I just caught up with this thread in one sitting, and it's a classic illustration of the view from inside a gated community (or the mentality of the gated community).

Yes, Mountain View is fantasyland, and I alternately cringed and chuckled at Tom's report from the field. Sounds like he might've caught not a "bus", in the sense of public transportation, but one of those private shuttles operated by the corporations. Or maybe it was just that he saw people who violated his stereotypes by managing to be happy instead of surly and resentful at their lot in life. Tom has a somewhat distorted view of human nature; unlike Conservatives, normal people don't spend all their nursing their grudges, and find time to enjoy life as much as possible. "All the little people are so happy, what could possibly be wrong?"

I live in the Bay Area too, in central San Jose. When I ride public transit my impression is "same as it ever was": The buses are what the real working class has to ride to get to work, the domestic workers, the laborers, the store clerks, as well as students, the elderly and the unemployed. And a few oddballs like me, freelancers struggling to carve out a living in the ever-shrinking interstices in the corporate system.

Tom works in an industry well outside the mainstream, and no doubt that isolation has a lot to do with his strange view of everyone else's reality. Silicon Valley long ago banished manufacturing to cheaper climes, and so is almost totally bereft of the worker class traditionally made up of factory workers. As a result, the Valley has a distinctly stratified society economically, with a large number of low-paid support workers, almost no lower middle class, a large upper middle class made up of professionals (engineers and managers), and a rather large top-hat-and-tails contingent of successful capitalists.

In recent years, the economic rot has been moving up the ladder. If Tom spent any time with people in the mainstream of local society, he'd find that engineers and managers are constantly worried about seeing their jobs sent overseas. The Valley is steadily moving away from its roots as an engineering mecca, and becoming just another collection of corporate headquarters and investment banks.

In other words, though he doesn't seem to recognize it, Tom's describing life in a full-out oligarchy. Play along with your neofeudal economic lords, and life can be pleasant. Step out of line, and you can look forward to a fulfilling career as a Starbucks barista. And the lords are smart: They make clear that nobody has any security and that anybody can be replaced by $5/day Sanjay in Bangalore. Life for a modern serf is characterized by material comfort (albeit at a steadily declining level) and constant insecurity and anxiety.

Wake up and take a good look around you, TB. People are scared, not just the poor, either, and it isn't because of a propaganda campaign by the Democrats. As you conservatives love to point out, people don't need anyone to tell them how the economy is doing, they actually have to deal with it every day.

No comment to make, just thought that it bears repeating.