Less sweet if shared?
One of the things about this S-CHIP debacle is that it’s exposing how the difference between the left and the right on reproductive justice issues really is our views on class and freedom, not “life”. Like this wonderful piece decrying the idea that the working class have any rights at all from Mark Hemingway.
While the debate around the Frost family at least initially centered around their relative wealth, the issue really at hand is one of bad behavior. While USAction and a labyrinthine maze of leftist activist groups prepare to rally around images of Tampa Bay’s Most Photogenic Baby holding up a crayon sign that says “Don’t Veto Me,” Dara and Brian Wilkerson are real poster children — for irresponsible decisions.
On the conference call, Dara admitted to me that she and Brian had been talking about having children since before they were married. She further admitted that after they were married she voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was “unmanageable.” From there she took a job at a restaurant with no health insurance, and the couple went on to have a baby anyway, presuming that others would pay for it and certainly long before they knew their daughter would have a heart defect that probably cost the gross national product of Burkina Faso to fix. But not knowing about future health problems is the reason we have insurance in the first place.
Certainly, chastising people for having children sounds a tad incongruous with the standard issue right wing anti-choice view that puts child-bearing into the “mandatory” category, but really this little passage from Hemingway reveals why they’re not “pro-life” or even “pro-baby”, but anti-choice. Like, any realistic choice. You don’t get a choice to abort that pregnancy but he’s also firmly against your choice to have the baby. Ideally, you’d be constrained to a handful of choices: Kill yourself, abstain from sex your whole life unless you’re a member of the elite class, or just let your babies with medical problems die for lack of care. Luckily, with the handy-dandy anti-choice policies, you’ll be making more whether you want to or not, and eventually some will be tough enough to get out of childhood, and then we’ll know for sure they’re healthy enough to pass the military physical exam, because we’ll be needing them to get the oil out of another country.
Hey, if you don’t like it, you should have chosen your socioeconomic class better when god was letting your pre-born soul in heaven pick your family.
Now, pause for a second. Are you reading this at your computer at work, in a job that you don’t particularly care for or even downright detest because you have a spouse and child that depend on you? You wouldn’t be the first or last person to make that choice.
It’s interesting that Hemingway is pleading for understanding from the very people he dearly wishes to fuck over. You know, the working person who has to navigate the territory between giving themselves a stress heart attack and feeding their families. This passage could be best summed up as: “Hey, asshole, what gave you the right to think that you should be allowed a decent living just because you work hard for a living? Here, hate on some other people who work for a living instead of focusing on the real culprits, people like me who want to defund your schools and retirement and give it all to Wall Street.”
What makes me a sad panda is how often that cheap ploy works on so many people. Don’t look at how the rich are getting richer while you’re getting poorer! Look, some Mexicans got some government cheese—hate them instead!
The pro-punishment bent of Hemingway’s article—with its unsavory implication that this baby should have died to punish the parents for feeling like they had a right to elitist privileges like sex and marriage—really gets to the heart of how a worldview that can be against the right to abortion (and other birth control methods) can somehow also be against child-bearing, at least from people of a certain class. It’s the same logic as the angry comments below about how the poor are getting away with murder because we let them have TVs now—simple, simplistic, hare-brained elitism. A worldview that posits that the main benefit of wealth is having much, much more than your neighbor. It’s not enough to have more than enough anymore; it loses its sweetness if your neighbors are getting by and not entirely miserable. That BMW drives that much better if your neighbor couldn’t afford to keep her baby alive. That McMansion seems so much more spacious if you know that the poor can’t even enjoy the momentary pleasure of fucking because they don’t have a choice to have a baby or not to have one.
It’s a worldview I don’t understand. The night air is sweeter if everyone is enjoying it in my eyes. That color TV is so fun everyone should have one. My sex life isn’t diminished if someone else gets to enjoy their own on their own terms. In fact, if someone out there is suffering needlessly, I feel diminished. My color TV is less, not more, fun because not everyone has one. My sex life is slightly grayer knowing someone is getting oppressed for the same thing somewhere else. It’s almost hard to believe other people are so mean-spirited, but the undeniable evidence of essays like this and the damn “let them eat cake” crap below forces me to see that what I don’t want to believe really is so.
88 Responses to “The cannon fodder factories are getting surly again”
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This country needs a good case of class warfare from below. so far, it’s only been the rich fighting it, and we’re all suffering.
I can’t claim to understand the attitude in any way other than intellectually, but here’s what it seems like to me. If people like Hemingway are doing okay, it’s because, in their minds, they’ve earned it, and that means they’re Good People*, and so if others, who are of a lower economic class, get some of the same kind of good stuff they have, that devalues what they have, and therefore devalues their “goodness.” That picture is very appropriate, because to them, having to share the cake does make it less sweet. It’s a common attitude you find among the super-wealthy–what good is it to have a Maine lobster flown in and served on a golden platter if a poor as dirt fisherman can catch the same thing and eat it as well–it cheapens his feeling of exclusivity, and what good is wealth if it can’t allow you the power to sneer at everyone below you?
*I was looking for that copyright symbol, but don’t know how to make it. I figure Good People ought to get up there with Nice Guy as a euphemism for assholes we’d rather never have to deal with again.
I hate to get distracted by the straw-man, but when I read the word “unmanageable” I assumed it meant her job became unmanageable (even tho’ the author chose to put it in quotes.) The author assumes that “unmanageable” means she simply didn’t like it, as do most of the commenters.
In my fair city, country club jobs are far flung in the wealthy suburbs. Most of the wait-staff can’t afford to live in these affluent areas and need a car to travel back and forth to work or else have to rely on unreliable public transport. So I was picturing a scenario where her junker of a car finally got to be too costly to fix and they had to decide to get jobs they didn’t need a car to get too.
Not just that we’d rather never deal with again, but who actively belie the label applied.
Incertus, yes, I see the Good People concept all the time around here, even in my extended family. I think it’s not only that they believe they’ve earned the right to hate on others but also that they don’t acknowledge the role luck has played in their success. Too often, people mistake good luck for personal virture and judge others accordingly. Feh.
