“Homer's Enemy” is the twenty-third episode
of the eighth season of The Simpsons. Frank Grimes, a man who suffered tragedy after
tragedy in his life but never stopped working hard, is hired by Mr. Burns to work in the
Springfield nuclear power plant. Frank encounters Homer Simpson, a far less
serious and far less professional worker. Frank discovers that Homer, in spite of his
disinterest in his work, lives a much more comfortable life than Frank. “Homer's Enemy” was written by John Swartzwelder,
an arch-conservative American libertarian and notorious, paranoid recluse, which means
it should come as no surprise when Frank exclaims “You're what's wrong with America, Simpson. You coast through life and you leech off decent,
hard-working people like me.” Whether Sqartzwelder's politics influenced
the episode consciously or unconsciously, my commentary would be the same. Frank represents – not conservatives but
a idealized, fantasy of who conservatives are in the minds of the very same conservatives:
the decent, hard-working people. The salt of the Earth. Those who value backbreaking labor as a virtue. Those who turn their nose up at the social
safety net because it somehow devalues their true god: work. Homer represents something else. He represents what conservatives blame for
some of the failures in capitalism: laziness. Not making enough money? Simply get a second job, like Frank Grimes. He mentions that he works a night job at a
foundry. Still not making enough to get by, even with
two jobs? Well, that's a “you problem” to conservatives. To them, not a failure of the system. To them, it's not necessarily even something
with which we should sympathize. If you aren't making enough money under capitalism,
then you must be lazy. If you are living on the street, then you
must be lazy. Why not at least live in a dangerous, overcrowded,
poorly maintained homeless shelter? American liberals may be less inclined to
agree with these statements, but American liberals believe in capitalism too, which
means they are doomed to see conservative workers as the enemy rather than the economic
system that is responsible for all this hardship in the first place. If someone suffers under capitalism but performs
all the tasks that capitalism demands of him, well, maybe that's the fault of the Homer
Simpsons of the world who “leech” off hard-working people. Nothing like a scapegoat to distract from
the real enemy of labor. [It's also standard procedure to blame a scapegoat
or sacrificial lamb.] Mr. Burns barely factors into the episode
except as a kind of neutral party, an oblivious and even harmless entity that doesn't care
one way or the other. Burns is brought to tears by Frank's life
story and hires him but also chews him out over something that wasn't his fault. Past experience shows that he thinks nothing
of Homer but gives him an award anyway. In a bit of writing ingenuity, “Homer's
Enemy” frames Homer Simpson as wrong but the protagonist and Frank Grimes as right
but the antagonist. Burns is an invisible hand of the market,
and the conflict is only between Homer and Frank. Mr. Burns is framed as a disinterested party
who has his ups and downs with both characters. If “Homer's Enemy” were more honest, Frank
Grimes would not be so correct and Homer Simpson would not be so incorrect, but it is honest
in ways it did not intend to be. Workers are pitted against each other by their
employers – focusing on competition between one another rather than competition against
their employers. An illusion of combativeness between workers
as if the workers are what's preventing other workers from earning better pay. Burns' exclusion from the conflict of the
episode is representative of how conservative capitalists see the angst of workers; as being
caused by other, lazier workers. Unjust systems generally require a scapegoat. “Homer's Enemy” portrays Mr. Burns as
having no strong feelings about the feud or even awareness of the feud, but if the episode
were more honest, Mr. Burns would be the one intentionally manipulating the feud instead
of passively pushing Frank over the edge at the end by rewarding Homer first prize in
the model power plant contest. The extremely conservative writer of this
episode naturally blames the wrong person and wrong institution for Frank's misery. And since Frank is his avatar – so does
the Frank character. Frank believes in the “cult of work” – a
belief system that props up capitalism not as a necessary evil that some liberals view
it but as a good unto itself, as something both godly and necessary to the rule of law. And if that is true, then poverty is the sole
result of laziness and lack of personal responsibility. The working poor – many of whom are conservative
– continue to buy into this in spite of it being opposed to their best interests. This is because this cult of work has brainwashed
them into believing one of two things. First, that their hard work will be rewarded. The second is that even if they don't raise
themselves out of poverty, the hard work itself is its own reward. That way, the cult of work can never be wrong. This is what rich capitalists want them to
think so that they can profit off the labor of the working poor and middle class. Over the centuries, hardline legal measures
have been taken against the poor – a reaction to massive population shifts caused by the
enclosure of the commons in England and how land was affected across Europe, particularly
in France. Outlawing idleness and the poorhouses physically
forced people from serfdom into wage-labor. The cult of work is partly the result of the
Protestant work ethic – meaning work in and of itself being godly, making idleness
a sin – and the desire among the poor to advance in life so much that they believe
that the rich will give them a slice of the good life if they work hard enough. This delusion forces them to see the rich
as their saviors and other workers as their competition and enemy. In the episode, Homer is the embodiment of
