CSotD: Hard Times Revealed to Come Again No More
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Tom Tomorrow's cartoon would be funny if it weren't so directly taken from life.
It seems, at first, a variation on the complaint about people being seen in grocery stores buying "luxury food items" with food stamps, which might, in reality, mean there is a birthday in the family, or it could be a sign of the systemic lack of ability to plan that led to poverty in the first place.
And, then again, it could simply be a lie, another case of an apocryphal story being passed on to make a political point, a variation on attributing the killer in the backseat to "a friend of mine" rather than admitting that it's "a story I heard."
Ronald Reagan, after all, used the story of a "welfare queen" to great advantage, though nobody ever figured out who this woman was, and the nearest case they found was nowhere near as egregious as the Gipper's oft-cited example.
In the current upheaval, the possession of a cell phone has more than once been cited as proof that the person does not have standing to be part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, an argument which begins with the notion that a cell phone is a luxury when, in fact, it may be less expensive than a landline, and continues with the idea that only the desperately poor are entitled to object to the current economic setup.
Which in turn takes us out of the realm of apocryphal tales of welfare cheats and into the Wayback Machine, rekindling the spectre of the "outside agitator" who, a half-century ago, came to happy places like Mississippi and Alabama to cause trouble among the contented darkies.
But, as Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in that era, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."
Still, the notion persists, aided by conservative news commentators and lazy editorial cartoonists who depict OWS protesters as longhaired, unwashed granolas, spoiled college students with no real gripes and no sincere cause to uphold, by which logic the white students who went into the South during the Civil Rights Movement were also wrong to be there, since they were not barred from the lunch counters or public transportation or denied the right to vote.
But Tom Tomorrow is not focusing on the demonization of OWS, and that greatly strengthens his argument, because there is a deeper, more pervasive hostility being fostered in the land, and that is that the wealthy are more deserving than the poor, which requires lowering the standard for poverty to avoid including your audience. If you have a TV, if you have a cell phone, you are not poor. It's those other people we're talking about.
And because you have a cell phone and thus are not poor, you'll agree with us that the wealthy deserve to keep their money.
I'm have heard the argument seriously advanced, by people who are far from wealthy, that, unless you can prove criminal action, it is wrong to suggest that there might be something to criticize in how the wealthy became wealthy, or that they should pay more taxes than the rest of us.
This despite the fact that, throughout the Good Old Days to which these people want to return, the wealthy paid quite a lot more taxes than the rest of us, and that there is no comparable period of economic success during which they did not.
I'm not a huge Olbermann fan, but he's certainly got this one right:
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