Put Me In Charge

Recently we received a political chain e-mail entitled “Written by a 21 year old Woman,” which was supposedly printed in the Waco Tribune Herald, on November 18, 2011.

While thousands of people across the country were holding Occupy events to bring awareness to the staggering inequalities in our economic system, to the disproportionate burden put on the working class, and to the difficulties being faced by the unemployed and chronically impoverished this young woman was authoring a venomous missive against so-called Entitlement recipients in her state of Texas. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. As we all know there has been a lot of Republican and Libertarian, and hell, Democratic (if you want to include Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996) party rhetoric devoted to excoriating attacks on Social Service Programs like Food stamps, Medicaid and government Housing. These programs are blamed for a number of troubles facing our Country, and at the height of the hyperbole they are even brought into some odd historical nexus with the ultimate causes of the Fall of the Roman Empire. Of course we here at the After Party aren’t terribly moved by this brand of scaremongering, and while we don’t exactly welcome the fall of our great Empire, the United States, we’re not shitting ourselves with fear that the Government is going to be brought down by Welfare Moms.

What did surprise us was how upon our first pass of this document there was a certain seduction to its premise. We were moved to almost automatically agree with its apparent logic. And nod our heads to the sensibility and fairness of its conclusions and solutions for our ailing democracy. Had we not gone back and critically examined the document we may have missed the inherent fallacies in its argument. Its real appeal was visceral and never intended to be analyzed. Its platform was, by the very gender and age of its author, assumed to be righteous and centered in common sense, and seemed, at second glance, to be a direct response to the crumb-bums and student anarchists that were filling the country’s public squares with their bongo music and weed smoke.

We know we’ve already ruined your first unadulterated contact with this piece by premising it in the way that we have, but we think it is only fair to reproduce the document in its entirety before we go through and publically destroy it. This is exactly the format in which we received the piece. Note that the italics are ours and only intended to draw attention to the fact that this bit is the work of a third person narrator, likely the generator of this particular chain.

Written by a 21 Year Old Female

This was written by a 21 yr old female who gets it. It's her future she's worried about and this is how she feels about the social welfare big government state that she's being forced to live in! These solutions are just common sense in her opinion.

This was in the Waco Tribune Herald, Waco, TX, Nov 18, 2011

PUT ME IN CHARGE . . .

Put me in charge of food stamps. I'd get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.


Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I'd do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal legations. Then, we'll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, or smoke, then get a job.

Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks?
You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair.
Your home" will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.

In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a "government" job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you.

We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the "common good.."

Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self esteem," consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.


If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.

AND

While you are on Gov't subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes, that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov't welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.

Now, if you have the guts - PASS IT ON...
I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO GET THIS BACK, IF EVERYONE SENDS IT,
I WILL GET OVER 220 BACK!!! I WOULD KNOW YOU SENT IT ON!!!

Gripping isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you want to go out and kick some fat black welfare mom in the cunt? We don’t know about you but we’re damn tempted to PASS IT ON, what do you say? Oh wait, wait a minute. We told you it was visceral. You are either titillated by this kind of speech or nauseated by it. Or in our case one then the other. But let’s hold off on barfing for just a second and see if we can’t tackle this thing a little more analytically.

We want to start by addressing the authorship of this document and it’s supposed date. We’ve done only a minimal amount of poking around on the internet and have discovered that this letter was neither written by a woman or penned in 2011. It does appear to have actually stained the pages of the Waco Tribune Herald, but it was written on November 18, 2010, and authored by a man named Alfred W. Evans of Gatesville, Texas. Where this confusion arose and whether it was intentional can only be guessed. Originally this document “went viral” under the title “Put Me In Charge” and was heralded by the mental juggernauts who bandied it about as a piece of titanic political prose the likes of which had not been seen since Mein Kampf. Actually the people who are trafficking this work aren’t likely to ever appreciate this connection, but it does accurately tap into a lot of contemporary Right Wing sentiment, even of the kind that professes a dedication to the Constitution and Democracy but sees no contradiction in simultaneously disenfranchising millions of American citizens. We believe that the new title “Written by a 21 year old Woman” was purposely given to this work by political operators in order to soften some of its more obviously Draconian edges and give it a perceived credibility with the younger generation. Making its author a woman was clearly an attempt to bridge a gender gap in the Conservative movement that has thus far been inadequately plugged by Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter.

So Put Me In Charge was written by a man but has now cunningly been attributed to a woman. Well let it be a woman’s work, this won’t upset our criticism of it a bit.

