These takes on Rand Paul have been on the pages of Jen Sorensen and Joel Pett for several days and on my mind as well.
I've wanted to feature them but wasn't sure what the mutual resonance was and didn't want to simply plop them in as a "Juxtaposition of the Day." I knew they demanded more than that. But what?
The problem was that I was having trouble defining what so infuriates me about Rand Paul and that corner of the political spectrum.
I have no problem with haters and fools.
For instance, there are commentators -- certainly including political cartoonists -- who don't even know that there is a line between mockery and criticism, much less where to draw it.
Some degree of mockery is part of the game, of course, but personal insults are not "criticism" and you have to have more to say than "what an idiot" or "we all hate this guy, right?"
"Look what the idiot did this time" is valid, as long as you then illustrate it with an example of something the idiot actually did, and that you can, in some fashion, justify it as ill-advised.
Simply repeating a rumor, helping to spread a meme or deliberately distorting facts is not commentary. It may just be lazy or it may be actively dishonest, but it is contemptible.
But that's not the issue with the button-down, polite-sounding Rand Paul crowd.
Thing is, as he makes his pious, reasonable pronouncements, I have to think that he is genuine and sincere. And parsing his arguments, they are perfectly logical and make sense, as long as they are based on theory and not on pragmatic reality.
Which got me wondering what kind of bubble he grew up in?
He's a doctor's son and grew up primarily in Lake Jackson, Texas, a town with a median household income of $73,857, compared to a national figure of $53,046. He went to the local high school and then to Baylor and on to med school at Duke.
So he's not a Bush or a Kennedy, but his background isn't hardscrabble, either, and I wonder how much he really knows about poverty, unemployment and need?
This made me think of Bobby Kennedy's historic visit to the Mississippi Delta, where for the first time he came face-to-face not just with genuine poverty but with genuinely poor people, not the "triumph over hard times" heroes at award ceremonies, but the good, decent people who continue, day after day, year after year, to live lives of relentless, grinding deprivation.
They may not be the type to rise above their situation unaided, but neither are they lazy or criminal, and if you've never met them, you'll never know them.
Even Bobby's sincere and heartfelt response was simply that of a tourist.
So I was thinking that I'm sure that, at some point, Rand Paul has done at least a cursory walk-through of a poor neighborhood, and, if it wasn't the life-altering experience RFK had, how did he respond?
At which point it hit me: The Garden Party.
A brilliant English professor assigned that above-linked 1921 Katherine Mansfield short story to us freshman year, and I don't know how much he wanted us to read it for the elegance of her prose and how much he wanted to see if it would rock us out of our own little middle-class bubbles.
I hated it then, I hate it now.
I loved it then, I love it now.
And I still don't quite know what to make of her main character.
I despise her standing with her piece of buttered bread, thinking that she is giving instructions rather than placidly and submissively agreeing with the men who have arrived with the tent, and all the while thinking to herself "How very nice workmen were!"
But at the end, Mansfield leaves me on the cliff: Laura stands at a crossroads from which she can make her life meaningful or else she can simply go back to exclaiming over the lilies and eating cream puffs, with some vague, unprocessed memory in the back of her mind of the evening she went down to the cottages.
If she chooses the latter, I hope she stays the hell out of political office.
Two points of tangency:
I have struggled a bit as a writer and I have been unemployed, but I have never been poor. I've been inconvenienced. I've been down on my luck. I've seen poor, however, and I have never, ever been poor.
I came from a mining town, but my dad was a mining engineer and the assistant manager of the mines.
In a small town, however, my friends spanned the full economic spectrum. My siblings and I were taught, as my father had been taught by his mining engineer father, not to take our advantages for granted or to flaunt them, but I'm sure there were far too many moments of insensitivity besides the ones I remember and redden over.
But these were my friends and I knew their lives and, even as a young fellow, I certainly recognized the gaps as I'm sure they did. Some people couldn't get past it, but I had plenty of good friends. Small towns are like that.
Here's something funny, though: One of our contemporaries who also lived a somewhat middle-class life was the elder son of the local physician. Some time after I left for college, I learned that his father's "vacations" had consisted of going to donate his medical services in Appalachia and on reservations, and I admired the fellow greatly for it.
It was not until Doc died that I figured out that our town, too, had been a place he served out of a sense of social responsibility. By then, his son had become a family practitioner in the North Country and he had a granddaughter studying to be a physician, presumably with the same sense of mission.
I guess the moral of the story is that there is a substantial difference between knowing which is the correct fork at the dinner table, and which is the correct fork at the crossroads.
And the second point of tangency is that Friend of the Blog Sarah Laing is working on a graphic novel about her fellow Kiwi, Katherine Mansfield, whose short story I already linked and you should really read.
I hope she's not procrastinating, despite her repeated insistences that she is.
A relative of mine once said she was poor growing up. Her parents raised four daughters during the depression on a college professor's salary. Were they poor? Well, they had a roof over their heads, heat in the winter, and didn't go hungry. When I got out of college I couldn't find a job. I lived on day-old bread and peanut butter purchased with food stamps, and I kept my apartment so cold the water in my toilet froze. I spent a lot of time in the public library because that was one of the few places I cold go where they didn't care that I didn't have any money. (That's one of the reasons I'm a librarian today.) My health insurance plan was to hope I died quickly and cheaply. So was I poor? Poor, but I know a lot of people were, and are, worse off. But the bubble people couldn't even imagine such a life.
Posted by: Phred | 01/04/2014 at 01:00 PM