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June 2002
According to Investor’s Business Daily, the federal minimum wage in 1968 was $1.60. Adjusted for inflation that would be $8.15 in today’s dollars. Actual present federal minimum wage: $5.15. [Later note: Oregon’s minimum wage went up to $6.90, and was indexed to inflation, by an initiative passed in Nov. 2002.] After 1965 real incomes slowed their long climb…. Between 1968 and 1981 the average American worker’s real wages declined by one-fifth.” Robert Reich, The Next American Frontier, 1983 I’ve been trying to construct an esthetic theory based on randomness. I wonder if anyone writes poetry to grandmothers. One good thing about writing is that you can get control. “Homicide” was still a show where you felt like they [the police] were doing God's work, and I don't buy that in the drug war. I think it may have begun nobly enough as this crusade against dangerous drugs, but it's become a war on the underclass. – David Simon, co-writer of HBO’s "The Wire", Salon.com Politics is such a memory game. You get into a political argument and it’s a question of who can remember the most facts. But the arguments are all pointless. No one ever changes their mind. I prefer writing. Just put out my point of view and people can make of it what they want. Nature, like visual art, doesn’t speak in words. A shaman apprentice friend tells me that the “unseen world” they seek is all around us. It’s the natural world. We don’t see it because we’re preoccupied. We need to train our minds to be more receptive. Our culture wants us to be busy. Even in nature we feel the need to be moving, talking. They use ceremony to tune in. “Either we’re having a mass hallucination,” she said, “or this stuff really works.” Any time you deny your own reality you become weaker. If your reality is different from that of people around you, or what they’re willing to admit to, then you have to insist on it. Preoccupation with possessions can divorce us from ourselves. Who are we without all that stuff? Who am I without books? Hard to be in this play without props. If there is any easy road through life, I’ve never been able to find it. The main purpose of conversation in America is avoidance. Television is mental insulation. People turn it on every day and get filled up with patriotic corporate crap, so they don’t have to think. To consider, for example, that we’ve killed as many civilians in Afghanistan as died at the World Trade Center. I don’t have a patriotic bone in my body. Why should I be loyal to America just because I happen to live here? Dennis Miller on TV talking about how he hates “our enemies.” Well, maybe they’re his enemies, because he has money. Once you lose your political innocence you can never get it back. Like virginity. Southern Utah: From the road it looks like parched, barren desert and I think, why would anyone want to live here? Spending a few days at a friend’s home, I realize that it’s actually a pleasant place to live, surrounded by sagebrush and juniper trees, full of wildlife. Many pockets of green. Lots of spectacular scenery, Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, that you can see on day trips. Quiet. This is a drought year in both Utah and Colorado, which I just left. Snow pack in the mountains is a fraction of normal. Utah is Mormon and mostly Republican, although the major of Salt Lake City is a Democrat. My friends, middle of the road Democrats from the San Francisco Bay area, now retired, feel socially out of place here. The southwest is rich in pioneer history. We’ve been taking guided tours of historical buildings in Utah and Arizona, a window into the past. An early Mormon home with two identical living rooms, on opposite sides of the hall, for the owner’s two wives. Yesterday I learned that much of the southwest in pioneer times was grassland. Grazing and, apparently, a climate shift turned it into desert. There have been experiments in reseeding the native grasses, but so far it hasn’t worked. St. George, Utah: oriental restaurant with Mexican-American waiters. If I lived here I would spend a lot of time listening to the silence. The gap between activists and non-activists may be as wide as that between different political philosophies. Our whole culture teaches us to be passive, outside our jobs. We’re supposed to shut down and watch TV. Problems? Have some more TV. There are usually alternatives, but we reject them because they require us to change. The rationalist distaste, for example, for any form of mysticism. We protect ourselves by restricting our minds to the surface. Looking at friends’ long-term marriages, it seems to be a continual process of negotiation. Social restrictions are very real, but also we often build our own prisons. We paint ourselves into corners. The basic problem with public transportation: you have to listen to someone run their mouth. I’m trying to focus on Robert Reich’s The Next American Frontier, on a Greyhound bus north to Salt Lake City, and the woman in the seat behind me is talking nonstop. In theory I believe in public transportation, like any good leftist. In practice I often find it oppressive, because it requires being around noisy people. I’m continually trying to withdraw from the world. What I need is a secular monastery. We all have our myths. People tend to believe whatever will make the best story of their lives. Even in jail years ago (for growing pot), I found that everyone had a story. Their story was that they got there by accident. Some people