_Random Family_

I've mentioned _Random Family_ by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc a few times in other posts, but it came to mind again today as I was reading a couple of NYT articles (about which more later).

_Random Family_ follows two women in the poorest part of the Bronx for about 20 years. It covers the people who circle in and out of their lives, their children, their mothers (not so much their fathers; fathers aren't a big part of this world), their doomed and floundering affairs with doomed and floundering men. It's clear-sighted about the weaknesses in their characters and the poor choices that they make, and they make a bunch of poor choices.

The first time I read the book, I was in a pretty uncharitable frame of mind, because when you spend all day every day dealing with people like this in some of their worst moments (i.e., after they get deservedly locked up for doing bad things -- and it's to LeBlanc's credit that she makes it clear these people get deservedly locked up for doing bad things; ain't no "but he's really innocent!" excuse-making here), it's hard to look at these lives of repeated bad decisions (and they are all lives of repeated bad decisions) and not want to yell "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, WHY YOU KEEP DOING THIS."

But the second time through (and in no small part due to Peter's prodding for me to pay more attention to the surrounding factors), it became pretty clear why they kept making terrible decisions: because there weren't any good decisions that these people could make. There's only "bad" and "worse."

The people in _Random Family_ are just people. They each have some gifts: one woman is uncommonly beautiful and spirited; another is warm and open-hearted and devoted to her family. But the environment in which they live does not allow them to make good use of those gifts, and it takes advantage of their weaknesses relentlessly. It punishes them viciously for every misstep, offers them no way out, and ensures that any small mistake keeps them locked down in poverty for life.

The beautiful woman never has the chance to parlay her looks into a trophy marriage or modeling career. Her world doesn't include the kind of people who could make that happen for her, and (due to terrible role models and perverse societal incentives) she doesn't have the skills to sustain a lasting relationship anyway. The one rich man she meets (who immediately snatches her up, because she's the kind of girl you snatch up) is a violent, abusive drug dealer who eventually gets locked up and takes her down with him. But there never was a better prince that this Cinderella could have picked.

The kindhearted woman never has the chance to build a close and loving family, although it's clear that in other circumstances she would have been one of those cozy lovey-dovey homemakers whose Pinterest makes you want to stab things. Instead, the family she actually has -- a temperamental and drug-abusing mom, various unreliable boy-men, and children she can't afford or care for -- drag her down into self-mutilating madness and keep her trapped forever, because she loves them too much to ever say "no" and cut them dead.

Her sister does, and though the sister's only a minor character in the book, she's still pretty instructive. The sister is the closest possible thing to an ice-cold Ayn Randian golem of self-interest, and she barely makes it to the ranks of the struggling working poor, and it takes a tremendous psychological toll on both her and her husband to get that far. People are not meant to live in a way that turns loving social relationships into liabilities. People are not meant to choose between affection and survival. If you have to make that choice constantly for years, it eats your soul. And even then, even if you have the wherewithal to make that trade, lack of skills and schooling will ensure you only make it to the next-up rank of the exploited.

The one flaw in _Random Family_ is that it doesn't really talk about the schools available in this setting. You have to read Jonathan Kozol's _Savage Inequalities_ or a comparable exploration of underfunded (and de facto segregated) schools to get that important part of the picture. In _Random Family_, people just drop out of school casually and it seems like a total bonehead move (WHY YOU DON'T TAKE THE AVAILABLE ROAD OUT); it's only when you see how dire the available schools are, and how illusory their promise of escape-through-education actually is, that you realize "oh, that's not a way out after all." There's no reason to stay in school when the school offers you nothing useful.

Anyway, I thought about this all again when I was reading the latest Edsall thing on "What Does It Take to Climb Up the Ladder?" and, as a companion piece, this profile on three Kansas kids weighing their college choices.

And I've been thinking about it in connection with all those pieces talking about the "diseases of despair" (Case and Deaton have a new set of findings out; surprise!, less-educated white people are dying even more than they thought previously) and the hollowing of poor white communities by opiate addiction and family dysfunction, and how the pathologies of the urban inner city are moving out to those communities.

I have considerably less sympathy for the plight of heroin-addicted suburban people, mostly because they're still one generation removed from middle-class stability and are therefore at a point where it's still fair to talk about "character" and "personal responsibility" as factors here. If you grew up in a stable, loving household and you had the opportunity to go to school in a meaningful way and not everybody in your personal universe was a dead end of dysfunction your whole entire life, yeah, in my view that choice kind of is on you. You had better options. You just didn't pick them.

But the fact remains that these people's kids won't have that choice. These people's kids are going to grow up in a universe that in some respects looks more like the one in _Random Family_ than the one their parents had. Not totally -- they'll still have some advantages and some escape routes that wouldn't be available to people in the Bronx in 1992 -- but close enough that it's a similar conversation.

What that conversation needs to be, I think, is how you offer ladders up and out. How do you make good choices feasible? Because "character" and "personal responsibility" stop being adequate answers as soon as we start talking about children born into homes that won't teach those things and communities that won't reward them. "Character" and "personal responsibility" aren't answers that can save anybody in _Random Family._ Increasingly, they're not going to save the opiate-addicted ruins of the formerly middle-class.

It's a good book. I recommend reading it if you want a clear and honest picture of people often subject to stereotype as lazy welfare grifters. The fact is, they're often frustrating to read about and they do make a bunch of terrible decisions -- but it's useful to question what decisions they could possibly make that would be better, and whether it's truly reasonable to expect kids (because they're usually kids when they make the first big mistake that crimps all future options) to do better, and what We As A Society might do to improve things.

I also think it's pretty key to understanding how somebody like me can simultaneously be a Big Government Liberal and spend all day hitting people with sticks for doing bad things. Those two things aren't really in conflict, but you might need to read something like _Random Family_ to see why.

"Speak English"

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look! -- it is too beautiful to eat.

Then the woman and the swan sailed across an ocean many thousands of li wide, stretching their necks toward America. On her journey she cooed to the swan: "In America I will have a daughter just like me. But over there nobody will say her worth is measured by the loudness of her husband's belch. Over there nobody will look down on her, because I will make her speak only perfect American English. And over there she will always be too full to swallow any sorrow! She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan -- a creature that became more than was hoped for."

