Wednesday, December 19, 2018

The Dirty People

Yesterday I heard someone say that the city was dirty because immigrants like the Chinese are a dirty people. He watches Fox News. This morning I read that Tucker Carlson of Fox is losing advertisers because he suggests on air that our immigrants make the cities "poorer and dirtier." I'd like to suggest that Fox News does the work of the Devil, but I am not into Manichaeism.

People like Carlson attach "dirty" to groups in racist or religious categories. My wife is a dirty Jew, my student is a dirty Mexican, the Chinese are a dirty people and so on. This has little to do with reality except in cases where poor people lack access to showers. In the old West, underpaid cow herders bathed once a year in a creek. They did this in the late spring, whether they needed it or not.

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