So, this is kind of an Andrew Yang moment right now, but I've been watching a lot of stuff on dead malls recently. This isn't a topic that I'm unfamiliar with. I've known about the decline of a lot of malls for a while. Andrew yang talked about it in his 2020 run and how retail stores and malls are declining and being replaced by stuff like amazon and online shopping. My dad worked at a dying mall for much of the 2010s post great recession until it closed and he was let go there as well.In that mall's dying days, his job began feeling increasingly like one of David Graeber's "BS jobs" to me. Ya know, ticking all of the boxes, being a task master. He kinda felt like his job was that of a glorified baby sitter. The owner of the mall was clearly killing it off, but they needed people to man the stations in the process of doing so, it felt increasingly like going through the motions. When a mall is dying, the work just starts feeling so unnecessary. I mean, if there's no customers, what's the point? Just show up, collect a paycheck, clean the place, make sure that there's some security so it doesn't turn into century III in Pittsburgh, and by the way, they automated a lot of security with an automatic alarm system, again, this place was Yang's 2020 pitch personified, do the maintenance needed, coordinate with the right people blah blah blah. But again, with so few customers, what's the point? The whole thing feels like BS to me at least. Even he, and my dad does subscribe at least somewhat to the religion of work, saw the whole thing as pointless after a while. Anyway, they let him go a few years ago now, and demolished the place not long after.
This isn't an uncommon phenomenon. Malls are dying all over the place. The mall across town that was always more upscale is also showing signs of decline. The sears is gone, and slowly but surely, stores are closing, and the crowds are thinning. I remember back when I was a kid in the 90s the malls were jamming. In the 2000s, as I reached adulthood, I largely stopped going. I mean, what's the point? The stuff there is overpriced, the selection not that good, and while boomers and the like like malls it seems, younger people don't. We shop at walmart, and target, and amazon, and malls are more and more niche.
But, sometimes i watch youtube stuff at night with my mom, and we got talking about another mall that closed maybe 20 miles away from here. So I brought up a dead mall video talking about it. I then showed her a video of my dad's former place of employment, which also had quite a few "dead mall" videos on it. And then she wondered about malls she used to grow up and go to. She used to live in northern New Jersey, you know, the area around NYC, but she and my dad moved to Pennsylvania in the 1980s shortly before I was born. The big reason seemed to be cost of living. I'm not surprised. I looked at her old apartment and they want something crazy like $3k a month for it now. Yikes. And it's not like it's big or anything. Here in PA we have this whole three story home for peanuts compared to what it cost in NJ. Anyway, I decided to bring up the malls she used to go to in NJ and...it was like living in a different world. These malls were DISGUSTINGLY upscale. Like, my mom barely recognized them. They had these makeovers to make them look EXTREMELY futuristic. Really, they looked sci fi to me they were so cool looking. And they seemed to be extremely upper class store wise. Like, tons of weirdo designer clothing stores with names I've never heard of, but that carry weight with upper class yuppies with too much money. My more distant relatives always seemed very materialistic in retrospect, and something my mom hated about them was that they always had this superficial keeping up with the joneses thing about them. Like, they would buy super expensive crap, parade it around as status symbols, and put us down for not buying expensive crap. And I never got into that. I always thought it was stupid. I dont care about knick knacks, I don't care about designer clothing. Hell, most of the clothing I got from these guys around christmas autistic me couldnt even wear properly due to the sensory issues. And yeah, it was always like overpriced, and i just never got into that culture.With me, clothing is just something i wear. In part to keep warm, in part to be "decent" and not be some unhinged nudist getting my butthole all over everything. I never dressed fancy, I dress as plainly as possible, and I've always been put down for it. I mean, if Im gonna spend money, let it be on video games and crap. I wanna spend as little as possible on CLOTHING. So yeah, I see these malls in NJ and it's like "oh yeah, this is the kind of weirdo designer stuff that they like. And then they had me look at another mall in NJ....it was also disgustingly upscale, and looked like a carbon copy of the other one. And then another one. Same thing. Also disgustingly upscale. Same fancy designs that made them look like something out of a sci fi movie, same weirdo stores with weird names I never heard of that to upper class people means CLASS. If you shop there, you're one of the cool kids. It shows that you have MONEY. And you can afford to waste it on overpriced crap. Disgusting.
