Had I Known Page 6

  But the real beauty of the welfare-plus-floggings approach is that it will provide an outlet for the punitive rage now directed at the down-and-out. In a curious inversion of the Sermon on the Mount, no social group attracts more ire than the vaguely termed “underclass.” The need to punish the poor is, of course, already built into the present welfare system, which insists that recipients travel from one government office to another, usually with children in tow, and submit to intimate investigations of their finances, sleeping arrangements, and housekeeping habits. Often this bureaucratic harassment reaches fiendish proportions, driving many poor women from the dole. But imagine the much more vivid effect that could be achieved by the actual drawing of blood!

  Madonna aside, sadomasochism is entirely consistent with recent political trends. For twelve years now, we’ve had presidents who have understood the primary function of government to be punishment in one form or another. All available funds have been channeled into the military, which rushes about the world like a schoolmistress armed with a birch rod. Bad countries—like Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq—are soundly whipped and sent to stand in their corners. Why, even as he was dragged from the Oval Office, George Bush managed to lash out once again at Saddam—with a “spanking,” as Time magazine so insightfully put it.

  Domestically, too, the punishment theme has been strictly adhered to. While all other domestic functions of government have withered away, the prison system has expanded to the point where the United States is second only to Russia in the percentage of its citizens incarcerated. For poor males, we have prison; for poor females, welfare—and there’s no reason why one sex’s punishment should be any less onerous than the other’s.

  It’s not that the welfare recipients have done anything wrong. On the contrary, they’ve been neglected by underfunded schools; abused, in many cases, by husbands and boyfriends; and left to fend for their children in trailer camps or cities that resemble Mogadishu.

  But we all know that “welfare reform” means, in plain English, that someone has got to be punished. Programs that throw women off welfare into unemployment or poverty-level jobs will punish, ultimately, their children. Hence the brilliance of the flogging approach: It will make the hawks and the wonks feel much better—without starving a single child.

  Going to Extremes:

  CEOs vs. Slaves

  The Nation, 2007

  Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain of American society. Starting at the top executive level, you may have thought, as I did, that the guys in the C suites operated as a team—or, depending on your point of view, a pack or gang—each getting his fair share of the take. But no, the rising tide in executive pay does not lift all yachts equally. The latest pay gap to worry about is the one between the CEO and his—or very rarely her—third in command.

  According to a study by Carola Frydman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raven E. Saks at the Federal Reserve, thirty to forty years ago the CEOs of major companies earned 80 percent more, on average, than the third-highest-paid executives. By the early part of the twenty-first century, however, the gap between the CEO and the third in command had ballooned up to 260 percent.

  Now take a look at what’s happening at the very bottom of the economic spectrum, where you might have pictured low-wage workers trudging between food banks or mendicants dwelling in cardboard boxes. It turns out, though, that the bottom is a lot lower than that. In May 2007, a millionaire couple in a woodsy Long Island suburb was charged with keeping two Indonesian domestics as slaves for five years, during which the women were paid $100 a month, fed very little, forced to sleep on mats on the floor, and subjected to beatings, cigarette burns, and other torments.

  This is hardly an isolated case. If the new “top” involves pay in the tens or hundreds of millions, a private jet, and a few acres of Marin County, the new bottom is slavery. Some of America’s slaves are captive domestics like the Indonesian women on Long Island. Others are sweatshop or restaurant workers, and at least ten thousand are sex slaves lured from their home countries to American brothels by the promise of respectable jobs.

  CEOs and slaves: These are the extreme ends of American class polarization. But a parallel splitting is going on in many of the professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5,000 a semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter in Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies are legion.

  Similarly, the legal profession, which is topped by law firm partners billing hundreds of dollars an hour, now has a new proletariat of temp lawyers working for $19–25 an hour in sweatshop conditions. On sites like http://temporaryattorney.blogspot.com/, temp lawyers report working twelve hours a day, six days a week, in crowded basements with inadequate sanitary facilities. According to an article in American Lawyer, a legal temp at a major New York firm reported being “corralled in a windowless basement room littered with dead cockroaches” where six out of seven exits were blocked.

  Contemplating the violent and increasing polarization of American society, one cannot help but think of “dark energy,” the mysterious force that is propelling the galaxies apart from one another at a speed far greater than can be accounted for by the energy of the original big bang. Cosmic bodies seem to be repelling one another, much as a CEO must look down at his CFO and COO, etc., and think, “They’re getting too close. I’ve got to make more, more, more!”

