Ode to the Welfare State
Posted By Russ Emerson on January 12, 2012 at 3:57 pm
I received in my mail an item that’s apparently been going around the internet recently, what looks like a photocopy of a bit of doggerel that appears to be on New York Daily News letterhead, dated November 4, 1949.
Like anything that circulates on the internet, it’s worth what you paid for it… but the image (see below) looks legitimate, and the language has the right “feel” for the era in question.
Genuine or not, though, the words are as applicable today as they would have been in 1949. Perhaps more so, given our current national financial straits.
ODE TO THE WELFARE STATEMr. Truman’s St. Paul, Minn., pie-for-everybody speech last night reminded us that, at the tail-end of the recent session of Congress, Representative Clarence J. Brown (R-Ohio) jammed into the Congressional Record the following poem, describing the author only as “a prominent Democrat of the State of Georgia”:
Father, must I go to work?
No, my lucky son.
We’re living now on Easy Street
On dough from Washington.We’ve left it up to Uncle Sam,
So don’t get exercised.
Nobody has to give a damn —
We’ve all been subsidized.But if Sam treats us all so well
And feeds us milk and honey,
Please daddy, tell me what the hell
He’s going to use for money.Don’t worry, bub, there’s not a hitch
In this here noble plan —
He simply soaks the filthy rich
And helps the common man.But, father, won’t there come a time
When they have run out of cash
And we have left them not a dime
When things will go to smash?My faith in you is shrinking, son,
You nosy little brat;
You do too damn much thinking, son,
To be a Democrat.
The photocopy in question:
Yep.