Child Support & Welfare Reform (was RE: working class civilsociety)

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Mar 26 12:17:12 PST 2000


kelley wrote:


>
> and for all the rhetoric of child support enforcement i can assure that it
> doesn't happen in florida.

This would seem to be the point at which analysis should begin -- and the framework for such an analysis might be provided by Kenneth Burke's category of "Political Rhetoric as Secular Prayer" -- essentially, that political rhetoric points in the opposite direction from political practice. He gives the following example:

. . .when Roosevelt, some years ago, came forth with a mighty blast

about the death sentence he was delivering to the holding companies,

I took this as evidence on its face that the holding companies were to

fare quite favorably. Otherwise, why the blast? For if something so

integral to American business was really to be dissolved, I was sure

the President would have done all in his power to soften the blow,

since he would naturally not go forth courting more trouble than he

would be in for already. To use language consistently in such cases,

rather than for stylistic refurbishment, would seem almost like a

misuse of language, from the standpoint of it use as a "corrective"

instrument. And I think that a mere treatment of such cases in terms

of "hypocrisy" would be totally misleading: it would not be judicious,

but litigious.

*Grammar of Motives* (1945), 393

(Such ironic discounting is powerful in the proper context, but it too needs to be discounted, as Benjamin DeMott argues in his fine Hudson Review article, "The Little Red Discount House." Irony can operate as a sort of universal solvent of meaning, reducing human discourse to mere babble.)

If Burke is correct (and in this case relevant) then we can be assured that as long as "all the rhetoric of child support enforcement" continues there will be no great change in the behavior of noncustodial parents and children and custodial parents will continue to suffer.

So what to do? What are our priorities, and how are those priorities Perhaps a beginning would be to drop the rhetoric of individual responsibility and attempt to generate a rhetoric of collective responsibility -- but perhaps that would not feminist enough for Kelley. :-) And perhaps it would not be moral enough for Barbara Ehrenreich. It would be morally repulsive to be so concerned with the immediate and practical problems of children and their mothers that we failed to concentrate on keeping our feminism and our moralism pure.

Carrol



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