velvetpage (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
velvetpage) wrote2006-11-02 07:44 am
velvetpage) wrote2006-11-02 07:44 am
Good article
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/43778/
Excerpt: "I wrote this book because I love this country, and I think America is a gift. Its greatest gift is this: people have come here from all over the world, and all they expected to do was work hard. And what they hoped was that their work would be rewarded. What they dreamed about was that their kids were going to do better than they were. That was the American Dream. And despite a civil war, two world wars, recessions, depressions, the American Dream has survived. Until now."
Excerpt: "I wrote this book because I love this country, and I think America is a gift. Its greatest gift is this: people have come here from all over the world, and all they expected to do was work hard. And what they hoped was that their work would be rewarded. What they dreamed about was that their kids were going to do better than they were. That was the American Dream. And despite a civil war, two world wars, recessions, depressions, the American Dream has survived. Until now."
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Replace "radios" with "Playstations" and "fish and chips" with "McDonald's", and you get America today.
"... in a decade of unparalleled depression, the consumption of all cheap luxuries has in-creased. The two things that have probably made the greatest difference of all are the movies and the mass-production of cheap smart clothes since the war. The youth who leaves school at fourteen and gets a blind-alley job is out of work at twenty, probably for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire-purchase he can buy himself a suit which, for a little while and at a little distance, looks as though it had been tailored in Savile Row. The girl can look like a fashion plate at an even lower price. You may have three halfpence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world, and only the corner of a leaky bedroom to go home to; but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as dark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal....
Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can't get much meat for threepence, but you can get a lot of fish-and-chips.
Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life."
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