The common American Sap/Sucker is such a fervent believer in free market ideology that he tends to trust implicitly anyone who espouses the same doctrine. He may be recognized by his gullibility and his unusual capacity for redundant consumption.
While the Common American Sap/Sucker mistrusts 'Big Government' and is strongly averse to paying his taxes, he idolizes big corporations. And although such corporations used to pay 50% of all federal taxes and now pay only 14%, and although 200 of America's largest corporations pay no taxes at all, and although the Common American Sap/Sucker has to pay more taxes to make up for their dereliction, he is not only happy to pay for them, he's even happy to include, in the price of the products he buys, money to help these same corporations pay the very expensive lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists that enable them to evade the taxes he will have to pay in their stead.
"Hey," he says, "this is the greatest system in the world."
The Common American Sap/Sucker believes wholeheartedly in the legal fiction that Exxon-Mobil and Monsanto and Bank of America and other corporate giants are private individuals like himself, and should have the same freedom from government oversight.
When banks gambled with his money and lost it all in dubious financial manipulations because of inadequate government regulation, the Common American Sap/Sucker was happy to see his taxes given to the perpetrators. After all, they had earned their riches by their ingenuity in thinking up new ways to bilk the public and further bulge their already bursting pockets. Though the Common American Sap/Sucker was not responsible for the financial catastrophe, he feels the perpetrators should be rewarded, because they were spectacularly greedy, and greed, according to his creed, is good. The fact that the executives responsible for the collapse were paid over a billion and a half dollars for destroying the economy seems perfectly fair to the Common American Sap/Sucker. They were the greediest, so they should get paid the most.
Nor is the Common American Sap/Sucker bothered by the fact that the bankers who received bailout money refused to disclose to the government or the public what they were doing with these billions. While the Common American Sap/Sucker would have had to make full disclosure were he to borrow money, the delinquent banks felt no such obligation. They simply took the money and told the government and the taxpayers it was none of their business what they did with 'their' money. "Get government off our backs!" they shouted.
And that's O.K. with the Common American Sap/Sucker. "Hey, they're big bankers, I'm sure they know what they're doing," he says.
The Common American Sap/Sucker is a strong believer in the status quo, no matter how it gets. Despite his mistrust of Big Government, he is not only happy to pay taxes to keep rich people rich. He's happy to pay taxes to keep poor people poor. The Common American Sap/Sucker is willing to pay the federal and state governments billions of dollars for bureaucratic red tape to make absolutely certain a welfare mother doesn't find some nefarious way to get an extra can of spam for her kids.
The Common American Sap/Sucker is also willing to put up with 'government interference' as long as it applies only to his neighbors. He wants his neighbors to be forcibly restrained by government from doing anything that would make his neighborhood less pleasant or desirable, but feels equally strongly that he himself should be able to do whatever he damn well pleases with his own private property.
"Hey, it's a free country," he says.
(For a more upbeat look at our world, see my website for information on my new book The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture).