Posted on 01/22/2012 12:20:10 PM PST by rhema
On January 1, 2012, Maine became the first state to ban smoking in all low-income public housing. Twelve thousand poor people faced their New Year’s Day hangover without the solace of a Marlboro to accompany their aspirin and coffee.
This, of course, was good. Just ask the high-minded, right-thinking progressive elites who, it’s safe to say, run Maine’s public housing authority. Progressive elites like to run things. They’d run the government, the media, and the entire U.S. economy if they could. Failing that, public housing authorities will do. The Detroit, San Antonio, and Portland, Oregon, housing authorities already ban smoking. Boston’s housing authority will do so in September. Los Angeles is expected to follow. And it’s no mystery what that highest-minded, most right-thinking, way-progressive elitist Mayor Bloomberg has in mind for New Yorkers.
Smoking is wrong. Progressive elites may be confused about the existence of right and wrong when it comes to wars against genocidal fanatics, market freedom, and the death penalty for mass murderers. But not when it comes to smoking.
Smoking kills smokers, which is about what they deserve for engaging in such lowbrow, wrong-headed, retarded, vulgarian activity, except they get sick first and that drives up the cost of a single-payer national health care system, plus their second-hand smoke is worse yet because it is a, yuck, inhalation hand-me-down from uncouth people who probably haven’t flossed, and it kills progressive elites who don’t even know anyone who smokes while also releasing greenhouse gases and stinking up the cheery curtains that elites hang in public housing group activity areas to brighten the lives of the underprivileged who are confined to concrete tower blocks with six-by-eight-foot living rooms, seven-foot ceilings, plexiglass windows, and sheet-metal doors with a dozen locks on them. Smoking is wrong.
But poor people don’t have a lot of pleasures. Sure, they have more sex than progressive elites. But somehow, for poor people, the sex always ends up in illegitimate children or HIV or some bum of a boyfriend instead of leading to, as it does for elites, a Reichian release of primordial cosmic energy or the wonderful self-fulfillment and midlife reawakening of a new divorce. And, yes, the poor have drugs and alcohol, but these bring them nothing but grief. They’re not at all like the subtle and refined delights of a 300-bottle wine cellar or the therapeutic relief from Zoloft, Lexapro, Elavil, Ambien, Halcion, Xanax, beta blockers, Levitra, and Cialis.
And poor people do have a lot of troubles. Sometimes, when you’ve got a crap job and are going to get laid off from it besides and your crack-head daughter has three kids by four fathers and your oldest son is on the front in Afghanistan and your youngest son can’t decide which drug crew to join and the cable company has cut off service and somebody’s jimmying the twelfth lock on the sheet-metal door, you’d like to sit down on your own damn chair in your own damn kitchen and have a smoke.
Well, forget it. The progressive elites are already charging you $7 for that pack of king-size filter tips, and pretty soon they’re going to add the price of eviction. Because they hate your guts.
The elites who denounce poverty despise the poor. Their every high-minded, right-thinking “poverty program” proves this detestation—from the bulldozing of vibrant tenement communities to the drug law policing policies that send poor kids to prison and rich kids to rehab to the humiliation of food stamps and free school lunches to the loathsome inner-city public schools where those free lunches are slopped onto cafeteria trays.
The federal government has some 50 different “poverty programs.” Nearly half a trillion dollars is spent on them each year. That’s about $11,000 per man, woman, and child under the poverty line, enough to lift each and every one of them out of poverty. (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2011 poverty guideline for a family of three: $18,530.) We call them “poverty programs” for a reason. If ordinary people with down-to-earth common sense were spending that half trillion, we’d call them “modest prosperity programs.”
Have progressive elites always hated the poor? Teddy Roosevelt did some rough riding with them. But once Teddy got all high-minded and right-thinking you didn’t see him hanging around with poor people who weren’t cooking or cleaning for him. William Jennings Bryan was in favor of prohibition, the bastard. These days we’ve got Michael Moore. You wouldn’t think he’d hate poor people, having once been one. On the other hand, in dress and deportment, Moore shows every sign of self-loathing. So he’s a hater too.
Why do elites hate the poor? It’s xenophobia. They don’t know any poor people—except their off-the-books Brazilian nanny and illegal immigrant cleaning lady from Upper Revolta who don’t speak English. Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples. When elites see a homeless person in the gutter, they assume he’s saving a parking place. And the elites have never been poor themselves. Although there was that time in graduate school, between research grants, when they had to go without sushi for a week.
Elites are irked at the charity they have to give to the poor. Not that elites, personally, give charity to the poor. They get the IRS to do it for them. Which is the way elites like it and why they’re in favor of higher taxes. It’s worth the price not to come into any actual contact and risk getting poverty cooties. But elites are human like the rest of us, and paying higher taxes irks them.
The elite resent the poor because, although poor people have few pleasures and many troubles, they also have a lot of fun. You can see it in their music videos. The elites whine and mope. You can hear it on NPR.
America is a meritocracy. Elites think those poor people should earn their fun, the way Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky. And, being that America is a meritocracy, poor people obviously have no merit or they’d be rich and could afford to join the progressive elite.