will only allow you to relate to them through a very narrow channel. They have no receptivity. In Salt Lake City I walk around, do some work on one of my Internet email lists at the library, see Amelia. Charming. At 9:35 on a June night in Salt Lake City there is still some light in the western sky. Democracy is a holdup. You use the vote to take from the haves and give to the have-nots. Every society has to do this, one way or the other. On the train coming down out of the mountains, heading for Sacramento, I talk to a young man from Sweden. He says taxes in Sweden run about 32 percent of your paycheck, but that includes all forms of insurance. When I was making about $20,000 a year 25 percent of my paycheck was subtracted, including Social Security and Medicare. I would prefer the security of the Swedish system, which I gather is much like that in other European countries. Amtrak trains routinely run two to three hours late. “We do apologize for the inconvenience.” I’m at the station in Sacramento, on my way back to Portland after a couple weeks of travel. The 11:30 p.m. Coast Starlight train, due at midnight, is now expected at 3:45 a.m. I just want to go home. Trains violate all the basic hurry-up assumptions of our culture. It’s like crossing the ocean on a ship. Old man, hunched over on the bench near me, dozing. He’s reading Texasville by Larry McMurty. Sequel to The Last Picture Show. Same characters in middle age. I’ve reached that late night stage where I’m here and not here. Read a pile of newspapers today: The Nevada Appeal,
Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle. Strange how little I’ve
learned. They all seem so superficial, hollowed out. No wonder only
11 percent of the population reads newspapers. Now is when I need a laptop with a wireless connection to the Internet. She loved these children, every last one of them. They had added more to her life than she could have imagined. But sometimes it was very tiring to have to speak in her grandmaw voice. – Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups Tyler’s book seems to be about accepting who you’ve become as you get older, which is not who you were, or expected to become, when you were young. Somewhere in northern California on the train. Beautiful country, green forested mountains, wildflowers. After the sparseness of the southwest this country seems so abundant. You wanted me to take a picture of the mountain. I took a picture of the mountain. – mother to teenage daughter, on the train I can’t believe the amount of crap we have to put up with on the Amtrak PA system. Now some clown is giving us sports scores. Every major industry in America is deeply involved with and dependent on government. The competitive position of every American firm is affected by government policy. No sharp distinction can validly be drawn between private and public sectors within this or any other advanced industrialized country; the economic effects of public policies and corporate decisions are completely intertwined. – Reich So much for getting the government off our backs. Conservatives speak against government while using it to regulate business to their advantage. Business in America is a sacred cow, untouchable – until it wants government aid, of which we cannot give it enough. Corporate welfare. Reich writes of the “countless tax abatements, tax credits, accelerated depreciation rules, subsidized loans, loan guarantees, tariffs, quotas, marketing agreements, and price supports that cushion American business against change….” If it is so important to make people on welfare find jobs, why can’t we also make business stop sucking on the government teat? I want to be “left alone” by government in the same sense business is: subsidized without control. According to Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men: · One billion of the earth’s population don’t have clean drinking water. · 30% don’t have electricity. · 50% don’t have telephones. · 4% of the U.S. population owns more than a quarter of the world’s wealth. At the Gay Pride parade in Portland a young woman says, “Hey, you hear about Dick Cheney coming to town? I’m going to bring a microwave, fire that bitch up right there!” Cheney has a pacemaker. I’ve also read that he has a gay daughter, and has fended off antigay moves from the White House. I marched in the parade as a way of getting attention for one of my political causes. At first I felt strange, watching middle-aged men dressed up as fairies. Then I realized they were freaks, just like me, and felt right at home. According to a National Sleep Foundation survey, three-quarters of people say they’re experiencing at least one sleep disorder symptom a few nights a week, up 7% from last year and 19% from two years ago. “Some people call it an epidemic,” says John Shepard, president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine…. “Everyone agrees it’s getting worse.” – Nancy Keates, The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2002 We are getting very tense. Older women: food and flowers. Nuclear warheads at the end of the Cold War, according to Michael Moore: · U.S. – 20,000+ · USSR – 39,000 At the beginning of the nineties, there were about a million people in prison in the United States. By the end of the Clinton/Gore years, that number had grown to TWO MILLION. The bulk of this increase was the result of new laws being enforced against drug users, not pushers. Eighty percent of those who go to prison for drugs are in there for possession, not dealing. – Moore