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.”