The "Deserving" vs. the "Undeserving" Poor

     A brief article in the N. Y. Times ("Week in Review," February 8, 2009) reminded me of how little progress we have made in our understanding and conceptualization of "the poor" and in any resolution to end "poverty" in, let's say, the last, 2500 years!! Jason deParle, in "The 'W' Word, Re-Engaged," re-raises the ages old American issue of how the U.S. will address, administer, distribute, handle, deal with, quietly maintain, sometimes ignore, frequently sweep-under-the carpet, and inevitably ghettoize -- "welfare" and those who receive it -- the poor. All of this makes me review in my mind some features in the history of the poor, and especially the perverse history of poverty and the poor in the U. S.

     When Jesus said, "For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always." (Matthew 26:11), he did not mean to say that we can ignore the poor because they are always lingering about, or that he was more important than the issue of the poor, and that they were worth ignoring compared to his presence. He did mean that those around him should seize the moment; in his case, the brief moment he would be alive. And, importantly, he meant that the poor will always be "WITH" us, not segregated from us, not apart from us, but there to be supported. As he said, "whenever you wish you can do good to them" (Mark 14:7), but he would not always be there.

     Most cultures have and do accept the fact that the poor are always "with" them. Two things strike me as interesting historical aspects of this fact:  1) the poor generally have stood in some kind of reciprocal relationship to others, especially the rich, in most cultures and societies; and, 2) the poor are often considered just that -- poor -- and nothing else. In the city of Rome before and after the birth of Christ, the poor were an integral political element that the rich sought to support through food subsidies, housing, and entertainment in exchange for political support. The same relationship holds today in much of Latin America -- most famously today in Cuba and Venezuela. In feudal Europe, the relationship of the poor (serfs and then later peasants) to vassals and lords stood at the very heart of the social structure. In early modern Europe, the poor -- both the agricultural poor and city artisans and servants -- occupied the role of producers and workers, while the obligation of the rich was to consume the products of the poor. With industrialization and modernization (18th century to now), the reciprocal part became more distorted, with the poor increasingly perceived as being exploited, and reciprocity a fiction (thus the rise of Karl Marx and a whole host of socialist and communist thinkers). As for the second facet, for most of history, and in most places, the poor have been seen simply as people without money and resources. Poverty has not meant, and does not mean in many cultures today (especially more traditional ones), that the poor are or have been stupid, lazy, or immoral. Above all, the idea of poverty and the poor has not generally carried with it the notion of the poor being undeserving or unworthy in a broad range of ways (income, food, housing, health, education, entertainment, etc.).

   The image of the poor and poverty in the United States of America (and, interestingly, far less in Canada, where in most regions poverty and the poor are seen to be more of an integral part of the social fabric) has been a perverse and severe one. Poverty in the colonial period was identified strongly with the marginalized -- non-Puritan newcomers in New England, indentured servants and sailors in the middle colonies, and African slaves and non-landing holding poor whites in the South. Radical Protestant ideas of "election" or salvation, which took away free will and put God in complete charge of choosing who would be saved, ironically left residents of communities often judging severely who was worthy and who was unworthy on the basis of poverty. By the time of the Revolution (1770s-1780s), republican virtue was added to the mix, leaving even "enlightened" reformers, in places like Philadelphia, carefully discriminating between the "worthy" and the "unworthy" for the administration of poor relief. Americans haven't stopped doing that. In Jacksonian democracy, it has been argued that the division in society was between "producers" and "non-producers" (A. Schlesinger, Jr., and others), thus making the rich prove their productivity as well. And, in 1899,

Thorstein Veblen, who invented the modern idea of "conspicuous consumption" was able to suggest that the rich, most of whom inherited their wealth and did nothing to contribute to society -- the "leisure class" -- were least deserving.

     That idea did not last, except among left-wing reformers. Even during the Great Depression (1929-1941) and the New Deal (1933-1939), FDR strongly opposed welfare that was not attached to work. Work relief was the very core of the WPA, and even there, wages were kept low in order to allow the private sector of the economy to complete with the government in paying low wages itself. Furthermore, FDR wanted to keep non-work relief to a minimum and low in value in order to encourage people to take jobs, despite the fact that many of the poor (children, for example) could not enter the work force. Most of American society spent the second half of the 20th century trying to move up into the middle-class, while the middle-class, in the last 30 years, at least, has tried to move up to the upper-class. Industrial opportunity, education, the happy

absence of warfare on American soil contributed to real accomplishments in the creation of a broad middle class. But after the 1960s, that progress slowed and reversed. Many Americans have deluded themselves into thinking they were middle-class when in fact they were much poorer. As David Hackett Fisher waggishly noted in one of his books, "Only in America does the middle class own only its debts" (or something close to that).

