Or, for that matter, about feeling good? Or even doing good in order to feel good? These questions, of course, are directed at the authors and devotees of “Stuff White People Like.” Admittedly, I’ve only read bits and pieces of SWPL itself, mostly as quoted in other people’s blogs. But SWPL is only the most coherent popularization of a strain of thought that has afflicted our culture for nearly a century now. It has its origins in a kind of pop Calvinism that has by now forgotten its origins, but is still basic to the American psyche.

Jean Calvin (no relation to the tiger’s pal), who brought us the Pilgrims and the Presbyterian Church, believed that people are inherently sinful, and can’t “save” themselves by doing good works. We are “saved” if and only if God chooses to save us. We have no way of knowing who is saved and who is damned, and we shouldn’t care. We should, of course, do good, but not to save ourselves from damnation. We should do good purely because that’s what God wants. We must do everything possible to guard against ulterior motives. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is no better than not doing it at all.

There are, Calvin tells us, lots of wrong reasons. Earthly rewards, like money and status and power. Heavenly rewards, like not going to hell. And psychological rewards, like feeling good about ourselves. Ideally, we should do good as secretly as possible*, and in ever-present uncertainty about our eternal destination. Calvin didn’t, so far as I know, have any helpful advice on how to keep from feeling good about having done good. Presumably, if we are all sinners, awareness of that fact should be enough.

Well, these days, it isn’t. Unlike Calvin and his ideological descendants, today’s Americans believe deeply in their inalienable right to feel good about themselves. We bump up our self-esteem for our skills, our temperaments, and our sheer lovability. As Senator Franken, in his earlier incarnation as Stuart Smalley, used to say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and—doggone it!—the Minnesota Supreme Court likes me.” Or something like that.

We are entitled to feel good about every aspect of our selves except—oddly enough—our attempts to improve the world we live in and the lot of its inhabitants. Not only are we not allowed to feel good about doing good, we are not allowed to feel good about being good, except in the sense denoting excellence of worldly skills. We still believe we are all sinners. But we also believe that, as Smalley would say, “that’s o-kay.” We don’t need to feel bad about being sinners, we just shouldn’t feel good about being do-gooders. That would imply that we do good for ulterior motives—namely, in order to feel good.

This at least provides us with a solution to the eternal conundrum of how to bad-mouth people we don’t like but about whom we don’t actually know anything discrediting—just say they’re only buying Fair Trade coffee/living in integrated neighborhoods/going to church regularly/sending their children to public schools/buying hybrid cars/etc. to feel good. It’s even neater than calling them hypocrites, which was the ploy before we discovered feelgood.

Admittedly, I come from the Jewish tradition, which is mostly profoundly behaviorist. With some rather esoteric exceptions, we don’t much mind if you do the right thing for the wrong reason—even reasons a lot wronger than mere self-esteem, like looking good to the neighbors, improving the image of your business, impressing eligible members of the opposite sex, or even intimidating potential opponents—so long as you do it. We figure the world will still be a better place than if you don’t do it.

For the same reason, we aren’t keen on doing good secretly. If your neighbors don’t know you donate to charity, they may feel they live in a world in which most people don’t donate. This may lead them to stop donating. It may also lead them not to bother asking for help when they really need it, because they don’t know anybody to ask. At the very least, it is likely to lead them to depression and even despair.

Moreover, as St. Augustine figured out a long time ago, it is just about impossible to delete selfish motives from our actions. Either we deceive ourselves about our motives, or we get paralyzed into not acting at all. This is not worth the trouble.

So, please, spare me the Stuff White Liberals Who Aspire to a Moral Code Loftier Than Al Capone’s Like. Nice people feel good about nice things. Nasty people feel good about nasty things. Pat yourself on the back and go on your way. Make the world a better place.

*This was the whole point of Magnificent Obsession, a very popular edifying novel of the 1950s.

Red Emma

The origin of Guantánamo is pure magical thinking, as is the current mainland US resistance to bringing Gitmo defendants onto our soil for trial before federal courts. Perhaps the ancient Hindu practice of untouchability is the clearest analog. A person who can pollute places and people by his very presence in a room, or by casting his shadow upon a Brahmin’s food, is, on one hand, the lowest of the low. On the other hand, he also has a kind of super-power. Remember cooties? Back when we were fifth-graders and the boys had decided that girls had cooties, the girls could chase the boys halfway across the playground threatening to pollute them. Oh, to have that kind of power again!

Well, Al Quaeda, and anybody even remotely suspected of being connected with Al Quaeda, has that power. If any of them are allowed onto US soil, we will instantly dissolve into terror and anarchy. The super-max prisons that now securely hold the worst of our worst home-grown criminals are presumed to be utterly ineffectual against these Muslim super-criminals. Never mind that the latter’s accents and looks make them a lot easier to spot and retrieve than our home-grown murderers and rapists. Never mind that many of them have probably been deprived of most of their physical and mental competence by their treatment at Gitmo. Once their feet touch US soil, they will gain 100 pounds, get a foot taller, and turn green and even meaner than, say, Ted Bundy, Ted Kosinski, and Brian Dugan.

