The Dysfunctional Rich

What would it be like if your father was the head of the CIA?
Wouldn't growing up in that atmosphere mean that you failed to learn certain basic things? Wouldn't you grow up thinking that it was normal to remove democratically elected governments?
I don't know. It's just a thought.... I had when I heard about a certain wealthy man who wants to be governor of New York and who believes that he can teach poor people how to live... Odd. That strikes me as very USA... like the time in Slovakia I spoke to a US citizen who said that, at the very least, US citizens abroad could teach the rest of the world about .... hygiene? no... SORRY,---That was a joke!..... He said that US citizens could teach the world about democracy (that's sort of a joke too.....)......

Today the grouch (aka yankee gringo) offers a few words of wisdom from the sociologist Wacquant...

How does a society in which every other lone mother and one child in four (over 13 million youngsters, including 10 million without any social or medical coverage) lived below the official "poverty line" in 1995 manage to convince itself that the penury that afflicts so many of its most defenseless members is a consequence of their individual failings? The answer to this query is found in the moral individualism that undergirds the national ethos and the tenacious ideology of gender and the family that makes poor unwed mothers (and fatherless children) into abnormal, truncated, suspect beings who threaten the moral order and whom the state must therefore place under harsh tutelage.

(p. 81, Punishing the Poor; The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity; Duke UP 2009, original French edition 2004)

There is a psychology here: the self-described good person fears the social outsider, and works hard to create a mental barrier. And the society engages in symbolic acts of cleaning and casting out.....

Funny thing, that sounds like my recent experience at KMart..... (KMorality?)

File this under "The Grouch Reads...."