While reading it, I kept thinking: how did things come to this pass? How did we allow profit to become the purpose of human existence, and companies to literally own us (so many people Ms. Ehrenreich meets are shattered by their loss of self-worth. Their personal value is completely caught up in what they do, and when they don't "do" anything....). How did we come to accept that no one should help us out? Where did populism go?
Who built the highway to Baton Rouge?
Who put up the hospital and built you
schools?
Who looks after shit-kickers like you?
The Kingfish do
Randy Newman's words for Huey "The Kingfish" Long, of Louisiana. I keep hearing those words, with the disaster in Louisiana, and while reading Ms. Ehrenreich's book I kept thinking: who talks like that now? What politician would dare say such things? I mean, Harold Raines is right, "The populism of Huey Long was financially corrupt, but when it came to the welfare of people, it was caring." Whatever happened to simple caring as an expectation of government leaders?:
Why weep or slumber America
Land of brave and true
With castles and
clothing and food for all
All belongs to you
Ev'ry man a king ev'ry
man a king
For you can be a millionaire
But there's something belonging
to others
There's enough for all people to share
When it's sunny June
and December too
Or in the winter time or spring
There'll be peace
without end
Ev'ry neighbor a friend
With ev'ry man a king
That's a campaign song written by Huey Long. Sounds like socialism today, doesn't it? But awhat's really, at bottom, wrong with it? Why isn't there "enough for all people to share?" Especially now. Especially in New Orleans, and Mississippi, and Alabama. Instead, we have Michael Chertoff saying things like this: "The critical thing was to get people out of there before the disaster," he said on NBC's "Today" program. "Some people chose not to obey that order. That was a mistake on their part." You have to actually see that in a newspaper account, to believe it. This Administration is absolutely without a clue.
Raines is right; and David Brooks is right: disaster has a political dimension. Disaster exposes things. Barbara Ehrenreich speculates that the social and financial disaster being visited on an American middle-class that "did everything right," and still ends up unemployed and impoverished, might eventually bring a reckoning, although she isn't sure when. Harold Raines thinks the policies exemplified by the current Bush administration, will surely bring a reckoning now. He puts his finger on the problem in his last sentence: "The church-going cultural populism of George Bush has given the United States an administration that worries about the house of Saud and the welfare of oil companies while the poor drown in their attics and their sons and daughters die on foreign deserts. "
"Church-going," of course, is a pointless activity. It's a social practice, and little more. The destruction of New Orleans won't bring an end to it, but if it ends, for a while, the death grip it has on our culture, that will be one good thing to come out of this disaster. It is not, and never has been, "church-going" that we needed in this country: it is Christ-believing, Christ-action. We have too willingly sacrificed appearance for substance. The lesson of the Hebrew prophets is one we have to learn over and over again: not that God is vengeful (that is a caricature), but that our decisions have consequences. Deal justly with the widow and the orphan, the prophets said, and all will be well with you. Ignore their needs, and your society will not stand long.
Even David Brooks seems to understand that, or at least have some inkling. Ultimately, it's all about justice. In the case of New Orleans, the lesson is an object lesson, this time. And object lessons are very hard for people to ignore.
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