CSotD: Juxtaposition of an Inglorious Autumn
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Jen Sorensen notes the ugly attitude that pervades our increasingly ugly culture: We won't help you with aid, nor will we help you with policies that might let you lift yourself out on your own.
Meanwhile, Pat Bagley depicts the paranoid hostility that fosters this ugly, hateful attitude in what should be a nation of decent people, and suggests that it isn't really making anyone very happy.
Well, except maybe those campaign donors Sorensen's politician is taking his tin cup to.
The winter of our discontent does not seem likely to be made glorious spring, and, what's worse, I'm not even sure we're into the winter yet. This may only be a cold, dying autumn.
Sorensen is right that there are policies that could lift people out of poverty, and it's not theoretical.
Those are things that once provided a kind of staircase: You still had to have the initiative to climb it, but it was there.
And it didn't have to be the New Deal and WPA projects, which were temporary fixes for a destroyed economy, but we'll come back to that in a minute.
My grandfather climbed out of, if not actual poverty, a modest childhood surrounded by poverty, in the early years of the previous century. He told of a friend whose parents ran the county "poor farm" where hopeless people were sent to live, the overwhelming despair he saw there and his determination not to end up there.
In those days, the path was uphill. He had a pair of mentors, the local superintendent of schools and the head of the mines, who not only encouraged him to stay in school, but helped get him a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin.
But his immigrant father thought it a waste, because he had no powerful contacts to help the lad once he graduated.
That flies in the face of the Great American Myth of shining shoes until you become a millionaire, but even the Horatio Alger stories were of the poor-but-honest kid whose hard work brought him to the attention of a wealthy and powerful patron.
That's not how we remember them, but that's how they were written.
And if the only books from which we took distorted images were dime novels, we'd be a better society for it. We'll get back to that, too.
Meanwhile, there was a much bigger pie with more slices available a century ago.
I don't suppose it would be as catchy to call "The Greatest Generation" the "Last Generation With A Chance," but the fact is they came out of the war and into their adult civilian lives while there was still a great deal more individual opportunity.
They could open a pharmacy or a diner or a corner grocery store or a donut shop of their own; they didn't have to become exploited cogs in a corporate franchise.
Sure, you can still become Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerburg or any of a small number of innovative billionaires. And you always could, if you had the great good fortune to, as they did, come up with some Fabulous Thing.
Thomas Edison didn't grow up on a silk pillow, after all.
But this view of opportunity either ignores those who also had good ideas that for one reason or another didn't catch fire, or it dismisses them as Ralph Kramdens and Wilkins Micawbers: Foolish dreamers too lazy to work for their rewards.
At which point we get to Pat Bagley's point: The relentless political preaching of paranoid, secular, Puritanical hostility, in which the pews are full of sinners whose efforts are never enough, and the world outside is full of Satanic elements united against all that is good and pure.
And the poor are poor as a punishment for their lack of character and sanctity.
Which brings us back to those Horatio Alger books and that other book we also don't look too deeply into, because it is hard, indeed, to read the New Testament and not discover clear orders to help the less fortunate, and to reach out to those not of our tribe.
And I wish those who sort through Old Testament commands about blended clothing and the proper height of altars in order to ferret out obscure commands about homosexuality and child discipline, and who wilfully ignore the clear commands of the man they call Messiah, would find a name for themselves besides "Christian."
It's like calling yourself a swim team but having a strict rule against going into the water.
Still, the people in the pews know only what the preacher has told them and, in the secular political church, the fire and brimstone is about how Obama is coming for their guns, illegal immigrants are taking their jobs, Muslims all ride camels and carry bombs.
And just as homosexuals are sinners, so, too, the poor are poor for lack of character.
Which brings us back to the New Deal and the WPA, because the secular preachers of despair and hatred inveighed against the "make work" that began at the same time as the Obama administration but was actually signed into law by … well, never mind.
"Government cannot create wealth" they insisted, with the same certainty that other preachers insist evolution is not real.
And the odd notion that the unemployed were seeking "wealth" rather than "jobs."
And if it's pointless to point out to religious fundamentalists all the proofs of evolution, it was just as pointless to show these secular true believers how many jobs were being funded, not just on highway projects but at the asphalt plants and gravel pits and places that make orange vests, and certainly pointless to note that we needed the infrastructure repairs anyway.
Or to apply the concept of "trickle down" to the various local businesses that would benefit from workers with money to spend. (Only rich people's money trickles down.)
We're not talking about science or economics.
We're talking about a religion.
And the preacher says the poor are not "the less fortunate." They are sinners.
And it is their sins that keep America from greatness, and that keep you from the rewards a secular, political God wants you to have.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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