Heartwarming Truth, Heartbreaking Lies
The “homeless cellphone” story (see next post) keeps growing. The Chicago Tribune online site had the first story (from pool reporters’ notes), but the Washington Post has its own version that almost glows with the warmth of simple, truly simple, decency – the basic and fundamental choice to take other people and their problems seriously:
Every weekday, rain or shine, Miriam’s Kitchen, at 24th and G streets NW, serves chronically homeless people breakfast. Last year, Miriam’s served 55,272 meals to more than 4,000 guests. . . .
All the food at Miriam’s is prepared on site. The group wants the food to be healthy for the diners, many of whom struggle with illnesses, physical and mental. Ninety-six percent are male; 70 percent African-American; 13 percent veterans. The average age is 46. Nearly 75 percent sleep on the streets or in emergency shelters. Every day at 5 a.m., they start lining up at Miriam’s Kitchen. At 6:30 a.m. promptly, the doors open. It is one thing the visitors can count on. Another is healthy food.
“If anyone brings us donuts, Steve throws them away,” Gibson said. “It is not good food for our guests. We care too much to give them anything but the best. Steve wants our guests to have the same experience as if they were paying $30 for the meal.”
Jennifer Roccanti, development associate at Miriam’s, stood in the back as guests filed in and took their seats at round tables with white table clothes. Glasses of Tang and cups of coffee in front of them. Weary faces wrapped in scarves. Their lives stuffed in bags. Wearing coats upon coats against the cold and danger of sleeping on the street. Sitting at round tables waiting. Mostly invisible people, living on the edge.
“It’s unbelievable for our guests that the first lady will be here,” Roccanti said. “It reaffirms the notion they matter. That people care about them. For the most part, people ignore them. But today, arguably the most popular person in America is coming and shaking their hands. We tell them everyday how much they matter. But coming from the first lady of the United States, that is a powerful statement.” . . .
Hinton said he got a chance to shake Obama’s hand.
“She asked, ‘Are you doing okay?’”
“I said, ‘No, ma’am. Honestly, I’m not doing okay.’”
“She said, ‘Hang in there. It will get better.’”
“Her assistant took my name and number.”
Well – I guess it was lucky he had a cellphone, then.
Here’s the winger perspective on the exact same group of people:
Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times, who started it all:
“It doesn’t detract from the first lady’s generous gesture or the real needs she seeks to highlight to ask two bothersome journalistic questions about these news photos: ‘If this unidentified meal recipient is too poor to buy his own food, how does he afford a cellphone?’ ‘And if he is homeless, where do they send the cellphone bills?’”
Michelle Malkin:
Priceless Photo of the Day: Homeless . . . With a Cellphone
“[H]ere is one of the homeless cell phone owners snapping a pic of First Lady Michelle Obama — ruining what was supposed to be a sob story photo op of the compassionate Mrs. O catering to the downtrodden. Say cheese!”
Kathryn Jean Lopez:
“America has the wealthiest poor people in the world. . . .But we are a blessed people when our poor have cell phones.”
Michael van der Galien:
“[Obama] hoped, she said, that she would inspire other Americans to help out the poor as well. Sadly, critical journalists noticed something strange about one of the homeless men being served by the first lady: he was taking pictures of her with his cellphone.” ["Sadly"?]
Hot Air and Greg Pollwitz:
“’sweet’ cellphone for a homeless guy”
Kathy Shaidle (first reported by Alex Koppelman at Salon):
“Today’s ‘poor’ are the rich Jesus warned you about: fat, slovenly, wasteful of their money and other people’s. I prefer to call them ‘the broke.’ A lot of (really naive) people are wondering (or pretending to wonder, when they’re in public) how this ‘homeless’ guy could ‘afford’ a cellphone: It would be better phrased: why is a guy with a cellphone homeless? Because then the question answers itself. He spends all his (our) money on cellphones and, most likely, tattoos and drugs and booze and other crap, and has no money left for a home and food. And why should he bother? We pay for his shelter and food anyhow.”
And another from the amazing Shaidle, from a different article just filled with her special goodness:
“On the poor: they are poor because they are ‘too lazy and stupid to a) finish high school and/or b) keep their pants on.…I don’t care about the poor. They’re no more real than Bigfoot.’”
Aside from pig-ignorant stupidity (“why is this guy with a cellphone homeless”? – what’s he supposed to do, trade a disposable cellphone for a house?), the sheer meanness of this nonsense is what hurts. This is a group of people who can look at the worst-off among us and hunt for reasons to mock and dismiss them. They are simply incapable of seeing even the simplest moment of humanity in someone not like themselves – so desperate to shore up their hateful and exclusionary mindset that they actually can’t admit that anyone is not well off, or deserves compassion, let alone help.
