THE SCREWING OF THE AVERAGE MAN The Victim As Co-Conspirator
Hapgood, David
THE SCREWING OF THE AVERAGE MAN : Why the Victim is Co-Conspirator by David Hapgood In a nation 'where the machinery of democracy is available for our use, why do we not take political...
...Religion went first when God died, somewhere in the suburbs, back in the late 1950s...
...Brand-Name Patriotism Faith in modern-day America is more secular than karma...
...If we can make it work...
...This self-protecting faith is an asset without price to those in power...
...The total potentially available for redemption is certainly high enough-so large, indeed, that one can hardly put a price tag on it...
...Exploited human beings evidently find it comforting to have a faith that assures us it’s not our fault but the way of the world...
...The details vary, but the story has been told a thousand times...
...Some, like the Russian Revolution and the American labor movement, have been betrayed by their leaders, who, once in power, decided that screwing the average Russian or union member wasn’t such a bad idea after all...
...Yellow Peril was waved at West Coast workingmen in the late 19th century...
...he has recently taken on a similar assignment up North...
...A look around the country provides us with ample ‘grounds for hope-and despair...
...A more veiled form of the youtoo threat is the practice of directing the average man’s attention to comparisons that make his plight look good...
...It is hard indeed to imagine a mass movement against the arrangement by which the bank gives us only 360 days' use of the loan on which we pay 365 days’ interest...
...In practice, however, we cannot find a handle on the total...
...Gooks originally were Asians whom our troops felt free to kill in ways frowned on by the Geneva Convention...
...it and its relative, the Menace, help convince the average man to hold still for the treatment...
...In all those cases, however, David Hapgood is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...In ancient Rome, they were the small farmers who joined the legions and fought so that wealthy Romans could acquire enough slaves ,to man the plantations that put the small farmer out of business...
...This would have ended many years of fruitful collaboration during which the two brother Menaces had made such mutually profitable arrangements as the sending of submarines to surface off the other fellow’s shoresaround Florida and Murmansk-about the time the respective defense budgets were being decided upon...
...Youtoo is a threat as well as a promise...
...none has altered the essential lines of the society in which they operate...
...it was probably true, but the average man could not help observing that those telling him to tighten his belt were the very people who had already lapped up all the heavy cream...
...The quick decay of a promising opportunity occurred in the early days of our own West...
...Of course, who is a Gook depends on whose eyes you’re looking through, and one man’s Gook is another man’s paisano...
...That doesn’t mean nobody is trying...
...That’s democracy...
...Matthew Josephson in The Robber Barons describes how quickly the average man was subdued in the years after the Gold Rush: So in the second decade of the Pacific Slope’s terrestrial paradise, the cycle is already completed, the arc defined...
...Black Menace was employed at the turn of the century by Southern aristocrats to secure the votes, and the money, of poor whites...
...In modern America, the lines are badly confused, for the reality of Gookery is hidden by layers of hypocrisy and wordnoise proclaiming that in a democratic society no one is a Gook, that we are all people...
...In tribal society, the condition of Gook grows in concentric circles moving out from the individual: the degree of fidelity that you owe decreases as you move out from family to clan to tribe, until those on, the outermost rim are total Gooks...
...The you-think-you’re-bad-off approach trades on the principle that we decide how well off we are by comparing our position to that of others, not to some absolute standard of what we ought to have...
...Instead, we are confronted with an endless series of swindles that are either small or infrequent, or both...
...The leadership was casting about for a successor Menace, but none of those nominated seemed to approach the stature of the incumbent...
...In the terminology of the old South, we have become a nation of house niggers...
...When he ventured out on Wall Street, for example, the little guy might well have asked himself if he was coming on as a ‘Gook...
...The reformers may hastily conclude that people are just plain ignorant, but it is an insult to the average man’s intelligence to suppose that he doesn’t realize that the monopolist and Lockheed and the other beneficiaries of -for-the-rich cost him a lot th,dnext neighborhood...
...History suggests that our question -why do we take it?-can best be 4 answered by the observation that we always have...
...Its political form is patriotism-a belief that we are better off being screwed by our own ruling class than by another one-and war calls upon us for its most extreme expression...