     Denial and invisibility has been part of the problem, as Michael Harrington

pointed out in "The Other America" in 1962. Most poverty, by then, was out of sight, off the main highways, in rural America, or in urban ghettoes where rich and white America refused to drive. Other factors, like the rise of casual dress (tee-shirts and jeans, for example) no longer visually distinguished the poor from the middle class. But other problems

 with the idea of poverty and the poor arose at the same time. When I was in college in the early 1960s, I attended a presentation by the anthropologist-novelist Oscar Lewis (The Children of Sanchez). It was the first scholarly-academic talk I had ever attended, and was I impressed! Lewis was introducing (at about the same time as Harrington) the idea of "a culture of poverty." The idea was that the poor formed communities of their own, apart from the rest of society, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating. For Lewis and Harrington, these "cultures of poverty" had arisen from profound systemic failings of the mother culture, not from some inherent moral failings of the poor themselves. I distinctly remember Lewis, in response to questions, explaining that being poor did not mean being stupid, the eloquence of some of the poor Mexicans he interviewed attesting to that fact. That was a whole new representation of the poor from what I had heard before. My recent travels to Mexico have confirmed this in my mind, as I have found very poor Mexicans more politically astute, for example, than their richer brethren.

     The Harrington-Lewis conceptualization of "cultures of poverty" became the foundation for Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," and it appeared that the will to end poverty had finally arrived. Two major elements of American life, however, not only stymied that will but produced an American relationship with poverty and the poor that may be the most retrograde in human history. 1) The first problem is that with new attention paid to poverty and the poor, the exaggerated American idea and psychology of human agency kicked into over-drive. "Rugged individualism" and belief in being the author of one's own destiny do not begin to describe the perversity of the American religion of agency. Stemming from the radical protestantism of the 17th century, individual agency became the prime interpretive tool in understanding society. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, born into poverty himself and the Congressional point man in the "war against poverty," was so imbued with the idea of individual agency that, in the end, he became a principle enemy of the poor by "blaming the victim" in poverty. The individual as cause of his/her own poverty is now even more powerfully embedded in the American psyche. The second force was and is right-wing anger, a modern anger that was driven mad by the New Deal and then by LBJ's social policies, and that highjacked the war on poverty as a means of retaliation. Always able to mangle any idea that has unexpectedly crossed their path, the right latched onto the "culture of poverty" idea of Harrington and Lewis, and distorted it into meaning that the poor had created their own ghettoes of poverty, and were responsible in furthering that culture, and were using it to milch money out of taxpayers who had earned their money (another moronic and mangled interpretation of how individuals are solely responsible for even multi-million dollar salaries).

    From the late 1960s onward, individual agency and the "culture of poverty" became occasion to ask just what the poor "deserved" to have. In the 1960s and 70s, the question often was, should they be allowed to have a color TV, and call themselves poor, or even a TV? What should they be allowed to buy, to have? Should they live a life of no pleasure, no intellectual stimulation, no engagement in the material and intellectual middle-class world? In 1980, Ronald Reagan officially launched the rightist anti-poor movement when he cleverly married racism and an attack on the poor by asking whether or not a "big buck" he had seen spending "food stamps" in a grocery store for "T-bone steaks" should be allowed to do so. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton was emboldened enough to match his sexual exploits and slight-of-hand denials by "ending" poverty by shutting down welfare. Well, in fact, he hid the funding of poverty, and his successor continued the process of minimal provision by under-the-table means.

   Needless to say, we are at the nadir of any desire for addressing poverty or changing our conception of what it is to be poor, or even how to successfully live "with" the poor. As Megan Mcardle has recently observed, "The mental model most Americans use for dealing with poverty is Dickens-with-a-hotplate." Will this change as the fortunes of most of us retreat in the New Depression? Will having less allow us to conceive of the idea that living well involves material advantage only to a small degree? American history certainly doesn't hold a lot of promise for this in the U.S., but it may improve things in the rest of the world.

(Ideas from, and conversations with, June Tagg, Pat Chuchryk, and Malcolm Greenshields have contributed to this essay. They are not responsible, of course, for the imperfections in this essay).

