In Their Eyes, We are the Damned - Democratic Underground

McCamy Taylor

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Thu Aug-25-11 08:29 PM
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In Their Eyes, We are the Damned

Ever wonder why the Tea Party and their corporate masters hate the poor? Why they delight in kicking those who are already down, stealing the bread from a starving widow’s mouth, kicking the walker out from under a disabled veteran? Why they praise each other for taking from those who have so little and giving that little to someone who already has too much?

In 1904, Max Weber attempted to answer these questions in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For those who have not read it, here is the McCamy Cliff Notes Annotated Version.

I. Destination Heaven versus Hell

“So, wherever the doctrine of predestination was held, the question could not be suppressed whether there were any infallible criteria by which membership in the electi could be known.” Weber

In the days before the mega Churches, we would visit a tiny, unadorned white chapel each Sunday. As we sat on the butt numbing wooden benches, the preacher would go on and on about the fires of Hell, and about how sinners would burn in agony for all eternity. There was no air conditioning back then. As the sun rose in the sky, the church would become hotter and hotter---and so did the minister. Until it came time to baptize a new member. Then, the glass pool full of water came out. Dressed in white robes, the woman was immersed in the coolness of divine grace. As children, we could not help but think that the water looked so inviting. Better to be saved and swim in that cool pool forever than to be damned and burn in the fires of Hell, that were probably a lot like the fires of Texas on a hot, August Sunday.

II. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

“Labour in a calling was also the ascetic activity par excellence…God Himself blessed His chosen ones through the success of their labors.” Weber

Pew did an interesting poll. Though we live in bad economic times, when corporate criminal acts like those committed at Enron are common knowledge:

Americans are by nature "conservative egalitarians." While they favor a somewhat more equal distribution of income and wealth, by and large they admire people who get rich through hard work (90% mostly or completely endorse this notion in the new Pew Research values survey).

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1255/economic-outlook-more-upbeat-haves-have-nots-less-concern

Who among us has not been sucked into the cult of the Rich and Famous? The rich are different. Their clothes are more sumptuous. Their love affairs are uncluttered by thoughts of What happens if I get pregnant? and I’ve got a date tonight, but my boss wants me to work late and I need this job. Every one of them is a potential presidential candidate. They can get away with things, like killing their estranged wife’s boyfriend and child in front of witnesses (Google Cullen Davis) , because they can hire the best lawyers. For the rest of us, a crime of passion like that would be a one way ticket to Death Row.

The Rich are more charitable. They give money to buy mosquito nets in Africa, and they build children’s hospitals. We do not have enough money left at the end of the week to pay our own bills, much less help out our sister who has lost her home due to unemployment. And the homeless veteran begging on the streets---if we were rich, we could put a $20 bill in his cup and feel so much better about ourselves. As it is, we dare not look into his eyes, because we have pain enough, we don’t need anymore thank you.

III. Lifestyles of the Shiftless and Lazy

“This consciousness of divine grace of the elect and holy was accompanied by an attitude towards the sins of one’s neighbors, not of sympathetic understanding based on the consciousness of one’s own weakness, but of hatred and contempt for him as an enemy of God bearing the sins of eternal damnation.” Weber

I don’t have to repeat the filthy slander, do I? We all know the rhetoric. We have all heard seemingly nice old ladies mutter that some people do not deserve the right to vote. We have all heard a doctor complain that the patient without health insurance had a cell phone. We have all watched a store manager follow the shabbily dressed shopper like a blood hound. Being poor in America is not just a tragedy. To some folks---many folks---it is considered a sin. And good puritans know that God did not put them on this earth to feel sorry for sinners. No, we are here to put them in the stocks, drive them from the village, burn them at the stake.

We do not start out feeling revulsion towards the poor. When my five year old son and I went to Mexico City, he insisted that we give to every beggar we passed. At five, it would not occur to him not to take pity on someone so thin, so desperate, so poor, when he knew that we had pockets full of money.

Somewhere between five and adulthood, many of us lose that natural compassion. We begin to stigmatize the poor. The old man on the street corner with the Will work for food sign is a wino. The young woman with the same sign is a crack head or meth addict, depending upon her race.

Politicians and the news media are a huge factor in our inhumanity. Here is a study of the effect of the “welfare queen” narrative started by Ronald Reagan.

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/102223/The-Welfare-Queen-Experiment.aspx

Patricia Hill Collins, a leading feminist scholar, professor and author of the book “Black Feminist Thought,” outlines this script when she observes: “She is portrayed as being content to sit around and collect welfare, shunning work and passing on her bad values to her offspring. The welfare mother represents a woman of low morals and uncontrolled sexuality.”

IV. Unseen and Unheard

“We know only that a part of humanity is saved, the rest is damned.”

“For the damned to complain of their lot would be much the same as for animals to bemoan the fact that they were not born as men.” Weber

Remember the old phrase about children. Seen and not heard? Poor children, the number one demographic group in this country living in poverty have it even worse. They are supposed to be neither seen nor heard. Every day, I open my local newspaper, expecting to see that the press has finally noticed the high unemployment and low insured rate in my part of Texas. And every day, I read, instead, about how this business needs a tax abatement and that agency says that we need more urban gas drilling. I guess I can understand it. Rick Perry is running for president, and it would not be patriotic for a Texas paper to draw attention to our own poor. No, poverty is something they have in blue states. Poverty is a scam designed to help promiscuous women eat steak and drive Cadillacs. Real poverty has no face and no voice---

Unless you happen to wonder through the pharmacy at the local charity hospital and overhear the mother begging for a voucher, because she can not afford the copayment on her son’s medication.

Unless you happen to drive down the street where the homeless, many of them veterans, congregate on corners, waiting for the missions to open.

Unless you happen to ask the woman waiting for the bus why her face is tear stained. If you asked, you might be surprised at her answer. She might tell you a tale of so much bad luck and such misery that you would walk away a changed person---

Corporate America does not want you to change. Corporate America likes things just the way they are. Which brings me to the scariest passage in Weber’s book.

V. In the United States, it is Always Open Season on the Poor

“In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of a sport.” Weber