As is typical for a functioning, healthy democracy where everything is in working order, the United States government has been shut down for a record 28 days.
The consequences of this range from the merely irritating and eye-roll-inducing — e.g. naming our most recent winter storm “Snurlough” — to the devastating and unconscionable: domestic violence shelters are cutting services; 39 million Americans on food stamps are forced to ration their grocery purchases as it could be at least 40 days before additional money is added to their benefits cards; and 800,000 federal employees go without their paychecks.
Amid all this, you’ve likely seen stories about a handful of compassionate citizens attempting to fill in the vacuum left by the Trump administration.
For example, on Wednesday (Day 26), chef José Andrés opened a relief kitchen just a few blocks from the White House, where a banner promised that the #ChefsForFeds kitchen would provide “Free food and coffee for federal employees and their families.” About 5,000 meals were reportedly served by the end of the first day; by Thursday, they were preparing some 200,000 meals a day. Andrés has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his relentless effort to feed people in crisis. As the Washington Post reported, he was “fascinated” by the fact that he has now found himself doing the same kind of relief work he performed after humanitarian disasters struck Puerto Rico and Indonesia here, in his hometown of Washington D.C.
“The message is that we shouldn’t be having this in America,” he told the Post. “Things can already go wrong on their own without our government inflicting damaging wounds on the American people.”
Andrés’ kitchen will remain open daily until the shutdown ends, assuming it ever does. A smattering of other D.C.-area businesses have offered deals for furloughed employees as well: a Capitol Hill medical marijuana dispensary is giving federal workers a 20 percent discount; a Herndon, Va. pizzeria extended their military discount to federal workers; a Tyson’s Corner hair salon gave federal employees $10 off services and $20 off products.
Said Sam Pettee, marketing director at the medical marijuana dispensary, “Some people, like those with muscle pain or cancer, make the decision” to avail themselves of the drug in spite of Office of Personnel Management guidance to abstain. “We’re hoping it brings a bit of joy.”
This brings us to a new installment of a favorite ThinkProgress feature: A special shutdown edition of the feel-good feel-bad story.
To review, the feel-good feel-bad story is:
…a news item spun to you, the reader, by some ostensibly authoritative source — a serious publication, an official spokesperson — as an inspirational tale, but that, when you think about it for even like .02 seconds, you realize is depressing at its core.
These are dispatches from the darkest, dankest cesspools of late-stage capitalism, where a person enduring a financial hardship through no fault of their own — like, say, you have leukemia — must be wholly dependent on the charity of others, and the spotlight is thrust on the charity, not the circumstances that caused the dependence.
These stories provide cover for the powerful by masquerading as three cheers for the underdog. They’re gross, is what I’m saying, made all the more disgusting by efforts to spin them as anything other than gross.
What the feel-good feel-bad story does, on an ordinary day, is highlight the horrors of our modern American life by revealing just how slender the space is between “getting by” and “falling through.” Though news stories will typically attempt to frame those anecdotes as heartening tales of individual triumph and/or community kindness, they are really just proof of something deeply, fundamentally broken, and should be read as such.
The shutdown intensifies this phenomenon, in that it is so indisputably an aberration from how things should be — to state the obvious just in case it’s not: the government is supposed to work — these stories are virtually spin-proof. It is impossible to look at the #ChefForFeds kitchen and think the key takeaway is, “Wow, it’s so inspiring to see government employees in a makeshift bread line outside the White House!”
This holds even for the glitzier efforts to alleviate the hardships endured by furloughed workers. Monday, Jimmy Kimmel announced he would give one such worker a job on Jimmy Kimmel Live! every day until the shutdown is over.
Like Andrés, Kimmel emphasized how “unfortunate” it was that “these workers who have nothing to do with this ridiculous wall aren’t getting paychecks.” Kimmel’s first temporary employee was John Kostelnik, a prison guard at a federal prison in Victorville, Ca. Did Kostelnik object “to being used as a pawn in this fight over the wall,” as Kimmel asked him? “Absolutely,” he said, before picking up the tambourine for his one-night-only gig in Kimmel’s show’s band. Next up was Mark Munoz, a U.S. Forest Service firefighter who, just months ago, was battling the wildfires that raged across California. Munoz received his last paycheck last week. He is required to continue working without pay.
Over on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert is shilling mugs that read “Don’t Even Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Paycheck” and donating the proceeds to Andrés kitchen for furloughed government workers. There, too, the gist is that it’s ridiculous our nation has stooped to this. “Get a mug! It’s great for a hot cup of morning bourbon.”
There is one place, though, where some of that insidious feel-good language is slipping into these shutdown stories, and it’s not an arena typically associated with feeling good: The security line at the airport.
Internet love abounds for the mythical TSA worker who makes deep, meaningful eye contact with public servants and ordinary citizens alike who implore us all to “not stop fighting”:
So hard going through the airport today. I looked into the eyes of our workers who deserve better. A TSA officer said: "Don't stop fighting. Keep it up." I broke down & felt the weight of the responsibility on me. I will never become numb to the human impact. We must end this.
— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) January 14, 2019
Here we see one of the classic tropes of the feel-good feel-bad story, as previously defined on this very website: “First, they describe how hardworking and humble the subject-slash-martyr is in near-pornographic detail, with emphasis on how they never complained, never asked for anything, never made any demands of anyone or anything ever in their lives, et cetera.” Take it away, Rep. Schneider:
Flying to Washington yesterday I met a TSA agent working without pay because of shutdown. She is a single mother raising a 15 year-old daughter, & her family is struggling to make ends meet without her paycheck. #ShutdownStories
— Rep. Brad Schneider (@RepSchneider) January 15, 2019
Not to be outdone, a senior Trump 2020 campaign aide tweeted about her encounter with this the folklore-inspiring TSA agent, who was rapidly becoming a stock character in travel narratives the nation over:
Going through TSA Pre✔️at #DFW and a man in front of me started apologizing to agents (5) for the shutdown chaos and said, “Congress could end this tomorrow.” The agents – nearly in unison – replied, “Yes – but the Democrats are all on a beach in Puerto Rico.” 🔥
— Katrina Pierson (@KatrinaPierson) January 16, 2019
So on top of working sans salary for who knows how long, these too-on-brand-to-be-true TSA workers now have to deal with the indignity of being props in everyone’s dumb tweets. Their work, which is as noble and good as all work that has as its aim the safety of other people, is both elevated to the point of caricature and denigrated as a meme. Meanwhile, they are reportedly squeezing some small joys out of these interminable days of unpaid labor by blasting racy, NSFW music at JFK.
Around 51,000 TSA employees across the country didn’t receive their paychecks last Friday.
As the shutdown drags on and on and on, it is likely that this can-do attitude will spread miasmatically from our airports to our businesses and schools and streets and so on, in an effort to perceive something objectively abysmal as having some twisted silver lining worth celebrating. For instance:
There’s always good news somewhere!
A furloughed worker was so in need of cash that she pawned her wedding ring.
When the woman’s family learned what she’d done, they contacted the pawn shop owner and bought it back for her.#GoodNewsRUHLES @MSNBChttps://t.co/vLzKwAaSSb
— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) January 17, 2019
Is there always good news somewhere? Is this “good” news? If everybody has officially mastered the art of determining whether a pair of socks sparks joy, none of us should have this much trouble discerning news that should make us feel better from news that, without question, should make us feel awful.