Rich And Poor

1. Afraid of the poor
     who don't like to get poorer,
     the rich who like to get richer
     turn to the State for protection.

2. But the State is not only
     the State of the rich
     it is also the State of the poor
     who don't like to get poorer.

3. So the State sometimes chooses to help
     the many poor
     who don't like to get poorer,
     at the expense of the few rich
     who like to get richer.

4. Dissatisfied with the State,
     the rich who like to get richer
     turn to the Church
     to save them from the poor
     who don't like to get poorer.

5. But the Church can only tell the rich
     who like to get richer:
     "Woe to you rich
     who like to get richer,
     if you don't help the poor
     who don't like to get poorer."

Peter Maurin's Easy Essays were first published in book form in 1949, it is sad to think of how anachronistic his description of the role of the state in providing justice for the poor is.  That is what has happened in the thirty-four years since Reagan took office or, if you will, the even longer since Nixon began dismantling Johnson's Great Society and Roosevelt's New Deal.  We've gone back to the pre-depression attitude on that, led first and foremost by the free press that is free to sell itself to the highest bidder.  And that will never, ever be the poor, it won't ever even be the working poor or even the middle class.  While there are many things that prove the insincerity of the pseudo-left, if not their stupidity, it is the faith put in and the support given to the media.  With the coming of electronic mass media a new geological age dawned and an entirely new media environment replaced that of print, it is one that values superficiality and dishonesty and, most damaging of all, centralization of attention on to media that is superficial, dishonest and which has the corruption of an audience whose highest function is to be duped consumers of products.

Maurin was deeply skeptical of even the Christian radicalism of the Catholic Worker,  of which he was the co-founder.  His vision was too radical even for that media organ.  While many of his ideas wouldn't be relevant and he made some notable mistakes,  his endorsement of Eric Gill, perhaps the most shocking of those.  Though in Maurin's defense, he was entirely unaware of Gill's profound private depravity, as everyone outside of his family seems to have been.  And  there were other things which are kind of jolting in their pre-war phrasing, things I would expect he would have put differently if he had a gift or prophesy required by critics of all but their own heroes.

Still, that aside, Maurin's writing, at its most useful, still seem to me to be far more radical than anything the heroes of secular radicalism ever produced.