According to today's Waterloo Courier, reports of child abuse were up 11% in 2009, a rise that is attributed to the familial stress induced by the economic downturn. This news comes on the nheals of Jim Bunning's solo filibuster on extending unemployment benefits to the millions of Americans out of work for a year more more. In the remarks of Jon Kyl, his Republican colleague from AZ, Bunning has a real point: "unemployment insurance provides a strong disincentive to look for work." He's likely serious, since this is only an extreme version of a very American tendency to either consciously refuse, or unonsciously fail, to connect the dots between distal events in the socio-economic environment and their personal lives.
In a sense, isn't this the "rationale" for Republican opposition to a "government takeover" of a healthcare policy that, they really believe, belongs in the hands of the private sector. Government "intervention" --though it exists in the VA and in Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP -- in the health of Americans serves to enable obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, refusal to accept personal responsibility for keeping oneself well. I honestly believe that this sensibility is sincere: that this as other cases of "American exceptionalism" is predicated on the "cultural" premise that not only do we NOT have obligations to provide a safety-net or floor of universally-met human needs, but to do so interferes with the Darwinian instinctfor survival. Those that have what it takes to survive need no one to help them survive and thrive; only the weak, the losers, and the unfit need this help. If we help them we do a disservice to Nature's Law of "surival of the fittest." Thoughts?
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You could contribute that sentiment to Bunning's mission to reduce the deficit by a miniscule fraction and cut UE benefits for millions of Americans who actually are supposed to have the federal government serve them. Kyl's comments crystallize the Republican ideology on providing any kind of social safety net.
ReplyDeleteI would use Gladwell's The Tipping Point to illustrate how little we realize (or care to admit) that the context of the situations we are in (recessions, mass uncertainty/frustration) can influence our behaviors. Domestic violence times over has been proven to increase when the male head of the household is out work. Financial problems are one of the main sources of maritial fighting & divorce.
American exceptionalism thought chalks all that up to "That won't be me", which is so disappointing and un-productive.
Disappointing and unproductive -- if I may risk sounding like a self-serving egotist -- to the fair-minded and sociotropic among us. But to the Karl-Rovian and Lee-Atwaterian super-partisans among us, this "that won't be me" form of American exceptionalism is a windfall for those unembarrassed to practice the politics of fear, division, and demonization of "the other". In this politics, the healthy, wealthy, and, yes, white find their Limbaughs, Becks and Hannity's who are too willing to do their puppeteers' bidding by agressively yet often in coded form calling out the weak, lazy, and, yes, typically non-white elements that threaten to pollute and degrade "true Americanism." To fair-minded notions of American's real promise, this is hardly productive; but if you doubt that it's politically profitable, pick up a copy of Rove's book (if you don't mind paying for it in ways beyond the costs in wrought on the Republic for the past decade). What is most incredible in this entire story to me is that the Rove-Atwater Republican Playbook for winning elections is only about five pages long: it's slogans and tactics are few and they are on such excessive, crude display in the current "debate" on HCR, now targeting the "parliamentary trick" of reconciliation as if the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, the prescription-drug addition to Medicare and a vast array of "tax expenditures" constituting policy and not just budget measures were never enacted by Republican simple majorities. Democrats, ever the airheads or spineless, tip-toe up to such tactics with no sense of history or no sense of who is really hurt by such cowardly aversion to doing the right thing.
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