Let’s move on to its first decree and tackle the issue of Food stamps. Popularized during the Reagan Administration there has been this persistent belief in the Conservative movement that so-called Welfare Queens are making a significant dent in our economic well-being and in the process ruining future generation’s chances of being productive members of society by teaching them a Philosophy of Entitlement. Left up to the hard liners the maintenance of the poor would be completely abolished and the job of ministering to the poor would be left up to just that, Ministers. Thankfully, and graciously we are being subjected to a “woman’s” touch here and find that she only wishes to limit Food stamp recipients’ choice to healthy foods like rice and beans, cheese and powdered milk. Of course this seems terribly sensible, and could be applauded if it weren’t for the fact that it runs completely counter to the Snack Food and Beverage Industries interests. On many occasions States have tried to limit the choice of their food stamp recipients by forcefully steering them away from “junk food” only to run headlong into a shit storm of litigation from an Industry whose bottom line would be damaged by having their products fall under that distinction. The public at large can’t be led to believe that this Industries products aren’t even good enough for the poor. That’s bad for business, and ergo, bad for America.

Besides that, why is a diet of soda pop, frozen pizzas and Ding Dongs more reprehensible when a Poor Person is using their food stamps to consume it than when a Minimum Wage Employee is using their meager wage to do the same? The diet is no less damaging to either party, and both consume it for similar reasons. However, when a person comes under the auspices of government food assistance they are supposed to transform their habits and resist the predatory marketing of processed food manufactures, climb from their food deserts and go on some sort of North Korean subsistence diet. Had they an education and alternative maybe they wouldn’t be loading their shopping carts with crap.

It’s unfair to characterize the poor as fat, gluttonous and unhealthy, but that’s precisely how they are portrayed to a Lower Middle-class Conservative Public who are perhaps self-conscious and defensive about their own food choices. There’s a certain amount of reactionary sentiment in the Conservative Party’s defense of junk food and perhaps this attack on the poor’s ability to load up on Ding Dongs and Pizza is less on account of a concern for their bad food choices than a statement about their right to have the “good” things that hard working people enjoy. Forcing staples on the poor satisfies their Christian faith’s Minimum requirements to Do Unto Others, and demonstrates their humanity by raising these unfortunates up from starvation. At the same time it does not contradict their Conservative abhorrence of the Organic Movement or send the poor clambering into the isles of Whole Foods where their minds will undoubtedly be further polluted by Liberal propaganda.

One last thing before we leave the food stamp issue. One of the specific things attacked in this letter was the Lone Star Card. We don’t know for certain who administers the funds attached to the Lone Star card, but in 26 States across the country JP Morgan Chase has a contract to manage the accounts of food stamp recipients. They make tens of millions of dollars a year on this program and are paid per recipient. They have a vested interest in keeping the rolls at a high margin and are doing their best through foreclosures and nefarious investment practices to maintain the increase in American poverty. Take a closer look at their activity over the last decade or so. They’ve paid countless fines for their involvement in Enron and Worldcom, and have recently appeared before congress to apologize for willfully targeting foreclosures against active military personnel. In their handling of the EBT food stamp card in Washington State they received 700,000 dollars from the State Treasury to provide the service and then without disclosing it to the legislators turned around and charged the card users an 85 cent transaction fee on every purchase. In 2008 they received a 25 billion dollar bail-out from the Federal Treasury. In 2010, they reported a 17.8 billion dollar profit.

Here are just a few statistics to chew on. Germany contributes on average 25-28% of its GDP to the maintenance of their poor, the U.S. contributes about 16%. The unemployment rate in the U.S. is hovering at 10 percent. There were nearly 2 million foreclosures last year. One in seven American’s receive some sort of Food assistance. Somewhere around 60 percent of food stamp recipients are single mother’s.

So yeah, what about that last statistic? Maybe some of these poor people ought to be sterilized. Maybe then there wouldn’t be so many food insecure children in this country. Seems like a contradiction to give them contraceptives, or sex education, so why not just tie their tubes or give them a surgical procedure that lasts for five years. Clearly this segment of the document has to be attributed to a woman or its traffickers would immediately be accused of peddling Eugenics. With a woman’s endorsement it fades from hardcore Nazism to a brand of reproductive politics. This stratagem ultimately fails, but it lessens the likelihood that we’ll make the appropriate correlation.

The prohibition against drugs, alcohol and nicotine is less offensive on its face but still feels like a backwards way of denying services to a population that may have a higher tendency to suffer from addiction. By removing treatment while at the same time continuing to allow schools to deteriorate, prison systems to expand and liquor stores to proliferate what we are saying to this segment of the population is that you are a disposable waste product, the refuse of the economic machine. If you had a job then all of these vices would be open to you. More or less the message reads, as a functioning part of the Machine your lubrication is guaranteed.

I don’t think we have to worry about the Sterilization issue. That’s obviously just wishful thinking on the part of racists and would-be Nazis. As for the mandatory drug screening, that was tried in Florida but was shot down by one of those pesky Federal Activist Judges. That’s a whole other topic but I love it when Conservatives accuse Judges of being Activist when they are really only protecting the Constitution’s guarantees to personal liberty and privacy.

