Yes, we'll have no bananas

I suddenly understood, late Saturday night, that for some people the ready answer would be “survival of the fittest.” Let’s glide over the fact that many of the folks who would say that don’t believe in evolution, and let’s just focus on the phrase itself. Because there have been times in history when that was roughly what happened — although the actor David Niven, if he were around to join in this discussion, would be quick to point out that you could just as well call it survival of the luckiest, because luck always plays a role right from the beginning. After all, it isn’t virtuous to be born with good genes and a great immune system — it’s lucky. So when you say that only the fittest medieval Europeans survived the plague, or only the fittest prisoners lived to create, out of penal colonies, the country of Australia or the state of Georgia, you’re talking about those who were blessed with the means of survival.

And in theory — in Darwin’s theory, that is, which is where the phrase is purported to have come from — survivors mate with each other and create a breed of survivors. If this is beginning to sound eerily familiar, that’s because it was the reasoning behind Hitler’s murderous efforts to create an Aryan race that would rule the world. One of the great and terrible jokes of the 21st century thus far is that our current president — working to help the uninsured, the disenfranchised, the discriminated-against; working to help them survive — is being compared by some with the man who infamously did just the opposite, and came terrifyingly close to destroying a large part of the world.

So what is this all about? Why money, of course. As economist Paul Krugman notes, “These are terrible times for many people in this country. Poverty, especially acute poverty, has soared in the economic slump; millions of people have lost their homes. ... Yet if you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you won’t find it among these suffering Americans. You’ll find it instead among the very privileged, people who don’t have to worry about losing their jobs, their homes, or their health insurance, but who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.”

This is a new spirit abroad in the land, and it bodes ill for my country, I fear. What will a nation be like that has a huge and impoverished “underclass” of desperately poor people? If you’re curious, have a look at Mexico, the only industrialized nation in the world with a larger gap than we have between rich and poor. Or just have a look at what very nearly happened to us just two short years ago. The guys who did that are trying for a comeback. Look out, America! We could be the next banana republic.

Susan Harper is retired, lives in Commerce and volunteers for the Commerce Library Board and the Jackson County Literacy Program.