Two of the oldest shell games

This business of victimising public employee unions reminds me of two of the oldest cons perpetrated upon the working class by the ruling class.

The first is the little trick of setting one working class minority against another. My spouse, with roots in western Mass. industrial cities, and a fondness for rose-coloured glasses, scoffs at this. She maintains that the various groups in those cities were all one big happy family, who showed their mutual love by strolling to one anothers' churches on Easter. She is of course a generation or two removed from the reality of the thing.

My grandmother had another opinion. She spent several of her formative years in Lowell early in the 20th century, and maintained that one ethnic group would visit the churches of another only if they were carrying brickbats and torches. More intellectual sources have told me that the Lowell mill owners deliberately fomented ethnic conflict to prevent the proletariat from organising.

This game has been going on at least since the Romans.

The unions have, perhaps too late, grasped the theme of "war on the middle class." That is a riff that only dates to the emergence of the urban middle classes in medieval times. Then, the ruling classes convinced the rural peasantry that they had a common cause, hostility toward the nascent middle class, and probably delayed the decay of the medieval aristocracy by several centuries. The ruling classes' war on the middle class is a very real phenomenon. Marxist rhetoric notwithstanding, few things have so much delayed the advancement of humanity so much as the unnatural alliance of aristocracies, born or made, with a reactionary rural peasantry.

Once again, we should hardly be surprised that in reactionary eyes, there really is nothing new under the sun.