We knew that back in 2001, of course, which is why we created Gitmo in the first place. Those of you familiar with pagan magick know about wards and circles, which create places outside normal space and time to which the most dangerous forces can be restricted. Well, that was Gitmo. The detention facility there was created to be a legal black hole, under no one’s jurisdiction for purposes of legal review, but under the absolute control of the US government for purposes of keeping the Bad Guys from our shores. Of course, as anyone who saw “A Few Good Men” well knows, there is legal US jurisdiction at Gitmo. That’s why the US military servicemembers stationed there can be disciplined and even court-martialed, right there on the base, if they violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If they don’t like the result, they can even appeal, first up the military chain of command all the way to the Pentagon, and then to the civilian federal court system on the mainland. But, apparently, the US public can’t handle that truth either. They/we can accept the novel concept of an “unlawful combatant” who is in a different category from prisoners of war, spies and irregulars subject to being shot on sight, and criminal defendants. Such a person therefore cannot be granted any of the legal rights of POWs or criminal defendants. But by reason of some strange compunction, he cannot be shot on sight either (perhaps because many of them were never encountered by US authorities on the battlefield in the first place, but were picked up from local bounty hunters.) Presumably that’s one of the three impossible things a good American is required to believe before breakfast. But we can’t imagine allowing these people to touch our sacred soil, lest they pollute it, and us, with deadly weakness.

Which is closely related to what happens to our sacred soil when the wrong kind of alien touches it. And also what happens to the right kind of alien (ie anti-communists and especially Cubans) touches that same soil—they are immediately free and legal. The soil that renders anti-communist Cubans free and legal is itself rendered vulnerable and polluted by capitalist-wannabe Mexicans. Does Hogwarts know about this?

Red Emma

It’s an old joke, of course. But not as old as the stereotyping of the relationship between police, and prosecutors, and what Hammett, Spillane, and in a somewhat milder vein, Gardner, used to portray as the intrepid but slightly disreputable private investigator or criminal defense attorney. Avid crime novel reader though I am, I always found that stereotype unpersuasive, perhaps because I’m also an attorney and occasionally do criminal defense work. And I have never been treated with anything but the utmost courtesy by cops and prosecutors. So I figured the hostility between cops/prosecutors and private eyes was just a literary device to generate conflict and complexity in an otherwise too-simple story.

Apparently I was wrong, at least in Cook County. Or, at any rate, the newly-elected Cook County State’s Attorney, Anita Alvarez, reads the same crime novels I do and takes them a lot more seriously.

Some background: David Protess*, a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, has for ten years or so been running an Innocence Project which has succeeded in getting several convicted murderers off Death Row and getting several other convicts out of the Illinois prison system. His students investigate diligently, and then turn their information over to the State’s Attorney, to prove that their clients were innocent all along. Not just “not guilty” on some technicality or other, like improperly seized evidence or improperly extracted confession—actually innocent. As in “they didn’t do it.” As in “some other dude did it” who may even still be on the street free to do it again. They succeed often enough that the State’s Attorney’s office is evidently a bit embarrassed.

So our new State’s Attorney has decided to strike back. Presented by the Innocence Project with evidence that Anthony McKinney had not committed the 1978 murder for which he was locked up for life, she has subpoenaed the students’ grades, notes, expense reports, and class syllabi, all in an effort to demonstrate that the students were more interested in getting good grades by any means necessary than in getting an actually innocent man out of prison. They paid witnesses to give exculpatory testimony, she says, and the witnesses then spent the money on drugs. They were themselves then rewarded by getting good grades.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…: The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! Investigators who were themselves being rewarded for getting the evidence may have paid the witnesses who provided it, who then may have spent the money on drugs. Oh the humanity! Ummmm, don’t the cops get paid to dig up evidence? Don’t they occasionally pay informants, or at least cover their expenses? Is it at least remotely possible that some of those informants then spend the money on something other than food, non-alcoholic drinks, transportation, extra socks, a new copy of the Big Book, and a donation to the parish poorbox?

Aside from which, the students say the only pay they gave an informant was his cab fare, paid directly to the driver with instructions not to give the change back to the informant. But what difference would it make if they had given him drug money? Isn’t it the State’s Attorney’s job to check out the information provided by the students? Why is she expecting them to present in finished form, suitable for presentation in court? Why is she persecuting them for not doing her homework for her?

I’m not even going to get into the issues of privilege raised by Medill’s attorneys—if the students are journalists, their notes and personal and academic information should be shielded from seizure by the prosecution, but so what? Even if they’re not journalists, and even if everything Alvarez alleges is true, what difference does it make? There is no legitimate reason for pursuing this stuff, and the most obvious illegitimate reason is that the head prosecutor is finally in a position to pursue a vendetta against the people who have been embarrassing her office for years.

