"Hard Times Again" By Theodore Dalrymple | January 23, 2012 For The American Conservative "We live in hard times, and all the indications are that they may get much, even very much, harder. No one, at any rate, would take a bet that they wonât. "The number of children in America claiming subsidized meals in school has shot up; the homeless are increasing by the hour; the formerly prosperous are laid off without so much as a thank you; the young struggle to find any work at all; beggars are making a comeback on the streets of cities as if they had been hiding all these years, waiting for the right moment to emerge from their subterranean lairs into the world above. "The February bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, then, could hardly come at a more appropriate moment in economic history, for Dickens was the revealer, the scourge, the prose poet, of urban destitutionâa destitution that, in our waking nightmares, we fear may yet return. "Dickens knew whereof he wrote. It was his habit to walk miles through the streets of London, and no manâexcept perhaps Henry Mayhewâwas more observant than he. Often accused by his detractors of exaggerating reality, he claimed in the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit that he merely saw what others did not see, or chose not to see, and put it into plain words. What was caricature to some was to him no more than the unvarnished truth. He held up a mirror to his age. The adjective âDickensianâ is more laden with connotation than the adjective that pertains to any other writer: Jamesian, for example, or Joycean, even Shakespearian. We think of workhouses, of shabby tenements with bedding of rags, of schools where sadistic and exploitative schoolmasters beat absurdities into the heads of hungry children, of heartless proponents of the cold charity, of crooked lawyers spinning out their cases in dusty, clerk-ridden chambers. We think of Oliver Twist asking for more, of Wackford Squeers exclaiming, âHereâs richness for you!â, as he tastes the thin slops his school doles out to his unfortunate pupils, of Mrs. Gamp looking at her patient and saying, âHeâd make a lovely corpse!â "If he had been only a social commentator, though, Dickens would have been forgotten by all except specialist historians of his age..." Continues: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/hard-times-again/
Sorry, but the connection between Obama and 30 years of wage stagnation or worse is also fictional. No need to invent new terms for old processes.
In honor of his birthday, i will flip a dime at the first homeless person i see on the way home from my friends office.... I will make sure i flip it just out of his reach though so he has to work for it...... I wouldnt want him thinking you get something for nothing in this world.....
I tried playing the roll of scrooge for you, as i knew it was only a matter of time till someone in the liberal media like Martin Bashir made the connection to conservatives in honor of Dickens Birthday...... Figured i would save them the .time, and eliminate the middle man for you...... <iframe title="MRC TV video player" width="640" height="360" src="http://www.mrctv.org/embed/109808" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>