Some days I read the papers and think, not much has changed since Bruegel painted his panoramas of peasant life.  never mind that Halloween is kind of a peasanty holiday. We'll let that slide. 

I'm talking about: imagine giving a 16th century peasant a Dodge Ram.  What do you think he'd do with it?  If you answered, "Run over other peasants with it!" Well, ding ding ding ding! You're right!

(By the way, this story is not dissimilar to one from earlier this year—and the lesson remains: peasants, even peasants with money, should not have automobiles.)

Just to be clear, I have nothing, personally, against peasants.  Some of my best friends are peasants, and (disclosure) I myself am descended from goatherds. (WOO!  Go Go Goatherds Go!)

It's just that sometimes, walking down Washington Street at Downtown Crossing, say, don't you start thinking: "this is basically the Middle Ages with the annoying addition of cell-phones"?  All we need is The Black Death (bird flu, anyone?), and the picture's complete. 

It's not as squalory, granted.  I have met real peasants in Mongolia who still live in the Middle Ages for all intents and purposes, and it's not gotten to that hereabouts.  In a way it's worse, though.  Because while peasants are ignorant of book learning, at least they can make themselves useful.  And they're self-sufficient.  They can scratch out a living regardless of what regime is in power in the capital.  Bureaucrats eat salads and run on their little treadmills at the gym every night and die at forty.  Peasants live forever.  On nothing but everclear and potatoes.  You think you're hardcore?  Try living on nothing but potatoes (and an occasional onion, which is cause for celebration and considered a feast).  That's hardcore.

Because America has no history of out-and-out feudalism, we have no real peasant class, of course.  But we do have lots of descendants of peasants—designer peasants, you might call them—who've managed to hold onto some of the central features of peasanthood, even if they're scratching out their living in cubicles instead of cubits of soil.

What are some of the features of peasanthood?  Have a look at Kurosawa's Donzoko (The Lower Depths), and it'll give you a pretty good idea (not to mention an unparalleled example of Japanese proto-beat-boxing.)

The difference is, if you set our peasanty classes loose without all their modern accouterments, how long do you think it would be before they went cannibal on us? (A major theme of Cormac McCarthy's The Road worth considering.)

And even our post-peasant white collar proletariat, who think they're educated and independent?  Switch off the electricity or the water supply for one week—just one week—and see what happens.  We are actually, in our modern world, probably about 48 hours at any given moment from utter anarchy.  And about 72 until the cannibalism kicks in.  If you are reading this right now, chances are your whole world would crumble in very short order without electricity.  Sounds funny, but it's really kind of not.

Still, people will think you're a right little freak if you start stockpiling water and canned goods.  Is it worth the social stigma just to survive the coming apocalypse?

Anyway, none of this make you a peasant.  You could be a cleric, like me.  But other than that, the world is still divided between lords and vassals, for all intents and purposes.  And while the modern left clings to the myth that the wretched of the earth are kinder and gentler than their overlords, it's all just degrees of pettiness in the end.  Absolute power to a peasant may be a hoard of potatoes in a time of famine, but the behavior and the outcome's basically the same.

I was recently reading in the Daily Mail that, according to evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry from the London School of Economics, "the human species will split into two different species," "an attractive, intelligent ruling elite and an underclass of dim-witted, ugly goblin-like creatures."  But I don't think we have to wait 100,000 years for it.  And I'm not so sure it won't be the cannibalistic "ugly goblin-like creatures" who'll be the "ruling elite."  If now is any indication, it could very well be the other way around.