Crisis on Main Street.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the economy has some issues. With the latest developments, thousands of white collar workers, some with the kind of salaries I have long scorned and envied because of the seeming lack of relation between their size and the amount of education/effort required to receive them, will lose their jobs. The government is stepping in again for an $85 billion bailout of AIG (where is that money supposed to come from? Maybe Iraq will lend it back to us), after saving the day for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac only a couple of weeks ago. The Republican love of deregulation is coming back to bite us.

The good news is, according to John McCain, that the fundamentals of the American economy are “strong.” Or, no, that’s not what he meant, he meant that the American workers are “strong.” Unlike Senator Obama, who McCain accused on “The View” of choosing his words carefully in respect to the “lipstick on a pig” distraction, McCain apparently does not give any thought to the meaning of the words he uses. But even if he really meant that American workers are “strong,” so what? What good is it to be “strong” when you’re losing a job that you won’t easily replace? Is strength going to save the day when Americans can’t afford to buy food for their children? When the bank forecloses on their homes? There’s been plenty of exaltation of the strength of the blue-collar American worker for the last seventy years, but for the last thirty of those it hasn’t meant much more than a way to pay lip service to the requirement that they adapt to the decline of the manufacturing era in the U.S.

If the typical blue-collar American worker has been labeled “strong,” it is not a word that applies readily to white-collar workers. Indeed, “weak” seems more fitting. Let’s face it, just like many blue-collar workers, many white-collar workers are ill-prepared without additional schooling or training to make a switch into a different industry, to apply a different skill set. And also like most other Americans, white-collar workers frequently do not have any kind of financial cushion to fall back on. That is a potentially devastating combination for anyone. The bottom can fall out quickly, and the latte crowd is arguably ill-equipped to deal with it, both financially and emotionally.

Today’s white-collared workers are a pampered bunch, rarely having known the experience of a job loss in an economy so weak that they could not quickly rebound. Many identify with their careers very strongly, and will struggle to redefine themselves as they are forced to adapt in order to continue to provide for their families. There is a pervasive attitude among many that their choice of careers elevates them above the people with the jobs they may find themselves doing in order to survive, and that elitist attitude will take a battering. The injection of such angst into the equation may seem pathetic to your average American, and to an extent it is. Nonetheless, it’s a reality, and an impediment to finding the “strength” of which John McCain speaks.

We’ll have to hope that what Senator McCain first said, what he didn’t really mean, is true after all: that the fundamentals of our economy are strong. If they are not, the relative strength or weakness of the American worker will mean nothing in the face of a downward slide that seems to be gathering momentum.