I'm pretty slow on the uptake sometimes--no brag, just fact--but every so often, I do figure something out. For my entire adolescence, I was puzzled about why, out of all the bad political regimes in the world, the one that American politicians were most upset about was the Soviet Union, to the point that some of them supported unspeakably evil regimes in Latin America and South Africa on the basis of the argument that they, too, were really pissed at the Soviet Union. It wasn't until around the time of the original Red Dawn that I put it together that they thought that the Soviet Union wasn't just an evil regime far, far away but some kind of actual military threat bent on subverting, undermining, and ultimately toppling the United States. My only excuse for having taken so long to get that is that it wasn't often spelled out by people who assumed that everybody all knew that, and I showed up on the planet too late to have Joe Stalin or Nikita Kruschev scare the shit out of me.
The Soviet Union I grew up with was a crumbling wreck watched over by a succession of aging party hacks who clearly just wanted to hang onto their shabby privileges and manage to make it to the sweet relief of the grave while staying out of jail. The earliest glimpse I remember getting of what life was like over there was a TV news report in the mid-70s showing the gaping crowds at some kind of detente-era trade show staring in amazement at the refrigerator that didn't look as nice as the one in our kitchen. It was impossible to live in fear of such people unless you really worked at it, which a lot of people were prepared to do, which is why late-inning reports on the Soviet threat leaned heavy on the idea that everything anybody from the West ever saw from over there was part of a Potemkin-village illusion, a phony backdrop of poverty and misery and technological ass-backwardness, behind which a crack team of committed scientists had limitless resources and cutting-edge methods to use in their never-ending campaign to create an army of Dolph Lundgrens. Anyway, believe me when I say that I take no pride in having taken so long to understand that this silly shit was what I was supposed to think. Whether I would have thought it if I'd known sooner that I was supposed to think it is beside the point.
Anyway, a week or so back, I figured something out. I'd spent the past two and a half years confused by those intelligent reporters, such as David Weigel, who seemed protective of the Tea Party, and to take offense at the idea that it was a movement comprised of idiots. The problem I had was that I kept reading that the Tea Party is an 'anti-tax" movement, and I thought this meant that they thought that taxes were too high, and since they were formed during a year when the new president rode into town and made a point of giving everyone a break on their taxes, I thought that this added up to clear instance of some very loud idiots behaving idiotically, very loudly. Surely, I thought, nobody would seriously try to argue that anyone who reacts to having his taxes cut by having a running shit fit about taxes could be anything other than a complete and total fool, right? But now, thanks to Weigel, I know that I had it wrong. "When the Tea Party started rallying in 2009," he wrote last week, "it wasn't protesting higher taxes, because federal income taxes were lower, with more loopholes. It was protesting the perception that productive Americans were shelling out for an ever-expanding class of moochers. "
That makes sense--not that there's anything to the "perception", I mean, but I guess it's a less stupid thing to hang your hat on than what I thought they were upset about. In my very limited defense, I suppose I got it wrong because, again, the people I understood could have been clearer about what they meant. This time, though, I think that, just maybe, some of the people making the argument were a little vague about what they were upset about, because they figured that it might seem a little mean to just start calling other people moochers. In retrospect, though, it sure did slip through. The moment that's supposed to have kicked off the Tea Party movement--"teabagging", we called it, back in those innocent days--was, of course. a TV clown's frothing, apparently nerve-touching rage that some people he didn't know or care about were getting help from the government instead of simply losing their family homes, which they had bought at the urging of the government and its abetters. The town hall meetings that featured anti-health care outbursts left behind some memorable footage of people going from whining at the top of their lungs about how they couldn't afford to subsidize other people's medical bills to mocking other people who stepped up to talk about their own hardships by pretending to weep in their faces. They looked kind of mean.
A couple of years later, and everybody on that side of the aisle looks ready and willing to own their meanness, to the point that the most prominent Republican presidential candidates are openly expressing their scorn for a system that allows for the concept of people who don't have to pay income tax because they don't make enough money to have it to spare. Undisguised, unapologetic bitterness towards the working poor broke wide open nine years ago, in a Wall Street Journal editorial denouncing us "lucky duckies" who are too broke to chip in every April 15. There was a time when I could have described it as "an infamous Wall Street Journal editorial", but now the attitude is officially ingrained in our mainstream politics and embraced by plenty of people who think they're clear-eyed, straight-shooting mavericks. Working poor people are the new welfare queens, having been shoved into the hole that was left in hateful conservative discourse after Bill Clinton "ended welfare as we know it" and took away the Republican party's favorite post-Cold War punching bag. Somehow, our existence is supposed to be a blight that causes hardship and pain to the rich people who do so many truly productive things for this country, like ranting on Fox News, writing Wall Street Journal editorials, closing down plants and shipping jobs overseas, and holding press conferences to boast about all the dynamite stuff their investigators have come up with on the President's true nationality and mediocre performance at Harvard. This is the emotional trigger attached to the WSJ's deeper complaint, that poor people who aren't taxes enough will never come to share the rich people's insight that taxes are the work of the devil.