the sin of sloth, a caricature of those who conservatives believe “leech” off the
hard-working people. In reality, the working poor, unemployed and
under-employed are not “sinful” so much as they are suffering under an economic system
in which disparity is a feature, not a bug. There have been mild attempts at reform over
the years but little interest in replacing this economic system outright. Welfare as we know it began in America in
1935 as part of Franklin Roosevelt's Social Security Act. Decried as socialism and as antithetical to
the cult of work in America, what the Social Security Act actually did was help struggling
families. For example, it granted aid to dependent children
who had lost an income-producing father. By the 1970's, welfare had become a lifeline
for single mothers, giving conservatives even more ammunition against it. A single mother defies the cherished social
norm of the nuclear family and the reliance on husbands as sole caregivers. For these socially conservative reasons and
many others, conservative and neoliberal politicians sought to end welfare as we knew it. Bill Clinton ran on this during his campaign. “When I ran for president four years ago,
I pledged to end welfare as we know it.” The Clinton welfare-to-work program ushered
single mothers and others off their support. Some greatly suffered because of this, and
those could find jobs often found them lacking – retail jobs and cashier positions that
couldn't possibly provide for themselves and their numerous children. Low wage jobs provide little room for upward
mobility, and since wages have been largely stagnant since the Clinton years, these low
wage jobs aren't getting better. The buying power for those pushed off welfare
by the welfare-to-work program is now lower than it was. Cuts to welfare are pushed by conservative
politicians, applauded by conservative voters and accepted by neoliberal politicians who
want to seem sympathetic but also follow a doctrine of capitalism. Food stamps, housing and health care outlays
are up, but welfare checks have shrunk so much that the very poorest single-parent families
received 35 percent less than they did before welfare-to-work began. What's more, there's another major problem
for welfare recipients right now: significantly reduced funding for job placement and training. Conservatives get into government, dismantle
programs and then use the now dismantled programs as evidence that they don't work. Men like the fictional Frank Grimes and their
real world counterparts would ignore this. He would call struggling mothers “welfare
queens” and see any failures of the system as the result of the Homer Simpsons of the
world. Again, unjust systems and policies require
a scapegoat. Frank tells his opposite that if Homer had
lived in any other country, he would have starved to death long ago, and the episode
treats this as fact in spite of the reality that most developed countries have far better
social safety nets than the US. Other scapegoats include policies, institutions
and people who actually benefit the work force so that rich capitalists can avoid detection
as the true problem. Sometimes rich capitalists can even benefit
from these policies, institutions and people – such as when immigration is blamed for
low wages, unemployment and the proliferation of the sin of laziness. In truth, immigrants are 30 percent more likely
to start a business in the US than non-immigrants, and 18 percent of all small business owners
in the United States are immigrants. Small businesses owned by immigrants employ
millions of people and generate more than $776 billion annually. Immigrants are also more likely to create
their own jobs. 7.5 percent of the foreign born are self-employed
compared to 6.6 percent among the native-born. Deep down, rich capitalists love immigrants
because of the cheap labor they can provide and because immigrants have started 25 percent
of public U.S. companies that were backed by venture capitalists. This list includes Google, eBay, Yahoo!, Sun
Microsystems, and Intel. But capitalists and their puppet politicians
need the workers to blame themselves – to blame other workers – which makes scapegoats
so prevalent. [I knew it was immigrants.] Another way rich capitalists get workers to
blame each other is through propaganda against unions. Workers are subjected to what union organizers
like to call a captive audience meeting. Employers hold these anti-union meetings once
they have caught wind of an organizing campaign. New workers sit through anti-union orientation
videos and presentations, which give misleading stats about the negatives of unionizing. The biggest “negative” of unionizing is
that the employer will fire the employee, but that is not a negative of unionizing. It is the product of not having a union in
the first place. Capitalist propaganda has made unions the
enemy of the worker even though it has historically been the worker's greatest ally. It is not a coincidence that wages have stagnated
at roughly the rate of the decrease in union influence in the US. The Simpsons had an earlier episode in which
Homer becomes a union representative, but talk of unions on the series has faded along
with the presence of unions in the real world. Anti-union propaganda is so strong that many
non-union workers see unionizing as a negative, not realizing that they are siding with rich
capitalists who don't have their best interests at heart. Frank Grimes' parents abandoned him as a child,
suggesting that he spent the rest of his youth in poverty. In addition to the episode, and by extension
Frank, misunderstanding other workers as the cause of Frank's ennui, Frank also fails to
realize that his position in life is not dictated by how hard he works but the conditions in
which he was born. Karl Alexander is a Johns Hopkins sociologist
who followed nearly 800 people from poor neighborhoods in Baltimore since they started first grade
