I was, to my chagrin, watching an episode of "Storage Wars" the other night – a show whose mere existence still confounds me – when the resident dickhead on the show said that he wanted to name his business "Rags to Riches," after his own life-story, you see. They then flashed a picture of his childhood home, which was…pretty nice, all things considered. Rather than rags to riches, his journey seems to have been more of a "lower middle class to perhaps upper middle class-ish."
More recently, perhaps, I've been chagrined by Speaker Boehner's characterization of his own childhood (the one that so often causes him to weep.) He was one of a gajillion kids, and he worked in his dad's bar. Now, from my vantage point, being the son of a small business-owner in a tiny Ohio town seems like a pretty good family to be born into. Just because you had to share a bathroom with the gajillion kids your parents kept having (because they were either (a) too ignorant to use contraception, or because (b) they want the kids for either free labor or a preferential tax treatment) doesn't mean you were raised in abject poverty.
I would posit that being in a single-parent family, and then managing to attend a prestigious university followed by an Ivy league law school on your way to becoming president of the country is a tad bit more impressive (Clinton, Obama.) But my point here isn't to compare Boehner's biography to that of two former presidents – it's to point out that more and more, the type of self-mythologizing that allows an individual to believe that everything they have acquired in life has been acquired solely through their own hard work and dedication, and that none of it is the result of existing power structures, institutional biases, etc, is one of the most dangerous ideas in political discourse today.
Bill Gates is a popular example of true "rags to riches," but I'm not sure the rags were so raggy in his case (although the riches certainly are richy.) I think that, in all probability, the closest true occurrence of a rags to riches story comes from the world of sports. Terrell Owens, Michael Vick? Terrible humans, in all probability, but they come out of a type of poverty – a setting – that most of us cannot imagine. The rags are there, and so are the riches. (This is doubly true for, say, a Brazilian athlete who makes the national team, or who gets to play in Europe. The amount of work and adversity they face to make it as professionals makes the hardships of being a collegiate athlete seem…well, like first world problems, frankly.)
It might be the case that people are using this phrase as lazy shorthand for "my life-story is improbable." Which is dumb, because every life-story is improbable. But for Boehner not to realize that not going hungry, having dinner on the table every night, being raised in a loving family, and being assured work that would contribute to the family's wealth as a young teenager gave him and his siblings a tremendous institutional advantage over others is either disingenuous or delusional. And the fact that he hasn't been asked to clarify what about his journey is so remarkable seems negligent on the part of the media.
