Ronald Reagan, the cell phone guy, and the myth of the "deserving" poor

Updated.

Has it even been established that the guy who took Michelle Obama's picture with his cell phone camera when she was serving lunch at Miriam's Kitchen was homeless or there for the free meal?

Jesse Taylor and Alex Koppleman, among others, have explained to the self-righteously indignant why the homeless would need the "luxury" of a cell phone and how they might afford one.

But here's my question.

So what if he wasn't deserving?  Why does it matter if there was one guy there cadging a free meal who could have paid for his own lunch at McDonald's?  What if the guy was an eccentric and miserly rich man who could have bought three squares a day for everybody there for a year?

The world is full of chislers, sharpers, knaves, con men, and thieves.  If one of them shows up at a homeless shelter for soup and a sandwich does that mean that the thousands of others who are broke, desperate, and hungry shouldn't get their meals?

What does it matter if some poor people would be a little less poor if they were a little more responsible?  Why do you care about them?  There are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of Americans who are drowning.  You're going to refuse to throw them a life-line because you suspect that a few of them could swim for it if they put their minds to it?

What is the point of your outrage?

Don't bother to answer.  We know the point.  It's so you don't have to think about those millions.  You focus your self-righteous rage on the one bum and all the helpless and needy go right out of your head.  You get to feel morally superior instead of morally responsible.  You get to congratulate yourself on not being like them instead of having to worry about how to help.

It's an old, old trick.  It was old when Scrooge used it.

You'd be glad to help the truly needy, the really deserving, but it turns out that none of them are deserving.  Look, they have cell phones and televisions and eat steak now and then.  They're practically rich.

This is the poison Richard Nixon spilled into the national spiritual well.  It's the poison Ronald Reagan served up to us in bright, shiny apples.  They both encouraged us to resent other Americans.  Whatever is wrong with your lives, they said, the problem was caused by those others, those undeserving others, the ones who got by cheating what you can't get no matter how hard you work for it.  Nixon identified the cheaters as the intellectuals and the East Coast establishment types and Liberals and black people.  Reagan expanded the cheaters to include all of us.  He taught us to fear and despise ourselves.  Government is the problem?  In America, who is the Government?

We are.

The People.

By teaching us to think of Government as the problem he taught us to think of our collective selves, we the People of the United States, as our own enemies.  He taught us to cut ourselves off from the People, to withdraw into 250 million nations of one.  He taught us to reject the strongest and best tool we have for improving our lives, joining hands with our fellow Americans to solve our problems together as a nation.

Ronald Reagan said a lot of quotable things, most of them vapid and asinine on the face of it, but most of them, even the most vapid and asinine, were said in order to convince us we don't have to care, we don't need each other, other people---other Americans are our main problem.

But not everything he said was vapid and asinine.  Some of it was pure evil.

My favorite was what he said when one of the several recessions that marked his Presidency was hitting farmers in the Midwest especially hard.  Hundreds of family farms were failing.  And Reagan's reaction.

"Well..."

It was all good.  Why?  It weeded out "the inefficient."

All those families ruined, all those lives wrecked.   Don't give it a thought, said the Gipper.  They're not people.  They're not our friends and neighbors.  They're not our fellow Americans.   They're merely the "inefficient."

We, all we individualized, atomized, alienated Numbers One looking out for ourselves, were to be happy to be rid of their inefficiency.  It was holding us back.  Keeping us down.  Taking from us what was rightfully ours.  Help them? 

They don't deserve our sympathy or our help.

If they'd deserved help, they wouldn't have needed it.

They'd have been efficient.

Updated to take another hammer to the myth of Morning in America:  Senoir writer for the Philadelphia Daily news and blogger extraoridinaire Will Bunch's book, Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future is out and at work doing its good.  The Philadelphia Inquirer just gave it a rousing review:

Bunch's book is a lively, overdue, and slashing rejoinder to the lengthening list of pro-Reagan hagiographies that have appeared over the last decade....