...Thus what appears to be kicking people when they’re down-which, by the way, is the only safe time to kick them-is an effort to raise our comparative status by diminishing theirs...
...And many, many others...
...Beating the House Odds This Souring of America is cause for mingled fear and hope among those of us who would like to see an end to the screwing of the average man...
...Too Many Gooks Spoil the Broth B Another corrupting influence is Gookery...
...Around this earth over the endless centuries, we humans have had any number of opportunities to create societies fit for the average man-and the record of failure suggests that the odds against our ever doing it are pretty long...
...It should be noted that this line has yet to be extended to more tangible transactions...
...Other swindles are insulated from popular wrath because, like a comet, they come around at rare intervals...
...This article is from his book, The Screwing of the Average Man...
...In a democratic society, this sort of faith has a particularly strong element of selfjustification...
...The purest example is the Hindu doctrine of karma, under which the good serf will be rewarded for his obedience and the bad landowner punished for his cruelty-but later, in their next incarnations...
...The average man’s faith in America has of course eroded spectacularly in recent years...
...Instead of thi promised Greening of America, or the Graying of America prophesied by some, we are now confronted with what we might call the Souring of America...
...A generation ago, during the years that were fat, that faith was probably at its all-time high...
...One example is the hundreds of millions of dollars paid out by the Treasury every year to subsidize the U. S. maritime industry...
...When Pharaoh’s bureaucrats summoned the common man to work on the pyramid, they spoke with the authority of the gods of Egypt, and later gods have continued to countersign the decrees of those in power...
...The great accomplishment of mo de rn America is that this minority has been converted into a majority: most of us, that is, apply our skills and labor to working the machinery by which we are exploited...
...to be published this month bv Doubleday...
...We can have our own experts if we will only learn to recognize them when they raise their heads, and they will continue to be ours if we hold them by the scruff of the neck...
...we can beat the house odds...
...Taking the idea one step further, if their gain is our loss, then their loss is our gain...
...Similarly, Massa’s message to the house slave was: “You want to be out there chopping cotton, boy, or in here mixing juleps...
...Some of society’s winners were, it is true, temporarily exempt: a 1973 Harris Poll showed a rising faith in doctors and bankers, from which one might conclude that if you’re going to screw people, it’s best to do it with dignity...
...The lines are clearly drawn, and the person at the furthest circle knows that you are as complete a I) Gook to him as he is to you...
...It is true that the average man is better off in Buffalo than in Bombay, but that observation does not seem to explain why he should be screwed in either place...
...Now that the pie is no longer expanding, now that the rich can only fatten their share at the expense of ‘the average man, that illusion is fading...
...the closing industry in general, and title insurance in particular, survive on the fact that the victim does not expect to go through this again soon, if ever, and so has no motive to go out and join an anti-closing movement...
...To the phony complexities inflicted on us by the experts, the messiah will oppose the false simplicity of his solution...
...Jews, for example, served European nations for many centuries as a peril that took people’s minds off the screwing of the average Christian...
...there’s Common Cause, and Consumers Union has been around for almost 40 years...
...It is discouragingly difficult to identify screwings that seem possible to reverse and are also big enough and frequent enough to be worth the effort...
...Hence the cheers that a promise to punish those on welfare can draw from people one step up the ladder...
...Or we can decide to do it ourselves...
...Others were betrayed by the average man himself: Nat Turner’s men were gunned down by their fellow slaves, and a couple of generations later in the same region, the Populists failed when the poor whites were persuaded to turn against their black allies...
...Each screwing has its solution-several of them in most cases-but none will come about without the active support of the average man himself...
...Two generations ago, when he was in the working class, the average man knew he was a Gook to his superiors...
...The promise “we’ll take $50 off your taxes, and a million off Rockefeller’s,” carries with it the unspoken message: “If you don’t like that, we’ll keep your $50...
...The financial carnage that takes place at a real estate closing is another...
...Organized religion has traditionally played the role of justifying the social order, explaining to the average man why it is right that the privileged, including the priesthood, should eat high on the hog while he roots for scraps...
...Most people ,are doubtless well aware of that reality...
...This makes it difficult for us to determine whether those in a position to screw us-the professional guilds, the bankers, the monopolists, the pension plan administrators, and so forth-when they look at us will see Gooks on whom it’s open season or people who are protected by some kind of domestic Geneva Convention...