Plus an adult has a right to consume whatever they want to, as long as they’re not harming others – second hand smoke, driving under the influence. And please, could we say something nice about the pushers? Without them we would have no users. Marijuana growers, for example, are performing a public service. People in the marijuana business are very serious about marijuana, just as much as wine, beer and whisky makers. More like farmers, because they don’t process the crop into something else. For growers the money rolls in, at least by working-class standards, $3,000 a month, middle-class wages. You can take care of your garden and not worry about all the usual stresses that come from work. Until you get caught. A man who asked me why he should pay for my health insurance, thought that human evolution was advanced by social Darwinism, survival of the fittest as determined by earning power. After I told him I was an atheist he said he would pray for me. What is that line from Alice In Wonderland about believing two contradictory things before breakfast? Retirement is not how I pictured it. There is still too much to do. There is still a list. After a long while you know what is real and what isn’t, but people arrive at different conclusions, depending on what worked for them, so you end up alone with your truth. Older people always want to dump their wisdom on the young. Bruce Sterling wrote that we should leave them alone, to construct their own world. Mostly I agree, but no smoking! I want young people to be happy. And if I could I would take away their cigarettes. The enthusiasm of children is just lovely. I would like to feel that way. After a certain age you need to focus on the one thing that is most important to you, because you are rapidly running out of time. Well I don’t know, sounds like the opposite of Drift. Weren’t we supposed to be work-free? Freedom from work worked better when I was young. Now I have too much on my mind. You know, the Arab-Israeli conflict…. Yeah, forget all I said about that focus stuff. Too linear. You don’t want to get narrower. You want to drift. If there are any great songs being written now they’re going right by me. CDs cost too much. Songs on the radio are the musical equivalent of TV sitcoms. I have this image of floating down a river on a boat, quiet, on my back looking up at the sky, practicing reception. It’s hard to receive politics. We instinctively want to get away from all those people telling us how to think, what to do. But once we know what we think we should join the chorus. The river gets wider before it meets the sea, right? Never mind. Over ten years ago my mother read Drift. She said she liked it but wasn’t sure she understood it all. I said, “Neither am I.” LET’S CRUSH THE WHOLE WORLD Today the U.S., having reached critical mass…. I don’t think anyone has discovered a suitable style for growing older. We all dance when we’re younger. We’re being sold impermanence. News splits the world up into separate events. So that the war against “terror” (the basic human condition), has no connection to the U.S. unemployment rate. Let your mind do the walking. None of us really know where we’re going. We don’t even know where we’ve been. But it was a long time ago. Ice on Mars, lots of it, buried a few feet deep in the soil. Exciting. Explorers won’t have to take so much water with them. You could also break it down to create oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for power. Also deeper underground the ice may melt. Water could support life. There are tribe and species survival advantages to morality, which creates enough trust to support joint action. We are pack animals, like wolves, and we need to work together. The more advanced a society’s morals, the more cohesive and effective it is. People work together more if they know they’ll be taken care of. This is what conservatives can’t understand. They are tribal at best. It’s a worldwide effort to reduce the debt carried by third-world nations. Over two dozen countries currently spend more on interest payments than they do for education and health care. … The young and affluent swept by, all wearing the masks of people determined to believe almost anything, so long as it bought them what they wanted. – T. Davis Bunn, Drummer in the Dark, 2001 Minority Report: Didn’t work for me. Seemed cold, uninvolving. Maybe because Tom Cruise never seems real. He’s like a moving statue. I suspect the most common treatment for depression in this country is busyness. I better start moving. Perhaps it’s an overdose of bad information that causes information sickness. Bad information mentally oppresses us while leading to no change: Today Israelis killed Palestinians and Palestinians killed Israelis. Nothing about the real issues or how the situation could be resolved. Leading to what psychologists call “learned helplessness.” Things are bad but they cannot be changed. … 34 percent of all homeless people have jobs, … 48 percent of all homeless families contain at least one working parent…. Portland has, every night, an estimated 3,000 homeless with nowhere to sleep and only 400 shelter beds available. – P.J. Murphy, Portland Tribune People may be leaving marriages for good reasons. Still, the bottom line is that we can’t trust marriage. It has become a paradox, a permanent contract that can be broken in a second, with no penalties. Nor can we trust business, government or any other institution. This is the age of impermanence. The only thing that stays the same is the