  The difference is that the galaxies don’t need one another and are free to go their separate ways nonchalantly. But the CEO presumably depends on his fellow executives, just as the star professor relies on adjuncts to do his or her teaching and the law firm partner is enriched by the sweated labor of legal temps. For all we know, some of those CEOs go home to sip their single malts in mahogany-walled dens that have been cleaned by domestic slaves.

  Why is it so hard for the people at the top to graciously acknowledge their dependency on the labor of others? We need some sort of gravitational force to counter the explosive distancing brought about by greed—before our economy imitates the universe and blows itself to smithereens.

  Are Illegal Immigrants

  the Problem?

  Barbara’s Blog, 2006

  I’ve been reading with mixed feelings an exchange on my website’s forum on the subject of illegal immigration. One contributor writes that “The first step is to deport the illegal aliens and those overstaying their visas. This should open up millions of jobs.” He—well, he says he’s a male in his mid-thirties—must have been watching Lou Dobbs’s strident series on “Our Broken Borders,” which blames about 51 percent of our economic woes on illegal immigrants. Though, to give Dobbs his due, he does pin the other 49 percent on “big corporations.”

  I’ve traveled across the US-Mexican border, and it didn’t seem too broken to me. Peer through the giant fence that runs right to the Pacific Ocean in Tijuana and you see what looks like an armed encampment: That’s America, the “land of opportunity,” as viewed from the poorer parts of the world. On the way back north, it took fifty minutes to make our way through the US border checkpoint, waiting in bumper-to-bumper traffic as gaunt peddlers, many carrying babies on their backs, went from car to car selling trinkets and snacks.

  The amazing thing is that so many Mexicans (and other Latin Americans) risk the border crossing and the hostile culture of the United States—a fact you’re reminded of as soon as you enter California and see the first “human crossing” warning signs. These show a silhouetted family running together, reminding you that it’s parents and children, not deer, you’re likely to collide with just north of the fence.

  Now we’ve been given a glimpse into the
lives of one of the biggest categories of illegal Latino immigrants, the day laborers who do jobs like construction, moving, and landscaping. According to a 2006 study, carried out by researchers at three major US universities, about three-fourths of the day laborers in this country lack legal documents. Not surprisingly, they live miserably. Their median earnings are $700 a month, most have no access to health care, and half of them said they’d been stiffed by bosses at one time or another and gone unpaid for their work.

  That’s what makes undocumented workers so attractive to unscrupulous US employers: When you rip them off, they have no recourse at all. So my first, knee-jerk response to Lou Dobbs et al. would be: If you don’t want undocumented immigrants competing with Americans for jobs, stop the exploitation of the immigrants and make sure they work under the same laws and regulations as anyone else.

  The real surprise in the study is that 49 percent of the day laborers interviewed said they were usually hired not by contractors or companies of any kind, and certainly not “big corporations,” but by American homeowners. I’d heard Bay Buchanan (sister of Pat) on Lou Dobbs’s show fulminating about the “big corporations” that are hiring all the illegal immigrants, but in fact it’s the guy next door who needs his house painted or his lawn mowed.

  So there’s a sickening level of hypocrisy here. In the last few years, we’ve seen anti-immigrant protests at day-laborer hiring sites—street corners or, very often, Home Depot parking lots—from Burbank, California, to Suffolk County, Long Island. But how many of those righteous protestors have employed undocumented immigrants themselves, if not as construction and lawn workers, then as nannies or maids?

  But I do agree with one forum contributor when he writes: “I get very tired of ivory tower ‘professional’ types who dismiss the impact of these workers because they’re just doing ‘jobs nobody else wants to do.’” There’s Jimmy, for example, a friend from Buffalo who hasn’t had steady employment since he was laid off from an auto plant in the nineties. Now he’s getting ready to move to South Florida, where there’s still a shortage of workers to repair hurricane damage. His plan? Get a job, or at least hang out at Home Depot, where the pay is low and the possibilities of advancement are negligible—so he might be spotted by potential employers.

  With the catastrophic ongoing layoffs in the auto industry, we can expect more American citizens to join the immigrants congregating in Home Depot parking lots. They’ll have a choice: to treat the immigrants as competitors and enemies or to band together with them, as coworkers, to fight for better wages and working conditions for all.

