by Rod Amis
EASY TO BE HARD - Rod Amis goes very personal in his third entry at the Huffington Post Contagious Festival to talk about poverty and the violence poverty does in people's lives.
7 November 2006: Easy to be proud.
Easy to say, "No."
Especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and "social injustice" -
Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend?
I need a friend. - James Rado, "Easy to Be Hard," from the musical "Hair"My late friend, Steven Bland, could do a spot-on imitation of Walter Winchell. One of my favorite riffs in which he used this imitation ran, "1969: The year of 'Hair.' The year you dropped acid, lost your virginity and decided it was time for a Revolution."
Steven was, by far, not the best of people but he could be funny. He died believing that I was among the best of people because - of all of our friends, he said - I had stuck to my dissident and literary guns. It was a pedestal I hardly deserved and it chastened me that someone would have taken that impression.
Steven did because, like me, he had grown up poor and Black. I visited his home in one of those towers that spotted the peripheries of New York City at the time when poor Blacks and Puerto Ricans were relegated to them. It was only because we grew up during The Great Society era of President Johnson that penniless waifs like ourselves were allowed an Ivy League education, rubbing shoulders with the children of ambassadors and senators, by way of scholarships, work-study and student loans. That certainly will never be allowed to happen in America again.
Steven, before dying of AIDS, knew poverty as intimately as I did myself, even into adulthood, even after that pristine and prestigious education that was supposed to buy our ticket into the American Dream. His obstacles were not only that he was Black and gay but also that he was a theatre person. The pinnacle of his life and career, I adjudge, was that he was briefly in the touring production of "Cats." He had some good fortune in a production in Europe prior to that but because of his pale skin-coloring and blue eyes, he was often passed over for parts because of being, as he said ruefully, "of indeterminate ethnic background." He got parts as a Latino as often as he did as an African-American.
In the years before he died, while wasting away in Lennox Hill Hospital, he wrote me a series of long letters. In those letters he made his assertion about my sticking to the guns of dissidence and honing my craft as a writer. Those letters broke my heart because I knew that I was living as just another corporate hack for another in a string of tawdry newspaper jobs. I had gone to the Valley of The Rich, myself to sell, as Chris Rea wrote.
Steven's letters thus struck me as an indictment of the betrayal I had made.
Marat we're poor
And the poor stay poor
Marat don't make
Us wait anymore
We want our rights and we don't care how
We want our revolution NOW - from "Homage to Marat" - Adrian Mitchell / Richard Peaslee for the play, "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade" by Peter Weiss, director Peter Brook, Royal Shakespeare Company.It is not easy being another person's hero, let alone the hero of masses of people.
While re-viewing Brook's moving, challenging, disturbing production of Marat/Sade, as the play is popularly known, it was difficult not to notice how the citizens could so blithely say, "Marat don't make/Us wait anymoreä " What a burden. As though they imagined that poor old Marat could simply wave a magic wand and overturn years of power and privilege to their advantage. That politicians and pundits claim to possess such a magic wand every single day is surely breathtaking hubris.
Lyndon Johnson, the former American President, could no more end poverty and inequality in the land than you or I can walk on water. Ronald Reagan could no more eradicate the scourge of drugs or George W. Bush the enduring threat of international terrorism than Sacha Baron Cohen can part the Red Sea.
Yet, in our hunger for heroes and heroines, we accept these simple lies.
The poor, if for no other reason than the on-going misery, sleeplessness and deprivation that characterizes every minute of every day of our lives, must hunger for some opening, so reformation of the social order. A revolutionary change that will make the world less brutal and more just. The rich militate against any such eventually and hire courtiers to ensure that what they have taken by force and cunning will never become part of the general economy again, not for hundreds of years, if that were possible.
Life in Poorville
This august company of readers, here at the Huffington Post, is likely unfamiliar with the daily landscape of a poor neighborhood. The author shall attempt to educate you on how the rest of us are made to live.