     

Announcers

    Like most folks, we found ourselves glued to the TV during the inauguration of Barack Obama. But one thing struck us as out-of-the-ordinary, as just not quite in sink with the occasion -- that was the delivery of the announcer. Every time someone new was introduced to the VIP podium, the announcer intoned, what sounded like:  "Laaaadieees and Gennntlemen, now playing left field and batting fifth -- Baraaaack H. Obamaaaa."

     OK, I exaggerate but not by much. Americans always do conduct their ceremonies in sometimes clumsy and sometimes inexplicable ways. For most observers, this was exemplified in the muffed oath of office, fumbled not only the the Chief Justice of the U. S. but by the new president as well (for a brief moment, it had the quality of the "Vicar of Dibley" episode in which Alice marries Hugo and takes over the vicar's lines leaving them both in confusion as they briefly reverse roles). If you had the fortitude, or enough snacks to last through the inauguration, you might have also seen the lawn mower contingent that marched (uh, pushed and "mowed"?) their way through the official parade (what was that about???). But for us, the announcer was the high-light. He would not have been out of place announcing "The Cavalcade of Sports Friday Night Fights." "In this corner, weighing 185

pounds wearing red trunks, the disgraced former president of the United States -- Geooorge Dubayaaa -- Bush." As it turns out, the actual announcer was one Charlie Brotman, who has been the auguration announcer ever since Ike's second inaugural in 1956. (I think June and I missed him before because, to be frank about it, we probably haven't listened to or watched an inaugural since 1952). June thought his announcements in this year's inauguration sounded more like those of a Circus announcer:  "Laaadieees and Gennntlemen, cast your eyes to the center ring where Dr. Stranglove, disgraced former Vice-President of the United States, will perform a sharp-shooting exhibition from his wheelchair."

     All of this makes me think about announcers in my lifetime, and how critical their voices are in situating ourselves in time and place. In the U. S., sports announcers probably have had the most recognizable voices. What male, of my generation, would not immediately remember

the voice of Mel Allen, who almost seemed to make the N. Y. Yankees into a virtuous organization (almost -- my two favorite teams were, and remain, the Detroit Tigers and any team playing the Yankees). Even fewer persons, men and women alike, would not recognize the voice 

(and image) of Howard Cosell -- a Jew born in North Carolina who famously and publicly defended Muhammed Ali for refusing the draft during the Vietnam War, and who much later was fired from announcing pro-football for describing an African-American running back in seemingly racist terms (Cosell was many things, but not a racist). Other great sports announcers come to mind too; Curt Gowdy (from Wyoming), the long time announcer for the Red Sox and then for national sports, whose mellifluous voice was enhanced by his addiction to cigarettes.

     So, sports announcers really did define American culture. But they have been only half of the equation; the other half have been news announcers. Before the pretty men and pretty women, who now smile through the broadcast of whatever latest tragedy has captured the attention of the media, there were stentorian announcers, those men (all men -- sorry, this is a very politically incorrect paragraph -- as was the last one, actually) whose listeners and viewers made them a part of the family routine. The earliest I remember were H. V. Kaltenborn

and Lowell Thomas, the latter presenting himself as the soothing voice of journalistic reason and much-traveled worldly expertise (I wonder how many people were encouraged to

travel because of him). Then there was Walther Cronkite -- everyone's father figure, everyone's "trusted" American -- whose contemporaries challenged him for presenting the news in the most excellent fashion possible. Chet Huntley (from Montana and a man who chain-smoked while delivering the news) and his intellectual side-kick, David Brinkley. And, after this generation, there was Dan Rather, and more importantly perhaps, Tom Brokaw (who was from South Dakota, and always sounded faintly intoxicated, which, if he were wise, he should have been on some news-casting occasions), and Peter Jennings (a Canadian who also smoked heavily, and died of lung cancer at the age of 67). What is it about famous American announcers coming from the wide-open spaces and adopting the pose of the Marlboro man.

     I had my own brief encounter with announcing as the "voice of the University of Lethbridge," almost three decades ago. A friend of mine was university "publicist," and he chose me, I am certain, not because I came from an remote town in the mid-west (which I did), or because I was a heavy smoker (although I may have been a smoker at the time), but because my voice sound "unremarkable" and neutral. I had to do take after take of the shortest, simplest lines. One recording of me was an introduction to the University that was put on a looped recording in a kiosk in the main foyer of the University. My voice spoke over a slide show whenever a passerby pushed the start button. The whole thing ran too many years (well, anything over a day would have been too much for everyone). I used to jog to get past the kiosk. The only thing worse than hearing your own voice say the same thing over and over, is to look at the profile of your own face in a mirror (yikes!!). My other odd experience as an announcer was a video presentation I made for the University, in which I was filmed (in summer, in a steamingly hot business suit, with sun glasses) stolling along the very steep side of a coulee slope, as I intoned about the University (seen in the background behind me). In those days, video was new, and I had to lug a huge set of wrapped cables that were run up my pant leg to a mic on my lapel. I dragged the whole apparatus along as if I were "Chester" in "Gunsmoke." Now, if you can remember Dennis Weaver as "Chester," you are old enough to need a nap. I don't care what time it is. Go to bed!