in 1982. Of the nearly 800 school kids he followed
for 30 years, those who got a better start—because their parents were working, had more income
or because of being a two-person household—tended to stay better off, while the more disadvantaged
stayed poor. Out of the original 800 public school children
he started with, only 33 moved from low-income birth family to a high-income bracket by the
time they neared the age of 30. This preserves privilege across generations. Only 4 percent of the low-income kids he met
in 1982 had college degrees when he interviewed them at age 28, whereas 45 percent of the
kids from higher-income backgrounds did. Of course, these statistics also intersect
with racial discrimination. Among men who drop out of high school, the
employment differences between white and black men are staggering. At age 22, 89 percent of the white subjects
who’d dropped of high school were given jobs anyway, compared with only 40 percent
of the black dropouts. Believers in the cult of work would claim
that some born into poverty fight their way up to middle class and in some extremely rare
cases even wealth, but that does not change the fact that it is much more difficult and
much less likely with fewer resources. Low-income children caught up in their parents’
economic struggles experience the impact through unmet needs, low-quality schools, and unstable
circumstances. In “Homer's Enemy” Frank definitely had
unmet needs, home-schooled himself and obviously had unstable circumstances. But when Frank laments that he lives in a
small apartment between two bowling alleys and Homer lives in a house, he blames Homer's
laziness for his own misfortune rather than a system that disadvantaged Frank from an
early age. Struggling workers like Frank are given a
pat on the head by rich capitalists because their added labor will always benefit the
income of said rich capitalists more, and because of this, struggling workers might
see these capitalists as their benefactors or even aspirational. The cult of work is at play here. So long as the workers don't complain about
the unequal arrangement, these workers are a net positive for their employers. If the workers do complain, capitalists will
make excuses that deflect criticism towards themselves. Things like “If you wanted a higher paying
job, you should have taken a higher paying job. That's a you problem.” But this ignores the aforementioned statistics
about the challenges in attaining these jobs for those born into poverty, not to mention
the the limited amount of higher paying jobs that sometimes require workers to take on
more than one occupation at a time. Rich capitalists are – more often than not
– born into far better circumstances than the poor, have far greater advantages, have
far more privileges, resources and stability. But they can't or won't see it that way and
instead blame the victims of capitalism rather than the beneficiaries of capitalism. The US props up an “American Dream” of
getting rich from nothing but the sweat off your back and a garage for your amazing invention. It is codified in the very culture of the
nation. It is a religion, a cult far stronger and
more prevalent than any other belief system, and it is just as supernatural. “It's a you problem” individualizes systemic
problems because individuals are easier to see and therefore blame. Frank blames Homer because he is his exact
opposite and because he can see him and shout at him and look at their disparate lives and
tell him that he's what's wrong with the US. And no, the conservative libertarian writer
obviously did not intend an anti-capitalist message, but like many conservatives who notice
income inequality but blame it on the wrong people, he was close an epiphany but could
not quite make the right connection. When Frank Grimes discovers that Homer Simpson,
who doesn't work particularly hard, has a much better life than himself, he could have
had a realization that the meritocracy that “personal responsibility” conservatives
and work cultists talk about was a sham, but that is never broached in the episode. For an instant, Frank sees the world for what
it is but takes the wrong lesson from it. What it gets wrong is how the myth of meritocracy
within this cult of work benefits the rich far more than it would benefit a working class
family because the rich – upon confronted with their obscene wealth hoarding can always
claim that they “earned” their millions and billions. Nobody earns a billion dollars, they steal
it from the labor of those who have no choice but to take low-wage jobs in a system that
previous billionaires maintained for new billionaires. US television sitcoms are filled with working
class families and humor centered around their working class problems, but said sitcoms generally
don't question economic injustice and capitalism as a system and sometimes also could be fairly
right-wing. Al Bundy never blamed his position in life
on the fact that his employer doesn't pay him enough. He blamed his position in life on women, most
notably his wife, his neighbor and the women customers at his place of employment. He complained far more about the customers
than about management, directing his unhappiness with his life at bystanders and other working
class people rather than those who actually control him. Simpsons fans sometimes take issue with this
episode because it portrays Homer as a foil of a man who had a hard life – he is a monster
who elicits laughs at Frank's funeral – but that is how capitalists frame anyone who works
for a living or wants to work for a living but doesn't buy into the cult of work: lazy,
worthless and ignorant. We are the butt of the joke. The ranting of Frank Grimes isn't directed
only at Homer Simpson but at us, anyone who is skeptical of capitalism, skeptical of meritocracy,
disinterested in shifting blame to our fellow workers. We've existed under capitalism for centuries
now, and we should all know who the real enemy is.
