Hunger Games: An eerie reflection of our “new American society”

My wife and I went to watch the blockbuster movie “The Hunger Games”. Before going to the movie I already understood that the ruling class, so expertly portrayed in Hunger Games, does in fact exist here in America.

Hunger Games is not science fiction; rather it is an eerie reflection of our “new American society”.

In Hunger Games the citizens of twelve fictional colonies do not govern themselves but rather are kept in a perpetual state of hunger by a “new upper class” that has arisen from the ashes of a nuclear war. In the book there are rumors of a thirteenth colony, sound familiar? The rational for their totalitarian policies is to prevent another war (rebellion). Citizens of each colony are allowed to produce a unique product (e.g. food, fuel, and clothing), which is then redistributed to the other colonies under the strict control of the new upper class. Annually children are selected from each colony for sacrifice upon the alter of the central government called the Hunger Game.

I read two books recently that describe a new American society not unlike that portrayed in The Hunger Game: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray and The Ruling Class: How they Corrupted America and what we can do about it... by Professor Angelo M. Codevilla.

Charles Murray describes two fictional neighborhoods called Belmont and Fishtown to describe the “new upper class” from the “new lower class”. He uses these fictional neighborhoods, which are based in reality, to track key indicators in white America, from 1960 to 2010. He calls these indicators “the founding virtues” of America: industriousness, honesty, marriage and religiosity.

This new upper class is well educated, wealthy and powerful. Murray writes, “[W]hile there is no such thing as an ordinary American, it is not the case that most Americans are balkanized into enclaves where they know little of what life is like for most other Americans. ‘The American mainstream’ may be hard to specify in detail, but it exists."

"Many members of the new upper class are balkanized,” states Murray. They live in large and modern cities much like Belmont described in Murray’s book. Murray identifies the new upper class as “overwhelmingly white and urban”. This mirrors the capital city in Hunger Games.

Murray analyzed where the “new upper class” lives in the United States by zip code. He found they are clustered primarily in four key centers or capitols: Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In these four communities, and smaller ones across the nation, the new upper class controls the money, high level jobs, political power and policies in their areas. You can easily identify them in your own community. You may also identify those at the opposite end of the spectrum known as the “new lower class”. Here in Sarasota County, Florida we have the communities of Longboat Key and Newtown which parallel Belmont and Fishtown respectively in Murray’s book.

Professor Codevilla in his book describes the “ruling class” as, “formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.” According to Professor Codevilla, “What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.” Both Charles Murray and Professor Codevilla are describing the scenario in Hunger Games. As professor Codevilla writes, and as we see in Hunger Games, “For our Ruling Class, identity always trumps truth.”

In Hunger Games "the truth" is the upper class is killing children for entertainment. Killing children becomes an annual event with sponsors, pageantry and rewards to the lone survivor. It is the Roman gladiatorial arena taken to a new level of high technology.

Frances Grund, the seventh son of a German Baron educated in Vienna, who immigrated to Philadelphia in 1825 wrote, “No government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States with a different set of morals. The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people correct in their actions. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their highest respect for morality and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.” [My emphasis]

As Patrick Henry wrote, “Bad men cannot make good citizens.” Self-governing requires individual citizens govern their own behavior first and foremost.

Rides_A_Red_Horse: "The late ruler of North Korea was a fat little bastard. The population could have been prosperous. Communist Kim reduced them to eating tree bark.... Rhodesia was a net exporter of food until Communist Jimmy Carter installed Communist Robert Mugabe. Now Zimbabwe is one of the poorest, hungriest nations on Earth.... Under Batista, Cuba thrived. Now, people will ride anything that can float to escape Communist Castro’s 'Socialist Paradise'...."

THANK you for the excellent examples. I realize we are a wealthy (and blessed) country. We throw away SO MUCH FOOD!

if I could bring up the standard of living of the rest of the world by 10 percent or 20 percent and see my own lowered by the same amount, I might be willing to be a progressive. It does not work like that (as proven by the "Big Black Book of Communism" -- more people have died in the attempt to bring about communist utopias than in ALL THE WARS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!!!). We are headed for trouble, big trouble. And those (on the conservative side or the more liberal) who think that revolution can be achieved peacefully are just fooling themselves.

