Writing: Freestyle Prose Sample
POVERTY: THE HARD SELL
Averting Welfare and Those Who Need It
Dr. Jeni Fazio
In memory of Karl Polanyi who dared to call the day dark
Indeed, it was not “that he was paid too little” – though he was – or that “he labored too long”, which was a given, but that he was now existing under physical conditions which “denied the human shape of life.”
~ Polanyi
Always a hard sell, it is near inconceivable how explanations of poverty continue to circumnavigate the most obvious structural inequities generated by a system that has operated under the auspices of an increasingly predatory exploitation regime. Equally inconceivable is how regime experts are still able to point their finger towards the devilish sloth within – within the downcast that is – as the driving force behind poverty. How are the experts able to reconcile a heightened premium on the responsibility of the individual with a firm conviction in a substrata’s psychological and behavioral inferiority? How does the idea of undeserving poor still receive sanction even though government relief – once said to be the enticing booty which lured the indigent from the rigors of labor - has continued to decline since the 1970s and in many cities no longer sustains poor families who, without work, are hanging from a precipice in the new frontier of sublime destitution? How have they been able to promote such a ramshackle of reasoning amidst what is fast reaching Belle Epoque levels of social exclusion? How is it that the experts are able to bring notions of individual responsibility, democratic inclusion, reasonable neglect, social disinvestment, control-based jurisprudence and neoliberal nation-building together in the one press conference while repeatedly castigating these subalterns as a collection of “whiners” always with an air of paternal patience and jocular whimsy? While the notion that vast numbers of us have been victims of the ruse of history couldn’t begin to tell the story, a comparative look at nineteenth century England’s free trade economy, replete with its ideological machinery, liberalism, illuminates a great deal with respect to the bowels of poverty, the depths of the street. In remembering what many pundits choose to forget through an amnesia of causation, we can better glimpse neoliberalism’s demise once its chimera ceases to conceal a cascading humanity just as a fascistic-like fanaticism rises from the ashes, the proverbial Phoenix, and the compliant gossips run out into the street crying “What is to be done?” never suspecting.
Whether the media cares to mention it or indices make its reality manifest, most will likely never hear of it, just decades ago, America entered a new era, the hallmark of which was renewed social exclusion, of individuals increasingly delinked from the economy and, by turn, the nation. However, socially cloaked in a language of economic determinism, a post-Fordist fate accompli, the historical collosus has been sutured into the norms of nation-building as the mere and inevitable socio-economic polarization of capricious markets, the inevitability throwing the light from the hidden hands of the well-conceived plan. Nothing is mentioned of the longer historical analogy, of the slide into heavy stock trading, gambling, swindles, financial scandles and the hooliganisn that precedes the imperial rise. For some time, the humanist vision of the poor man – once hailed as the embodiment of the fragile aspect of man, once hailed as the natural inheritor of the earth, as the humble wise made wise by her station, once guaranteed a seat in heaven – like the poor themselves, has fallen on hard times. Just as the notion of property rose to new heights as something revealing of man’s ontological essence and like a sword took on the establishment – all the inheritance stuff was swiftly written out of the language of redemption. Nineteenth century liberals, excessively preoccupied with the rights of man, philosophized as to life, liberty and the pursuit of two hundred and forty-plus acres. All of the sudden, at about the time when people ceased to see their essence in the other, in I-Thou transcendence, and the Cartesian relation of man to the world gained currency in monied circles, a person couldn’t earn a dime off of such syrupy sympathies – disparaged as the blood-letting heart – government least of all. And so it was that England’s nineteenth century parliament became disinterested in the same poor folk whose status was crestfallen.
