Silly politics silly nostalgia

Working backwards, Joe Kline of Time Magazine, said on the Meet the Press this morning that the Health Care Bill has a provision in it that requires “small” business owners to provide space for women to breast feed/pump। He thought this was silly, because his dad owned a small business and would of told the women to use his office. Awe, Joey gots a nice daddy. And if more people were like him we might not just need a government at all. Right?

Well the sad fact is that women, pregnant women, and women with children are discriminated across the board. In this country once you become pregnant you are on the road to disability. Most employers don’t even offer maternity leave. So I’m sorry Joe, healthcare reform might have some funny provisions, but we can’t all be your daddy.

However, Peggy Noonan doesn’t want to be your mommy either. Noonan lamented that for the first time in her lifetime (ooohhhh) there is real prospect that children won’t do better than their parents. I’m sure those older to me can attest to other times that this has been true, in fact I remember as one of the platforms that Bill Clinton ran on in 1990s. But furthermore, do we need to strive to do better than our parents. Doesn’t this affectively say that our parents were some kind of failure? And what do we mean by better?

My parents spread the middle-class economic gap, and I hope to land somewhere in the middle. But that does not constitute better in any real way. I asked my students that other day to define success, and one said, “the ability to take care of others.” My parents have definitely done that. Taking care of others does require money, but it requires much more than that, stuff that is not related to money. In fact, money often corrupts the desire to take care of others. This could be because gaining money often requires for you to think of yourself in competition with others, as oppose to community.

I think that the rap group Chiddy Bang says it best, “I know I’m privileged because while I’m in the booth, my cousin is in the village.”

Stroking

I’m sure by now that most of you have seen Colbert’s testimony to congress। His performance was spot on as they say – bitting satire at some of its finest। But what was even funnier, or shall I say, what congress found funnier, was their own questioning to the panel of testimonials, which included Carol Swain Professor of Political Science and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University and Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriguez.

Reductive reasoning and pigeon holding seemed to be what is taught and fostered by our congress। Not to mention a sense of superiority that dismissed everyone on the other side of their bench. One line of questioning went something like this to Colbert from senator Lamar Smith (R-TX), who also recently said to Rupert Murdoch, “Gosh Fox News is great.”

‘how many workers did you work with that day’

Colbert looks to Rodriguez and confirms ‘about 100’

‘Do you know how many were legal or illegal working’

‘I didn’t ask them for their papers’

‘So you don’t know’

‘No’

‘So since you didn’t ask, we can assume that most were legal’

What the fuck। The line of questioning, and part of the reason for Colbert’s testimony, was precisely to say that Americans don’t do this work, nor would they willing do this work.

It is this reductive, self & national aggrandizing logic that is killing us. Even senators from the “left”, who were primary African American on this sub-committee, held the same arrogance and dismissiveness. It was sickening on all fronts.