Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society Thomas Frank
2018, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company.
“Social scientists have tried for more than a century to understand how class works.”
The opening line of Thomas Frank’s “Rendezvous with Oblivion” sets the tone for the entire collection of essays. The theme is that a plutocratic class has taken over America and completely subsumed democracy and freedoms and worker and civil rights. The titles of the four sections tell the tale: “Many Vibrant Mansions”; “Too Smart to Fail”; “The Poverty of Centrism”; and “The Explosion.”
Each examines different elements of the theme of class exploitation.
The first addresses such things as the continuing proliferation of tacky and overpriced McMansions, the exploitation and degradation of workers in the fast food industry, the assumption of privilege and entitlement by the moneyed class, and the pretentious scam that underlies the assumption that cities and large towns need to be “vibrant” for pet artistes of the moneyed class.
“Too Smart” discusses the horrific scam that higher education in America has become. In an era where an 150,000-word e-book can be downloaded for just $5, college texts run $250 or more and are deliberately made obsolete the following year so new copies can be sold. Non-tenured professors and adjuncts are degraded to work slaves, making minimum wage or less and never permitted to opine on their work. College debt is, for most attendees, a lifetime burden that cannot be escaped. I was a bit surprised that Frank didn’t address the hundreds of millions spent by the Koch Brothers and other plutocrats to make once-proud universities extensions of right wing think tanks such as the Federalist or Heritage Societies, but I’m pretty sure he has in his other writings.
“Centrism” explores the neutering of the political class by Citizens United, through which no politician dare express views that are not favored by the moneyed elite. It also covers why the punditry go along with this, and ignore Bernie Sanders or other figures who discuss class inequality and the corrosive influence it has on America and Americans. The lies and viciousness of Donald Trump are permissible, which tells you all you really need to know about corruption in America’s upper class.
“The Explosion” is the result of the three sections above. Frank writes in his title essay, “Why, oh why, did it have to be Hillary Clinton? Yes, she has an impressive résumé; yes, she worked hard on the campaign trail. But she was exactly the wrong candidate for this angry, populist moment. An insider when the country was screaming for an outsider. A technocrat who offered fine-tuning when the country wanted to take a sledgehammer to the machine.”
Frank sees America’s largely self-imposed class problems as dire, but at the end, offers this ray of hope: “Trump succeeded by pretending to be the heir of populists past, acting the role of a rough-hewn reformer who detested the powerful and cared about working-class people. Now it is the turn of Democrats to take it back from him. They may have to fire their consultants. They may have to stand up to their donors. They will certainly have to find the courage to change, to dump the ideology of the nineties, the catechism of tech, bank, and globe that everyone now knows is nothing but an excuse for an out-of-touch elite. But the time has come. History is calling.”
History is calling. Are you listening? Are the Democrats listening? Frank does an exemplary job of telling us what we need to hear.