Keep Them Barefoot and Pregnant

So goes the chauvinistic phrase from the early 20^th century about keeping women at home and curbing the threat of divorce.  This was apparently taken from a British proverb that held, “Keep her well-shagged and poorly shod and she’ll not wander far.”  Aside from being tasteless, it has at its roots a desire for dominance by taking away choice.  A newer push from the political establishment seems to be to keep them ignorant and proud of their fate. 

How else do we explain the unbridled support of our underclasses for billionaires who flaunt the need for government austerity by cutting social programs?  Those programs often provide relief for hard-working families in times of crisis.  When man-made or natural disasters strike, it will generally be the less financially fortunate among us who suffer the greatest.  Cuts in the areas of medicine, housing, and food welfare are threatened while tax breaks that more widely help the wealthy, are promoted.

We regularly see some of our poorest states reelect leaders who wrap themselves in the flag, yell about the need to protect their right to carry weapons of war, and raise the specter of fear of disease and oppression from immigrants.  I haven’t mentioned a particular political party, but I think we can guess. 

Economic stagnation is the latest form of "barefoot and pregnant."  The 10 states with the lowest per capita income levels are Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Louisiana, Montana, South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, and North Carolina.  Donald Trump carried all 10 of these states in 2016.  Then, in the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump carried all 10 states again.  After 4 years of Trump’s Republican leadership, they were still the poorest folks in the nation.  In 2022, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Kentucky all got Democratic governors, but they are still majority Republican at lower levels of government.

The flip side of this is that nine of the top ten states with the highest per capita incomes voted Democratic in the presidential elections of 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.  The exception to this was Alaska, a traditionally red state.

Republican leaders hold an American flag, a Bible, or an AR-15 in one hand leaving the other hand free to pick the pockets of their less fortunate constituents.  Like any good magician, they distract with the pretty baubles while working their true magic of self-enrichment.  They fool the poor and reward the wealthy.  The poor continue to vote for them and the wealthy contribute a portion of their winnings back to the “dealer.” 

My favorite quote from the old Mary Tyler Moore Show was from her boss, Lou Grant, who explained his success in management saying, “I know how to delegate blame.”  The GOP uses this tactic by blaming liberals, immigrants, people of color, Jews, and certain select (liberal) wealthy individuals, for housing shortages, lackluster job opportunities, inflation, poor education, and inadequate healthcare. 

The GOP will say they are protecting your freedoms while taking them away.  Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis wants to micromanage the school system.  He has gone so far as to emulate Adolf Hitler who banned all books that were deemed “un-German” on cultural, religious, or political grounds.  In 1933 Nazi Germany, Hitler publicly burned such offensive books.  DeSantis just adopts a vague policy whereby he outlaws certain books and then threatens school administrators and teachers with loss of employment, fines, or even jail time if he finds books they didn’t remove from libraries that offend him. 

The Florida school employees are among the worst paid in the nation and now they must filter through millions of books to find any that would make white heterosexual students feel uncomfortable.  >In Florida, the terms are CRT and WOKE.  Any books that reference social conscience in terms of race (Critical Race Theory) or hint at systemic injustices that may exist in our society, must be removed.  DeSantis wants to end anti-white bigotry, at least that’s the red meat he throws out to his audience.  He wants to outdo the efforts begun by the team of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and their America First Legal group.  Just keep people ignorant of history and distract white voters with another shiny bauble.  DeSantis can then advance to the final round in the American political game show, aka his run for the presidency.