Bunch has crafted an intelligent and relentlessly anti-Reagan polemic that succeeds in taking Reagan's presidency down several pegs. Admirers have applauded Reagan for consistently sticking to his anti-big-government convictions, but Bunch shows that Reagan's actual record is much more complicated than conservatives like to admit.

Comments

[policomic]

This is right on the money, Lance. A lot of what the country is suffering through now is the legacy of Reagan: deregulation, fantasy-based economic policies, and the kind of financial Calvinism that says the rich deserve to be even richer, because obviously they deserve it (or else why are they rich in the first place?). But the worst thing the Gipper cursed this country with was exactly what you talk about here: bull-headed hostility to the idea of a common good, and government as an agent of that idea. Reagan didn't invent Americans' anti-government superstition, but he took that know-nothing, crank ideology to the very seat of the government it supposedly disdained, and set America against itself. It's no wonder we've come to our current, desperate state of affairs.

[sfmike]

Thank you for the revisionism. It still makes me sick when right-wingers hold up Ronnie as a saint-like figure. He was just plain evil without even realizing it as you point out, which somehow is even worse than fully self-conscious villains like Dick Cheney (sorry for naming Voldemort but he still hasn't been destroyed).

[Ed D.]

Two things to amplify.

Reagan legitimized greed. He told us that the free market was about self-interest (true) and then narrowed the definition of self interest into strictly monetary terms. Adam Smith told us the pinnacle of self-interest was the love and admiration of the community around you. Wealth is part of that of course, but not all of it or even the larger part of it.

The Prince was advised to not be concerned if the people didn't love him... as long as they don't love each other.

Reagan's main thrust was to cut the people from the government so that the government might be controlled by business. He did a good job. There are a couple of generations of folks who think just that. And they don't get that what is needed now, is their participation. Letters to the editor, calls to the congress persons, talking to the neighbor across the hedge on a Sunday afternoon. That is participatory democracy.

Yes, Lance, you hit it just right.

But I think we also need to lay some of the blame at the feet of Robert McNamara. We got him to apologize for the Vietnam war, but not for the changing of our collective mind set to be dominated by numerical statistics. Not that stats are bad... but they are not the whole picture. Ronnie used that as well, as did the leveraged buyout kings of the 1980's. Uncountable things like quality of product, love of community, the contributions of non-workplace mothers became relatively worthless because they couldn't be quantified. McNamara and his Whiz Kids of WWII are largely responsible for the death of wisdom and real value in the face of numerical analysis. Long term building surrendered to short term profits. And here we are.

[Doghouse Riley]

Well said, sir, but I think you've underestimated Reagan. Banal and asinine, sure. But always at the service of Evil.

[minstrel hussain boy]

yay lance!

Ole! mi amigo!

[John Royce]

You gained a fan with this one, Lance. Excellent points and well said.

It is way past time for the Cons to learn the definition of the word "accountability." Perhaps objective truth will cleanse the Right-wing infection.

America needs to rediscover itself. We DID fight the Right in WWII ... that is common knowledge, correct?

[Belvoir]

Extremely well said. The past 8 years, the way the nation has been divided and at each others' throats- where did that all start? I've read Nixonland, for sure, but Saint Ronnie seems to have made it a national ethos. I've got mine Jack, and all you teachers, cops, unions, nurses, firefighters and air-traffic controllers... parasites all!

The exaltation of greed, of begrudging the poor and working class the meagre benefits they got.. Reagan was the start of something quite malevolent in our society, a deliberate fraying of our social contract here.

[nobody]

My cell phone cost $20 and every three months I buy an airtime card for another $20. Given how many pay phones I see each day here in Austin, TX (for the record. they're all gone), would one of the damned pundits please explain why my cell phone is a 'luxury'? Lance, I hate these people but not, at least, to the point where the hate is destroying me. Not yet, at least... (If the wrong wing had 25% of a functioning brain they'd realize that the ability to plug in a charger for it is far more significant, but they do not yet they still dominate the media?) EXPLETIVE(S) DELETED

[Mike the Mad Biologist]

Ronald Reagan was no FDR. FDR:

"Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."