But when she arrived in the new country, the immigration officials pulled her swan away from her, leavning the woman fluttering her arms and with only one swan feather for a memory. And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

Now the woman was old. And she had a daughter who grew up speaking only English and swallowing more Coca-Cola than sorrow. For a long time now the woman had wanted to give her daughter the single swan feather and tell her, "This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar and carries with it all my good intentions." And she waited, year after year, for the day she could tell her daughter this in perfect American English.

-- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club.

I have read that prologue more times than I can count, more times than I can remember, and it always makes me cry.

When people tell immigrants to "speak English, like real Americans" -- or any variation of that same small and ugly sentiment -- what I hear in their words is the fear of the ignorant. I hear a deep and defensive ignorance, a fear of admitting that ignorance, a fear that would crush newcomers more worldly and knowledgeable into the same cramped little horizons so that no one might stand taller or see more than they do.

I hear people who know very little and recognize, somewhere deep, that they know very little, and who are afraid to let others know more. Who have only one language, and fear the not understanding that comes with confronting the limits of one's own knowledge, and whose answer is not to try to learn more, but to take that learning away from others.

I feel this because they took that language and that learning away from me. I should have grown up bilingual. I should have grown up speaking Korean as easily as I do English, learning words and rhythm with the ease that comes only from hearing those words and feeling those rhythms while you're too young to understand anything but the sound.

But I didn't, because my mother, like so many immigrants, came here and was told that anything other than perfect American English was less than. Less than worthy. Less than really, truly American.

So she didn't teach it to me. Didn't risk a daughter who might have some kind of an accent, however slight, and come out sounding different to match looking different (which was hard enough, at times, because of course the same ignorance that prioritizes "talking American" also prioritizes "looking American" and defines that with the same crippled and crippling racism). And so I lost a knowledge that should have been my birthright before I was old enough to comprehend. I lost stories and histories that can't be told in another language without losing their essence, because ideas take on the shape of words and forcing them into other forms must, always, alter their meaning.

And my mother remains self-conscious, some forty years after coming to this country, that her own English is not perfect American English. Which is the other side of the cruelty, of course: that it imposes the shame of inadequacy on people who have done far more to accommodate themselves to a strange and alien culture than the people mouthing this idiocy can ever understand.

Nobody wants to struggle with language. Nobody wants to be limited in understanding the world they occupy. When I was ten years old my parents put me in a German school in Germany. I didn't speak German. I didn't speak much at all, actually, for the three years I was in that school, because while my classmates were unfailingly kind and encouraging, and Germany at that time period and in that social class had nothing like the grotesque chauvinism of "speak English," it is still unpleasant to be a bumbling foreigner who mangles syntax and enunciation and can't understand the simplest things. It is embarrassing. Breaking through that barrier requires a courage that few people possess, and that I certainly didn't have at that age. I likely wouldn't have it now.

But of course that's the point. The point of telling people to "speak English" is not, actually, to encourage them to speak English. It's to tell them "shut up, you aren't wanted here." It's to say "you don't belong, leave, go away." It is to denigrate their efforts as never good enough, their accents as badges of shameful difference, their children as somehow un-American if they know too much.

And it's to say "I have only this one language (barely), and I'm conscious of the deficiency (barely), and I do not wish to be reminded that someone else -- someone of a different color -- might know more. I do not wish to be made self-conscious of my ignorance. So I will take away the knowledge that you have, make you embarrassed about passing it down to your descendants, and do my utmost to ensure that your future generations remain as stupid as mine."

That is what that is. It is the perpetuation of ignorance because of inadequacy. It is the use of shame as a cudgel to separate others from their heritage and knowledge.

It is stupidity wielded as an imperative, and it deserves scorn.

Melania, Nude Modeling, and Misogyny

Yesterday I put up a Facebook post that said this:

I deeply dislike the line of criticism that argues that Melania isn't "classy" because she took some nudie pics as a model.

The Birth of Venus is a nudie pic. The Venus de Milo is a nudie sculpture. Marilyn Monroe was the first-ever Playboy centerfold. Those are all pretty classy things! (Also, I will fight you if you want to argue about Marilyn.)

There are other criticisms one can make of Melania (although, frankly, I'm not a huge fan of those, either), but the nude modeling one particularly annoys me because hey guys, we're supposed to be the enlightened feminist body-positive side out here, and that there is some straight-up misogynist prudery.

Defining "classy" as something that exists in opposition to art or photography or (gasp!) the female body is, in my opinion, not great. I'm not surprised when the right does it; that's what they do. I am, however, pretty disappointed whenever I see it from the crew that's supposed to be about smashing the patriarchy. Because that right there? That is holding patriarchy up high.

Not too surprisingly, it turned out to be a pretty hot-button topic that got a bunch of comments and some spirited discussion. DJT and the people around him are a topic about which lots of people feel strongly; the tangled knot of sex/nudity/decency is another topic about which lots of people feel strongly. For the most part, I felt the discussion was thoughtful, insightful, and as measured as any quasi-political discussion can reasonably be these days, although a few times I had to clarify that my intention was not to defend Melania as a person (my purpose with this discussion was and is to use her as an interesting and challenging prism through which to approach, question, and examine these ideas, not to defend her life choices or hold her up as a figure of admiration), and as with any fast-paced conversation on the internet, a few of the finer points probably got lost in the avalanche all around.

But, again, for the most part I thought it was a good and useful discussion, especially given that the original post was semi-flippant and not too obviously a springboard for a serious examination of these issues. I think that the intersections between modesty and frankness, "decency" and how its varied interpretations intersect with feminism, celebration vs. exploitation of female sexuality, etc., are not discussed often or candidly enough for many people to have clearly separated out why they feel as they do, what they think the salient differences really are between art and porn, moral and immoral, "classy" and degraded/-ing, and so on. Almost everyone has strong feelings about at least some of the issues tangled up in that ball, but few people have really taken the time to figure out why.

And since DJT and his coterie are very public figures, we're all familiar with them and all have at least a basic idea of where the conversation might begin. Accordingly, the current First Lady provides (in my opinion) a valuable opportunity to discuss some of these ideas.

Anyway, things trucked along for a while and then one particular comment thread took a turn that just happened to hit on a lot of the reasons that I made the original post in the first place (namely, my belief that stigmatizing women's sexuality has a lot of negative ripple effects for a lot of people [mostly, although not exclusively, women] throughout society, and that for this reason it is advisable for us all to consider carefully what we wish to criticize in this sphere and why).

