There’s been a lot of discussion about Paul Ryan’s racially-tinged dismissal of inner-city poverty as evidence of a cultural deficit. As Timothy Egan’s recent column in the New York Times reminds us, there’s a particular irony in Ryan’s appropriation of an argument that used to be mounted against his own Irish forebears.
“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.
Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.
You never hear Ryan make character judgments about generations of wealthy who live off their inheritance, or farmers who get paid not to grow anything. Nor, for that matter, does he target plutocrats like Romney who might be lulled into not taking risks because they pay an absurdly low tax rate simply by moving money around. Dependency is all one-way.
We humans evidently have a deep-seated need to distinguish the virtuous “us” from the undeserving “them.” As Egan demonstrates, however, the identity of “us” and “them” is anything but static. Many upstanding Americans can trace their roots back to a once-despised “them.”
Does the Land of the Free have class distinctions? Are such distinctions inevitable? Defensible?
American notions of class aren’t grounded in lineage and tradition—at least, not to the extent they are elsewhere. Class in America gets confused with concepts of meritocracy and echoes of Calvinism, the belief that earthly success was a sign of God’s favor and one’s “chosen-ness.”
The conviction that material wealth was evidence of moral merit was accompanied by the conclusion that poverty must signal moral defect. Over the years, these doctrinal roots of our belief in the comparative worth of rich and poor was lost, subsumed into a secular, class-based proposition: poor folks are lazy “takers” who lack “middle-class values.”
In a culture that celebrates (fast-disappearing) meritocracy and social mobility, it’s easy to conclude that poverty is a result of class-based attitudes and characteristics. And of course, if you’re privileged, it’s satisfying to attribute your good fortune to individual merit rather than the fact you were born (with the “right” race, religion, gender and sexual orientation) into a family with the wherewithal to feed, clothe, educate and endow you.
These attitudes foster policies that favor the fortunate, diminish the middle class, and make social mobility virtually impossible for the working poor.
There will always be winners and losers. There will always be some people who work harder than others, who are smarter or more entrepreneurial and deserve to do better. But a society that confuses individual worth with money and social status is a class-based society.
NOTE: HAVING INTERNET PROBLEMS. HERE’S TOMORROW’S BLOG. IF YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME FOR A DAY OR SO, I’M WORKING ON MY ACCESS….
This post from DailyKos mirrors two others I’ve seen, reporting the response of several Texans (!) to the use of a term derived from Arabic to describe a dust storm.
Hateful hubbub arises over haboob. The word, from the Arabic for “strong wind,” and, in particular, a dust storm in North Africa or the Arabian peninsula, has been used by meteorologists to describe such storms in the United States since the 1950s. But after KCBD News Channel 11 in Lubbock, Texas, posted a photo on its Facebook page with the caption “Haboob headed toward Lubbock,” some Texans went crazy:
“Since when do we need to apply a Muslim vocabulary to a good ole AMERICAN dirt storm?? …I take great offense to such terminology! GO BACK TO CALLING THEM DIRT STORMS!!”
“It’s called a dust storm..Texas is not a rag head country.”
“Never had a haboob until we got that Muslim boob for POTUS.” […]
America is doomed.
If this were an isolated instance, or even limited to Texas, it would be embarrassing, but this sort of assholery is everywhere. Including Congress.
It’s bad enough that people are this ignorant and bigoted; that they feel compelled to publicly express that ignorance and bigotry is really more than I can take.
Paul Krugman’s column on The Dog Whistle deserves to be read by anyone and everyone who professes bafflement over today’s incoherent politics.
The only thing he omits is a discussion of the degree to which anti-Obama fervor is motivated by the color of this President’s skin. But then, that phenomenon is hard to miss for anyone who isn’t willfully ignoring it.
I can’t add anything to Krugman’s dead-on analysis. Go read it.
A couple of days ago, the Indianapolis Star reported that a lawsuit had been filed by same-sex couples seeking to have Indiana recognize their marriages.
The usual suspects said the usual things.
“For years we have warned legislators and policy leaders that homosexual activists were seeking to force a new definition of marriage upon every church, school and business in Indiana,” Micah Clark, executive director of the American Family Association of Indiana said in a statement.
“Today, a lawsuit has been filed in the Southern federal court district of Indiana to overturn our laws that recognize marriage as not just any relationship, but as the special union of a man and a woman which benefits children and society like no other. We knew this would happen when the legislature sent the signal that it would not protect our laws with the final passage of the Marriage Protection Amendment this year. This issue now rests in the hands of unelected judges, just as a majority of our legislators wanted, rather than letting the people of Indiana decide the future of marriage.”
State Sen. Mike Delph, R-Carmel, a staunch supporter of Indiana’s same-sex marriage ban, immediately took to Twitter to criticize the lawsuit.
“We knew this day was coming,” he said. “Our federal court system has evolved into the forum of choice for liberal activism.”
Curt Smith of the Indiana Family Institute, another supporter of the constitutional amendment, said lawmakers have “denied the people of Indiana the right to preserve marriage and handed an invitation to our opponents to go ahead and knock marriage out before Hoosiers can vote on it in 2016.”
Same old, same old.
My question is: where the hell was the reporter? By acting simply as a transcriber—by simply quoting the hysterics of these reliable homophobes without question or comment—the reporter left readers who don’t know better (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of them!) with the distinct impression that passage of HJR 3 would have averted this lawsuit and/or its outcome.
Not so.
Let’s try this one more time: the federal constitution (you know, the one these guys all claim to revere) trumps state law. Even state constitutional law. If and when the courts decide that the U.S. Constitution requires recognition of same-sex marriages, a contrary provision in the Indiana Constitution will be rendered null and void. Hoosiers can vote until the cows come home—if same-sex marriage is entitled to Equal Protection of the Laws, their votes can’t change that. The Bill of Rights is a counter-majoritarian document; it protects fundamental rights against efforts by majorities to deny those rights to unpopular or disfavored individuals or minorities.
Indiana citizens can’t vote on my reading materials. They don’t get to choose my religion, my friends or my politics. They can’t vote to deprive me of the right to a jury trial if I’m arrested, and they don’t get to vote to allow police to stop and search me without probable cause. Since 1967 (when those “activist” judges recognized that citizens of all colors came within the Bill of Rights’ protection) popular majorities haven’t been able to vote on whether a white person can marry a black one.
Micah Clark, Curt Smith and their ilk may be too blinded by their animus to GLBT folks to understand this basic element of our constitutional jurisprudence, but there is no excuse for the Star reporter.
