If you haven’t seen it yet, check out John Oliver’s recent bit on income inequality from his hit show Last Week Tonight. Oliver’s main premise is that America’s blind obsession with hope may be to blame for its dreadful income inequality, and even more to the point, for the lack of civil unrest that should accompany such dire disparities as the entire developed world now faces.
Like John Steinbeck’s popularly paraphrased misquote from America and Americans, “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” Oliver echoes that statement overall on his program with such humorous, yet apt lines as:
“The point is that the President said the words ‘income inequality’ 26 times in that speech, which everyone took to mean one thing …. You better watch your ass income inequality ’cause you’re about to get violently ameliorated! Or you would have been if [Democrats] hadn’t almost immediately backed down.”
Or:
“So basically, income inequality has become just another topic of conversation we prefer to avoid in America, like Japanese internment camps or that time that we gave Roberto Benigni an Academy Award. You know, national tragedies, equally wrong.”
Americans live and breathe through income inequality every day, yet they keep their blinders on in order to maintain, to keep going, to trudge forth. You can almost hear them saying, What’s the use in talking about what everyone knows and recognizes as true already? Instead, folks keep their heads down, their noses to the grindstone, and they try not to think about it too much. Thinking is for dreaming, for floating off in the midst of one’s own ruin to a happy place where money is plentiful and days filled with sun and laughter kiss you on the lips and fill your heart.
It is upon a screen of futility and hopelessness that folks on the shorter end of the income inequality stick cast their hopes and dreams. When income inequality is not quite as severe as it is today, dreams are more within reach. Folks know they may be able to grasp them if they work hard, so the dreams are more tangible, more realistic. However, today, through acceptance of our economically stagnant lives, folks lose hope for a better way of life and that loss of hope twists the rational hopes of better times into something more far-fetched, out of reach, yet far more extraordinary. It is through that lens that Americans begin to see themselves far less the victimized proletariat but much more the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” The further away the realization of hope becomes, the more outlandish the dreams that accompany the actual loss of hope no one will admit to losing.
Such rampant denial can only lead to increasing the wealth and income gaps we are currently experiencing.
Take a look at this video complimentary to the Oliver segment above and see if the two together might help you pull the pillow from beneath your head and rise up, America. Soon you’ll have nothing more to lose anyway.
H/T Vox.
Dylan Hock is a writer, professor, videographer and social activist. He earned an MFA in Writing from Naropa University in 2003 and has been an Occupier since Oct., 2011, both nationally and locally in Michigan. He is published in a number of little magazines and has an essay on the muzzling of Ezra Pound included in the anthology Star Power: The Impact Of Branded Celebrity due out July of 2014 by Praeger. He is also a contributing writer for Take Ten, Addicting Info and Green Action News. Follow him on Google+! Hire him for freelance writing and editing projects through Elance.