Hunger Games: An eerie reflection of our “new American society”

Who is it who is busy trying to pit various sectors of society against each other to keep his regime afloat while starving the nation for:

electrical energy (EPA shut-down of coal-fired electrical generation, more than 40% of U.S. electricity comes from that, coal mines),

petroleum (one of the biggest ever restrictions on exploration and drilling in the history of the U.S. while subsidizing Brazil to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, EPA shut-down of refineries, plans to impose Cap and Trade, rejected by legislation, by regulation through the EPA that will add many hundreds of billions in costs to every sector of the economy),

health care (supposedly to get insurance to about 15 million uninsured, who account for 1/2 of 1% of all health care costs annually, Obamacare has already resulted in skyrocketing premiums and will soon, if not stopped, force about 30 million to lose their insurance they get through their employment),

jobs (the total number of people employed has shrunk by millions over the past 3 years, those missing who are no longer looking for a job or are unemployment compensation are no longer counted in unemployment statistics, making what looks not so good a lot better than it would if it accurately reflected reality),

money (refusing to continue the current tax rates and then increasing taxes greatly to fund Obamacare will increase the amount of money going to Washington, leaving even less with people to spend, invest, start businesses),

fiscal sanity (has piled on a greater amount of debt in a shorter amount of time than anyone in U.S. history and has blown nearly all of it on bailouts for foreign banks, for contributors’ “green energy” companies, for unions, for taking over companies like GM and then giving them to his contributors, for vastly expanding public sector employment at both state and federal levels, for plans for fricking trains, for absolute morons like Stephen “we could have everyone paint his roof white” Chu, who, though he may have a Nobel in physics, doesn’t have a clue about energy production)

I haven't read the book, nor have I seen the movie: so I can only comment on the article at the top of the thread.

The closest thing I can see is that Obama (and the globalists / Communists / whatevers behind him) are trying the classical techniques for undermining / subverting a society -- see also Antonia Gramsci and/or the famous 1963 Congressional Record article on the Communist Goals for America; or Paul Harvey's speech on what he'd do to destroy America if he were the devil.

I think there are a number of reasons for this.

1) The United States is steeped in freedom and individuality -- everything from the Declaration to the Constitution to the Bill of Rights to "Go West Young Man" has created a cultural memory with its own inertia, which is proving harder than expected to eradicate. More on this later. Whereas Europe's cultural history is full of feudalism, overlords, monarchies, dictatorships: the people have a cultural memory of being servile, and without social mobility.

2) Related to this, the United States has long been a Christian country: we fought a war to eliminate slavery. And Christianity focuses on the individual: Christ died for sinners, to *make* them worthy, not *because* of anyone's or any group's inherent superiority.

3) Putting these factors together, the left has been trying to eliminate the cultural memory of the U.S. ("Hey hey! Ho Ho! Western Culture's got to go!") and to dumb down the people (public schools were developed in Germany to make compliant serfs for the masters, and fit in well with the "Organization Man" meme of the post-World War II bureaucracies). And hand in hand with this has been the effort first to remove religion from the public square, then to make religion bad ("homophobia" or "anti-science" anyone?), and then to destroy the last bastion of resistance to tyranny, the family (birth control / abortion / welfare / hookup culture).

The thing is, it isn't working: or rather, it isn't working like clockwork as it has in other countries.

And so the Gramsci-ites and others are working on other time-tested techniques: Cloward-Piven (put enough financial strain on the system that it will collapse), dependency, class warfare. The idea is twofold: one, if the great middle class is in the way, get rid of them by pressure from without (outsourcing / taxes / regulation to stop entrepreneurs) and by subversion: encourage unhealthy personal and societal habits in order to foster near-universal dependence on government.

So instead of dividing the underclasses *geographically* as in the movie (although to some extent this happens with the Rust Belt and/or the South being full of "bitter clingers"), people are divided along class lines.

And as in Animal Farm where the puppies were raised to be attack dogs, so the underclasses are being groomed via Race Hatred and the Occupy Movement to attack the Middle Class, the elites hope to pit the non-elites among one another, fighting for the scraps.

But two things are happening, that the conspirators haven't counted on. One, is that all their toxic results are hitting the lower classes; two, the more educated youth, having been inculcated with a sense of entitlement, are nonetheless left with a sense of *superiority* such that they will not deign to accept handouts: oh, no, they want a job commensurate with their perceived status.

And they remember that four short years ago, everyone HAD jobs. But now? They have awful debt, and NO job.

So who are they going to blame? Not themselves. The man at the top: the one who *PROMISED* change...not telling them it was change for the worse.

And the second, is that one has to time things VERY carefully. The Cloward-Piven is working so well, that not only are the underclasses running out of money; the lower echelons of the elites (the government functionaries, the apparatchiks, are threatened with losing their livelihoods as well.

And if both the lower classes and the middle classes become dispossessed at the same time -- someone just *might* get the idea that "Let's get the dirty bastards at the top!" will bring more *positive* change than fighting each other. It wasn't the Rust Belt Union Boys who came up with the idea of sending all the factories to China: it was MBA hot-shots doing the bidding of the top dogs. It wasn't the middle-aged white male programmers who came up with the H1B visa and having to train in their own replacements: it was the elites. And it wasn't the working-class blacks who came up with the idea of de facto amnesty for illegal aliens in order to lower costs by paying manual labor their wages under the table, and socializing the health care and other disruptions. Yup, it was the elites again.

And I fear that it was a grave mistake to try to keep power by resorting to the politics of personal destruction to keep Palin and Cain out of power: it simply acted to plug up a pressure cooker of political frustration...

Cheers!

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