The things people in glass houses do......... maybe Mr. Ryan can eat rotten potatoes for a few days.....
Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia
IN
advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s
and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian
England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest
empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the
hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.
A
great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving
Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”?
Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles
Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to
be made an agreeable mode of life.”
And
there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to
America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence,
wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of
dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was
also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.
There
is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that
resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern
American poverty programs.
But
you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party
favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that
English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.
The
Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was
the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012
presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he
wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears
during the famine — and hurt them badly.”
What
was a tired and untrue trope back then is a tired and untrue trope now.
What was a distortion of human nature back then is a distortion now.
And what was a misread of history then is a misread now.
Ryan
boasts of the Gaelic half of his ancestry, on his father’s side. “I
come from Irish peasants who came over during the potato famine,” he
said last year during a forum on immigration.
BUT
with a head still stuffed with college-boy mush from Ayn Rand, he
apparently never did any reading about the times that prompted his
ancestors to sail away from the suffering sod. Centuries of British rule
that attempted to strip the Irish of their language, their religion and
their land had produced a wretched peasant class, subsisting on
potatoes. When blight wiped out the potatoes, at least a million Irish
died — one in eight people.
“The
Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the
famine,” wrote the fiery essayist John Mitchel, whose words bought him a
ticket to the penal colony of Tasmania.
What
infuriated Mitchel was that the Irish were starving to death at the
very time that rich stores of grain and fat livestock owned by absentee
landlords were being shipped out of the country. The food was produced
by Irish hands on Irish lands but would not go into Irish mouths, for
fear that such “charity” would upset the free market, and make people
lazy.
Ryan’s
running mate in 2012, Mitt Romney, made the Tory case with his infamous
remark that 47 percent of Americans are moochers, “dependent upon
government.” Part of that dependence, he said, extended to people “who
believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to
you name it.” Food — the gall!
You
can’t make these kinds of heartless remarks unless you think the poor
deserve their fate — that they have a character flaw, born of public
assistance. And there hovers another awful haunt of Irish history. In
2012, Ryan said that the network of programs for the American poor made
people not want to work.
On
Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This,
after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch
because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story
was garbage — almost completely untrue.
“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of
men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about
working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words,
these people are bred poor and lazy.
Where
have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish
national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was
“defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and
turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.
You
never hear Ryan make character judgments about generations of wealthy
who live off their inheritance, or farmers who get paid not to grow
anything. Nor, for that matter, does he target plutocrats like Romney
who might be lulled into not taking risks because they pay an absurdly
low tax rate simply by moving money around. Dependency is all one-way.
“The
whole British argument in the famine was that the poor are poor because
of a character defect,” said Christine Kinealy, a professor of Irish
studies and director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac
University. “It’s a dangerous, meanspirited and tired argument.”
And
it wasn’t true. The typical desperation scene of the famine was the
furthest thing from a day in the hammock. Here’s what one Quaker relief
agent, William Bennett, found in a visit to County Mayo in 1847:
“We
entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from
the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled
together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and
ghastly ... perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in
the last stage of actual starvation.”
For
his role in the famine, Trevelyan was knighted. The Irish remember him
differently. At Quinnipiac’s Great Hunger Museum hangs a picture of this
English gentleman with a dedication: “For crimes against humanity,
never brought to justice.”
Irish
Alzheimer’s, goes the joke, is to forget everything but the grudges —
in the case of the great famine, for good reason. What Alexis de
Tocqueville called “the terrifying exactitude of memory” is burned into
Ireland’s soil. But more than forgetting, Paul Ryan never learned.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 16, 2014, on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: Paul Ryan’s Irish Amnesia.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/paul-ryans-irish-amnesia.html
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