The social distancing achieved through the use of pejoratives such as “underclass”, “slackard”, “lay-about”, “dullard”, “good for nothing”, “contagion of production” and the much opined “welfare queen” – was given new life. An unfortunate turn of events for the man living hand-to-mouth no doubt but, nonetheless, justified from the vantage point of esteemed inner circles, the inside of which no one could ever get a handle on due to their hermeneutic tendency towards enclosure, unfortunate when considering the thrust of its power in history. Nonetheless, it was here, inside the circle that gratuitous acts of magnanimity and the habit-forming sporadic benevolence of royal authority was written off the pages of history, the same pages which were hastily being rewritten in accordance with yet another Copernican revolution that would once again put man at the center of the universe. This fine rendering of liberation’s conversion was, of course, kind of true and kind of not true – as with very finest of historical codes, doctrines and sacred texts steering transformation. Man was indeed to be repositioned as central – seemingly good news for anyone who feared that they might play second fiddle to, say, the wetlands. But upon plummeting the depths of the doctrine, it really wasn’t “man” exactly that the authors were interested in liberating, not “man” where the same liberty, freedom, concern and enthusiasm for “men”, that is society, would necessarily follow. Rather, it turned out that true liberation was site specific within the individual – a fact easily washed over – residing within his profit making potential, “his” in the abstract – or to be more precise, its authors, if one were looking for a model.
From the position of the in-crowd, it was a matter of no contest. The sacrifice – poverty relief, was no sacrifice at all, not when cutting back would widen the aqueducts where profits surged forth at the same time that destitution would usher forth a radical turn towards solid family values, a return to nuclear conceptions of belonging as only ever experienced in the most impoverished of times. This cultural revolution would be so radical as to go well beyond the wildest dreams of what the conservatives could ever hope to create through simple oration, door-to-door pamphleteering or recommendation, and soon, with the cultural turn in one’s pocket, all the horrors of radicalism would be gone. It was really no sacrifice at all. Under the circumstances, such distancing, social splintering could easily be received by the imagination as a minor sacrifice, the necessities of power-making, that is, empire, the benefits which would, in theory, befall everyone. It fell to the floor with a thud as yet another necessitous bit of social legislation. As for the practice of slander, it was nothing to lose sleep over. Afterall, everyone knows that words cannot break bones. The casting of verbal stones was mild really in terms of life’s adversities, which everyone should be exposed starting from when they are young as to stave of misrepresentation and pretense. In many ways, the fain of heart could only benefit from a little name calling to shore up one’s character.
Paradoxically enough, harboring the kinds of paradoxes that only history can harbor, the new imagination, the one that conceived of the destitute and forlorn as the dead weight pulling down the system, showed up during the indeterminant mélangey period of the 1970s where the melting pot of styles was exploding and it was impossible for designer’s to predict the winter line because it was just such a case of anything goes. Well, such a goulash of culture could never be more than temporal for such free wheeling invariably meant one’s guard was down. Though no one suspected a coup of the spirit, coups were brewing if only because new materials were being discovered and they needed to be consumed with a certain degree of predictability not with a “could fly, then again, who knows, these days, nothing can be known for certain except, perhaps that man is the center of his world, responsible.” You see, the seeds of coup were already being sown but no one knew because everyone was busy dancing in the street singing of liberation, believing that this time it included their people.
Stumbling towards empire meant ticking and tacking through a playground of enterprise trying to find anything that wouldn’t hang like jello or fade like denim for it was a time when disco took synthetic to new heights, when synthesizers displaced the gospel penetration of soul, that Latin America stood as the unfreedom across the border, when the uncola turned out to be sparkling lemon water, when Mao’s Red China lost its pearly luster, when the high water mark of the radical wave of the late 1960s broke and was busy receding in a flurry of decadence, introspection and a gut rejection of civil bureaucrats as harbinger in the individual life. It was a time when people started puttering about in their yards dreaming of garages and tool sheds to call their own, places to tinker just as, and not even God could have timed it better, global profits contracted in what would be a relentless dip, the colonial clock wound down and economists convened in backrooms everywhere.
Poverty wasn’t always the hard sell it has since become. Never a favorite among subjects, it certainly had its place within the social conscious. It simply wasn’t something that could be erased as a subject, disappeared as a people like the vanished of Argentina. Concern for the meek was embedded in the social imagination for what would social mean if it only included some? Nixon, Carter and even first-term Reagan meant presidents had to contend with public outcry when civil liberties were compromised and this included service cut-backs for the needy. So just when did the turning begin?
