Hard at work for others
Interesting little piece over at Marrianne.net letting us know, in a somewhat circuitous fashion, that the telethon will be on one of the main networks in France tonight, but there is a good deal of chiding inherent in the message. First, the se of the word “enfoiré”, meaning, more or less, bothersome idiot, a term brought into current usage by Coluche, a comedian who stuck pins in a lot of society’s balloons and who founded les Restos du Coeur, a chain of eating establishments dedicated to feeding the poor and dispossessed at the height of the ’80’s recession. It was meant to be a stopgap measure, especially with the election of the Socialist Mitterand government, but the institution, and the problem endures today, and in a grossly exaggerated form (if this sounds familiar, it is because it is a phenomenon that exists in one form or another all over he world, and what happens in France is a reasonable mirror of how we attempt to deal with it here). Mitterrand, it seems, liked the name and the party, but really didn’t act as a socialist, as seems to be the case with the latest Socialist In Name Only, François Hollande. OK, here is a rough translation of the paragraph from Marianne:
The Idiots land tonight on TF!. They are symbolic of our times where the struggle against poverty has morphed into organized charity and planned compassion. The artists, spokespeople, and brands, helped along by the rather incoherent media, like to show off their humanitarian solidarity on this one day. But it’s really that we’re called on to shed a little tear and to move quickly on to other matters…
Everywhere people are called on to open their hearts and wallets to help feed, house and clothe those who seem not to be included in the golden dream that is our society. I can’t say that we actually designate certain people to be at the bottom of the economic and social heap, but by default, when some are allowed to corral an inordinate share of society’s riches, someone at the other end has to take less. As inequities have grown over the last forty or fifty years, there has been a multiplier effect where, for every Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Carlos Slim, there are thousands whose livelihood is diminished, and, while these people may sell themselves as leaders and job creators, the vast majority of their wealth has been generated by people other than themselves, and their claims of increasing the size of the economic pie often ring hollow as the pie they expand is entirely based on monetary fictions, easily erased by economic contractions. In effect, we have seen no diminution of poverty or precarity, though often the stats can be manipulated to show whatever the current régime wants to put in front of the electorate (e.g., unemployment stats based on the number of job seekers registered with the authorities, rather than the actual number of people without meaningful work).
Here is a quip from Teddy Roosevelt, born to privilege, but able, at least, to articulate what it might take to reduce poverty, want, and precarity in a society that truly functioned as a society:
“The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare…No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so that after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life with which we surround them.” – Theodore Roosevelt
While you’re at it, go have a look at John Ralston Saul’s The Comeback, a reasonably detailed litany of the transgressions of the Crown (us) in Canada against First Nations and what it means for the sorry state of our government and societal institutions.