Sunday Fire and Brimstone

Messy subjects are something we avoid when possible, so I apologize if this sends you crawling back under the covers. The other day a caller to CSpan said something that has stuck in my craw ever since, about a Prescott/Bush ancestor being involved in a movement to rid the earth of those underclasses that were such an impediment to progress for the 'rest of us'. Of course, the caller was relating present policies of this awful occupied White House of economic disfavor toward the deprived.

I can't say I haven't verged on accusations of this degree, but it's so mindboggling, I don't think I can commit to that opinion myself. I don't think the cretin in chief actually has the mental capacity for the kind of planning involved in slanting economic policy to eliminate the poor altogether. The powers behind his do-it-yourself throne may be more inclined and more able to put together that sort of schematic plan, however.

While the results of the present policies of our rightwingers have the result of making life precarious for those who they take advantage of, I don't accuse every member of the weakminded followers of having actual physical annihilation of their opponents in their minds.

This was something we talked around this a.m. in comments at Eschaton, and Avedon kindly sent me a reference when I inquired about one that a commenter had put up, that wasn't giving real information. I am going to excerpt a few interesting, or, more to the point, revolting, pieces from a review of the eugenics movement that Edwin Black reported on in his recent book, War Against the Weak, reviewed by Daniel Kevles.

Black pursues his thesis across largely familiar ground -- the eugenic theories that attributed costly physical conditions and socially deleterious behaviors to genetics, accounting for many of them as expressions of ''feeble-mindedness''; the claims in the United States that such deficiencies occurred with particularly high frequency among African-Americans and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe; the respectable standing of eugenic science at leading universities, state agencies and institutions, public interest organizations and research installations, notably the Eugenics Record Office, which was part of what became the department of genetics at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and which was financed in the main by the widow of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman and in part by grants from the Rockefeller philanthropies. Black rightly observes that eugenic research into heredity combined ''equal portions of gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked together by elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter of a genuine science.''
(snip)
If he covers what is in the main a well-known story, he adds to it substantial new detail, much of it chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States. Some American eugenicists argued for killing the ''unfit,'' and a few indeed practiced it by subjecting newborns to euthanasia (not a merciful death for those in pain, Black points out, but a painless death for those ''deemed unworthy of life'').
(snip)
Eugenics was an insidious doctrine, unabashed in its aim of deploying up-to-date science to solve social problems, even if that meant writing the ostensible dregs of society out of the American social compact. It nevertheless attracted many adherents among the white middle class, not only conservatives but also a number of disparate progressives, including, for example, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger and Rabbi Stephen Wise. Despite its imperfections, Black's book does prompt us to wonder what in medical genetics and biotechnology we are taking socially and morally for granted today that our descendants might indict us for tomorrow.

While the segue to 'mercy me, in light of such atrocities, we must look at what we MAY do that would approach this vicious mistake" avoids making a correlation with present day policies, I think we see more than a reflection of eugenics in today's libertarian theses. What effect besides eliminating do we envision if we knowingly condemn children to poverty and lack of health care.

When we eliminate the prospect of good wages for a large portion of the American public, they have no resort but to leave or do battle in whatever way they can with the forces against them. In our years of the War On Poverty, our society consulted its better instincts and offered opportunity to the less fortunate. In the present War For Poverty, the worst element in our society routs out the goodness and replaces it with law of the jungle.

It is past time to reclaim the high ground.

317 days.