Back when I was working at the Federal Public Defender, my boss told me, while expounding on final arguments, “a lot of jurors vote to convict because they find the prosecutor really likeable and they don’t want to hurt his feelings. You need to point out to them that his feelings won’t be hurt in the slightest, because an honest vote to acquit isn’t a defeat for the prosecutor. He’s not like us—we only win if our client gets acquitted. But the prosecutor wins if justice is done, whichever way that goes.”

This prosecutor is losing.

* Full disclosure: David Protess and I were involved in draft counseling some of the same students at Roosevelt University in the 1970s. He’s a good guy.

RedEmma

No, this isn’t about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” I just did that to catch the eye. There is no heat in my office, my hands are cold, and the only way to keep myself typing is to start with something eye-grabbing. This is actually about the state of Maine (with which I have family connections) and the results of their referendum on same-sex marriage.

1) Why a referendum at all? Since when do we put constitutional rights to a popular vote? The fact that we have done it, in California and Maine, begs the question. Holding a referendum (regardless of its outcome) presumes that we don’t consider marriage a constitutional right, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the marvelously-named Loving vs. Virginia case 40 years ago. Foo.

2) Does that mean that those who voted to repeal same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted?

3) Or does it mean that the supporters of same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted when they called their opponents bigots? Or that they were interfering with their opponents’ First Amendment rights by advocating boycotts and other non-violent demonstrations of opposition to the repealers? Conservatives seem to consider being labeled as bigots to be a fate worse than, say, Matthew Shepard’s death. Whatever happened to “sticks and stones”?

The word “bigot,” BTW, is believed to come from some Germanic sort of root meaning “by God.” There is a literal equivalent in Spanish, referring to little old ladies in black crepe who spend most of their time in churches: pordiosera. For more etymological information, see the Wikipedia entry.

Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Mr. Wired draws a very useful distinction between them. “Prejudice” is what everybody has a bunch of, just by virtue of having been born and raised in a particular context. Most of them we don’t even notice most of the time. They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in. But as a practical matter they’re morally neutral. It is useful to be aware of one’s own prejudices, because that enables us to avoid discrimination.

Discrimination is not morally neutral. It involves acting on one’s prejudices, to the detriment of the well-being of others. It’s a real sin. Not serving people in restaurants. Not letting them hold certain jobs. Beating them up. Hate crimes.

Very often, the way we become aware of our prejudices is by somehow associating their object with our children. Desegregating schools unveiled a lot of parental bigotry after the promulgation of Brown vs. Board of Education. White people who were willing to work with, or even for, African-Americans, or to vote for them, or to recognize the legal authority of people who had been elected mainly by the Black vote, found themselves drawing the line at the schoolhouse door.

The campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine apparently owes its success to the claim that schoolchildren would have to be taught that same-sex marriage was no different from the usual kind. So far as anybody can tell, that claim was utter hogwash, but, as other bloggers have already pointed out, it served as a proxy for the Bigotry That Dares Not Speak Its Name, opposition to allowing our children to be aware of otherwise normal people being gay. How we want to raise our children (as opposed to how we live our own lives) is often an expression of both our highest values and our lowest prejudices.

Many otherwise very decent opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly okay with civil unions. As a practical matter, that keeps them mostly on the right side of the prejudice-discrimination line. Most same-sex couples will not suffer unduly from having civil unions rather than marriages, given proper legal drafting. Until we think about why these decent anti-same-sex-marriage opponents want to take that position. It’s really the same reason that classical and medieval authorities required prostitutes, and Jews, to wear distinctive dress. Not because Those People were so utterly different from The Rest of Us, but precisely because they weren’t. Without the yellow hat or the blond wig or the six-pointed star, they could easily be mistaken for, and treated like, Real People. We wouldn’t know whom to discriminate against.

When one of my colleagues tells me he frequents gay bars because he is “husband-hunting” (and I respond, as gently as possible, by telling him that bars are not usually great places to meet spouses), the very normality of this exchange puts any eavesdropping adolescent at the risk of concluding that gay people are just like the rest of us. For that matter, what happens when your kid’s high school class does a field trip to the local court and hears the judge, in the course of jury selection, ask a member of the panel, “Are you married or do you have a domestic partner?” (Yes, here in Cook County, they do that.) We can’t have that, can we?

Many sincere and religious people believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. Most of them also believe that adultery is a sin (one which is usually condemned in the same biblical paragraphs as homosexuality, and sentenced to the same punishment, by the way.) Many of them even believe that remarriage after divorce is a sin. But they somehow survive their children interacting with, or at least becoming very aware of, the public adulterers and remarried divorcés around them. So apparently their religiously-based discomfort with those classes of sinners does not get translated into discrimination, maybe not even into prejudice. One has to conclude that homosexuality is different for reasons that have nothing to do with biblical morality. The yuck factor, as some religious bloggers have termed it.

