Feeding Senators for Little Fun and No Profit

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

23 April 15

he Guardian has an interesting piece by one of the people tasked with making sure the members of the United States Senate do not go hungry. No, not lobbyists with fat expense accounts. This guy cooks in the Senate cafeteria and cooking for the Senate apparently is cooking on -- and for -- the cheap. He's decided to embark on a wildcat job action.

I'm a single father and I only make $12 an hour; I had to take a second job at a grocery store to make ends meet. But even though I work seven days a week – putting in 70 hours between my two jobs – I can't manage to pay the rent, buy school supplies for my kids or even put food on the table. I hate to admit it, but I have to use food stamps so that my kids don't go to bed hungry. I've done everything that politicians say you need to do to get ahead and stay ahead: I work hard and play by the rules; I even graduated from college and worked as a substitute teacher for five years. But I got laid-off and I now I'm stuck trying to make ends meet with dead-end service jobs. American voters should ask themselves: if presidential candidates won't help the workers who serve them every day, will they really help the millions of low-wage American workers who they don't know or see?

"Or see" is the heart of it. Invisible People always have existed within the toxic fairy tale about the American Dream that we tell each other when electing someone every four years. Different groups of people have been invisible from time to time throughout our history but, except for some very brief and rare exceptions, poor people have been the permanently Invisible People because poor people give the lie to the fantasy, and we can't or won't have that. We treat poor people the way that the Soviet authorities treated Andrei Chikatilo, the Railway Killer. The Soviet system was too perfect to allow someone to become a serial murderer, let alone one of the most atrocious in history. In the same way, the American Dream, this country's primary narcotic, cannot admit that poor people exist through no fault of their own, or through neglect and cruelty hardwired into the system. Better not to see them.

The only periods in which they become visible for a prolonged length of time is when the economy generally goes to pieces, and the people who are not poor, and who never have been poor, suddenly find themselves looking poverty in the face. This makes the reaction to the 2008 Great Recession something of a historical anomaly. Even facing their own personal economic crises, a great number of Americans allied themselves, not with their fellow citizens in trouble, but with politicians and opinion leaders who were running the ball for the people who wrecked the joint. If I had to guess, and I do, I'd say this was because the most recent catastophe occurred after a very successful 30-year campaign against the very notion that we as a self-governing commonwealth could use the institutions of that government as a counterweight to the money power, and to help those of our fellow citizens who were severely victimized by its crimes. You cannot emphasize with the invisible, even if it's handing you your ham-on-rye.