Jitterbugging for Jesus

They smoke cigarettes and drink a lot beer and cheap wine too, of course (they have no taste in fine wine, the poor dahlings)–and we all know who’s smoking crack in this country, which is such a crass drug compared to the ones that the rich kids on Wall Street and the “Masters of the Universe” get high on when they take their helicopters to the Hamptons where their spouses are “summering” with the children who are, God helps us, our future.

(Pardon this snarky aside, but did you know that Plano kids all get ponies for their birthdays–which is nothing compared to kids in Frisco, Texas who all get full-grown Paint Horses. I don’t want to put too fine a point on this, however, because it puts me at risk of making sweeping generalizations about the rich kids among us, who all prefer to guy high on “designer” drugs and binge drinking anyway.)

Much has been made of a Heritage Foundation (click here) report that proves” –verily PROVES!–that America really has no such thing as a poor people because America’s alleged “poor” people all have refrigerators to preserve the food they lack and microwaves to heat up their crack cocaine and–eek!– even WIDE SCREEN TVS and CELL PHONES.

The report suggests and implies (wink!) that if America’s poor people would do without refrigerators (?) and microwaves and wide screen TV’s and cell phones and –eek!!!– CABLE SERVICE, they’d be people of good character like those people in their cool ivory towers at the Heritage Foundation and the Fox News suites, not to mention the Halls of Congress, they who have aids to open doors for them and 100 percent paid health insurance and pensions they can retain even if they get caught crooking us to death and have to go to jail.

Or their campaign “war funds.”

The Heritage report is enough to set Sean Hannity’s ultra-conservative haircut on fire–he who judges every night who the “good Americans” are as opposed to the traitors and scummy radicals. (Personal message to Sean: You really should consider counseling for that intense, irrational and pathological hatred you feel in your Christian heart for President Obama.)

(And then there’s Bill O’Reilly, who does the Kingdom of God a great service every night by separating the “patriots” from the “pinheads.” Jesus in Matt. 25, BTW, says that we’ll be judged by how we treat the wealthiest and most privileged among us, and that the well-to-do patriots will go to heaven while the pinheads will burn in Hell eternally, which is forever and ever and ever and ever, which is such a long time you don’t even want to think about it. Bill has been quoting the Bible a lot lately, a book of which he is an astute student and this we KNOW because he tells us so; who knew that Catholics actually read the Bible, much less study it, but I digress with that sweeping generalization about my Catholic friends, or now ex friends as it were).

The Heritage Foundation report is not entirely wrong and not entirely without any merit whatsoever. It makes some points that I as a bona fide bleeding heart Marxist radical flame thrower (not to mention a pinhead) and mushy follower of Christ can’t argue with.

But the operative word above is “few” good and valid points made in the Heritage conclusions. In the big scheme of things, the report is flawed from the get-go in that it makes material goods and conveniences the measure of all American poverty and pretty much concludes that our so-called “poor people”–who aren’t really poor (it asserts)–are lazy and shiftless shits (why don’t they come right out and say it?) who are all gaming the system like a bunch of Wall Street crooks or something.

It’s flawed in that it takes statistics to make points with no real perspective or context. Mark Twain’s famous quip comes to mind every time I re-read the report: “There’s lies, damn lies and statistics.”

And I do keep reading it because I can’t believe all the contradictory sentences and aforementioned flaws.

It seems to me that if it contained objective perspective and context and all that– if it were, to used a Fox News phrase, “fair and balanced”–the researchers would have done the grunt work on the ground and interviewed people of faith who work with the poor every day. (I, for one, was available for interviews and would have been glad to introduce them to the poor people whose stories I hear every day in the ER adn the ICU and at outreach and mission ministries I’m involved in.) Also, they would have talked to people of faith who live among the poor. (I’m STILL available here at my man cave apartment here in the Hood and would have been glad to have introduced the researchers to a neighbor downstairs, she who works two jobs and has a nice big TV she bought at something like a Salvation Army store, and has no cable {or health insurance because it’s not offered at the jobs she works}, and whose two teenage kids got no useless electronic toys for games because they’re working just to help mom pay the outrageous electric bill in the concrete oven that is Dallas, Tx these days. But she does have some food in her — eeek!!! —- refrigerator, and is such a rancid poor person that she and the boys insist on sharing food she cooks with yours truly sometime. Who knew that poor folks can be hospitable and Christian like.)

I just wish the researchers who did the report on poverty would have talked not only to the poor people who buy “conveniences” at thrift stores and places like the Salvation Army stores and some of whom, yes, have cable and cell phones–I wish they had interviewed people at Food Banks, volunteers for Meals on Wheels, Big Brothers and Big Sisters (like me) and the managers of homeless shelters.

Meanwhile, our Congress men (have you noticed no women out front in the blood bath on the debt ceiling except for an occasional peep from Michele Bachmann who scares me half to death?) are fighting the good fight for the billionaires and multimillionaires summer in The Hamptons and the corporations that plant their headquarters in obscure countries to avoid taxes while “outsourcing” jobs to countries that are not so obscure like India?

You gotta love Congressmen–they have people opening doors for them everywhere they go, they have health insurance for them and their families that pays 100 percent (remember the tea party freshman who complained that his 100 percent insurance didn’t kick in for a few weeks?), and whopping pensions that will pay even if they go to Jail in their capacities as the go-to guys for the Corporations and Defense Contractors and Big Oil Companies that own us.

God help us, it’s getting so it’s not even funny anymore.

Read Full Post »