber Barons who would go on to rape and pillage our economy for the next 80 years.  There is are several reasons that the often quoted “average (mean) net worth” of Boomers is over $1.5 million while the real average (median) is somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000.  Not enough for a secure retirement, by a long shot.  There are 11 million 65+ Americans working past their retirement age, 20% of that age group, and many are living paycheck to paycheck. 

Nixon started the shift, especially by encouraging health insurance companies to become for-profit institutions with the s Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) Act of 1973.  That set the stage for an annual half-million Americans going bankrupt due to medical bills.  41% of working-age Americans—72 million people—are paying off medical debt and on the verge of bankruptcy.  7 million 65+ adults are also in the same sinking boat.

Most of that huge income inequality gap is due to tax policies enacted during the Reagan years that transferred nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% by 2025 and has all but eliminated the US middle class in the process.  Reagan and his goons launched a propaganda parade against the “unearned income tax” rates and that set us up for the hedge funds, vulture capitalists, and the billionaire class that the USA is probably permanently cursed with today.  Every tax cut since has widened the gap, increased economic inequality, decreased working class security, and lowered the quality of life in this country. 

 

In 2011, my grandson and I took a motorcycle tour of the Black Hills, the Utah and Colorado Rocky Mountain range, and the spaces between Minnesota and those destinations.  We camped almost every night in state and federal campgrounds.  Every single campground was hosted by people from my generation and all of them had lost everything except the trailer they were living in and the vehicle that pulled it from campground to campground.  Several of them admitted that they didn’t really own the camper or the vehicle, either.  They were on the move to avoid the repo man, since they couldn’t afford the payments on the remains of their life before the Crash. 

There is no generation alive today who had it easy.  But there are generations of the inherited rich who have passed on entitlement, wealth, power, education, and opportunity to their offspring.  Thomas Jefferson wrote, ““… there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.”  While Jefferson didn’t live up to many of his own ideals, he proposed a “law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature,”  Reagan’s goons convinced voters that an inheritance tax was a “death tax,” which is ridiculous but was effective.  Trump’s goons are trying to eliminate public education and to dumb-down the nation to prevent an outbreak of democracy, justice for everyone, and the kind of giant leap in technology, culture, cooperation, world peace, and stability that might allow humanity to solve the real problems, like global warming, that will end our species if allowed to go unchallenged.  Pitting generations against each other is key to preventing anything good from rising from the ashes of our current decline.