safe position near the top of the social pyramid.

Below the high command posts there is a wide range of handymen and
specialists who fill particular positions and place their time, energy,
experience and expertise at the disposal of the high command. Among them
are scientists, engineers, technicians. Equally important are their
spokesmen, advisers and apologists: lawyers, preachers, teachers,
writers, speakers, publicists, carefully chosen for their ability to
apologize, passify, justify and reassure. On the political side are the
diplomats and politicians. Protection for their persons and property is
provided by the police and the armed forces, composed of highly paid,
well-trained, well-armed destroyers and killers.

Social stability and mass support come from an extensive middle class
composed of public servants and body servants, small tradesmen,
self-employed craftsmen, rentiers and retired persons who are assured
body comforts, social recognition and preferment for themselves, their
relatives and dependants. Members of this middle class are recognized on
occasion, pampered, amused, diverted, bored, frustrated and eventually
corrupted by the soft living which their middle class status makes
possible.

Close to the middle class come the white collar workers and the better
paid blue collar workers. Their lives are cluttered with gadgets and
fringe benefits. Their homes are paid for or bought on credit.

Below these more or less regularly employed workers on salaries and
wages come the semi-employed, racial or class underlings living in
poverty at or near the subsistence level.

Associated with this range of bourgeois occupations and often closely
identified with it are owners of family farms, tenants and hired hands.

Outside of the employment range, but dependent upon the economy are the
defectives and delinquents, the parasites who live on cake and the
parasites who live out of garbage cans.

Beyond these categories, in the American Empire, there are the colonial
compradors and handymen who enjoy standards of living comparable to
their opposite members in the North America nucleus. Below them are the
colonial masses who live their entire lives under conditions of
uncertainty and insecurity.

Millions of young people across the planet, born into the complicated
and bewildering social network of western civilization after war's end
in 1945 and graduated from school after the onset of the Vietnam War in
1965