For England, the devolution was long in the making, starting out innocently enough from a certain befuddlement as to causes which sounded something like this, “Where on God’s earth have all these poor people come from just when things are picking up in terms of global outreach – just as vessels are lining foreign shores like a string of the Queen’s best pearls?” As action could not wait for an answer, legislation was drafted, policies went in to effect premised on the notion of the commonweal and the collective good. England’s Poor Relief of 1795 brought into the social conscious the idea of government relief, providing an aid-in-wages which bridged the gap between income and the livable wage. Admittedly at times encouraging a slovenly labor, the “boondoggle” of feigning work sufficient to garner relief, it also suffered abuse at the hands of employers, those who were only interested in hiring persons on relief as to lower their own contribution to wages. As its original purpose was indeed employer wage subsidization, early forms of corporate welfare can be said to begin here as employers reduced wages, pauperizing the countryside. Though such relief would not last the century and soon, under Elizabethan Law, the poor were forced – in a habit that would only repeat with time – to succumb to the iron law of wages, that is, to take what they could get with little by way of economic guarantees and social union, much less the notion of a “right to live”.
It might be said that capitalist England began where the rule of the benevolent landlord and his allowance system ended in England’s Reform Bill of 1832 precipitating a wave of enclosures and the rise of the rural proletariat. In England, the promises of industry whet the appetite for taking a penknife to the social ripping it in two. The Reform Bill disenfranchised the rotten boroughs and gave power in the Commons once and for all to businessmen where the first thing they did was abolish the poor relief. The Poor Law of 1834 meant that one was forced to hustle their wares to survive or succumb to the very hunger used to drive wages down and enter the Poor House, which had rapidly transformed into a Hall of Shame now that its occupants were considered outsiders. Just as notions of the “undeserving poor” crystallized in form taking on a translucent clarity, hunger as a method of social control rose to the surface in what was a topsy-turvy inversion of the English world. In the give-take battle of subsistence, the compensation for the loss of one’s sanity, security and sense of self was enriched rights, the latter which meant little once having accepted one’s station as indigent. The earlier impulse towards paternalistic protectionism against the foils of the market – which not even capitalists thought to deny by letting maxim-anchored reason buoy action such as trickle down and karmic outcomes – had been abandoned leading to the near starvation of the masses. Not long after the historically poor masses were being internally rent asunder through a new identity casting based upon “deserving and “undeserving” poverty – both of which proved problematic when up against the notions of “trickle down” and “karmic outcomes” where the former honed in on individual effort and anchoring maxims spoke to the consequence of systems – there was for the dispossessed a slow sinking of self-respect – and the collective sense that it had once engendered. For the first time, upon death, the pauper was renounced by his fellow man. The sublime regulation of markets came at the price of social fragmentation. Before even hyping its trickle down gains, the pursuit of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, the new order had already absconded with the soul of man.
The push for personal responsibility and an end to burdensome relief seized the laissez-faire imagination. Wanting as much a scientific as biblical vindication, hungering in fact for such reasoning, rationalizations for the end of relief ran the gamut from God’s will to the sublime perfection of self-regulating markets to karmic for the Eastern fringe thinkers. In turned out, in fact, that often one rationale was as good as the other and the combined effect was that much more potent, toxic, sexy even like the different motifs of all the various rooms of a carefully conceived Chateau, one for every like, for every whim – for who could tell where mood would meet with the day birthing opinion. The gyrations of rationale that would do away with relief came thick and fast. Social good, which had slowly been ripped from its international foundation in mankind to be partnered with the national border during the rise of nationalism, the first God of of the modern, was all of the sudden about “the greatest good for the greatest number of people,” a decidely majority-driven agenda that had little to say about “every man’s right to live”. Still, it was hailed as exemplary in terms of democratic reason for it did include concern for the majority, even if it was in terms of an abstract livelihood and not a concrete ballot casting. Somewhat predictably, the loosely defined goal of “greatest good for the greatest number” quickly entered the murky lagoon of political uncertainty from which statisticians were born to provide proof that society was indeed being served. In a certain yin-yang of transformation, precisely in tune with the frequency in which accolades to the greatest good rushed forth and the funds to back it receded, statistical indicators of all stripes, frequencies and histograms also fell forward. Until, finally, testament to the greatest good for the greatest number simply could not be persuasively defended, too many things were happening, too many people roamed the streets barefoot, slept in allies, pushed carts filled with their life belongings, babbled to themselves as if partaking in playful dialogue amidst a carnival troupe. Quietly, with zero-fanfare compared to when the great liberal poet and thinker Matthew Arnold spawned the idea, the idea of the greatest good slipped out of sight deep within the wilderness of opportunity now described as “survival of the fittest” and sometimes “catch as catch can” that had by the late nineteenth century come to better capture the ontology of being for the people of imperial England.
