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Monday
Depressingly and predictably, Republican House members want to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Unconcerned during the Trump years when their tax cuts for the wealthy ballooned the deficit into the stratosphere, they’ve now decided that red ink is threatening the country. In response to the news, someone on Spoutible (regrettably I forgot to record who) quoted activist Jake Blount from Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
First, news of Republican plans. A Washington Post article reports,
Top House Republicans are exploring significant changes to the nation’s food stamps program, including benefit cuts and stricter work requirements, as some in the new majority scramble for ways to slash government spending this year.
Food policy experts say that such changes “could open the door to debilitating cuts” and “worsen an existing hunger crisis.” According to Vince Hall, whom the article describes as the chief government relations officer for Feeding America, a nonprofit network of more than 200 food banks that provided more than 5 billion meals last year, “We are strained to the breaking point with a major increase in demand coming next month. It is deeply disturbing to contemplate even further reductions to the SNAP program.”
And then there’s the fact that such assistance is dwarfed by the big-ticket budget items, such as Medicare, Social Security, and the military budget—items that Republicans are afraid to touch. In other words, their proposed cuts will have minimal effect on the deficit and considerable effect on people’s lives.
This is the kind of thing that gets activist Jake Blount riled up in McCuller’s depression-era novel. Appearing in 1940 and set in a Georgia mill town, Heart Is a Lonely Hunter captures the lives of people at the margins. Here’s what Blount has to say:
We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.
Blount is also right on target, no less in 2023 than in 1940, about the GOP’s deflection strategies—which is to say, how they play upon cultural fears to hide their plutocratic agenda. Worse than the country’s poverty, Blount says, is
the way that the truth has been hidden from the people. The things they have been told so they can’t see the truth. The poisonous lies. So they aren’t allowed to know.
While we’re on the subject of oppression, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a remarkable African American character, the black doctor Benedict Copeland, who calls out the town’s racism. At one point he sounds like any number of Civil Rights-era leaders:
Our mission is to walk with strength and dignity through the days of our humiliation. Our pride must be strong, for we know the value of the human mind and soul. We must teach our children. We must sacrifice so that they may earn the dignity of study and wisdom. For the time will come. The time will come when the riches in us will not be held in scorn and contempt. The time will come when we will be allowed to serve. When we will labor and our labor will not be wasted. And our mission is to await this time with strength and faith.
Reviewing the novel in 1940, Richard Wright wrote,
To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle African-American characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.
And to make the book even more relevant, McCullers has characters worry about rising fascism. It’s remarkable that she wrote her novel at 23.