The Day I Made Mitch McConnell Go Hungry!
The bad table service we're all still paying for
By Brian Arbenz
What on Earth could have transformed Mitch McConnell from a baron of subdivision drainage and park maintenance in suburban Louisville three and one-half decades ago into the bare-knuckled power-wielder for the nation’s elites?
How was a bespectacled, ostensibly nerdy, tentative-voiced suburban county government chief turned into America’s prime arbiter of conservative priorities with the mandate to declare to the pundits which law is the worst of our time?
The man who once politely asked for legendary civil rights activist Lyman Johnson’s endorsement today confidently defends his party’s various state voter ID laws designed with the unapologetic aim of keeping millions of minorities and the poor home on election day.
Who or what made this once mousey-appearing civil servant roar? Did someone push Mitch’s buttons in a moment of crisis decades ago, setting off a hunger for validation, the kind to which politicians (including those actually in office and those of us who once seriously thought of running) are so vulnerable?
Remember that word “hunger,” as I start to recount a brush with a future Senate Minority Leader in 1978 that, who’s to say, didn’t change the course of history.
Then, as now, I was on the far left, not an easy place for a college student in the era quite accurately deemed the “Me-Generation” on campus.
Today, while Mitch McConnell and other Republicans insist they aren’t for exploiting the 99 percent, one of that group you know today as Brian Arbenz collected concrete evidence – actually copper – that could qualify me for a spot on Rachel Maddow to portray Mitch as cheap and arrogant – to Marie Antoinette proportions.
But hold on. Adequate wages must be earned, not guaranteed. Yes, you heard correctly; I’m on the far left, and my encounter with my side’s future nemesis taught me that bit of conservative wisdom. Let me tell you, though, it must have taught the powerful something we leftists always hold true: poverty hurts.
Now unless first-year Jefferson County Judge-Executive Mitch McConnell 39 years ago had an intelligence gathering operation that would make today’s Secretary of Homeland Security blush, he could not have judged the 20-year-old college student bussing tables in a downtown Louisville restaurant he entered at noontime one autumn day as anything more than an inconsequential, pimply kid out to make enough in tips to buy a six-pack.
Well, in defiance of that period’s youth norms, I eschewed the brew and spent my dollars instead on things like Michael Harrington's farsighted book, "Socialism" and other leftist writings.
Mitch entered a Main Street row restaurant called the New York Steak Exchange with two other suits, presumably from county government or the business realm.
To everyone’s dismay, this power lunch happened on absolutely our worst day. Even on our best, we were no gastronomical gem. A newspaper review said our various gimmicks – including a real working stock ticker over the bar – couldn’t make up for the mediocrity of the food.
On this day, the service was poor to boot. So crowded were we that my supervisors had me work as a food server while not busing tables. After Mitch’s party had waited an inordinate amount of time for their food, we hauled three plates through the frenetic din to their table, only to be told this was not what the trio had ordered. We apologized, with me anguishing as we took the plates back and placed them under red lights to await their rightful owners.
More time went by as the judge-executive and his cohorts were just the most recognizable people in this restaurant hungering. Only so much politics and policy can be discussed at a table before, “Where’s our food?” becomes the sole concern.
And the three orphan plates sat there under the red lights until another server was ordered to take them to the McConnell table on the chance that they were theirs. Oh dear.
I gave chase trying to stop her. You see in the restaurant business, there is no mistake worse – more glaringly unprofessional and insulting -- than bringing someone the wrong food. At that moment, I realized that there in fact is. That is bringing someone the wrong food twice. And as though the damage to us could have been worse, we were bringing the wrong food – twice – to the head of county government, the government that includes the restaurant inspection division of the health department.
She reached their table, asking: “Is this what you ordered?” Out of breath from running, I watched as Mitch and the other power hitters looked at the food, and looked at each other. Then the nation’s future highest-ranking member of the Republican Party looked at this young woman and said, in his classic McConnell-esque understated way: “Yes.”
