The History of Beer, Politics and Other Things
That title is borrowed from an email doing the rounds at the moment, and that I received this morning. It starts off with a weak joke about how civilization began with the invention of beer and consequently humanity was split into two groups: Liberals and Conservatives. Liberals are credited with “[the] domestication of cats, the trade union, … group therapy … and the concept of democratic voting” (those evil Liberals) and are identified by what they eat and drink (tofu, sushi, French food, imported beer and white wine), by what they do for a living (social workers, journalists, hair dressers, Hollywood dreamers) and by either being women or woman-like. Conservatives, on the other hand, eat red meat and potatoes and have manly jobs like big game hunter, rodeo cowboy, lumberjacks, construction worker, corporate executive and soldier.
What struck me about this email was not how obnoxious it is, but how it fits nicely into the current received notion of what a Liberal is in this country. Liberals are the wine quaffing homos who want to live off the welfare state and Conservatives are the real people of America, the working johns who earn a living. So how did this happen? How did the American right manage to convince the working people of this country that they should look to the Conservatives to help them improve their lives?
The left are complicit in creating this image. George Orwell wrote that “the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents”, and it’s a sentiment that would spring to mind when I would be accosted by Socialist Workers (a political party in the UK) on the Holloway Road in London, screeching out their dogma in voices like sawing sheet metal. I felt the same disgust when I saw a man chalking ‘Bush Out’ in Union Square, but replacing the ‘S’ with a swastika, while the political puppeteers make ‘jokes’ about Bush and Cheney in high-pitched voices. These people seem to represent me and my beliefs in the popular imagination, but in fact do no more for me than grate my nerves.
Real, serious socialists (or leftists, or liberals – whatever you want to call yourself) need to reclaim the political arguments in this country and remind everyone who earns less than $100,000 a year that their interests are not best served by a party who wants to reduce the tax burden for the rich and free corporations of all those icky regulations that stop them from hammering every last drop of worth out of their employees before letting them free to fend for themselves in sickness or in old age. And the next time someone asks you how you feel about gay marriage tell them not as strongly as you do about America being below about thirty-five other countries in the infant mortality world rankings, below Cuba even.
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I think the statistics ranking the U.S. so low in infant mortality may be a bit skewed due to the fact that the U.S. has exceptional care for the premature and low birth weight infants. Thus, statistics of live births include those infants who would have died in the fetus and would never have been born alive if it were not for this care.
That may be true and might push the US up a few places, probably above Cuba, but it would still place the richest country on the planet around the 30 mark.
Statistics are so tricky - that’s why I prefer to focus on issues such as gay marriage which are so cut and dry - I mean, after all, who doesn’t love a wedding?
At any rate, I’m still questioning that statistic for reason said above, and I wonder how the ranking would actually change with this info considered. Still, even if the US is only pushed up a few places, say behind Britain, I’d like more info as to why that is. A classist health system? The popularity of having a first child well into the thirties and forties? Our propensity for eating the most artificial of foods and watching an abundance of television?
BTW, great blog!
After our experience having a child here and the chronic lack of aftercare (unless you are rich), I wonder how many of these deaths are the result of infanticide?
Thank you - I’m new to this game. I agree about statistics being tricky, slippery things but I think this one is a reasonably good indicator of the amount of money a nation spends on the health of its citizens. The USA is ranked 4th in the world for average annual income per head and I think such a large discrepancy between that figure and the infant mortality rate ranking is worrying, albeit in very broad, hand waving terms.
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