I propose funding a Time Travel Repatriation Project to deal with the wingnuts once and for all, since they seem to like the past so much — I just can’t decide whether people such as Mark Hemingway should be sent back to 1889 (the age of robber barons, Newport, the brutal suppression of strikes, and Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives) or to late medieval Europe, when they could enjoy witnessing religious fanaticism and persecution, sumptuary legislation, and mass death from epidemics.
“So I hope Bethany grows up strong — I’m worried about her. Not because I’m worried that the state won’t take care of her, but I’m afraid that her parents will continue to set a bad example. In which case, she’ll need all the help she can get.”
Yeah. I bet if my parents were a hard-working couple who loved me enough to brave the bureaucracy nightmare of condescension, incompetence and humiliation known as Government Assistance to get me lifesaving surgery, then put their rather excruciatingly normal personal situations up for public savagery to try to make sure that other kids got the same help, I bet I’d turn out to be a psychological mess. Cause research shows that having parents who wanted you and loved you like that is about the most psychologically unhealthy environment a kid can have!
What bothers me, is that this guy doesn’t seem to have any idea of the multitude of sins that “unmangaeable” can cover. From sexual harrasment, to an arbitrary and sadistic boss yanking you around to get you to quit.
And this from the same party that argues that for plebes and proles, the ONLY recourse to wrongdoing by the boss is to find a different job. Assholes.
sara,
the problem with your proposal is that the ancestors of people like the bushies and their christmas card list were on the winning side of robber baron’s, brutal suppression etc. and think that they absolutely deserve to be. and their poor sheeple followers are the kind that have throughout history loved their own oppresion.
Interesting how National Review articles don’t have a space for comments. Or is it just that I’m not a SUBSCRIBER? (which god/goddess forbid)
So in Mark Hemingway’s eyes, the “bad decision” this family made is that they weren’t born rich. And that being lower middle class means they shouldn’t have had children. Very pro-life of them fellas, for sure.
Somegirls, I think you hit the nail on the head. Nobody these days gives up a paying job with healthcare because they don’t “like” it. Everybody I know will stay in an absolute hellhole of a job if it has healthcare benefits. There were obviously issues making that job impossible to keep.
I work in IT. Even among the newbies…………..not to mention us oldtimers working in the more obsolete stuff……….I work with people here who, 10 years ago, were on top of the world………….they could pick their company, or decide to take time off and go herd goats for fun, etc. No more. Nobody is budging an inch. People I thought would have quit the company to pursue something more fun a long time ago? Not so much, anymore. They are grimly hanging on just like us obsolete oldtimers.
And that’s just the way the rightwing wants it………middle class folks desperately clinging to crummy jobs at less pay than they used to have.
Lisa, thanks, I needed that.
I’m a coward. But I can’t fathom exposing my child to the flying monkeys.
I fight them in person in my state’s legislature; that’s part of my job, and I’m good at it in part because they don’t scare me with their contemptible allusions to the lesser among us who deserve to suffer. I know that what they mean is, I wouldn’t take care of my kids if the law allowed me to send them to work. And I know I’m not that kind of person. I’m willing to fight for a society in which that kind sometimes gets away with a little something he doesn’t deserve.
But I’m not willing to let them rake my kid over.
Not just to find a job, but to be thankful for any job, no matter how demeaning or dangerous. And, to recognize that if the job goes away, well we should feel good for the stockholders whose portfolios always seem to go up when labor is cut.
The term “human resources” gives away too much about how management/ownership see laborers; resources to be exploited that just happen to be human. And the human side of it is secondary to being an exploitable resource.
The cake is a lie..
The cake is a lie..
The cake is a lie…
*ahem*
Indeed. There’s a lot of reasons why a job would become “unmanageable”. Maybe the hours are too unpredictable for child care, maybe as somegirls mentioned, there was transportation problems, maybe it was simple as a personality conflict. There are assholes (usually Republican) in this world you know. And these things can be REALLY bad, especially if you’re counting on the job to keep your kids healthy and a roof over their heads.
Actually, now that I think about it. She’s a waitress, right? In most places, they get paid basically nothing. (Their wages come from tips). I’ll bet that being a high-end country club, her tips were very small, and her tip-out (money is passed down the line to the cooks/dishwashers/busboys etc. in most places) probably took most of her paycheck. Tip-out is usually calculated as a % of your daily business..from what I’ve heard if you’re not getting more than 10% tips you’re not making a dime. And less than that? That waitress is paying the honor of serving you. Yeah.
Now THAT’s unmanagable.
I don’t think it’s necessarily that they gain pleasure from having benefits over others, so much as a defense mechanism. They can’t reconcile their worldview that the value of hamity can be measure in money, and that economic freedom is the only true freedom, and still admit that people who worked every buit as hard, or harder, than they did, have still failed.
To they find a reason, any reason, to make them Unworthy. They must have made “bad choices”. What bad choices? Oh everyone has done SOMETHING that they wish afterwards they had not done. And if there isn’t anything direct that people can poin to, then there can always be an ideological impurity. They expected a handout, they weren’t godly enough, they were irresponsible.
While the attitude is ultimately classist, I think it’s pretty independent of background. I’ve known a number of “I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps” Republicans, who grew up poor, and often in dysfunctional situations, and truly did overcome incredible adversity. But they don’t want to think that they didn’t do it alone, or that they might have merely been lucky, in overcoming their difficulties.
Everyone beat me to the “Good People” concept, and said it much clearly. Feh. Back to the beer with me.
somegirls,
Besides the unmanageable aspects of trying to get from point A to point B, I read somewhere (and do not know if there’s any truth to this) that Dara had been sexually harassed at the country club AND that she had left that job seven years earlier so even using the country club job as part of the argument is rather specious.
As if that fact ever stopped a wing nut.
On the conference call, Dara admitted to me that she and Brian had been talking about having children since before they were married. She further admitted that after they were married she voluntarily left a job at a country club that had good health insurance, because the situation was “unmanageable.”
“Admitted”? What, is she confessing to some kind of crime here?
And the situation was unmanageable: maybe her car broke down, maybe her schedule clashed with her husband’s new job, maybe they wanted her to switch to night shift, maybe the rest of her co-workers were all chain smokers and she got really bad chronic bronchitis, maybe they asked her to do something illegal… (These examples are all real: I personally know at least one person who quit for each of these reasons.)