Originally, when this country was founded, before the Bill of Rights and Universal Suffrage a Citizen was defined by his Poperty holdings, Race, and Gender, not the simple fact that he/she was born on American soil. Clearly the Conservative movement is Harkening back to this age. Now, in this weird, pseudo-Marxian bent toward inclusion in the work force, our citizenship is directly associated with our ability to pay our own way. Of course it’s ok not to be able to pay, you can still be poor and a citizen, but only if you starve to death or die of exposure. If you ask your fellow man, if you, in your time of need, have to fall back on the generosity of your society for your survival then you cease to be a citizen. You give up your rights, even presumably, if you’ve made great sacrifices in the past for that very same Nation.

Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks?
You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair.
Your home will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.


Truly this is a dark vision of American Society, one where your house and possessions are subject to random inspection and cataloging. If the idea behind Government assistance is to allow distressed families to regain their foothold so that they can rise out of poverty then surely we can think of no better way of stifling this climb than forcing them into a Soviet style program of austerity. Had we not allowed all of our manufacturing jobs to be shipped overseas we might have actually benefitted from these TV and video game purchases, but alas the only people profiting from this profligation are the very people who put most of America out of work.

A job is not always the answer, but of course when we are dealing with political propaganda it helps to simplify things. We’ve tried our hardest to make sense of this missive, but there is so much going on in this piece that it’s a little overwhelming. We’re especially interested the class warfare undertones. We know that Conservatives pride themselves on not inciting class warfare, that their leadership, millionaires to the last, try with every ounce of their strength to erase the word Rich from the lexicon. So that’s why we can’t understand why they would so gleefully and mercilessly attack the poor. Why would they pit the working class against the unemployed? Talk about a politics of Envy (a recent Romney coinage). The message here couldn’t be clearer. This is directed at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. The only people you could possibly get to Envy and Begrudge the possessions of Welfare Recipients would be Minimum Wage Earners. This is not a particularly new tactic sad to say. During Reconstruction there was a lot of class and race hate stirred up by rich plantation owners to divert attention away from the conditions of serfdom they’d put their share croppers under.

We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the "common good.."

There is obviously no fear of being attacked for racism here. The rhetorical apparatus, the anti-media, anti-liberal, anti-government message that blankets the Conservative airwaves assures its participants that they are immune to accusations of racism. Racism is just a mechanism, they say, that the liberal media wields against their righteous attack against general immorality. By bringing the accusation the liberal media is merely using race to its own political advantage, trying to keep free Americans tied to the idea that there is a systemic Racial imbalance plaguing our society. Race, the Conservative movement assures us, has been neutralized. We live on a level playing field. So to even acknowledge race is to sully that surface and create new obstacles for those trying to honestly navigate it. Nevermind that this very work of Righteousness appeared prominently on a website called Chimpout under the title “Get Off Welfare Niggers”. Or that most of the characterizations and stereotypes that we encountered in Chat rooms and message boards when this piece first came out had to do with “hoodrats” and immigrants and the like.

So to whose “common good” do these confiscations go exactly? Is this a white “common good”, a fully employed “common good”, or does the end result of this divisive screed just give further cover to the real thieves and abusers of our society?

Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin their "self esteem," consider that it wasn't that long ago that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.

If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.

We would love to think that this was directed at Wall Street and not Main Street, but that’s how warped these tiny minds have become. They’ve been victimized, deformed by bad arguments, backward logic and self-hatred. We feel sorry for them. It really is a shame that they don’t read these two paragraphs and immediately think about the Financial bail-outs of 2008 and how directly after asking, no, demanding that the Government bail them out for their mishandling of their investments, these same Executives took, WITHOUT SHAME, their grotesque performance bonuses. If we really want to have a dialogue about the Welfare State then we need to talk about real special interests. Don’t come crying about Labor Unions and NGO’s. Last I checked only 7% of the American workforce was unionized and NGO’s don’t even come close to the 600 million in campaign contributions and lobbying expenses that the Financial sector doled out last year alone. Reality check, poor people are not the problem with our economy, they are the result of that problem. Period.

We listened to an interesting interview today with a man named David Stockman. He was a Republican Representative from Michigan in the US House back in the 70’s before he became Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. He has always advocated a “serious curtailment of the welfare state”, but has more recently turned his attention from the so-called social entitlement programs and come to realize that the real danger to the United States are not the
Welfare Queens, but the Crony Capitalists. He believes that the only way to cure this problem would be to take the money out of politics. We need a Constitutional Amendment curtailing the power and influence of Wall Street and Corporate America.

While you are on Gov't subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes, that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest.

Corporations don’t actually get a vote they just have influence over millions of VOTES with their unlimited SuperPac dollars. As long as they have the same speech rights as individuals we will not have a true democracy, or for that matter a free market economy. They will just continue to tap our treasury at their whim, use the money to influence our politicians and send our jobs overseas to further fatten their already obese bottom lines. We think this fictional 21 year old woman ought to be worried about our fictional democracy and our fictional economy instead of concerning herself with what somebody else has in their shopping cart.

After all it’s her future she's worried about and this is how she feels about the [corporate] welfare big government state that she's being forced to live in! These solutions are just common sense...

Common Sense, it’s not that common.