relationship between classes, between predator and prey. They say a society rots from the top down. Ours has a suicide core, slowly spreading outwards. Writing and creativity Someone wrote that writing is mostly a habit. I suspect this is also true for other kinds of creativity. If I had to depend on discipline, will power, time control or inspiration to write, I would never get off the ground. There will never be the right time to do your art. There will always be something else you “should” be doing, in this Our Society of Infinite Expectations. You will never be good enough. You won’t please a lot of people. It’s embarrassing. Just do it. You’ll feel better, more alive, more like yourself. You’ll be real. Creative people are really good at tying ourselves up into knots. If you just do it you cut the knot. You can’t judge creativity in advance, because you don’t know where it will go. Just let it go. Instead of asking yourself “What do I have to say?”, just say something, and decide later if you want to pass it on. I think it helps to put the work aside for awhile and come back to it later. Gives you a little distance from it, a fresh point of view. Because I’m so far behind, I do my typing and editing months after the writing. I never know what I’m going to find when I open those old notebooks. Sometimes I’m afraid it will be what Jack Nicholson’s wife found in The Shining when she looked to see what he had been writing all that time, as he slowly went crazy: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Don’t pay too much attention to other people’s opinions about your creative work. It’s nice if they like it, but it’s not necessary. If you like it probably someone else will. Unless you’re trying to make a living at it, write mainly for yourself. Modesty helps. If you can’t meet your expectations, try lowering them. Rather than see Drift as “literature,” I prefer to think of it as something like a local newspaper column. Just a way of sharing some ideas. If I have too large a conception of what I’m doing, I’ll stop doing it. If you want to be creative but can’t seem to find the time to do it, try slowing down for a while, open up some space in your life. As an experiment, try talking less. Writing is like exercise: as you practice you get more fluid. Why I write: if I bring this stuff up in conversation people change the subject. Maybe some ideas can only be communicated in writing. Reading is quieter, more private. You can deal with the writing without the writer. Or you can turn me off and watch TV. I’ll never know the difference.
“Human capital” The idea that education, job training, health, housing and nutrition programs are social luxuries, to be indulged in if and when the American economy is strong enough to afford them, stands the true relationship on its head. It is precisely because these programs have not been properly conceived and adequately funded that the work force is now stymied. – Robert Reich, The Next American Frontier, 1983 Reich was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. He must have been very frustrated. Clinton talked about investing in “human capital” – free job training – when he ran in 92, and that was the last we heard of it. You don’t get free job training from a conservative southern Democrat who is beholden to the money men. Insecurity born of the fear of sudden, arbitrary, and unanticipated loss – whether of job, home or health – does not inspire people to new productive feats. To the contrary, insecurities like these discourage risk taking and constrain adaptability. – Reich I don’t think Reich took into account, 19 years ago, that our rulers would simply write off manufacturing, farm it out to other countries, and make services the center of our economy. Service jobs, mostly low paid, are 80 percent of U.S. employment. Manufacturing jobs peaked in the 70s and have been declining ever since. The “deindustrialization” of America. Reich assumed that U.S. manufacturing would have to change to be competitive, become more specialized, flexible, human. Instead it has been disappearing. The U.S. is suffering from over-production, as it did in the 1920s. We can only absorb so much stuff – unless you want to extend affluence to the working class, which those in power do not want to do. It is, apparently, the principle of the thing. The middle and upper classes need someone to feel superior to. Market saturation, automation and cheaper wages in other countries mean that many of us are no longer needed. In that lovely English term, we are “redundant.” Reich believes in vocational training, but I’m not sure the “good” jobs are there to train people for. Reich writes about “human capital” and the need to develop it, but I haven’t seen that on the ground. What I’ve seen is that business wants people to do routine low-level work. A computer programmer I know tells me that if he lost his present job he would have difficulty finding another. We do have a shortage of nurses, but that’s because hospitals laid them off and drove them out of the profession. Now they discover that nurses are essential after all. Who knew? In fact, those who run this country treat their “human capital” with contempt, as if we were poor white trash. Flexibility has been attained not through training, but by turning workers into temps. Instead of union living wage manufacturing jobs, working-class people are employed providing services to the middle and upper classes, at low wages. We are told that the “market” decides, and we should feel lucky to have these jobs. But now some of these service jobs are being exported or taken by immigrants. Customer service call centers are being set up in India, with workers who speak English without an accent and use fake American names on the phone. Recent immigrants from Mexico, speaking English so poorly they’re hard to understand, are working at the local McDonalds. The middle class and me(Skip this if you find the subject too painful.) Working class: 1. those persons working for wages, esp. in manual labor. 