Now we weren’t a grand jury, so this one-word lie doesn’t have the scandal potential of Bill Clinton’s “No” in response to an inquiry from Kenneth Star about the president’s involvement with an intern, though if the Democratic Party had the GOP’s chutzpa, learning of this would prompt it to call for McConnell’s resignation tomorrow. But the Democrats, unlike their opponents, tend to know not to make a federal case over an unimportant falsehood which, like Clinton’s, stemmed from a crucial human need -- in this case, food.
And Judge-Executive McConnell – as they say in Senatorial debate lingo – ate someone’s lunch, learning in the process to avoid all contact from then on with the New York Steak Exchange.
So could it be that the indignity of eating survival rations, instead of what you wanted, soured Mitch McConnell on those of us who can’t afford to start our own Super PAC?
Well, who among us wouldn’t have sympathized at that moment with Mitt Romney’s declaration: “I like being able to fire people?”
Restaurant diners can’t directly do that to those who inflict even the lousiest service imaginable, but Mitch’s trio found an even more revealing way to express their discontent.
No tip? Nope. Lying on the McConnell party’s table, inscribed with that state-established notation “In God We Trust,” was a penny – for the three of us who had waited on them somehow to divide among ourselves.
Notice Senator, that the nationwide perception of your party in this era when you have lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections is that you have it in for low-wage workers, the left and women.
Whether the ravenousness and disrespect we made you endure three and one-half decades ago lit your still burning fire, or was forgotten the following morning, shouldn’t you find cause to declare peace between the GOP and those constituencies from the knowledge that you once – albeit justifiably by most any standard -- tipped a representative of each, literally, one-third of a cent?
If invincibility in politics is possible, Mitch McConnell has achieved it. The Senator sweated out re-elections against nationwide Democratic Party wins in 1990, 1996 and 2008. In 2002 he won easily after garnering endorsements from even liberal publications, and he has always been bathed in corporate money.
However, as a working person, I also am perched on a privileged spot. I got to witness something astounding in 1978. I saw the well-heeled and self-assured Mitch McConnell hungry and frustrated – so desperately that he was reduced to lying. How many people can say that?
Brian Arbenz retired from waiting on tables in 1979, but he still writes, researches and organizes left activism.
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How I Learned Never to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombshell that Went off in 1973
By Brian Arbenz
I vividly recall hearing in eighth-grade U.S. history class that Benjamin Franklin answered the question, what kind of a government do we have, as he exited a session of the writing of the Constitution by saying: “A republic – if you can keep it.”
That impressed me with how vulnerable success is – even after the struggle of a lifetime is won to achieve it.
One year later, Ben Franklin’s words jumped right in front of me again when I heard John Chancellor start the NBC Nightly News with a story that seemed impossible: The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that all laws against abortion in the first three months of pregnancy are unconstitutional, instantly making abortion in the first trimester legal everywhere in the nation.
Awed by the profundity and unexpectedness of this change, I was immediately overwhelmed with the question: can we keep it?
I was 14, so the matter of abortion was a fact of human existence I only recently had heard of; I knew from about three years of being interested in social justice movements that feminists had included its legalization on their agenda.
Now a seven-member majority on the court had given this victory to the whole nation.
Seven men. The math involved in that set off anger among conservatives over “judicial legislating” (something they hated until five men on same court elected their candidate president in 2001).
Seven men. The gender exclusivity involved in that reminded feminists of the truth that no group can ask for freedom, all must go out and get it.
..."Congressman Ron Mazzoli -- who introduced legislation in 1981 declaring: 'In respect to the right to life, human beings shall be deemed to exist from conception' -- was born on Nov. 2, 1932, but try sending him a Conception Day card on Feb. 2."
So the battle for legal abortion really was just beginning in February 1973.
And it has so many battlefields! On the electoral front, the prochoice side has won hands down, bolstered by large majorities in polls ever since 1973 wanting to keep abortion legal.
But when factoring in the depth of feeling on abortion, and the willingness to vote based on the issue, the prolife side wins.
