05.10.11
The Rising Menace of Beggars
Sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh at the comically mean people on Fox News.
On Saturday around lunch time I caught a few minutes of Stossel.
Run out of ABC a couple years ago, Stossel’s new show has one theme: Afflicting the afflicted. There’s no person or class too poor or bottom-out-of-sight to be spared the lash and some mocking laughter.
And while there’s always a lot of merriment at the expense of others on Stossel, the real humor is in catching the kinds of guests rubbing their hands together in glee and yukking it up over how they’ve exposed the manifold evils of the poor.
In another manner of speaking, Stossel brings fulfillment to the same demographic niche served by bear-baiting competitions.
On Saturday, it was the rising menace of beggars, attested by two “experts” from — paradoxically — the poor man’s Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute.
First up, Stossel put on a fake beard and pan-handled for the camera. He told viewers he could have earned a decent living doing it, extrapolating a salary from a modest sum he allegedly earned after a few hours.
Think of the argument this way: You find a twenty dollar bill on your way to the market tomorrow. If you continue with that as proof of your earnings power per hour, starting as a baseline, you’ll think you can make $160 a day, tax free.
Uh-huh.
But the guests took the cake, with everyone at one point — near the end — pointing out that poor people are the fattest in America. Because they, like, get a lot of free food and then use all their begging money in the purchase of liquor and drugs.
The only rational response is to laugh at the cartoons masquerading as rational people, for instance, one named Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
McDonald’s routine is getting an audience to believe begging is out of control and that, by extension, beggars have the highest sense of self-entitlement in America.
Indeed, she’d have no career if it wasn’t actually rather easy to persuade a certain percentage of stupid but sometimes influential white people in cities that the real reason things are in decay around them is all the damn beggars and vagrants lousing up the joint, refusing to straighten up and fly right.
And if, in your opinion, begging hasn’t yet been sufficiently criminalized it’s only because MacDonald and the Manhattan Institute don’t have the lobbying might of agencies like the National Rifle Association or the Chamber of Commerce. It’s certainly been criminalized but enough is really never enough in 2011 USA.
I’d send you to Fox but the show was too long to endure just for the sake of seeing MacDonald.
Instead, I’ll just cite some of her over-the-top claims (you can read the rest) on the menace of beggar youth in San Francisco, here:
Four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.’s current relabeling effort sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. “Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you???? Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby. “Dude, do you have any food???? His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls, and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth “traveler,??? as the Haight Street punks call themselves, stares dully into space … The girls wear necklaces and bracelets of plastic disks and other hip found objects; their baggy tank tops and stockings are stylishly torn.
Of all the destinations on the “traveler??? circuit, the Haight carries a particular attraction to the young panhandlers, thanks to the Summer of Love. Starting in late 1965, waves of teens from across the country began pouring into what was then a ramshackle, blue-collar neighborhood of pastel Victorian houses and low-rent businesses, drawn to the emergent drug culture and its promised liberation from the bourgeois values of self-discipline and hard work. “The time has come to be free,??? a local flyer proclaimed. “Be FREE. Do your thing. Be what you are. Do it. Now.??? This insipid philosophy was eventually co-opted by consumer capitalism, while the hippie ethos gave way to punk, daisy chains to piercing, acid to meth, and mindless utopianism to mindless nihilism.
Over the last several years, the Haight’s vagrant population has grown more territorial and violent, residents and merchants say. Pit bulls are a frequent fashion accessory …
Merchants trying to clean up feces and urine left by the alcohol-besotted youth are sometimes harassed and attacked …
An unintentionally hilarious letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2010 revealed just why the homelessness-industrial complex is so desperate to claim the Haight infestation for itself: government contracts. “The majority of the youth on the streets and in the park are in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there,??? wrote the executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. “Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community.??? Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.
As for becoming “contributing members of the community,??? that’s definitely not on the agenda, either. Asked what he saw for himself in the future, a “traveler??? in the Stanford documentary rolls his eyes, smiles nervously, and shakes his head for nearly a minute before replying: “A hot dog, there’s definitely a hot dog in my future.???
For Stossel, beggars were momentarily expanded to a national problem, one perhaps contributing to the economic state of malaise.
Vagrants and freeloaders have such nerve!
And you know beggars are always the fattest people you see on the streets. Unfortunately, there’s no hunger in America. It’s because of all the free food and booze money, damn right. These people even have enough left over to feed pit bulls.
Or did I already mention that?