There is simply an uncrossable gulf between the right wing and human decency. These are the worst people alive. They are simply not morally or mentally normal human beings.
I have a Virgin Mobile phone. Nobody sends me a bill at all.
Every 3 months I have to top-off for a total of 20 bucks.
A poor person who can pony up 20 bucks every quarter can have a cell phone.
I don’t think this is impossible.
Are you doing okay, sir?
No – that’s terrible to hear.
Um, no, I’m not really going to do anything to help you. And, frankly, I was totally unprepared to respond to any answer other than “Jolly good, pretty boss lady.” All I’m really here to do is shovel this gruel into your bowl, which this dude over here would do to no public fanfare were I not here. But, please, take a picture with me. My husband and I lack street cred.
Um, how about you give this gentleman your phone number, and you’ll never hear from us again. Sound good?
Dude, that’s harsh!
Constituent services are a basic political chore – especially if you’re from Chicago. I’m sure they haven’t forgotten that.
It certainly would be interesting to know if anything comes of him giving the assisstant a phone number. Interesting to know, but very hard to investigate, and even harder to do so credibly.
Of course, that has nothing to do with how stupid it is to complain about the homeless having cell phones. Prepaid phones can be worked entirely on a cash basis, and the homeless are not entirely penniless all the time. And hey, you know what? The cell phone might actually be kind of important to them. I don’t suppose it makes it easier to get odd jobs or anything. Not having enough money doesn’t mean having no money.
Oh, I now see that your other post covers the having a cell phone thing.
On another matter, I do have to disagree with you, KTK. What you ascribe to the right wingers, such as a lack of basic human dignity, most certainly applies to Malkin and Limbaugh. But these people, and a lot of others, make their livings by being the opposition the left wing. Decency is pretty much irrelevant to them, or for people like Coulter a severe liability.
The same is not true for the private citizen who is right-wing. The guy who thinks his taxes are too high, thinks he’s in financial trouble because he can’t quite affort the payments on the new coupe, and thinks the economy would be better if we required people at soup kitchens to get a job in order to get served, is not of the same kind as Malkin. Sure, he’s a chump for believing this shit, and sure he’s doing harm to people, but show him a child living in a box, and he’ll feel sad, and he’ll want to change things to fix it. Sure, he might advocate actions or vote for politicians who’ll make it worse, but that’s not a matter of decency or compassion, but one of confusion. Hell, confusion brought about by reading right wing media, but still, confusion.
In short, you paint with too broad a brush, to say that right wingers have no decency. No, it’s right-wing pundits who have no decency, and who have made it possible for decent people to vote for George W. Bush.
One more interesting observation. Social conservatism is much like religion, you have the moderates and the extremists. But while in religions it is the moderates who shield the extremists from real criticism (We can’t admit that Jerry Falwell was more of a bigot than Hitler, he believed in the same god we do! [Bullshit.]), is political conservatism, it is the extremists who shield the moderates (Jonah Goldberg and Tomas Sowell can publish in the WSJ because they can look calm and reasoned compared to Limbaugh and O’Reilly and Fox, and then hold the same fucking politics, just a little more politely.).
Preach on, Dan!
KTK: As if it wasn’t clear, I’m in agreement with you re: the cell phone thing. My point is that anybody who thinks Michelle was doing anything meaningful might be in the market for some beanstalk beans. Perhaps, she may legitimately care about the poor, and perhaps she may, even aided by experiences like this, make a concerted effort to address homelessness and poverty as issues. But, let’s not pretend that her showing up at this soup kitchen is any more important, in and of itself, than Danny Bonaduce showing up to open a mall in Mineola or some shit.
Dan:
What you ascribe to the right wingers, such as a lack of basic human dignity, most certainly applies to Malkin and Limbaugh. . . . The same is not true for the private citizen who is right-wing. . . . Sure, he’s a chump for believing this shit, and sure he’s doing harm to people, . . . but that’s not a matter of decency or compassion, but one of confusion. Hell, confusion brought about by reading right wing media, but still, confusion.
