Friday, August 23, 2013

A fault line of callousness

The discussion of poverty in America has always centered around the question of deserving vs. undeserving poor. Some of the first acts of Congress dealt with providing pensions for the widows and orphans of Revolutionary War veterans. But up until the Great Depression the Federal Government largely left "poor relief" to localities and private charitable organizations. The experience of government remedies for poverty in England was fairly negative, poor laws sometimes drained the revenue of a parish to the point of bankruptcy. Then there were workhouses in the old country that basically put many paupers in prison. Besides, this was a land of opportunity so much of public opinion held that if you were able-bodied and still poor it was your own fault.

Deserving poor included widows and orphans of war veterans, but also people rendered unable to work due to illness or disability. However, to get any kind of relief the deserving people had damn well better show gratitude and humility. The undeserving... well at best they are on their own. And once race is entered into the equation the long knives really come out. America's original sin of slavery has had long-lasting consequences of callousness and irrationality that will provide fertile ground for academic study until hell freezes over.

When the stock market crashed in 1929 and local relief was quickly overwhelmed by the resulting carnage of economic dislocation, certain influential people realized that the government would have to do something. So FDR's New Deal created a number of agencies to provide relief and try to counteract the deserving vs. undeserving dichotomy by helping all of the downtrodden regardless of situation. Somehow, finally, the public came to understand that not all poverty was the result of laziness... for a time. Not that a certain segment of the population ever truly stopped hating the poor, but they were marginalized. Again, for a time.

Recessions came and went, Keynesianism did it's best to stabilize the economy but as the gospels say "the poor shall always be with you." Slowly, the war on poverty declared by LBJ in the 1960s mutated into a war on the poor because the white middle class could not let go of the undeserving frame. Then along came Ronald Reagan and tall tales about "welfare queens" driving Cadillacs with welfare money and "big bucks" eating T-Bone steaks on the public dole became conventional wisdom instead of bitter whispers. It just did not matter that the stories Reagan told were manufactured, the seed of propaganda always plays to the prejudices of the people.

Anecdotes and exaggerated rumors replaced statistical analysis and untainted Christian charity in the direction of anger and callousness. Where I live, you will no doubt run into someone who will tell the fantastic tales of abuse by unscrupulous and undeserving poor people. Always there are bad people out there perfectly able to work but taking advantage of the system and breeding like rabbits, according to the now loudly voiced opinions. The great recession and subsequent depression Americans are still living through bears more than superficial resemblance to the Great Depression, but there has been no upwelling of caring and sympathy for our neighbors. The list is just too long to recount but social media makes the attitudes of popular opinion plain and in text format. I wanted to share one such crowd-sourced exposition I recently witnessed, just for the heck of it.
Mike: so i switched jobs, have a lapse in insurance, and wanted to get badger care, TEMPORARILY, for my kids. initially I was told that any child could be covered, regardless of income. now i'm being told that I make too much money. so the programs that I pay taxes for cannot help me temporarily?! how come there are no programs for people who play by the rules? theres a loophole for the crackhead that has seven kids and I can't get help? FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!! [comments follow]
 You actually expected anything different....I thought you were American. Welcome to the country....lol
I agree, its a jacked system!!! 
 
  • Sara: Did you not see my post a couple days ago about having dual citizenship? This government is backwards! Trust me... I work with the exact population you describe and know all the loopholes! Its disgusting!
  • Randy Luetticke Hi my name is Obama I'm going to ruin your country. I'm going to keep the war going to massacre children in other country's and joke about it, I'm gonna take your tax money and spend it however I see fit. Even if its giving just a little to warfare for phones and other non productive things or just going on vacation. I'm going to make this a police state by monitoring you through your computers and drones. Don't u feel special? I'm going to cater to Muslims cause duh I'm one of them.....
    How long is this shit going to last.
  • Noble Craver II Yup, sounds about right, the planet will boil over if everyone has access to air conditioning, automobiles, and big houses, lol!!
  • Randy Luetticke I think sometimes the guy does things just to see what else he can pull.
  • Noble Craver II He hasn't pulled the rug out from under the American people, he has burned it!!!

  • Noble Craver II Yet we stand around and let our feet get burned!
  • Neil: I'm pretty sure the old employer has to offer Cobra.
  • Neil: It's not anything new. This happened to us long before Obama was president.
  • John OMalley Yep and Obamacare will make it worse
  • John OMalley They want to mandate wearing a microchip, so the NSA can spy on us even more so than they already are. The NSA is the biggest joke since the war on drugs. I'll explain the war on drugs, basically we spend billions of dollars a year for the same drugs we can prescribed and now you're starting to go after their own by making prescription drugs illegal unless your prescriped it then it doesn't matter who you get it from as long as your name is on the lable,
  • Matthew Mattyg Gutoski hard working people always get fucked, elections will not change that....only revolution
  • Mark Rakow talk to, dare i say the word, our so called governor ??? 

  •  So right from the beginning the "deserving vs. undeserving" meme is present and is never challenged. What amazes me is how quickly frustration with our shredded safety net boils over onto the president but not onto the immediately responsible state government until much later. I know some of these people so the regression to conspiracy theories is not surprising, but the attention to conspiracy in lieu of Occam's Razor or even the mention of insurance companies is a revealing glimpse into how people think. Granted, American society is incredibly complex and unbiased information about how the system works is often hard to come by, but does it necessarily follow that the real world should automatically be discarded in favor of wild speculation?

    Divide and conquer.

    Monday, August 5, 2013

    Information-Action Ratio

    Every now and then you come across a passage in a book that just begs to be quoted verbatim. I just found one such passage that "sank my battleship" as it were. From Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death, pp. 67-8.
    As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use. A man in Maine and a man in Texas could converse, but not about anything either of them knew or cared very much about. The telegraph may have made the country into "one neighborhood," but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.
    Since we live today in just such a neighborhood (now sometimes called a "global village"), you may get a sense of what is meant by context-free information by asking yourself the following question: How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the "information-action ratio." 
    In other words, everything I write about, so much of what we all busy ourselves arguing over... does not matter one wit. Postman continues to argue that the irrelevance of information makes us impotent, the possibility of effective action to address problems is in practical terms... nil. Given this practical reality I suppose my job as blogger needs a reassessment; history and national issues are important... somehow,  but I and others interested in these things need to construct a new defense of why and how what has happened before or what happens in Washington D.C. matters. This is certainly not impossible, Seventy years ago Reinhold Niebuhr built from scratch a defense of democracy that went beyond the theoretical or abstract and corrected for just this kind of deficiency. New Left intellectuals and activists tried to redress the balance of the information-action ratio by promoting "participatory democracy" and since then those of us interested in justice have attempted to increase the potency of citizens and make information relevant again. It is a hard road, just look how easily so many 'wingers have been sucked into a completely imaginary world where information is not simply irrelevant but useless. However the right clings to its fantasy tenaciously and if we are not careful the Daily Me can become just as dangerous to the left.