Stephanie Mencimer
On Hot Dogs and Republicans
Cross-posted from The Tortellini
Ted Frank, among others, has also taken issue with my post yesterday in which I observed that many of the leading lights of the tort reform movement appeared to me to be “overprivileged white guys.” I didn’t suggest that all of them are overprivileged (thought almost all of them do seem to be white and male!). I apologize to all the former burger-flippers and grocery store clerks who took this personally.
I also apologize for inadvertently characterizing myself as a peon. I am certainly not underprivileged, as Ted points out. For what it’s worth, however, I did spend a fair amount of my youth and early adulthood in grueling, minimum-wage jobs. The most memorable was a long stretch cooking corn dogs at the now-defunct Ogden City Mall and the L.A. County Fair, wearing red polyester hot pants, clown-striped tank-tops and matching cone hat. (I still have the hot oil burn scars and varicose veins to show for it). The chain motto was “Fast, Fresh and Friendly.” (You can’t make up stuff like this!)
The founder of Hot Dog on a Stick was a cretin who only hired women (most of them teenagers), and decorated the hot dog stands with mirrors strategically positioned to show off the hot-pants and the inevitable jiggling that ensued while we pounded the pulp out of lemons in 10-gallon lemonade drums. To say that we hot dog girls endured a fair amount of humiliation in exchange for earning the California, as opposed to the Utah, minimum wage that we got working for this company would be an understatement.
But I digress. ..I did have one other response to Ted’s post today. Just for the record, and contrary to what the subhed of my book may also suggest, I don’t “dislike Republicans.” My father used to be one, until the party started spending too much time worrying about what people did in their bedrooms and not enough about the budget and other things that matter. My late father-in-law was a longtime Republican member of the New York state assembly, and many of my extended family members are stalwart GOPers whom I love dearly. I may disagree with many of the GOPs major platform items, including much of its tort reform agenda and most especially, the gay-bashing parts, but I try not to write people off because of their political beliefs. Besides, there are plenty of democrats who have supported tort reform in recent years. The GOP hardly has a monopoly on this issue.
I do find, though, that there is a mean streak in conservative, GOP politics today that is prominently displayed in debates over tort reform. When I wrote yesterday about the background of some of the biggest tort reform advocates, I was also thinking that the dearth of empathy among tort reformers for the people who become plaintiffs in personal injury suits might stem from the buffers of privilege. I forgot, though, about the Clarence Thomas School—the kind of thinking that comes from raising yourself up by the bootstraps, and then having nothing but disdain for all the other poor schmucks who can’t seem to do the same. Clearly, you don’t have to be overprivileged to be mean…
Posted at 12:50 PM, Jan 17, 2007 in Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