You make a very good point, and I’m sure you’re right in large degree. But I have a very hard time taking that into account, for a couple of reasons:
(1) A lot of the “confusion” that run-of-the-mill conservatives stumble into is just out-and-out hostility, prejudice, or factual boneheadedness that really shouldn’t be justifiable no matter how much you listen to Rush Limbaugh. Racists and sexists (and their “sophisticated” fellow-travelers who “just happen to be” worried about crime, “American values” or “the family”) are responsible for their shit, no matter how much encouragement they get, and whether it comes from Ann Coulter or the American Enterprise Institute. Christianist overlords are an offense to individual rights and a violation of civic decency, no matter how self-righteous they feel. People who are so soft-headed that they believe in creationism, or that one snowfall disproves global warming, are simply wrong, in ways that a basic junior-high-school education should have immunized them against. And this stuff matters. The stupidity, the sweeping falsehoods and basic factual inadequacy, and the open embrace of an utterly uncritical, incurious, and simply logically incompetent approach to important issues that affect other people’s lives is more than just confusion – it’s a culpable fault. It’s pervasive on the right wing, but it consists of prejudices and attitudes which, at bottom, I think any reasonably aware person ought to be able to overcome by their own efforts. Of course Southern racists in the Civil Rights era were prisoners of their upbringing – they were still racists, and there were plenty of non-racists around to prove that racism was not inevitable. They deserve to be called on their shit.
Which brings me to the second, related, point:
(2)Most of the stupid shit that circulates on the right wing is simply not seriously entertainable by any reasonably intelligent person. Of course everyone believes their own beliefs are true (that’s why they’re . . . beliefs) and the contrary opinions are false. And of course it always seems “just obvious” that your beliefs are true, and incomprehensible that your opponents’ beliefs are false. But for the bulk of fact-based disagreements between liberal and conservative positions, it is just obvious that the liberals are right and the conservatives are wrong. I’m not even talking about technical issues that, conceivably, could confuse an ordinary person – such as “supply-side” economics, or whether global warming has been definitively proven. I mean stupid, obvious shit. First there are all the large-scale factual issues that are so dumb that you have to unequivocally be dumb to believe them: creationism, faith healing, that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, that the country is ruled by a secret Zionist Occupation Government/international Communist/Jewish/One World conspiracy, that gay people recruit children into homosexuality because they can’t reproduce otherwise . . . . And then there’s the simple factual crap that, if you really cared, you could easily look up, but which conservatives pass along employing not the slightest critical inspection but still convinced that this is all true and really matters: that there was once a major “global cooling” scare, that unemployment is typically short-term and easy to overcome, that stories about the decline of animal species and commercial fish stocks are made up, that pay-as-you-go free market healthcare treats more patients at lower costs than universal insurance, that Social Security is bankrupt or cannot sustain itself, that the CRA housing bill caused the mortgage-industry collapse, the ACLU made it illegal to pray in schools, and on and on. This stuff is just false; stupidly false, easily and obviously false. Yes, it’s promoted and distorted and worked into dogma by the Noise Machine, but it’s not hard to find out the simplest truth about this kind of stuff. And yes, the right-wing machine furiously pumps out Big Lies one after the other, on complicated or wide-ranging issues that make it easier to hoodwink people – the Democratic Party is “socialist”, the FDA makes healthcare less safe, abortion causes mental illness and cancer, evolution theory is “in crisis” and “intelligent design” creationism is a viable alternative, homosexuality is some sort of social threat – but an audience that is trained to be, and chooses to be so grossly uncritical even about the little, stupid lies has voluntarily disarmed itself against the Big Lie assaults on their intelligence. You don’t have to be an expert on evolution, or the environment, or economics, or whatever, to know Rush Limbaugh is full of shit on all that and everything more. If you just note that every easily verifiable thing he says turns out to be false, you’re not in danger of getting confused over the complicated things that you already know he doesn’t know anything about. But the right wing knows nothing and wants to know nothing. (Note that their educational policies on evolution, sex ed, gay rights, the Civil War, and library books consist entirely of grievance lists of things they want kids to be prohibited from learning. Ignorance is not just a lifestyle, it’s an explicit goal of the right wing.) The confusion they get into, about things large and small, is very easy to overcome, with even minimal effort. They work at not overcoming their own falsehoods. And for that they have themselves to blame.
From that perspective, I have a hard time cutting ignorant right-wingers too much slack. From my perspective, the things they’re wrong about just seem so obviously wrong that I can’t see their false beliefs as anything but culpable error. At the very least, they’re like drunk drivers – maybe they were in no condition to help themselves when they went off the road, but it’s their responsibility not to let that happen. In this, I admit, I may be too critical. It’s hard for a liberal to fathom how conservatives can be that dumb. Maybe they’re just the inevitable lower half of the bell curve – more to be pitied than punished. Maybe we should just find simple, mechanical jobs for them and make sure they’re not left alone around children or bunny rabbits. (But then, it’s usual to rescind such people’s voting rights, also – something to consider . . . .) At any rate, my point is that some errors, both mental and moral, are supposed to be avoided, and I can’t help thinking that the errors of right-wing thinking are much of that kind. Their failure to avoid such errors seems to me to be a deliberate embrace of patterns of thinking, and even of feeling, that decent people shouldn’t, and don’t, embrace. And that was what I meant by the last line in my original post, above.
