Prometheus 6

George Will has an editorial in the Washington Post derived from American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare by Jason Deparle, a new book that I am totally unfamiliar with outside of this editorial.

The editorial itself is a pretty standard presentation of pretty standard fare on welfare reform so I don't intend to go into it in detail but I'm reacting on the fly here and don't really know how long this post will be. There are a few things in there I feel can be rescued from Mr. Will's world view, and a few things that give the whole editorial a really unfortunate spin that, as a fellow wordsmith, I know was unnecessary.

To be honest, this feels a lot like bobbing for apples in a freshly flushed toilet bowl...you don't see no shit but you know it's there.

After the liberalization of welfare in the mid-1960s, the percentage of black children born to unmarried mothers reached 50 by 1976 (it is almost 70 today), and within a generation the welfare rolls quadrupled. But DeParle says people mistakenly thought people like Jobe were organizing their lives around having babies to get a check. Actually, he says, their lives were too disorganized for that.

You cannot read this paragraph without coming away feeling Mr. Will is implying the entire quadrupling of welfare rolls was due to the increase in Black children born out of wedlock. If asked was this his intent I'm sure he would say no. And yet you cannot read this paragraph without coming away feeling Mr. Will is implying the entire quadrupling of welfare rolls was due to the increase in Black children born out of wedlock.

Here is the apple in this toilet:

[I] thought people like Jobe were organizing their lives around having babies to get a check. Actually, he says, their lives were too disorganized for that.

This is far closer to the truth, a far more useful formulation, than the 'lazy baby factory' definition of "people like Jobe" (quoted because I'm treating the phrase as an undefined term). I think a certain cultural underdevelopment or immaturity (I statistics on who prefers which term would show a strong racial correlation) rather than disorganization is more to the point. There is a certain amount of structure and regularity in life that is needed to even be able to plan. In general the regularity "people like Jobe" deal with is the regular requirement to hustle. This makes you organize things differently than a person that is comfortably ensconced in the mainstream, makes you organize to deal with things a person who has been essentially comfortable all their lives can't even see. And that comfortable person will look at the way you are arrayed and ask, "what the hell is that about?"

What can help organize lives, at least those that are organizable, is work. The requirements of work -- mundane matters such as punctuality, politeness and hygiene -- are essential to the culture of freedom.

Yes, the nigras must warsh they azz and learn to keep in they place. Lawd knows you ain't gonna get they shufflin' butts offa CPTime...

I'm sorry, Mr. Will, but fuck you too.

No, I'm not.

Work is not a means of organizing life. Your life organizes itself around the work you do...different thing entirely.

But DeParle's unsentimental reporting offers scant confirmation of the welfare reformers' highest hope: that when former welfare mothers go to work, their example will transform the culture of their homes, breaking the chain of behaviors that passes poverty down the generations.

I could have told you that. Probably did.

Rather than making it harder and less attractive to be on welfare, we should have made it easier and more attractive to get a job. Relativity of perception is such that a person with a basically negative turn of mind can see the former as the latter but they really aren't the same thing at all.

And down at the bottom of the toilet bowl:

What of her future? Today she says, "I don't think much about tomorrow." Complete absorption in the present is both a cause and a consequence of living a precarious and disorganized life, but so far her post-welfare story illustrates two truisms: People respond to strong social cues, as she did when she got on the bus and later when she got off welfare. Second, poor people are more resilient -- and more resistant to fundamental behavior modification -- than their various would-be improvers suppose.

That he sees the lack of use of foresight to be both a cause and an effect is good.

The point about people responding to strong social cues is excellent. It has bearing on my support for collective action and decisions; it is the reason certain Supreme Court decisions Conservatives are whining about nowadays were just and necessary.

But he loses almost all the benefit of these observations with this

poor people are more resilient -- and more resistant to fundamental behavior modification -- than their various would-be improvers suppose.

Because the REAL point isn't about poor people but all people.

"People are more resilient -- and more resistant to fundamental behavior modification -- than their various would-be improvers suppose."

That loses none of his meaning and, because it is broader and equally accurate, can't be read as "they're hopeless." I am, of course, assuming "they're hopeless" is not part of his meaning.