I caught holy hell a couple years ago for suggesting that Jane and Joe Citizen upbraid the next kid they see lookin’ like a fool, wearing his pants on the ground in foolish homage to prison culture. I took my own advice and lived to tell about it. Bonus: The kid hiked up his trousers without F-bombing the store.
This being Madison, I was accused of racism most foul, that all-purpose conversation stopper employed by people who have lost the debate. Racial minorities form the base of the liberal food chain, essential fodder for the government class. Because your scrivener has a creamy-white outer layer, a condition I blame on my parents, he is told to defer to carnival barkers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson but to ignore Thomas Sowell and Alan West, whose chocolaty goodness is contaminated by their red-blooded conservatism.
Almost 50 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act (thanks to Republican support), the recipe for success in America today reads the same whether printed in black, white, yellow, or red: get up in the morning ready for study or work. Obey the law, delay gratification, stay clean and sober, respect your neighbor, keep your word, and subscribe to In Business magazine. Yes, government has a role: build roads and bridges, protect life and property, encourage entrepreneurship, promote saving and investment, protect the shores, and succor the truly helpless (rather than the indolent). Otherwise, I’m with the Tea Party: read the Constitution.
All of which poses an existential threat to the “you didn’t build that, the government did” crowd. Which is why Barack Obama and his people suggest that Mitt Romney is a felon for the crime of success. They want us to think that he’s got our money, that we are all victims – victims of the 1%, Wall Street, the banks, the Koch Brothers, Fox News, WMC, various Fitzgeralds, and the Waukesha county clerk.
In the Malthusian telling favored by The Progressive magazine, Reagan’s shining city on a hill is but a mirage. The U.S. of A. is just one GOP Road Map to the Future removed from a new Gehenna. Young Julia would be whoring in Babylon without the government-contracted services of Planned Parenthood. Unemployment would top 8% for a record … Umm, never mind that last one.
Barack Obama has become the transformative president to which he aspired. He has taken us from a nation of patriots to a hoped-for re-election plurality of victims – not just black people but Hispanics, gays, women, government employees, old folks, teachers, college students, and a particular unmarried and overweight mother of four in Miami, Fla.
“All she was talking about was her $646 check, which was coming in three days, which she needed to buy more food,” said former Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jeff Greene, in full victim alert. One of her children had been shot, one was in jail, the other two are gang bangers, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal reports.
“It never seems to dawn on Greene,” Taranto observed, “that this is what happens to people when government resolves to take care of them – that dependency is more poison than elixir … (caused by) a government that has made promises it has neither the competence nor the resources to keep.”
Comedian turned social reformer Bill Cosby made the same point in the book he co-authored a few years ago, Come on, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors. Waiting on Big Gummint for salvation hasn’t ended poverty so much as it has incubated social pathology.
“From victim’s to victors?” Them’s fightin’ words to dependency-peddlers like socialist scribbler Barbara Ehrenreich. She countered that Cosby was a “billionaire bash(ing) poor blacks.”
After all, what would a billionaire know about success?
“Certain people tell us that we are picking on the poor,” Cosby observed. “Many of those who accuse us are scholars and intellectuals, upset that we are not blaming everything on white people as they do. Well, blaming only the system keeps certain black people in the limelight, but it also keeps the black poor wallowing in victimhood.
“We have to take our neighborhoods back,” Cosby challenges. “We have to go in there and do it ourselves. We saw what happened in New Orleans when people waited for the government to help. Governments are things. Governments don’t care. People care.”
That’s not a black message of hope and change, that’s an up-by-the-bootstraps American message.
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