Poverty's a little different from just not finding work

Poverty no longer rising 

but grips 46,000,000.

The New York Times 

yesterday's date

Even feudalism is doctrinally

predicated on the employment

of the employable. Not "right

to work" America. We have mas-

tered inefficiency in the name

of efficiency - as Bob Dylan

wrote for a track in Modern

Times, to "compete abroad."

Every exquisite element of this

injustice has been enshrined in

fiscal policy since Reagan. All

of it has been sold as a pipe-

dream of revenge on the under-

class, or the patronising in-
sult of healing it by example,
in a pentecostal fandango of 
greed. Where capital has en-

countered the threat of distri-

bution, we have enjoyed warfare.
Yes, what else is new?

46 million persons should not be

impoverished in the solar system.

For them to be suspended in that 

agony here, is a phenomenon which 

summons Lamb's A Dissertation upon

Roast Pig and his Complaint of the

Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis

to the same luncheon entertainment

at the Economic Club in Washington,

where just now the Secretary of the

Treasury opined, We are not where

we want to be. Jay Gould, himself,

could not have put it better. 

This was polite of him, given the

mystery that he is not behind bars.

I did not come to the internet to

sequester myself in a Speaker's

Corner in a leafy page. But I did

want to speak up for seeing, an

act which is directly affronted,

intimidated, and suppressed, by 

any brutality. I cannot accuse the

Steps Scene in Battleship Potemkin,

or its view of maggots on the sail-

ors' butchered meat, of agitprop,

and suffer a Treasury Secretary to
confide, he isn't happy. It ranks 
right up there, with infant mortal-
ity and malnutrition. Happiness: 
didn't Mr Jefferson aver, we might
all pursue it?

              Close the restaurants? Well, it'd

              be a start; but those people really

              can't find other work. Tithe the

              Koch brothers? God forbid. Why not

              just eliminate the innocents who

              see - which is, I assure myself,

              not actually, truly, really, and

              certainly the Right wing's program -

              and spare ourselves the remorse of

              their effrontery? I think of asking
              this of Stephen Crane, I think of 
              asking Melville, James and Faulkner.
              I think of any surfer, trusting in
              another wave. The literature of our
              people is of power without force.

              Who would betray a second chance?

Sergei Eisenstein
  director
Eduard Tisse
  cinematography
Battleship Potemkin
1925

Charles Lamb
Elia
1822
op. cit.

Timothy Egan
("Context" Sidebar)
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September 19, 2013