“Survival of the fittest” may have sounded good among day-traders but it left many questions unanswered for politicians and local municipal officers. The question of relief persisted as more citizens were, oddly enough, found to be in need. It left ontological questions with respect to the condition of fitness. Would that be a physical “fittest” or a mental fittest? Is the man with the shotgun fitter than the behemoth shackled under lock and key? Is felicity of mind really a kind of fitness or is it better described as cunning? Though seductively evoking the rhythms of nature – like all the best of art-house nouveau, its underbelly – a considerably cooler que sera sera – was never so innocent. The poor mouth grew in number while audiences turned their head. Its increasing numbers were inversely related to the infrequency in which economists and politicians sought out a language for debt relief, a language of sympathy backed by a commitment to social union. The more mouths there were to feed, the more there were of the hungry and disheveled, the more administrative language conjured images of the foils of fate, bad decisions, wrong place wrong time probabilities. The more mouths there were to feed, the more the administration looked to heavens, spoke adamantly – if not passionately – of how only divine intervention has ever really saved anyone. At this point, when someone in the audience questioned their purpose – as administrator – if in fact nothing could be done – the new language of messenger, vessel, was born. However, in back rooms it still sounded very bare bones, something like this, “Screw it. There are just too many of them…. It would take god damn miracle.” Though God was on their side, his scope was limited.
The ramping up of the laissez-faire imagination was never so innocent. While “survival of the fittest” might have meant a new kind of poverty for the Oliver Twists of the world, for the poor mouth who could no longer return to his or her village, for the weaver who could turn her hand at nothing, for the sharecropper who had lost his plot through the enclosure of the commons, more importantly, it provided the imaginative garb that would justify the savage exploitation of those deemed subhuman. “Survival of the fittest” marked the irruption of a new level of exploitation. While providing the go-ahead for the accumulation of vast and inequitable riches, such an objective necessarily meant a savage abuse of those deemed subhuman, the less thans of the world – for which – it was said, there were many – those beyond the pale of pauper, beyond the pale of poor sod. In the wilderness of capitalism, the savage sufferer, he who has lost sense of his person, reduced to animal instincts, was manufactured not born. But when it came time to address the Common Ravens, no one thought to limit production, instead fingers were pointed downward from elevated heights towards the said creatures as they were gathered up in paddy wagons and shuttled out of sight.
Try as they may to enlist the support of nature, science, history and God, no one could escape the sublime yin and yang. As the new premium on competition redefined relations in the towns and villages of England, it reigned down like a series of carpet bombings in the colonies. The fact was, “survival of the fittest” was much less a standard to live by than it was a black hole through which humanity fell through never to return. It had no limits and in the free fall the sacrifice of humanity had no resonance. If here it meant a well-umpired competition, in some other dark hole, it meant the trafficking of children. What it really meant no one could be certain for holes have no end. As vast a moral opening as the sky was wide, it was soon forgotten that it started as an idea, weak like any idea without the lives lived in its shadow.
Now, almost 200 years into the rule of catch as catch can, basically, it didn’t look good. In America, the percentage of people living in poverty has hovered at 20% for at least three decades, shamefully high in the face of other OECD nations whose safety net is not so tattered that they wouldn’t unquestioningly opt to bridge the gap between the livable wage and earnings for single mothers with children. Other indicators are just as bleak in their prospects. Along with increases in homelessness, disenfranchised and those living in poverty, uninsured young adults jumped ten percentage points within the short period of the Bush ascendancy. This is the same population that has the greatest difficulty entering a tight labor market that promises little by way of employee packages for low-end jobs. Even the death of collective bargaining is two generations removed from these youth who can’t even imagine employee say, for whom their youth status alone weakens their leverage, forces them to the take the deal whether in front of a judge, a cop or a corporate head. If anyone still spoke in terms of class, these youth would surely comprise the lumpenproletariat but no one does speak in these terms, written out of the textbook, these youth are busy trying to keep the faith and get close to what they’ve heard, talk of equal opportunity.