You may have noticed the self-inclusionary note there. I am a poor person, and have been one all my adult life. No doubt this claim would seem rich indeed to the gang at Fox News who, in a clip that I'll admit I'd have missed if it hadn't gotten a lot of play on Comedy Central's fake-news block, reported that many people who are classified as "poor" actually have refrigerators and running water and other impossible luxuries, including cars and computers. I confess that I have always had a refrigerator, on those occasions when I had a place to live. I have usually had a TV, too. I used to work hard to keep my phone bill paid, and, clearly, I have a computer. I have not always had a computer, because the sons of bitches break, but for the past decade, I've seldom been without a job that didn't absolutely require me to have a computer. That means that I have been known, during those periods when whatever second hand computer I owned had broken down and I was able to acquire a new second-hand one, to camp out at Kinko's or someplace where I could pay to use a computer, paying more than I would be paid for the job I was doing, so as not to get dropped by my employer. I'm not sure what the chortling empaths on Fox would have had me do--give up my computer and phone. and losing my jobs in the process, so that I'd better live up to their ideal of a genuine poor person? I never had a car, but I envy the people in my income bracket who managed to acquire one and who didn't have to be more careful about always having set aside enough money to cover the costs of public transportation to and from work. I imagine many people who own cars would have envied me for not having to set aside enough for gas, or for never having to worry that my lifeline to work would break down and saddle me with a massive repairs bill.
I hope it doesn't sound as if I'm whining. I don't think it's society's or anyone else's fault that I've always been poor, and I'm not calling for a massive round of government spending for the specific purpose of making my "DONATE" button ring like the bell at the top of a test-your-strength game at Coney Island. For me and, I'll bet, for a lot of people, it's just how it is. I'm not especially lazy, but I'm also not especially ambitious. I never took my chances trying to make a bundle on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. I got out of school, looked around, and started taking jobs to try to keep my rent paid. Because I have other interests that use up a lot of my brain power, I never knuckled down trying to reinvent the wheel or perfect the next big video game. I'd get a job, do my best at it, go home, and read. There are also certain personal qualities that have never helped me in the job market. I mean little things like shyness, and not being physically attractive--I'm sorry, but studies do show that it makes a difference when it comes to impressing prospective employers--and the fact that I don't come from what anyone would call a "good family", or graduate from a "good school", and I'm not well-plugged in. I've never gotten a job--never, not a single one--unless I knew someone there who could vouch for me and push for me, and I've just never known that many people.
Plus, for most of my life, I've been alone. It was during the '80s. under that great champion of the traditional nuclear family Ronald Reagan, that our society changed in a way that it quietly became conventional wisdom that you needed a two-income household to maintain a real living wage. In the last year, I've been living with someone, and this has made a phenomenal difference in my life, in a lot of ways that definitely includes my standard of material comfort and how stressed-out I am all the time from fear that I'll lose my electricity or go to bed hungry a certain number of nights a week or fall behind in my rent and end up on the street. But for most of my adult life I've been alone, and lonely, largely because most of us need to have money to initiate a romantic relationship, to ask someone out and demonstrate our potential worthiness as a mate, and I didn't have it. All this falls under the general heading, "How it is." It's no one person's fault, and I don't lose a lot of sleep over it.
What's unsettling about the recent barrage of sneering and angry attacks on people like me has been the discovery that there are so many people who do lose sleep over the way I've lived my life, because they see me as a moocher and a leech. I'm not on welfare or food stamps, and haven't been except for a few months in the mid-90s when I was between jobs for over a year, but they see me as a moocher because I'm, well, not rich and yet alive. Technically, I guess, I'm sticking my hand in there pocket every time I ride on publicly maintained roads or collect my mail or check out a book from a public library or, God help us all, use Amtrak. Of course, it's not as if I've never paid taxes. I have in fact paid income taxes many a year--it is in fact possible to make just enough money to be vulnerable to the tax bite and still be broke as a son of a bitch--but the main way that bite has been felt by me, year in and year out, has been in payroll taxes, the good-sized chunk of my paycheck that I may well never live to get my hands on. Payroll taxes are a side issue that don't count as far as the anti-lucky duckies crowd is concerned, which is strange, since things like the estate tax certainly do. Yet so fully does my income bracket disqualify me from full brotherhood in the United States that I am among that select group of people, including college students and government workers, who Fox News commentators have suggested should be prohibited, or at least strongly discouraged, from voting. Our insufficient hatred of the idea of higher taxes for the top ten percent is said to prove that we're ill-informed, overly emotional, and Do Not Get It. To the best of my knowledge, no Fox News commentators have ever suggested that the vote be denied to that segment of the electorate that studies have almost consistently shown to be the most spectacularly ill-informed, Fox News viewers.