...We are in danger of succumbing to whatever messiah can capture all that free-floating faith...
...Viewed this way, however, a gain for those below us is a loss for us: so tax reform in New Jersey was defeated by working-class voters who, though they would have gained by the reform, saw that the poor would have gained more, narrowing the gap between them...
...Not long ago columnist Russell Baker reported on the high-level concern over the impending retirement of the Great Communist Menace...
...They are mortal, and the system is not...
...Despite such exceptions, every indicator from polls to simple intuition told us that the average man had suffered a massive loss of faithin 4 the system in which he lived...
...In the old days, we all knew that you had to sell your goldbrick outside the tribe, but now we no longer can be sure who is in the tribe and who isn’t...
...We can observe that faith in the example of the two men loyallyarguing the respective merits of their cars, while, somewhere inside, both of them are aware that the cars are equally overpriced lemons...
...slaves are Gooks by law...
...The human masses of free pioneers who came yesterday plodding over the desert route, with its trail of ox and horse skeletons and wrecked wagons, its numerous mounds of graves, braving storms, flooded rivers, thirst, hunger, heat, and Indian raiders-these and their children and their children’s children are all in subjection to princely and dynastic overlords, who rule by “use” and “wont,” who “own” because they own, and are well seized of so much land, forest mineral deposits, harbor rights, and franchises and rights of way because they have seized...
...Still other movements decayed after a brief success, as the French Revolution in less than ten years rotted into Bonapartism...
...The reports of the impending retirements proved to be greatly exaggerated, however, and at this writing the twin Menaces, though a bit creaky with age, were still on display, reassuring the average man in both countries that he is being swindled for his own good...
...if, under the voutoo B principle, the . - average man envies those above him, he will not resent the fact that people further up the ladder are pulling steadily away from him-that’s where he hopes to be some day...
...We do not hear the car dealer say: “You think you got a lemon, you should see the car I sold Jones-didn’t even make it to the corner...
...Those who have lost faith in the existing order can seek new authority, or they can place their faith in themselves...
...In the American South before the Civil War, they were the house slaves and overseers who managed the plantation while Massa was out boozing or chasing Scarlett...
...If we heed the message, if we lay down the burden of determining our own fates, then all history tells us what will happen next: today’s messiah will tomorrow be selling us used cars, or far worse...
...People continue to be screwed because a large number of losers actively support the system that B sscyrsetewms s thoefm . exTplhoriotautgiohno ut hahvies todrye,pended not just on the passive obedience of the majority but on the active support of losers who were one step off the bottom...
...Neither they nor anyone else likes to admit that he’s been suckered...
...thoss who administered the system were a small minority compared to the great mass of outright losers...
...To take the extreme example, in the concentration camps they were the inmates who helped run the camps for the Nazis right up to the moment that they, too, were shoveled into the gas chambers...
...It’s doubtful that the Indian peasant really believes this...
...Between the two horns of that dilemmaleave it to messiah or read it ourselves-there is room if we know how to use it...
...If we are screwed not because God wills it but because we permit it, we can avoid the implied self-reproach by denying that there is anything wrong-denying, that is, the fact of the screwing...
...For the average man, the grand illusion is that he has at last moved up out of Gook status...
...more likely he would seize the opportunity to trade places with the landlord even at the risk of coming back next time around as a cockroach...
...To admit that we’re being screwed and could perhaps prevent it would imply hope, which is painful, and the need for action, which is frightening...
...The odds that the average man will ever make it into the big leagues are remote indeed, but the possibility is there, and envy is no launching pad for revolution...
...Then the faith began to fade, while the average man was still inching ahead, like one of those mythical stocks that predicts a turning in the market...
...In a broader sense, Gooks are people we don’t have to treat like people: we can abuse them in ways forbidden by the usual code of behavior...
...This is the you-think-you’rebadoff approach...
...Reformers run into this attitude when they find that working-class people typically are more resentful of welfare than of corporate chiselers...
...Many a movement has been led for the purported benefit of the average man, and all have come to naught...
...Often the average man is promised in return for his sacrifice the kind of reward that does not require anyone to put money in the bank...
