The Short and Simple Annals of the Forgotten

Millions of lives of quiet desperation

One of the many reasons I will never, and could never be a conservative is my empathy for the underclass. The unwashed masses. The common riff-raff. The ones looked down upon by the upper middle class, and despised by the eugenicist elite. The ones who’ll never own a stock option or achieve membership at the local country club.

It’s natural for me to feel this way. To quote the great Ambrose Bierce, I came from poor because of honest stock. My mother’s family was so poor they used to send the kids to the garden parties in the better part of town, where they’d sneak in after the event and forage for loose change that had been dropped on the lawn. My father’s family was even more poverty stricken. No heat in their rotating apartments. Ice on the walls in winter. They were evicted so often that my father would come home from school to find a note with his new address posted on the door. Six boys slept in one bed. My grandmother still managed to be a fantastic cook. If the rumors about her having boyfriends is true, I can’t really blame her. They say she wore no underwear. Maybe she couldn’t afford it. My next book- “My grandmother was a floozy.”

When I was growing up, everyone we knew in our family was similar to us financially. Lower middle class. Most of them had bigger houses, but they were stuck in the same status- victims of a casino economy where 80 percent must lose so 20 percent can keep winning. My father had a cousin whose daughter somehow married Rutherford B. Hayes III. Years later, I found a photo of her and the reason for her crossing some very formidable tracks to enter the One Percent world became obvious; she was beautiful. Rich guy falling for the lovely matchgirl in rags; it’s a story as old as time itself. Anyhow, we never met any of that part of the family, other than to see them on the “society page” of the newspaper. My mother’s aunt married a guy who was the official photographer of Congress. She rose above the eccentricity of her financially struggling relatives. I never met her, either.

It’s no wonder that Huey Long’s mesmerizing speeches attracted me at such an early age. I wanted a horse so badly during my childhood. And a Ludwig drum set. Both of them were far beyond my family’s financial reach. Huey Long helped me to start understanding that. I had one vacation during my entire childhood- a week at Virginia Beach when I was eight. Maybe that’s why I never liked to travel. But I don’t think either my mother’s or father’s families ever had a family vacation. Vacations weren’t possible for the poor and working class in those days. My mother’s father worked twelve hours a day, 365 days a year. They let him come home for lunch on Christmas Day. Even with terminal cancer, he kept working as a security guard.

Very few Americans have heard of, let alone have an appreciation for, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. One of the few good things to come out of FDR’s unconstitutional New Deal monstrosity, it created the forty hour work week, and overtime pay, and through sick and vacation leave, finally made possible a short summer trip to the beach or the mountains for families that never had the opportunity before. Pressure from Huey Long- who wanted a thirty or even twenty hour work week and a guaranteed month vacation time for all workers- triggered this watered- down but still immensely beneficial piece of legislation. In terms of what it did for average Americans, it was the greatest law in the history of this country.

Growing up at a time when America had its strongest economy, it took me a long time to realize how fortunate I’d been. The Baby Boomers enjoyed a marketplace that hadn’t existed before, and unfortunately is unlikely to exist again. The postwar boom, which created the Military Industrial Complex and a slew of other bad things, also brought us this powerful economy, where every job truly paid a living wage. Where men pumping gas and selling hardware supplies could buy houses and raise large families. And their wives could stay at home, cooking, cleaning house, and caring for the children. I can sense the feminists who may be reading this foaming at the mouth at this point. That was a historical reality, and I remember it fondly. Sue me.

But even during that golden era, there were the suffering “losers” of even that robust economy. Bums or tramps, as they were indelicately referred to. There just were a lot fewer of them. Really, for that small window of American history- from the late 1940s to maybe the early 1970s- there was a better chance at upward mobility for almost everyone, than there had ever been. If you’ve read my book Survival of the Richest: How the Corruption of the Marketplace and the Disparity of Wealth Created the Greatest Conspiracy of All, you know how I feel about our present rigged economy. And that book was written prior to the COVID psyop, which featured an unprecedented, unconstitutional lockdown, destroying what was left of small business.