So, okay, I’m willing not to call same-sex-marriage opponents bigots if they’re willing to allow civil unions (or, for that matter, religious marriages) with all of the privileges that go with civil marriage in this society—so long as they don’t treat people in civil unions, and gay people in general, any differently than they treat public adulterers and remarried divorcés. Which means allowing their kids to interact with and be aware of and be taught in school by all, or none, of these public sinners.

CynThesis

The new Defense Appropriations Bill either has been or is about to be signed into law, with an amendment that places people under federal protection from those who object to their sexual orientation. I’m certainly in favor of whatever it takes to prevent atrocities like the murder of Matthew Shephard. But I’m getting uncomfortable with statutes that protect only certain groups from crimes that we should all be protected from. I just did a quick run-through of the criminal section of the Illinois Compiled Statutes, and found something like 34 categories of people who are specifically protected from homicide, battery, assault, or hate crimes.

Specifically, that’s:
peace officers
correctional officers
minors
emergency medical technicians
persons over 60
disabled persons
teachers and school employees
unborn children
family or household members of the perpetrator
prison or jail inmates
park employees
caseworkers
bus or cab drivers
state or city employees on duty
sports officials and coaches
emergency management workers
utility workers
pregnant women
judges
merchants detaining shoplifting suspects
child athletes, and
people being victimized because of their
actual or
perceived
race
color
creed
religion
ancestry
gender
sexual orientation
physical or mental disability, or
national origin.

Of course, I’m not including any of the specifications about: who the perpetrator is, or where or when the crime is committed. I just want to know whose life is worth more than that of the average person on the street. (And never mind, for now, that assaulting or battering anybody on the street is, by reason of that fact, aggravated.)

Most jurisdictions have similar catalogs, so far as I can tell. Certainly federal law does. I spent some years as a federal law enforcement official protected by a statute that, I think, imposed a possible death sentence on anybody who murdered me. At the time, I was handling a case in a small local jurisdiction where the mayor had recently hired the killing of the City Attorney with whom my predecessor had been negotiating, so I kind of liked having that protection. But my point, obviously, is that every such jurisdiction (except the feds, who have no generalized murder, assault, and battery statutes) supposedly bans assault and battery against anybody. So why should we need these extra protections?

As to homicide, we really don’t. Homicide statutes get enforced fairly uniformly, except for informal special considerations for Important, or at least Nice, People, as opposed to street people, prostitutes, and prison inmates, and perhaps illegal immigrants—people whom many of us believe we would all be better off without.

But as to assault and battery, we really don’t bother. Illinois apparently doesn’t have any anti-bullying statute yet, but some other jurisdictions do. Bullying mostly involves juvenile-on-juvenile conduct that also clearly constitutes assault and battery. But most of us object to “criminalizing normal youthful hijinks,” even if they would already be criminal if the victim were an adult. Adult-on-adult “simple” assault or battery, unless the victim is within one of these protected classes, or the locus of the crime is a protected place, also gets ignored.

So we have to invent 34+ protected classes of victims and roughly the same number of protected locations to notify our police and prosecutors that “we really mean it” as to those persons and localities. Then we get objections from conservatives and more sinister forces that we are granting “special rights” to some groups at the expense of others. And, unfortunately, they’re right. Some people have special rights to be protected from assault, battery, and other unpleasantries, and the rest of us don’t.

That’s not (conservatives to the contrary notwithstanding) because we value some people more than others. It’s because we cannot be bothered to recognize a general human right to be safe from assault, battery, and other usually petty crimes. We put it into our statute books, but we almost never enforce it.

And that, in turn, is because our law enforcement system doesn’t want to be hauled into every petty dispute between ordinary people. Our police and judges have been all too well trained by their mothers: “I don’t care which of you hit the other one first.
Both of you shut up and sit still, or you don’t get any TV tonight.” “Nobody likes a tattletale.” In school bullying situations, all parties are likely to get the same punishment. This discourages reporting, which is just fine with the teachers. With children, or with unimportant people in general, the point of a disciplinary system is not to do justice, or even to inculcate good habits of behavior. It is to relieve the authorities of all but the most necessary work.

For my sins, I have had to spend a great deal of time representing a couple of people who are trying to direct the attention of the law enforcement system to various infractions committed by people near and formerly dear to them. Both the police and prosecutors have told my clients repeatedly that they have unlimited official discretion not to arrest or prosecute, regardless of the enormity of the offense in question. Most of this discretion doesn’t even make its way into the statutes or the reporting of court cases, because exercise of this discretion means, by definition, that there will never be a court case. This is, we are told, essential if we are not to expend most of our gross domestic product on law enforcement. Choices have to be made. Designation of special victims and crime circumstances are the way we make those choices.

