A Calvinist in Washington
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington As long as it was possible to trick the Baptists and the Catholics into thinking of each other as natural enemies the odour of public piety could be contained and occasionally tempered. Unhappily, Mr Carter and his secretary of health, education and welfare have discovered that, minor liturgical distinctions aside, they are two moralists who think as one. The results are a huge new welfare 'reform' of a decidely calvinist stamp and a continued insistence that is wrong for the Government to pay for the abortions of the poor.
Carter-Califano make exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape and incest and any pregnancy which threatens the mother's life. Carter-Califano have yet to explain why the sin of the rapist father must' be expiated in such drastic fashion by his fetus: at the same time, another fetus, maimed by pre-natal damage but conceived in wedlock, is doomed to birth and life with his cretinuous equals in the mentally retarded wards.
It's ecologically sounder, of course, to tie the tubes and excavate the wombs of upper income women while letting the poor begat themselves silly — or is it beget? Rich children grow up to consume whisky, motor cars and any number of commodities, the production and disposal of which is turning space ship Earth into a garbage can. But the youthful poor, consuming less, have less to dispose of.
So perhaps Carter-Califano have method as well as morals with which to recommend their programme. The same may be said for their encouragement of the birth of deformed and unwanted children. These must be taken care of and, under the welfare reform package, millions of lazy, undeserving poor are to be chucked off.the dole and put to work. There being no readily visible work for them, it may be surmised that they will be employed to take care of the children the Government refused to pay to abort. The reform programme also suggests,that single parents of children aged seven and up must work part or full time if day care facilities are available. Mr Carter says many of these parents will be given jobs as teacher aides, that is, they will be employed to take care of someone else's child while someone else is employed to take care of theirs. It's a grandly expensive tautology but one that provides self-made, hard-shelled Christian peanuts with the assurance that no one is getting away with anything. Mr Carter, who is never eloquent, verges toward it when mentioning welfare 'fraud', and his statesmanlike deter
mination to stop all conniving evildoers.
The belief in the spiritual benefits imparted by work to the workers have never been higher in official circles. Hence it must have come as a decided discouragement to learn from the District Attorney in Brooklyn that fully half of the people indicted thus far for looting during New York blackout have jobs. Even more encouraging for those of us firmly dug in on the side of sloth is that a high percentage of these gainfully employed looters have jobs as Government poverty fighters, social worker aides and such. To cap this madness off, the other day when the city of New York opened offices to hire workers to clean up the mess from the lootings, 10,000 mostly black teenagers showed up and caused another near riot.
The same Brooklyn District Attorney, who must be a nasty man, also announced that of the scores, and scores of stores smashed into, robbed and looted, only four sell food. Whatever we're dealing with here, it isn't hungry people. In any event the social disciplinarians in Congress and elsewhere are praising the proposed reforms, while denying they expect a million Black women presently on welfare to answer the question of whatever happened to the cheap domestic servant.
Since holding a job, any job, is known to be edifying, uplifting and a tonic to one's moral fibres, you cannot get a hearing if you should suggest that it is more costly, in financial and social terms, to erect village factories and offices where people are paid to perform tasks no one gives a damn about. Nevertheless, it's possible that over a period of time this forced work programme, like many others which have been tried, will dry up into pro forma ritual, leaving the rest of the Carter-Califano proposal in place. They want to greatly extend minimum income guarantees. Under this approach all people not merely those on welfare, but also lowincome employed people will receive an income large enough to protect them against want. Under this negative income tax proposal, as George McGovern called it when he was running for President and getting laughed at five years ago, low-pay working people will have higher incomes than welfare recipients, larger families will receive more than poor ones. Nixon proposed much the same idea but he had no better luck with it than McGovern: this time the thing may get voted in.
In others parts of the moral kingdom, President Peanut has asked Congress not to legalise marijuana, but to decriminalise it. If Congress agrees, it will henceforth be some kind of Quasi-Civil offence — like parking in a zone reserved for buses or politicians —
to be caught with small amounts of the stuff' by a federal cop. You could still go to jail in state where smoking the rope weed remains a crime, Carter is not asking for decriminalisation of the sale and distribution of marijuana: for that the federal agents will continue to put you 'in jail. I doesn't make sense, but apparently it conforms to the inner promptings of a Baptist conscience.
On the brighter side, the Rhode Island Supreme Court, a tribunal of great majesty, has ruled that an employee injured as a consequence of drunkenly falling out a window at the office Christmas party is entitled to workman's compensation. As a result, it's expected that many companies will hold their parties on the ground floor this year.
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