From there she took a job at a restaurant with no health insurance, and the couple went on to have a baby anyway, presuming that others would pay for it and certainly long before they knew their daughter would have a heart defect that probably cost the gross national product of Burkina Faso to fix.
I can’t parse that last sentence. They went on to have a baby before they knew she would have a heart problem? How the heck would they the baby would have a heart problem before they had it?
I think a lot of the psychology of this is based on that great feeling you get when you feel better or smarter than someone. They ran out of health care because they were irresponsible! They deserved it. It won’t happen to me because I am smart. Its a defense mechanism. I won’t get hurt, I wear my seatbelt! Those people are poor because they don’t work hard!
If you accept that bad things happen for no reason you have to accept that they might happen to you. A lot of people have trouble with that.
Richard,
I had read that she quit the country club job years before she had the child also. That’s why I acknowledged that I was getting distracted by straw men. If it was sexual harassment then that’s as bad or worse in my mind but for a republican would just mean she was a whiner and a feminazi. So I’d be surprised if she said sexual harassment and the author didn’t include it in the article to mock her even more.
But even beyond all that, the real issue is that hard working people can’t aford proper health care. Not what job she had when. Maybe we should blame the new employer for not providing health care? Oh wait, that would be hurting the small business person…and you know why that is: HEALTH CARE IS TOO F’N EXPENSIVE.
It’s kinda weird, the social conservative right likes to identify itself as “pro-family”. I’ve always wondered, is there an anti-family movement somewhere? The name “pro-family” seems to imply there must be some anti-family group out there somewhere they’re opposed to, but I’ve never exactly been able to find one. (Oddly, the people who the “pro-family” movement winds up in opposition to seem to be anyone who thinks homosexuals should be allowed to have families– you know, marry, have children, all that.)
Except here I think we’ve actually found it– Mr. Hemingway actually writes the only actually anti-family op-ed I think I’ve ever seen, in which he argues that starting a family is an act of irresponsibility which should not be followed through on unless you can guarantee that you won’t be potentially creating a burden to society by doing so. And this anti-family argument is to be found in the otherwise [one would assume] “pro-family” National Review.
I guess maybe I can be charitable here and say this isn’t so much a contradiction: Mr. Hemingway may be writing for the National Review, but he may not himself be a “pro-family” conservative (is he? I have not heard of him); he may be one of them pure “fiscal conservatives” you sometimes hear about. Either way, between the “pro-family” branch and whatever branch Mr. Hemingway is a part of, it seems like the conservative movement is overall placing quite a lot of restrictions on who should be allowed to have a family. So far I’m counting the rules that if you want a family, you must:
- Be heterosexual
- Have employer-provided health insurance
Any other conditions, am I missing anything here?
mcc,
other conditions:
-be married
-be wealthy enough that the mother doesn’t have to work too
-be a woman that doesn’t want to work
i’m sure i can think of some more soon
I love this shit. We’re in the end times for the wingnuts. They’ve lost any hope of being able to conceal their real feelings, so now we get article after article wherein they tell us, and middle America, what they really think. Just delightful.
Somewhere on one of my hard drives I have a cartoon that depicts two banker types, in the dialogue balloon is “what’s the point if everyone’s rich?”
This is just a continuation of high school cliques, what’s the point of being cool if you can’t be cruel to other people.
A quick Gagoogle did not reveal whether this smuck is a relative of Ernest. I hope not, he’d be the guy sitting at the bar saying he would loved to have had the opportunity to hunt Nazis if it wasn’t for that painful anal cyst. I hope that the lovely and talented Muriel and Margaux don’t have to be around this twit during holidays.
It’s Economic Calvinism; just replace God with The Market. The blessed are blessed because they are good; the cursed must have sinned and are going to hell. So let ‘em rot.
Of course, when sane people point out how bad things happen to everyone, no matter how virtuous, no matter how young and innocent, it shows through their paper thin arguments. Then the ranting and flying monkeys begin in earnest.
Hey America; here’s the real face of the Republican party, what you get when you rip off Reagan’s smiley wrinkled mask. Take a good look.
Hold the phone. According to Coulter, getting married before procreating is the solution to poverty. Where did these lowlifes go wrong then?
I love the argument “You shouldn’t have had a child if it’s going to be a burden on society.” especially since the head boy of Poppys’ and Babs’ little demon brood has been far more damaging to society than little Bethany ever will be.
But seriously, it’s an old class game. As Paul Krugman depicts in The Conscience of A Liberal, there’s many reasons why the US is the only first world nation without national health insurance, and racism is one of the main ones. Truman tried going the national health care route in 1949, but he was stopped by Southern Democrats who feared (gasp!) integrated hospitals. He didn’t have the same trouble integrating the armed services; maybe because In Crowd was happy to have black cannon fodder, as long as said fodder didn’t share the same hospital as the Special People.
One of the things I have really hated is the complaint that these families have cars! More than one!
It is almost as if some people are so insulated they don’t know that there are a lot of jobs that you cannot even get without a car. Nevermind getting to the job. They won’t hire you at all if you take public transit.
Anybody else read the line “Must have own car” in a want ad? Apparently right wingers don’t grasp what that means for the poor and lower middle class in this country.
Wingnut reasoning at its finest:
Step #1 - Mention a situation when some poor/middle-class person is laying claim to some taxpayer money better routed to the deserving rich, like Republican Pioneer-class donors
Step #2: Find some way, however twisted, to blame that person for their current situation (You should have thought about the risk of congenital defects before you chose to be born)
Step #3: Observe in a condescending way that the person is therefore to blame for their own problem, and (unlike Wall Street brokers selling mortgage-backed securities to the unwary) shouldn’t expect to be bailed out by hard-working taxpayers.
sarahmc–Funny thing is then Fred Thompson should’ve lived in poverty since he had a shotgun wedding at age 17, 7 months before he had his first child. Of course, it wasn’t your average shotgun wedding between two poor kids: he’d go on to be a lawyer for his father-in-law’s firm (funny, when Kerry married into wealth under more responsible terms, Republicans thought it reprehensible.)
actually, it’s just having sex before marriage that Coulter referred to…it was funny looking at all the comments on right-wing blogs in praise of that article, that when anyone tried to call her out on hypocrisy (and yes, she’s bragged about how she “plays the field,” it’s not an issue of “shaming her because she wears a short skirt,”) the right basically admitted that she gets a different set of rules because she’s rich, and of course whined about how it was worse that Gore and Edwards had big houses while fighting poverty and global warming.
