Edited to add: I didn’t mean to do it! I didn’t uncheck the box that says put this on the front page and OMG look where it wound up! Please, someone who can, move it over to the sidebar where it belongs!
Over at Booman Tribune I got linked into this happy story at Huffpo:
White House Brings Minimum Wage, Overtime Protections To 2 Million Home Care Workers
It’s definitely a BFD for the many hard-working, unappreciated, peon-wages-paid folks who take care of the most vulnerable among us. As the article says,
In a move that will change working conditions for two million Americans, the Labor Department announced Tuesday the enactment of a new rule that will extend minimum wage and overtime protections to home care workers, one of the fastest-growing occupations in the country.
As of Jan. 1, 2015, the long-awaited change will end a 38-year-old carveout that excluded workers who attend to the elderly and disabled in their homes from the basic labor protections enjoyed by most Americans.
“Now, waitaminnit”, I hear you say, “just where do the giant puppets come into this?” Thusly:
I dipped down into the comments on this Huffpo article, and what should meet my eye as the very first one at that moment? None other than this:
If it was that simple, why did you wait so long to do it??
Sigh…. How often have we seen that kind of response to any positive accomplishments of this administration? Take, oh, take DADT as just one example; after months and months of howling outrage at Obama for not sweeping it away with one stroke of his mighty pen, how did large swaths of the Left react when the stake was well and truly driven through its heart at last? With sneering bitterness that it should’ve been done long ago, with smugly superior pride that only the Left’s outraged howling pushed the President into doing anything, and with contemptuous dismissal that he deserves little credit for what he could’ve done a long time ago if only he were Pure.
Name just about anything Obama’s accomplished and you’ll see similar reactions. So I quoted that sneer at Booman and commented thus:
Watch this positive action by the administration be either dismissed as too little, too late or completely ignored by the proud champions of the Left.
Why? Why, I wonder, have wondered for a long time, do so many on the Left react thus? And by damn, I finally got an answer! From priscianus jr, who laid it out so beautifully:
In a slightly different connection, I realized just yesterday WHY so many on the left continually have this sort of knee-jerk response: It is what they have been miseducated to think of as rational. It’s known as the “immanent critique” — the very core of “critical theory”. It works like this. You criticize everything against the ideals theoretically held by the person or group or society in question.
No account is taken of anything else: person, place, time, or any other circumstance. To call this a simplistic way of thinking is an understatement.
Such critiques are never made against the right wing, since the standards they uphold are considered odious anyway, and besides, they do uphold them. But against the left, well the left aspires to the pinnacle of moral perfection every minute, every hour, of the day. Therefore any shortfall must be courageously unmasked.
There is virtually nothing the president or anyone else could do, operating with a reasonable degree of prudence in the real world, that would come anywhere near satisfying this criterion. Hence the better the person, the more he will be criticized.
Now, if someone would organize a bunch of people to carry giant puppets through the streets and throw pig’s blood at the white house, that would be worthy of praise indeed! But not raising the minimum wage. Sorry. That is “too little, too late.”
Lefties, falling short of perfection is not necessarily a sign of hypocrisy or incompetence. It is very commonly a sign that one is functioning in real-world conditions in which there are many conflicting goals and many obstacles.
I looked up immanent critique on line, waded into as much of it as I could grasp before cranial implosion set in. Reread priscianus’s appplication of the theory to the reality that has so dismayed me. Good grief – it makes sense, it all makes sense at last.
All except the giant puppets. Those, I still don’t get.
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