  Of course, I hope they’ll choose the latter. One image haunts me from my border crossing: a thin brown man in tattered clothes trying to sell handmade wooden crosses to the Americans crawling along in their cars. He was carrying one of the larger ones on his back.

  What’s So Great about Gated Communities?

  Huffington Post, 2007

  Another Utopia seems to be biting the dust. The socialist kibbutzim of Israel have vanished or gone increasingly capitalist, and now the paranoid residential ideal represented by gated communities may be in serious trouble. Never exactly cool—remember Jim Carrey in The Truman Show?—these pricey enclaves of the white upper-middle class are becoming hotbeds of disillusionment.

  At the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington in 2007, incoming association president Setha Low painted a picture so dispiriting that the audience guffawed in schadenfreude. The gated community residents Low interviewed had fled from ethnically challenging cities, but they have not managed to escape from their fear. One resident reported that her small daughter has developed a severe case of xenophobia, no doubt communicated by her parents: “We were driving next to a truck with some day laborers and equipment in the back, and we stopped beside them at the light. She [her daughter] wanted to move because she was afraid those people were going to come and get her. They looked scary to her.”

  Leaving aside the sorry spectacle of homeowners living in fear of their landscapers, there is actually something to worry about. According to Low, gated communities are no less crime-prone than open ones, and Gopal Ahluwalia, senior vice president of research at the National Association of Home Builders, confirms this: “There are studies indicating that there are no differences in the crime in gated communities and nongated communities.” The security guards often wave people on in, especially if they look like they’re on a legitimate mission—such as the faux moving truck that entered a Fort Myers gated community last spring and left with a houseful of furniture. Or the crime comes from within, as at the Hilton Head Plantation community in South Carolina, where a rash of crime committed by resident teenagers has led to the imposition of a curfew.

  Most recently, America’s gated communities have been blighted by foreclosures. Yes, even people who were able to put together the down payment on a half-million-dollar house can be ambushed by adjustable-rate mortgages and forced down from the upper- to the lower-middle class. Newsweek reports that foreclosures are devastating the gated community of Black Mountain Vistas in Henderson, Nevada, where “yellow patches [now] blot the spartan lawns and phone books lie on front porches, their covers bleached from weeks under the desert sun.” Similarly, according to the Orlando Sentinel, “Countless homeowners overwhelmed by their mortgages are taking off and leaving behind algae-filled swimming pools and knee-high weeds” in one local gated community.

  So for people who sought not just prosperity but perfection, here’s another sad end to the American dream, or at least their ethnically cleansed version thereof: boarded-up McMansions, plastic baggies scudding over overgrown lawns, and, in the Orlando case, a foreclosure-induced infestation of snakes. You can turn away the immigrants, the African Americans, the teenagers, and other suspect groups, but there’s no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

  All right, some gated communities are doing better than others, and not all of their residents are racists. The communities that allow owners to rent out their houses or that offer homes at middle-class prices of $250,000 or so are more likely to contain a mix of classes and races. The only gated community I have ever visited consisted of dull row houses protected by a slacker guard and a fence, and my host was a writer of modest means and liberal inclinations. But all these places suffer from the delusion that security lies behind physical barriers.

  Before we turn all of America into a gated community, with a seven-hundred-mile steel fence running along the southern border, we should consider the mixed history of exclusionary walls. Ancient and medieval European towns huddled behind massive walls, only to face ever more effective catapults, battering rams, and other siege engines. More recently, the Berlin Wall, which the East German government described fondly as a protective “antifascism wall,” fell to a rebellious citizenry. Israel, increasingly sealed behind its anti-Palestinian checkpoints and wall, faced an outbreak of neo-Nazi crime in September—coming, strangely enough, from within.

  But the market may have the last word on America’s internal gated communities. “Hell is a gated community,” announced the Sarasota Herald-Tribune last June, reporting that market research by the big home builder Pulte Homes found that no one under fifty wants to live in them, so its latest local development would be ungated. Security, or at least the promise of security, may be one consideration. But there’s another old-fashioned American imperative at work here, which ought to bear on our national policies as well. As my Montana forebears would have put it: Don’t fence me in!

  Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

  New York Times, 2009

  It’s too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life—like sitting, sleeping, lying down, or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinan
ces that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Florida, said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

  In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container of alcohol.

  The report lists America’s ten “meanest” cities—the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colorado, has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

  That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled sixty-two-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington—the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.