My head just exploded. What happened to how responsible individuals are “open to children”?
Hemingway neglected to mention that Dara left her job at the country club seven years before Bethany was born.
I got that from Steve Benen.
So is Paris Hilton the new Marie Antoinette?
If you accept that bad things happen for no reason you have to accept that they might happen to you. A lot of people have trouble with that.
That’s basically it. The basic wingnut coping mechanism is to hate and scorn and isolate yourself from people whose bad fortune you don’t want. They’ll never be you, because you’re Good People.
An interesting take on the Anti-Family Voter. I had to read this for a poli sci class in 1992 and it has stuck with me since:
I’m the Anti-Family Voter
These wingnuts need a lesson in civics. In the rest of the world we would
a) assume that the Wilkinsons had themselves paid taxes, and therefore had a right to be supported by what they had paid
and
b) believe that society should look after those less fortunate than themselves, and a small rise in taxes for everyone is worth it to ensure that people of all classes can raise their children to adulthood and live full lives
and
c) refuse to punish a CHILD for the mistakes (real or imagined!) of his or her parents
Isn’t it the wingnuts who are always demanding more classes in civics at school? They need to get onto that for themselves!
Of course, these are the same jerks who would ban abortions even for rape and incest, because “it isn’t the baybeez’s fault that happened”. If the kid is born with a birth defect or gets in an accident, then s/he deserves to die because “their parents made bad choices”.
Exclusivity and the feeling of being special and above everyone else is the main reason for the attitudes referred to in the post. In fact, isn’t that one reason why there are snobs in this world?
So is Paris Hilton the new Marie Antoinette?
Entomologista,
If Paris Hilton is the new Marie Antoinette, who is the new Louis XVI?
You don’t have to look hard to find blatant classist writings from any decade in the last couple centuries. I wouldn’t read too much into it.
World Congress of Families…Howard Center.
Google.
Please take my word for it. Read closely as the republican religious right attempts to reconcile what they believe with what they believe.
It must be read to be comprehended.
Blue Jeans, oh yes, Truman had trouble integrating the armed forces as well. What happened was that the Southern way of doing things was so inefficient, with the inefficiency magnified by all the little things one had to do to comply with Jim Crow laws, that it was directly impinging on the war effort. The southerners didn’t have a choice…
“The name “pro-family” seems to imply there must be some anti-family group out there”
That’s the problem. These folks are just amateur families.
These people live in an alternate reality. By “reality” I mean “fantasy.”
I think Amanda explains it perfectly: you are “irresponsible” if you don’t want kids and dare to have sex… but if you have kids, it’s because you are irresponsible. It’s a lose-lose situation. These bastards will find any reason to demonize you if you don’t make enough money for their goddam tastes.
I used to be friends with a conservative (in Canada, so that can mean many things down there). I remember a conversation where we were discussing our parents’ situations. Her parents became rich, while I grew up in poverty (I’m one of five, she’s an only child.)
I said that my parents started out poor (my father an uneducated white guy and my mother a gifted white woman whose father refused to supplement her scholarship since “education is wasted on a girl.”) They both joined the military and ended up married when my mom found herself pregnant (at 19).
Her reply was that her parents “started out with nothing:” read: university educations and trust funds… She explained how they obviously must have “worked really hard” to get rich, as opposed to my parents, who would have been able to get rich, if only they had worked harder. Who both died of cancer while I was a teenager.
I asked her if maybe my parents might have done better, if, say, they hadn’t died? She still made a point of how her parents got rich, so they obviously worked harder than mine. Not friends anymore. Any ideas why?
It’s a worldview I don’t understand. The night air is sweeter if everyone is enjoying it in my eyes. That color TV is so fun everyone should have one. My sex life isn’t diminished if someone else gets to enjoy their own on their own terms. In fact, if someone out there is suffering needlessly, I feel diminished. My color TV is less, not more, fun because not everyone has one. My sex life is slightly grayer knowing someone is getting oppressed for the same thing somewhere else. It’s almost hard to believe other people are so mean-spirited, but the undeniable evidence of essays like this and the damn “let them eat cake” crap below forces me to see that what I don’t want to believe really is so.
At least part of it is the conceptualisation of taxation as theft - any taxpayer money is MY money because I pay taxes, and I earned MY money fair and square with the sweat of MY brow, and the Government stole MY money, and it is giving MY money to the Evil Poor/Queers/Performance Artists Who Smear Peanut Butter On Themselves!!!
It’s pretty obvious that money, the value of work, and any wealth is embedded in a functioning society, and that all three are enhaced by a society that reaches past functional towards an idea of the Good. Obvious to us, anyhow. All we have to do is look at Somalia as an example of what a non-functional society lacking governance really means.
But the idea is fixed in the heads of the screamers of THEIR money existing entirely seperate from a social context, and being taken by force by the Government.
And the Republicans play on that idea to gain power - and screw over the screamers even more.
[first post, sorry if it comes out weird]:
i can’t believe this guy.
from Hemingway: “Which brings us to another salient point — Bethany Wilkerson is healthy. She is covered by existing programs and has already received the much of the medical care she needs. The current debate centers on expanding the program, not kicking the Frosts and the Wilkersons to the curb.”
…only the SCHIP budget Bush wants wouldn’t be enough to cover everyone already on the program. so, yeah, someone’s gonna get kicked to the curb. But anyways, the kid is fine–after costing us the GDP of Burkina Faso, she’d better be–so Dara and Brian should just shut up already.
the Burkina Faso thing really pissed me off–as if spending that much money on a poor kid (for any reason) is just pouring it down the drain…
I’m suprised no one has brought up the phrase ‘Social Darwinism’. It’s natural selection, see…If you die, it’s because there’s a problem with your ancestry, not with society. And all the strong smart women realized millions of years ago that they didn’t need men to survive and that having children was a pain in the butt, so they all died out, and only weak stupid women reproduced, passing on the weak stupid women gene to all their decendants.