The biliousness of the attacks on people like me are enough to make me wonder: do these people really think that being poor is
easy? Maybe they do. I admit that, from where I'm sitting, being Rick Perry or Lou Dobbs looks easy. But I do know that a lot of work goes into it, and who know, maybe even some stress. I used to worry every day about losing my lease and having no place to live; maybe they worry, with just the same degree of intensity, about some unimaginable cataclysm that will cause them to sell the yacht and buy their suits off the rack. And if that happens, maybe it's important to think that it's the fault of people like me, for not getting out there and busting our butts and becoming billionaires so we, too, would see teachers' unions and consumer groups and politicians who want to extend unemployment benefits as practitioners of the most insidious kind of class warfare. That's not a new term from the Fox News candy kitchen, of course; ever since the awesome shift in the size of the income gap that's the single most defining change in American life these last few decades began, the charge of "class warfare" has been thrown at everyone who's even noticed it, from such perches as The New York Times op-ed page as much as its counterpart at the WSJ. (During the 2000 presidential campaign, the Times and other outlets were accusing Al Gore of class warfare, for his "populist" rhetoric against the income gap, at the same time as self-styled "progressives" were accusing him of being a Trojan horse for Montgomery Burns and having three sixes burned into his scalp beneath his hair.)
Ronald Reagan once said that the best and most important and treasurable thing about being an American is that an American can come from anything to become fantastically rich. It's not as quotable as "Tear down this wall," but it looks to be the sentiment most deeply burned into the America he left behind, his truest legacy. Many of our mouthiest citizens see any kind of consumer protections, environment protections, worker protections, and guidelines establishing limits on how much damage you can do in the name of making money as unacceptable, criminal limitations on their ability to do the only thing they were put on earth to do, and they're more than ready to see anyone who has been less successful (and ruthless) at the financial arts than themselves as not just society's failures but morally compromised. We're bad people. I admit it: I was stupid enough to think that the 2008 economic collapse would change things, because it would force people to see that economic hardship can strike anyone, and people's attitudes towards the income gap and the inherent repulsiveness of those with less money would have to soften. Instead, it seems to have exacerbated things, creating a Soylent Green America where those who have still have theirs become increasingly hysterical in their efforts to dissociate themselves from anyone worse off than them, because the needy bastards are presumed to want to drag them down.
Of course, my naive assumptions about how hardship would produce a better America, one where people identified with their neighbors and pulled together, were based on sentimental stories about how America worked under FDR and the New Deal during the Great Depression. It's a measure of how much we've changed that, among many Republicans, including Rick Perry, it's one of their leading priorities to rewrite accepted history and establish that the New Deal was a failure and Roosevelt a bad, bad man. I'm not sure that they know what they're asking America to go back to--a time not just before Social Security and Medicare and school lunch programs, but before child labor laws? The big thing seems to be that they want Ronald Reagan--not the real Reagan, who negotiated and raised taxes and didn't completely junk the social safety net, but the one they've created from his speeches and TV commercials--to be the one true, great modern President, the one who got it right, and they have to tear down Roosevelt because, as they used to say in the Highlander movies, there can be only one.
Amity Shlaes, whose book The Forgotten Man got the ball rolling on the New Deal revisionism scam once said, “This is a time for choosing, and I’m not the first person to say that or to use that term in saying so. Reagan could afford to like FDR because, at the time, it seemed possible to keep our entitlements if we reformed them. It turns out that we can’t afford entitlements. We have to choose between Reagan and Roosevelt. You can’t just say you like both Reagan and Roosevelt.” I'm not sure I'd disagree with that last part, and it's refreshing to hear someone who'd choose Reagan come out with it. The missing part is where she forgot to say that it turns out that we can't afford entitlements if we stop asking the rich to pay their fair share in taxes, on the theory that we all benefit from a country with a guaranteed standard of decent living, rather than a Mad Max hellscape where a few people can, as Greil Marcus recently put it, become so rich that democracy becomes irrelevant. Really, I don't understand why people like Perry and Shales think things were so horrible from the time of the New Deal through the Great Society. Maybe they think the '80s were the best thing ever, but it was the period of entitlements and a strong middle class that we remember as the time of the American Century, the time that Ronald Reagan, at the start of the 1980s, claimed he wanted to bring back. Except for the fact that Social Security didn't get itself privatized, they got a better-than-rough draft of the country they seem to want during the Bush Junior years, and do they really think it turned out so great? Saying that the country we are after a decade of the blinkered, short-sighted cruelty and insularity of the Bush years is proof that we can't have entitlements is like pointing to the position blacks were in the South after years of Jim Crow laws as proof that we never should have ended slavery.
