Because reasons, today’s post will be something different, and more personal. I will also come close to violating Horowitz’s Rule: Never generalize about your own necessarily limited experience. Joel Horowitz was my freshman sociology teacher all those many years ago. He was in his mid-thirties when he taught us, and his PhD was a second career for him. After leaving our large state university he taught for nearly thirty years at a smaller public institution across the state. While there, Horowitz, who was proudly from the Clifton-Paterson-Passaic conurbation in New Jersey, made a difference by showing his mostly Southern and rural or near-rural pupils that there is indeed a very big world out there and that they should enter into it.
According to one of his colleagues, when he retired he was celebrated as a teacher, mentor, and friend to all. He was sui generis in a place that nevertheless was home to Carson McCullars. Ms. McCullars served during my high school days, along with Flannery O’Connor, as an antidote to our otherwise very good English teacher who could not stop talking about Ayn Rand and James Michener in class. [1] There can be no doubt many of his students took to heart Horowitz’s approach to society. To give you some taste of what it was like for him, I remember well the student who brought his Bible to our lectures to dispute the class analysis that was included in our standard readings and Horowitz’s interpretation of society. Not that he preached, ever. But there was never a dull moment in that lecture room. I do wonder if such a thing is even possible now, during a time when Joel Horowitz would be viewed as the first self-professed atheist that many of his students ever met and therefore thoroughly un-American.
The proximate stimulus for this largely personal essai, according to an original meaning as “an attempt to understand,” is a conversation I had recently with a local surgeon who is slightly younger than I am old. Let us call him “Dr. B.” He is by all accounts an excellent practitioner of his art, craft, and science, as well as a very good companion walking the golf course (we both agree that the motorized golf cart is a peculiar American perversion of the ancient game and reason enough to hate the American version of the game). Unlike most of his medical contemporaries, Dr. B comes from a thoroughly working-class background in the Mid-Atlantic, where he grew up not far from Horowitz’s home ground. He then went to college and medical school across the Hudson in the Bronx and Manhattan, respectively, where he naturally excelled.
Both of our fathers were trained on the job as machinists during the early-1950s. Mine worked for a large chemical company. Dr. B’s father eventually opened his own machine shop, which is something my father regretted not doing. Both of us were also among the first children of our generation in our families to go to college, and our first jobs were in union shops. We agree on much based on our common origins, especially compared to the local rentiers who we tend to spend too much time in the presence of. Still, a lot of practical sociology can be learned among these people if one is willing and able to listen. Alas, the Professional Managerial Caste is generally incapable of paying close attention to and understanding what is actually said and meant by non-caste members in the world at large.
But Dr. B and I do not agree on everything. Yet. While walking down the fairway “Dr. B” remarked that all this “free stuff” is a big problem for what passes for a left in the United States. “Free stuff” has become a frequent trope among the MAGA right, but it has a much deeper history that is at the very least coextensive with the Neoliberal Dispensation. Before Jimmy Carter unleashed neoliberalism with the appointment of Alfred E. Kahn to his administration, complaints about “those people” (in this case virtually everyone in the working class) getting free stuff were limited to a certain demographic that is not now and never was limited to the American South. The trope has spread along with the neoliberal belief that “the market is the measure of all things, even those that cannot be measured.” Perhaps its most enduring fiction of “free stuff” is the Obama Phone, which is not free. Nor was it Obama’s, but I still hear of it on occasion. The so-called Obama Phone also has much older origins than the two Obama administrations, perhaps going back to Woodrow Wilson:
(President Obama) has no direct impact on the program, and one could hardly call these devices “Obama Phones,” as the e-mail author does. This specific program, SafeLink, started under President George Bush, with grants from an independent company created under President Bill Clinton, which was a legacy of an act passed under President Franklin Roosevelt, which was influenced by an agreement reached between telecommunications companies and the administration of President Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson phones, anyone?
I have pointed out this actual history on more than one occasion but generally seem to get nowhere. In any case, it was and remains nearly impossible to participate in our society and political economy without a phone, and there can be no legitimate reason for a country as rich as the United States to not make it possible for everyone to have subsidized (and limited) phone service, as well as a job that pays a living wage and rudimentary checking and savings accounts through the local Post Office, but I digress.