Does this guy even know how MANY jobs there are out there that you can bust your butt at and still not even make a living wage, let alone perks like health insurance? Who does he want to work at those jobs, if he thinks that waitresses and handymen shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce? Ah, he’s in favor of immigration then.
I also found it odd that at the start of the article he’s complaining about children being posed as political props. But then he seems to be endorsing the Jon Benet Beauty Queen lifestyle as more worthy of attention than the ’sick child with the beautiful smile’, and seems offended that no one is making her wear eyeliner.
This article by Mark doesn’t seem like he even read it through himself, and if I weren’t so lazy (and repulsed) I’d look up some of his other articles and see if, in the past he had ‘proven’ that he could write a single coherent peice. If he’s done it once then he’s obviously capable, so we’re left to wonder why he is no longer doing so for a living.
If he gets company funded health care for writing so poorly, then I’m doublely offended.
I have often said that should things ever go pear-shaped here in Britain, I would have a number of escape routes handy. France and Holland are both attractive places to live. Scandanavia makes a sound refuge. Japan has its benefits (I’m married to a Japanese).
These debates over SCHIP just illustrate why America never has, and never will be, on that list.
It isn’t just the wingnuts, sadly. It’s a basic coping mechanism that many people seem to hang their sense of self-esteem and insecurity on.I knew a gal, generally as liberal/Democratic/progressive as they come (bisexual, polyamorous, aggressively feminist, etc), who was had an extremely troubled childhood. Poverty, drugs, abuse, the whole bouquet. But she got herself out of there without help from anyone and made herself a life.
Good for her.
Except…
Because she was able to do it, anyone who failed to rescue themselves singlehandedly was a bad, lazy, immoral person and undeserving of help or sympathy. Needing help, she believed, meant one was weak and despicable. (Incidentally, she was also opposed to statutory rape laws because she would have been able to say no, so any child of any age who consented to sex with an adult should be treated as having given consent; and any gray areas of the child’s word against the adult’s, she was confident, would be satisfactorily determined in court.)
When my husband and I knew her, her life wasn’t exactly cake and roses. It was a huge improvement over what she had escaped from, but it still involved living paycheck to paycheck just barely making the rent, having no health insurance worth speaking of, and living with a medical condition she was unable to afford medication for. I believe to this day that our friendship with her ended because we wanted very much to help her with these things… which meant, in her twisted Good People(TM) world view, that we must have thought her despicable and weak.
It’s a coping mechanism. It’s a way of denying that bad things happen to good people. That this poisonous worldview is all but legislated by those currently in power and near-unanimously argued for by the wingnuts doesn’t, sadly, prevent otherwise liberal and tolerant people from indulging in it too.
The winners in the stakes of capitalism do not feel like winners, because emotionally they are not winners. They haven’t earned their gain. They have barely “battled” for it. It has been theirs through inheritance, or through social positioning due to birth, or through good fortune. So, deep down they know they are not winners, and it causes them to seeth with resentment. They think that they can finally receive that emotional jolt that says “winner” if they have somebody nearby whom they can rob of a living or of a bit of happiness. They think that finally this kind of situation will give them a sense of being able to feel an emotion of humanity at last. But of course it doesn’t, simply because being mean and robbing others of their feelings of success does not make anyone a man.
(I know this is another case of getting bogged down in the details at the expense of the larger picture, but still…)
As someone who was born with a heart defect that may be genetic, and also doesn’t have any health insurance at all at the moment (despite, btw, working for the government), I just have to ask…
If I get raped, and I become pregnant because of the rape, and I decide to keep the baby like a good little girl, will good old Mark approve of the government paying to fix baby’s defective heart then?
********
Debates over heath care always get my blood boiling, but it’s the ones that argue that my government should have had no obligation to help me when I was a baby if the choices my parents had made had left me with no health insurance - those are the ones that cause the endless profanities.
Lucky for me, my dad took a government job in part to avoid such scenarios. The government being widely known for being more generous than most employers when it comes to things like vacation time and health insurance. A fact which is often used to bag on public employees for getting more for less work. And the current debate is about whether the government or employers should pay for health insurance. Which is all nicely ironic.
Also ironic? The fact that if I give the hypothetical baby (product of rape or not) up for adoption, and s/he becomes a ward of the state because no one wants a kid with health problems, then the government will pay for the baby’s medical expenses.
No ironic: how closely such a scenario resembles the plot of a Dicken’s novel.
You know, I don’t object to my tax money going to help children. It is, in fact, one of the few perks of paying taxes that some of it goes to worthy causes like, for example, helping children. What kind of person are you if you can whine about your tax money being used to make sure that children have happy, healthy lives?
This going on about “bad choices” is beyond stupid and bordering on surreal. You never know if a choice you make is good or bad until all cards are on the table, and that can take years, or decades, or a lifetime. By then, all alternatives are pure speculation.
some will be tough enough to get out of childhood, and then we’ll know for sure they’re healthy enough to pass the military physical exam
Heh. Even if that was the goal, it doesn’t work that way. Didn’t North Korea just lower the height requirement for military service to 127cm or something? A starved and sick child won’t become a healty or strong adult. It would take generations until this specific kind of toughness came out on top of other traits like strength, intelligence, longevity, dexterity, good looks and what-have-you. Shades of “Brave New World” here…
somegirls: the problem with your proposal is that the ancestors of people like the bushies and their christmas card list were on the winning side of robber baron’s, brutal suppression
Unless they are descendent from royalty, there’s probably a fitting place for them if you go back a little further.
Some of my favorite time-places to send religious nutcases to are the witchhunts in Bamberg and the Anabaptist’s reign in Muenster, though for the “what-public-health?” types, we could find a nice cholera epidemic. Those are pretty much the textbook case for the need for public works like sewers and clean drinking water.
I always just figured that wingnuts are those children who graduated from kindergarten without meeting the test requirements. I propose we send them all back until they understand the concepts “sharing”, “playing nice” and “no name calling”.