At the same time (see http://wiredsisters.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/the-flabby-arm-of-the-law/), we keep the simple assault and battery statutes, and all sorts of other statutes we have no intention of enforcing, on the books. Thus we maintain the appearance of being Nice People, while not having to pay undue attention to the ordinary behavior of ordinary people, and at the same time holding a weapon in reserve for when that behavior arouses serious public emotion. Creation of one more class of protected victim is now the standard response to any horrendous crime. Many of the laws embodying this approach memorialize the names of victims, to keep the crimes fresh in our memory, so we will continue to consider them important—Megan’s law, Amber Alerts, and so on. No doubt the most recent addition to the federal hate crimes catalog will become known, at least informally, as Matthew’s law. Which is a worthy memorial to a young man who deserved a lot better of his society. But wouldn’t it be better to take seriously the rights of all of us to be free of assault, battery, and homicide?

Jane Grey

“By MARY FOSTER, Associated Press Writer Mary Foster, Associated Press Writer – 6 mins ago

“NEW ORLEANS – At least two civil and constitutional rights groups in Louisiana are calling for a justice of the peace to resign after he refused to issue a marriage license for an interracial couple.

“The head of the American Civil Liberties Union in Louisiana and the Center for Constitutional Rights and Justice said Keith Bardwell should quit immediately.

“Bardwell is a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish in southeastern Louisiana. He refused earlier this month to issue a license or marry Beth Humphrey, who is white, and Terence McKay, who is black.

“Bardwell said he always asks if a couple is interracial and, if they are, refers them to another justice of the peace.

“He says children of such unions face troubling futures.”

Umm, like the President of the United States? Or Tiger Woods? Oh, never mind.

Red Emma

Beck’s comment on my last post inspires this query. “[T]he existence of our poor,” says Beck, “emerges from a massively systemic problem with the way our political and economic systems are structured.” It also triggers my recall of an old album of comedian Bill Cosby about the joys of a college education, titled “Why Is There Air?” Cosby chats about the various kinds of people he met in college, from the philosophy majors who went around asking “why is there air?” to the athletes who knew perfectly well why there is air—it’s for blowing up basketballs.

Cosby, however, not having been a philosophy major himself, didn’t stop off and look at Aristotle’s multiple analysis of causality. There’s:

• The material cause: “that out of which”, e.g., the bronze of a statue.
• The formal cause: “the form”, “the account of what-it-is-to-be”, e.g., the shape of a statue.
• The efficient cause: “the primary source of the change or rest”, e.g., the artisan, the art of bronze-casting the statue, the man who gives advice, the father of the child.
• The final cause: “the end, that for the sake of which a thing is done”, e.g., health is the end of walking, losing weight, purging, drugs, and surgical tools.

So okay, the material cause of poverty is lack of resources. That’s easy. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway between them made it plain. The poor are different from us because they have less money, or none at all.

The efficient cause requires an economodicy (it’s a monstrous word, but I can’t think of a better one for justifying the ways of The Invisible Hand to man.) Maybe the Invisible Hand is the efficient cause.

The final cause: the perceived self-interest of everybody, I suppose.

The formal cause is the really difficult one, here. We tend to regard poor people as useless. In fact, they are anything but useless.

Let’s stipulate to two classes of poor people: the working poor and the begging poor. The begging poor are necessary as a spectre to frighten the working poor into continuing to work. If there were no homeless people or panhandlers, Wall Street would have to hire out-of-work actors to impersonate them. (In my conspiracy theorist moments, I suspect they did, at least in the early ‘80s.) Poverty gives people an incentive to work harder to make money for other people as well as for themselves. Without poverty, we would all be lounging in some Polynesian Eden, picking breadfruit off the trees and getting semi-dressed for the next luau.

And the working poor are necessary to do the things for which machines are still too expensive. In Saudi Arabia, where oil reserves have pretty much abolished poverty among native Saudis, they actually have to import an entire population of poor people to do their manual labor, mostly from Asia.

This explanation of the formal cause of poverty, of course, requires some entity to do the formulating. In economics, that’s a whole field of study in itself. The Invisible Hand? The Ruling Classes? I tend to the latter explanation, if only because I can’t get my mind around the notion of what an Invisible Hand can be planning. Yes, there are people in positions of power in our economy who consciously and deliberately see the existence of poverty as one among many implements creating The Workable Economy. That was, essentially, the thinking behind the developments that brought one generation after another of new workers into newly-created poor people’s jobs. First it was married women, to do the clerical work. Then it was teenagers, to flip burgers. Then it was former welfare recipients, now “reformed” into the private sector, to become temporary or part-time workers with no job security, even from week to week, and no benefits. Somewhere along the line, undocumented immigrants got into the act, to do anything American poor people wouldn’t or couldn’t do for the wages available.