Digg:
anybody who thinks Michelle was doing anything meaningful might be in the market for some beanstalk beans
Certainly the thing was symbolic more than practical (though apparently they donated a lot of food, too). That doesn’t make it useless, though I’m usually not that impressed by the symbolic stuff.
But you made it clear you thought the exchange with the down-’n-out guy was a sham. I suspect it wasn’t. It’s a small thing, but “all politics is local” even for the President, and I predict they’ll follow up (even if only to avoid crapping on their own PR stunt!).
I think “sham” is too strong a word for this sort of PR stunt, and I think Digg didn’t mean it that strongly. Hollow, but not deceitful.
Anyway, I still have to disagree with you, KTK. The gammut of things covered by the terms “conservative” and “right-wing” is much wider than than the Christianists and Coulters and conspiracists (the KKK, you might say). It covers the people who think the EPA can take away jobs (They can.) and reduce the value of investments (They do.) and think that needs to be balanched against their good. It includes the people who want use to make Moon Base, but are too short-sighted to fix education. Heck, it includes people who want to fix education by disagreeing with teachers’ unions and avoiding such things as bilingual education (in cases where that means non-English monolingual education) and whole-word spelling.
It doesn’t really matter that you want to call such people “moderates” or think they’re still wrong. There’s a lot of room in the label “right-wing” that doesn’t mean indecent or evil. Hey, maybe none of them are right, but that’s a different matter. Seriously, don’t include a New Hampshire republican in the same group as Wolfawitz.
don’t include a New Hampshire republican in the same group as Wolfawitz
Why don’t we let them take care of that?
I’ll stop lumping the moderate right wing in with the kooks, the crazies, and the fascists when they stop putting people like Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales and Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott into power, and stop making people like Limbaugh and Coulter and Michael Savage and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and James Dobson and David Horowitz and Michelle Malkin into media stars and opinion leaders. They’ve always had the power to do that. They’ve never seemed to think that repudiating that form of politics was more important than getting their 5% marginal tax rate reductions and parochial-school tuition vouchers. Why should I see them differently from the way they see themselves?
Knowlingly hollow, but not deceitful.
Fixed.
And, that borders on sham. However, it wouldn’t actually call it a sham, because she gets something of an escape clause on practicality grounds. You can’t exactly have the First Lady taking contact info of individual homeless people and following up on efforts to help them, individually. Not only would she be inundated, but it’s inefficient and wouldn’t accomplish anything that would continue absent her involvement.
I wasn’t totally joking, but I wasn’t totally being serious either. My sentiment was for real, but at the same time – what was she supposed to do?… So, I’m not roasting her for it. I’m just making fun of the situation in general.
No argument with you, Digg.
A lot of valid points have been brought up, however, I think the last part of the last citation on the “winger” list still rings true:
“…And why should he bother? We pay for his shelter and food anyhow.”
I am genuinely curious how you would answer that. Especially since you quote another article in another post which discusses how the kitchen is trying to dignify homelessness. I don’t spit on homeless people, I certainly don’t have welfare envy, and I think homeless people have the same constitutional rights that I do. However, I also think that being homeless is not something that should be dignified. I highly doubt that any of those homeless people feel dignity in their state of living. I think that if they had a sense of dignity, they wouldn’t spend 5 years being homeless. Your articles mention the physical and mental ailments, but do they mention problems with drug and alcohol dependency? No. They should, because it is undeniable that drugs and alcohol are leading reasons for long term homelessness.
Barbie,
I think that if they had a sense of dignity, they wouldn’t spend 5 years being homeless.
Doesn’t this presuppose that they have a choice in the matter? Dignified or not, do you actually think any significant number of people choose to be homeless?? Maybe this is the same kind of choice that they make when they decide to be addicted to drugs?
Snark aside, about dignity and the homeless. I think it’s worth distinguishing between persons having dignity and an aspect of their lives having dignity. Is the fact of being homeless a mark against one’s dignity? Of course. Should it be? Maybe. Should that mean that nothing the person ever does again can have dignity? I’m pretty sure the decent answer to that is an emphatic no. Just because a perosn has to crawl into a cardboard box to sleep, should he also not be able to sit down at a table to eat? The point of providing dignity for the homeless is to make clear, both to themselves and to others, that not having a home doesn’t make them inhuman.