[I will certainly grant you this: Right-wingers are ever more aggrieved by folks' lack of humble gratitude for this record-breaking prosperity. The following – a signed editorial by John Strausbaugh in the current NY Press – is a prime example of this.]
Weep the People
It’s official. Americans are the whiniest nation on Earth. One has often suspected as much, but now it’s confirmed: it was on the front page of "the paper of record" this Sunday.
Even to those of us conditioned to seeing The New York Times peddle bizarre versions of reality as it seeks ever new ways to instill insecurity and foreboding in its complacent suburban subscribers (an insecure market is a market addicted to news), Louis Uchitelle’s "Working Families Strain to Live Middle-Class Life" was the journalistic equivalent of Surrealism. Uchitelle’s opening gambit was the flat declaration of "a central fact of American life: most of the nation’s 72 million families feel they cannot make ends meet." Unsurprisingly, there was little substantive fact and few data in the remainder of the article to support this bold pronouncement, and one soon saw that the key word in it was the fudge-factor intransitive feel. He went on: "No one argues that middle-income families cannot put food on the table, pay the mortgage, own a car or two, take a modest vacation. What stresses them, sociologists and economist say, are the other outlays of middle-class life: new clothes, child care, lessons for the children, restaurants, movies, home decoration, computers, big-screen television sets, stereo systems, Christmas gifts, and saving for college and retirement."
A short way farther along, Uchitelle admitted that American families "are doing better. Their income, adjusted for inflation, had plunged in the early 1990’s," but has risen 12.7 percent since it bottomed out in 1993. No matter. He quotes a labor economist conceding that "Middle-income families are definitely a few dollars ahead of where they were and they are happy to be there. People are more likely today to hold full-time jobs with health insurance than part-time or temporary work, without benefits." Of course, there was a cloud around the silver lining: "But the stock market boom has not reached middle-income families in any important way," the economist went on, "and while family income is up, so is family debt and hours spent at work." Leave it to a labor economist not to understand the links between a healthy economy, a booming stock market and all those full-time jobs with benefits.
The article took a turn for the nauseating as it presented us with profiles of these unfortunate American families, struggling to make the payments on that second utility vehicle or pay down the credit card debt from their last splurge vacation. There was the heart-rending tale of a couple living in a ranch house in Ohio, where the wife has been forced to develop a "resistance to impulse buying, particularly of clothing and toys." On a recent shopping trip, she suddenly decided to spend $250 on "packaged snack food." Why were we reading about this apparent mental case in an article ostensibly about "average" Americans? Because if this article was to be trusted, all middle-class Americans must be nuts. Otherwise, how to explain the couple in Des Moines who bring in $90,000, good money in Des Moines, and "hope to build a larger house on a suburban lot they have bought, now that they have paid off the mortgage on their present three-bedroom home"? Their complaint? They both work long hours at their tv appliance store to make that good money.
Another couple is spending $7500 on a new shed for the tractor he uses on "their small spread," even though she was laid off from her job at an assembly plant. A 55-year-old man wants to retire in a year or two and thinks it’s "highway robbery" that Medicare won’t kick in until he’s 65. A 30-year-old woman just bought a $118,000 house in the suburbs and whines about her expenses: "car insurance, a cell phone, a beeper, cable television, beauty parlor and nail salon, gasoline, groceries, dry cleaning, home security, Internet connection, 403 (b) pension contribution, health insurance. As a preacher’s daughter, she tithes $300 a month. And there are the credit card bills, which average $500 a month."
Schedule the Red Cross air-drop.
What are these people complaining about? Lives there a person in Pakistan, or all of Eastern Europe, Central America or the continent of Africa who wouldn’t trade places with these whining ingrates in a heartbeat? Why did the Times publish this nonsense at all, let alone on the front page? Was it meant as some cruel form of parody?
A small article from Reuters, buried on page A26, purportedly dealt with Americans who really do have something to complain about: "Millions Still Going Hungry In the U.S., Report Finds." And yet even this was circuitously argued and worded for the most worrisome affect: "While fewer Americans are going hungry thanks to the country’s booming economy, a federal report says that 31 million people grappled with hunger, or at least the fear of it, last year." Emphasis added. We would like to see the survey instrument and the raw data on this, to distinguish how many of those 31 million are truly "going hungry" and how many are not hungry but feeling pangs of "food insecurity" – numbers the article, of course, failed to provide. It is probably too much to hope that such an article would also distinguish clinical "starvation" – as in "Millions Dying of Starvation in Africa" – from the murkier "going hungry." One would like to think that any policy to address this issue will demark relative degrees of severity, on a scale from life-threatening hunger to merely fretting about it. Hunger is a condition we as a society can address. Maundering about "insecurity" in the midst of unprecedented plenty is a callous insult to a world where true want is common.
[end]
Carl
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