The Slow Boat to China; the long decline of the American small business.

This once proud edifice,

this eviscerated facade is but the latest casualty in America's century old psychomachia; the struggle between old wealth and small business ownership.

It was implied in the struggle of World War I. Most anyone fighting or losing a family in that struggle believing we only entered into it for economic reasons; to secure the return on loans that wealthy New York bankers (the House of Morgan) had made in Western Europe. It was on the lips of nearly everyone Jon Dos Passos interviewed on the home front during World War II for State of the Nation. Everyone at home in factories amping-up war production knew that the government, in its legislation of the day, was colluding to kill private business ownership. It was built into the very design of the interstate system; to bypass small towns and dry them up, to restrict gasoline sales to adjacent large corporate-owned  fuel stations, to concentrate wealth and main-line it back to a well established hierarchy (the 1% of our population who are obscenely rich). It is the contradictory truth to the deceit of Reaganonomics; that rather than the rich paying it back down when they get richer they merely consolidate it into larger estates and pass it on in trust funds to their descendants. It is the enormous unstopped drain known as Wal Mart preying on our rural communities and sending all their money in a flood back to Arkansas. It is within the bull-shit we're sold everyday on the news when we're shown the Wall Street indexes as the best indicator of the nation's economic health, rather than median income and employment rates. And within the self denial that let all of the middle class believe this past decade that since Wall Street was making a killing their standard of living must be going up in parallel (when in reality their income remained the same and they had only fictitiously increased their standard of living with credit). Our nation is (probably) irrevocably stratified economically and it is a structure only reinforced by our laws and government.

I have been friends for a long time with the family that owned Nanking. Their story is not completely tragic, as both of the family's daughters are grown and embarked on careers of their own and the parents have been ready to retire for a while. It had been managed by two generations already, but the daughters were not encouraged to carry it on. Which I believe is strongly indicative of the state of private business ownership in this country. I'm sure had it seemed like a healthy financial future one of the daughters would have ended up running the restaurant for several more decades. Still I can't help looking at the remnants of that building (which is supposed to be gone entirely by next week) and know that one more of our last, great hold outs against fast food chains and Big Business has died and I'll never have its delicious home-made bread again. And with that thought our community grows a little colder, a little more corporate.

The monster eating.