Holiday Spirit, 1980s-2011

Mr. Dickens......meet Mr. Meese.

Some 1983 quotes, from Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor—

12/8 Continuing his tradition of holiday season insensitivity, a well-fed Ed Meese scoffs at the notion that the administration's policies are unnecessarily cruel to the poor. "I don't know of any authoritative figures that there are hungry children," he declares. "I've heard a lot of anecdotal stuff, but I haven't heard any authoritative figures.... I think some people are going to soup kitchens voluntarily. I know we've had considerable information that people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that that's easier than paying for it. ... I think that they have money."

12/15 Ed Meese tells the National Press Club that literature's classic miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, to whom he has recently been compared, suffered from "bad press in his time. If you really look at the facts, he didn't exploit Bob Cratchit." Explains Meese, "Bob Cratchit was paid 10 shillings a week, which was a very good wage at the time.... Bob, in fact, had good cause to be happy with his situation. He lived in a house, not a tenement. His wife didn't have to work.... He was able to afford the traditional Christmas dinner of roast goose and plum pudding.... So let's be fair to Scrooge. He had his faults, but he wasn't unfair to anyone."

12/16 "Did he really say that? I can't believe he said that. ... Dickens is saying that the poor deserve to live not on the margins, but with comfort and love and with freedom and medical attention. I mean, isn't that the very point about Tiny Tim? ...He desperately needs a doctor and can't get to one because his family is so poor....He's dying because he can't get medical care....Boy, I'm really getting angry now. I can't believe these people."
—University of Pennsylvania Victorian literature scholar Nina Auerbach on the Meese interpretation of A Christmas Carol

You almost have to feel for Ed Meese, what with his having to work so hard to spread the word. After all, this was decades before the bipartisan consensus would be that the poor are bankrupting us. Just one recent sign of the latter: scams involving food stamps—instead of chicanery by, say, Wall Street —would seem to be the only fraud worthy of prosecution by the Feds.

Reagan demonized the poor for political gain. On landing in White House, he and his administration found it more advisable to pretend U.S. levels of poverty and hunger were exaggerated.

The percentage of the population in poverty continues a staggering (if not surprising) rise, in the decades since Reaganite policies won.

But not to worry: the noise machine is there to make sure the public knows the poor have phones and TVs; ergo, there's no poverty. This (and its corollary: poor people are fat, so they are not poor), are trotted out around this time of year, just as the public might be most susceptible to feeling charitable.

With the ranks of the permanently unemployed rising—and middle-class security an illusion—making the unemployed into Welfare Queens in need of drug testing is just one of the newest fronts in the war on the 99 Percent.

Holiday season 2011: the head of Republican Party—like Meese, a vastly overstuffed sort—calls hungry children in need of school meals year-round "wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the state."

Even if not widely reported, reality—which can include the emotional disturbance brought on by despair—sometimes intrudes.

The Dear Leader of the post-Reagan Revolution has been back in the headlines, and proposing child labor for the poor.

Mere recycled shtick, consistent with Gingrich's 1994 proposal to put the children of the poor in orphanages.

Looking back brings up the way the whole dynamic operates. Although those of us who lived through the period remember the ridicule heaped on Gingrich, once the Big Idea was put On The Table it became an issue in need of consensus from Serious People.