The Republican sees himself as the bedrock, the core of the country, the vast middle class, with the poor being a little fringe of lazies and crazies at the bottom, and the rich as the ultimate guaranteed destination of those who play by the rules and keep their noses clean. The class whose manners you ape and whose patronage you crave.

But this is only a historical accident. The poor are those that, until lately, were legion, and the middle class was tiny, although still more numerous than the upper crust they felt they were entitled to join some day.

No, it hasn't always been the way it is now. We had the good fortune of inheriting a fabulously rich and underpopulated continent that enjoyed the blessings of slave, then cheap foreign, labor and (relative to Europe) political and economic freedom for most of the last half of the 19th century. The new century brought anti-trust laws, progressive taxation, social and welfare legislation and universal education to further redistribute the wealth. And after the Depression and the War, we strode into a devastated world, intact, untouched and productive, with a social welfare democracy determined to ensure prosperity forever. We got us a middle class, a real middle class; a prosperous and numerous one. Poverty, we were told, was limited to a few pockets in Appalachia and the ghettoes and the New Frontier and Great Society were taking care of that. We are part of all that, and it is all we have ever known.

But the memory of that old poverty is there. Those of us a little older have heard the stories, we spoken with witnesses of the immigrant experience, the Dust Bowl, the labor unrest, satanic mills and tenement halls of the Gilded Age. We remember the stories of hardships our grandparents told, and our parents repeated. My mother suffered starvation as a child during the Depression. It scarred her for life, physically and psychologically, and I was immersed in her pain even though I never experienced any myself. Deep down we all know perfectly well how close we are to the edge of the abyss, how thin the door that separates us from the blizzard--and the wolves.

The times are changing, partly due to our own sloth, ignorance, greed and avarice, but mostly just due to the march of history and the winds of change. But we are not really ready for it. And we prefer to blame our fellow victims for our own vulnerability, and our victimization by thse we aspire to become.

The middle class is shrinking, the ranks of the poor are swelling, and the wealthy become phenomenally wealthy and increasingly harder to find. This is not a coincidence. For the last generation our median income has dropped, even though worker productivity, the stock market and profits have gone up. It doesn't take any knowledge of economics to see the reason for that.

The difference has gone to protecting and insulating the rich. The difference for the poor has been made up by debt; personal, governmental, and corporate. And we have put our women to work in a desperate attempt to prolong our suburban middle class paradise just a bit longer. We have squandered away our productive capacity playing financial games, and have covered up our declining prosperity with cheap goods from abroad, trading our real skills, income and wealth for Wal-Mart bargains.

Yes, the poor scare us. Because when we look at them, even though we blame them for being lazy and stupid and seduced to violence by our class enemies, we recognize ourselves. They are us, just one or two generations removed, our comfortable middle class existence as the clerks and technicians who administer the Empire, the new Perikoi, our genteel lives and our bourgeois values a historical blip, a bump in the road, a brief springtime that followed the Second World War. We're going back to 1930 again, or 1890 if the fascists get their way. We don't dare admit it but we are scared shitless.

Study history, Jody. It is not a little morality play of nasty villains pitted against noble heroes. They tell you it is because they have cast themselves in the role of hero, and their victims in the role of villain.

History is a random and chaotic avalanche of events and personalities roaring down from Up the Line. Sometimes we get swallowed up in the flood, sometimes we briefly ride the crest of the wave. And I think the wave is about to break.

Don't blame the poor if the economy has been mismanaged. They weren't in charge. The middle class wasn't in charge either, but they went along with those who were.