I'm indebted to this commenter, because when I saw this comment I wanted to go "YES! THAT'S IT! THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS TRYING TO PUSH BACK AGAINST HERE." But I didn't, because it was around 4 am at that point and I was pretty brain-blasted after a long day at work and I had to take the dogs out. So, instead, I filed it away to write a blog post about later, and now here we are.

Here's the comment that struck me so hard (lightly edited to remove the first and last sentence and insert some paragraph breaks, otherwise reproduced as originally posted):

You can't have it both ways. You can't drive down the street without seeing young girls in shorts up the crack of their ass, boobs hanging out and 4 lbs of makeup. You have music calling them bitches and whores. Magazines that pray upon their opinions about their appearance. We have young girls getting pregnant that are 12 years old and others giving blow jobs. Our society sexualize women from the day they enter the world. 

Most of us would prefer to be valued for character, our heart, our mind. We rant and rave because we are paid less, our ideas and intellect aren't valued. We don't want to be just sex objects. We don't want that to be what young girls learn or how they see themselves. On the other hand you have women like Melania who help teach those young girls exactly what is important. If you are sexy enough, pretty enough, crafty enough, and know how to use your body then men will want you. And if men want you they will take care of you. You can try but you can't separate Melania from that message. 

We all know how this works. We've all had the doe-eyed, big boobed nitwit at the office. Melania isn't some free spirit forward thinking feminist. She's got the oldest game in the book. Sex sells and as long as there is testosterone it always will.

What strikes me most immediately here is how strongly and (in my reading, although I might well be mistaken) unconsciously the argument grants the continued and unchallenged existence of male supremacy in this world, and therefore proceeds to the conclusion that the "correct" course for women is, presumably (and, again, in my reading) to desexualize themselves. I want to argue against that, but I also want to take a moment to pick apart what I think are the essential underpinnings of this worldview.

The "young girls" who put themselves on display are described in terms that portray them as both victims (prematurely sexualized, manipulated into adopting roles and postures they don't fully understand and whose consequences they cannot appreciate) and sirens (painted and underdressed "with boobs hanging out"). The possibility that they might simply be experimenting with and play-acting at adult roles (as preteens and adolescents are wont to do, and as is necessary for eventual adulthood), as innocently and safely as a girl trying out her mother's high heels and lipstick in her own bedroom, doesn't seem to exist in this scenario. Instead, the outcome that's contemplated is that 12-year-olds will get pregnant and give blowjobs. Wear revealing clothing --> turn into a slut, get knocked up.

Curiously, men are absent and yet ever-present in this scenario. Music calls these girls "bitches and whores." Magazines prey on their insecurities. Our society sexualizes girls from inappropriately young ages. But the fact that (predatory) men do have to be involved somewhere for pregnancies and blowjobs is never called out. The focus is not on them, but on the girls for inappropriately expressing their sexuality. Implicitly, the girls are condemned for not doing enough to protect themselves, or for playing with fire and getting burned, but the fact that the "fire" in this scenario has its own moral agency is not contemplated or questioned. It just is, an elemental and eternal fact of the universe, a natural hazard against which girls have to be prepared to defend themselves (by reining in their own displays and presenting an appropriate demureness, but not by challenging the men around them).

The next two paragraphs exhibit similar assumptions. If women present themselves as sexy, that is the reason they're paid less, their ideas are devalued, their worth reduced to sexual appeal. The danger is other women -- and, specifically, other women's sexuality -- not the men evaluating them. The possibility that (predatory) men might not be the arbiters of a woman's worth, or might choose to evaluate their employees fairly -- maybe your boss is a woman! maybe he's a guy who's just a decent person! -- is not entertained. The world is presented as a zero-sum game in which scheming beauties (who are simultaneously empty-headed, "big-boobed nitwits") win by manipulating men at the expense of the plainer but more skilled.

(As a footnote, this also sets up a no-win scenario for pretty women. If a woman happens to be "doe-eyed" and "big-boobed" but is also serious and skilled, where does she fall? Does she, like Emma Watson, become an illustration of the proposition that "our culture cannot handle a woman who is both sexual AND serious"?)

In my reading, then, that comment exhibits a deeply misogynistic worldview. Which is not to say that it's entirely inaccurate in its observations. Girls do get sexually exploited at disturbingly young ages, and there are workplaces that still run on a Helen Gurley Brown-esque, early-'60s model of overt sexual favoritism. Not many (and certainly not any with a half-competent HR department), but they exist.

But, by and large, we recognize these things as unacceptable, and we recognize that the crux of the problem does not lie with the women. I was sexually assaulted on a public bus when I was 10; it wasn't because I was made up or dressed alluringly (I was an extremely plain child, I'd even say "grubby"), but because a random middle-aged dude on a public bus was a pervert. There are workplaces that place more emphasis on women's appearances than their job skills, but generally we recognize that the problem isn't with the short-skirted secretary but her boss.

And -- this is where we circle back to my original post and original point -- I think the best curative to these toxic scenarios is not to condemn the women or tell them to repress their sexuality, but to help them explore and understand themselves without stigma or shame, and also to place condemnation where it accurately belongs: not on a 12-year-old girl experimenting with makeup and clothes, but on the man who thinks it's acceptable to put his penis down her throat. Not on women who were born with big breasts or like to wear false eyelashes, but on the people (men and women) who think that appearance gives them license to devalue those women's ideas and intellect.

My belief is that openness and frankness and tearing away the shame is both kinder and more effective social policy. Broadly speaking, it empowers women, keeps them safer, and breaks some of the levers that are used to hold them down.

Girls are going to experiment. It's part of growing up. The best thing we can do for them is not yank away the lipstick (if you don't get your beginner makeup mistakes out of the way when you're 12, you might wind up making them when you're 22, which -- take it from me -- is way worse), but to give them a space to explore and experiment safely, with clear and calm parental guidance that gives them the freedom to learn without abandoning them to fall too far. We would do better, too, to arm them with the knowledge (about contraception, about STDs, about the emotional and mental health aspects of sexuality) that they need to safeguard themselves. Ignorance never keeps anyone safe; it only makes them easier prey.

And girls are going to make mistakes, as we all make mistakes, because that too is part of life and how we learn. I think destigmatizing those mistakes goes a long way toward neutralizing their corrosive impact, though. So much of the shame and moral panic about women's sexuality is used to coercive effect: the high-school girl who gets blackmailed with her nudie pics; the one-time porn starlet who feels locked into a job she no longer wants because, having been made "dirty," she feels like she can't do anything else; the stereotypical but too-frequently-real rape victim who blames herself because she wonders if wearing a short dress and getting a little too drunk meant she was asking for it.

