May 8^th

I thought I might have a go at Cal Thomas today because he has a column in the local paper, but no, his column is all about the British election and he provided no grist for my mill. Instead I’ll look at the current obsession of the right wing with quotation marks.

Say what?  It’s true, they do have an obsession with quotation marks; for example the wealthy when writing about the wealthy always put wealthy in quotation marks as in “wealthy.” Quotation marks are used around words when the writer disagrees with their usage in a particular context. Sometimes quotation marks replace “so called” as in when the so called wealthy becomes the “wealthy.”

This tendency to put wealthy in quotation marks does not signal that the writer is ignorant of the word’s meaning but that there is a disagreement with its usage in this context. For example, here in this little quasi-resort community we have a number of retired executives and professionals. The community is expensive and populated largely by two income tiers: those in the upper tier are professionals, physicians, lawyers, dentists and financial advisors, and in the second tier, wait staff, fast food workers and store clerks. A retired VP might not consider himself wealthy if he has an income of 180 thousand dollars a year, a paid for home worth half a million and a Mercedes in the driveway. He might not think of himself as “wealthy” because his firm’s president has also retired here and he is in much more comfortable financial circumstances.

When folks on food stamps, and many of these are fully employed at minimum wage jobs, speak of the wealthy they never put the word in quotes. If they refer to the owner of the McDonalds where they work, who also owns twelve other McDonald, they’ll say wealthy and they’ll have no need for quotes. I believe that anyone who puts wealthy in quotes is wealthy and anyone who doesn’t use quotes probably isn’t. You don’t need their Form 1040s to determine their income.

Now we consider the term class warfare; sometimes these words are placed in quotes. The term usually indicates the income level of the user. The wealthy use the term to characterize people who complain about the enormous disparity in wealth between the top 1% and the other 99%. The complainers are not usually in the top 1%, those folks are usually very well insulated from the complaints of the complainers, and in any event they are rich enough not to give a fig! Those who complain about class warfare are the second tier rich and particularly those who are politically active; this included the right wing commentariate. Of course there is no class warfare, no one is issuing rifles and screaming, “to the barricades” or “up against the wall.”

Indeed the lower economic levels in our society who have been victims of class warfare seem much less inclined to mention it than the very well off. The politicians who cut food stamps, speak of raising the age for social security benefits, think a flat tax is just a great idea; these are the people who are practicing class warfare and they are clearly winning that war.