Anyway, after seeing three of these in a row I'm just like, wtf is going on here? Well, I kinda knew. You see, due to a lot of the polarization in America between what Andrew Yang calls "the bubble" and the rest of America, there's increasingly two americas emerging. One is super successful, super prosperous, and super upper class. And these people live in...a bubble. In their own little world. In their world, America works, everything is good, everything is great, and they just look down and sneer on the little people everywhere else. And everywhere else there's....decline. Malls are going out, retail stores are going out, everything is dying, and anti work me is just wondering "what's the point in making new jobs if we don't really need to all work any more"? Seriously, I look at this and I'm like, cool, we're automating jobs, we don't really need a full employment economy, and most suffering from this is expecting people to work as if the economy works exactly like it always has, even though it doesnt work like it always has. We're suffering anomie, a mismatch between society's values, and its reality, and people are suffering both materially and psychologically from this mismatch. Just as people suffered at the beginning of the industrial revolution when the term anomie, people are suffering now. A basic income would go a long way to resolve this decline, but it might mean some rich fudge in northern New Jersey can't buy some fancy clothing in Nordstrom. The horror.
But that's exactly what's so messed up with our politics. And it scares me. The really ironic thing is the rich fudge buying fancy $200 shirts in Nordstrom is probably a democrat. They probably like Biden, they're probably sane, and they're probably recoiling at horror of the popularity of Donald Trump in the "flyover" parts of the country that they've long neglected. They probably voted for Hillary in 2016, but thought that Bernie was just too darned socialist, and might have supported Republicans like Romney, McCain, or George W. Bush in the past, or even Ronald Reagan if they're older, but they just don't feel at home in the republican party any more.Or they might have been democratic since 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton. And they just don't understand what's going on in the rest of the country. Is it racism? Are they just uneducated yeehaws who don't like black people? Do they need to learn economics to understand how free trade is a tide that raises all boats despite some job losses occurring around the country? Why are things going so horridly wrong?
I mean, I'm NOT a fan of donald trump, this should be known by anyone who follows me on here. I hate the dude with a passion, and always thought he was a demagogue, but am I really THAT surprised in retrospect he won 2016? Running the numbers and the statistics, yes, kind of, he overperformed statistically by several points, especially in the rust belt and the mid west, but in part now. As a pennsylvanian witnessing the decline of much of Pennsylvania's economy over my lifetime, I can't be surprised at all. How can you be surprised when you watch the malls close, you watch toys r us go out of go out of business, you watch the Hershey chocolate factory relocate to Mexico, and you honestly never felt that your area TRULY recovered from the great depression, no matter what the monthly "jobs report" tells us? Honestly, I feel like America in 2016, after 8 years of Obama and a hollow economic recovery based on a promise of "creating jobs", but then being in a constant state of job insecurity and understanding that most people are on the edge of losing it all, that the democrats just lost their luster. In 2008, Obama was the hope and change guy. In 2012, he was the guy who wanted to expand unemployment while Romney wanted to cut it so we could give more tax breaks to the "job creators", but what was Hillary's message in 2016? "You can't have nice things, we're not a social democracy, and if you live in a crappy area just move." That's about right.
Honestly, I can feel peoples' righteous anger about the state of the economy, and why people would want to vote for the guy who promised to "Make America Great Again." Who wanted to bring back the factory jobs, pull out of trade deals, and kick those schrodingers immigrants out who were simultaneously stealing our jobs and being too lazy to work. Even though I understand that in 2016, Trump was completely full of crap, I understand why he had this populist appeal of being "the guy" to bring back the jobs and make America "great again."
I mean, I don't think this should be controversial. Yes yes, racism played a role among the more yeehaw than me demographic. Ya know, those deep south whites who still haven't gotten over LOSING THE CIVIL WAR. And it even mightve played a role among the more archie bunker types who are more "casually racist" who say horrible things at the kitchen table, but are less dedicated to the idea than the Nutzis waving swastikas around and playing militia. But, I think a lot of what got the ball rolling with Trump was the fact that the democrats just...fumbled the ball. The fact is, as Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas" and "Listen Liberal" have pointed out, is that our politics is backwards. The elites are trending toward the democrats, and the democrats have largely abandoned the working class in the process. And the right has this weird anti elite populist thing going on, but it lacks any sort of economic basis behind it.
