June 04, 2005

Poverty Fetish : A response to "Why does the left hate money?"
by Liza Sabater

Ellen Dana Nagler has quite a provocative post at The Blogging of the President 2004 | Why Does the Left Hate Money?. I am going to re-blog the whole thing here if only because you will have to go to the site to read up on all the wonderful comments :

Our good friend John Aravosis at AmericaBlog asks the question. The article and comment thread — provocative, and a conversation worth having — reveal a knee-jerk lefty loathing of having anything that looks like wealth. One commenter has an explanation, and a phrase to go with it, that strike a chord:

I think a lot of it is the idiotic obsessive competition for ideological purity. I call such people "leftier-than-thou's".

We know the "leftier-than-thou" problem. It's what interferes with our being able to bring the "ideological purists" into a rational discussion of critical issues like the use of nuclear energy to help move us to an economy less dependent on fossil fuels.

I'm all for money — making it, enjoying its fruits. (For all my life I've maintained that I want money for only one reason: it enables my freedom.) I don't see any disconnect between having a comfortable financial base and being committed to expanding economic opportunity for others. I come from the old school: being privileged means having an obligation and duty to "give back." My kids went to supposedly snooty New England boarding schools (which were a helluva lot more egalitarian than many other institutions less reviled by the purists). That was the central moral lesson they were taught there, as well as at home.

But abuse of privilege has given the privileged a bad name. Elitist, for one. Plutocrat, for another. And, from the left that loves to bite the hand, that disdainful term from the 60s: "limousine liberal."

Thoughts?

This is a fanstastic post if only because it strikes at the heart of what I have been dealing with during the past few weeks --and it's the reason why I have not been posting regularly here. Ironic because what I am doing behind the blog is building the social and financial infrastructure to support my blogging.

So I have to blog less in order to hopefully, some day, blog more. The logic and the reality-check of it all sucks. I want to blog more NOW.

I for one am one who is not blogging, waiting for the book deal. I truly love this form, this medium, and I want to use it and explore its possibilities and push the medium technologically and aesthetically as far as I can.

If someone asked me to write a book and offered an advance, I'd really have to qualify the opportunity because "book writing" is not as fun and as creative as blogging. Sorry people, the linearity of the form ... everything that could be done with a book has been done. Linguistically by James Joyce Blooming of the language in Ulysses; structurally by Julio Cortazar's Jackson Pollocking of the form with Rayuela.

As a said, books as a creative form, have been done. Blogs? That's virgin territory and there is nothing like probing a virgin. If you can do it, why not?

But creative work takes time. From the financial standpoint, the only way you can get time to do this is if the time you spend surviving is shortened (ie : you get a full-time paycheck for half-time work) or you've managed to turn your creative work into a source of income. But there is another, more important aspect to this equation. Ian Welsh points to it in the comments :

Money is good. Lack of money is bad. Who was it who said "money isn't the root of all evil - lack of money is"?

What I hated about being poor was that money consumes your entire world. No one but scrooge McDuck thinks about money more than the poor, because you're always calculating what you can afford and if you can make what you have stretch far enough. Always living in fear.
Posted by: Ian Welsh at June 3, 2005 02:42 PM

This is at the heart of what I have written about in Secular Blue America and what I will be pouding away at until at least 2008. Where is the "hardware" of life options for secular blue Americans, regardless of race, class or ethnicity? Where do we go for help?

There is nothing worst than not knowing if you will be able to afford to by a quart of milk for your family or to sweat over paying for a doctor and buying medicines when you can barely pay the rent. I've been there too. It is unbelievably taxing to the body to live like that, but it is even more to the spirit. It breaks even the hardest of men.

When I hear of people like Ralph Nader who, as it was pointed out at the BOPNews thread, is a millionaire who lives like a monk, I just want to go ballistic. People like Nader can afford to disdain money because, well, they can afford it. They have the money to do so. If anything goes wrong, if a crisis arises, they know they'll have the money and the support structure to rely on in times of need.

That's why I think being in the "just barely making it" class is worse than being poor because that pay check will exclude you from a lot of poverty programs. And the left has allowed for this to happen as much as the right. We've allowd for welfare to become a dirty word and have looked the other way while it's been cannibalized to the point that it can only help the indigent. If it does at all.

The left has allowed it because it has a poverty fetish. Without poverty they can't play Robin Hood. But life's basic necessities should not be part of a game. Actually, let me reframe that : In order for a democracy to sustain itself, we as individuals and citizens need to make sure that the fundamentals of Life, Liberty and the puirsuit of Happiness are always sustained as inaliable rights to all and not just the privilege of the few.

Declaration of Independence We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I wrote not so eloquently about the "leftier-than-thou's" :

This attitude, these idiots are the reason why we have a culture that believes no universal medical insurance is still acceptable. Why affordable housing for the working classes is non-existent. It's why we've gone from Pell Grants to Student Loans and why NEA has been gutted to the bare minimum and why creative education --whether in arts of trades-- has been basically wiped out in this country. It's why we have no rights to fully-paid maternity nor parental SABBATICALS. Basic fundamental needs like health, shelter, education, family : they're treated as "privileges".

And I stand by what I wrote. I believe the left's poverty fetish is what has gotten us where we are right now. What better example than this thought experiment : When you hear BLACK or PUERTO RICAN, do you immediately think POOR ?

Yeah, I thought so.

So to go back to my own endeavors. If there is anything the internet has taught me is how networking, the work of the Devil's children or yuppies, can be empowering (another one of those 80s words).

How socializing or meetings, qualifying your contacts by having informational interviews or meetings, public displays of acknowledgement or thank-yous, all those things that many of us disdained during the 80s as the thing of yuppies, are what social technology is all about. And it is what is changing politics as we speak.

Actually, it is changing my life as I blog.

So I'm getting rid of my poverty fetish. I have been intuitively for the past year. But it wasn't until Ellen wrote about it that it really hit home.

Because, seriously, I don't want y'all to show me the money out of greed. Show me the money out of possibility building a better future through strong, creative and free communities online and off.

Blogging?
That's the seed.
The spark.

Support thy bloggers, and you support a new democratic revolution. It's just that simple.

Which reminds me, that image on the top, it's tip jar. I am going to start some serious fundraising for culturekitchen. Every cup of coffee counts.

Yup.

I'm gonna hit you with pledges and hit you hard. My bandwidth costs are going off the roof with this site. I need to move it to another account but that costs me not only money but time that I do not have. At least a full week's work of tech work --and at $50/hour (and this is a low-ball estimate), that's a chunk of money I don't have.

So you're gonna feel good about yourself afterwards. Not spent and dirty like after a PBS pledge-a-thon. Then again, if that's what you're into ... Nah, won't go there.

Posted by Liza Sabater in Activism, Blogs, Books, Business, Class, Commerce, Creative Class, Creativity, Culture, DIY, Democrats, Economics, Finance, Grassroots, Liberalism, Money, Poverty, Privilege, Rights, Writing
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