It's all part and parcel of the same thing. It is all shame and stigma used to strip women of agency, cow them into compliance, and reinforce the patriarchy.

And I will yell about it all day every day forever, if need be.

On the "Luxury" of Self-Esteem

I've had a number of friends who have, at one point or another, hit hard times financially. Some of this just goes along with being a millennial and having a lot of friends who entered the working world during and shortly after the financial meltdown of 2008; some of it's because no matter what the broader economic cycle looks like, there are always going to be some people who, through bad luck and happenstance, find themselves on the outs. It happens. Nature of a dynamic economy and us being trapped with occasionally malfunctioning meat sacks for bodies.

All my friends are decent people. They'd work hard if they could, and it cuts them deep when they can't.

It *also* cuts at them when they're on disability, unemployment, or just come into a few bucks from friends or family -- any kind of money that they feel they didn't "earn" -- and want to spend a little on something that isn't a basic life-or-death necessity. I have seen so much *agonizing* over whether they're "allowed" to spend $5 on a bottle of nail polish or tickets to a show or a couple of carefully-nursed dive drinks so they can spend an evening hanging out with friends.

It kills me. Because we're not talking about welfare-myth caricatures who blow their entire allowance on lobster and steak and snazzy Obamaphones. We're talking about good and frugal people who wrack their souls over allowing themselves the teeniest tiniest little bits of joy that they're worried might be "nonessential."

Which is, by the way, a lie. Joy IS essential. Maintaining your optimism and self-esteem in the face of the constant bludgeoning barrage that is being unemployed in This Dumb Society is absolutely essential. You need hope. You need to feel like you're still a full-fledged person and yes, you're allowed to enjoy music and the company of friends and feeling a little bit pretty once in a while. IT'S ALLOWED. IT'S FINE. YOU'LL GO CRAZY WITHOUT IT, TRUST ME.

What this whole thing is really about is whether the poor are allowed to feel like genuine full-on people. So much of the punitive "they can only have cold water and beans! anything else is a LUXURY!" stuff isn't really about what's in the best interests of the poor (nobody cares about the actual best interests of the poor, that's why we won't give them health care or child care or a half-decent education), it's just about undercutting their self-esteem that last little bit by telling them that they're not good enough to have the things reserved for Real People With Jobs.

The effect of that, whether intended or not, is to make people feel like absolute garbage. It makes people feel morally culpable for plain bad luck. Which accomplishes nothing productive, although it does allow fragile people without any real self-esteem of their own to feel momentarily superior, and it also allows unscrupulous employers to exploit their desperation more easily.

Now there are, certainly, people who do their best to scam the system. They exist! There are people who just don't care to have legitimate jobs and get by with welfare grifts and fraud. I know a few. They're not my *friends,* but I know them, and I know the Janice Soprano lowlife isn't a complete myth.

But the question is this: Is it better to punish good people who are trying their best to do the right things, and make their lives more difficult so it's harder for them to climb out of that hole, or is it better to accept that Janice Soprano will get some checks she doesn't deserve? Because you have to pick one. Either good people suffer unnecessarily, or crummy people get a few bucks they did nothing to earn (and, keep in mind, you can't actually tell which ones are which; that's why you have to paint with a broad brush one way or the other). Either self-esteem is affordable for the poor, or it's a luxury we don't care to allow them.

And I think which version you choose depends heavily on whether you've ever been or had friends who were poor. Because the question looks a little different when you see it applied to people you know to be decent and struggling, rather than the caricatures imagined of strangers.

Follow-up on USDA Silencing

Couple of follow-ups to the puppy mill/USDA silencing post (here's a NYT piece with an overview as reminder).

-- I've seen a few people wondering what the motivation might be for cutting off public access to the USDA's animal-welfare records. The answer is pretty simple: it's about money.

At the most straightforward level: it costs more money to treat animals humanely. Bigger cages mean less density per square foot, so you're not extracting as much money from your space as you could. Breeding animals less frequently (versus breeding mill dogs to death within a few years) means you're not extracting as many puppies per bitch. Mandating that dogs get exercise in open spaces means that you have to dedicate an exercise yard, keep it clean, and pay more employees to take the dogs out and watch over them.

All of this cuts into the puppy mill's profits. So if all you care about is maximizing profits, regardless of the toll in suffering, then you're probably not a big fan of the AWA. But lobbying against that (or, worse, being caught violating it) looks bad, and puppy buyers tend to be a pretty sentimental market, and you need your product to look cute and innocent and lovable (and not like what it actually is). So the *best* course, for you, is not to fight about it, but to pretend to go along and meanwhile make sure the public can't see what you're doing.

That's what this is. There are a couple of other profit motives that also tie in here (check out the egg lobby trying to kill egg-free mayonnaise in the excerpt later) but they all come down to $$$.

-- "But according to the APHIS website this has been in the works for over a year, so it's not DJT at all! LOOK, OBAMA!!"

yeah, no

First off, we already know this administration lies. It lies about everything from the size of inauguration crowds to Iran supposedly attacking U.S. ships to the "Bowling Green massacre." DJT and his people just straight-up lie about everything constantly, and furthermore they silence agency employees from communicating honestly with the public. As far as I'm concerned they have zero credibility anymore. So my immediate response when a DJT-controlled entity says anything is "uh huh, where's your proof?"

There is no proof. The statement itself is written for maximum weasel-ability (the actual wording is "DURING the past year," i.e., it could have been 10 minutes ago, that's still "DURING the past year"). No specific officers or employees are identified by name. No reports are provided; there's no paper trail (and we know DJT's administration deliberately avoids creating a paper trail so they can avoid accountability; we *also* know the Obama people did not do this, therefore if this were in the works during the preceding administration then there should be a paper trail and DJT's team should be eager to show it to us so they could punt the blame over to the other guys). None of the court opinions they're ostensibly basing this on are named or cited. There's just no substantiation at all.
Furthermore, if Obama's administration *did* have this in the works and DJT's people genuinely thought "whoa hey no, this ain't right, the public has a right to know what's going on," they could easily just... not delete the records!

