{"id":186266,"date":"2014-03-17T19:33:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-18T00:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/17\/thats-gonna-leave-a-mark-paul-ryan-edition\/"},"modified":"2014-03-17T19:33:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T00:33:00","slug":"thats-gonna-leave-a-mark-paul-ryan-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/17\/thats-gonna-leave-a-mark-paul-ryan-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Paul Ryan Edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Krugman serves a can of whup ass on Paul Ryan for his racist dog whistles<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.\u2019s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he\u2019s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he\u2019s talking about.<\/span>

<\/span> So it\u2019s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a \u201cculture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.\u201d He was, he says, simply being \u201cinarticulate.\u201d How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars \u2014 people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. <\/span>[As an aside, when he was a senior in high school, Charles Murray burned a cross next to a police station, which sort of describes his whole career since then] Oh, wait.<\/span>

<\/span> Just to be clear, there\u2019s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn\u2019t matter. He said what he said because that\u2019s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.<\/span>

<\/span> Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Krugman makes a point that needs to be made.  Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater’s Southern Strategy, the Republican party has aggressively embraced racists and racism, so the the dialogue within the GOP is permeated with racism.<\/p>\n

So he said something that makes perfect sense within a political party that is lacking in, “mindful human beings,” to quote what Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, but it was viewed with horror by much of the rest of humanity.<\/p>\n

And then there is Timothy Egan, who observes that Ryan, who frequently makes hay of the fact that his great-great-grandfather fled the Irish potato famine, which was a product of near-genocidal British policies, which were driven from the Victorian concerns about fostering dependency, which is exactly the same point that he makes when assaulting the social safety net<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In advance of St. Patrick\u2019s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland\u2019s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world\u2019s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.<\/span>

<\/span> A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a \u201cculture of dependency\u201d? Certainly England\u2019s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. \u201cDependence on charity,\u201d he declared, \u201cis not to be made an agreeable mode of life.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span> And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated \u201cculture of dependency\u201d is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England\u2019s excuse for lethal negligence.<\/span>

<\/span> There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.<\/span>

<\/span> But you can\u2019t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy. <\/span>

<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span> On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn\u2019t want his free school lunch because it left him with \u201ca full stomach and an empty soul.\u201d The story was garbage \u2014 almost completely untrue.<\/span>

<\/span> \u201cWe have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.\u201d In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.<\/span>

<\/span> Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes \u2014 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was \u201cdefective.\u201d The hungry millions were \u201ca selfish, perverse, and turbulent\u201d people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Krugman serves a can of whup ass on Paul Ryan for his racist dog whistles: There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.\u2019s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he\u2019s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1002,1051,978,1001],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-writing","category-hypocrisy","category-politics","category-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186266"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}