Tuesday, April 19, 2011

beached white males


Video - Falling Down I want breakfast.

Newsweek | Capitalism has always been cruel to its castoffs, but those blessed with a college degree and blue-chip résumé have traditionally escaped the worst of it. In recessions past, they’ve kept their jobs or found new ones as easily as they might hail a cab or board the 5:15 to White Plains. But not this time.
Can Manhood Survive the Recession?

The suits are “doing worse than they have at any time since the Great Depression,” says Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute. And while economists don’t have fine-grain data on the number of these men who are jobless—many, being men, would rather not admit to it—by all indications this hitherto privileged demo isn’t just on its knees, it’s flat on its face. Maybe permanently. Once college-educated workers hit 45, notes a post on the professional-finance blog Calculated Risk, “if they lose their job, they are toast.”

The same guys who once drove BMWs, in other words, have now been downsized to BWMs: Beached White Males.

Through the first quarter of 2011, nearly 600,000 college-educated white men ages 35 to 64 were unemployed, according to previously unpublished Labor Department stats. That’s more than 5 percent jobless—double the group’s pre-recession rate. That might not sound bad compared with the plight of younger, less-educated workers and minorities, but it’s a historic change from the last recession, when about half as many lost their oxford shirts. The number of college-educated men unemployed for at least a year is five times higher today than after the dotcom bubble. In New York City, men in the 35-to-54 kill zone have lost jobs faster than any other group, including teenage girls, according to new data from the Fiscal Policy Institute.
manhood-INTRO Matt Sayles / AP

As if middle age isn’t bad enough. The moribund metabolism. The purple pill that keeps your food down. The blue pill that keeps another part of your anatomy up. Now you can’t get an effing job? Stuck in your own personal Detroit of the soul, with the grinding stress of enforced idleness. The wife who doesn’t look at you quite the same way. The poignantly forgiving sons. The stain on your masculinity for becoming the bread-loser. The night sweats and dark refuge of Internet porn. The gnawing fear that this may be the beginning of a slow, shaming crawl to early Social Security.

25 comments:

nanakwame said...

The sector of the population that demigods are courting, and could cause big problems

CNu said...

Really?

According to this article, it's a sector HAVING big problems and as voters and constituents of the polity, isn't it eligible for public sector entitlements and largesse?

http://conservativetimes.org/?p=8496

Seems to me that the president of America is compelled to seek solutions for all Americans and that these Americans have a right to politic on their own behalf. What am I missing here Nana?

nanakwame said...

Of course, the Stupid Party (i.e. Republicans) are going along with Obama, calling for even more cuts for old white people (while implicitly protecting programs for younger non-whites). Are they engaging in another wave of political suicide? Steve Sailer’s advice to the Republican Party:

You see this statement as objective? Or I am missing something here. And I will tell you that my generation is a bunch of whiners at this point, and if we keep putting it as a ethnic difference instead of generational, we are masking for sure. We bought this and we own it

WASHINGTON – Two centuries after America's birth, the national debt was a bit under $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. Just three decades later, it has soared above $14 trillion, and accusations of blame are flying. Both Republicans and Democrats played major roles in driving the figure sky high.
If the tab were divided up now, it would come to roughly $47,000 for each man, woman and child in the United States.

Plus I stand on Doc Sub outlook Obama will be seen as a race Traitor as FDR was seen as a class Traitor, there is one winner here the Oligarch so far

submariner said...

Great article! "The night sweats and dark refuge of Internet porn. The gnawing fear that this may be the beginning of a slow, shaming crawl to early Social Security. " LMBAO!

I love today's politics because no matter where we end up it will be there together. Unlike the days of welfare reform or mass incarceration the policies up for consideration will be applied in a truly democratic fashion. Hard for states like Texas and Arizona to cut Medicaid without affecting the folks described above. And though there were some sincere attempts at the beginning to blame the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 for the bursting of the housing bubble and the onslaught of an economic crisis, it became impossible to sustain when pristine homogeneous communities in Arizona and Nevada were suffering. It's also hard to make a credible case for undocumented workers or terrorists for the collapse.

CNu said...

You see this statement as objective? Or I am missing something here.

I saw the Newsweek article as somewhat objective, bringing to light a largely under reported though quite sizeable section of collapse casualties.

Your one-liner response to the Newsweek article seemed to lack objectivity.

So for contrast and comparison, I put up the article from conservativetimes to function as a political photo negative.

CNu said...

Unlike the days of welfare reform or mass incarceration the policies up for consideration will be applied in a truly democratic fashion.

Unless of course the states rights advocates enjoy a political renaissance, and they have certainly been advocating for just such a return to their "good old days" of yore....,

umbrarchist said...

