My daughter is starring as Yenta in Fiddler on the Roof, and somebody asked what is America to do with its new poor, the people who have worked a lifetime to make an honest living. So I'm thinking about the old poor.
Why do we need a bigger government to fix what the free market has not? Because there are people who honestly believe that money solves every problem - the only question is who they trust with the money. State capitalists. Now I get to use Chomsky against the Left. I just ranted the following over on Facebook.
I think Desmond is thinking of a bigger solution than corporatism can create, which means creating a bigger state with more power of fiat to create the proper job/occupation/lifestyle/grave for the masses.
On the other hand, my grandfather grew up as an orphan and managed to teach himself Latin. Which is to say that quality of life doesn't come from employment and the political impulse to provide the masses with "meaningful employment" is merely evangelism of a godless sort.
If I were an academic, I would spend time looking back to the literature and quality of life in the slums. Yes slums. Before urban renewal and eminent domain destroyed the Little Italies and Little Polands and Little Irelands of the world and created a great de-ethnicized, mainstream, whitebread white middle class, there was *something* of value there. And anybody who pretends to be a serious multiculturalist says so all the goddamned time. Not to mentions saving the indigenous people of the world.... See More
I'm saying that an underemployed America can be an urban indigenous zone without any need for a safety net or the requisite taxation. A deflated negative growth GDP could take us to that child-growing village some people always claim to desire, and the desire for the nanny state is inherently conflicted with belief in the human spirit.What is a police state but a nanny state with boots?
My more complete point is that I am thinking of the romance I have with my spiritual connection to old mensches who grew up playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn. I am thinking of the feeling of longing I got reading about gardens in the city in my first grade Ginn Readers knowing that little grew in the dust of my backyard - but somewhere in New York, even the New York of Bugs Bunny, there were little gardens between brick tenements.
While I'm at it, let me go there, back in time to when we kids at Virginia Road School used to brag and boast about which Ginn Reader we were in.
- Little White House
- On Cherry Street
- Around the Corner
- We Are Neighbors
- Friends Far & Near
- Roads to Everywhere
- Trails to Treasure
- Wings to Adventure
In one of those books was the story I'm talking about, and yes I do remember way back to elementary school 40 years ago - back when Mrs. Byers used to curse our parents too poor to send us pickanninies to school without our own pencils. I didn't know - the school always used to provide the big fat blue pencils and the parallelogram erasers upon which we drew mag wheels turning them into Dan Gurney's Lola GT.
We had a garden in the third grade, and next door Mrs. Arnold grew her own greens. All three kinds. It was called the horticulture class, but none of the Arnold kids needed it because they grew tomatoes already. That's how you fed a family with eight kids in 1969. They were from Texas. People still come from Texas with horticulture skills don't they, or do they just fly planes at their enemies because they can't find the right kind of engineering job so that they can afford, AN AIRPLANE.
I have lived in Southern California for too long, two steps ahead of a non-English speaking minority with little or no skills that somehow managed to survive and move into my old neighborhood without the benefit of police protection or welfare. It seems I remember too much of the old days and the old ways, when kids cracked bicycle frames from jumping them off wooden planks sitting on wooden milk crates without the benefit of helmets. And the boys bike frames didn't swoop down in front of the seat like girls bikes so we crushed our nuts on bad landings and *then* cracked our heads on the sidewalk.
We grew up believing that President Kennedy wanted us to do pushups and run miles so we could get to the moon first. We had ashy knees and hardscrabble values. And just in case we ever got soft, every year we'd watch the Grapes of Wrath when it came on TV. I cannot imagine, I cannot *even* imagine that being shown on broadcast TV. I think it would remind us that Progress, bought to you by Congress is not actually nor were they ever a sponsor. I seem to recall that Alcoa and US Steel were the sponsors. But I could be romantically misremembering, after all, this is just about what I grew up believing.
When Bugs Bunny fell off a roof, there was always a tangle of clotheslines between tenement building. Old ladies clothes would be between him and the ground, and every few stories he'd end up in a corset or a dress or a petticoat before he landed in the dirty garden on the first floor. There's a class of people out there today who give a lot of lip service to the organic bonds between humans, and yet when money runs out for government entitlements, they think we're going to crater as a society. I don't think so. I think that the urban poor will survive. They'll survive without socialism. You have to forget a whole lot of American history in order to believe otherwise.
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