But they didn't do that, because that isn't what happened here. What did happen here is that Klippenstein (who, again, has a long long history of trying to protect factory farmers and puppy millers from accountability) saw an opportunity to use the DJT administration's love of deleting information to benefit his longtime benefactors.

And this *does* have a long history to back it up. Factory farmers and puppy millers have been trying to avoid the public eye for years.
In fact, the APHIS statement's note that "you can get the records through FOIA!" is particularly eyebrow-raising when you remember that ag groups have been trying to dodge out of FOIA scrutiny for a while now, see, e.g.: http://bigstory.ap.org/…/inside-washington-ag-groups-seek-e… and http://www.sej.org/…/commodity-groups-slip-foia-exemption-h…

"Lobbying by agricultural commodity groups can sometimes be embarrassing — which is why House Republicans slipped language carving them a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemption into the Agriculture Appropriations bill now awaiting passage.

It was FOIA'd emails that revealed the American Egg Board trying to strangle an egg-free mayonnaise startup in its crib in 2015. The Egg Board is one of the commodity-specific "checkoff" boards funded by industry to promote agricultural products. Congress has made industry contributions to the boards mandatory.

After a collection of ag commodity lobby groups wrote a letter earlier this year to the House Appropriations Committee requesting a FOIA exemption, that panel wrote one into the funding bill."

so yeah: big ag has been trying to limit USDA scrutiny on animal welfare violations for a long time; Klippenstein was a lobbyist for exactly that purpose; DJT comes into power, lets Klippenstein run the USDA transition; mysteriously USDA scrutiny on animal welfare violations vanishes; ostensibly there's a FOIA exemption (for now), but hm yes big ag has been lobbying the GOP to make that go away too, wonder how long that'll last.

Brian Klippenstein and Silencing the Watchdogs of the USDA

Since I took a minute to spell it out elsewhere, let me do a quick game of connect-the-dots on Brian Klippenstein, the USDA records purge, and how DJT's administration is now actively aiding and abetting massive dog abuse.

On Friday, the USDA's animal welfare records suddenly got purged: http://www.sciencemag.org/…/trump-administration-blacks-out…

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today removed public access to tens of thousands of reports that document the numbers of animals kept by research labs, companies, zoos, circuses, and animal transporters—and whether those animals are being treated humanely under the Animal Welfare Act. Henceforth, those wanting access to the information will need to file a Freedom of Information Act request. The same goes for inspection reports under the Horse Protection Act, which prohibits injuring horses’ hooves or legs for show.

The agency said in a statement that it revoked public access to the reports “based on our commitment to being transparent … and maintaining the privacy rights of individuals.”"

Let's take a second to appreciate the deep irony of "our commitment to being transparent" being used as a reason to block public access to animal welfare reports. Let's also reflect on just how bad the risks to those animals need to be when you have to have a specific act preventing the deliberate injury of horses' legs FOR SHOW. And, finally, let's take a second to recall how miserably minimal the USDA's protections fo mill dogs really are (they are bad!). But in many states, the Animal Welfare Act and the USDA are the only protection puppy mill dogs have at all: https://www.aspca.org/…/state_puppy_mills_guide_w_chart_jun…

As the Washington Post notes, the USDA further "said the removed documents, which also included records of enforcement actions against violators of the Animal Welfare Act and the Horse Protection Act, would now be accessible only via Freedom of Information Act Requests. Those can take years to be approved."

The WaPo continued:

The records that had been available were frequently used by animal welfare advocates to monitor government regulation of animal treatment at circuses, scientific labs and zoos. Journalists have used the documents to expose violations at universities.

Members of the public could also use the department’s online database to search for information about dog breeders, as could pet stores. Seven states currently require pet stores to source puppies from breeders with clean USDA inspection reports, according to the Humane Society of the United States — a requirement that could now be impossible to meet.

So why did the USDA suddenly decide to stop caring whether factory farms and puppy mills were abusing their animals? Because Brian Klippenstein, pro-puppy-mill lobbyist, is head (or, possibly, is the entirety) of DJT's USDA team.

Prior to joining DJT's team, Brian Klippenstein worked for "Protect the Harvest," a hilariously/horribly named lobbying group that campaigns for factory farms and puppy mills against animal welfare efforts: http://www.motherjones.com/…/trump-usda-klippenstein-heitka…

"Back in 2010, the year before Protect the Harvest was founded, Lucas [PtH's founder] vigorously opposed a Missouri ballot measure to "require large-scale dog breeding operations to provide each dog under their care with sufficient food, clean water, housing and space; necessary veterinary care; regular exercise and adequate rest between breeding cycles," and to "prohibit any breeder from having more than 50 breeding dogs for the purpose of selling their puppies as pets." In 2014, Protect the Harvest opposed an Illinois bill banning the retail sale of puppy-mill dogs."

In other words, this lobbying group was founded in response to a Missouri ballot measure that would have required more humane treatment of puppy mill dogs, with the express aim of blocking that (extremely minimal!) humane treatment and allowing existing abuses to continue. This is what Klippenstein did for his job before joining up with DJT.

He's also pretty much a one-man army for the USDA transition, or was as of December: http://www.politico.com/…/trumps-usda-landing-team-looks-li…

This sudden silencing of the USDA in regards to animal welfare has Klippenstein's grubby little fingerprints all over it. That's who he is, that's what he does, and that's the department DJT put him in charge of transitioning.

And that, apparently, is what DJT's administration wants to transition the USDA into: absolute silence on animal abuses, and refusing to enforce even the extremely minimal safeguards of the AWA.

(crossposted from Facebook; originally posted December 11, 2016)

The Reassuring Patriarchy of Old Movies (or: a real long post on The Cake Is A Lie, 1950s cultural hegemony edition)

In addition to watching a ton of action movies, I watch a lot of old movies.

Like action movies, old movies can provide a remarkable insight into some of what’s happening today. You don’t even have to go that far back; whenever somebody tells you that the ‘80s and ‘90s were less racist or sexist than the Year of Our Lord 2016, pull up Major League (1989, where undressing the effigy of a [scheming, manipulative, looks-driven] woman who presumes to run a sports team is considered just comeuppance for her sins) or 48 Hrs. (1982, where the hero angrily calls a woman a “dyke” and later uses her as a human shield because she had the temerity to turn down his crude and unwanted advances) and bask in the sheer unadulterated sexism and hostility toward uppity women that permeates both films.