Of course, most employers who pay poverty wages don’t actually like employing poor people. Poor people are fat, and ugly. They have lousy teeth and sometimes questionable personal hygiene. And they keep missing work, or being late, usually because they’re sick or their cars have broken down or somebody in the family has some dumb problem and can’t take care of it without help. Whenever possible, employers prefer hiring people who are middle-class by virtue of the earnings and assets of other family members, and who therefore won’t start living and looking like poor people simply by virtue of not having enough money. That is, the employer is looking for a subsidy from the worker’s family, in return for the inestimable gift of a job. If I show up at a Mercedes dealership with a bus token and assume that the dealer will stake me to the rest of the cost of the car, I’m pretty nervy. But an employer who pays poverty wages and expects the families of his workers to stake him to workers with the look and behavior and work habits of middle-class people is just being rationally self-interested.

Anyway, that’s why there are poor people. Beck calls this a problem with our economic structure. That depends, obviously, on what the economic structure is for. A case can be made that poverty is a solution, from some points of view.

Red Emma

Most self-proclaimed conservatives who believe government has any legitimate role in alleviating poverty, believe that role must begin with means testing, that is, checking to make sure that any would-be recipient of government aid to the poor really is poor. They underline their case with horrifying references to “welfare queens” using food stamps to buy steak and lobster, and travelling to and from the welfare office in Cadillacs. The goal these compassionate conservatives claim to be aiming at is a reasonable one–let’s give scarce public resources only to the people who really need them. Even when public resources are more plentiful, they are still most effective when targeted to those most in need.

But the c.c.’s–who normally presume that all the consequences of any governmental program not aimed at killing the enemies of the people at home (police) or abroad (army) are unintended–seem to have lost their grip on this fundamental law as it applies to means testing. Means testing really does have unintended consequences. At least, one hopes they are unintended. (Oliver Stone probably thinks they are intended.)

First, the eligibility line for any means-tested program is always set at least a couple of notches below the income which would enable a person to purchase all of the goods and services supplied by such programs in the private sector. There is always a group of people in the middle, too poor for private health insurance but too rich for Medicaid, too poor to be able to afford a balanced diet on their own funds but too rich for food stamps, too poor to be able to afford the rent on a decent private-sector apartment large enough for the whole family but too rich for public housing, too poor to be able to afford a lawyer but too rich for Legal Aid. Naturally that group in the middle will direct their envy and anger, not upward at the legislative and regulatory bodies that set the eligibility standards, nor at the agencies that administer them, but at the people below them who do qualify. This too, we must presume, is unintended.

Second, the procedure for qualifying for such programs requires the applicant to supply humiliating and exhausting detail about his or her personal life, beginning of course with the public (or at least on-the-record) acknowledgment of being poor. Most of us would rather confess to having sex with an underage dead chicken than to poverty, these days. But the mere admission of poverty is never enough. Verification must be supplied: paycheck stubs, rent receipts, utility bills and so on. The official purpose of the ritual is to weed out ineligible applicants. But the effect is to weed out any of the eligible applicants who still retain any pride or still value their personal privacy. This mostly gets rid of applicants without dependents, since most of us will endure a lot more humiliation and intrusion to provide for our children and disabled or elderly relatives than for ourselves. Anyway, we know for a fact, and repeated studies have verified it, that nearly half of those eligible for governmental assistance to the poor either never apply for it, or drop out of the process in the very early stages. We have known it for well over 50 years. I’m with Oliver Stone on this one–we want it this way.

Third, once we have designated a program as being for “the poor” and no one else, no one else but the poor will have any interest in maintaining it, or administering it properly and effectively. Once a program has been labeled “for poor people only”, its days are numbered. Why should “we” pay for a program that benefits only “them”?

Most of us have lived with this situation so long that we respond almost reflexively, “But of course the people who need the programs can’t afford to pay for them–otherwise, why would they need them? And of course the people who pay for the programs don’t need them. The best we can do is appeal to their sense of generosity and charity. ” (We do that, of course, only after a concerted campaign to discredit those virtues.) But we literally cannot imagine any other way to distribute public benefits, except by putting the people who pay on one side of the Great Divide and the people who receive on the other, and making sure than never the twain shall meet.

Well, no, it’s not quite accurate to say we cannot imagine any other way. We have in our midst a program open to most citizens and residents of this great country regardless of their current resources, and paid for by almost all of us. It is the most popular government program in the history of this country. And it is currently under constant assault in a relentless effort to discredit, privatize, and ultimately destroy it precisely because, to most of us, until very recently, it was proof positive that government could do something useful in alleviating poverty without humiliating the beneficiaries of the program.

