#hand-wringing

Vivian Maier, Location unknown, 1956, © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

The heroine is almost a caricature of the Virtuous Poor, yet living in a way that such a poor saint... couldn’t, really, as far as I know? She works part time for minimum wage. And yet, she lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. (Does the author know studios exist?) In this apartment, she has zero possessions other than her (ragged) clothing and a bowl for the cat. She sleeps on a cot provided by the landlord. Everything else is bare, except for some books she has virtuously borrowed from the library. (Author has never gone dumpster-diving, and/or wants to demonstrate that the heroine has never spent a single penny on herself and owns nothing that she could sell to improve her lot in life, as if that was a reasonable thing to expect.) She does have a cat, because she is Kind and Good - this part isn’t unrealistic, a lot of people have pets, it only stands out because the story otherwise bends over backwards to show how perfectly poor she is, and how she otherwise gives away every single penny that isn’t 100% necessary for her survival to her evil stepmother*. She lives off as little as $4/week in groceries, in New York State. (The story is a bit old, so this is probably around 2000 timewise, and I don’t KNOW how little you can live off if you try hard enough, but.) She receives no assistance of any sort, because she is Virtuous. 

She has no friends, no connections other than the vague acquaintance of her supervisor at her part-time job, no emotional attachment to any part of her life except her cat, so that the Rich Princess can sweep her off her feet and out of her old life without a backwards glance.

Her ridiculous virtuousness wouldn’t be such a big deal if it weren’t for the fact that the rich characters in the story expect all poor people to be lazy, lying, Welfare Queens... and every other poor character in the story is just as ridiculously mean-spirited as the heroine is ridiculously virtuous.  (The rich characters are not shown as perfect, they are all flawed and some of them are fairly one-note obnoxious too, but overall they are more likely to be rounded characters with good and bad points)

It just bugs me. Story’s still a guilty pleasure but I feel compelled to protest the Problematic every time I reread it, which is silly.

(H/T bilgisticallykosher)

“I am under no illusion as to how quickly that will happen.  In fact, let me offer a reality check on the actual number of “peace loving” peoples in this region.  First, note that on Saturday, October 7, before Israel undertook any military response to Hamas’ depravity – at a time when the whole world knew about the music festival killing fields and the kidnappings of children and the frail elderly (because Hamas proudly distributed video footage of such) – not a single Arab country condemned the barbarity, nor did a single influential Islamic authority declare the atrocities war crimes according to Islamic law.  And they haven’t since.  They should have been mortified by the behavior of their brethren and co-religionists.  They were not.  Nor were their counterparts throughout the world – including those who signed anti-Israel letters and demonstrated on American Ivy League campuses against the Jewish State.  All too many rationalized or even celebrated the barbarity, recasting it as a form of heroism.

“Then there are the Palestinians themselves.  What happened this past weekend was not an aberration.  It was of one piece with their terrorist history: slaughtering school children in Maalot, taking the Israeli athletic team hostage in the Munich Olympic “Peace” Village, tossing wheel-chair bound Leon Klinghoffer overboard the Achille Lauro, etc., etc. and turning the perpetrators into national heroes – all before Hamas was founded in 1987.   It should come as no surprise that in poll after poll, Hamas has done very well among the entire Palestinian population – not only among those living in Gaza (64%), but among those in Judea and Samaria (58%).   Needless to say, the rest of their respective populations are hardly pro-peace.  Rather, they spread their loyalties among Islamic Jihad, Fatah, and other Jew-hating political parties.  Moreover, as indicated by the polls, the younger the Palestinians, the more radical their views.  Accordingly, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are complicit in both regimes’ perverse crimes.  Though some Palestinians might be better than the state-trained and dispatched butchers who overran southern Israel just over a week ago, most have wanted the leadership they’ve got, celebrated and funded the terrorists they’ve raised, and embraced the ideology that drives them.  Accordingly, they are suffering the consequences of their own choices for themselves and their children.  They are not innocent.

It’s been so long since I’ve posted anything, I’ve half convinced myself I’ve forgotten how to write.