     

Why Is the Political Right Always So Angry?

     Do you find yourself, when discussing politics or society or culture, struggling to define your terms?  Do you notice that anyone you are talking to struggles also, or else falsely assumes that you share a common nomenclature? No words are more empty, more available for broad, differing, even contradictory meanings, than words like "liberal" or "conservative." Liberal can mean either holding progressive views on society or conversely hands-off laissez-faire views of government, society and the economy (a rightist view). Conservative can mean someone who seeks to conserve the natural ecology of the planet (a leftist view) or someone who demands the maintenance of patriarchy and a host of precepts regarding abortion, birth control, and class, race and ethnic divisions. The antiquated designation of one party as the "Liberal Party" and another as the "Conservative Party" in Canada is a prime example of the ridiculous use of these terms. The Liberals really aim to conserve the so-called "environment" and a host of long-standing Canadian institutions; the "Conservatives" would like to usher in a new kind of "libertarianism."

     Putting aside liberal and conservative, what useful terms remain? Not many if we mean to divide North American societies into two distinct camps. We have neo-progressives (the pragmatic Obama style of what used to be termed "liberal"); we have neo-liberals (the free-marketers who will just not go away, despite reality); we have "libertarians" or hyper-individualists who extend free-market economic ideas to all of government and society. And, so it goes, as you all know.

   Yet we know that there are two opposing sides -- that the "born again" Christian is likely to support the free-market capitalist, and that the ecologist is likely to befriend governmental activism and be pro-choice and in favor of socialized health care -- despite the internal contradictions in these positions. So, how can we label them.  For many years now, I have simply divided the two camps into "traditionalists" and "modernists." Traditionalists (I also use the term "rightists" at times) tend to create a static vision of an ideal past (more of which later). Modernists (I also use the term "leftists" at times) tend to create a dynamic understanding of the past, present and future. [But, you might protest, the rise of modernism in art, for example, was a rise in individualism, in artists demanding that they be free to pursue art in their own highly individualistic fashion (much like the "libetarian" ideal that I place largely in the rightist camp with traditionalism). That is in part true. But more importantly, the artistic rebellion called "modernism" was a revolt against older, traditional forms of art. It was dynamic.]

     By now you have started your own list of ways in which my dialectic is wrong. I will not answer your objections here. The point is that "modernists" are open to new ideas, new ways of doing things, to experimentation. This does not mean that they are hostile to things like the "family," although they may be willing to expand the boundaries of family in new ways. The tend to favor the gifts that science can bestow -- not just in pure knowledge, but in the application of science. They may use philosophy and history to provide some general pathways, but they are not as gripped by specific philosophical mandates or historical imperatives in the way traditionalists are.  The ugly side of "modernism" and "modernization" comes when its adherents elevate some particulars to the altar of ideology. Modernization economic and development theory has ruined populations in much of the second and third world, even more so when its disciples refuse to recognize the ways it is not working. Cultural modernism rigidified becomes "political correctness," and can be just as nasty as any  right-wing position. Where modernism fails is where it loses its sense of dynamism and possibility.

   Traditionalism has its merits, I think, when it is emulates the better side of Edmund Burke's conservatism -- not in his particular love for the institutions of Church and Crown but in his argument that "habit," and what he called "prejudice," provide the mortar to hold societies and cultures together. This conservatism might be called the best of cultural evolution. But rightist politics, which I place under the umbrella of traditionalism, hardly follows Burke's conservative ideal any longer. Some might think that "Rightists" are attached to history, that they look to the past for answers.  But modern traditionalism -- those who cry out for the sanctity of the unborn, traditional marriage, patriarchy, and laissez-faire economics, and against government, taxes, bureaucracy, and even society itself on occasion -- are not devoted to lessons of the past or history. They are devoted to a mythical past of their own creation.

