By: PAUL S. MARCHAND
Let’s blame the poor for being poor.
After that, we’ll tax the poor.
We’ll tax the poor till they have no more.
And then we’ll blame the poor even more.
It may sound like a bad riff on a Dr. Seuss story, but it’s actually the new political strategy being pushed by the American right.
There’s a kind of curiously unhinged, frothing-at-the-mouth quality to the way in which the American right has taken out after the poor and middle class in this country. There certainly seems to be a disposition among the American right to want to turn on its head the lyric from Ten Years After’s classic song “I’d Love to Change the World” “Feed the rich, tax the poor, till there are no poor no more.”
Commies. Fleabaggers. Freeloaders. Losers. Malcontents. Mooches. Socialists. Scum. Traitors. Troublemakers.
We shouldn’t be surprised, only disgusted, to see defenders of the One Percent lashing out with such vitriolic words at America’s middle and working class, and particularly at those millions of Americans who are either living in poverty, on the brink of poverty, or in daily insecurity of their own economic position and status. America’s One Percenters and their water-carriers in the media and in Congress use, and encourage their followers to use, bullying and hateful words most of their parents would not have tolerated from them as children.
If ever we needed proof that the American right is wrong, we have it now.
Perhaps that unhinged, frothing-at-the-mouth anger betokens -- at least among the more perspicacious One Percenters-- a realization that the American middle and working classes have grown tired of being despoiled in the interests of a very few wealthy individuals and corporations. Perhaps a few of the One Percenters have begun to realize that the days when the Ninety Nine Percent would quietly acquiesce to being treated as an ATM are over. When a company like General Electric pays no income tax at all, the Ninety Nine Percent’s irritation (to put it mildly) becomes understandable.
Certainly, behind the anger of the American right and their water-carriers should lie a real sense of worry. Bullies often get worried when their targets begin to hit back. Like the too-often bullied gay kid in school who one day rounds on his attacker and breaks his nose, a majority of the American public is becoming increasingly disinclined to tolerate the misconduct of the favored few at the expense of the middle and working class many.
Every movement, it seems, has its own series of turning points. Like the 2011 World Series, whose turning point came in the Cardinals’ miraculous bottom-of-the-ninth rally in Game VI, the Occupy a movement’s turning point may very well have come when Scott Olsen, a twice-deployed Marine veteran, suffered a fractured skull at the hands of the Oakland Police.
For in that moment, millions of Americans who might otherwise have been inclined to dismiss the Occupy Movement as nothing more than a bunch of social undesirables throwing temper tantrums were forcibly confronted with the fact that the Occupy Movement looks a lot more like America than the right wing and too many of the mainstream media would have us believe. When a decorated Marine veteran becomes the victim of officially-sanctioned violence, Americans sit up and take notice.
Shortly after the injuries to Scott Olsen became national news, a sometime constituent of mine, himself a Marine veteran, observed to me that of all the people the Oakland police could have hit and injured, it had to be a twice-deployed, gainfully employed Marine veteran. Strike one. Strike two. Strike three. As my former constituent noted to me, the Marines are perhaps most insular and clannish of all our armed services. “Screw with one Marine,” my former constituent said to me, “and you’ve screwed with the entire Corps, living, dead, or yet to be born.”
What millions of Americans are now confronting is a disturbing reality that at least part of our social structure seems quite prepared to appeal to violence and hatred in order to avert a real conversation about the alarming growth of economic and fiscal inequality in this country. If we are to avert class warfare, there must be a conversation that does not take as its starting point the idea that the poor are taxed too little and the rich too much. The conversation also cannot start from Herman Cain’s wrong premise that the poor are to blame for their condition.
Of course, there have been times in our history when blaming the poor was not merely acceptable, but fashionable. While Herman Cain might have been perfectly happy to live in such a time, he seems to forget that under such a dispensation he himself would have been worse than poor; he would have been a slave. A society that claims to be Judeo-Christian in its values and outlook nevertheless seems astonishingly forgetful of repeated scriptural admonitions showing God’s preferential option for the poor.
Despite the admonitions of Scripture and even of the better angels of our personal natures, blaming the poor and inciting hatred toward them have become all too common in a society which has managed to go altogether too far toward re-creating and glorifying the inequalities of France’s ancien régime, and which refuses to find any lessons in the collapse thereof . Like Talleyrand’s Bourbons, the right-wing mockers and abusers of the middle class and the poor seem to have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. The views expressed herein are his own.
