Chappie Wants to Know Why Didn't He Get Sprinkles on HIS?

I have mercifully left off posting during the main months of the run-up election cycle. Among the trillions of words sputtered out in inchoate rage and blithering, ignorant stupidity since the beginning of the year are none if any of mine. Not that I wasn't tempted...the apparent general permission to babble like an idiot or bark like a dog that so many seem to have availed themselves of this year was hard to pass up. I'm only human! Yes, you're very welcome. But every good thing must end....  That being said, I will keep this short...

Chappie has grasped the fact that the essence of the Republican Spirit is not actually a desire for more of their favorite expressed drug--Liberty, but the fear that someone will get (without apparent labor or effort) something that "Joe Bimbo" has or wants or has worked for for a long time, for example a white, tricked out Lexus LS just like the one in the Bimbo's driveway. What's George Jefferson doing with MY car? It's like jonesing for the Joneses, the agonizing anguish that someone will get something that he doesn't "deserve." Think of it as reverse covetousness. The Bimbos, Joe and Jill, worry about this constantly and apply this concern to almost everyone they see whom they don't know and who has anything that the Bimbos themselves regard as desirable. If the possessors of said stuff are alien to the Bimbos' keen eyes (they speak a foreign language or possess a deliciously tawny complexion), the Bimbos' suffering goes into overdrive and they start picking at each other. Sometimes this leads to make-up sex, but not often. And this agonizing fear drives them mad over time. Of course, whenever Joe and Jill receive something that they didn't obviously deserve, they tend to be quiet about it OR if a not very bright version of the Bimbos, to celebrate it in obliviousness to the irony of the situation. And so it goes.

For the record and in the interests of discussing the relative merits and demerits of Right and Left, Chappie will hereafter refer to symbolic Republicans as Joe and Jill Bimbo and Democrats as Don and Diane Key (DonKey? Get it?). I hope this seems like an equitable distribution of silly names.

 Equus africanus asinus                                 © Isidor Stankov/Shutterstock.com

Anyway, as I was about to say when I rudely interrupted myself, this outraged Republican angst is understandable. Furthermore, the something that Diane Key gets that she doesn't deserve is likely to be something the outraged Jill Bimbo doesn't have but has always secretly wanted and been working towards. The deeper mystery of the Bimbo personality/weltanschauung is its intensely zero-sum nature, the sense that someone else's having or getting or winning entails the Bimbos not having or giving up or losing. In a free and productive economic system like ours (the very thing that attracts most immigrants) this is a failure of imagination and a sad thing.

When the Republican type (claiming allegiance to notions of personal responsibility and moral superiority) perceives some other achieving something that the Republican adjudges this other undeserving or unworthy of, emotions run high and the other's business becomes the Republican's concern. We can see the same dynamic operating in Republican opposition to other people having the right to marry whom they like, to other people having the right to control access and outcomes involving their bodies, in other people having the opportunity to vote, in other people having a right to valid, free public education, with other people having the right to temporary public assistance to feed their children. Seemingly the only  liberty issues Republicans have that are actually about imagined restrictions on their own possessions, are the obsession with guns and taxes.  The link just above is to a poignant scene on YouTube I came upon the other day. I freely point out that I possess no inside knowledge about the political affiliation of "Kimmy," the woman staring in the video linked above whose arguments and behavior I will be describing and commenting on, but I claim the Right of Stereotype here, anyway. Conversely, I admit that these Republican virtues I am apparently castigating are shared to some degree by all humans. It's just that the cup runneth over with most of those who self-identify as Republicans.  Everyone on both sides of the political divide seems to regard herself as superior to the other in any number of ways, so I guess everybody can't be either right or wrong, can he?

The cellphone recorded video linked above is of a woman (Kimmy!) verbally assaulting a man in a checkout line with his child, ostensibly because the man was using food stamps (her hard-earned money.) This video came to my attention when it was fully described at a respected liberal website, Raw Story without much editorializing. For the record there have not been any food stamps involved for many years, nor any of the corruption associated with that form of transaction. Participants have a debit card. Perhaps prejudice requires a false description of reality as it's first principle, Kimmy?

