I was at a young peoples' party the other night (late 20s, early 30s). The Beatles were playing pretty much the whole time -- still fresh, after all these years. It got me thinking about experts, specialists, the elite classes that now pretty much run our country, the "brightest and best," for instance President Obama (Harvard) or Yale (Bush), or Princeton, whatever -- Larry Summers, Geithner, Greenspan. What have these "brightest and best" delivered to us, as opposed to, say, the Beatles who delivered something quite new (maybe birthed is a better word)? And the "fab four" weren't elite at all. They made that very clear. They were just normal guys who joked and played around like the rest of us. After all, they'd come from Liverpool (a third rate city in a lesser part of England), but they delivered real change.
Change would be good about now.
For instance some real reform on a profoundly corrupt Wall Street (it ain't gonna happen), even as those gentleman (and a few ladies) drain the U.S. Treasury thanks to a docile Congress, President and Federal Reserve. (And it also ain't gonna happen that the Federal Reserve is going to be taken to task for it's massive blunders -- or crimes -- of the last fifty years.) And then there's health care (thank you, pharmaceuticals, you've taken a page from Wall Street; your CEOs, managers and lobbyists are going to make out like bandits.) Then there's Afghanistan, Iraq, even Iran flickers, not to mention Pakistan. And let's see if Guantanamo Bay ever closes after all the fancy talk.
Yeah, change would have been good, but it ain't gonna happen despite the Obama hope still shining in so many of my progressive friends' eyes. Real change would have had to hit the ground running during the Honeymoon period. It would have had to have happened like the Beatles first songs hit us. It would have had to have been brash and maybe a bit humorous, but with a working class toughness as underpinning, a real melody with a driving beat, not just words.
It had to have happened even before Obama with his majority of Democrats took office, dogging the hell out of Bush right after their landslide victory which was supposed to have been all about change, not about embracing Bush's cohorts who had constructed the nightmare that our country was becoming.
And frankly real change would have needed a deeply wounding recession that collapsed General Motors and Chrysler, swept away the Goldman-Sachs-black-widow-bullies, the AIGs jokesters, the banks that were rotten. It should have exposed the Federal Reserve for the devious, cruel and thieving cancer that now makes the Teapot scandal look like a teapot.
But it ain't gonna happen. And for what it's worth what do we think is going to happen now? Seriously. What do we think's going to happen with two wars still cooking in the middle east, with gas over three dollars a gallon and climbing, with 6 million new people (not counting those that have given up) out of work, with California sinking and not even the Terminator being able to salvage it, with a blind New York governor replacing one of the only guys who had tried to blow the whistle on this mess (funny how Eliot Spitzer got knocked just off when he did, poor horny bastard -- only we're the poorer for of it and the fat cats are a hell of a lot richer.)
What's going to happen when half a million more jobs are lost every quarter for the foreseeable future and the media continues to crow about things getting better because it's not six hundred thousand? (And of course things do feel better at the higher reaches of our nation - those guys at the top are getting trillions of government cash; they're all on a high-end-welfare-ride with no consequences. But ask those half a million people every quarter and counting how they feel, how their families feel. Ask them as their health care continues to suck as the Pharmaceutical CEOs continue to take home millions in bonuses like their buddies on Wall Street.
And what's going to happen when those once again wildly happy Wall Street fellas finally hit another wall and there's no more money in the treasury to bail them out and we finally have to admit to stuff like global warming? What happens then?
It ain't gonna be good.
And then somebody around here had better have one hell of a tune with a great melody, which I believe will happen (after some really nasty bumps), but I believe those melodies will in no way come from the guys (and few gals) at the Harvards or Yales. I believe they will be coming from places more like Liverpool.