The post-2001 succession of “jobless” recoveries can hardly be touted as the wave that will lift all boats, a caveat that stopped not a single news anchor or politician. Inevitably, greater numbers of families have sunk deeper into poverty, with children being hardest hit. Of course, deepening poverty is not particular to the Bush administration. Rather it is the most blistering symptom of an ailing society marked by an “Atleast I’ve got mine” economic feeding frenzy begun on as the backlash to 1960s’-styled armed citizen resistance the image of which was emblazoned on the social consciousness forever in the form of a Black Panthers’ march. Cited as a yet another failed initiative of Pollyanna liberals by conservative ideologues, the truth is the war on poverty curbed poverty from 22 percent in 1960s to 11.1 in 1973, which, we now know as an all time historical low. At the time, no one would have suspected that they were living the day of the high water mark, but they did feel it, that is, they lived it as they took to the streets dancing and believing. Euphemistically cited as an unfortunate “downward assimilation”, predictions for the life of the tomorrow’s poor are grim for those of the next generation raised within an outcast zip code amidst de facto segregation and the striations of mobility that come when there’s just enough room on the boat for a handful of men. Perhaps the biggest hole where progress falls out – America’s cities, its dropout factories – manufacture outcasts. Carceral rehabilitation - formerly hobbling along with a declining budget under Carter when the prison as the final solution was determined to be ineffective - the solution was reborn under Reagan, losing the rehabilitative slant, replacing it with the spirit of control, orthodoxy and the black/white reading.
The job market itself is of course dwindling faster than you can say “tall frappacino”. Disposable labor, a mainstay of the urban ghetto, has spread its undifferentiating tendrils into towns everywhere. Though the figures would seem to set off alarms, in the streets it’s business as usual, except where the sign reads, “Closed. Thanks for the 52 years.” Meanwhile, figures suspend as if in a permanent fantasia upbeat unemployment figures. The “excessively” unemployed, that is, “the discouraged worker”, become – as in the liberal nineteenth century – members of the invisible unemployed or the socially disappeared, the modern day pauper adrift in a global village that has abandoned the social and sees instead only neighborhoods stocked with labor reserves, indigent, criminal elements and common ravens.
It pays to probe the past for solutions… for times – most times anyway – have come and gone at least once if not dozens of times before. The repeating patterns are striking. At just the time that England had – fast like epiphany – come to see the wisdom in doing away with the humanity borne out of the livable wage, America was busy being born. Jockeying like a young man determined to catch the ball and prove himself on the global playing field, free trade fell into its arms. Though the displacement of England’s citizenry due to enclosures is perhaps more closely reflected in Mexico ever since the PRI’s 70-year commitment to the ejidos was rescinded under structural adjustment, one still sees parallels in terms of a general lack of refuge plaguing citizenry. Crippling to the nineteenth century economy of England, there was in the new towns no settled urban middle class, no such nucleus of artisans and craftsmen, of respectable petty bourgeois and townspeople as could have served as an assimilation medium for labor – who worked drudgingly at the mills. There was no organic intermingling of trade and tradesman, of artisan and industry, where each benefited just that much while aiding on the woman or man to their side as part of a movement of hand-in-hand growth. Then as now, there was social polarization from which the crude laborer could not grab hold of even the flimsiest of objects to support himself. Indeed, it was not “that he was paid too little” – though he was – or that “he labored too long”, which was of course a given, but that he was now existing under physical conditions which “denied the human shape of life” (Polanyi, 1944:103).
If it is the case that the in the realm of politics the promise is at least two steps ahead of the delivery, so that as the promise dwindles the delivery is sure to have already receded that much more, how do we reconcile Jeremy Bentham’s ideal Panopticon, conceived in 1794, a vision of total control, with the pursuit of freedom, an ideal having seized the imagination a mere 18 years before? Though originally conceived for use as a prison surveillance system, it was a simple stretch of the imagination before industry-houses came to incorporate similar systems and capitalism could no longer be said to better the lot of the poor rural farmer whose simple life was no longer tenable against the press of the city. Though China has taken the lead in manufacturing “jails without guilt” in the twentieth century, variations are widespread.
