Pot & Kettle
So, I have really enjoyed watching that picture of a pristine Paul Ryan 'washing' an equally pristine pot in a clean soup kitchen circulate round and round the Interworld. It evokes a kind of dark nostalgia for the Bush years, during which the staged photo-op was raised to an art form. Probably no one will ever top the infamous flight suit photo under the sadly wrong "Mission Accomplished" banner...but coming in a close second, for me, was the photo of Bush 'serving turkey' to the troops in Iraq tht was unleashed with such fanfare one November.
Still. Looking at this picture of a man totally not helping the poor in any way while trying to make it look like he is was also, in a way, depressing. Because in a way it's a picture of all the ways in which charity, by itself, cannot solve our problems.
I have done some volunteering in my life, and the thing I found I enjoyed the most was working in soup kitchens. I like cooking; I like watching people eat food I have made and enjoy it; and I like the fact that it is simple. You make food and people eat it and then they're not as hungry as they were when they came in. A lot of charitable enterprises have unintended negative consequences. But you can be pretty sure that giving someone a meal isn't going to do them much damage. It is also simpler than most of what I do in the rest of my life. It was a good thing for me that whatever had gone wrong with my work during the week, I could at least go help feed a hundred people and that would usually work out OK. At the soup kitchen where I put in most of my volunteer time, they got a lot of donations from local restaurants, so you could usually make something that was actually a pleasure to eat. Now we go to a church that has a very well-developed food pantry (this is what they call it instead of "soup kitchen," which is really a misnomer these days) which not only feeds people on site but packs bags of groceries for people to take home with them. Their schedule makes it impossible for me to cook there, but I help out packing the take-away bags sometimes. There are two kinds: the bag of groceries for people who have access to a kitchen, and the bag of groceries for people who don't have a stove, a can opener, plates, or, basically, a home.
This is important work. They feed a shitload of people. It does matter. But it is not enough. It cannot be enough. Private charity can never and will never truly compensate for the failures of public policy. Charity cannot match the scale of the need. There are too many people who have nowhere to live, too many people who have nothing to eat, too many people who are "food insecure," which is what we evidently call it now when a family cannot be sure where its next meal is coming from.
We believe in charity; we engage in it; we are training PJ to believe in it. Still, when we all take our donated school supplies to church for the local public school, which cannot afford to keep its own students outfitted because of the insane way our city's property taxes are siphoned off to fund private development, and PJ talks with that heartbreaking confidence about how much this will help people, it just makes you want to cry. Yes, it helps some. A truly just and sane approach to public education in this country would help a lot more.
What was Paul Ryan doing in that soup kitchen anyway? Why did they want that photo? Because this is the only visible form conservative "compassion" is allowed to take: the individual rich person, out of the goodness of his heart and fullness of his wallet, donating a little time and money to make life slightly better for a few people some of the time. This is as photogenic as "trickle-down economics" will ever get. If they wanted an image of their guys doing something to help the 47%--hell, to help the 99%--this was the only way they could get it. Even if the work he was doing had been real--and I'd kind of enjoy seeing Ryan do some real cleanup work at a soup kitchen; I've done it myself, and you come out a lot messier, not to say wetter, wrinklier, and smellier, than you went in--it would still, in a sense, have been a lie. Because if he and Romney get elected, they are going to make way more people "food insecure" than that kitchen can ever feed.
The fact that this photo turned out to be pure image--that in fact, what we have is not a picture of work being done but a picture of a man treating a kitchen that feeds hungry people as if it were a movie set--is of course delectable to the connoisseur of irony. But the real irony, the one that scalds me, is the implication that scrubbing a few pots somehow balances out the record of legislative ruthlessness that seeks to strip out more and more public support for the poor even as it moves more and more of the country's wealth away from ordinary Americans. For the scale to balance, Paul Ryan would have to frickin' live in a soup kitchen--and Mitt Romney with him--and wash dishes from sunup to sundown for the rest of his natural life.
The Plaid Adder
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