Be Stupid Harder, With a Vengeance by KTK

Apparently, disposable cellphones are the new color TVs.

K-Lo, and a lot of other people, are all worked up over the fact that one of the guys in line at a soup kitchen where Michelle Obama was volunteering the other day was shown in news photos holding a cellphone.

Where Do You Send the Bill?

America has the wealthiest poor people in the world. . . . But we are a blessed people when our poor have cell phones.

It used to be that conservatives argued that there were really no poor in America because X% of the “so-called poor” owned color TVs. Apparently a cellphone is now the unmistakable mark of Croesus.

At least Lopez expressed some perfunctory sympathy for the people at the kitchen. Michelle Malkin (no link) was her usual nasty piece of work, mocking the story with a pop song parody and the bizarre claim that the fact the guy had a phone “ruin[ed] what was supposed to be a sob story photo op of the compassionate Mrs. O catering to the downtrodden.” (I guess if you’re Michelle Malkin, the fact that anybody is not actually starving and naked ruins your impulse toward compassion. Presuming there is any such impulse in the first place.)

“The Swamp”, the Chicago Tribune’s politics blog, carried the original story with a certain amount of class:

The homeless here are called “guests” – “because it’s all about dignity,” Gibson says. On average, the guests have been homeless for nearly five years.

Today, Obama became the first first lady to volunteer here, Gibson says, though Karen Hughes, a senior aide to former President George W. Bush, had pitched in at the kitchen. The first lady made it clear that she hopes to set an example for other volunteers.

“We’re really just thrilled that our new neighbors took notice of what we’re doing,” said Gibson. . . .

“We are facing tough times in this country,” Obama said, and it is important to help those who have no place to live. Miriam’s Kitchen “is an example of what we can do, as a country and as a community, to help folks when they’re down… We’re all going to need one another in these times. We’re going to need to keep lifting each other up, in prayer and in hope.

But the winger contingent couldn’t follow suit. The LA Times’s own blog was the one that introduced the question “Where do they send the bill?” The question was echoed by almost every right-wing commentator – Lopez, Malkin, Don Surber (“[W]elcome to Obama World, where it is the Depression again just so we can gin up the size of government. They are giving money away.The cellphone homeless are only the first of the undeserving to get bailouts from the government.”), Greg Pollwitz (also at NRO, where ignorance is a group activity), Michael vander Galien at PoliGazette (there was “something strange about one of the homeless men . . . he was taking pictures of [Obama] with his cellphone” [bewildered and outraged emphasis original]).

And this just underlines (part of) what’s wrong with the right wing. They do not merely lack sympathy or compassion – that simply defines them. They lack any connection between their knee-jerk impulse toward viciousness and any even passingly realistic view of the world. Characteristically, right-wing chatter is marked by an almost stunning ignorance of the subject at hand, but more than that a kind of giddy indifference to facts in the first place. (Listen to any Rush Limbaugh broadcast: he makes a pretense of being informative or educational, and so is seen as some sort of expert opinionator by the right wing – but the crap he spews is almost always a complete distortion of the truth, if not entirely made up.) Knowing what you’re talking about is simply not a relevant consideration for right-wing pundits. And the idea that there might actually be an explanation for the many ordinary things that leave right-wingers completely confused appears not merely to be foreign to them, but in fact perceived as some sort of “enemy combatant” to be renditioned into their mental Abu Ghraibs and tortured to death, lest it join the conspiracy against them.

Hence the utterly flabbergasted response to the fact that a homeless man has a cellphone.

Not one of the right-wing commentators I have seen offers the slightest recognition that . . . he probably has a cellphone because . . . cellphones are ubiquitous, cheap, and a virtual necessity in today’s society (and especially so if you’re homeless and can’t have a landline phone). Prepaid “disposable” cellphones cost about $25 new, and less than that used. You can get them anywhere. You can buy them one time, when you happen to be flush, and keep them afterward. You can buy minutes in small blocks for cash upfront, at whatever rate you can afford and without a monthly plan. This not only explains how poor people can afford phone service, but answers the question almost every idiot winger cleverly asked (“Where do they send the bill?”): there is no bill, moron – that’s the point.

Yes, it’s totally cool that anyone can now get essentially worldwide real-time phone service – portable, no less – for about four hours’ worth of minimum-wage pay. You can also get a used color TV, either hand-me-down from a luckier friend or relative, or second-hand for just a few times more than that, or a used car by the same process. The poor in every country have always created communities of traded goods and services, in which the leavings of affluent society “trickle down” to where they can still do some good. As our society has made technology both cheaper and more necessary, the amount of technology available to the poor also increases. You get the impression that wingers believe the urban poor are likely to be living like Biblical peasants, winnowing grain by hand and eating grasshoppers, or something. After all, they’re poor, right? And the Bible says that’s what poor people do. So if they don’t live like that, they’re not poor. QED, don’tchaknow . . .? These assholes honestly believe you’re not poor if, at some point in your life, you had $25 for a no-frills phone, or $100 for a second-hand TV, or $400 for a shitty car – or that, if you are poor, you actually don’t deserve to try to better your living conditions when you can, as you can.

Lopez is not even correct that having cellphones makes the homeless in the US “the wealthiest poor people”. Cellphone service is ubiquitous in the Third World, for precisely the same reasons as here: the technology is cheap, you can scale the cost to your budget, and it’s vital for keeping track of your family, doing business, or keeping in touch with sources of assistance. (Because it requires less on-the-ground infrastructure than landline phones – which require wiring to every single house – many Third World countries have jumped straight from no phones to cellphones. So, great! By K-Lo’s analysis, there are actually no more poor anywhere in the world! Bangladesh has cellphones! Their problems are solved!)

The problem with people who seem like they’ve never even heard of pre-paid cellphones is that they can’t imagine what being poor is like in any other practical sense either. The people they’re mocking for having cheap phones (damn, Nebuchadneezer didn’t have a cellphone, and he was a king! QED . . . !) have been homeless for an average of almost 5 years. Over 650,000 people lost their jobs just last month, and many of them, very likely, are no more than one or two monthly payments away from being evicted or foreclosed on also. Something like 8 million people are predicted to go into foreclosure in the next few years – and those are people who own not just cellphones but entire houses! Being poor in this society will kill you dead, and you can get there quickly, in a whole lot of ways. The fact that there’s cheap technology available doesn’t mean you can’t be desperate. (Affording cheap shit isn’t the problem for the poor. Making a living that any of these winger dipshits could even manage to survive for two weeks takes a hell of a lot more scratch than does buying a $25 phone.) But it’s obvious that simply telling K-Lo and the howler-monkey right wing about prepaid phones is going to have no impact whatsoever on their ability to comprehend, let alone empathize with, the people in that news story.

Stupidity breeds viciousness, no doubt, but for these people there seems to be a circular reinforcement mechanism taking place.

UPDATE: Thank God Alex Koppelman at Salon gets it, with good post that also notes the widespread assumptions the winger blogs are making about the guy in the picture, who isn’t even mentioned in the article. [Allow me to note here: Salon covered it, but I posted first!]