[caption id="attachment_69215" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Grover Norquist."]
Talk about timing. I've been reading a classic but forgotten Irish-American novel called "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," which is set in the streets of Williamsburg, circa 1912. It was a tough time for lots of people, including the book's key figure, young Francie Nolan, a 14-year-old aspiring writer.
The author, Betty Smith, is unsparing in her descriptions of the poverty, frustrations, and hopelessness experienced by the Nolan family and other Irish-American families in the old neighborhood.
One scene comes to mind: young Francie's widowed mother is about to give birth to her third child. The mother, Katie, is attended to by her two sisters and nobody else. Katie didn't have the five dollars it would cost to hire a midwife to assist in the delivery.
At one point during a prolonged and powerful birth scene, Katie asked her daughter, Francie, if it is dark outside. A seemingly innocuous question, until the author adds a simple touch. "Katie had no way of knowing because even at bright noon only a dull gray light filtered through the airshaft window."
That's how many Irish Americans lived a century ago - in apartments so devoid of sunlight that families could barely tell if it was dark outside. Who among us hasn't heard stories of long-gone relatives living in dark, unsafe tenement houses a century ago?
All of this is timely because one of the country's most-powerful people said on television the other day that he is determined to return the United States to the time narrated with such power in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
Grover Norquist, the well-fed, self-satisfied ideologue who has such a hold on the modern Republican Party, told 60 Minutes recently that he wants to shrink the size of the federal government to what it was in the early 20th Century.
Norquist, founder of an anti-tax organization, Americans for Tax Reform, and the man responsible for holding all Republicans to promises that they will never, ever raise a single tax, said he wants to return the U.S. to the days when the federal budget took up about eight percent of the nation's Gross National Product. It is now about 40 percent.
"We functioned in this country with government at eight percent of GDP for a long time and quite well," Norquist told Steve Kroft.
Kroft pointed out that back in those wonderful days of limited government spending, there was no such thing as Social Security, Medicare, and other safety net programs (what Mitt Romney refers to as European-style entitlements).
Norquist said it would be better if the federal government simply stopped "kicking around" poor people, old people, the unemployed, and other people who cash government checks.
If these are the sentiments of today's mainstream Republican Party, well, we really have become a more cruel society, haven't we?
Perhaps that's what Romney means when he says he believes in America, not Europe. Europeans aren't cruel enough. Americans - real Americans, that is, not so-called Americans who disagree with conservative ideology - know that in this age of hyper-capitalism, only the cruel will survive.
Let's be clear about one thing: the world to which Grover Norquist would return us, the world where the federal government accounted for just eight percent of the nation's gross national product, is a world that Irish-Americans (and others) rejected a century ago. It is a world that Irish American figures like Al Smith and Lenora O'Reilly condemned as incompatible with the real-world experience of the Irish, in Ireland and in America.
And yet it is a world to which, one suspects, some Irish-Americans would have us return. Funny how a measure of comfort and affluence can make people forget helping hands along the way.
"A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" was set during Grover Norquist's idea of America's golden age. In Smith's telling, however, it was a place where men who lost their jobs invariably had nowhere to turn, except to the saloon, which often became their final stop.
It was a place where women gave birth at home, attended by untrained relatives because they could not afford a midwife. It was a world in which widows and children had nowhere to turn of the family breadwinner died or became incapacitated.
In Grover Norquist's view, this is a picture of America doing "quite well." It is a place where vast fortunes were made off the unregulated sweat of 14-year-old girls.
It is hard to believe that this is Mitt Romney's idea of an ideal America. The man does seem too decent to believe that, even if he believes he has to imply that the current president of the United States, a black man, is an alien, an outsider, a believer in foreign ideas, in order to appeal to those who share Norquist's sinister world view.
The next time any Irish American with any sense of history hears anybody waxing nostalgic for the good old days of limited government programs, he or she should spend a minute thinking about what that meant for their ancestors.
Or they could simply pick up a copy of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."