The 67-to-70 percent of Americans who want abortion kept legal includes a majority who will vote based on pocketbook issues for an incidentally pro-life candidate.
On the front of street activism, rallies and protests have been heavily weighted toward the prolife side, though the physical blockades of clinic entrances by groups often called “Rescue” generally have been met one-to-one by brigades going by the name “Escort.”
Then, there are the ugly incidents of intimidation and outright terrorism which have chased doctors away from performing a procedure which is legally protected, but often not enthusiastically protected by local officials in socially conservative areas.
I have covered the abortion issue for publications which were prolife and prochoice and for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which has been open to both sides on the issue (yes, there are leftists who are for banning abortion on the same human rights basis as being opposed to bombing and the death penalty).
Among the lessons I have learned is that Catholic does not simply equal prolife, even when limited to Catholics who are active parishioners.
While working for the Archdiocesan newspaper The Record, I covered the second of several blockades by Kentuckiana Rescue (which was not affiliated with the national Rescue organization). Members sat on the steps of an entrance to an East Broadway clinic where abortions were performed.
Of the 47 people arrested for blocking a public passageway, 44 were non-Catholic. That’s right -- in a city of about 150,000 active Catholics, the many archdiocesan-affiliated groups and agencies involved in this action could find three willing get up before dawn that cold morning in 1989 and face arrest.
I prefer to think I value ethics over expedience. Nonetheless, I have seen the prochoice position revealed to be the practical and sustainable one; there are too many ethical and logical quandaries to accept the idea that abortion equals murder, outright and with no exceptions.
Our respected and likeable retired congressman Ron Mazzoli -- who introduced legislation in 1981 declaring: “in respect to the right to life, human beings shall be deemed to exist from conception” -- was born on Nov. 2, 1932, but try sending him a Conception Day card on Feb. 2. Try even finding cards at Hallmark for such an occasion.
My parents experienced two miscarriages before their two children were born and though I don’t want to soft peddle the sadness involved in such a loss, does a miscarriage universally, in the whole societal sense, equal the death of a child?
For many people, it does, in the realm of their own emotions, and their religion. But a legal definition equating a miscarriage with death would be bound on everybody, and such a law first would have to reflect a historically shared moral, legal and civil consensus.
The same is true for equating abortion with murder. All are free to equate the two in the personal and the parts of the familial realm over which they have domain. But when a matter is as complicated as the point at which a human being begins – an issue as old as the basic questions of who we are and where we came from – the certainty on which the prolife position is based evaporates when trying to legislate.
Consider that some widely used birth control methods do not prevent fertilization, but prevent a fertilized egg from attaching itself to the uterine wall. Then think of how many people have been able to raise children in families financially and emotionally prepared for them because of years of reliance on such birth control.
In Vitro fertilization, which is done outside the womb, has allowed 200,000 Americans to be born since it was introduced in this nation in 1981. Part of the complex process is that surplus fertilized eggs created in a lab are discarded. In pro-life logic, that means little children are murdered.
If that is how you see it, then refraining from using In Vitro is the way to live by that belief without creating a quagmire of disruption and chaos that would result from giving the state the power to enforce the prolife position.
Prochoice groups tend to avoid pointing out that In Vitro and much birth control would become illegal if abortion were banned, choosing to stay with the argument about a woman’s constitutional right to choose.
Perhaps they see warning of the practical implications in the details of any ban as taking a fallback position from the overall prochoice argument.
Similarly, the prolife organizations focus relatively little attention on the abortion alternative movement, which features generally upbeat, less brooding activists promoting adoption, sometimes establishing residential centers in the model of the homes for “wayward girls” of a century ago.
This part of the prolife spectrum similarly concerns some of the hardliners who see such a pragmatic approach eroding their zeal and signifying backing away from the goal of a total ban.
I wonder if the solution to the seemingly interminable clash over abortion lies in a more nuanced and morally honest blend of the ethical and possible as pointed to by these more practical people on both sides.
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