Radio-Free Robin: Don't Help the Bear!

     This is a column for this week's Sentinel I wrote not as a Bob's Little Acre but as a Radio-Free Robin, which means it's what passes at the Acre for political.  It's not necessarily artful but I had to be rid of it!  It's spring and time for people of my proclivities to roll happily in the dirt.  This afternoon I was trying to do just that but I had this piece to finish before deadline and this point I wanted to make about the Current Situation on my beady little mind, so instead of rejoicing in dirt I kept furrowing the brow and moving the lips as I formulated arguments.
     And really, after I ruined my Sunday for the piece, what boots it?  Do I change anybody's mind?  Do I strike any real blows for Truth, Justice and the American Way? 
     Well, who knows?  But I promise, I'm through with these Radio-Frees for the rest of the spring anyway.  The next Bob, which I've already started, will be about asparagus.
     Well, sort of about asparagus.  Mostly about asparagus.  Though there were some points I wanted to make about materialism and poverty and Truth, Justice, the American ...
     Later.

Kiss the Girl!  Have Some Kids!  But Above All, Don’t Help The Bear!

By Robin Ford Wallace

            “There once was a farmer who took a young miss, in back of the barn where he gave her a –

Lecture, on horses and cattle and chickens and eggs, and told her she had the most beautiful –

Manners, which suited a girl of her charms, a girl that he wanted to take in his –

Washing, and ironing, and then when she did, they could get married and raise lots of –

Sweet Violets!”  

            In case you’re wondering, the above is a song called “Sweet Violets” that my mom used to sing me when I was a child, and one reason I never reproduced.  Think of the awful power of mothers to warp their children for life. 

Oh, you wouldn’t mean any harm.  You’d just be trying to get your kid to sleep.  But there you’d be at 3 a.m., slumped against a wall jiggling away, when suddenly you’d realize what you’d done:  Infected your innocent baby with all the words to “Honey,” which would haunt him for the next 90 years.

But weren’t we talking about the stark and terrifying socioeconomic realities of the early 21^st century?

Yes, I fear so, Gentle Reader:  Radio-Free Robin rides again! 

Don’t look at me like that.  You think I want to editorialize?  It is spring, when a girl like me is already torn between the siren call of dirt and the more winsome melody of wildflowers.  You think I got time to watchdog our cherished American freedoms? 

However, keeping the world safe for democracy gets to be a habit, and it was not for “Sweet Violets” that I was delving through the spidery attics of my memory.  “Sweet Violets” just seduced me from my grim duty momentarily, being about flowers.  What I was really looking for up there was a song my mother used to sing about a preacher chased up a tree by a bear.  He prays:  

              "Oh, Lawd!  You delivered Daniel from the lion's den.  

              You delivered Jonah from the belly of the whale and then,

              The Hebrew children from the fiery furnace, so the good book do declare,  

              Now Lawd, dear Lawd, if you can't help me,

              Please!  Don’t help that bear!”

              What got me singing that was a speech by newly elected Labor Commissioner Mark Butler.  Mr. Butler expressed regret for the Labor Department’s reputation of hostility toward the business sector, and vowed to make it more business-friendly from now on.  “I don’t think the Department of Labor should be about handing out checks,” he said.

              You realize, of course, he was talking about unemployment checks?  

              So the new labor commissioner is against taking care of axed workers, on the grounds it might irritate business, and it’s not the first time I’ve heard this.  Here’s the thinking:  

              With millions of Americans out of work, job creation has become our national holy grail.  And who creates jobs?  Why, business!  And business could create a whole bunch more if it weren’t for all these pesky government regulations!  “We need to get government out of the way,” I heard (also newly elected) U.S. Congressman Tom Graves say in a speech on job creation.

              Ahem.  Does anybody besides me remember who it was who shipped American jobs overseas because overseas workers work cheaper?  Who eliminated jobs in favor of outsourced consultants so it wouldn’t have to pay for health insurance?  (And don’t even get me started on health insurance!)

              Business did those things, of course.  It is ridiculous to hope that business will save the American worker.  Business doesn’t care about the American worker.  Business used to send coal miners into dank pits where they died like flies.  Business still does that as far as it can get away with it.  

              In fact, business has always treated workers as badly as it was allowed.  Remember, please, the company store, where business clipped workers of what little wages it was obliged to pay them.  For that matter, business used to capture people in poor countries and sell them to other businesses so they wouldn’t have to pay wages at all.  Business still adores slave labor and that’s why it recruits illegal aliens.  

              And business never even pretended it was a good guy.  Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The business of America is business,” but who ever said the business of business was America?  Business never made any bones it was doing anything but trying to make a buck.

              Now, Point Two:  It is a legitimate – a vital! – function of government to protect American workers from the greed and rapacity of business.  If it weren’t for government regulation, business would still be cheerfully boiling workers down in lard vats and beating little children to make them operate machines faster.  

              But now, when the greed of business has not only outsourced the jobs but collapsed the banking system and more or less obliterated the American middle class, when working Americans are fixin’ to become nothing but a pool of disenfranchised organ donors for the very rich, what does the great toothless voice of tea party populism shriek?

              “Keep the government out of business’s hair!  Abolish the minimum wage!  Dismantle collective bargaining!”   

              It is like my mother’s violet song, when the rhyme scheme suggests the farmer is going to kiss the girl and instead he commences to carry on about chickens.  If the world made sense, we wouldn’t elect candidates who said things like that, we’d swarm over them like Zulus and cut them up for meat.     

              What I’m trying to say here is that I am perfectly happy for the government to intercede in my behalf to keep rampageous capitalism from harvesting my bone marrow.  And if it won’t, all I can hope is:

              It won’t help the bear.

END