It is often the case that something I see the government do causes me to think of “Kill the Poor” off Dead Kennedys’ debut Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. It’s sad. At least to me, it shows how often policies are proposed and enacted with the clear intent to harm the poor.
This is certainly true of the recent efforts to cut back food stamp (SNAP) funding. And that’s very telling. The original idea of supporting food for the poor was because of government price floors on food. Since the government was making food more expensive, the least it could do was to help poor people struggling to afford it.
Today, we have conservatives who are all for continuing to enrich farmers (who are increasingly just large farming corporations) while hurting the poor. The justification conservatives use is the same as we recently heard from Ron Johnson about why he was against relief for people affected by Covid-19: it will make workers lazy.
Kill the Poor!
But that’s just their cover. They actually want to kill the poor and that brings us back to Dead Kennedys. You see, the truth is that “Kill the Poor” is not actually about this kind of thing. In the grand tradition of Jello Biafra, it’s much more concrete. It’s about the neutron bomb.
For those who don’t know, the neutron bomb is basically what our country termed a “dirty bomb” when it was speculated that terrorists might use it. It’s a bomb that has a low explosive yield and instead creates a bunch of neutron radiation, thus killing people but leaving structures mostly intact.
So I feel weird using it more generally to express how I feel. But I shouldn’t! It’s all the same psychopathy and xenophobia. Ron Johnson would be all for dropping a neutron bomb on San Francisco. But frankly, he probably doesn’t know they exist. He’s known to be something of a dimwit. And evil.
But you could say that about most American conservatives these days. Do you think the Senate would be seriously considering a relief bill if Hillary Clinton were president? There’s just no way.
Dead Kennedys by Zvargas16 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
