Are you for state-run welfare or not?  In Sebastian Yunger’s book Tribe he makes the compelling argument that both sides of that argument are basically for the same thing.  Despite our spoken myth about being radical individualists, Americans are strongly communal people.  We care about people, and care for them.  So, on the one side someone who thinks we need more welfare programs doesn’t want to see a member of the body harmed by need and so looks to mechanisms to make sure they are cared for.  On the other side people against welfare don’t want members of the body harmed by having their needed or rightful resources drained from them for the sake of someone else that doesn’t need them or is taking advantage of others.

Let’s look at two true folk artists for example.  Johhny Cash and Oliver Anthony.

When Johnny Cash was invited to the White House by Richard Nixon, he refused to sing a song that was proposed by the conservative president because it seemed to denigrate welfare recipients.  Cash was a true man for the common man, and he felt a solidarity with the poor and refused to make fun of people that might be in true need and experiencing real suffering.  If you know Cash, you know he certainly wouldn’t do that with wealthy politicians in the room who very likely didn’t know want like the lower classes.  As one of his greatest songs says, he wore black in remembrance of the suffering of the poor, the dispossessed soldier, the prisoner, and so on – he didn’t wear black to the White House in formality to the rulers of the day, this is for sure.

Next, we can consider Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.”  That now famous song clearly made fun of welfare recipients when it said, “if you're five-foot-three and you're three-hundred pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds,” a critique of someone growing fat on welfare, indulging their flesh at the expense of someone else’s hard work.  I group Anthony as a folk singer since his emergence came from him clearly expressing an ache in the hearts of many – he was expressing a sense that “people like me and people like you” were being taxed to death for ignoble ends like freeloaders and oligarchs.  I don’t think he’ll have the staying power and career of someone like Cash, but that song sure took the country by storm, going from farmer’s market performance to being played at the Republican Presidential Primary Debates.  I group Anthony with Cash in some ways because of that very thing, because after that debate he made clear that the Republican (“conservative”) politicians on that very stage were still “Rich men north of Richmond” and were part of the problem.

One can both see the need and abuse of something like welfare and not be accused of cognitive dissonance.  For that we’ll move to America’s other folk style of rap.  (I defended rap’s genuine folksiness in an issue of S&S.)

Tupac’s song “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” talks about a family being excited about a scandalous pregnancy because it meant more welfare money, an indictment of using people for your own gain without care for them.  But Tupac would also be a bit more like Johnny Cash in defending people that don’t seem to have another way to stay afloat.  Bone Thugs in Harmony’s hit “First of the Month” is less fearful of bragging about living on the dole.  The song describes the spirit of revelry that comes over the hood on the day you can pick up your welfare check, the first of the month: “Wake up, and I see that my sister was already dressed / She said, ‘I'ma run and go get my stamps’ / Watch and make sure no one snatches my check…”

If someone wanted to speak about abusing the system, Bone Thug’s song would surely provide some ammunition: “See how they just live check to check doing nothing but drinking and smoking weed?”  I mean, the song says as much.

I might have a tad more sympathy and think more like Cash or Pac.  I lived in between some section 8 housing (the hood) and in a trailer park off and on quite a bit.  There is a phycological conditioning in these places generational poverty that makes one feel trapped.  It’s easy to say “if they worked harder they could escape,” but the place of their “hood” is something that nourishes belonging and despair at the same time, and as much as we want to avoid despair a lack of belonging is much scarier to the human heart.  It isn’t unlike an abusive relationship, where the source of abuse is both comfort and pain.  If that’s the case, why not receive some bonus benefit from the abusive system when it gives it out?  Why in the world would I not receive some recompense from a system that keeps me here whether I like it or not?

Also, if you know that hard work and virtue pay off its likely because someone mentored you in that and even modeled it.  So, it ain’t just you and you’re not just a product of bootstrap yanking.  I think our country has a bad habit of presuming all poverty is by some sort of laziness or choice (or bad choices), this likely rooted in us being midwifed as a nation by John Calvin (but that’s another RIPPP).  As a character in a Joshua Hren’s  Infinite Digress said after being accused of noblesse oblige, “I’ve lived in seven countries – and let me tell you something: this country could use a little oblige, and a noble tone wouldn’t hurt it.  I’ve never, anywhere else but here, seen the poor condemned so brutally, so condescended upon by equals, so ‘imagined-as-vile’…

But – here’s my point – I think that if welfare is something abusive (in many directions) it is because it only thrives in a culture where we don’t know and we don’t love.  One has to be very hardened or self-absorbed to literally take a lunch from a baby.  As I witnessed even recently during Helene, people tend to not abuse the goodness of other people they can see and know, but they are prone to do so if its abstracted from reality like, oh I dunno, a massive bureaucratic form that prints money, doesn’t believe in the necessity of family solidity, and makes promises based on political expediency and a complete ignorance of subsidiary and true solidarity.  People will take money from FEMA and not need it but they would never take it from their community.

I would argue that the plundering of corporations through lobbying and owning/manipulating the debt of the poor is diabolical because it is calculated plundering.  I dislike a pirate more than a lazy kid since one is an active, cognizant threat and the other is just pitiable and annoying.

At this point it just seems like money isn’t a real thing and that you’d better get it while its available and spendable.  It was George Bush that first started sending checks to Americans to get them spending money again, because its all based on consuming.  Surely the welfare state will topple, but the welfare goes to both the rich and the poor, just in different ways – one polite and necessary (“too big to fail”) and one disreputable and low (“I’mma get mine”).  I just can’t see how love figures into either, which I guess means its some kind of answer to the dilemma.