I've been spending a lot of time poring over grad school applications and packaging my answers on What I Want To Do. Really, this is what I want to do. I keep thinking I've changed, that I'm 25 now and that I have a set list of things I want to do and things I've given up on, and that one of the things I've given up on is journalism, my dreams of muckraking and truth-seeking and -telling. I haven't outgrown those dreams. My full-hearted adult passion for sociology and public policy seemed to me to be the outgrowths of that old and discarded dream, but I read a piece of writing like this and all I want to do is buy a tape recorder and go out and find people to talk to about the ways policies and structures shape their lives. I want to read about it, study it, measure it, but mostly I want to be the one on the ground responsible for getting the word out.
* * * * *
Twenty
years ago, an old man emerged from the deep forest, and what tales he
told. A woman buying vodka with food stamps. Another woman who missed
her federally financed medical checkup because she'd flown to Hawaii on
vacation. Were they real, ducking like shadows through the overripe
greenery of perception? Did it matter whether they were real, as long as
we came to believe them? "He is the first modern president," a scholar
once said of Ronald Reagan, "whose contempt for the facts is treated as a
charming idiosyncrasy."
Perhaps. However, as the Scripture warns, the poor--or, more accurately, the impoverished--will be with us always, but who they are and what they represent changes with every generation. They are a burden and then an obligation, and then a burden and an obligation again. A Square Deal follows a Gilded Age, a Depression follows the Roaring Twenties, and a New Deal follows that. Clintonism follows Reaganism. And the story of Marcus Stephens, a real person who died, follows the story of the welfare queen, whom nobody ever was quite able to find. It's too easy to blame the old man, who, after all, was little more than a skilled tracker along old trails.
He pointed the way, though, and all of our leaders followed. Perception grew thicker, strangling reality. And, in that lingering spirit, the lush and larger world came spinning across the path of the little world of Marcus Stephens. In its momentum, it grew more heedless, more relentless, more truthless.
[...]
One night, when Marcus was in the hospital in Memphis, Myrtle Riddle stayed up there with him while Sammie drove home. By the time Sammie got back to New Albany, Marcus's condition had grown worse. It looked as though he might not last the night, and he was calling for his grandfather. Sammie had absolutely no money. The SSI money had gone to hotels and food. There was no gas in the car. He began to tear the house apart, looking for any money he might've forgotten, but also because he felt like tearing something apart, and the house was handy.
[...]
Where were they all when Marcus Stephens died? None of them killed him, certainly--his heart did that. In fact, if they'd known him, and if they'd known the details of his short life, they all certainly would've agreed that he was exactly the kind of child for whom the SSI program was rightly designed. But they didn't know him and didn't want to. He was an abstraction, less substantive than all those children soaking up "crazy checks," whom no government study ever found, less real than the welfare queen and her vodka, who may not have existed at all. In the larger world, where airy anecdote is hard currency, it was Marcus Stephens who was the phantom.
[...]
Once, programs like SSI were considered a part of some national obligation. Once again, though, the poor became a burden. In the 1980s and throughout the 1990s and continuing today, applicants faced a tacit presumption--and occasionally an outright accusation--that they were attempting to work the system. The act of applying for a government benefit became prima facie evidence of trickery and fraud. The whole program stank of the urban legend of crazy checks. Acceptance rates of SSI applications have declined since the early nineties, and they remain low. According to the latest figures from the Social Security Administration, from August 1996 through the end of last July, there were nearly 900,000 new applications for the SSI program.
Of these, 550,000 were denied.
Perhaps. However, as the Scripture warns, the poor--or, more accurately, the impoverished--will be with us always, but who they are and what they represent changes with every generation. They are a burden and then an obligation, and then a burden and an obligation again. A Square Deal follows a Gilded Age, a Depression follows the Roaring Twenties, and a New Deal follows that. Clintonism follows Reaganism. And the story of Marcus Stephens, a real person who died, follows the story of the welfare queen, whom nobody ever was quite able to find. It's too easy to blame the old man, who, after all, was little more than a skilled tracker along old trails.
He pointed the way, though, and all of our leaders followed. Perception grew thicker, strangling reality. And, in that lingering spirit, the lush and larger world came spinning across the path of the little world of Marcus Stephens. In its momentum, it grew more heedless, more relentless, more truthless.
[...]
One night, when Marcus was in the hospital in Memphis, Myrtle Riddle stayed up there with him while Sammie drove home. By the time Sammie got back to New Albany, Marcus's condition had grown worse. It looked as though he might not last the night, and he was calling for his grandfather. Sammie had absolutely no money. The SSI money had gone to hotels and food. There was no gas in the car. He began to tear the house apart, looking for any money he might've forgotten, but also because he felt like tearing something apart, and the house was handy.
[...]
Where were they all when Marcus Stephens died? None of them killed him, certainly--his heart did that. In fact, if they'd known him, and if they'd known the details of his short life, they all certainly would've agreed that he was exactly the kind of child for whom the SSI program was rightly designed. But they didn't know him and didn't want to. He was an abstraction, less substantive than all those children soaking up "crazy checks," whom no government study ever found, less real than the welfare queen and her vodka, who may not have existed at all. In the larger world, where airy anecdote is hard currency, it was Marcus Stephens who was the phantom.
[...]
Once, programs like SSI were considered a part of some national obligation. Once again, though, the poor became a burden. In the 1980s and throughout the 1990s and continuing today, applicants faced a tacit presumption--and occasionally an outright accusation--that they were attempting to work the system. The act of applying for a government benefit became prima facie evidence of trickery and fraud. The whole program stank of the urban legend of crazy checks. Acceptance rates of SSI applications have declined since the early nineties, and they remain low. According to the latest figures from the Social Security Administration, from August 1996 through the end of last July, there were nearly 900,000 new applications for the SSI program.
Of these, 550,000 were denied.
"The Era of Big Government Is Over And Marcus Stephens Is Dead," Charles Pierce for Esquire
What a stunningly well-done article.
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