"One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards, the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female voice said YES?
'O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Esquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!'
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
'I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison their own sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe.'
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF THAT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
'But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.'
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which point she turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left the Polyfather stranded with his own species.
- Principia Discordia : How I found Goddess and what I did
to Her when I found Her, by Malaclypse the Younger
A common misconception among some moderates (and perhaps a willful misconception among many liberals) is that conservatives, as a group, are oblivious to the sufferings of the poor, or scornful of the poor as individuals. Living most uncomfortably below the poverty line as I do, spending far more time looking for work than actually getting to do it as I do, I am often amused when I hear preaching on this score, usually coming offline from very sensitive (and often very Anglo-Saxon) souls whose fashionably up-to-date garments telegraph the fact that at the very least, they weren't short on cash the last time they hit the department store, if by "short on cash" one means "too poor to spend a few hundred dollars on clothes". And yet they want to lecture me on poverty. Cute.
So how, as a poor person, one who hardly has spoken out in support of asceticism or any other form of masochism, do I bring myself to vote for the Republicans, the party of big money and the crusher of the poor? Because unlike some of the preachy individuals one encounters when this topic comes up, I didn't learn about this subject in my civic affairs
Some will point to the job situation, with young people fresh out of undergrad struggling to find work. Very young and very white, so their discomfort counts in the eyes of some, I suppose, as it would if they were very black, but these kids don't know how bad bad can be. Let's consider the case of "Sam". You might remember "Sam" as being the man whose experiences were mentioned in "Saying Goodbye." No, to answer a question sometimes asked, "Sam" wasn't a composite. He's a real guy, and his job seeking experiences, if anything, made his brief bout of anthropological curiosity amidst the Reader Circuit community seem idyllic by comparison.
Think that you're having a rough time in the personnel office, right now in 2005? Try standing, as many did in Chicago during the early 90s, in a line of hundreds of people wrapped around the block, shivering in the subzero temperatures blowing in off the Lake. Picture your extremities turning numb and hoping that you won't lose any digits to the chill like your neighbor did, wishing that you could get out of that 30 mph wind, or that you could have waited until after 4 am to get in that line, for an office which wouldn't open until 9, and knowing that you and all of those hundreds of other people were standing, freezing and waiting for a chance to fill out one of an all too limited collection of applications for a minimum wage hamburger flipping position, because management wanted to cut a few pennies on their printing costs.
Picture wanting to say "scr** it!" and go home, but not daring to, because on the $2.50 cents per day you get for food stamps, you've had a hard time keeping on body mass, you can't remember the last time you weren't hungry, you're already 40 pounds underweight and your caseworker isn't sure that you'll have any aid next month. Picture waiting all that morning and well into what you suspect is the afternoon, but can't be sure because the sky is a dark, featureless grey, and you haven't been able to replace the watch you lost to a mugger last year. Eventually, you stumble in, and about an hour after getting in the door, because personnel is in no hurry to pass out the forms and those filling them out are in no hurry to return to the cold, you get into the office. Picture filling out the application, handing it to the girl, and then having her laugh in your face, turning to see her tear up your application as you leave.
You stumble through the snow, which has been turning to a chemical laden slush from the heat rising from the subway grates, walking the next few miles back to home, because an El ride is a luxury you can no longer afford. As was medical care for the wounds the mugger left you with as he clubbed you from behind in order to get your K Mart special timepiece, or for the periodic blackouts you've had since, whenever you've been foolish enough to attempt any heavy lifting. Legal aid is something else you've had to learn to do without, something that you were left to ponder when the local police, noticing that you were having even more trouble with coordination than your already partially disabled self usually had, thought that it was funny to handcuff your hands behind your back and make you walk down your building's stairwell, trying not to stumble and snap your neck. You think of signing out a complaint against the officers, who according to word on the steet do this kind of thing a lot, but you remember the warnings about what happens to people who complain about Chicago's finest, some of whom at this point have been out "solving crimes" by grabbing those too poor to afford real lawyers, and torturing confessions out of them through the use of electroshock, suffocation, and beatings, and will for years to come, none of this proving to be of much interest to the office of professional strandards and practices. "So what makes you think that they're going to care about how many steps they marched your halfbreed, sand ni**er Jewboy a** down?" somebody asks you, with that s**t eating smile you've gotten so used to, but you know she's right. You'd better keep quiet, and maybe if you're lucky, they'll forget about you and you won't forget not to disappear some night. Or get carelessly splattered by some car that will show up out on nowhere, accelerating through your rapidly expiring body, the way "Teardrop" did.
