A Victim of Conservative Idealism

Posted on February 23, 2006 in Class Compassion Justice Liberals & Progressives

I, Mr. George Earl Lewis, do agree that what I’ve done was not right concerning the law. I do not deny the fact whatsoever. However, I did what I did simply to keep my wife Thelma up in her medications and to pay any bills owed due to her illness. She was diagnosed with cancer. Her Medicare just doesn’t pay all of her expenses. So what I did was simply trying to meet the needs of my wife, whom I love very much. I can assure you that I have learned a valuable lesson. I will do all I can simply to live on our income, which is my retirement check. And pray that God will have mercy on me, to see me through this ordeal.

If granted probation, I plan to continue to mow yards during the summer and fall, and whenever I am able, to pick up cans. I will continue to live with my wonderful wife whom I have been married to for twenty-nine blessed years. I will slowly learn how to read and write the best way I can. I will spend time at home with my wife, looking at TV, and sitting outside together. Mainly the only activities I have are mowing yards, running people around, looking at TV, and sitting with my wife in the cool of the evening.

George Earl Lewis
Chickasa, Oklahoma
September 2005, Quoted in Harpers, March 2006

Mr. Lewis and his wife live off a $600 monthly retirement check. His wife’s medical expenses comes to $350 each month. He was arrested after selling an FBI informant two grams of crack cocaine. Lewis is 74 years old and will be on probation until he is 84 — if he lives that long.

We have been well-wired against pity in this country, particularly when it comes to the War on Drugs. Like Skinner’s pigeons, we press the lever of callousness at the mention of a story like this. It doesn’t matter that the man is poor, that he is old, that he can’t pay his bills, that he must push lawnmowers and pick up beer cans until his heart thumps and his joints ache. Conservatives have trained us to look at only two things: that he sold crack cocaine and that he watches television. “Why he should have sold his television!” goes the refrain, refusing to factor in how little that would have brought and how brief an interval this pittance would have lasted.

This nation had a great heart once. I was born into a warm world which thought it could end poverty or at least ameliorate the effects. Then Ronald Reagan came along, inventing nonexistent welfare queens and a government that was on peoples’ backs. He might have gone out the door in ’84 except for Jodi-Foster-crazed-John-Hinckley-Junior putting a bullet in his chest, a bullet that was extracted by a doctor using techniques made possible by government-funded research. If it had not been for the Great Society, Reagan would have died in 1982.

And he never said Thank You.

Reagan and Bush I scraped away what they could of Johnson’s Great Society. Now George III wants to destroy the New Deal. In the Bush world, Lewis is nothing more than a criminal. Extenuating circumstances do not figure: even liberals have allowed the conservative fog horn of tintanbulating retribution to silence them.

Yes, it gets tiring to hear these true accounts of men and women who turned to crime just to survive. Yes, there are scofflaws who rampage as a matter of habit and who drain all the sympathy and legal maneuver out of the system that they can. Then there are the many who are just plain dumb or ignorant, the kind of person who make Bill of Over the Edge thump his head hard on the defendant’s table as in “what was this guy thinking?”.

I don’t know why Bill continues in his job as a defense attorney or why he continues to identify himself as a liberal after a career of assisting felons in their trial. Liberal ideology insists that the greatest good for the greatest number depends on protecting the rights of the individual. Even if you don’t like the guy you’re defending, you strive to give him an even break because that could be you there. The conservative assumes that will never be him. If his day comes, he sees it as a game.

Mark the case of Robert Stroud, the so-called Birdman of Alcatraz. Immortalized in book by William Gaddis and in film by Burt Lancaster, Stroud was hardly a nice man. First, he got into prison by being a pimp who killed another man for not paying. Then he killed a young guard in prison. This brought him the death penalty and, later, a lifetime sentence which he served in near solitary confinement. While at Alcatraz, Stroud threatened to molest and kill the children of the guards should he get out. And, worst of all from the point of view of the Alcatraz administration, he filed endless writs to obtain his release.

Former Alcatraz prisoners remembered Stroud for his selfishness. He did not give a damn about the other prisoners — with the exception of one incident when he offered to give himself as a hostage to guards and marines during the 1947 Blastout*. Stroud’s politics were far to the right. He played the system, mocked the liberals who ran the prison, and did everything he could to shame them.

Even his bird remedies and texts could not be trusted. His “medicines” were tested by veterenarians and found wanting. He plagiarized much of his books. Snake oil poured out of Stroud’s bottles and his lips. He was in every way the model of a contemporary conservative, damning the system and yet working it for his own ends. ( Just look at which states get the most welfare from the rest.) Tom Delay and Robert Stroud have much in common.

So it’s damn Lewis and apotheosize Stroud. Make war on drugs, but not on the lie that led us to war or the tailored suits which fed Tom Delay and his friends in Congress. The latter can have stained glass windows or paintings done like mass-murderer Maria Medici commissioned for herself. Lewis can only go home at the end of a tiring day and watch television. The man who brought the cocaine to America will continue to vote Republican in a Miami precinct and stow his riches in the Bahamas.

This War on Everything makes no sense. LBJ started it when he announced a War on Poverty. He meant well: we were to bring all our resources to bear on the unemployed, the disabled, the exploited, and the sick. Then conservatives bought up the media and sang canticles in praise of a deified Ronald Reagan who, unlike any saint, told us lies about the poor. Crashing repeatedly into our eardrums, the messages told us that we would be rich one day and that it was parasitism and sloth to rely on anything other than our own work, our own savings to survive. Lewis clearly heard that message: he mowed lawns and he collected aluminum cans. His turning to the sale of crack cocaine to make ends meet comes out of this same dream of self-reliance. He just didn’t want to think of himself as lazy.

You could say that Lewis was a victim of trying to live up to conservative ideals.

* Arguably, being taken as a hostage could be seen as another selfish move. If the guards had accepted the offer, Stroud would have been taken out of the target area.