That's George Bush's infamous response to the working mother who told him she worked three jobs.
Bush, of course, while finding it fantastic, and thus reflecting the ruling class view that working people are sub-human means to an end with no rights to a life outside exhaustive poverty, was wrong.
It's not uniquely American. It's not American, it's not unique. It's a common state of affairs in all exploitive economies.
Poverty Knock
Up in the morning at five, it's a wonder that we stay alive
It sets me yawning to great the cold dawning
And back to the old, dreary drive
I work three part time jobs. On Mondays and Thursdays, I'm up at 3 a.m. to drive the 45 minutes to my first job. It's hard physical work. The amazing thing to me is this: While I'm driving I'm far from alone on the roads. There are a lot of us up before dawn in the cold Chicago winter, driving to cleaning jobs, jobs in donut shops, jobs in 24 hour gas stations. Jobs without benefits.
Oh dear, I'm going to be late, Gaffer is standing at gate
With his hands in his pockets our wages he'll dock us
We'll have to buy grub on the slate
Most of these jobs don't pay much. Wages, as we know, have fallen in real terms. For those of us in a pastiche of part time benefit-less jobs, the wages are little more than minimum wage. Meanwhile, food costs keep rising. More and more Illinois residents are buying food on credit cards, using food pantries, and desperately trying to get food stamps Food stamp use jumps to record rates in Illinois It's not buying food on the "slate" at the company store, but when you can't pay that monthly Chase Mastercard bill with your ramen noodles and cereal and milk charged, it might as well be.
If the car makes a strange noise, if your tooth breaks and begins to hurt, if the cat is looking a little rough and not eating well, you don't do the things you might have done 10 years ago. Mechanics, dentists, vets - these are vestiges of a former life, a former economy, and increasingly available only to those few privileged ones still living among us.
Poverty poverty knock, my loom it is saying all day
Poverty poverty knock, Gaffer's too skinny to pay
Poverty poverty knock, always one eye on the clock
I know I can guttle when I hear me shuttle go
Poverty poverty knock
We have to wet our own yarn by dipping it in yonder tarn
It's cold and it's soggy, it makes me feel groggy
And there's rats in that dirty old barn.
There's a sameness and a lack of hope that has begun to set in. This "Great Recession" drags on, and there's no FDR in sight, no promise of a New New Deal. This, we are told, is the "new normal". Get used it it. The dreams of that elusive middle class, those standards of living so many of us grew up expecting, those are gone for good. It's a numbing thing. But not numbing enough. The bars, those are still doing pretty good business. People are turning to alcohol and entertainment for escape, lacking any real hope of making their own lives fulfilling. One of my other jobs is in a library. And day after day, we see the unemployed and underemployed come in, grab six movies, head out and come back the next day. They are groggy, numb from months - sometimes years - of applying for jobs that never materialize, from watching dream after dream and hope upon hope evaporate.
Sometimes they blame other people for their plight. Unfortunately, the other people they blame are rarely the ones actually responsible for the crimes that shattered their lives. Pensions of state and city workers? Salaries of teachers, nurses, firefighters? Those are easier, I guess, to grasp than the actual crimes of AIG, Wall Street, and a foreign policy that is designed to protect an empire of corporate interests. It's what Fox News tells them, too, and in a place of changing demographics and the resulting xeonphobia, it's an easy sell.
Sometimes a shuttle flies out and gives some poor woman a clout
She lies there bleeding while nobody's heading
Who's going to carry her out?
The tuner should tackle my loom, but he just sits there on his bum
He's always busy a-courting our Lizzie
And I just can't get him to come
And Lizzie's so easily led, I reckon he takes her to bed
She used to be skinny, now look at her pinny
It's just about time they were wed
We are told we're living too long. Raise the retirement age, the privileged shout at us, as we are struggling to stay on our feet for hours on end, lift weights that are growing heavier by the year, crawl on knees that are no longer young. We are watching our children graduate from college, drowning in debt and finding no work - or falling into the part time/ no benefit work that we ourselves are also trapped in. They're not entering coal mines or sweat shops, not yet. But the differences may be more cosmetic than real. I frequent an online board to support people fighting melanoma. Every single person on that board is terrified of losing their job and any health care benefits that come with it. But fighting melanoma requires treatments that are often debilitating and in-patient based. Do they sacrifice their lives or their homes? Do they fight this disease and bankrupt their family or die and hope they do it before they can't keep making the life insurance payments?
Oh my poor head how it sings, I should have woven three strings
The threads they keep breaking, my poor heart is aching
Oh God, how I wish I had wings.
"If I had the wings of an angel", goes the song about a prisoner longing to be free. We do have wings, as it turns out. But they're not heavenly isused wings. They come when we decide that "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" and take the risks that others - like the garment workers and coal miners before us took - and unite. There is power in the union. There is far more at stake in Wisconsin than the issues on the board over the budget. Like in Egypt, victory there will be like lighting a prairie fire instead of a flame. You can blow out the latter - not the former.
You can blow out a candle/but you can't blow out a fire/once the flames begin to catch/the wind will blow it higher....
(Peter Gabriel)
It's a class war in Wisconsin
I know we are not supposed to like the language of "class war" in this nation. But when many of us are losing housing, access to food, health care, and being told "if you can find a job, work at it until you die" to make sure the wealthiest among us need never contribute an additional cent to the public good - what would you call it?