<em>"This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper."</em>
<strong>-- T.S. ELIOT</strong>

<em>"It's the end of the world as we know it, the end of the world as we know it."</em>
<strong>-- R.E.M.</strong>

It may be slightly premature to write this, much like writing an obituary for a terminal patient who is still breathing, but I think the American middle class has pretty well had it.

It's difficult to place the blame on one culprit, but I can tell you when and where it started. In the mid-to-late 1970s, when all of a sudden there were credit cards, car loans and easy mortgages for almost everyone, and the idea wasn't how much you owed but whether you could afford the monthly payments. Shortly after that, saving money in banks or credit unions became passe and the idea was to put it in the stock market and watch it grow.

[caption id="attachment_1187" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="How things change."]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ill_pho_port_bw_1_pic_american_way_life_blacks_1937-1.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1187" title="ill_pho_port_bw_1_pic_american_way_life_blacks_1937-1" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ill_pho_port_bw_1_pic_american_way_life_blacks_1937-1-300x215.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="215" /></a>[/caption]

Then the good jobs for blue-collar workers began disappearing, and all of a sudden it wasn't really possible for men with high-school educations to make enough money to support their families. The $20 an hour job in a steel mill became $4 an hour at McDonald's or some other fast-food outlet.

Middle-class wages have essentially been stagnant since 1972, which was pretty much when the federal government stopped caring about the middle class. More and more companies stopped paying pensions, and fewer and fewer businesses provided health care for their employees.

The people running things sold this as a good thing. They called it an "ownership society," and said we had control over our own retirement and our own health care.

Of course, we had to pay for it.

And I don't know one person anywhere who had a better retirement with his own self-financed 401(k) than he would have with a company pension, just as I don't know one person anywhere who was better off paying for his own health care.

But where things really got evil was when people with mortgages were encouraged to refinance or take out home equity loans to support a higher standard of consuming. When the housing market collapsed, something like 40 percent of all homeowners found that they owed more money on their homes than they were worth.

Couple that with 9 percent unemployment that is actually probably closer to 20 percent when you add in the underemployed, a housing market with millions of properties sitting unsold and a staggering economy that isn't making anyone feel confident, and you've got a middle class on the proverbial respirator.

Ask yourself this:

Why would anyone of middle class status -- and middle class insecurities -- even think about buying a house right now? For one thing, there is absolutely no guarantee it will hold its current value, let alone appreciate in value. For another, how many people have jobs these days that they're confident they'll have long enough to make the payments?

So who killed the middle class? Or what?

I suppose we could say it's partially self-inflicted. Too many people thought that they should be rich and took too many chances.

But Wall Street encouraged it, and a Republican Party that never saw a rich person it wouldn't bend over backward for is to blame too. As are the Democrats, who forgot who their constituency was and bent over backwards for those same rich folks.

So the middle class is dying, and who knows what will replace it? If our corporate masters expect us to be happy little serfs, they had damn well improve the level of television programming.

Otherwise, since we started with Eliot, we might ask ourselves what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem, ready to be born?