Keep in mind that these are mainstream blockbuster *comedies,* explicitly geared toward things that the broadest possible swath of the American public would find to be funny and not offensive, and wildly successful in that regard. Those attitudes used to be not only totally normal, but fine fodder for loljokes. If you didn’t think that was funny, welp, that was why everybody used to think feminists were humorless scolds, because *obviously* that stuff is harmless comedy.

Except it isn’t, and now when you watch the “funny” ways that men trivialized and undercut women back then, it is downright painful. Cringeworthy. Because, contrary to the oft-repeated misperception, we haven’t actually gotten more racist or sexist in modern times. We’ve gotten more race- and sex-*conscious,* but that’s the opposite thing. I’m serious: rewatch some ‘80s comedies and see what they tell you today about what the world was then.

Anyway, I like using old(-ish) movies as primary documents because most people have seen them (so it’s less painful than asking people to read and analyze Procopius for historical insight on old-school sexism), and since they’re broadly mainstream fiction, nobody needs to be put on the spot for *personally* holding those attitudes (we’re not saying *you* were a racist sexist dick, we’re saying Nick Nolte’s fictional character in 48 Hrs. was a racist sexist dick! …that millions of people in American audiences were happy to applaud), but at the same time there’s no denying that these *were* mainstream attitudes. If you try to use Latasha Harlins or Mark Fuhrman to talk about 1990s racism, people who feel threatened will try to push those aside as extreme outliers (not untrue!), but talk about Falling Down (1993) or even Olympus Has Fallen (2013, twenty years later!) and the mainstream appeal of some real iffy racial caricatures can hardly be denied.

I got to thinking about this again when I read Edsall’s NYT piece on how Trumpies got a morale boost from their guy winning, not because of any specific policies or programs they thought he’d enact, but purely on the basis of feeling like their identity as disinherited white people was validated and maybe they’d get to be back on top again. I linked this once already but I’ll link it again since I’ll be talking about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/…/…/trump-voters-are-feeling-it.html…

Block quote:

In their widely covered 2015 study, “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, ” Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton, found a marked increase in the all-cause mortality of middle-aged white non-Hispanic men and women in the United States between 1999 and 2013.

This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround. The midlife mortality reversal was confined to white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics and Hispanics at midlife, and those aged 65 and above in every racial and ethnic group, continued to see mortality rates fall. This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. An important approach to depression in the psychological and evolutionary literature has been to view it as an evolved response to “involuntary subordination,” to being displaced from dominance.

This is exactly what happens when you have to accept a subordinate position on a status ladder because you lost your job and can’t find a comparable one.

[…]

Going into the last election, nearly three quarters (72 percent) of those supporting Trump said that American society and its way of life had changed for the worse since the 1950s, according to an Oct. 25 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Then I got to thinking about how you square “the 1950s were better” with “I’m not a racist,” and this is where I landed:

It’s safe to say that most Trump voters either weren’t alive during the ‘50s or have nostalgia-fogged childhood memories that are about as accurate as my memories of watching Robocop as a 10-year-old (turns out Batman is not actually in Robocop, in case you were wondering), and that most of their impressions about what life was like in the ‘50s come from the pop culture of the time. Because what we *actually* know about the ‘50s is that it was a time when the civil rights movement started gaining steam, despite various efforts to stomp it down (blacks won the right to be admitted to white universities in 1950, and Brown v. Board got started in 1951 before the decision came out in 1954, spurring violent resistance by white segregationists in the latter half of the ‘50s and into the ‘60s). We know that the ‘50s were when housewives hit peak usage of Valium, Librium, and other tranquilizers to cope with the stifling, perpetually smiling lives of birdcage domesticity they were expected to lead.

But we also know that’s not how the decade was portrayed in contemporary movies, and it’s really interesting to watch Old Movies with a careful eye toward what, exactly, is idealized in their depictions. Because it *is* a world in which white people (specifically white men) are on top, but that’s not the entirety of its appeal.

First off, recognize that Old Movies (which is my personal shorthand for “Golden Age Hollywood movies made from roughly 1934 [with the advent of the Motion Picture Production Code] through 1960 via the established studio system”) are all about escapist fantasy. “Shall We Dance” (1937, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) posits a transatlantic ocean liner where the guests wear full evening dress, all tuxedos and ankle-sweeping silk gowns, to potty-walk their dogs. “42nd Street” (1933, Busby Berkeley vehicle) gives you a bunch of starving chorus girls in the depths of the Depression who nevertheless all own luxurious fur stoles and designer dresses. Realism has no place in these movies. They’re all about getting to escape to a beautiful world inhabited by beautiful people for a couple of hours.

And in the 1950s, the nature of that beautiful world changed sharply.

‘30s movies, especially pre-Code movies, can be surprisingly daring. The costumes are revealing, the innuendos are scandalous, and the plotlines are frequently ones that you’d have a hard time getting away with today (e.g. in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1933 pre-Code comedy “Design For Living,” the happy ending is a menage a trois: the heroine ends up living happily ever after with *both* of the male leads, and abandons her husband to do so). Female characters in ‘30s movies are often smarter, stronger, and more ruthless than their male counterparts; Barbara Stanwyck in “Baby Face” (1933) is a straight-up Nietzchean power fantasy where the heroine uses, crushes, and coldly casts aside a series of men in her relentless march to the top via sex. She never gets punished for her sexuality and she never expresses any regrets about any of the guys she drives to ruin. She straight-up *wins* that movie, and she does it without any apologies.

By the ‘50s you don’t see that anymore. The economic exigencies of the Great Depression and WWII (which empowered women to work outside the home and achieve some financial independence) are gone, and in their place you have a suddenly anxious wave of American men who want their jobs and social status back. They’re insecure and they don’t want to see strong women getting the better of male characters on screen. They want to be reassured of their primacy, and the movies change to reflect this.

Gone are the quick-witted and relentlessly competent heroines of His Girl Friday (1940) and The Lady Eve (1941). In their place we have Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield creating the new archetype of the dumb blonde in movies like Some Like It Hot (1959) and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), in which they play vapid, gullible, childish beauties who are overtly sexualized but also infantilized. These are women who can’t manage themselves, let alone their male rivals. They *need* to be shepherded through life with a kindly but firm hand, and they’re always ever so grateful for the help (barring the occasional petulant pouting fit). And it’s that gratitude, I think, that’s really the key part of the fantasy. It’s not enough that women have to be subordinate to men; they have to *welcome* it, to be shown as actually grateful for the loss of control. The fantasy is (as ever) that they *want* it, and it’s really what’s best for them anyway.

