Lucky Duckies
My favorite all-time Tom the Dancing Bug recurring theme is Lucky Ducky. More specifically, it’s Hollingsworth Hound, the perpetually aggrieved and victimized dog banker who suffers from Lucky Ducky’s privileged position in the upside-down world of conservative thinking.
I mention this, because Ruben Bolling revived him as an illustration for a post linking to Matt Taibbi’s take-down of David Brooks’ corporate class victimhood. Also for your edification I submit HTML Mencken’s structural analysis of BoBo’s rhetoric.
Yeah, though racists are more specifically people who say things like… well, like what David Brooks said about Haiti. But that’s neither here nor there; my point is Brooks’s strategery, his affect, and for what ultimate purpose. The first co-opts a liberal point; the second does as well, but is a more subtle (doesn’t immediately ring as phony) “evidence against interest” item than the first, coming from a conservative. Then there’s the third item; ding ding ding; here’s the real “tell”: those who even see class differences are the moral equivalents of racists. And to actively oppose the interests of the opposite class? Hitlerian, presumably.
And on a tangential note, MightyGodKing adds his two-cents regarding the Citizens United decision. Shorter: he thinks it sucks, but can’t muster the indignation others have. Certainly worth a read, as his take is different from Glenn Greenwald’s standpoint of free speech absolutism.
that lucky ducky stuff is batty. i love how the example of the lucky ducky in the wsj editorial is someone who makes $1,000/month. presumably the people who wrote that live in new york, so it is even more baffling. how can you both promote an economy that makes people poor and resent them for it? i do not really want to understand “conservative thinking”
A grand a month is tough enough in Portland, but doable. I’ve done it before, and even with kids now, I could do it, albeit on food stamps. In New York? In the 5 burroughs? Well, I’m sure some folks are doing it, too, but not w/out serious public assistance.
The WSJ editorial board is famously out-to-lunch-on-another-planet-while-wearing-diapers. David Brooks is almost as batty, but I actually think he’s too smart not to know that he is full of shit. His whole “reasonable” dodge reflects a guilty conscience, a bad faith. He must have a really scary porn collection.
Yep, that $1,000/mo earner is already making only 80% of the minimum wage. So after his employer’s illegally underpaid him, he gets to pay 4% of it in taxes.
Oh wait, that was from 2002, when the minimum wage was nearing its lowest buying power ever because of GOP reluctance to raise it.
I remember living off of $5K a year. I don’t know how that was accomplished. The rent was really cheap. Of course, I was a college student, lived with at least 4 other people, and worked in restaurants and pizza joints where I could eat for free. Still had money for beer and smokes, somehow. Minimum wage was $3.35/hr then, too.
God, that sucked. Ahhhh, memory lane.
I agree that Brooks is writing in bad faith. Him and Friedman and, well, almost anyone writing for the Times (excepting Anthony Shadid, my ex-girlfriend’s sister, and perhaps a handful of others) are generally writing from bad faith. Their function, usually, is not even to fool the rubes, but to supply the talking points to make people think they’re fooling the rubes.
I currently live off about 13,000 a year, here in Portland. Unfortunately I’m classified as an “independent contractor” (even though I have one client, i.e. my bosses) and so get screwed on self-employment taxes (the percentage of my income these grab, I think I would consider scandalous even if I was filthy rich, but yes I’m biased).
I’m not complaining (anymore in this particular comment), but the idea of someone living in NYC at the same income level is unimaginable to me.
Also, I’d like to observe–and this is the implicit message of Bolling’s cartoon, I think–that class warfare is ongoing. It’s time to long past time to draw up battle plans.