The first thing I thought of when I read Amanda’s post is the plot of the famous futurist movie Metropolis, where a thin crust of incredibly wealthy capitalists live (literally) on top of teaming masses of invisible (to the capitalists) poor, downtrodden proles, who are considered maybe one notch above insects in the social hierarchy.
I always enjoyed it as a cautionary tale that shows all people deserve respect for what they do, no matter how great or small, and who they are, simply for being human. It also demonstrates that we are all in this together and one class cannot be subjugated without negatively affecting the higher classes.
I never thought that anyone would see Metropolis, 1984, Brave New World, etc., as anything to idealize and emulate.
It seems like some of these “social Darwinist” authoritarians would like to skip straight ahead and create the future world of H.G. Wells The Time Machine. They of course would be the Morlocks, quite literally feeding on the lives/bodies of the Eloi.
What a wonderful vision for the future of America…
Everyone keeps saying the congressional SCHIP bill will “expand” the program. I’m hearing this from left and right.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
But it’s my understanding that this bill doesn’t “expand” the program at all but properly funds it so that more children who are currently eligible can be enrolled. In fact it includes measures to remove adults and less poor children to make more money available for the really poor.
Am I reading this wrong?
I’m glad someone pointed this out, because I was about to make a similar point. We all make “bad choices” from time to time, and yes, we can’t always remedy the resulting situation despite our efforts. Does that mean we should pay the penalty the rest of our lives?
When I think of how many bad choices I made when I was younger, I blench. Any one of them, if I hadn’t been from the Right Kind of People, could have rendered my life a permanent hell…
Actually it seems to me less like they made “bad choices” but that they made the right choice at the time. Circumstances change. The appropriateness of choices change with them. Just ask anyone who bought a house with a variable interest loan, or the millions of people who worked at the same job for decades thinking that they would get a pension and suddenly it’s “What pension? You should have been saving for yourself. Sounds like you made a bad choice by relying on that pension.”
Everybody gets snagged in bad circumstances. Those circumstances are devistating when you’re poor.
What is the role of personal choices in this arena? Not to pile on this one family, but while dating my current wife in college, we talked about the family we hoped to start one day. We also talked about it when we were just out of school and trying to get careers started and debt under control. In both cases, we didn’t act on the desire to start our family because we knew our economic circumstances couldn’t handle it. We certainly never considered that anyone other than us would be responsible for paying the costs of birthing and then maintaing the health of our children, and being unable to manage that at those times in our lives, pushed off having kids until out very late 20’s. Don’t get me wrong - this isn’t a screed on how this family is irresponsible and we rock cuz we such good adults. And we all understand that circumstances occur where the best laid plans of mice and men still can’t cover all eventualities. But putting aside the obvious need to take care of a child by society that can’t be taken care of by his/her parents - what is the responsibility for an adult to limit their choices when it is clear that someone else will have to foot the bill?
The parents may have made bad or good decisions, but we are not talking about health care for adults, but for kids, who aren’t allowed or able to make any choices. If you don’t get access to health care, and some shot at education, how are you supposed to pull yourself by the bootstraps?
I thought the whole reason why the right wing view of the world is supposed to be fair was equality of opportunities. Or do you have to be extra healthy and very lucky on top of intelligent and hard working?
And by the way, WASPs are mainly descended from puritan european migrants of a very low class. They would enjoy their way back to the middle ages as much as the rest of us would….
No contraceptives, even for married couples
No abortion even, for rape and incest
No having babies if you can’t afford it
Boy doesn’t the right wing make sense?
I’m not even going to get into the get a job any job and stay off welfare vs. oh your irresponsible because you don’t have the right job, right wing brain pretzel fuck
I interpret “unmanageable” to mean something like:
My boss was an asshole and regularly belittled me in public.
Customers sexually harassed me.
Or something of that ilk. It’s a rather polite euphemism with something nasty hanging unsaid in the background.
And this quote you pulled really does take the cake:
“Now, pause for a second. Are you reading this at your computer at work, in a job that you don’t particularly care for or even downright detest because you have a spouse and child that depend on you? You wouldn’t be the first or last person to make that choice.”
I’m not surprised though–there is a strong under-current in American social discourse that if you suffer, then it is right and just that others should suffer too. Why should anyone else benefit from an improvement to the system?
But putting aside the obvious need to take care of a child by society that can’t be taken care of by his/her parents - what is the responsibility for an adult to limit their choices when it is clear that someone else will have to foot the bill?
Considering that it wasn’t clear that “someone else would have to foot the bill” until the child was born and found to have a congenital heart defect, it’s a pretty useless question.
That’s the point. Do you really think it’s realistic to insist that everyone who wants to have children needs to keep $2 million in the bank at all times just in case their child has an unexpected birth defect?
Oh, and if you’re assuming the child would have been automatically covered under the parents’ insurance, you clearly haven’t dealt with an insurance company lately. My former boss only just managed to convince her insurance company to pay for a test that was done on her daughter 24 hours after her birth because the baby had a seizure and they were trying to figure out why. Her daughter is five years old, and the insurance company has been fighting payment for the test that entire time. It even got sent to a collections agency at one point even though the policy said it should be covered.
Now tell me again how any private insurance company would have happily paid all the expenses for an infant’s heart surgery and all she had to do was stay in her job that had health insurance and everything would have been fine.
“what is the responsibility for an adult to limit their choices when it is clear that someone else will have to foot the bill?”
i ask myself that all the time but bush continues to choose to go to war even though my taxes pay for it. unfair, really. i’d rather pay for someone’s sick baby to get better.
To my mind the cant of the right wing isn’t about babies or abortions or anything except strict, strong authoritarianism. It seems they’re most interested in simply controlling absolutely everyone and everything. The concepts of freedom, liberty and questioning of authority are anathema to them, and we can expect them to go categorically insane any time any of those concepts are put on the table.
These are people who would be much more comfortable in a strong theocratic state — provided, of course, it was their brand of theocracy running the show, which is why they haven’t all moved to Iran yet.
That color TV is so fun everyone should have one. My sex life isn’t diminished if someone else gets to enjoy their own on their own terms. In fact, if someone out there is suffering needlessly, I feel diminished.
