How does a guy who joined the Marines to fight the Taliban end up sounding a lot like them? You’ll have to ask state Representative Rick Brattin, a clean-faced 34-year-old Republican from the 55th District and the flat-as-a-table plains of Harrisonville, southeast of Kansas City.
The former Marine’s jihad on the undeserving poor has gotten a lot of attention since he proposed legislation that would prevent anyone on Food Stamps from buying steak, fish or any other “luxuries.”
But this isn’t his first flirtation with an ISIS-like concern for the personal habits of the people. Brattin has also introduced bills that would:
* force a woman to get the father’s permission before having an abortion; asked about an exception for rape, he channeled his inner Todd Akin, telling the reporter that the woman would have to prove that a “legitimate rape” had occurred
* allow creationism and “intelligent design” to be taught as scientific fact in sciences classes
* require the state of Missouri to nullify federal gun laws.
You might conclude that the same zeal that led Brattin to enlist in the Marines explains why his devotion to conservative, and slightly loony, causes is so fervid. But even that isn’t clear. Brattin’s web site says he enlisted after 9/11 as a matter of patriotism. But in a 2012 interview with the Jefferson City News-Tribune, he says he enlisted before the 9/11 attacks, looking for more than “just another paycheck” from construction work.
Whether the motive was paycheck or patriotism, Brattin’s campaign and official state bios mention his Marine service prominently, failing to note (as the Jefferson City newspaper did) that he was in the Marine Reserves and didn’t deploy to Iraq with his unit because of a crushed ankle from a Marine construction training accident.
But while his biography may be slightly ambiguous, his position on the poor is crystal clear. His political theology, shared by a large number of white rural Republicans, is that being poor means you just aren’t trying hard enough. He imperiously noted to a Kansas City TV station earlier this month that his family (him, wife, five kids) would get over $1,000 in food stamp benefits, and said “I couldn’t imagine spending that much money. I’d just be throwing stuff into the cart.”
A little quick math shows that each member of Brattin’s family, at $1,000 per month, would get $1.59 per meal. Add some cardboard and paint chips and $1.59 per meal might keep your stomach full, but one rural representative’s fuzzy math isn’t the point.
The point is that Brattin, like so many others in the Missouri Legislature, wallows in a philosophy where the Makers – hard-working, Christian, mostly white – are engaged in Armageddon with the Takers – poor, lazy, mostly black, and criminally suspect.
Before the representative and his minions howl about race-baiting, I might point out that as a white (more than) middle-aged male born and raised in rural Missouri, I can hear a dog whistle as well as anyone else, and know that when most white rural Missourians talk about “welfare fraud,” they’re talking about black folks, not poor trailer whites scattered throughout their own communities.
Before anyone thinks that Brattin is some isolated goofball wearing a tinfoil hat to committee hearings, consider that he was chosen as president of his freshman House class in 2010, has won re-election twice handily and, the last time, ran unopposed.
Obviously, both his House GOP colleagues and his rural constituents near the Kansas border think a good deal of him. They presumably share his views that some rapes are more legitimate than others, that evolution never happened, and that poor people who get food stamp cards from Missouri’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are long-term welfare chiselers spending the tax dollars of hard-working people on crap tables, filet, Newports, lobsters and the clubs in Sauget.
Brattin, like so many of the other anti-welfare jihadis in Jeff City, base their opposition to social benefits on a combination of a pro-business political philosophy, and a fundamentalist Protestant ethic rooted firmly in the Old Testament. As Robert Soucy of Oberlin College writes in the Encyclopedia Britannica, that marriage of religion and pro-corporatism is a classic definition of Fascism, whether in Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy or Fascist movements from Argentina to Croatia.
An old saying, improperly attributed to Sinclair Lewis, goes “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the Cross.” And complaining about food stamps.
Charles Jaco is a journalist, novelist and author who has worked for NBC News, CNN, Fox 2, KMOX and KTRS.
