Oh, They'll Get in Line

 

I can recall finally understanding what "elitism" meant to anti-intellectual MAGAs, and basically, it was them being told they were wrong or cruel and being made to feel bad by...anybody. It wasn't about class or education status--it was the idea that someone out there was gonna tell you you wasn't exactly as good as them. So there! 

So, in the H-1B visa debate that is roiling TrumpWorld, Vivek Ramaswamy seems to have been part of the mild fracas happening on X by letting US (White) Americans know they culturally weren't producing well qualified tech job applicants because they didn't rise and grind the way Asian kids do. Too many jocks and prom queens and peaking in high school. MAGA was fine with "pull your pants up and take care of your kids" lectures directed at Black Americans, but if you tell them that their four touchdowns in a single game for Polk High School doesn't qualify them for more than selling shoes, they are going to get Big Mad. 

And we already know where white supremacist Laura Loomer was on this one:

The Unhomed and the Inhumanity!

 

San Francisco art gallery owner Collier Gwin used a hose to spray water at a homeless woman sitting on a sidewalk on January 9.

The victim “declined further police action," according to The Standard, citing the San Francisco Police Department pic.twitter.com/t2TUKXqXbV

— TRT World (@trtworld) January 11, 2023

This man is hosing this woman off the sidewalk like she was no more than refuse or dog droppings. He has no more respect for her human dignity than to do this. This man has an art gallery. What can a soul who does this to another human being know about art? He knows money and status. This man pimps the vision of souls for status. That woman may as well not have a soul to him because she has nothing of negotiable value. She brought down his property value by having a body existing outside of his place of business. He needed her body elsewhere, and this was the obnoxious way he chose to do it.

Being alive means having a body and needing to put it somewhere. It's a blessing and a curse. I've known absurd sensations of pleasure, and also what it's like not to sit or stand or even lie down comfortably.  But I've been able to enjoy my pain and delight alike indoors, because I've always had the fee for convenient body storage. I can sleep indoors any time I like, even if my bed feels like a stone to me. 

I sleep knowing others sleep on stones. How fucked up is it that we do this? We sleep knowing other human beings can have their tents, their tarps, their possessions, however meager, scattered because someone anywhere doesn't care for the basic physical fact that these people need to lay their bodies somewhere? That when we aren't awake (as no one can be, healthfully, forever) we need to put our physical, food and oxygen and water requiring selves somewhere. We need access to money to negotiate our nutritious and hygienic needs. We need blankets and clothes in absence of heating.  And we pretend other human beings who can't afford that basic allowance of humanity--don't need this? And sweep away their lives and give them nothing in recompense? 

There's another way, of course. If the unhoused require being homed to not be homeless, what if someone just put them in housing?  It sounds radical, but it just might work! What if this could be done nationwide to reduce homelessness by just putting people in homes? (The Finns--they have good ideas about cherishing people, and I respect it.)

This is something we could easily do. We can build convenience stores overnight--making affordable housing should not be more expensive than the stupid things we do to deter people with bodies from having comfortable places to lay themselves down, like pigeon-repellers except for people placed under overpasses and increasingly unseatworthy benches. Giving the homeless somewhere to live--permanently, not a shelter, is the most cost-effective solution, and the one people are avoiding because it is actually kind and decent. 

Treating human beings as human beings is a choice and one we can afford to make, and should, because the cost of not doing that is our humanity.  What if we treated human beings as human beings, and no one got hosed? 

Trump Talked to People Today and It Was Dystopian

 

Somehow, the former president of the United States suggested that permanent Hoovervilles were some kind of reasonable accommodation for the homeless instead of, I dunno, actually finding them real homes they could affordably live in with dignity and without having to crowd about with abusive and dangerous people. He also suggested that the federal government should be able to take control of state National Guard units in emergencies, like, I presume uprisings that fall out from unhomed people having access to a fucking tent among other desperate people instead of anything halfway approaching a shot at a somewhat normal and dignified life. 

This is exactly the kind of dystopia we've seen in SF. The proposal itself is suggestive of just clearing away inconvenient people and pretending their lives don't matter. It suggests a willingness to use violence to let everyone know how not-valued certain life actually is. 

This person cannot ever be near power again. He doesn't see any people as people, but as problems. and this is always a bad sign. He is a monster,  and thinks monstrous things. 

UPDATE: No this was not a neat change from comparing things to the Handmaids or even Orwell. That multiple dystopian narratives start sounding really plausible is not actually a great takeaway or either me finally understanding that my English Lit degree has value, it's me realizing I should know a lot more about firearms and jarring vegetables than I actually do because the shit is basically right on top of us. Welcome to my nightmare, says a Generation Xer primed for Soylent Green and the rise of the machines. I mean. Seriously? We are overrun with hammerheads and require merely people of competence to show up. 

And I think these people will.  I have to. 

"Not Many People Know it...."

 

TN GOP state senator uses Hitler as an example of how people can make something of themselves after being homeless.