I am referring, of course, to Social Security. Until a decade ago, the closest thing to a means test for Social Security (or its younger brother, Medicare) was an earnings limit. Now, even that is long gone. And the compassionate conservatives–including even some “centrist” liberals–cannot stop fulminating at the thought that Bill Gates will someday be able to collect his $1,100.00 per month from the public treasury. Under current law, most of that $1,100.00 would actually be taxed away (although the value of Gates’ Medicare would not.) Most American senior citizens can live with that arrangement, because it spares them the necessity of confessing poverty and pleading for charity. But conservatives and “centrists” simply cannot swallow the idea of giving a public benefit to anyone without collecting the recipient’s dignity in return. Indeed, now that we have finally given up on the idea of privatizing Social Security, our main suggestion for “saving” it is to means-test it.

Most honest conservatives will come out and say that, regardless of where it comes from or what we call it, any aid to the poor from the non-poor is charity, and the poor should acknowledge that fact. Means-testing is one of the more effective ways of rubbing it in. Which might be acceptable, if we were willing to allow dignity to the recipients of our charity. If “poor” were not a four-letter word. If we did not, at heart, believe that all of us get what we deserve and deserve what we get. Or don’t get.

I prefer the Jewish tradition in its view of charity. To the extent that we have any resources, they come ultimately from the Holy One, Who makes all of us conduits for those resources. I like the approach of Maimonides, Writing in the 1200s in highly-urbanized Spain and Northern Africa, he is realistic, and perfectly willing to admit that there are phony beggars out there, people who claim needs they do not in fact have. The Holy One has allowed these fakers to exist, he tells us, to create a benefit of the doubt for people who refuse to give to beggars (Maimonides was realistic about those people, too.) If all the beggars out there were really destitute, he says, anyone who failed to give to one of them when s/he could afford to would be committing a grave sin. Since some of them are fakes, those who refuse to give are guilty only in proportion to the ratio of real beggars to phonies. Ultimately, he says, means-testing is the job of the Holy One.

Cynthesis

Obama wants to lengthen the school year and the school day. Probably the school week is the next target. Like the educational experts who have been suggesting all this extra time for the last twenty years, he has several different rationales. First, of course, the original school year was set up for an agrarian society in which the kids had to be home during the summer to tend to the crops. That’s quite true, and makes the classic June-through-August vacation an anachronism. Moreover, the data are pretty clear that such a long time out between school terms really does cause most kids to lose some of the learning they had accomplished the previous spring by the time they come back in the fall. So the longer school year has some solid facts behind it.

But, as the AP article points out (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_us/us_mor), a longer school year doesn’t have to mean a longer school day: “Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).” And AP isn’t even looking at European nations that start kids in school later (in Denmark and Sweden, as late as age 7), or with shorter school days than ours (in France, 8:30 AM to 2:30 PM with a 2-hour lunch break until age 11), that still have better literacy and graduation rates than we do. Whatever it is that American schools are doing in the classroom, it is not at all clear that more of it would be helpful to the students. It sounds too much like the irate restaurant patron who complains that the food is terrible and the portions are too small.

In fact, anyone who has worked with adult literacy programs can verify that it shouldn’t and usually doesn’t take anywhere near 12 years—even with current summer vacation and school day schedules–to teach what most high school graduates come out knowing. Note also that summer vacation has already suffered considerable abbreviation in many school districts. The whole idea of Labor Day as the last long weekend of summer (meaning, presumably, children’s summer vacation) now makes no sense at all. Almost all public schools start up around the middle of August these days, and many don’t shut down for the summer until nearly the end of June. (Which is a good argument for moving Memorial Day into late June and Labor Day into early August, but I digress.)
Compressing the school year even more than we are already doing may make sense, but lengthening the school day really doesn’t.

In fact, the justifications for a longer school day are entirely different, and a lot less plausible, than those for a longer school year. Obama (and most of the other people one hears declaiming on the subject) are mostly concerned, not about education, but about safety. “Those hours from 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock are times of high anxiety for parents,” [Secretary of Education Arne] Duncan sa[ys]. “They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table.”

Yes, those safety concerns are valid. But what do they have to do with school? Why should professionally-educated adults who should be home grading today’s papers and preparing tomorrow’s lessons have to function as baby-sitters to keep Johnny from getting shot? That’s the job of recreation directors and supervisors, or at worst, of cops. And even more to the point, why should kids have to be on task and programmed for 8 hours a day, just because their parents are? At that point, the arguments against child labor start to fade into insignificance. When do the kids get to just “chill with their friends”? Or have we already accepted the premise that an unsupervised, unprogrammed child is a child at risk of crime, sex, drugs, or obesity, and that the only way to save our children from these dread fates is to subject them to the same scheduling that has already shredded the emotional and physical health of their parents and destroyed the family life that used to keep the children safe?

