Trays, entitlement and the little brown bag

THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#667)

Trays, entitlement and the little brown bag

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Representative Paul Ryan’s frequent outbursts of pseudo-sociological insight are little noted nor long-remembered in the greater scheme of American rhetoric. But they tend to make me lose my cool and go all high-school. This is mostly because, for the last 50 years, my old high school has been playing his old high school in football (latest score: LaFollette 41, Craig 23).

So, it was inevitable that my simmer would escalate to near-boil when Ryan confabulated a spurious morality tale about the little boy who knew his mommy loved him because she sent him to school every day with a homemade brown-bag PB&J lunch. Ryan’s penance for this barefaced whopper was delivered in the form of four “Pinocchios” from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.

I’m not sure if Ryan felt bad when his second-hand story was proven bogus. But as he told it, he clearly believed himself. How could anyone be so naïve?

If there’s an answer, its clues lie in his background. As I’ve written, Ryan’s hometown of Janesville has a history more true to Mississippi than to Wisconsin.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, America experienced one of the great diasporas of the Industrial Revolution. Hundreds of thousands of black field hands and sharecroppers fled the near-slavery of the Jim Crow South, to work in the burgeoning factories of what we now call the Rust Belt. The northernmost outposts of that vast Midwestern industrial swath were two towns in Rock County, Wisconsin — Beloit, on the Illinois border and, ten miles north, Janesville.

These cities grew up similarly, in many ways. They became economically dependent on several very large manufacturers. Each city developed a two-class social structure. The majority were blue-collar factory workers. Both towns’ tiny upper crust was composed of the managerial elite from the companies where the working-stiff masses of Beloit and Janesville earned their daily bread.

The difference was that the black refugees who had gotten this far north on Highway 51 — which bisects both cities — all lived in Beloit. Janesville stayed stubbornly lily-white for the entire 20th century. Although this chapter in state history is ill-recorded, there is evidence to indicate that sometime in the mid-1920’s, Janesville’s ruling class convinced the realtors and landlords of Rock County to halt the black tide at Janesville’s southern border. They drew a red line just north of Beloit that even the civil rights movement couldn’t erase.

This heritage is significant because, as a scion of Janesville’s elite, Paul Ryan — perhaps unknowingly — inherited the crypto-Confederate worldview that protected his hometown from the Negro infestation that lurked only ten miles away.
Which gets me back to school lunch.

Everybody knows that lunchtime in high school — once the cliques settle in and hunker down at their chosen tables — is a snakepit of class, status and popularity groupings. But before all that, as kids pour into the cafeteria, the divide consists, simply, of your trays, your baggers and your browsers.

Among the kids who grab trays, you can’t tell who’s getting a government-subsidized lunch and who’s paying full fare. In my school days, I was probably qualified for free lunch, but who knew? Nobody ever offered. I guess my mother should’ve signed us up, but she was pretty much permanently preoccupied.

Mom couldn’t even think about paying full price for her kids’ lunch, which would have come to about $9 a week. Even less likely was Mom getting out of bed to pack our lunches in Rep. Ryan’s iconic little brown bags. This is because the day before, she’d put in six hours selling fridges and dishwashers at Clyde’s appliances, then worked ‘til 2 a.m. waiting tables at Leske’s Supper Club. Every morning, as I headed out the door into the dark Wisconsin dawn, Mom was sprawled in bed, mouth open, dead to the world, making unmotherly noises.

I suppose I should have packed my own little bag. But I was barely awake. And most of the time, we lacked ingredients. Lunch meat and tuna fish, for example, were infrequent luxuries that tended to disappear overnight. Even a loaf of bread was a sometime thing. Besides, who could afford brown paper bags?

My daily lunch strategy was simple. Most days, I didn’t eat (which is probably why I’m fat now — I’m overcompensating). But, just in case, I browsed.

Now, at lunchtime at LaFollette (and also at Janesville Craig), the ideal was to take a tray. It blended you in. Also, that tray full of institutional cuisine united you in common complaint with the whole student body. “What’s in this crap?”

A brown bag set you apart, uneasily. No one regarded it as a symbol of motherly love, family values or household stability. It told other kids that your parents were cheapskates, or your old man was unemployed, or your mom was divorced. Every brown bag contained a thin, Saran-wrapped slice of shame.

As neither a tray regular nor brown-bagger, I would amble diffidently into the cafeteria and browse the steam tables with a critical eye. Now and then, especially on sloppy-joe day, I’d take the plunge, blow 60 cents on a lunch ticket — about half my disposable wealth in any given week — and grab a tray.

That was my thrill for the week. On a normal day, I just went back to the school commons, watched the greasers playing euchre with Coach Olson and waited for the fifth-period bell. My first meal of the day was supper, which — if I played my cards right — wasn’t at home, where pickings were slim, but over at Dick’s house. By age 15, my mooching skills were at a professional level.

When he talks about school lunch, I suspect that Paul Ryan is sincere. It’s easy for him to wax sentimental over brown bags stuffed with love, because — as every bagger and browser can tell just by looking at him — he never carried one.

From his first day in kindergarten, Paul Ryan was a tray.