When all else fails, blame the poor

Okay, I'll admit, I really let David Brooks get to me too much. It's not his sophmoric ideas or slight of hand arguments, plenty of neo-conservatives, neo-liberals, post-structuralists, post-neo-paleo-moderate-Weberians exhibit just this tendency. It's not even his good-natured, upper tax bracket, only leaving the Upper East Side for St. Barts (and, no Mr. Brooks, that's not a synonym for Jewish), appeal to the "well-meaning rich," who really, really liked reading Foucault in their sophmore English class because they realized doing a bunch of coke and kissing someone of the same-sex at an Avenue B punk club made them a "true radical" (obviously, I have some pent up anger here). No, I'm starting to think its simply his anti-intellectualism. I realize its fun to blame the poor for everything, hell they did kill Kennedy, but when one starts claiming that talk about poverty and job loss is "crude, populist rhetoric," I get a little pissed off. Of the few "arguments," Mr. Brooks makes in his column today, not a single one stands up to any decent historical analysis. Argument #1-"poverty comes from cultural conditions not economic." While this claim tends to be both inherently racist and sexist (see the excellent historical scholarship of Daryl Michael Scott, Linda Gordon and Adolph Reed), I will choose to assume that Mr. Brooks, in his continuing attempt to convert the east coast wealthy (who disdain anything that smells of their fathers "cultural" sins) from neo-libaralism to neo-conservatism, is not engaging in the blatant examples of this argument obvious in the 'welfare mother' discourse of the 1990s or 'single-parent household' argument perfected by the Moynihan Report. So even if I choose to disregard all this garbage, this argument still comes face to face with the simple problem of jobs. According to Mr. Brooks, the poor's lack of"industriousness" (read, the opposite of the capitalist discipline buzzword: laziness), sobriety etc. comes from their continuing cycle of poverty. This formulation is problematic on two levels. On the one hand, the pseudo-social science that came up with the whole "culture of poverty" theory (okay, its been around longer than social science, but quoting Jeremy Bentham does not play to Mr. Brooks' audience) has rarely, if ever, used a control in their studies. While it may come as a shock to Mr. Brooks, on the whole, the non-poor tend to exhibit the same qualities of laziness, infidelity, and unpunctuality that the poor do. What's that you say, people who aren't poor cheat on their wives, get pregnant outside of wedlock, drink alcohol, are late to work, waste "valuable" company time playing video games and looking at pornography, why I never... The other problem (fine, there are thousands more, but, like the non-poor man I am, I have to get industrious again and stop wasting my labor time) is the simple fact of jobs. An anti-anti-intellectual understanding of the whoafully inept, insufficient and inefficient welfare program that lasted from the Great Society to the Clinton years would, maybe, take into account that the same period was coincident with the disappearance of the entire economic structure that allowed poverty to decline and the middle-class to expand for the longest sustained period in American history. I'm talking about the unionized manufacturing jobs that by and large, could allow a working-class family to buy a house and help their kids go to a state college (institutions that have also seen their funding steadily decrease). Do such jobs exist in America today, not really, but the fact that America has per capita millions fewer jobs that pay people a wage higher than the (antiquated) poverty level could never be a source of increased poverty, I mean come on, the poor are so different than the rest of us, it's got to be their fault, right? They live in the wrong neighborhoods and towns, they go to the wrong schools, they talk funny and (admit they) shop at wal-mart, I mean, their culture is so, so, POOR. Like the man said, "Two dollars and an industrious culture will get you on the subway."