Another problem is usually that wingnuts really aren’t happy with their lot, and that alarms them. That color TV isn’t really making them happy. They’re not getting that much sex, or it’s not that good, or they wonder what it would have been like if they had slutted around a little before they got married. They get crushes on co-workers or cheat on their spouses and feel horribly guilty about how much they don’t like being married. Turning outwards for the source of their depression, they conclude it must be other people’s happiness. Depression makes normal people uncharacteristically selfish and self-absorbed, so what it does to poorly-socialized wingnuts must be catastrophic.
It’s an issue that comes up time and again in discussions of the health service here in Britain. It’s one of the reason why anti-smoking, anti-obesity camapigns are on the government agenda, because the public generally realizes that cutting the diseases that result from people’s abuses of their bodies would ease pressures on the health service and the public purse.
But curiously very few folks here, save some conservative frothers of the Littlejohn persuasion, believe that services should be withdrawn from those that have contributed to their condition. Maybe that’s because most people know someone in their family who would be penalized under such a system. My Uncle Bill who was a diabetic but smoked until they cut both his legs off, was undoubtedly responsible for his condition. But it’s a feature of a National Health Service that it treats everyone, regardless of cause, and that it is right to do so.
The moment we start applying tests to people’s access to care we are on a slippery slope. Yes, folks should try to keep healthy, but they have no obligation to anyone but themselves to do so.
Someone else (that means all of us) footing the bill is a necessary condition of having a society where we think that the well-being of society depends on caring for the individuals in it. That means educating children (and even adults) with someone else’s money, that means health care for people who can’t afford it (and really should be all of us) on someone else’s money, that means feeding people with someone else’s money.
Because that what a healthy society should do.
Lots of us probably are not big fans of popping out as many kids as you possibly can and do see it as irresponsible. HOWEVER, having the state step in with coercive policies related to family size the way China has is not compatible with our American values. Having people purchase a license to procreate based on income is just not going to happen, nor would it be a good idea if it did. That is why feminists work so hard to educate people about their family planning options. Limiting family size only works to create a more just society if it is self policing. Once kids are here, feminists don’t ask how or why. We just make sure that as a society, we are doing right by them. This is what the Republicans will never get.
It’s one of the reason why anti-smoking, anti-obesity camapigns are on the [British] government agenda, because the public generally realizes that cutting the diseases that result from people’s abuses of their bodies would ease pressures on the health service and the public purse.
Fat does not equal smoking. Fat has multiple possible causes, some of which involve “indulgence,” but many of which are rooted in fat people having done exactly what their doctors told them (and their parents when they were young) to do — i.e. chronic dieting and medication use. Smoking is caused by only one thing — putting a stick of tobacco in your mouth and lighting it. Which may be a nightmare to try and give up, but at least the point of entry is completely optional, and can be made less attractive with the increased cost of tobacco. There is no such comparable intervention that works for “obesity.” Quite the opposite; talk to anyone with a BMI of 35 or higher, and almost without exception you will find that they were put on diets (or had involuntary food security problems) when they were very young.
And frankly, I think a lot of what the British government does to punish fat people for the crime of being fat is, well, criminal — e.g. not allowing hip and knee replacements for anyone with a BMI over 27 or 30 or whatever that section’s cutoff happens to be. Not because there’s a huge medical risk from such surgeries (there generally isn’t) or because they don’t work for larger patients (they do), but because fat people don’t deserve the pain relief until they get thin. Great, take someone who is in excruciating pain from degenerative arthritis (which is largely genetic in origin) and can barely move, and tell them they have to radically starve themselves for a year or more in order to be a worthy candidate for surgery, even if they’re willing to pay for it themselves! It’s something I desperately hope doesn’t happen in a U.S.-based universal healthcare system, but I won’t hold my breath, since so many people here think my fat ass should pay for thin people’s health care but I should be happy to do without the services I’m paying for.
Clymenestra - you are forgetting “don’t have sex unless you are married and can afford to support a child in every way until he/she is finished with college.
This is simply the logical extension of the Prosperity Gospel the riech-wing fundies espouse.
If you’re not wealthy, it means that God doesn’t favor you because of your sins.
All the rest follows from that. God Provides for his faithful. Everyone else, can literally go to Hell.
Nobody said it did. However, smoking and obesity have both been issues in the debate over where British taxpayers’ money goes. Interestingly, today the experts came out against obesity being the responsibility of the individual. However, I suspect we have a way to go before that is universally accepted.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7047244.stm
Not just the British government. Wasn’t Steve Gilliard, who many of us here knew or knew of, refused a particular treatment until he was able to lose weight? I suspect this is something more pervasive to the medical community than any particular government.
What human action embodies more optimism and hope than the choice to have children? We, of all the species, have the cognitive ability to make that choice. To suggest that anyone does not have the right to choose to procreate due to financial circumstances is more abhorrent to me than words can convey. How dare they!
My husband and I had our first child 30 years ago. We couldn’t afford her. But we hoped not that someone else would support her but that our circumstances would improve. And they did. Things used to be that way. You started with a struggle and things got better.
Were I faced with the choice today to reproduce, I’m not sure I could bring a child into this world. That doesn’t stop me from adoring my granddaughter (whose parents struggle financially) all the while fearing for the world she will inherit.
Dr T.: while dating my current wife in college, we talked about the family we hoped to start one day. We also talked about it when we were just out of school and trying to get careers started and debt under control. In both cases, we didn’t act on the desire to start our family because we knew our economic circumstances couldn’t handle it.
And by that very reasoning, of all my friends, only two have kids. The others said “I need some economic security and a stable relationship before I have a kid”, and now that some of them have it, they’re pushing 40. And of those that are ten years younger, are in the process of doing the same.
Is not having kids the right choice for them? Was it the right choice ten years ago, is it now, will it be in 20 years? There’s no way to tell, much less any way to tell what their kids, had they had any, would have been like. It’s speculation, useless.
You do what seems best to you at the time, and you do not know how it will turn out.