Then picture yourself, at that point two years into a futile search for a job, any job, running into a pack of rich spoiled brats who will then preach to you about how "privileged" you are, because you're white (sort of) and male. You can't help but notice how much the very white, very Anglo-Saxon "oppressed woman" from the mean streets of Kenilworth looks like some of the Klan supporters who left you with such happy memories before you returned from the redneck town you went to school in, back to a hometown you can no longer recognize, to classmates dropping from untreated cancer because medical care and checkups are one of those "luxuries" that you and yours are supposed to be patient enough to wait for, without complaint, indefinitely. But at least you can talk to your "roommate", if you've reached the right state of mind, and he won't say anything condescending. Your "roommate" being the large norwegian rat who comes up through the hole in your floor to surprise you as you get up in the middle of the night, awakened maybe by the meltwater dripping through your ceiling, or the pounding on your back stairwell door (it's the wind, you're guessing?), or maybe the screaming from the other side of the courtyard that stopped so very suddenly. Hard to be sure, but those two bright eyes shining in the darkness present you with the friendliest companionship you've had all day. "Is he really blinking in time to the steady drip drip drip onto my mattress, and do I look good to eat to him?", you wonder in your first second of awareness. Alas, he seems to be harboring similar thoughts and disappears down that gap, not to return until a few hours later.
How many places have you applied to, somebody asks you. "Have a copy of the Chicago Yellow Pages", you respond. They laugh, but you're well on your way to not kidding about that. Do the math - you've been unemployed for two years, you've never tried to apply to less than 20 businesses in a day - thank God for long legs, and thank nobody for the fact that in the vast majority of the place you've tried to apply to, you've been refused the opportunity to fill out that application or to leave off a resume by people who've known nothing about you other than the way you looked and the way you've sounded, and have refused to know more. But as somebody points out to you, in one of the few places where you have been allowed to apply, how very silly of you to think that you could get an entry level job. After all, she points out, you only had a 3.7 average and the minimum for hiring is a 3.9. (The scale only goes up to 4.0, with the Dean's List beginning at 3.5), and how do you expect to get an entry level job without experience? The four years you put in as a teaching assistant in Grad school, working 60 hours per week before studies in exchange for a tuition waiver and a princely $6000/year stipend, not counting as real work. How could you expect to get a job with such weak academic credentials, she asks, and in such easy fields as Mathematics and Physics.
How is one supposed to get a job before one ever gets one's first job, and should you expect to hear the sound of one hand clapping at such a Zenlike moment of success, you wonder silently to yourself, because pointing to the unreality of what one is hearing at a job interview is known as being a quick path to a blacklisting. Moot point, though. Picture yourself going on to be denied employment after that on the basis that your lengthy period of unemployment reflected negatively on you, until one day you wake up and discover that you've now been looking for work for 16 years, and still haven't encountered so much as a single person willing to offer even the slightest amount of help. Oh, to be sure, some people did get work during that time, but listen to the words people use as they give advice to the chronically stonewalled - "you need to network". Translation from Jargon into English: people are hiring their buddies. If you had to work long hours putting yourself through school at a time when grants weren't available for any but the fortunate few who met the often quirky requirements (eg. of Norwegian descent from Logansville, Illinois, in the case of one grant program mentioned at the U. of Chicago) and loans were practically non-existent, you didn't have time to go out and party. You got up, you worked, and you went to bed, where you then collapsed into something resembling sleep. Where, living such a life, is somebody supposed to find "buddies", other than among the few equally unemployed classmates one briefly exhanges pleasantries with in the Hall, before racing to one's next obligation?
It is a standard that is as unfair and as discriminatory as discriminatory can be, one that condemns some to a life of grinding poverty with little real hope of escape, punishing more than a few people savagely for the heinous crime of having worked too hard and having accomplished too much in spite of a hostile environment set out for them from the start, and when one hears the racial epithets dropping from the lips of some of those same secretaries - the ones shredding the applications in from of applicants - one needn't look too hard for a reason why. In Chicago, as in much of the US, it's OK to be very, very WASPishly White. It's OK to be very, very Black. But, somehow, it's not OK to be anywhere in between, and if you should be one of the "marginally Caucasian", you encounter a strange world, indeed - not white enough to be accepted, but too white for anybody to acknowledge that the open ethnic hostility is wrong. And forget about any kind of civil rights action, because you are one of the privileged overclass, don't you know?