This is absurd. pic.twitter.com/bhyTWIz6C1

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) April 14, 2022

There was a time when I would wonder if this kind of nut-picking was fair. Can you really point to what some state legislator dumbass says and then somehow judge the whole GOP because of it? And as I looked around me, I eventually decided yes. Yes, I absolutely should make the connection. When someone takes a look at the life story of Adolf Hitler, the takeaway should not actually be that, say what you will about the man, he was a real go-getter. (And a terrific dancer!) 

There is a real problem when a party regularly demonstrates that they don't actually see the problem with Hitler comparisons because, well...they don't see the problem. They are deliberately not seeing the problem.  And if Republicans wonder where folks get the idea from that they are represented by people like Patrick Little or Arthur Jones or Paul Nehlen, or...you get the picture. 

This was a gaffe. They guy made an unfortunate positive reference to Hitler, in regards to a bill that punishes people who have no homes for camping in public spaces. (I rankle at the term "camping"--it's called "living". People exist with bodies that have to go somewhere. They are living in those bodies in those places because shelters are for whatever reason not a possibility for them. But it isn't a pastime for them and they don't have a home to otherwise go be in. 

Why am I pointing this out? The idea that vagrancy is a choice and should be punished is to classify the people as the problem. There is a long history of the in the US and elsewhere--but it certainly isn't helpful. And absent good options, it can lead to people deciding where "undesirable people" or "asocials" need to go. 

I worry about that. Republicans are very good at labelling people as the problem. And they are even re-locating people they consider a problem. Stupid, dangerous stunts today--but with a kernel of something very dangerous in them that makes me wonder what we will see from them in the future. The party of "Don't say Gay" and "Where's your Papers?" feels like they aren't making mistakes when stuff like this pops out, just letting a mask slip/ 

From "A Christmas Carol"

 

“They are Man's and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.”

― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

It's not the cheeriest of meditations for a Christmas morning, but I think of these two especially today, because we live in a world where ignorance and want are not mere human conditions created by the lack of something denied: learning and nourishment; but where poor information, misinformation, and pockets of human poverty are designed.  Like Dickens' s Christmas spirit, I think there is terrible danger there. 

The Christmas gift we have is the one given Scrooge--to know that and to make a choice.  Ignorance and want are not someone else's problem but add to the chains weighing down all our human existence. Better is possible. But when I see the gospel preached that ignorance is safety and want builds character, I know why "better" stays a struggle. 

Famine of Choices

WATCH: As California farmers make the hard decision to plow through crops no one is buying, analysts say the drop in food supply will be felt in a few months by consumers eager to buy produce at grocery stores https://t.co/F4LVLT5Gct pic.twitter.com/ecrWcGja7c

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 16, 2020

Some portion of my ancestors came to the US because there was, quite purposefully, no food where they came from. The one crop poor people mostly ate, failed. Just about every other kind of food a rich land produced, was exported. If it mattered enough, just a tweak of economics could have saved lives (a million people may have died, maybe a million more were saved by leaving). It wasn't that they couldn't have lived off what the land provided--it's that that nourishment was intended for other paying customers' tables. This sort of thing happens the whole world round. People starve not for a lack of food, but because the political climate doesn't allow it to be on their plates. It's either deliberately withheld, as can happen where the government is oppressive, or because there is no foresight on a government's behalf that food insecurity is a national security issue.

It's not just in light of the above story I consider that--it's a painful thing for farmers to produce good food and watch it go to waste and also know that it isn't just money they are out for their labor, but that the demand exists (people still need fed), it only needs a different path to the ultimate consumer. It's in light of images like this:

image of the line of cars waiting for food aid. Surely, they has to be a way for other plans to be made for more produce to be canned, dairy to be powdered, etc. possibly by an act of government, to make food more available for the people temporarily in want? The logistics for such a thing must exist. I know when I was a kid, people talked shit about government cheese (but it was good for grilled cheese) but that was a staple. We need the USDA to get it's top game on.

I'm not a logistics kind of person that knows exactly how to translate not plowing crops under into filling the bellies of people who just need tiding over until this virus crisis is licked, but taking inspiration from folks like Chef Andres, I know if the will existed we could find a way to do it.

That's the kind of thinking we should want in government. And the sort of thing I think government can make happen on a meaningful scale--but which shouldn't stop food relief groups, local governments, etc. from trying to manage, because I think the crisis is still unfolding, and future food shortages could drive inflation and just some really fucked-up realities. Basically, capitalism Venezuela. I could be wrong about that part, but I am not wrong about feeding the people and subsidizing the farmers. We all need to eat and we all need to take care of one another when things are rough. We are all in this together.

That is what makes a nation great.

It's a Clearly a Budget. It's got Lots of Numbers in it.*

"We stand by the numbers," Trump budget director says of $2,000,000,000,000 error that uses same money twice. https://t.co/iSU10e0wy3 pic.twitter.com/jeIdJlFumX

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) May 24, 2017

You can say a lot of terrible things about the Trump budget, but the bottom line is: They (Trump and Ryan and Mulvaney--oh, lots of folks) don't care. Is it based on a mathematical error? They don't care. Is it going to cut Social Security and Medicaid? They don't care. Is it actually going to add to the debt because they can't do math and Trump doesn't hire the best people? Is it sheer misery encoded in a document that nickel-and-dimes away basic decency?