This same fantasy exists with regard to minority characters, although on this front there isn’t the same dramatic change from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, because nobody was ever portraying black or Asian characters as getting the better of white people. Rather, they’re mostly invisible — they simply do not exist in the moneyed and glittering parties and restaurants that these movies revolve around, except occasionally as performers or waiters; that any minority could ever be an educated professional, love interest, or (maybe above all) *club member* is utterly unimaginable — and when they do appear as menials (bootblacks, train porters, domestic servants), they’re invariably servile, with huge exaggerated smiles and head bobs to convey just how childishly happy they are with their low-status positions. And non-Christian religions, other than the rare token Jew, simply don’t exist. They are elided from the world, scrubbed out of the comforting uniformity of churches and Christmases.

It’s the same thing. It’s the same comforting fantasy that everyone who isn’t a white Christian *wants* to be in those marginal roles, they’re happiest there, they’d only be miserable and afraid if they had to compete with white men, so best we just keep them down below where they’re content. Or erase them altogether, otherwise.

That, I suspect, is why the pop culture of the ‘50s has such a strong pull for white people who’d prefer not to consider themselves out-and-out racist or sexist today: because the lure of that idealized world is that everyone else *wanted* to be subservient, and that was the happy and natural order of things. Because there wasn’t any overt conflict or unhappiness, it was (and is) easy to tell yourself that there wasn’t any racism or sexism or xenophobia, either. After all, nobody was *complaining.* Everybody was just happy! Why can’t we just have that again!

Well, obviously, because it was a lie. Because in the actual real world, lots of women *aren’t* happy to just be vapid sex toys, and lots of minorities *aren’t* thrilled to bob their heads and smile along subserviently without saying a word, and non-Christians do actually exist. And that was why the ‘60s were what they were: because the ‘50s were a lie, and a lie so pernicious and hateful and hurtful that in the end it had to be broken by sustained and sometimes violent resistance.

But the lie persists. The fantasy persists. And the great fantasy of the ‘50s, the thing that was so reassuring to a wave of insecure Americans then and remains reassuring to the same insecure population today, wasn’t just that you could *have* a white patriarchy, but that you could have one where everybody else was totally happy to stay in their places. Where you could, at least if you were in the right part of the audience, remain happily oblivious to the invisible threats and coercions that kept the smiles on everyone else’s faces. Where you could pretend those smiles were real, and not have to care that they weren’t.

That’s what the movies of the ‘50s were selling. That’s what a lot of people, for very similar reasons, would like to buy today. Primacy and cultural dominance, but a cultural dominance where you don’t have to feel like you’re being mean (or racist! or sexist!) to get it. You’re not stepping on anyone else to get on top. They’re just lying down in the mud on their own.

(facebook crosspost; originally posted January 10, 2017)

American "Socialism" and Meritocracy

There really is very little conflict between what Americans think of as "socialism" (which isn't really socialism, but generally translates to "a robust social welfare package and safety net") and individual achievement. I would argue pretty strenuously that you can't have the latter without the former, in fact, and that the modern-day GOP actively undercuts any semblance of real meritocracy at every opportunity.

This is going to be obvious to a lot of you, I realize, but let's spell it out all the same: If you're born into poverty in the U.S., you're running with a parachute in the marathon of life.

Your mother will probably have worse prenatal care and baseline health, putting you behind the ball before you're even born. Once out, you will probably eat less nutritious food and learn less healthy dietary and exercise habits. Your home environment is more likely to be polluted, deprived, and dangerous. You will probably go to underfunded public schools (or, if you're even unluckier, predatory scammer schools of the type Betsy DeVos holds so dear), and you will almost certainly have no chance to go to private school. These effects will compound year after year.

Your friends and family will likely be poor, which carries a whole raft of consequences. These range from higher incidences of adverse childhood experiences (even things as small as your parents arguing nastily in front of you because of money stress, or the embarrassment of being the dirty kid at school because nobody had time to bathe you and there weren't any clean clothes in the house), which have been shown to cause lasting and observable brain changes, to simply not having a lot of books around the house or anybody with the free time, subway tokens, or gas money to take you to the library.

If you do beat the odds and break out, you will need time and practice to acquire the manners and social capital you weren't born with, and every failure will cost something. You're likely to be less adventurous about switching jobs or moving to new places, because you don't have a cushion to fall back on if things go wrong. You may find it harder to sustain relationships, due to lack of good role models and the psychological scars of those childhood experiences (which, again, leave lasting changes ranging from outsize stress responses to poor impulse control: might not be enough to get you locked up, may well be enough to make it hard to maintain a stable relationship with a stable person). And you will, again, find yourself in the position of having to float your extended networks more often than being floated by them.

If you are born into affluence, you can flip a whole lot of those factors. Maybe not all of them, and not every time, but all those probabilities tilt toward you instead of against you.

If you're born *rich,* you can be an outright mediocrity and succeed. You can be an utter drug-addled psychotic failure of a person and live in luxury your whole life. Generational wealth will carry you along. And that is just how the GOP, in its current iteration, wants things to be.

Socioeconomic inequality has a number of negative effects throughout society, ranging from increased death rates from preventable ills to (seriously) lower rates of patent applications, suggesting that inequality stifles creativity both among artistic types and among inventors of a more practical bent. It's not great!

We've never had a particularly strong social safety net in the U.S., and our government is not (contrary to rhetoric) all that active in redistribution -- and it's become far less so now than it was in generations past. We are way behind the world average on that front. But to the extent the government *does* play a little bit of Robin Hood, taxing the rich to give back to the poor, many of those harms are mitigated. Not cured (because all we're doing is opening the door a little wider for individual agency to matter, which means some number of those individuals are going to make garbage dumbass choices*), but mitigated.

And if you care about individual meritocracy and fair competition, then it really needs to be about individuals and merit and fairness. Not tilting the playing board so people keep winning just because their grandparents won, even though they themselves are garbage at the game. And not keeping good, talented people hobbled because we're too spiteful or shortsighted to give them a fair chance.