So what had happened? Where did the dream go wrong? Was it in fact envy, intrigue and vanity that drove nations while talk of giving came to revolve around the high charity of noblesse oblige? Was it really the weakest link, the poor mouth, that should be expected to pay through the sweat of his brow to make wide the margins of profit in this making real national progress? Was human sacrifice really requisite to the order? Was it because when left to their own devices goats and men bred at biblical rates that something had to be done in terms of regulating the minds of the commoner of simple want and little need? Was it that since sacrifice was not allowed under the protection of constitutions, a chronic hunger would have to take its place in subduing the otherwise unpredictable at times headstrong masses? Was government to increase want in order to make the physical sanction of hunger effective or were the utilitarians scheming? Was there wisdom in believing that the advocates of deprivation governance could better provide relief by way of charity, volunteerism and intermittent alms than legal obligation? Could the outcast really be blamed for the confusion when they were welcome in the eyes of God and yet disposable among men?
While social conditions change, the human condition remains the same. Under the circumstances, it is difficult to know if the mystery of the reproduction of inequality, that is poverty, is as much unfortunate as it is tragic. Whatever the case, it is a mystery that has remained with us throughout the centuries. One can only be struck by the litany of various causes first proffered by a bevy of pamphlets while industrialization was still in its chrysalis years. Among them were scarcity of grain; too high agricultural wages, causing high food prices; too low agricultural wages; too high urban wages; irregularity of urban employment; disappearance of the yeomanry; ineptitude of the urban worker for rural occupations; reluctance of the farmers to pay higher wages; the landlords’ fear that rents would have to be reduced if higher wages were paid; failure of the workhouse to compete with machinery; want of domestic economy; incommodious habitations; bigoted diets; drugs habits. Some writers believed that the poor should eat less, or no bread, while others thought that even feeding on the best bread should not be charged against them. Some speculated that it was tea that impaired the health of many poor while others thought that home-brewed beer would restore it; those who felt most strongly on this score insisted that tea was no better than the cheapest dram.
As with today, the relationship between markets and poverty all but escaped the imagination, while the eating of bread remained persuasive. In some ways, these innocent ancestors are to be forgiven, for – unlike today’s proclaimed “Age of Globalization” – the relation between pulling water from a well in the countryside or plucking grapes and the passage of cargo ships on the Seven Seas were not yet clear. And yet, from the social critic’s lens of Dickens it would be difficult, certainly round-about, to explain the hunger of Oliver Twist in terms of stomach pains and poor diet. For others, “Uncertainty of labor conditions is the most vicious result of these new innovations”such that “when a town employed in a manufactory is deprived of it, the inhabitants are as it were struck with a palsy.” The truth of the matter, then as now, was of course traceable to “the aggravation of pauperism and the higher rates due to an increase in invisible unemployment.” (Polanyi, 1944: 95-96) But, with respect to the 19th century, not until some one hundred years into its distance would the coast be clear to say so. As for ourselves, we are still waiting.
That poor diet and poor practices, including poor table manners and all the other poor-like things that these poor people do was the actual cause of poverty was a hard sell – but not an impossible sell – and that’s all the space that was needed. Why wasn’t it impossible? Because, as always, there were all the signs of progress largely put forth by experts, a breed that has since only proliferated at biblical rates. What was only clear in hindsight for the Age of Industry was that, throughout the 19th century – decade after decade – the material level of existence of the laboring poor was not – in spite of the modern democratic revolution, in spite of mercurial role of republican empires – improving, “indeed, it was becoming worse” (Polanyi, 1944: 128), locked in, as they were to the iron law of wages and its standard of wretchedness.
