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.

As a certain folk-singer once said, “Everyone is a fucking Napoleon.”

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”.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.”

It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.