I just finished reading Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War by Joe Baegent. Here's how Joe poingniantly puts it:
Republican or Democrat, this nation's affluent urban and suburban classes understand their bread is buttered on the corporate side. The primary difference between the two parties is that the Republicans pretty much admit that they grasp and even endorse some of the nastiest facts of life in America. Republicans honestly tell the world: "listen in on my phone calls, piss-test me until I'm blind, kill and eat all of my neighbors right in front of my eyes, but show me the money! Let me escape with ever cent I can kick out of the suckers, the taxpayers, and anybody else I can get a headlock on, legally or otherwise." Democrats, in contrast, seem content to catalog the GOP's outrages against the Republic, showing proper indignation while laughing at episodes of The Daily Show. But they stand behind the American brand: imperialism. They "support our troops," though you will be hard put to find any of them who have served alongside them or who would send one of their own kids off to lose and eye or an arm in Iraq. They play the imperial game, maintain their credit ratings, and plan to keep the beach house and the retirement investments if it means sacrificing every damned Lynndie England in West Virginia.
Yes, I'll have some of that corporate-buttered bread too, please. Some jam would be nice also.
As an actuary, my job was: to count the sick, to count the dead, to raise the premium rates on the aged and the infirm, and to help design and price manipulative products to be sold by the unscrupulous to the unwary. Or, at least that's how I have come to tell my story, because it makes the swallowing the pill of the lost financial fortune that could have been mine easier to swallow.