By the time of Reagan, it was all forgotten so that the buggery could be repeated all over again. The Underclass were nothing but derelict poor, behaviorally dysfunctional members of the undeserving poor unconscionably irresponsible living off the dole, babies having babies, and every other sort of conceivable debauchery. At the price of shared enterprise as the engine of growth, they were also a reserve army outweighing the industrial army proper used as a terror tactic to hold down first wages – and with a new and considerably more venal twist – civil liberties, eliminating any real need for totalitarianism as such. Pinpointing the cause of social rot in the people themselves, the Underclass became an immediate target through relentless vilification which allowed Clinton to do what the conservatives that preceded him could only dream of (oh, how they loved him!) – dismantle welfare through the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. Very much in keeping with history’s hidden iron law of inverse proportionately, as went welfare so went those in need. Integral to the dismantling of welfare was the imposition of heightened forms of permanent social exclusion through the prison reform of 1996 which would deny all former convicts of outdoor relief and a myriad of other forms of social service supports normally used to raise oneself up out of poverty. And so it was that here, as in England’s Age of Austerity, in a flurry of insecurity and contagious disdain, man would invariably be renounced upon death by his fellow man as the social fabric ran wild in its unfurling and experts hunted out causality.
As in the 19th century when the poor man was denied bread, made hungry, exploited, pushed aside into a reserve army, asked to compromise his family and his soul, to sell himself to the company store, to indenture himself and forfeit any kind of real liberation, any kind of actual human freedom, told to lay off bread and the dubious drink of the Orient, poverty persisted. As then, confusion followed as to who these scoundrels of welfare abuse were: pauper and unlucky blurred. Was the fully employed workman of today who was on the streets tomorrow penniless a member of the undeserving? Could it be that the good and the bad flip-flopped like that as random as the rain or shine from one day to the next? Could we really attack such individuals for their slovenly habits? It didn’t seem like the stuff to steer legislation. The Underclass and her namesake, that is, “welfare queens driving cadillacs”, was successfully used to dismantle the welfare state just as a similar vilification had led to the abolishment of the Poor Laws when business had taken control of England’s parliament. And yet, as the notion of underclass quietly slipped into the pages of history having served its purpose as the tool with which to pummel the Welfare State, poverty and unemployment persisted regardless of the cut backs, regardless as to whether or not the government was offering free rides to the Promised Land.
Once again, people threw up their hands, “Where on earth did all these poor come from?” No one said anything about the Underclass, the poor mouth, not this time, not since they had nothing left, including the freedom to belong, and their very mention might incite a riotous account of the economic implications of underclass which had been surreptitiously glossed over through a perverse association with behavioral dysfunction that included all but biogenetic inferiority. But the demand for accountability hasn’t happened. The indictment that targeted a population as subhuman has been quietly forgotten, save the poverty that lives on, while one awaits the return of quasi-biotic processes – the last and final frontier in the dark hour of capitalism.
As the experts toil in the details of an hour while humanists cry out for considerations of the human condition to no avail, the human condition continues to reinvent the same if not very similar schisms of history. While the conditions most assuredly change and the social conditions change, the human factions remain. While there are those individuals who will most certainly rise up in indignation upon hearing what is more than a mild criticism of a politic, what may be a very audible condemnation of this or that caucus, congress or constitution, there will be behind him, somewhere off to the side the delicate gray-haired woman who reminds the crowd that at times entire civilizations have been wrong and that recognizing this is indeed the bitter pill of patriotism. Sadly, though provocative, the implications – in terms of existential indeterminacy, casting as it does democratic outcomes into question – only raises the ire of the already indignant like the hair on one’s back. As this exchange echoes into the ages, the very definition of poverty changes.
Because the times demands empirical rigor for any serious criticism to be given credence or weight, accepted indices are limited. Those which make one squeamish or uncomfortable, stand as a possible criticism or indictment, are easily dismissed as outbursts of poor taste, poor manners – if not lost in the deluge of counter evidence that swarms in around the objection like a pack of mountain lions going in for the kill. And yet, Americans love the absurd. They always have and they always will, god bless them. Try as any politician might to conceal the insights of a Richard Pryor or a George Carlin, they will fail. Through the absurd, Americans hear their own heart which, while at times lost in the shuffle, is relatively constant. In terms of social justice, it had seemed to be as good as it gets. As ingrained as the liberal imagination has come, informing everything to how one feels about how much they got done in a day to appropriate relations with Syria, as entrenched as its structures run, it is difficult to know as yet how much tide the Obama presidency can turn back, particularly when considering the long gestation.