Saturday, April 04, 2015

LET THEM EAT ICE CREAM



The Rev. Dana Prom Smith (4/1/2015)

 

          In Eugene O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh, the fantasy of salvation of some sort, some political, some economic, and some religious, runs throughout the play.  The scene is a bar in Greenwich Village peopled by drunks and a few prostitutes with the promise of the coming ice man.  A similar fantasy runs through the politics in Arizona only this time it is the Ice Cream Man Who Cometh, promising salvation through deprivation, a deprivation of public education by means of financial starvation.  The theme seems to be that the fantasy of ignorance will produce prosperity for the corporations.

 

          While nearly everyone else in the country wants to strengthen education, the Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, the ICE CREAM MAN, and the Republican controlled legislature want to reduce education in Arizona in a race with Mississippi to last place.  Of course, all the while these prosperous corporations are on government welfare with tax breaks.  Their purpose appears to be a society and haves and have-nots. 

 

          It is all reminiscent of the French Revolution and the Queen, Marie Antoinette, to whom is attributed the famous phrase, “let them eat cake” upon hearing of the starvation of the peasants who had no bread.  The governor’s Lenten message of denial has no promise of an Easter resurrection to the schools, only the dismissal of “let them eat ice cream.”    

           

2 comments:

Loni Shapiro said...

I have discovered this year with a new local consultant for taxes that the best way to counter Doug Doucey is to devote $400 of my tax dollars to a local school. It is deducted directly from my taxes. In addition you can devote %400 more to a charitable non-profit such as the Poore Clinic. That way the nutty state legislature and governor will get $800 less of my money.

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