...as its administrator explained in its defense, it costs us each year only a shot and a beer apiece, hardly grounds for an uprising...
...Probate is one example...
...women and children are often Gooks...
...indeed, it is they who usually do the day-to-day work of administering the system, while the beneficiaries play...
...To name just a sample few: here’s Ralph Nader and a bunch of public interest lawyers fighting an array of dragons...
...The promise of youtoo keeps the average man’s eyes directed upwards, to what he might, if he is lucky, attain, and once he identifies, even if only in his dreams, with those above him, he will feel envy rather than resentment at the way they screw people like him (not himself personally, for such sorewings as tax evasion never appear to be directed at anyone in particular...
...This makes wh Answers to September puzzle: those below us...
...Instead, it is increasingly obvious, as the average man looks up the ladder in the hopes of a sign of friendly recognition, that those looking down at him see merely-another Gook...
...The question is particularly important when we are dealing with that rapidly growing army of experts who ask us to take their mysterious ministrations on faith, for we have few independent means of checking on whether they are gooking us...
...Foreigners are frequently Gooks...
...Belief in the political order fa’ded, never more noticeably than when American officers in Southeast Asia found themselves unable to force their draftees into dangerous assignments...
...That doesn’t mean each of us has to figure out the fine print of the experts: we know that’s not going to happen...
...THE SCREWING OF THE AVERAGE MAN : Why the Victim is Co-Conspirator by David Hapgood In a nation 'where the machinery of democracy is available for our use, why do we not take political arms against those who are taking us to the cleaners...
...if they don’t respond, it is because in some measure they identify with the person doing the screwing: msoorec thiaan Ythos e people on welfare in one day they themselves or, if not they, their children, will be defense contractors or tax loopholers or members of professional guilds...
...Then it seemed, during that great quarter-century after the Second World War, that he had climbed to the point where those above him could distinguish him from those he had left behind, and therefore treat him better...
...American Menaces tend to come painted in bright colors to make them more fearsome...
...Viewed from the proper angle, it can be seen that the Brahmin is doing the peasant a favor by offering him the consolation of faith...
...Those who are screwed the most are the least willing to admit it-the poor, who are hit by more than the average share of credit frauds, are those who react most angrily when someone points out how they have been taken...
...The outcome depends on the use we all make of that frighteningly vast quantity of faith that is floating around, like unrequited molecules, in search of an object to which it can attach itself...
...Power to the People...
...Other institutions followed...
...Whatever its specifics, the essence of his message will be: give the power to us, let us run it for you, lay that burden down...
...Today Red Menace stands there like a figure in a shooting gallery to take the blame for the screwing of the average Americanthough it has never been made clear why the nastiness of the Russians should entitle those who point it out to us to stuff their hands in our pockets...
...Or the surgeon: “You call me a butcher-at least you’re alive to complain, which is more than you can say about my last patient...
...Still, the peasant is going to be screwed in any case, and karma gives him a rationale for his existence and something to hope for in his more credulous moments...
...Each has valuable achievements to its credit...
...The Youtoo Affair ~~ ~ ~~~~ The corrupting influence of the phenomenon known as “ youtooism” is a more profound reason for our acquiescence...
...Baker’s column was said to have caused distress bordering on panic in Moscow, where it was feared that the Menace’s retirement would force out of office his Russian twin, the Great Imperialist Warmonger...
...Finally, skepticism flourished when word began to come down from the top that the growth years were over, that m ore-is-be tter was an impossible dream...
...It is faith, without benefit of the afterlife, in the American system and its products-a kind of brand-name loyalty...
...Another example, closer to home, is the multiple small bites taken out of us by our bankers...
...Out of the strenuous milling of free frontiersmen, two or three Yankee shopkeepers emerge, a derelict lawyer from the East, a pair of practical Irish miners in collaboration with a pair of Irish saloonkeepers, an English invalid gambler, a land-jobber, a drover and innkeeper from Indiana, these have banded together to form a ruling class, by something equivalent to an imperceptible process of coup d’etat have seized all power, all economic control...
...Gooks are often dressed up as Menaces to distract the average person from his own Gook status...
...so are those of another color and of a lower class...
...So we dismiss the problem and renew our faith...
Vol. 6 • October 1974 • No. 8