But, now that we have decided that all more or less able-bodied adults must spend at least 40 hours a week being paid to work for somebody else, we have also decided that anybody who looks after children has to be paid. For more recent data, see:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5intayNnUex0u2p2aPfl95SZitE9QD9B15QLO0 and
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8277378.stm

And, no, none of this has anything to do with feminism. It is mainly connected to stagnant wages and rising fixed living costs such as housing, health care, transportation, and education. Most stay-at-home mothers don’t view themselves as having chosen to stay home. See: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-census-momsoct02,0,3742466.story for why most stay-at-home mothers are younger, less educated, and have more children than the rest of the female population, so that their prospective earnings are lower and their child care costs would be higher.

I mention these stories because they have all hit the Web in the last 24 hours. But they do a lot to prove my point that the main reason we really want our kids to spend more time in school is that it’s the cheapest way to free parents to put in 40+ hours a week earning money. Once cryogenics has been perfected, we can keep our kids in a deep freeze until a couple of years before they are old enough to work. We can spend the intervening time teaching them what today’s high school graduates know, and go on from there. O brave new world, that hath such people in it!

CynThesis

I guess I must have repressed my memories of the Republican opposition to the Clinton administration. It required too much suspension of disbelief even for a long-time Coleridge fan. Reminds me of the time I tried to turn my experiences running a legal aid office in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in Chicago into a series of short stories. The one that finally ended that career detour was the two kids I interviewed about their juvenile court case, who told me they had run away from home because their parents were practicing black magic.* I realized, as I reviewed my notes, that there was no way I was going to be able to make truth as believable as fiction, and I might as well go back to writing briefs and memoranda.

So here we go again, with the MSM trying to make the opposition loonies as believable as the Mad Hatter and the Red Queen. Lewis Carroll, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Remember poor Vince Foster, supposedly murdered by White House operatives because he Knew Too Much? Nobody could ever enunciate just what he knew too much about, but si non é vero, é ben trovato. And the apocryphal Secret Service agent whose job was to recruit lesbian bimbos for Hillary? Lesbian bimbos? Gimme a break. The scandalized reporters who discovered that Hillary, in her brief forays into the investment market, had actually made money? Omigod. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes…The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! (sorry, I know I’ve used that before, I just can’t find anything more apt.)

Some saner conservatives are pointing out that the loonies are raising some valid points, such as the proper role and size of government, which deserve a serious debate. Some liberals have pointed out that we just had that debate, which, in this great country of ours, is called an election, and our guy won. Some other liberal commentators suspect that the reason the loonies can’t accept the legitimacy of the Obama presidency is that he’s Black. Obviously, they have the same trouble I did remembering the Clinton administration, which the loonies also never accepted as legitimate, even though Bill is at least as pale as I am, and Hillary is a good deal more so. They just started with the axiom that the Clintons had somehow snuck in under cover of darkness and then changed the locks on the White House. Color was never an issue. The issue is, and has always been, who qualifies as a Real American. A few Blacks and Hispanics (especially Cubans**) actually do. But anybody who believes the government has a valid role providing help for non-rich Americans really doesn’t qualify.

Remember the New Deal?*** FDR made it happen by making a deal with the Devil, or rather, the Dixiecrats, that would guarantee that none of its benefits would extend to Black people. Social Security and Unemployment Compensation specifically didn’t cover agricultural and domestic workers, who made up the majority of employed African-Americans at the time. Black sharecroppers didn’t count as “farmers” for purposes of the New Deal agricultural programs. Aid to Dependent Families was off limits for Black single mothers, because it was too easy to prove them “morally unfit,” unlike White widows, or to show that, unlike White women, they could never qualify because they always had a way to support their children, namely domestic labor. And so on. Well, what the loonies are looking for this time around is a guarantee that Obama’s health care reform won’t just exclude illegal immigrants from coverage, but will guarantee that they can never, ever, get treatment for any medical problem in any medical facility that receives federal funds, or from any doctor or nurse whose education was paid for with federal grants and loans. Anything less than that will forfeit all support from that side of the aisle.

But everybody in this particular controversy, on all sides, seems to have forgotten that, unlike FDR, Obama doesn’t need the support of the loonies to get his program passed. Yes, it would be nice to end the LaRouchie/teabagger/loony-sponsored sniping and become One Nation. But every time Obama extends a hand across the aisle, somebody cuts off one of his fingers. Now, apparently, he has only one left. Let’s hope it’s the one he needs for the appropriate gesture.

Red Emma

* In fact, what the parents were doing was Santeria, which most people at the time didn’t know about, and which the kids didn’t know about because their parents had always told them “We’re Catholic,” until the kids came home from school early one day and found their parents and some friends in the basement doing stuff Sister had never taught them. The solution, as in most juvenile runaway cases, was to encourage better parent-child communication.

** In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m Cuban, but like many second or third generation Cuban- Americans, I do not consider Castro the AntiChrist.

*** See Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White for the best historical treatment of this era.

]]> http://wiredsisters.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/back-down-the-rabbit-hole/feed/ 0 wiredsisters