I delivered three babies in two pregnancies. The first pregnancy I gladly accepted an epidural, which resulted in my having a difficult time pushing out my twin sons. After that trauma, I decided, before the delivery of my third child, I would not again accept an epidural. However, when the pain came on in that third delivery, I quickly lost my resolve. It is surely human to seek to escape pain.
A birth analogy seems appropriate to a discussion about an America on the cusp of a new economy, especially in an age when the nation has at its fingertips any number of pain-avoiding serums or epidurals. Plain old denial is an epidural. Isn't this the option of politicians who pretend we can bring jobs back home, that we can stop the speeding train of globalism? How do you return Americans to the hourly wages of manufacturing workers of the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties? American audiences welcome such promises because they are hardly ready to accept that the decline of our standard of living may be permanent. And who can blame them when such decline ironically is swaddled in a continuing proliferation of consumer goods? The machine of the consumer economy has not stopped, has it? Smart phones, I-Pads, even Kindles and Nooks are the opiate of the people, aren't they even as they are manufactured far beyond America's shores?
Last week, I watched MSNBC's "Morning Joe." The guest at the table was political theorist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in very plain language delivered this key message: the 21st century America cannot be the 20th century America because the 21st century world is not the 20th century world. America will not necessarily have to take a back seat in world politics, but it will not be able to police the rest of the world nor should it. He in fact suggested that in this millennium there will be no superpowers. Yet, Brzezinski commented that domestic gridlock, and the kind of talk that goes along with it, that is, an out-and-out refusal for some politicians to admit that America is going to have to step back, is keeping American leaders from arriving at this new reality. Joe Scarborough and company sat with their mouths agape at this news, and I wasn't sure if their unusual silence was because they were just being kind to an old man or if there was a grand canyon between Brzezinski's consciousness and theirs. Of course. The very existence of the talking heads, employed by a hybrid television cable station and Internet entity, MSNBC, depends on the idea that more is more (Americans need 900 digital channels to choose from), and that the machine will keep churning out products, each with a very short shelf-life no matter how many more of similar vein get produced.
Which brings me more closely to the matter at hand--American housing. In his essay, "Stop Payment, a Homeowner's Revolt against the Banks," (Harper's, January 2012) Christopher Ketcham discusses what drove the housing machine, or part of what drove it. The engine was the gambling mindset we hear critiques of the housing boom (post bubble) talk about. The engine was packaged loans that became securities that people and other entities, mostly the latter, invested in. Most of us understand why the bubble burst--because Americans couldn't afford the mortgages from which the securities originated. What Americans haven't maybe known, most Americans anyway, is that in order to create the housing machine and the "Avatar (read fake) economy" that was born of it for the first time ever the two documents that throughout the country's real estate history have served as proof of mortgage ownership--deed of trust and primissory note--were separated. These items, once held by local courthouses (chanceries) , landed in very many cases with MERS (mortgage electronic registration system) in Virginia. MERS has served as intermediary, the theoretical holder of one's mortgage while it is in the process of being sold, a practice that most American homeowners recognize as all too common. Who knew? Good question. Lots of people knew, yet I guess too few people questioned the practice. According to Ketcham, the consequence of the separation of documents is that today those entities who claim to hold one's mortgage is not likely able to prove it. Ketcham shares in his report stories of several individuals who had MERS cases and in at least one the homeowner, even after being foreclosed upon, retrieved his home through the courts after arguing that the bank that had foreclosed could not prove it actually had owned his loan. In theory, the reality that was shown in this case is true of literally hundreds of thousands of other mortgages, which is why at the end of the essay Ketcham leaves the reader hanging. Another homeowner, whose case is still in the process of being litigated, may also get his home back. The attorney for the other side--the bank--has offered but one argument: the implications of the homeowner winning the case are too big to allow. The judgment, which would set a precedent, is unacceptable. Awarding hundreds of thousands of homeowners their homes free and clear of debt, even after illegitimate foreclosure, would cause a cataclysm--a failure of banks that would be so much larger than the last forestalled failure. America would have to begin again from, well, nothing. The question Ketcham leaves us with is the same one that some were asking before the bank bailout of 2008: should we not just let it (failure) happen? Is that not the purest form of capitalism?
The problem with the epidural is that one cannot feel anything down there and, yet, one does feel--I did anyway--guilt. I knew that birth pangs were actually part of what it takes to bring new life into the world. And yet this progress in medicine allowed me and many other women to avoid the natural pain. In defense of the treatment, anaesthesiolgists do implore women not to request an epidural when birth is imminent; it should only be given early in the delivery process. The question for America is how long we have been in that early delusional stage and what we will do now that the pain is on the horizon.
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