The first thing you notice about my neighborhood is the strip malls that have various places that prominently announce they cash checks. There is a reason such businesses congregate here, of course: many poor people do not have bank accounts.
The reasons why poor people don't have bank accounts are vari ed but the result is the same: the working poor who don't have bank accounts pay more to get access to their hard-earned money. The level of this usury is determined by the greed of the company or convenience store offering this "service."
Next you'll notice that there are no nearby supermarkets - where food and other necessities might be purchased cheaply - but a great number of corner stores, along the "convenience" store model, who charge a minimum of 10% but can go as high as 40% more in mark-up than even the priciest supermarket chain.
When I resided temporarily in Shenandoah, Texas, next to the planned community The Woodlands - one of the most affluent in the country - there was a nearby Dollar Store across the street from a 99-cent store. Both were always busy and pristine. Clean, well-lighted, colorful and well-stocked aisles offering everything from toiletries to clothing to food items at a substantial discount.
Here in the barrio, where I live now, there is one half-assed Family Dollar store that has very little in-stock if one does not like candy and other confections, a few and cursory cooking utensils and most items, belying the store's name, cost many dollars rather than a single one as do those stores catering to the well-heeled in south Texas's affluent neighborhoods.
Need I ask what's wrong with this picture - as offered thus far? Why do those stores charging a margin higher than usual thrive in the neighborhoods catering to the poor while those that offer actual discounts abound in the neighborhoods of the better off? Is this a form of social engineering in which the poor are intentionally penalized for being poor? The evidence, not just here in Texas but all over the United States, would seem to support the latter conclusion.
Go to any neighborhood where the housing prices stretch the survival of the indigent and you'll find this latter phenomenon to be the case in America.
So what's the demographic of my own particular neighborhood? I am in southeast Austin. The majority of the people who live within three miles of me are predominantly Latino, there is a smattering of Blacks, and finally very poor Whites. These latter, judging by those one passes on the street, in shops and on the buses, are those who would be characterized as "poor White trash." Among these latter are a very high percentage of drug abusers and alcoholics. The neighborhood is known to be plagued by both crack cocaine and heroin, for example.
Those unfamiliar with the micro-environments that urban neighborhoods have become (Even natives of Austin I've encountered, are unaware that only three miles up the road is the student ghetto - some of them have assumed that this neighborhood is part of it.) are also unfamiliar with the differene a mile or so can make in such neighborhoods. But there is a significant difference, for one who actually looks, between the student ghetto - located south of my location - and the barrio. When one arrives in the environs of the student ghetto, rather than taco stands and check-cashing places and the Family Dollar, there is suddenly a H.E.B. supermarket across the street from an Albertson's. There is a Wendy's hard on a KFC/Taco Bell, hard on a McDonald's. Hmmnn.
As reported, the differences between the two neighborhoods - besides the demographic - are the offered amenities and the housing prices. Both are nothing more than apartment-complex jungles. Here in the barrio, a one-bedroom apartment can be acquired for as little as $500/month. In order to move into the student ghetto, an additional $150 - $300/month is required. And so it goes, as the wonderful Linda Ellerbee used to say.
The Violence of Poverty
Gandhi once noted that poverty is one of the worst forms of violence. You can see that on the faces of many of the people where I live. These are hard and heavily lined faces, not telegenic at all. There is care and suffering etched on these faces, as with my own.
These are the forgotten Americans, people who have spent nights in pain because they couldn't afford medical care and who don't seek health care at all, lacking insurance of any kind, until their physical suffering is so bad that they fear death and must be hurried off to a hospital emergency room.
We are the toothless Americans of the popular jokes. Toothless because dentistry, like vision and health care, are luxuries we can ill afford if we mean to keep roofs over our heads and those of our children, buy clothing or eat.