I see this, and yet I vote Republican. Am I so evil, that I don't care about how people are treated? Do I have a case of desert fever, hankering for some Mayflower descendent girl who will get the hots for me if I turn into a half-semitic Uncle Tom? (Or would that be an Uncle Tomas?)
No. But I am amused at the standard of evidence used to support the strange demands made of me. Has Sam (and others like him) seen nearly unendingly hateful mistreatment? Yes, no sane person could argue otherwise, though more than a few ideologue crazies will try to, but you know, the funny thing is that most of those crazies are to be found among those "caring and compassionate" liberals, as are more than a few of those very white secretaries and personnel people who've proved to be such a nearly impermeable filter in the employment process. The people who bar Sam's way, and the way of so many others as they futily attempt to begin lives that have been stalled, now, for far longer than the length of the entirety of the great depression, by and large are not to be counted among the rich and famous. These aren't CEOs, this isn't Donald Trump or Bill Gates sadistically conspiring to keep the little guy in his place, especially if the little guy has dared to be something less than completely blond haired and blue eyed. The lives of these people who are being stomped into the mud have been slowly destroyed, not for greed and profit by the big guys, but for "s**ts and giggles" by other little people, or in some cases in a bout of outright hatred and spite by some 19 year old chicklet who has had her oppression studies class, knows how evil those overprivileged white males are, and feels vindicated in her bigotry as she takes her self-righteousness out on somebody looking like (and often related to) some of the same people her granddaddy would have sicced the unionbusting goons on, a few decades back.
Liberalism is not going to make such experiences go away, for all of the caring facade it presents, because Liberalism, more than anything else, is about giving people excuses to hate, and more than a few in this country are all too eager to do so. As for the government "helping", let's not forget that affirmative action - the pretext used to keep many like Sam from ever having a chance to apply for a number of positions - was a government program. So was "Project Chance". Oh, you didn't hear about that? Let me tell you what that was.
At about the time Sam and his peers were struggling to get by, in many cases because of circumstances that the government played more than a small role in creating, somebody felt that it was terrible, just terrible that all of these people were struggling to get by on welfare for year after year. Something just HAD to be done about this. The solution - make those lazy malingerers start looking for work! As if they hadn't been already. As if the stubborn unwillingess to break in a new employee except as a favor to somebody plugged into the old boys network (or who qualified as an affirmative action hire), or to accept a resume because (horrors!) one might be expected to file it, represented laziness on the part of those pounding their feet to a (sometimes literally) bloody mess on the concrete every day, instead of laziness on the part of those unreasonably saying "no", sometimes going on to whine a few years later about the shortage of junior employees - you know, the employees they wouldn't have had, had they not freely chosen to choke off entry level opportunities? So, one day Sam gets handed a sheet of paper and an ultimatum. Either he fills the list with the names, addresses and phone numbers of a few dozen businesses where he has just filled out an application or left a resume in the last week, or his luxurious $2.50/day lifestyle is over! His foodstamps will be cut off. "And if people refuse to let me do so". That's your problem he's told, but some of those in the "caring" profession of social work.
Not that explaining his predicament produced no responses, he says, with others reporting similar experiences. No, in some places the people he explained this to threatened to call the police, because they felt "threatened", and as any good feminist knows, feeling threatened is the same thing as being threatened. But he got those names, courtesy of a little added strength because the garbage bins downtown were a little less lean that month, he suspects - he was able to cover a little more ground. And so he managed to get to the point at which, without a phone, he was able to set up his first tutoring appointment, the temp work he has sort of gotten by on to this day beginning with him only going down to somewhere between 60% and 70% of his optimal body mass - ie. somewhere around the level that, overseas, would officially qualify one as being a famine victim. During this time, he says, he had no luck getting food at any of the missions or soup kitchens, because lines were long in those days, and everybody "knew" that the white boys were rich. Even when, strictly speaking, they weren't legally white in all of the states, I guess.
