Con man America — Neal Gabler's view has bite

© 2017 Peter Free

 

14 July 2017

 

 

After three years in Germany, I recently returned to the United States

 

Neal Gabler's description sums my cultural impression:

 

 

[Donald] Trump has gambled that many Americans would enjoy his unpresidential, con-man antics. He hasn’t entirely won that gamble. Most Americans don’t. But there are enough who do, especially among Republicans, to let him wreak havoc.

 

After all those years of our hearing Algeresque [work hard and succeed] bromides, President Barnum [the circus guy] is now in charge, and he is working hard to reveal America as one great big con game.

 

© 2017 Neal Gabler, Trump Bet Americans Would Like His Un-Presidential Antics. He May Be Right, Moyers & Company (13 July 2017) (paragraph split)

 

 

Gabler is right, but much more broadly so than his anti-Trump slant admits

 

We are a con man culture. This is not President Trump's doing, although he took advantage of the trait. I have noticed an increasing American emphasis on appearance over reality for the last few decades. It is an aspect of our delusion-prone self-entitlement and unrestrained narcissism.

 

Appearance, usually with the aim of pillaging other people's wallets, outweighs reality at mostly every turn. Which may explain why American democracy is dead and plutocratic looting runs whole hog, evidently with our conned public's approval.

 

 

A minor example from yesterday

 

I'm in San Antonio. That bulging, over-bustling city of accident-prone drivers and excessively shop-lined (traffic-jammed) freeways.

 

Looking for a place to live, we took a gander at four newish neighborhoods that cater in large part to retirees and near-retirees. The best looking of these enthusiastically embraces the "conned populace" motif:

 

 

Houses are attractively stone faced, but with cheap vinyl siding in the back.

 

Lots are ridiculously small (by 1950s and 1960s standards) and many are graded in the wrong direction for water drainage. (San Antonio experiences impressive deluges. Proper grading should be a no-brainer.)

 

Ceilings are 12 to 20-plus feet high in some of the common areas. The higher ones are impossible to reach and clean, and they provide no living space. This uselessness comes at increased costs in building material and future energy use.

 

Doorways are frequently too narrow for even moderately-sized furniture, much less crutches and wheel chairs.

 

Toilets are mostly imprisoned in tall narrow closets that make it impossible for anyone with significant mobility ailments to use. Enclosing these faddish spaces takes more material and labor than necessary.

 

Windows, fixtures, doors and shower stalls are all bottom line trash.

 

Handicap access from the outside is often impossible, given the lack of ramps and a plethora of stairs, even inside some of the garages.

 

Two and three-car garages are too short and too narrow for many American sized vehicles.

 

No changes to these specs are allowed, until you buy the house and do them yourself. Which doubles the waste.

 

Open space consists of steel-towered electric transmission line easements. The development's required solid fences block views of the open space anyway. Yards are tiny, but just big enough to require annoying maintenance levels.

 

The electrically operated gate to the "community" is not manned. When it breaks (as these regularly do) drivers will be presumably stuck in place for some time.

 

 

But, yeah, the houses "look" okay.

 

The fact that these homes are not functionally or qualitatively good — and you have to pay extra (in the form of unusable space) for the privilege of being conned — seems to escape the attention of these developments' eager buyers.

 

As the agent told us, regions tend to offer pretty much the same kind of house with superficial permutations. In other words, if you want something noticeably better, custom build or go somewhere far away.

 

 

Cross-culturally

 

Unlike Germany's neighborhoods, the ones we saw in San Antonio yesterday will most probably decay within 20 to 30 years. The comparatively new one across the highway (from the one that I described) already shows pronounced indications of blight.

 

Metro-wide, I daily pass businesses and developments that were new-looking 19 years ago — when I last lived in this city — that are now dilapidated and passed over. Everything is moving outward. The city crumbles, and everyone has to drive farther to get to the newer places.

 

None of this makes long-term economic and social sense.

 

 

The moral? — We live in a culture of con people and short-term-itis

 

"We the People" voluntarily swallow this uninsightful and ignorant nonsense, many of us going so far as to emulate and parrot it back. Buck and ego seem to be the only things of worth.

 

How, for example, do we think that the United States justifies its perennially expanding, nonsensical wars? Reality? Or simulated geopolitical necessity for the purpose of profit-seeking?

 

America's basic business is the con. President Trump is just the latest and most boisterously obvious manifestation of that predictable aspect of capitalistic behavior.