GOD WANTS LOW WAGES – Pay them nothing and they will teach.

•   McGill comments get national attention,
• AEA boss gives McGill failing grade

I’ve only half-joked for years that God really needs a better PR team here in the temporal world. Some of the most log-headed charlatans, grifters, and just plain logically-challenged people claim to speak on His behalf. Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, and the ethically inept Newt Gingrich are just a few who work non-stop to tarnish God’s image.

Unfortunately, there’s another PR flack trying to grab a share of the ignobility. AL state Sen. Shadrack (Shadrack, really? Shadrack?) McGill is currently charming the nation’s electorate with the fanciful notion that God has issued an edict that teachers should be underpaid, perhaps as foretold in the Book of Ignoramus.

“It’s a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher’s pay scale, you’ll attract people who aren’t called to teach. To go and raise someone’s child for eight hours a day, or many people’s children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn’t want to do it, OK?”

Oddly, though not surprisingly, McGill doesn’t extend the same “logic” to lawmakers. Last year he voted for a 62% increase in his pay.

Lawmakers: Bribed, Not Called

I suppose this illuminates his idea that lawmakers don’t need to be called to serve, they must be bribed to take on the job. It’s not unlike paying a large retention bonus to the CEO who ran the company into the ground because his expertise is essential to rebuilding the business.

But in his defense, McGill reasons that by paying lawmakers more they’re less susceptible to bribery – apparently bribery from someone other than the unbribable legislators themselves.

Head-scratcher, ain’t it?

It doesn’t do much for his credibility that he voted to tie legislators’ pay to the average Alabama teacher’s pay last year and reversed course this year. It’s OK though, flip flopping is a venerated sport at the Statehouse Country Club and the all seeing, all knowing God won’t really notice a little free play with facts.

Darby McGill and the Little People claim Alabama teachers are the 4th best paid in the country. Now I don’t know about you, but most people know that pretty much everything in Alabama education sucks a big weenie. They usually joust with Mississippi for the 49th or 50th spot in everything – although Propped 13 California is a strong up and commer. The true value of an Alabama teacher’s pay actually ranks 31st in the National Miseducation Sweepstakes.

Smite That Rascal Lord

Hey McGill, wait a minute. If that No. 4 standing is correct aren’t you overpaying teachers and attracting a bad crowd of the unmotivated kind? Shouldn’t you work harder to lower Alabam’s No. 4 ranking to 49th – or at least 45th?

If you’ll excuse a minor blasphemy…my God. If you claim to be serving as God’s on-scene commander, the least you could do is get your story straight. It might also sit better with the Big Guy if you didn’t stand behind his robes and yell, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my words and actions will never haunt me.”

God, I know you and I haven’t been on a first name basis for close to 45 years now, but I like to think we at least have a workable truce. So I beseech thee, if you’re really there control people like McGill. They do a disservice to you and just really chap the pants off the rest of us – You-fearing and not fearing alike.

Smite him o’ Lord. Cast him into the fiery pit of the unelectable. Just take away his 62% pay hike before you give him the eternal shove.

Can I get an Amen?

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THE OLD HOMESTEAD – It’s not my grandparents’ shack, but it is a close facsimile. If Mitt Romney would live in a place like this for a week, I’d vote for him.

Much has been said about how multi-millionaire candidates relate to the middle class. Most of them advize Americans who are part of the shrinking middle class to simply get new  jobs. They’re understandably silent on just how to pull that off in the recession they’ve created. In their opinion, any grousing from Americans caught in the vice of diminishing means is just class warfare against the wealthy, Cayman Island, tax-dodging, outsourcing, politically powerful. BANG! You’re very poor.

No Rusty Iron Spoons for Mitt

Candidates, as often as not, speak as though the very poor don’t even exist. Much like their notion that gay soldiers didn’t exist unless you asked if they were gay. And when they infrequently talk of the working poor, it’s usually along the lines of Mitt Romney’s statement that he doesn’t worry about them because they have an adequate safety net. Fine words from a man not born with a rusty iron spoon in his mouth.

I’m very lucky. I started as a marginal middle class blue collar worker and made my way up with a lot of luck and the ability to know to jump ship when I heard the deckchairs scraping. These days, I defy the odds as an upper middle class man with a nice house, good job, health benefits, and enough money to fund a retirement and buy most anything I truly want or need (not yachts and airplanes and multiple summer “cottages” in Vail you understand) without stretching too much.

My parents were more middle-middle class. They were acutely aware that money didn’t grow on trees.  My father was one of those grossly overpaid civil servants you hear so much about these days. Even though he was lucky to have his job, his “overly generous benefits” didn’t cover my mother’s and grandmother’s schizophrenia or my sister’s bipolar illnesses. In fact, it didn’t pay for most extras and most of the disposable income was already disposed of when the check arrived.