 

Upon being verbally encroached upon (in the presence of his small child) for carrying out a completely legal and valid financial transaction, the man (who looks like a "Skeeter" to me) explains to his attacker that he is a working father working "50-60 hours a week" to support his family. He is under no conceivable requirement to explain himself to this obnoxious woman (whom I'm calling "Kimmy" in honor of the heroic Kentucky office holder, thrice-divorced champion of vanilla marriage, Kim Davis, whom Kimmy painfully resembles in all her blousey authoritarianess) and the store should have taken steps to remove and ban her immediately, but Skeeter, bless his heart,  makes an attempt to explain himself--a fact no doubt driven in part by his own embarrassment at using the SNAP program. Poor people are actually not smug about their poverty! Ignoring his trapped response (he has a small child in his care) and perverting it's sense, Kimmy snarls that SHE supports his family. 

Now, we know nothing about these two real people besides what the poor quality video reveals. For the sake of argument, Chappie chooses to believe the best of both parties: Kimmy is a hard-working taxpayer who is not, according to her, a "bleeding heart liberal" and Skeeter is a struggling parent finding it impossible to make ends meet without availing himself and his family of "food stamps." Perhaps the most impressive thing about Skeeter is what he does not do: he doesn't make any cruel, sexist references to Kimmy's doughy appearance or invite her to worship certain regions of his anatomy, as Chappie almost certainly would have done. Go Skeeter!

 

 

Food stamps, so-called, are actually "plastic"--the chief function of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP which cost the US taxpayer "$74.1 billion in fiscal year 2014 and supplied roughly 46.5 million Americans with an average of $125.35 for each person per month in food assistance." This wasn't all the money they spent on food, just a supplement. 76% of SNAP benefits go towards households with children. It's fair to suppose that this assistance kept these people from going hungry in The Greatest Country in the World. If Kimmy knew the facts, she might have just a hint of a smile on her face. Her Republican House of Representatives cut the SNAP program by $8.7 billion in the 2014 Farm bill (they had tried for $39 billion but were blocked by Obama's veto threat) at the same time that they increased subsidies for corporate farming by a $6 billion increase in subsidized crop insurance.

To the extent that Kimmy pays any Federal income tax, she may be supporting the man's food stamps with her taxes (not her money--by definition, your taxes due are NEVER your money but what is due the government for providing you with the environment in which to live safely from the moment you "earn" anything.)  Chappie thinks it is healthy, realistic to realize that your taxes are never your money. Imagine how you think about your mortgage and the earnings that go to support it--your earnings are "spent" the moment you earn them, no?

Anyway, $74 billion is a lot of money. If we accept the widely documented fact that SNAP is a very effective program in alleviating hunger in America, then we should ask ourselves what $74 billion dollars represents to us? Well, we spent $60 billion on our pets last year. Every penny worth it, I'm sure. It's not clear to Chappie whether this figure includes funds spent to euthanize nearly 3 million dogs and cats whom nobody wanted? According to Market-watch (as Chappie did a quick check for facts) five years ago, "Americans spent a whopping $33.3 billion on cosmetics and other beauty products in 2010, up 6% from 2009, according to the Commerce Department." We also spent nearly $13 billion in 2014 on aesthetic plastic surgery (92% by women) and that overwhelmingly for breast augmentation.  Don't get mad...I'm just sayin'...

Lest you think these amounts constitute discretionary spending that no one really needs to spend, check out the price of our prisons, places where the inmates get, in additional to mental and other forms of torture, room, board and medical care 24/7/365: $80 billion. Or then there's the cost of automobile accidents: $871 billion. These numbers make me dizzy. Then there's the cost of the Pink Tax, the many percents that women in America and elsewhere spend extra for the same products that men buy. A California study estimates that it costs women an extra $1400 per year. If we consider that a third of our population are "women" (the other two thirds being "men" and "children") we come out with a figure around 150 BILLION extra that women pay every year for being women. That means you, too, Kimmy. So get off Skeeter's case, OK? Compliment him on his kid.

Chappie supposes that "Kimmy" is not a hypocrite since she is clearly too factually challenged to know that what she is claiming to know about Skeeter is basically not true and certainly would give the lie to her claim of being a Christian (as I'm sure she does and is...whatever that means.) Skeeter and I are similarly on a fishing expedition to assume that someone with a dreadfully perverted and ironic sense of entitlement and a rabid a social persona is a Republican when she is probably just an anguished meme escaped from cyberspace into our reality.

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