the united strange.

the u.s. is a very strange country. from the point of view of its infrastructure, the u.s. often looks like a “3rd world” country…. not for everybody, of course. there are people who can say, “ok, fine, i’ll go in my private jet or helicopter.” drive around any american city. they’re falling apart. the american society of civil engineers gives the u.s. regularly a D, the lowest ranking, in infrastructure.

it turns out that in the cohort roughly 25 to 50, the working-age cohort of whites, the white working class, there is an increase in deaths, what they call “deaths of despair”: suicide, opioid overdoses, and so on. this is estimated at about 150,000 deaths a year.

half the population has negative net worth, meaning debts outweigh assets. there has been stagnation pretty much for the workforce over the whole neoliberal period.that’s the group that we’re talking about. naturally, this leads to anger, resentment, desperation. similar things are happening in europe under the austerity programs. that’s the background for what’s misleadingly called “populism.” but in the u.s., it’s quite striking. the “deaths of despair” phenomenon seems to be a specific u.s. characteristic, not matched in other countries.

what happened was, the first major, huge advertising campaign that was a kind of a model for others later. an enormous campaign was carried out to try to create a gun culture. they invented a wild west, which never existed, with the bold sheriff drawing the pistol faster than anyone else and all this nonsense that you get in the cowboy movies. it was all concocted. none of it ever happened. cowboys were sort of the dregs of society, people who couldn’t get a job anywhere else.  

it was brilliantly discussed by thorstein veblen, the great political economist, who pointed out that in that stage of the capitalist economy, it was necessary to fabricate wants, otherwise you couldn’t maintain the economy that would generate great profit levels. the gun propaganda was probably the beginning of it.


-noam chomsky