     History is about change over time, and its lessons are about how history can positively or negatively inform us about where we are now, and where we might go. Rightists are about fixed principles of economics, fixed principles of the family, and a fixed image of how society should operate, even if they articulate this vision very poorly.  In fact, they are idealists clinging to wrong ideas and romantics clinging to a time in the past that never existed. To be more precise, rightist businessmen (and they are usually men), some entrepreneurs, some industrialists, and most financial movers-and-shakers, live under the foggy impression that there once was something akin to the state of nature in economics -- sometime after Adam Smith (who, if they really knew his ideas about human empathy and the limits of the free market, they would disown) -- when laissez-faire blossomed. They applaud the industrial revolution in this, and the rise of the corporation in the late 19th century, and the business culture of the 1920s, and the conformist culture of the 1950s, and hail these as the brief eras in which all was true and right, when we were all homo economicus. Social and cultural rightists imagine that perfect world of the past in which father was the bread-winner, mother was the home-maker, and the children were all well-behaved.  "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver" were the iconic emblems of that perfect time in the past. Most rightists in the U. S. A. today would like to re-create that era, just as earlier traditionalists yearned for 19th century Victorian forms and attitudes. Having grown up in the 1950s, I would be willing to disabuse anyone of the perfectness of the era. Rural poverty, racism, sexism, desperate lives of political and cultural conformity, anti-intellectualism, "Red baiting," child abuse, poor health care, and the Cold War were more the reality than suburban bliss.

     The consequence of this perverted romanticism and perverted idealism has been a perverted cynicism. In the U. S. A., at least, the right has felt that its "vision" has been attacked, corrupted, and disadvantaged in a broad conspiracy to keep their romantic ideology out of power. It began with the Federalists in the 1790s and early 1800s. They were willing to abandon the idea of a new nation, because the "people" might rule, and the best and the brightest (read:  the richest) would no longer hold positions of privilege.  The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Hartford Convention of 1815 were the height of their frenzy and rejection of the "modern" world. In the late 19th century, the courts were assailed for attempting to interfere with the God-given right of corporations to do as they pleased, including forming discriminating monopolies (e. g., John D. Rockefeller). Social Darwinism became the favored form of understanding Darwinism in general:  some were meant to be rich; some meant to be poor, and so on. When "Progressivism" (1890-1914) retaliated with sweeping social reform, rightist-traditionalists were aghast, but overwhelmed (let's hope 2009 forward is similar). But in 1912 "The Fundamentals" were published, which promised and attained religious backlash against science and Darwin. In the 1920s, the tensions and hatreds the war engendered led to escapism and helped bring about the laissez-faire heaven that rightist-traditionalists had hoped for.  Then the Great Depression and FDR destroyed that. The political right planned its revenge from the 1930s onward. Their hatred of FDR and Truman was venomous. Eisenhower proved too soft for them. JFK and LBJ, even Richard Nixon, and then Jimmy Carter were anti-christs (if the plural is possible). If you don't believe the levels of hatred from the 1930s until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, read the right-wing press for that era. Then, in 1980, Ronald Reagan put a happy -- let's say "Ronald McDonald" -- face on everything. The right was back. Nirvana had been attained.

     But wait, read the "National Review" from the 1980s forward, and you'll find that isn't true. According to those farthest to the right, the victory had not been won (why? because they demanded, and still demand, total victory). During the 1980s, even during the 1990s when Newt Gingrich and his crew dominated Congress, the right complained bitterly about always being left out, of the Left conspiring against them. Hate was the underlying principle of most rightist editorials, even during their heyday from 1980 to 2008. And, why? Because the transformation was not perfect. Hedonism and pop culture continued. Abortion remained. All government had not been destroyed. The economy was damned near, but not completely laissez-faire. The Right had upped their demands after 1980, and doomed themselves to failure when perfection could not be attained. Rush Limbaugh was their chronicler -- a man who never basked in rightist-traditionalist victories but was and still is always angry, angry, angry at the fact that people are still allowed to live in America who do not agree with the full rightist vision.

     What a strange history -- one hard to believe. And, there is no foreseeable end in sight. Rather than work with a very accommodating president, the Republican right has decided to vote against him -- just like the Supreme Court in the early 1930s worked against the New Deal, and just as most Republicans, for the last century, have identified the Democrats as an evil force. This is not just a post-empire America that is emerging, it is one that is filled with hate from a large minority of its population. As the unilateral power of the U. S. slides away, are Americans going to suffer a continued ideological tribalism or a renewed sense of possibility in which homo civicus once again arises?

Ebert Gets It Right

   Do not miss Roger Ebert's blog of Feb 5, "Well, Here's What I Think." It is what I think, too. Ditto, ditto, ditto.