What If the Rich Never Stopped Getting Richer and Everyone Else Continued to Tread Water?

By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality. Posted October 22, 2007.

Who can help us best understand what happens to deeply unequal societies that let wealth concentrate, beyond all reason, at the top of the economic ladder? Economists? Sociologists? Over a century ago, back in the original Gilded Age, Americans looked to a different source for wisdom on inequality. They looked to novelists. In books like Looking Backward, a fabulously popular 1888 novel that imagined an America gone egalitarian, our forebears found the inspiration they needed to challenge robber baron fortune and power.

Looking Backward would eventually sell, after Uncle Tom's Cabin, more copies than any secular book in the entire 19th century. The book's impact crossed class lines. Nationalist Clubs" espousing the principles of Looking Backward sprouted up in genteel middle class communities. In the South, organizers of dirt-poor farmers handed out Looking Backward as a membership premium for joining the insurgent agrarian advocacy group that would evolve into the Populist Party.

Edward Bellamy, the frail New Englander who authored Looking Backward, revolved his story around an affluent Bostonian who slips off to sleep in 1887 and awakes in the year 2000 to discover an America that had been totally -- and happily -- transformed. No one lacks an adequate income. No grand stashes of wealth allow some to dominate over others. An equal America. A better America.

In short, not our America today. Not our America tomorrow either, suggests veteran novelist David Lozell Martin in his remarkable new book, Our American King.

No one will ever will ever confuse Martin, a former open-hearth furnace steelworker in Southern Illinois, for a frail New Englander. And no one will ever confuse the future America that Martin imagines in Our American King with the better America Edward Bellamy envisioned.

In Martin's post-apocalyptic America, set in our near future, the super-rich play golf in fortified gated communities while, outside the walls, packs of machete-wielding adolescents in wedding gowns -- "with no more than curiosity showing on their young faces" -- slice off the arms of starving suburban matrons.

In other words, a nightmare America.

But with this nightmare the 61-year-old Martin may have given us a Looking Backward for our time, a novel that forces us to confront the inequality that so distorts our lives. The defining difference: Edward Bellamy, writing in perhaps a more innocent age, painted a gloriously hopeful future to force a focus on inequality. David Lozell Martin paints a horror.

What triggers this horror? Martin never lets us know. We learn only that a "social calamity" has hit the United States, leaving the government dissolved, the infrastructure of modern life completely broken down. No electricity. No gasoline. No regular supplies of food. Disorder everywhere.

The mega millionaires, Martin writes, have "purchased and seized massive quantities of every imaginable commodity, trainload after trainload of fuel oil and pharmaceuticals, generators and gin, coffee and clothes," and made fortresses out of places like Montauk at the end of Long Island, "where you could pile burned-out buses and stretch razor wire and position rapid-fire weapons to keep at bay the starving mad million hordes to the west."

In what's left of Washington, D.C., next to a White House fence festooned with the hanging dead bodies of politicians who overstayed their welcome, the mad hordes eventually find a champion, a man who would be -- and does become -- king. Martin's novel tells his story, through the recollections, from fifty years later, of the half-starved Northern Virginia suburbanite who would give that king a son.

That story takes the king and his rag-tag followers across the continent and back, past strongholds of frightened average people they either convert or kill, past empty cities and face-down corpses, with buttocks sliced and diced to offer up "steaks" for the achingly hungry.

Inequality, the king's followers muse as they "sew buttons and snap beans, recalling life before the calamity," made all this inevitable. Their American nation, "the site of the largest accumulation of wealth in human history with the gap between that wealth and the poorest Americans widening every year, was it any wonder that that America became unsupportable."

How fanciful is all this? David Lozell Martin, earlier this month, is sitting at a sidewalk café table in downtown Washington, D.C., a block off the capital's famed K Street corporate lobbyist corridor, talking about his new book. Every few minutes, gaggles of power suits pass by, rushing to meetings and deals designed no doubt to enhance the fortunes of America's already fortunate.

See more stories tagged with: inequality, the american king

Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

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