But the real reason progressive elites hate poor people is fear. What if the poor quit believing in the progressive elite, quit supporting the progressive elite, quit voting for the progressive elite? The elite would be out on its ear—impeached, recalled, defeated on the ballots, dismissed from the universities, fired at newspapers and television networks, booted out of nonprofit foundations, and chased away from church pulpits.
The high-minded, right-thinking progressive elite would then be poor people, working crap jobs. And what a mess they’d make of it! Imagine elites manning the drive-through window at Burger King, giving customers all-lettuce, all-pickle Whoppers without buns, cheese, or burger patties to combat obesity. Or at the 7-11 making change for a twenty the way the Federal Reserve does. “Wait a minute, I’ve got to go in the back and print some fives.” Or convening a yard care seminar and producing a 200-page white paper on sustainable grass maintenance instead of mowing your lawn. Or panhandling in the manner of the U.S. government, “Hey, Buddy, can you spare $787 billion so’s a guy can get a stimulus package?”
Life would be hell if the high-minded, right-thinking progressive elite wasn’t elite anymore. We’d better quit smoking.
Okay, I’m against the Nanny State telling people what they can or cannot do.
But if people are so poor as to need the taxpayers to provide housing for them, where do they get the money to pay for expensive cigarettes (or alcohol)?
And, since they’re living on someone else’s property, who pays the piper calls the tune.
The leftists love poor people, which is why they want there to be as many of them as possible.
His point (under the satire and sarcasm) is that liberals love the concept of “the poor”, and want as many of them as possible .. so they can control them.
BUT, liberals hate the poor as individuals. They want them totally out of sight and out of mind, and have zero desire to help them.
I love PJ!!
yeah. Don’t be smokin in the pjs*(’’public housing projects’’). Uh huh. Okay. Go in there and tell homey to put the cigarette out. Yeah, go do that and see how long it takes until you end up with a 9mm. diameter hole in you.
One factual error in the article. Michael Moore grew up in a very comfortable middle upper middle class home. He has honed his working class persona well but he is not and never was working class.
Oh that's easy. People always find the time (and money) to do what really matters to them. People may profess to believe or support all manner of things, but the way to know what you really care about is to inventory where your time and money goes. It was a sobering experience for me.
There are a few tenants that must be born in mind when contemplating liberals:
1. Never judge a liberal program on its merits or results. One may only judge the good intentions of the program regardless of the pain, misery, suffering and destruction caused.
2. Whenever a liberal acknowledges the inadequacy of any given liberal program his/her solution is not to abandon the program but to add more legislation (and cost). A smart fellow once said “The closest thing to immortality you are likely to see in this life is a government program.” Truer words were never spoken.
3. Any objections raised to any liberal program are always met with charges of hatred, racism, bigotry, homophobia or a general lack of compassion.
4. Using hard data to discuss the merits of any liberal program or liberal held position on any given subject are to be automatically discounted as all liberals engage in discussion with their feelings.
5. The vast majority of liberals loath being in the presence of the poor or disadvantaged unless their presence can be portrayed to other liberals as being compassionate or sacrificial. Most liberals only wish to view the poor through the tinted windows of their BMWs…at 60 mph.
It has been my experience that if I can keep all of the above in mind while talking to liberals, I seem to walk away with more hair than I otherwise normally would (i.e. I haven’t pulled it all out by the roots in frustration.).
In short, I agree. Liberals detest the poor and only keep them around to vote the liberal democrat ticket.
Before the War of Insurrection, democrats campaigned to the poor minority (the Irish) saying they were “for the little guy”. If the republicans got their way and freed the slaves, the newly freed blacks would take the Irish jobs because they would work for lower wages while opposing black freedom and rights at every turn... Then they shifted their focus onto the blacks campaigning “for the little guy” protecting them from the evil rich. Now they are turning their attention to the Latino vote espousing the same rhetoric.
It is no wonder “liberals” resist the teaching of accurate history in public schools. They have been an impediment to the prosperity of every disadvantaged group throughout American history.
Maine was famous in the nineteenth century for its prohibition laws. I suppose that was left wing extremism as well.
“It is no wonder “liberals” resist the teaching of accurate history in public schools. They have been an impediment to the prosperity of every disadvantaged group throughout American history.”
Yes.
Yup, the Liberal elitists pay the price to keep their herds well tended so they can milk them for votes.
Maine is also one of only two states that allow incarcerated felons to vote, Vermont being the other one.
They’re afraid smoking may ignite the meth labs.
they love poor people on voting day!
Give them free cancer sticks.
Free rides and some cash to boot!
they love poor people on voting day!
Give them free cancer sticks.
Free rides and some cash to boot!
P.J. ping.
They can order them not to smoke in a government provided house but they don’t want them to be tested for drugs before they get a welfare check. Democrats are just plain stupid. And I’m talking about the voters.
With that said, I quit smoking in 2008. Shortly thereafter I walked into a Casino, was going to eat at the buffet, and turned around at the door and walked out. I couldn’t stomach the stale smoke odor. That was my choice!
Now now......
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