The Same "American Tune"

March Madness takes on a very new meaning this year, 2009. I sit typing and watch the rain here in "drought" headlined California. It looks like we dodge a fatal bullet to our reeling economy in the Golden State this year with these late winter downpours. There will probably be enough water this year. It doesn't appear to brighten many people's outlook on life, however. People I chat with, of varying ages, seem to be under a dark cloud that this is the worst of times for America, ever.

I was listening to some compilation CDs I put together a few years back. I still engage in the practice of personal deejay in my unfailing pursuit to convert all my analog tapes and records to shiny disc. (Pity, CDs are almost as retro and useless today as my albums of tape and melted plastic grooves. Technology advancements to make sure obsolescence occurs to make you repeatedly buy the same shit over and over again.)

After that small digression, on one of my homemade masterpieces there spilled into the air Paul Simon's American Tune. The song first appeared on Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon album in 1973. At the heart of the song is the line "You cannot be forever blessed." That's the way the country felt during the decade of the 1970s. Viet Nam, Nixon, Watergate, high unemployment, rising interest rates.

It didn't get any better for most of the 1980s. Unions met Reagan and took it on the chin. There is a splendid documentary, American Dream, now almost 20 years old which covers the plight of organized labor when pitted against large corporations in America. The film deals with the Hormel meat packer strike in the 1980s but seems eerily topical today. The 1980s had the precursor to our latest financial woes with the Savings & Loan meltdown, the insider trading of Ivan Boesky and junk bond shenanigans of Michael Milken to ponder. We also witnessed the art of the leveraged buyout from private equity firms that decided mob economics could work on big scale with the RJR Nabisco deal.

I still remember the wild initial-public-offering ride of the 1990s followed by the collapse of the dot.coms from 2000 to 2001 and of course, 9/11, which put the nation on its collective heels, and ushered in an era of no recovery for anyone except the very top of the earnings pyramid until our latest greed-splurge bubble burst over real estate and credit crunches.

To Paul Simon's point, many of us in the USA just haven't been blessed for a long time. A lot of individuals, and families by extension, did leverage everything they had to create an unsustainable lifestyle that now looks like an aberration rather than an American reality. We be back to square one without much to show for all our efforts but more debt.

All this seems bleak, but really that is not the case. We are still in the same boat we were floating in about 36 years ago. Really, no worse for wear as a nation just a little nervous around the edges. There are great opportunities to be had today if we pull together and build a stronger network that includes all of us.