If you walk through my neighborhood - oops! forgive my forgetting that this august company contains people who would only drive through my neighborhood - you will see the face of hopeless. You'll see the face of hopelessness on old women and young mothers waiting an hour for the only bus that stops within blocks of here - the 26 Riverside - in order to get to the supermarket up the way to buy to groceries or to get to a job that pays minimum wage and requires that they wear a uniform. These are the lucky people who actually have jobs. My neighborhood is filled with people who wait in the day labor jobs of American cities, people who have given up hope of ever having regular employment again. Those still young and presentable enough to get a job end up in those uniforms I mentioned.
The poor are easily identified anywhere in America because the jobs we are allowed to hold - from security guard to fast food worker to hotel maid - always, always require that we don a demeaning uniform of some sort. It's as if every company who would hire a poor person believes that we should have the mark of the Beast on our foreheads in order to be easily identifiable.
As you continue your luxury tour of my neighborhood, you'll also notice the many grown men just sitting on a concrete wall, a divider, some steps, staring off into nowhere or drinking out of brown paper bags. Some are dirty and look as though they have slept on the street, some probably have, and others are clean and well-dressed but did not make the day labor pick this morning and now have another day of just sitting, just sitting and worrying about paying the rent at the first of the month, affording diapers for the children, keeping the electricity on, trying to explain why there is no lunch money to a trusting son or daughter who does not understand why and is visibly building a storehouse of resentment.
Despite the popular myth, nobody young or old is wearing $80-plus tennis shoes in my neighborhood. The biggest luxury of the week, if a guy gets a job doing dry wall or laying brick, is sharing a twelve pack of beer with his neighbors on a Sunday afternoon while working on a second- or third-hand car or watching a game of football or just listening to the mariachi music blaring out of some other guy's truck.
I have lived on the west side of Manhattan in Harlem, in a barrio in Phoenix, in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans and the story at each location was much the same for the poor: predatory shops, usurious check-cashing places, poor public transportation compared to the rest of the city and always lots of liquor stores. In America, you pay a toll, physically and mentally, for being poor.
Who is speaking for the plight of the urban poor in your election today, America? Who even wants to mention that we exist?
"Marat don't make
Us wait anymore"We have developed a social means of dealing with the poor that moves across generations. Poor children are belittled by their peers because of their clothing and by their teachers because they are reflections of the frustrations and exhaustions of the parents; in our educational system they are faced with the de facto re-segregation of the count ry and the cultural bias toward helping them not succeed. These phenomena added to the second half of the social final solution, their targeting by the so-called criminal justice system, pushes them toward capitulation to the Spartan choice.
The poor who hope to succeed have always been the fodder for the military adventurism of the United States; the difference today is that we are actively and culturally limiting their choices. For too many poor youth - and especially in the American South - the message is clear: prison or war.
Tom Joad might have envied these alternatives.
If this is what the celebrated NASCAR-World Wrestling Entertainment-Afternoon Talk Show-Wal-Mart culture is offering us, then we are eating our young.
A cynic would argue that this is good because we are not leaving them much of a future. While celebrating the glories of the Empire, we are driving them into bankruptcy, environmental degradation and functional illiteracy by comparison to their peers in the rest of developed world. By force-feeding them on a culture of violence, consumerism and isolation, we are actively making them pariahs and malcontents.
Roll over, Beethoven! Roll over, Voltaire! Roll over, Marat! Roll over, Langston Hughes! Roll over, Marcuse! Roll over, Neruda! Roll over, Mahfouz! Roll over, Andres! Roll over, Kayyam and Malcolm X! All of your great dreams are squandered and lie upon a sandy beach baking in the optimistic sunlight before the waves wash them finally away.
I am left to wonder if people in the United States still care about voting today and, if so, for whom?
And there you have it.
BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE Introduction - Balance of Power: China & Wal-Mart
BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE Two - Athens Speaks of Sparta
G21: The World's Magazine
Rod's First Project at the Huffington Post
Rod's Second Project at the Huffington Post
Rod's Third Project at the Huffington Post
Rod's Fourth Project at the Huffington Post
Rod Amis Unbound
© 2006, Rod Amis.
E-mail your comments to rod@g21.net.
