The Worst St. Patrick’s Day Article You’ll Read All Year: How Paul Ryan is Like Genocidal Englishmen

In yesterday’s New York Times, National
Book Award and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Timothy Egan
likens Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to the English overlords of
Ireland’s great potato
famine of 1845-1852. Seriously.

Egan says he did a bit of “time traveling” in anticipation of
St. Patrick’s Day (whose celebration in the form of parades and
drunkeness is largely an invention of colonial America). What did
Egan find while traipsing about in the Old Sod?

A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the
starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of
dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the
famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,”
he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

And there I ran into Paul Ryan…the Republican congressman was
very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His
oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a
lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal
negligence.

But wait, before you dare say that Egan in any way means to
compare Ryan to the architects of one of the most heinous acts
of imperial brutality, perish the thought:

There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide
that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of
modern American poverty programs.

But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a
Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same
language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an
epic tragedy.

You got that? “There is no comparison”
between “de facto genocide” and Paul Ryan’s call for, what,
trimming (not eliminating, mind you) future increases in food
stamps? And yet, that’s exactly the point of Egan’s article – to
put Ryan’s mug cheek-to-jowl with the 19th-century malefactors who
controlled the food supply of Ireland and did little or nothing as
the race of kings died like flies. All while mumbling that “there
is no comparison, of course.”

There’s a “lazy-day hammock” going on in all of this, and it has
nothing to do with Paul Ryan having “a head still stuffed with
college-boy mush from Ayn Rand.” It’s got a helluva lot more to do
with Timothy Egan’s (and by extension, The New York
Times‘) willingness to entertain any useless and
un-illuminating comparison as long as it slags the right
villain.

Paul Ryan’s ritual invocation of his Hibernian roots is indeed
every bit as grating to me as the howl of the banshee at the end
of Darby O’Gill and the Little People. And it is
sweet music to my ears compared to the underhanded and rotten sort
of song Egan is singing.

As for the question of contemporary anti-poverty
programs: Does anyone seriously doubt that we haven’t been defining
poverty upwards for a decade or more now?
It definitely started under Bush, who doubled food-stamp
spending during years when unemployment hovered in the 4 percent
range, massively increased disability payouts, and created an
entire new entitlement (Medicare Part D) in the name of helping
penny-pinching seniors (yet the program, like Medicare itself, was
not really means-tested). How else do you explain that at least

49 percent of the U.S. population lives in a household that
receives a direct benefit from the government (including 35 percent
who receive a means-tested benefit)? In 2006,
according to a study by Douglas J. Besharov of the American
Enterprise Institute and Douglas M. Call of the University of
Maryland, between “between 74 and 81 percent of all American
infants would be WIC eligible” (emphasis in
original).

But the important thing to remember this St. Paddy’s Day, folks,
is that to even question the efficacy and effects of anti-poverty
programs is to align yourself with Sir Charles Trevelyan, the
English adminstrator who chalked up Ireland’s poverty and
starvation not to colonial exploitation but to a defect of
character.