PUNDIT WATCH
Douglas, Susan
PUNDIT WATCH Susan Douglas How to Wage War Gee, I wish Newt Gingrich had taught me history when I was in college. Then I wouldn't feel so bad about Verdun or Gallipoli. Those guys, little piglets...
...I'm thinking of the ones with big desks, big mouths, and big power, who never went to war, per se, but who know how to wage war against those weaker and smaller than themselves.* Susan Douglas, author most recently of "Where the Girls Are," appears in this space every month...
...Poor people never had a chance...
...In the episode on welfare, entitled "My Brother's Keeper," mothers active in the welfare-rights group offered deeply moving accounts of their struggles to raise their kids without enough money to feed them, let alone buy one a new shirt or send to school the $3 needed to go on a class trip...
...It is essential to ignore the effects of the GI Bill, one of the largest social-welfare programs in U.S...
...P.S...
...Their chosen title is ironic, for what they graphically document, in episode after episode, is how the war on "the War on Poverty" started nine minutes after Lyndon Johnson announced the program and ten seconds after his Administration set up the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964...
...Remembering for the camera his boss's policies toward the OEO, John Ehrlichman said, "We resorted to all kinds of trickery and artifice to try and strangle it...
...The series provides something too rarely seen on television (or, given recent pronouncements, heard in politics), a compelling history lesson—and puts the lie to the notion that antipoverty programs had unlimited time and money to "end welfare as we know it...
...The Great Society programs of the 1960s failed because they were naive, overly permissive, and created a "culture of dependency...
...This is the status of history today, my friends...
...We see a war...
...We hear over and over how programs designed to end poverty had their chance and have unequivocally demonstrated their futility...
...So as you listen to the barrage of welfare-bashing lectures from our new historian laureate and his acolytes, lectures which will repeat the War-on-Poverty-as-failure version of history, consider the following...
...We get to see women like this dragged into paddy wagons by the cops when they demonstrate for more money for themselves and their children...
...In other episodes, we see how "urban renewal" in places like Newark destroyed black communities, we see the harassment of VISTA workers, we see Governor Reagan's vicious attacks on the poor...
...Job Corps programs, like the one housed in the dilapidated barracks of Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, near where I grew up, taught young black men factory skills no longer needed by manufacturers...
...The War on Poverty as misguided and unmitigated failure—this is a characterization so pervasive, so taken for granted, that it is always the starting point of any news story on welfare and any pun-ditry on the topic...
...The first Congressional appropriation for the Office of Economic Opportunity, which coordinated the War on Poverty, amounted to approximately 1.5 percent of the total federal budget, or somewhere between $50 to $70 for every poor person in America...
...This is made even more pressing by the news that more than a quarter of the country's children under the age of six live in poverty, and that their numbers increased by one million between 1987 and 1992...
...Who cares if millions were needlessly slaughtered...
...As early as 1969, the states began to cut back on benefits...
...The news media have done nothing to question this version of history, which is being used to justify the further emiseration of poor women and their children...
...Oh, don't worry, there will be pigs in my story, too...
...history, to sustain this argument...
...This is four years after it got started...
...They failed, we are told, because it is impossible for the federal government, no matter how much it spends, to get people to improve their lot in life...
...Yes, some men can be piglets when it comes to war...
...In the mainstream media, however, there is only one answer, which closely follows the revisionism of Professor Newt...
...In these times, when the VFW gets censorship privileges over the Smithsonian's museum scripts, and PBS is under assault for airing this kind of documentary, it is essential that we remember the real history of the War on Poverty...
...Three out of five of them have working parents...
...This is why every American—with the possible exception of the erudite Professor Gingrich—should be required to watch the PBS series America's War on Poverty, written, directed, and produced by Leslie Farrell, with Henry Hampton (who did Eyes on the Prize) as executive director...
...But I'm not thinking of the guys in the trenches...
...In the classic debate about why socialism failed in America—remember that by 1912, more than a thousand socialists held elective office in thirty-three states and 160 cities—the question is whether: (a) socialism remained too poorly organized and ideologically unattractive to the masses to succeed, or (b) the forces of capital were economically and militarily too powerful...
...Those guys, little piglets that they were, loved trench warfare...
...But since Newt, in this surprise rhetorical move, brought up the importance of history, wars, and the role of gender in both, I'd like to follow suit, but from a slightly different tack...
...Today we have an updated version of this question, which asks why the War on Poverty failed, leaving the country with a welfare "crisis...
...Girls didn't get to 'cause the mud gave them scabies or something...
...We see how the War on Poverty was throttled to death by Nixon and Ehrlichman, by Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, by mounted police, by corporate executives, real-estate developers, and segregationists...
...And we're not talking Beavis and Butthead do World War I. This disquisition comes from a man employed by one of our country's institutions of higher learning...
...While spending on social welfare soared between 1960 and 1974, 75 percent of this went to the non-poor, through increases in Social Security and the establishment of Medicare...
...Hey, they got to play in the mud...
...When Richard Nixon, in 1969, shocked conservatives by proposing a guaranteed annual income, the amount— $1,600 a year—budgeted twenty-three cents a meal for families, leaving virtually nothing for shelter or clothing...
...The National Welfare Rights Organization argued for $5,500 a year...
Vol. 59 • March 1995 • No. 3