So can I get a lot of skin lightener and go around shooting economists?

Take that you no algebra knowing muthaf----!!!

ROFL

nanakwame said...

States Rights is being used for whom you want to pray with and live out your twilight days, it already has taken shaped; with Latinos being a majority within the cities

nanakwame said...

http://www.amconmag.com/blog/sleepwalking-into-the-imperial-dark/

Ed Dunn said...

Some beached White male once told me that my skills and experience makes me better off than most Black people - I had to remind him that my skills and experience makes me better off than most White people.....look on his face was priceless

CNu said...

The so-called war on drugs has put nearly 1 in 6 Black males permanently on the beach. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:1lBSD-0l2xUJ:etd.ohiolink.edu/send-pdf.cgi/Carson%2520Rebecca.pdf?ohiou1194573373+how+many+black+men+have+been+criminalized+by+the+war+on+drugs?&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg8ftoXIaa1X3ofY9yyzzkwV7wzuXuTLGXvUgBlHhe6AGfbvZa8IIndLRPzLuaxwnihZiDXx8gN9G6EkupAndt5d5rJC25i6yBtIpW6Op0CJOhLFSzQlogc3ZTO19vL4OY4_H7Q&sig=AHIEtbR60t7wfF2K0Meu2HFvJGLL82lbrA&pli=1

Gee Chee Vision said...

This is a fascinating piece. I'm going to read it today. Because she mentions the relationship with masculinity and crime, in all honesty we have to consider rap music as one of the major contributors. It's a difficult discussion because rap is so polarized in the media (as is everything else). We allowed the expropriation of it. That of coarse is easy to say in hindsight. Who would have imagined that it would come to challenge Hollywood to the point black men who perform black music about killing white cops are recruited by Hollywood to play cops. It is more than just a genre. Patricia Rose points out its the only genre used by a generation to define themselves i.e. whereas earlier generations did not define themselves as a jazz generation or blues generation. I really get what some artists argue (Ice Cube being the catalyst I believe) that their music is no different than Schwarzenegger's films; that it's a narrative in the same way. However, the "realness" package in rap music is the authenticity that it stands by. The irony is like of the dope man being turned out by his own product.

Hip Hop is an effective marketing tool for ideas. Five years ago Reginald C. Dennis said, "McDonald’s is already paying rappers to name check hamburgers. Can it get any worse?" If it's effective with product placement, what of moral & social behaviors. Thinking of Rebecca Carson's point of the broken family being one of the contributing factors, it is not without reason that Esther Role took the role ("big pun") on the condition that a father was written into the script (if that story is accurate). I could never watch Good Times until recently because I hate to see black folks not only loose in real life but in make-believe too. But I watched how some shows would close out with the family at the table having dinner or as an earlier generation calls it supper (dinner being lunch). Then there is the episode when the entire building community put together a fund raiser to pay off a tenants rent. I was on the edge of my seat in fear someone was going to steal the cash box or something like that. That's what usually goes wrong but it didn't happen and I was like" black folks winning". Message: In poverty, family and community can think tank their way out of the septic tank. Those were some powerful concepts. Probably dated concepts but powerful. There was some winning taking place, but the "winning" was probably too subtle.

nanakwame said...

I enjoyed Good Times for it showed a kinder black man and father. My position is if there was not such racism in the justice/legal system; we may have been in your face fascism in the USA. This overview I re-read and have it as a bookmark. I even had to look over this point:
http://www.counterpunch.org/shivani1026.html
Emphasis on aesthetic structure . . .stressing romantic and mystical aspects.

Which now with Thor (btw Atlas Shrugged I hear is a flop) and animation of powerful males, we still flirt with it as Anis Shivani has pointed out. The extreme masculine in the Afro-American community is such sadness to me; it spills over recently to attacking gays and of course self-hate murders. I believe we have a very warped view of maleness today and with women taking most of the jobs, it has worsened.

About a third of Americans today are certifiably fascist; another twenty percent or so can be swayed around with smart propaganda to particular causes. So the existence of liberal institutions is not necessarily inconsistent with fascism's political dominance…
Violence is glorified for its own sake. The masculine principle has been elevated as the basis of policy-making. Command is authoritarian, charismatic, and personal.


W need the romantic theme of Dumas, because we must counter this romance with violence and commander in our history, but; I fear it may be too late. The external factors such as oil peak, food prices and climate may exacerbate the situation, but in the end it will be the internal political options my nation takes in the next 20 years, for we still have good resources factors.

Makheru Bradley said...

Tupac said it best, paraphrasing--it's safer to be negative. This was a great interview.

http://bit.ly/hf1Htc

If only he had maintained the convictions he developed while in prison, and liberated himself from the thug lifestyle.

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