Yes, America will once again quietly queue up in bread lines

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.

Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can't afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they're down. (Barbara Ehrenreich, “How America turned poverty into a crime,” Salon, 9 August 2011)

The Coming Explosion...

When the number and desperation of people at the bottom of the economic ladder reach critical mass, there will be a revolution in this country that will put all others to shame. We are armed to the teeth, and there aren't anywhere near enough police and national guard to quell mass riots, nor is there any assurance that our demonized and demoralized public authorities would be willing to shoot down people by the hundreds or thousands. They might just join in and turn those guns on their exploiters.

Think it can't happen here? Think that Americans in the 21st century will quietly queue up in bread lines as they did in the 1930s?

The thin veneer of civilization is wearing very very thin. Time for those in power to get serious about improving the lot of everyday people, or ignore same at their dire peril. (michaelira)

michaelira

Re: Think it can't happen here? Think that Americans in the 21st century will quietly queue up in bread lines as they did in the 1930s?

Yes, this is what some of us think, as:

Economic depressions are motivated internal sacrifices which often kill more people than wars do. Cartoons prior to and during depressions often show sinful, greedy people being sacrificed on altars, and the depressed nation becomes paralyzed politically, unable to take action to reverse the economic downturn. Just as depressed individuals experience little conscious anger--feeling they "deserve to be punished"--so too nations in depressions are characterized by "introverted" foreign policy moods, start fewer military expeditions and are less concerned with foreign affairs. The feeling during depressions is "I should be killed" for my wishes rather than "I want to kill others." Depressions are economic anorexias, where people starve themselves to avoid being eaten up by the Dragon Mother, the maternal vulture of infancy. The nation begins to look for a Phallic Leader with whom they can merge and regain their failed potency and who can protect them against their growing delusional fears of a persecutory mommy. (Lloyd DeMause, Emotional Life of Nations)

Why do you think it'll be different this time around? I'm genuinely curious.

respectfully,

patrick

Link: How America turned poverty into a crime (Salon)

Discussion over the fate of Jolenta, at the Gene Wolfe facebook appreciation site

Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 28 at 10:36 AM Why does Severian make almost no effort to develop sustained empathy for Jolenta -- no interest in her roots, what made her who she was -- even as she features so much in the first part of the narrative? Her fate at the end is one sustained gross happenstance after another... Severian has repeated sex with her while she lay half drugged, an act he argues later he imagines she wanted -- even as he admits it could appear to some, bald "rape" -- but which certainly followed his discussion of her as someone whom he could hate so much it invited his desire to destroy her; Severian abandons her to Dr. Talus, who had threatened to kill her if she insisted on clinging to him; Baldanders robs her of her money; she's sucked at by blood bats, and, finally, left at death revealed discombobulated of all beauty... a hunk of junk, like that the Saltus citizens keep heaped away from their village for it ruining their preferred sense ...

Salon discussion of "Almost Famous" gang-rape scene

Patrick McEvoy-Halston: The "Almost Famous'" gang-rape scene? Isn't this the film that features the deflowering of a virgin -- out of boredom -- by a pack of predator-vixons, who otherwise thought so little of him they were quite willing to pee in his near vicinity? Maybe we'll come to conclude that "[t]he scene only works because people were stupid about [boy by girl] [. . .] rape at the time" (Amy Benfer). Sawmonkey: Lucky boy Pull that stick a few more inches out of your chute, Patrick. This was one of the best flicks of the decade. (sawmonkey, response to post, “Films of the decade: ‘Amost Famous’, R.J. Culter, Salon, 13 Dec. 2009) Patrick McEvoy-Halston: @sawmonkey It made an impression on me too. Great charm. Great friends. But it is one of the things you (or at least I) notice on the review, there is the SUGGESTION, with him being so (rightly) upset with the girls feeling so free to pee right before him, that sex with him is just further presump...

The Conjuring

The Conjuring  I don't know if contemporary filmmakers are aware of it, but if they decide to set their films in the '70s, some of the affordments of that time are going to make them have to work harder to simply get a good scare from us. Who would you expect to have a more tenacious hold on that house, for example? The ghosts from Salem, or us from 2013, who've just been shown a New England home just a notch or two downscaled from being a Jeffersonian estate, that a single-income truck driver with some savings can afford? Seriously, though it's easy to credit that the father — Roger Perron—would get his family out of that house as fast as he could when trouble really stirs, we'd be more apt to still be wagering our losses—one dead dog, a wife accumulating bruises, some good scares to our kids—against what we might yet have full claim to. The losses will get their nursing—even the heavy traumas, maybe—if out of this we've still got a house—really,...

The Invisible Counterpoint

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