(* -- an important thing to remember here, btw, is that individuals are not isolated. You give the junkie clean needles because maybe he'll kick the habit and maybe he won't, but either way society doesn't need his girlfriend to get AIDS. You don't kick people off welfare for dirty piss tests not only because it's a waste of taxpayer money to do those tests [although it conclusively is], but because their kids don't need to starve just because they got born to a parent who's using. You give free contraception to teenagers not because we *want* them banging, but because they're going to be curious or lonely or thrillseeking or [in the real world, much as we might like to pretend otherwise] trading on their bodies for food and a warm place to stay, and none of that needs to end up in STDs or babies.

Individual choices have consequences beyond those individuals, and sometimes they're not truly free choices. Any real and effective social policy should be clearsighted about that, as much as possible.)

Reflection on a Mammogram and a Senate GOP Vote

(crossposted from Facebook; originally posted January 12, 2017)

I had a mammogram today. (Before you get all worried, I'll just say now that it's nothing serious.) The timing, coming as it did only a few hours after the Senate GOP voted to revoke health care from millions of others, is really the only reason I'm making this post.

In early December I noticed a lump in my right breast. I called my primary care practice and scheduled an appointment to have it looked at about a week after I got back from our holiday vacation.

Within 48 hours of that preliminary exam (and it could have been in 24 hours, but I had to schedule around jury duty), my PCP got me in for a mammogram at Jefferson, which is a top-of-the-line hospital with top-of-the-line imaging equipment and, conveniently, about a 15-minute walk from my front door. I had a mammogram and an ultrasound back-to-back, and two hours after walking into the imaging center I was back out and on my way to work, secure with the knowledge that the lump was a benign cyst and I don't have cancer.

Total cost to me: zero dollars.

There is a three-tier health care system in this country. If you're lucky enough to be on the top tier, with good insurance, your health care is gold-plated. The best in the world.

If you're on the bottom tier, you can go broke and then die in the street. Or, maybe, in the ER, where they can't send you away (and they can't send your catastrophic bill to anyone, except maybe to taxpayers).

Obamacare made something in the middle possible for millions. Maybe not gold-plated Cadillac coverage, but a damn sight better than "hand over every last penny and thanks, go die now." That's almost certainly going away now, thanks to a bunch of awfully clueless or awfully selfish voters and last night's midnight vote from the gang of maniacs they voted into office.

I didn't have cancer. It cost me nothing but two hours of my afternoon to learn that. A lot of other people don't have cancer either, but they do have lumps (like mine), and they'll have to live in uncertainty, because they won't be able to afford peace of mind. And a lot of people do have cancer, and it's going to cost them everything, because some of their fellow citizens couldn't stand to give up a little bit to help them. Not even the time to educate themselves about what they were really voting for.

Pearls and Entitlements

(political stuff, cross-posted from Facebook)

January 15:

I've decided to wear pearls to the protest march. Mostly because it makes me laugh (1. who wears pearls to a protest? ME THAT'S WHO; 2. I like the idea that even the kinds of ladies who routinely wear pearls are going to protest this monstrosity because YES EVEN WE ARE DRIVEN TO THE STREETS HERE; 3. it amuses me to have pearls and most emphatically *not* clutch them, because actually we will be taking more direct action, thanks for your concern).
But also it's worth remembering that pearls are a beauty born of deep and lasting irritation coalesced around a heart of stone. Believe them hollow at your peril.

January 14 ("Answering the Rhetoric Against Entitlement"):

Today I want to talk a little bit about how the rhetoric against "entitlement" undermines the common good of the American people.

I didn't realize until this election how deep the resentment against "entitlement" runs in some quarters. I also didn't realize until one of my friends sent me an article on it (I *think* it was Aaron but I don't totally remember, and sadly I've failed to find the link again) how pernicious this actually is, but once it don don'd me, it was like the hidden picture in a Magic Eye suddenly came into view.

The gist of the now-lost article was that "Bill Gates doesn't need a Social Security check, but it's important for the political viability of the Social Security program that he gets one." In other words, it's important for universal-good programs to *be* universal. To be politically enduring, they must be entitlements -- yes, that loaded word -- that every American *is entitled to* by simple virtue of citizenship.

Obamacare is what happens when a beneficial program isn't a universal entitlement. Even though Obamacare has unquestionably done a great deal of good for the country (and for all of us in it, whether we're directly in the program or not; all of us benefit from a healthier and more secure society), it's open to attack because it's *not* universal. Not everyone has access to the same benefits across the board (in part due to different states implementing the program differently), and not everyone sees it as part of your basic right as a citizen.

Because it's not universal, it can be attacked as a charity program that benefits only part of the populace. Some people don't get (or "need") it at all, and some of those who do get it receive wildly varying benefits. People have different incentives to participate in the program or not, and they're put at odds with each other instead of being united in protecting a universal good.

And charity programs are always vulnerable to attack. Charity often carries with it a whiff of begrudgment and pity; those who give it may resent the gift (especially if it's undertaken out of obligation rather than any real wish to help) and those who receive it may feel ashamed. Charity also often comes with strings: if you aren't sufficiently worthy (or if I just plain don't like you that much), then you don't deserve the help.

In the health care context, these things are poison. Everyone needs health care, and everyone deserves it. We'd be a whole lot better off if everyone in our society had the kind of coverage that those of us with top-tier insurance get. We'd be a whole lot better off if everyone could get preventative care to prevent catastrophic expenses down the road, and if everyone had the peace of mind that unforeseeable expenses wouldn't demolish their finances, and if everyone felt equally entitled to use that care.

But that means accepting that some level of health care should be universal. That means accepting that yes, there should be an *entitlement.* And this is where the rhetoric against "entitlements" -- the idea that "entitlements" are some ridiculous luxury that only the coddled and spoiled think they should have -- is so harmful. Because it convinces people that they shouldn't ask for these things, that they don't really deserve them, and that the people who *do* ask for them are somehow morally inferior.

That's how you get to the current fractured and fragmentary landscape. That's how you use rhetoric to con the people who'd benefit most into scoffing at the very *idea* that they might deserve to have some basic right to health care as a citizen.

But, in fact, a basic right to health care *should* be an entitlement. And that shouldn't be a word that people are afraid of, because you shouldn't be ashamed to demand what ought to be yours. This idea doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from very rich people spreading it to their considerably less-rich listeners, and playing off old animosities and myths of self-sufficiency to keep their listeners jealously guarding an illusion of independence at the cost of unity and real gains.

Look past the words. Look at the money. Who's creating that rhetoric, who's disseminating it, and who would stand to lose if the great majority of Americans demanded their fair share -- what they are, in fact, "entitled" to?