I mean, something with a lot of these ideologies going around is that many of them offer easy answers to complex questions, even if they oversimplify or people are wrong. But, people who are suffering will drift toward the answers available, even if they arent good ones. And that's what the MAGA movement has done. That's also what the left is doing with its weird embracing of Marxism. I was gonna write another article about this tonight, but I don't think I'll get to it as it's too late by this point. As far as me, keep in mind, I designed my own ideology. The fact that Yang came along in 2020 doesn't mean I latched into it because of him. It's because he's been kinda saying what I have for years, and while yes, he's caused me to fine tune some stuff, and brought stuff into focus, even back when I started this blog, I was for UBI as the solution to our economic woes, and had a vaguely human centered capitalist mindset. In reality, I supported Yang to the extent that I did because I realized he was basically running on exactly what I've been saying for years, so I felt an obligation to back him up on that. Keep in mind, the extent to which I support a person is primarily based on how much they conform to what I believe myself. It's not the other way around. I'm a leader, not a follower. BUT...to go back to my point, most people just follow what's available. And when the left doesn't offer answers, then they'll trend right. Everything that has happened since 2016 has been because of the original sin of that election cycle, where the left rejected Bernie Sanders and his message, in favor of Hillary Clinton, and because Clinton flat out sucked as a candidate, people bought into the lies of Trump. 7 years later, we're gearing up for 2024, Trump's cult of personality has morphed into an existential threat to our democracy, and the democrats still havent learned, and many on the left have embraced full on marxism, because liberalism failed to offer them solutions. It's the opposite of what happened in the 1930s. In the 1930s, FDR countered the growing threats of marxism and fascism by advocating for the new deal. In the 2010s and 2020s, the center is failing because it didn't embrace anything resembling the new deal, and instead the left is going further left and the right is going further right. And while the center might appease yuppies who shop at weirdo upper class stores at malls that the vast majority of americans cant afford to shop in, it's losing the plot for everyone else.
Honestly, we're reaching a point where there's two Americas. There's dense urban cores that are increasingly upscale and expensive to live in, and there's everywhere else...which is in decline. What's happening to malls and main streets is what's happening all over the country, everywhere. Either you're becoming increasingly affluent and well off in your own little bubbles, or you're witnessing the decline and have no freaking clue what to do about it, because the only people talking about it in the mainstream are the weirdo populists who look backwards instead of forwards.
And yeah, that's why I decided to talk about malls. Because these malls are a bellweather of the state of the country. Much of it is in decline, but some are doing unbelievably well and defying the trends, but at the expense of being increasingly upscale and out of touch with mainstream americans.
As for my own solutions, isn't it obvious? Reject jobs, abandon a future of leisure and basic income.
I mean, this is the result of living in a world where we are seeing the decline of traditional paid work, but we lack the mechanisms to distribute wealth properly in its absence. We love to act like, "oh, in the distant future no one will have to work, but that's hundreds of years off, we need people to do work today". Except...as I always say, we're struggling to employ people now. If you live in an area with a dying mall, you've probably wondered about the state of the community. You've heard politicians talk about job creation for years only to see nothing be done. You see mayors offering tax breaks to millionaires to build something in your community for the purpose of "creating jobs", but you also understand that no matter how many jobs we talk about creating, that most of us are just completely up crap's creek. Because we are.
If we truly lived in a world in which everyone had to work to survive, that would be one thing. But it's come to my attention that...we don't. And trying to pay off the glorious "job creators" with ever lower taxes under the promise that they will create wealth by creating jobs just...never sat well with me post recession. It clearly doesn't work. Trickle down economics should die as a concept. And instead of this weird neoliberalism, or the luddite ideologies of the traditional left, we need to embrace a world that doesn't rely on work and employing people. We need a basic income, we need medicare for all, and while we still need some work to be done, we should just let the market take care of it AFTER we provide for everyone's needs. Sure, the net payers of my plans would be the weirdos who shop at upscale malls most normal people can't afford, but that's a risk I'm willing to take. You'll live without your lladro figurines and fancy clothes from Lord and Taylor. I promise.
And yeah, that's how I would fix the economy. It's a distribution problem. A common quote ive heard post christianity, and I've heard said by Andrew Yang at one point, is that we're society with people withj primitive brains, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. So, people are stupid, our institutions are outdated, and we're rapidly advancing in ways that could make society a utopia for many, but because people are stupid, and our institutions dated, we're kinda making hell on earth instead. We should be living like gods, but because of peoples' ignorance and our crappy outdated institutions and ways of thinking, most people just seem too blinded to solve the problems. And those in the know dont wanna talk about the problems. But that's another discussion for another day. If I address the marxist left again, I may touch on this some other day.
No comments:
Post a Comment