Lazy Young Men?

So I read the other day that House Speaker Mike Johnson has defended the GOP’s cut to Medicaid because it will get young men back to work. The headline I saw, in The Latin Times, was  Mike Johnson Says Men Need to Stop 'Playing Video Games All Day' and Get to Work: 'They're Draining Resources' "Return the dignity of work to young men who need to be at work instead of playing video games all day."

It was such an absurd statement that I had to go check to be certain it wasn’t a fabrication or a joke. But it seems to be true. Johnson really said something very much like that.

The first question, of course, is how on earth young, healthy, able-bodied men…none of whom would qualify for Medicaid…could actually be somehow getting it. The second question is how many young men really are wasting their lives playing video games all day. My guess is that the population of such individuals who are refusing to work and, instead, spending their waking hours blasting imaginary alien invaders to imaginary hells in imaginary universes is vanishingly small.

So I have to think that something else is going on here. I suspect that Mr. Johnson is trying to distract from the fact that cuts to Medicaid are not going to impact welfare cheats but rather the elderly, the infirm, infants, and young, single mothers. The cuts are, in other words, going to harm the most vulnerable among us for the benefit of a few obscenely wealthy and obscenely immoral billionaires.

The second thing I suspect is going on, though, is that we see in Mr. Johnson’s comment what the Rich and Powerful today really think of the people “below” them in social status. That is, for the 1%, there is no such thing as the working poor. Instead, there are merely scum who waste their time playing games…and whose extinction will do the human race no end of good.

There is something terrifying in that.