But, just because I led a modestly middle class life doesn’t mean I’m inexperienced in the lives of the very poor.

Meet My Grandparents

The "safety net" mental hospital where my grandmother spent decades.

Meet my grandparents. They lived a life straight out of the mid-1800s. My zero grade school grandfather had no steady job because in the backwoods of the Appalachians, there weren’t any, steady or otherwise.  And my grandmother, similarly uneducated and dogged nearly all her life with multiple incarcerations in a state mental hospital that was every bit as scary as those in the mid1800s led a very hard life too.

I know. I visited her there many times and heard the screams of the “patients” and the stink of their urine while she slowly rocked in a chair almost comatose from medication.

They lived in a leaking tar-paper shack one step removed from a cardboard box. Heat and cooking fuel came from wood cut a ½ a mile up a steep embankment. During a particularly bad winter they burned one of the rooms of the house because they couldn’t reach the wood pile in hip-deep snow.

Drinking water came several times a day from a hole in the ground by bucket and was drunk with a community ladle. They bathed and washed clothes in a small creek, polluted from mine waste, behind their tar-paper manse. The outhouse was nearby where, yes, they used actual Sears catalog pages. It was a 2-holer though. They lived over a hole of luxury.

They owned a small “farm” with soil so poor they grew only potatoes and cabbage – everything else died. Meat came from the occasional chicken that stopped laying and daily hunts for squirrel, raccoon, and possum.  Once, my uncle even downed a bobcat. After my mother dropped out of school in the 8^th grade to help support the family she vowed never to eat another ‘coon. And, she never did. But, she never made it back to school either.

The Day Electricity Came on the Back of a Mule

I’m 57 and remember when electricity arrived in the holler. It came from the road a mile away and was strung from the back of a mule slipping and sliding down the almost impassable slope. It dangerously provided one light fixture with no switch in a house without wiring. You unscrewed the bulb to turn it off. My grandparents barely used it. It scared them.

The closest telephone was a mile away at Speed’s General Store. Because of the snow, winter calls were impossible.

There’s more, but you get the essence.

From them, I learned much about the lives of the very poor. It’s easy for people like Gov. Romney to call safety nets with holes so big millions of people fall through them “adequate”. It’s easy for the fast-disappearing middle class to ignore these people…until they’re outsourced and suddenly find the safety net not nearly so safe as they thought.

I’d like to think I would be more compassionate than them, but without my experiences I possibly would have been as blind to the “have nots” as Romney and the Tea Partiers (BTW, I don’t think my grandparents ever drank a cup of tea. They couldn’t afford it).

Just Another Muttonhead With Slicked Back Hair

Had I not had the privilege of seeing the back-breaking labor that stood between my grandparents and, in some cases, death. It would have been possible that I could never have fathomed a life that poor. That deprived. I’d like to think I wouldn’t turn into just another muttonhead with slicked back hair, a limo, and a gold spoon hanging from his mouth. But there for the grace…

I’m willing to vote for anyone in any party if, for once, they’d go live like my grandparents, or in the projects, or under a highway overpass for a week. I’d like to give them a sense of what an “adequate safety net” means.  Just once. Just once.

Gov. Romney, my vote is yours for the taking. I’ll vote for you if you have the courage to live like so many other people in this country for only a week – hell, even a day. After that, I’ll campaign for you if you can just define exactly how it is that our safety nets are adequate.  I’m waiting to give my vote to you right now.

Governor?

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AND THEN I TOLD MARIANNE… – “Darlin’, I got some serious junk here and there’s just too much of Newt to not share the wealth.”

Newt Gingrich has an ego as big as all outdoors, or at least a big as Donald Trump’s. He’s a historian with only a nodding acquaintance with text book history and his own self-professed place in it.  The other thing Newt has is a propensity for pissing people off. People like voters and political allies in his own party. While this isn’t an altogether useless skill in an election, it isn’t so great when a President has to work with people rather than through them. If cockroaches will survive nuclear holocaust Newt will be right there tossing garbage to them.

Newt and the Bulldog
The Grey One has already screwed the pooch in the opinion of most political pundits. Screwed the bulldog just like The Crazy One, The Pizza Deliverer, Governor Big Hair, and The Unknown Candidate. He’s left competing with The Even Crazier One, The Crazy Little Old Man, and The Moronic Mormon.  As long as evangelicals, pissed off white guys, and the rest of the Ignorati from small, unimportant states vote like lemmings he’ll still be winner take all on pure political gutsiness.

Make no mistake, Newt will become the candidate. I’m not a believer in legislating personal behavior , but a man pandering to values voters while having none of his own isn’t a problem. The values folks vote that way all the time and a little pecker-waving is a small price to pay beating The Messiah (oh, and BTW, when’s he going to show us his birth certificate?). By election time, the Mormon will have as big a reputation for never meeting a position he didn’t like and revealing his birth certificate instead of his 0% tax rate forms will be the least of his problems.