2. the social or economic class composed of these workers. Middle class: U.S., a class of people intermediate between the classes of higher and lower social rank or standing; the largest social, economic, cultural, etc., class, having approximately average status, income, education, tastes, and the like. Left: the complex of individuals or organized groups advocating liberal reform or revolutionary change in the social, political, or economic order, usually on behalf of greater personal freedom or improved social conditions. – Webster’s It’s hard to write about working-class anger because it is painful to middle-class people, some of whom are my friends. They don’t see that their lives are built on top of the working class, and that we’re getting a raw deal. Middle-class people see themselves as average folks just trying to get by. But in my working-class world average means constant worry about money, and no job security. This condition is what divides the two classes. If we’re going to have a dialogue about class in this country, anger has to be a part of it. Would you ask blacks to talk about racism without anger? I would like to make class as visible an issue in the U.S. as race. But it’s no fun telling people what they don’t want to know. I have to fight the temptation to just shut up about it. Class is America’s dirty little secret. In the U.S. people think class is an outdated European concept, of no relevance here, where everyone thinks they’re middle-class. Our main form of political blindness. I’ve been asked, by middle-class friends, why they should pay higher taxes to provide other people with health care. My response is, why should working-class people work for low wages, at insecure jobs, often with no benefits, to provide middle-class people with cheap goods and services? Is it simply a matter of who has the power? Class warfare has been around for 10,000 years, since the invention of agriculture. It doesn’t go away because people don’t want to think about it. I’m finding it hard to communicate politically across the working-class/middle-class divide. Middle-class people haven’t had the experiences I’ve had, so they don’t see working-class reality. It’s a foreign country to them, another culture. Democrats are afraid of Republicans – that seems to be the core of their politics – but they also don’t like the idea of paying more taxes for social programs. They just see that as a loss, not a gain in security or social stability. Their world is comfortable and orderly. Society seems to be an abstraction. Economics is personal, not social. I see middle-class Democrats as socially liberal but economically conservative. They feel they’ve worked hard to get what they’ve got and they don’t want any of it taken away. Less advantaged people, in their opinion, should have done what they did. From my progressive perspective, their politics seem to boil down to hatred of George Bush. I don’t see any vision of change, of how this could be a better country. They just want to hang on to what they’ve got. A defensive politics. To them the left – progressives, Greens, Nader voters – is a threat because we helped elect George Bush. They seem to feel that the left has no business meddling in presidential politics. They don’t seem to be interested in progressive politics, our issues or proposed solutions. We’re just an intruder in their political world. The left has about the same position in America as gays – most people want us to be invisible. I think we have to keep doing what gay people have done for many years, get in the face of the majority until they’re forced to grudgingly accept our existence and give us some kind of place in American politics. We’re here, we’re left, get used to it. Working-class anger is not just personal alienation, it’s societal. We’re reacting to the basic structure of our society. Yes I can appreciate that some middle-class people have worked hard to get to where they are, financially. They would have had to work even harder if they hadn’t had the working class to do their shitwork for them. The middle class is living on a political fault zone, but they can’t see it. My hope is that if the left gets together every four years, votes as a block and slaps the Democrats in the face, eventually they’ll wake up. We can’t expect them to appreciate it. It’s the only way to communicate with them, since they’re not going to attend our meetings, read what we write or watch our cable shows. Middle-class people assume that following the rules automatically confers virtue, a concept cancelled by the corruption of the rule-making process. Even under the most democratic of circumstances, the rules will always be made for the benefit of the middle-class majority. Middle-class people need to understand that being nice is not enough. We can’t live on nice. Exercise 1 for the middle-class person who wants to understand the working class: Imagine worrying about where next month’s rent is coming from, frequently, for years.
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