CSotD: Cartoon Classic: Mitt Goldwater
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Herblock had little patience for Barry Goldwater's pull-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps attitude towards the poor, and expresses it in straightforward fashion with this 1961 broadside.
God knows what he'd make of Mitt Romney. Of course, Mitt didn't inherit a department store. He didn't even inherit a car company. We don't pass on actual businesses to our children anymore. When we get our hands on a business these days, we strip everything of value from it, toss the empty, looted husk aside and leave the money to our kids.
I understand Mitt is planning to leave $100 million to his kids. Thank god, if the Republicans maintain power, those poor kids won't have to pay taxes on it, because, gosh, they just wouldn't have enough left over to live on.
We are living in a world in which compassion is not just unfashionable in the halls of power but unknown there. And those who need to learn it most are the most stubborn of the willfully ignorant.
Back in 1967, Senator Bobby Kennedy — no poor boy himself — went to Mississippi to hold hearings on poverty and hunger, and, as part of that, he went out to the Delta country and met some poor people face-to-face. He didn't just hear their carefully prepared testimony as they sat, neatly scrubbed and dressed in new clothing provided by sponsors for the occasion. He went to their homes and met them as they were, saw their lives as they lived them, saw their hungry children, witnessed for himself the reality of their poverty.
It changed his world view, and he had gone there with a compassionate heart to begin with. He had gone there knowing it was bad, but not knowing how bad it was.
And, by the way, he wouldn't have found that kind of hopeless poverty back home in Massachusetts, and, in particular, he wouldn't have found there the schools Phil Ochs described as ones "where every single classroom is a factory of despair."
Massachusetts had poverty, Massachusetts had racially divided schools. But Massachusetts was not Mississippi, and, though no state could claim perfection, the inequity of effort devoted to schools, and to assisting and elevating the poor, among the states was appalling. Those who want states to be allowed to control their own social services and educational systems have a poor sense of history indeed, that can't even go back less than a half century.
Understand that I am only accusing them of ignorance out of a generosity of spirit on my part. The alternative is to suggest that they simply don't give a damn about other people. Between those two explanations, ignorance is the more charitable choice.
And so I wish that some of these people who speak of personal responsibility and, yes, of "initiative," could spent just a few days living the life they do not see and have not known.
What I'd really like would be for one of them to live at 150 percent of the poverty level for a year and then report back to the group.
Leave behind the nice house, leave behind the new car, the nice clothes, all the accoutrements of the one percent that are so much a part of their lives that they don't even notice them. Come live the life of the working poor.
Without health insurance. Without food stamps. Without heating assistance. Without a housing subsidy.Without all the "entitlements" they don't feel poor people ought to have.
I wouldn't require them to go work some thankless, numbing minimum wage job. They could continue to go to the Senate or the House every day and do their job there.
Let them walk among their colleagues every day in their K-Mart and Sally Ann clothing, without perks, without being allowed to eat food unless they paid for it out of their earnings. No haircuts, no shoe shines, no massages at the gym, none of that, unless you pony up the money.
And no limo. Get to work however you can, from that apartment you've found in DC that you can afford.
No security guard at your apartment, either. If your neighbors have to worry about getting ripped off, so should you. Besides, you're not supposed to have anything in there that your neighbors don't also have, or to dress better than they do.
This still wouldn't provide the full experience. You can't not know that there's a big house and a deep, hot bathtub and nice clothes and a full refrigerator waiting for you, as soon as the charade is over.
You can't simply stop having a college education and a law degree and the social poise and experience to know that, if you weren't constrained by the rules of this play acting, you could seize opportunity and elevate yourself quickly beyond your current, temporary state.
Mostly, though, the experiment would fail because, when they reported to their colleagues what they had discovered and what they had learned, they would simply be denounced as traitors to the cause, as having been brainwashed, as having turned socialist.
You cannot expect the seeds of compassion to grow on stony ground that has not be properly prepared to nurture them.
photo: New York Magazine, Oct 26, 1970
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