In today’s world, all of the perks from the Baby Boomer era are long gone. Most companies used to provide a nice pension for their employees, which coupled with Social Security, enabled them to cope with retirement much more easily than the elderly today can. Private pensions have largely vanished. Some companies replaced them with 401Ks, which are nice, but at best the company only contributes a small matching amount. It’s far different from traditional pensions, which the company paid for entirely. Yearly raises? I used to get two raises a year as a blue-collar rabble rouser in the late 1970s-early 1980s. One for cost of living, and another merit increase based on your performance evaluation. By the late 1990s, we were seldom given even a token annual increase. Just part of the odious “new normal.”

When I worked for Inova Health, I think they had about 15,000 employees. At Christmas time, probably no more than 50-100 top executives received six and seven figure bonuses. For all the rest of the workers- nothing. This mirrors the way America 2.0 works; crumbs for the masses, while the overlords are constantly being gifted additional riches. In the 1990s, our “representatives” gave tax-exempt status to wildly misnamed “performance bonuses.” It’s a One Percent thing, you wouldn’t understand. It just seems about as unfair as possible that those already making 100s of times what their lowest paid workers make, are given huge bonuses, which they don’t even pay taxes on. But they can’t afford modest yearly raises for the hoi polloi.

The too often forgotten Henry David Thoreau said that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Women, too. And now transgenders. The statistics very from source to source, but more than 70 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck. About the same percentage have less than $1000 in total savings. Flying by the seat of your pants doesn’t quite do justice in describing the financial situation the vast majority of Americans are in. Forced to work pointless jobs they hate. Their lives made even more miserable by unreasonably demanding bosses. Biting their tongue as they obey one senseless and inconsistently applied rule after another. Watching their backs, so some other sap can’t score brownie points at their expense.

As the devotees of Ayn Rand used to say, “Shit happens, and then you die.” Almost all of us are forgotten far too quickly by even our closest loved ones. Is there any other human who lived more than 700 years ago that is still remembered at all, other than Shakespeare? The name has recently made something of a comeback, what with the first alleged case of COVID in Great Britain striking another less accomplished William Shakespeare. You can’t make stuff like that up. Most of the Golden Age of Hollywood stars have been forgotten, except to people like me, who doggedly enjoy those relics from America 1.0 every night. The old athletes are forgotten, too, all now relegated to being what author Lawrence Ritter called “The Glory of their Times.”

But those are people that achieved fame or notoriety, whether on the stage of the Globe Theatre in 1600s England, or the green pastures of America’s old ballparks. Very, very few people become famous. To any degree. So they are much easier to forget. Most don’t even get the gold watch and farewell luncheon that many did back in a more prosperous United States. I was unceremoniously whisked off Inova’s property after being fired for helping out a handicapped co-worker in 2018. Worked for them for forty four years, my entire adult life. I was forgotten before the door slammed shut behind me. I found out my co-workers were not actually my friends. Just co-workers. Like the kids you graduated from high school with. Utterly forgotten.

But even the working class has it good compared to the most forgotten of all; the truly impoverished. Their presence is more overtly felt these days, with the tents and human excrement on the streets of major American cities. Many of these would have been forgotten in another way in earlier times. Institutionalized in mental health facilities. Visited very infrequently by close relatives, who resented their “craziness” and were embarrassed of their connection to them. Kind of like the elderly now, with or without dementia. Even before COVID, there were a stunning number of old folks who wasted away in loneliness, “cared” for by insensitive workers at a typically horrid nursing home. Waiting in vain for a visit from a child or grandchild.