Exactly. I have health insurance and the level of coverage has gone down significantly from when I first started. It used to be I just had a copay of $10 for office visits. Now 2 years later I have to pay for 25% of everything. I’m currently pregnant and according to my health plan they are supposed to pay for 100% of my prenatal costs. Already there are issues getting them to pay for simple things like my midwife visits every month.
I’ve also been informed that the delivery is not a routine part of the pregnancy so I will be required to pay my $500 deductible, a $500 deductible for the baby and 25% of all costs incurred. This means that it’s my responsibility to keep the costs of labor low, so no epidural as one of those costs about $1,200 and I’m hoping down to my toes that I don’t end up either needing or being forced into an emergency c-section. Let alone the baby needing to spend any time in the NICU (Newborn Intensive Care Unit) or having some kind of terrible undetected illness like a heart problem.
So this idea that having employer health insurance instantly guarantees no bills or even bills that you can afford when you have a baby is a total load of high minded crap.
So this idea that having employer health insurance instantly guarantees no bills or even bills that you can afford when you have a baby is a total load of high minded crap.
There’s a reason that all of the people in sICKO were people who had health insurance that turned out to be horribly inadequate when they actually had to use it.
Was it someone on here who had twins, but the insurance company decided that the second twin’s birth was “incidental” to the first one’s and so they didn’t have to pay any of the expenses for the second twin’s birth?
“It’s almost hard to believe other people are so mean-spirited, but the undeniable evidence of essays like this and the damn “let them eat cake” crap below forces me to see that what I don’t want to believe really is so.”
This is what was driving me crazy about the thread below as well! The whole economics discussion was painful to read, because, as Mark Foxwell pointed out, the “economists” who are commenting were focusing on details that had nothing to do with the overall point. Sure, absolute poverty is “better” than the past, but that has nothing to do with the quality of society that we’re living in.
How dare they be so responsible as to think ahead about whether they wanted children or not, and not just wait until she got accidentally pregnant!!
As Gore Vidal said of Americans (everyone?):
Raine:
Bush is the new Marie Antionette, and the expression is no longer, “let them eat cake” it’s “they can go to the emergency room.”
Will someone help us out with a good selection of Charles Dickens quotes? I know there are at least a dozen good bits with a high-minded character going on about the irresponsibility of the
middle classpoor, having babies when they ought to be working three jobs and so on. This would save Mr. Hemingway some time.It’s doubly odd because being queer is one of the surest-fire ways of keeping from ever having children of your own (except by deliberate design) and therefore of avoiding child-related predicaments such as the one the Wilkersons now find themselves in.
(Predicaments which, as we now discover, conservatives abhor.)
“I’ve also been informed that the delivery is not a routine part of the pregnancy…”
huh.wha? Delivery is not a routine part of the pregnancy? What do they think happens, the Baby Fairy comes and waves her magic wand and the baby goes directly from your body to her arms?
How cute that he thinks the people reading this on the computer at work are the ones in the most desperate economic circumstances. Yes, all those farmworkers, janitors and childcare providers with unfettered Internet access! How bitter they must be that the Wilkersons didn’t suffer enough!
ohsohappy, you’re not thinking like an insurance company. See, the pregnancy and the birth are two different things, and are subject to different excuses to fuck you out of coverage.
“ . . . while dating my current wife in college, we talked about the family we hoped to start one day. We also talked about it when we were just out of school and trying to get careers started and debt under control. In both cases, we didn’t act on the desire to start our family because we knew our economic circumstances couldn’t handle it.”
Sure, and same here currently, : ( but you have to look at this a bit more broadly. This is part of a general middle-class+ life history path (as touched on by inge) in which the ideal is to wait to have (few to one) kids untl after graduating college (or beyond), becoming established in a career, etc. - which may well take into the 30s or even 40s. Indeed family planning becomes part of the urban middle class’ strategy and ethos during the 19th century, iirc. But this only makes economic and emotional sense for people on track for/reasonably able to reach that sort of solid (and increasingly out of reach) middle-middle-class+ prosperity. I don’t know much about the Wilkersons’ situation and background, but it’s entirely plausible that an additional decade or two child-free wouldn’t find such a couple substantially more ‘prepared’, in this sense, to have a kid. They might be a bit better off, a bit worse, off, maybe even a lot worse off. In many cases, the ‘responsible’ path might well be graduating high school and having one or much more likely both partners employed.
Besides the basic moral imperative, I’m tending to see stuff like the S-CHIP program and proposed expansion as functioning to try to keep the border between poor and working/middle class as much as possible a one-way street (to mix metaphors). (See esp. work on the near poor, the “missing class”, as in the recent book of that name - and indeed, with the ever soaring cost/unavailability of health insurance, increasingly unreliable employment, the mortgage disaster, etc., this sort of fragility is extending well upwards, I think.). It would appear that conservatives even have the same goal, except that for many of them it seems as if they want it going in the other direction.
It would appear that conservatives even have the same goal, except that for many of them it seems as if they want it going in the other direction.
The larger the underclass/”hoi polloi”/”riff raff”, the greater the accentuation of their own “superiority” and thus, further justification for their snobbery. If everyone were able to achieve the level of prosperity and good fortune they have….they are no longer so special and their own delusions of superiority are shattered. Hence, the need to forestall this “calamity”.
“they are no longer so special and their own delusions of superiority are shattered.”
As a certain folk-singer once said, “Everyone is a fucking Napoleon.”
Just a minor rant from a food-service veteran on the obliviousness of Hemingway and his fellow denigrators regarding Dana’s “bad choice” to take a job at a “…restaurant that didn’t have health insurance.” As far as I’m aware, unless one works for a hotel or larger entity, NO restaurants (at least not in the states I’ve worked in) offer any sort of insurance coverage. That’s par for the course. The country club seems to have been an anomaly, obviously operating on a different contract from stand-alone restaurants.
He obviously has no idea what kinds of jobs people actually work in this country, and what kinds of conditions workers put up with in order to draw a regular paycheck (or, in the case of restaurant work, tips at the end of one’s shift.)
In comparison to Hemingway’s cruel takedown, Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” seems almost quaint, with its implication that perhaps she was naive enough to think peasants had that option. Hemingway is most clearly saying “Let them starve.”
Ucch.