Victor Davis Hanson: A Tour Through Recession America
The last seven days I tried to jot down what I saw in some slices of America in recession — and much of its seems at odds with our general government narrative....
Here follows some other unscientific observations. This is a funny recession. My grandfather’s stories of the Great Depression — 27 relatives in my current farmhouse and barn — were elemental: trying to find enough food to survive, and saving gasoline by shifting to neutral and gliding to stops or on the downhill.
The problem I saw this week was rampant obesity, across all age and class lines. If anything, the wealthier in Palo Alto/Stanford eat less (yes, I know the liberal critique that they have capital and education to shop for expensive healthier fruits and vegetables while the poor and neglected must turn to fast food, coke, and pop tarts). No matter — a lot of Americans are eating too much and moving too infrequently — and no one, at least if girth matters, is starving.
There is a new beggar. I see him on the intersections now on major urban boulevards. They are never illegal aliens, rarely African-Americans, but almost all white males, and of two sorts. One is someone who looks homeless, not crippled but in a walker or wheelchair (yet he gets up occasionally). He has a sign on cardboard with a wrenching narrative (fill in the blanks: veteran, of course; disabled; will work (not) for food, etc.). Choice corners become almost enclaves, as two or three cluster on islands and stoplights, as if certain franchises are choice and more lucrative than others.
A newer second sort is younger, more upscale. One fellow looked like a fraternity brat with a sign that said “Mom has cancer. No health insurance. Please help!” Another burly lad, well fed and toned, had a placard, “Need gas money. Broke down.” Yet a third waved a card, “Sudden wedding, need money.”
My illiberal side suggests that if we were to investigate, both types have not inconsiderable cash in their pockets. They certainly feel there is no shame in begging. All that is changed from antiquity is that we have eliminated the vocabulary not the act: beggars don’t exist; “homeless” and the “needy” do.
For a recession, there are lots of Mercedes, BMWs, Lexuses, and Volvos around — and in places like Fresno too. Maybe these are just leases (renters who prefer to lease a big car than buy houses), but for depression-era times, our contemporary versions of the Packard or Pierce-Arrow are pretty ubiquitous. (Note: I still can’t see how a Mercedes or Lexus warrants the far higher price over, say, a Camry or Accord that seem as comfortable and reliable). Thirty years ago one saw an upscale car on the Stanford campus; today you see them on an American high school campus....
I confess this week to have listened in on many conversations in Palo Alto and at Stanford, read local newspapers, and simply watched people. So I am as worried about the elite upscale yuppie as the poor illegal alien. The former have lost almost all connection with physical labor, the physical world, or the ordeal that civilization endures to elevate us from the savagery of nature....
A strange elite I suppose likes and pays for the ambience — that is, living among people like themselves — of upscale university-centered communities. Why? I have a theory. It allows them to be liberal and progressive in the abstract, without having to live the logical consequences of their utopianism, or deal with the underbelly of American life. Take the most sophisticated Palo Alto dweller, and a week outside of Laton on a farm would make her, well, “seasoned” so to speak, and challenge much of her assumptions about wealth and poverty....