Pfft!

They don't care! And they meant to do it like that. So there!

*Title courtesy of President George W. Bush.

Know Your Class War: Freddie Gray's Neighborhood

(This picture, from this post, sums up the question: "What is important in our lives?" If there are cities with "ghost blocks" like this, where every house is boarded up, what does that say to the people who live in close proximity to such blocks? What do those residents feel walking down such a weirdly dead area? What would their conception of the future look like?)

At Crooks & Liars, Karoli has written a most excellent piece regarding Freddie Gray's shadowed start in life, from premature birth to childhood development poisoned by lead, and surrounded by poverty. We know that exposure to toxic chemicals and substances like lead are a damaging part of poverty, robbing people of IQ points and years of life expectancy. The exposure to lead, specifically, has been associated with criminal incidents, with might help explain, if not totally excuse, Gray's rap sheet.

Know Your Class War: Your Brain on Poverty

A recent study has found that children in poverty have smaller brains than children raised in better economic circumstances. I think we can be fairly certain that malnutrition plays a big role in the underdevelopment of brain function and size in children, and that epigenetic factors like the stresses of poverty (and the stress of a child's parents), factor into this dismaying discovery. 

This is why I border on fury with these debates on food assistance in a country where one in five kids last year were on food assistance. (I touched briefly on how almost Puritanical new Kansas welfare regs seem to be in my last post near the end). People who are against government food assistance seem to think that going to bed hungry builds character and turns people into go-getters. What it actually does is cause developmental delays in children and set them up for continued set-backs as an adult, if not encourage generation to generation poverty. When I see a scheme to restrict the kinds of food purchased with food stamps by eliminating classes of healthful proteins like fish and steak (like cans of tuna? skirts steaks? those aren't luxury items), I simply imagine an actual hostility towards the people on this kind of assistance. There is actually little abuse in these programs at all, and if a parent wants to treat their toddler to fishsticks, some high and mighty state legislator shouldn't considering it a sumptuary violation.

Also consider, a lot of people receiving food assistance do work, they just don't make enough to make rent, utilities, and still feed themselves. Is anyone at all confused about food being the fuel humans need to work? So if there really is a bias against food handouts, wouldn't the proper solution be making work pay enough that people could eat decently on their wages?

But it is something to think about. It makes you wonder--or it doesn't--when people who rail against the unfairness of something like the estate tax to the children of the wealthy on one hand, want to cut back on the food going into the mouths of the poor on the other. And that is why I call these blog posts: "Know Your Class War".

I'm on Team Gwyneth Tried.

A lot of articles regarding Gwyneth Paltrow's attempt at the SNAP challenge are being pretty snarky about her quest only lasting about four days. But I want to go ahead and agree with this article that starts out Team Gwyneth--because she tried.

Ok. She comes from successful people and has been food-privileged her whole life. I don't think we need to stand and wonder about how she didn't know beforehand how difficult it was to feed oneself on the cheap--she has simply never had to do it. It's one thing to know what you know--and (I know this is an awkward way of saying it) it's really hard to know what you don't know. Unless you grew up knowing from dollar stores, discount bins, the brilliance of cheap meat slow-cooked and used as flavoring, and the necessity of eating lots and lots of noodles, where exactly do you go to find this out? Because some of us learned from our mothers and grandmothers--how to turn $3-4 worth of chicken thighs and a smattering of cabinet staples into meat you could do for dinner one night and sandwiches a time or two later, or why the basis of casseroles and hotdish all over the country begin from essentially, macaroni and cheese. That cookbook is word-of-mouth, not necessarily available at any store.

She didn't know. She has been about healthy eating and didn't know whole food eating is costly. Cheap food is prepared foods sometimes, and also pretty starchy, salty, and sugary. She wouldn't have known to compromise.

Bedbugs and Bread Bags

Sometimes I think us East Coasters are a little sort-changed when it comes to the SOTU speech and the rebuttals--it's late by the time all the coverage is done. I have to get up for my paying gig the next day, and I usually have to get to bed before I've been able to properly ruminate on the President's speech, let alone the rebuttal. Especially not if there are five rebuttals.

What is a blogger to make of five rebuttals from the opposition party? Given that there's an "official" GOP response, I have to guess that the "takes" from different "rebuttals" have to be taken individually, on their own merits, and not view them cumulatively. I mean--would that be fair--five against one? (Well, yeah. I did think Obama did a heckuva job. Easily worth about five of those other speeches.)

See, I'm not what you'd call a pro, like Ron "No 'I' in Leadership, well, except that one" Fournier. And the benefit of blogging for seven years is that my regulars pretty much know where I stand on the major points President Obama brought up (raising the minimum wage--for it, equal pay for women--for it, addressing climate change--for it, land wars in the middle east--against'em), so I just feel like a point by point of the SOTU itself is pointless. In general, he looked more at home giving the speech this year and his zinger about winning two elections himself took some of that expectation that Dems losing the midterms overall would leave him "checked out" and lame-ducking it until January 2017 away. He's still "all in" as far as I can tell. But that's just my opinion.