Yes, it stinks that people treat each other this way, but guess what? Nobody held a gun to their heads and forced them to act like a**holes and to go on acting like a**holes in the decades that followed. They did that, in large part, because they got off on doing so. That's how people are, and that's where hard times have been coming from lately. Not from the so-called war, not from the economy crashing out due to some ill-conceived action on the part of this or any other administration, but simply because people have grabbed onto any excuse, any at all, to go out of their way to treat most of their neighbors like dirt, even when by throwing away people who would work hard and bring valuable skills to any employer who would give them a chance, they help to impoverish their employer, raising the likelihood that they, themselves, would find themselves walking the same streets that they got such a blast out of not letting others escape.
As the writers of the Federalist Papers noted, a democracy offers no hope to those who run afoul of the passions of a majority faction; if most of the population feels like being vicious just for the sake of being vicious, then a vicious society will result, no matter what laws we put on the books. All that getting the government more involved, at such a moment, is likely to do is get a few of those generally vicious people into a position of essentially unchallengeable power. As some of us have so often noted, if a private charity is badly run, those needing help are free to look to other charities and those donating money are free to do so as well. But if the government takes over the business of charity, driving taxes us so high as to choke off the revenue stream for private charities, and it is run badly, there is little recourse. The rising government payroll means that the misbehaving federal employees will be almost impossible to fire, and good luck getting a bad policy changed - bureaucracies are not democratically elected, they are appointed, they make their own policies, and as long as the payrolls aren't cut, the twits are in for life. As for the government bailing out corporations in order to "keep jobs in America" - consider Sam's story. Jobs for who? By eliminating the role of market discipline, such actions ease the hardship that uncompassionate waste of human potential would otherwise cause.
What we are left with, as we examine the situation, is the question Eris implicitly presents the author and reader with in the above quote - why do people look to authority on high for help with problems that they make for themselves, of their own free will? Individuals may have reasonable grievances, but on the whole, the responsibility for not shooting ourselves in the foot lies not with the government, but with ourselves, and if we refuse to exercise that responsibility, what is President Bush or anybody else supposed to do about that?
As for some of the current complaints, of people with terminal bachelor's degrees in fields like the humanistic study of videogames (I swear I'm not making that one up), mediocre averages and lacksadaisacal work attitudes, who bitterly protest that they had to look three whole months and settle for $35K or lower - if it sounds like I'm snoring as I sit through your tale of imagined woe, that's only because I am, so don't take it personally. Life could be a lot worse, and for many, it continues to be.
Perhaps, though, I'm being unduly pessimistic. If you look at the demographics of those entering the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, very, very few of those people are very white or very black; like "Sam" they fall somewhere in that chronically despised middle, and they fall there by the thousands. Imagine that - thousands of desperate, hungry, and increasingly angry techies, getting told to "suck it up" when they express a wish to have a chance to enjoy what much of society takes for granted, and finding that they aren't being allowed a real chance to do so. Funny thing, though - these are the very people who have the knowledge needed to produce the majority of the weapons technologies known to man, and if you look at some of the skilled laborers having trouble finding work, any work - a whole bunch of them are machinists, electricians, and oh, everybody else needed to produce a wide variety of weapons systems, and those are highly marketable skills overseas, in a wide variety of places. As businessmen have often said, one should be absolutely ready to leave home and family behind to relocate to where the work is found, and desperation should be driving more than a few of them to locations they might never have otherwise considered, for the lack of better (or in some cases, survivable) options. So perhaps I should be of better cheer, for a new day may be dawning for many of us, with the help of these new business associates and the opportunities for them that the hunger-opened minds of these very highly trained individuals are likely to eventually create. Some may stubbornly say "no", maybe even most, but out of a starving cast of thousands, what are the odds that all will prove so altruistically stubborn when such an easy route of escape from otherwise inescpable troubles keeps presenting itself, as the desire for revenge becomes so well motivated. One offers both the carrot and the stick, and expects there to be no takers? Doubtful in the short run, inconceivable in the long run, if nothing changes.
Wow! I think I see the dawn of this brave new age already! Is that the sun rising out there in the West? Better stock up on your sunscreen, because we may be in for a very warm day, sooner than we expect.
Sooner or later, if it pushes people hard enough, any society will find that loyalty, like patience, has limits, and no amount of preachy rhetoric will make that bit of reality go away. Nor should it. Societies, like individuals, are responsible for the free and informed chances they make, and if they don't like what they see at the end of the path they've chosen for themselves, they're always free to choose another.
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