America Officially Dickensian, Jailing People for Years for Unpaid Debt
Sometimes, I think our society is becoming more and more Dickensian. But sadly, I don’t mean Dickensian in the sense of the big happy family gathering around the hearth for a jolly Christmas feast, or the flinty-hearted miser experiencing a life-altering event that, at long last, causes him to rediscover his humanity and become a benefactor to all mankind. No, what I’m referring to is the dark side of Dickens — and the man had a very dark side indeed.
Take, for example, Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’ fictional schoolmaster in Hard Times, who espouses the kind of fanatically utilitarian educational philosophy that would warm the heart of Michelle Rhee. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts,” Gradgrind proclaims. “Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” Hard Times is set a mill town, Coketown, full of factories that poison its workers as surely as, for example, the North Carolina glue factory recently profiled in this harrowing New York Times article poisons theirs — and in spite of OSHA regulations that are supposed to protect workers from such horrific consequences. The corrupt financier class, embodied in Dickens characters like Little Dorrit’s Mr. Merdle (Dickens always gave his villains the most brilliantly repulsive names) — clearly, they’re even more deeply embedded in our society than they were in his.
The Scrooge who, pre-transformation, rebuffs a request to contribute to charity with, “Are there no prisons? … And the Union workhouses, are they still in order?” — that guy expresses the Ayn Rand, anti-altruist philosophy that is all the rage on the right these days far more pithily than any of Rand’s interminably long-winded heroes ever did. (Admittedly, though, ol’ Ebeneezer wasn’t anywhere nearly as hawt as such strapping Randian hunks as John Galt or Howard Roark). Newt Gingrich (now there’s a Dickensian villain name if I ever heard one!) wants to bring backOliver Twist-style orphanages for welfare kids. Even what was perhaps the single greatest scourge of Dickens’ England, the child labor that haunts his novels (and that he himself experienced, when he worked in boot blacking factory as a boy) has not totally disappeared from our society. For example, child migrant farm workers are still with us, and still subject to systemic exploitation. At one point, the Obama administration looked like it was ready to institute some serious reforms, but itcaved to agribusiness interests and sadly, the underaged farm workers are still subject to the same abuses.
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