Newt is Newt
Newt will stride across the GOP stage like John McTheusela and try to convince the Republicans that running as President and Vice President at the same time is a good thing. After all, he’s Newt and Newt is more powerful than God. Still, some single-payer corporate grifters will kibosh the idea and force Newt to take on a wildly ridiculous running mate, maybe a Dan Quayle comeback.

The Dems will float a Biden Presidential run because they are just as afraid of Newt as the few thinking Republicans are.  But eventually, The Messiah will clinch the nomination after some public cat herding. Eventually, the Obamunator will win by the skin of his socialist nose after Newt’s hubris trips him up by saying something so weird even the Republicans can’t overlook it – perhaps moving into the White House immediately after his nomination.

Never underestimate the power of a man who can schtup wife two while taking on the Stepford Wife with the bad hair and can explain that the whole thing was Calista’s doing.

Hey, it could happen.

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ADRIAN! - "In this corner...Rockin' Rick 'Rocky' Santorum"

I don’t know if Rick Santorum is a racist. I know he says many stupid things, so he might be an idiot, or maybe a racist idiot. It is hard to tell when a person has a brain the size of an empty, withered walnut.

But, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume he’s an earnest man without a trace of racism and that he really believes, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn their money and provide for themselves and their families. The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling.”

Minorities are as Rare as Untipped Iowan Cows
Let’s forget that most welfare payments go to white people and let’s forget that 91% of Iowans are white. Minorities in Iowa are as rare as untipped cows.

Getting manufacturing going is important. If it was working everyone in the economy would be better off, even the rich. However, many American manufacturers are so far gone they can’t come back. Plus, there are fewer people who can afford products, regardless of where they’re made. The golden goose has been fed rat poison by over-consumption and under-manufacturing.

Santorum rightly makes the point that while minorities aren’t the bulk of the welfare population, they are disproportionately represented. You know, sort of like the 1 Percenters. So, programs to help them get out and, “give them the opportunity to go out and earn their money and provide for themselves and their families,” is a tough, withered walnut shell to crack.

Santorum and others of his ilk want to put the poor back to work without funding schools, job training, medical care, affordable housing, or anything else that jacks up Bill Gates’ tax rate. In fact, some Republicans want the poor to pay more in taxes. What sort of math allows you to raise the poor’s taxes by 50% without understanding that 50% of nothing is, urm, NOTHING?!!

Welfare programs are hugely expensive, though not as expensive as other expenditures being stalked by ravenous budget-wolves. But assuming welfare will magically go away if we simply stop paying is wishful thinking – like absorbing millions of illegal aliens and then assuming they’ll disappear if we throw up some chain link halfway between Arizona and New Mexico.

Yes Rick, there is a problem. But no, busying yourself with the sex lives of other people doesn’t solve it. And further, this isn’t a new problem. It is the result of kicking a very large can down a very long road.

Many welfare programs were born of LBJ’s Great Society. The Great Society was an admirable effort to lift poor sharecroppers above poverty by trying to balance the economic and racial inequities of American society. In the end, all it did was move people to housing projects were there is no sharing or crops and minorities are contained so they wouldn’t be so noticeable.

The great failing was assuming you could start by giving kids something to eat, a place to live, and a school to go to while ignoring the generations of people who were already past the point of lifting up.

Mommy the Crackhead and Daddy the Pimp
You can teach a kid how to read and count, but Mommy being a crackhead and Daddy being a drug-dealing pimp isn’t exactly world-class role modeling. Too many people are simply warehoused in crumbling housing, ducking gang raids, and learning that dealing drugs makes way more money than flipping burgers. All the while listening to nitwits preach that fixing the problem is as simple as stopping payments for the crumbling housing and decrpit schools.

Santorum probably thinks that being poor trumps being a minority. He may not want black folk in his neighborhood, but that wouldn’t be as bad as a white family of project transfers moving in next door. He just doesn’t like one, the other actually drives down his property values.

Being poor or a minority is a problem in this country. Sometimes they’re inextricably linked, other times you can tease economics from bigotry. But either way simply stopping funds and pretending that all the downtrodden need is some paternal advice to get a job won’t make it go away. No matter how hard he might try, Rick can’t make these people and their problems invisible. He can’t pretend their problems aren’t the nation’s problem.

In the end Rick’s solution is no solution at all, it’s merely another kick of the can. If we want to lessen the need for welfare, we’ll need to reform what we spend on, not how much we spend. Throwing cash at ill-advised, half-assed, ineffective programs is just as bad as doing nothing.

And nothing is exactly the change Rick’s plan will make.

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When the going gets odd, the odd turn to Santa

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