What constitutes the other “free stuff” that has people of a certain social class so exercised these days? The list will include health care, pre-K education, and elder care for those who need. We can keep going with subsidized housing for those in need, virtually always through no fault of their own. And even if “blame” must be placed, is it not better for everyone to have a safe and warm or cool place to retreat from the elements and sleep? Going still deeper, we need a political economy that provides everyone with the essentials for a good life, including healthy and wholesome food [2] and an environment that is clean and supports all life. The latter may be a battle lost before the coming of the inconvenient apocalypse, but we must not give up.
What gave Dr. B a start during our conversation was my reply to him, “These things are not free and never will be, but they should be no-cost at the point of delivery, just like roads and public schools.” He immediately replied, “That is an interesting way to look at it; I have never thought of it that way.” I changed the subject, but the point was made. As in medical education, one student at a time is the only way to go.
But he is correct that this is where the notional left in the United States has completely lost the plot. They prattle incessantly about “free this” and “free that” with absolutely no conception of how this locution plays in a real world in which the “lucky” people are working harder and harder while falling further and further behind. The unlucky have largely given up. Take health care, for example. At the moment my better half and I will be required to pay a lot of money in the near future for diagnoses and interventions, even though we have health insurance that would probably qualify as “silver” in the rickety-to-the-point-of-collapse Obama Care framework. We can afford it, for now. But our part of the cost would put the typical American working family underwater for the duration. There is no way most of them could drop more than $800 as the “patient’s responsibility” for a pre-operative CT scan and another $1800 as the upfront cost of having a procedure two days later.
So, what is the answer to health care? There is only one in this country, and that would be universal health care funded out of our taxes that would be offered to all at “no cost at the point of delivery.” Period. Not only would this be cheaper in the short and long runs, it would produce a much healthier population. Medical care is more effective when people do not put off going to the doctor because they are legitimately concerned about medical bankruptcy. It does not take AI to figure this out. Call it Medicare-for-All, do it right, and be done with it.
It’s not only health care by any means, and this is where my oldest friends have also lost the plot. I hear them prattle about “government schools,” which are the same public schools that prepared us for whatever success we have had. Their disdain contributes to the parlous state of our public schools today, which are increasingly no longer “no cost at the point of delivery.” Some of my friends also forget that their parents and grandparents lived happily in local subsidized housing that was conveniently in town, safe, and comfortable. One mother of a particularly successful good friend absolutely refused to leave her friends in The Homes when he offered to buy her a new house. He told me he could not understand that. I reckon not.
I currently live in a medium-size city in which the public school system has been abandoned by the rentier class that used it to get ahead. They do not care. There was also a robust bus system here when I visited as a teenager. On a regular schedule, one could get anywhere in town for a quarter within twenty minutes. Now? There is a bus system, but it is slow and inconvenient and severely underused for these reasons. The local rentiers do not care. Ditto for the public library across the street from my house. The general attitude seems to be that an Amazon Prime account is sufficient to the task of books, not that these people actually read them, plus virtually everything else. This will not end well.
I am currently working on my next lesson for Dr. B. In a previous conversation when we were playing as partners in a local event, I allowed as how my view of political economy crystallized one evening at about the age of ten when I was watching the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. This was a very regular occurrence in our house, because the only channel we could get in those prehistoric days was the CBS affiliate about 75 miles away. The story was about a large corporation that had laid off a few thousand workers, with the immediate effect that their stock price jumped. This has been repeated thousands of times since then. I told Dr. B that I thought that was wrong and have ever since built upon that realization. He immediately replied that this was just economics. No, but it is most certainly capitalism, which is not one and the same with political economy. Nor is it just business. That is the hard lesson to get across, not too different from teaching a fish what water is. But it can be done.
And as for violating Horowitz’s Rule, I intend to plead not guilty, and I think he would agree.
Notes
[1] It is unfair to place these two writers in the same sentence. While Ayn Rand produced pure drivel with The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, James Michener wrote books that were actually worth the read for this teenager: The Source, The Drifters, and Kent State: What Happened and Why. From the latter, Michener’s Girl with the Delacroix face endures more than 50 years later, jpg; Mary Ann Vecchio is the girl.
[2] Healthy and wholesome food are one and the same. Health, whole, and holy come from the same root (OED).
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