Some become so forgotten that they are buried in “pauper graves.” Unknown soldiers who weren’t soldiers. Some once renowned entertainers died without having a single person claim their ashes. I recounted these sad tales in my book On Borrowed Fame: Money, Mysteries, and Corruption in the Entertainment World. It’s hard to imagine a famous actor becoming forgotten, even when they have children, but it happens all too frequently. Being forgotten so quickly is like a cosmic slap in the face, an indignity that essentially invalidates a life. Perhaps the humanist lesson has become too well absorbed. We are treated like random specks of dust in an endless universe.

The great socialist Eugene Debs was tried for sedition in 1918. His “crime” was protesting World War I. He told the court: “I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” It’s been over a century, and nothing has changed in this regard. The average NBA salary is just under $10 million a year. The average American worker earns just under $60,000. So it would take the average worker sixty years to make one/third of that- $3 million.

Something is beyond wrong- sinful is the appropriate word that comes to mind- with a system that permits a CEO to make more from one tax-free Christmas “performance” bonus than the average full-time worker would earn in three centuries of work. You don’t have to be a communist, or a socialist, to understand just how unfair and illogical such a system is. When America was at its peak, the president of a company (before they invented the term CEO) might earn twenty times what the janitors were paid. Not thousands, or even millions of times more. No one’s life is worth that much more than anyone else’s. In the eyes of God, we are all equal.

Even if one of my books really took off, or I started getting the number of paid subscribers here that the big names on Substack do, my heart would always remain with that bottom half of America. The ones that collectively have less than one percent of the total wealth. I’ll always stand with the hapless, underpaid worker getting yelled at by a bully supervisor. I’ll always stand with the homeowner being foreclosed on by a bank that lent money they didn’t actually have under our fractional reserve system. I’ll never support the repo guy who steals the automobile that some bank, again, financed through a counterfeit process. I always hated the Yankees. I’m the opposite of a bandwagon fan. I won’t defend a system that is rigged.

An unknown number of people are behind bars, convicted for things they didn’t do, by a corrupt system of unscrupulous cops, blindly ambitious prosecutors, biased judges, and stupid juries. Very few seem to care. There but for the grace of God, we used to say. We don’t say that any more. Talk about forgotten. How many of their families believe in their innocence? How many come to visit them? The system that provides just enough for worker bees to keep making their rotating credit card payments, took even that away from the unjustly imprisoned. They are criminals, whether they did anything wrong or not. “In the eyes of the law,” as they say.

We tolerate the plight of the Forgotten because we don’t have to interact with them very often. We scurry past the homeless beggars on the street. Nervously look away from the person seeking money at stop lights. If a family member falls on hard times, we tend to give them “tough love.” In other words, we don’t give them money, food, or shelter. That would only “enable” their behavior. Devout Christians are most renowned for this philosophy. Since Reagan shut down most of the mental institutions, there really isn’t anywhere else for them to go. I cherish private property, but carried to its logical extreme, this means effectively that someone without a home might literally have no “legal” space in which to exist.

Reading Jack London’s The People of the Abyss had a great impact on me. It was written over a century ago, but the familiar problems remain. In the glamourized ghettos, and non-glamourized trailer parks and Appalachia. We all need money to survive. For food. And clothing. And shelter. The cost of everything has risen sharply in the past few years. The salaries of those making the lowest wages would have to rise commensurately, just in order for them to tread water. With every new wave of undocumented, extremely impoverished immigrants, that bottom fifty percent is growing. At some point, it’s going to occur to them to storm the mansions that exist only short distances from their shamefully squalid neighborhoods.

The poet Thomas Gray wrote about “the short and simple annals of the poor.” A more sadly accurate assessment has never been written. If we can’t get our “representatives” to force a fairer distribution of the wealth, we can at least treat the Forgotten decently ourselves. Give those poor souls a few bucks at the stop lights. Pay it forward to someone who needs it. And especially try to have some compassion for your own family members who fell on hard times. Whether it was due to drugs or alcohol, or just bad luck, your flesh and blood will be just as cold and hungry, and in need of help. Be as understanding of them as you would be of a rescue dog. In this culture of victimhood, there aren’t any more legitimate victims than these forgotten souls.