Sports and “The -tions”

22 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work

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"Social Political Economic", African American History, De-industrialization, Declining Cities, Economic Inequality, Gentrification, High School Social Studies Teaching Formula, Higher Education, History, History of American Sports, History of Education, Immigration, Industrialization, Migration, social mobility, Suburbanization, Teaching History, The -tions, Urbanization, US History, World History

Gentrification via sports collage, December 22, 2012. [Includes aerial view of location of new DC baseball stadium site, June 22, 2006, http://www.wreckingcorp.com; Nationals Park Greeting Card; Baseball Stadium Price Tag cartoon, March 27, 2008 (Nate Beeler/Washington Examiner)]

Off and on for the past twenty years, I’ve attempted to wean my students off the ridiculous high school social studies formula for addressing an essay question or writing a history paper. Thinking about history — particularly modern world history or US history — purely in social, political and economic terms misses so much. History is about patterns, trends and dynamic processes involving people and human tendencies. So in my discussion sections for US History Since 1877 in the fall of ’92, I began to discuss the idea that you can better understand history through applying what I started to call “the -tions” as a series of trends, processes and patterns.

I did this because I’d already grown tired of students who had adopted “the formula.” The formula goes something like this. First, write an introduction (usually, without mention of the need for a clear thesis statement). Then, put facts, events, ideas and evidence in the social, political and economic changes silos (it always has to be these three). Then, write a conclusion that restates the introduction, with a “my essay/paper has proven” sentence.

Steel grain silos, Ralls, Texas, October 12, 2010. (Leaflet via Wikipedia). In public domain.

It’s a terrible way to teach history, and a terrible way to write about it. It leaves so much out, including the idea that history is a constantly evolving process, not a static picture of events involving larger-than-life individuals herding billions of people through one period of history or another. So I decided to make immigration, industrialization, urbanization, and migration (sometimes called internal migration) a bigger focus with my students my second year of graduate school at Pitt. Some liked it, some didn’t, and some just kept writing their formulaic five-paragraph essays for their midterm and final exams. Oh well.

So, in expanding my list of -tions to include de-industrialization, suburbanization, globalization and gentrification over the years, I’ve begun to see patterns beyond what I typically teach or even write about. The rise and decline of American cities are a case in point. Especially if one compares this to the rise and decline of mainstream American team sports over time. That baseball, football and basketball have all been the nation’s first or second most popular sports at one point or another since the 1890s is a reflection of the leisure activities available to ordinary Americans living in growing or declining cities.

Of course, I could also include boxing (as this was America’s most popular sport through the first four decades of the twentieth century). But as an individual sport wrought with even more racial overtones than baseball, boxing deserves a separate discussion. For team sports, though, their rise or decline in popularity seems to have followed a number of trends related to the -tions.

Baseball was the nation’s most popular team sport from the 1890s through the 1950s, mirroring the growth of American cities (urbanization) during the same period. Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe helped grow these cities, as they left behind rural poverty, religious persecution and pogroms for industrial exploitation here in the US. Native-born Whites, already enamored with baseball, essentially introduced these immigrant groups to the sport, which in turn made it more popular. Of course, many sons of these immigrants became great baseball players. Blacks migrating to cities such as New York, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Chicago also adopted the pastime. Every -tion is involved, at least, that’s my argument.

As we well know, though, baseball has declined in popularity since the 1950s, as the professional game became an integrated sport, and as millions of Whites began moving to the suburbs, taking millions of jobs with them. Blacks underwent a second massive wave of migration after 1940 that grew during the 1950s and 1960s.

During this transition, basketball and football (especially the latter) became more popular sports. Both were sports whose history and records were less revered than those in baseball, and at least appeared to be more welcoming of athletes of color than baseball. In the migration of Whites from cities to suburbs and Blacks to cities, the shuffling of team sports’ popularity and their locations began.

Pittsburgh's Civic Arena under demolitiion, March 11, 2012 (AVPHOTOGRAPHICS PGH via Flickr.com). In public domain. The "Igloo" (home of the Pittsburgh Penguins) itself was built after the demolition of the Lower Hill District between 1958 and 1961, displacing thousands of Blacks in the process.

Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena under demolition, March 11, 2012. (AVPHOTOGRAPHICS PGH via Flickr.com). In public domain. The “Igloo” (home of the Pittsburgh Penguins) itself was built after the demolition of the Lower Hill District between 1958 and 1961, displacing thousands of Blacks.

Once the US economy began to decline, and then de-industrialize, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990, the role of declining cities attempting to hold on to their sports franchises became a new theme. Declining post-industrial cities like Baltimore, Detroit and Cleveland lost their teams entirely to other cities, or lost them to the suburbs. While Sunbelt cities like Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver and Houston have picked up some of these pieces.

Gentrification, backed by a politically conservative model for economic growth and nary a concern for the declining income of city residents, has led to a return of professional sports teams to city centers. Billions of taxpayer dollars have gone into sports arenas and stadiums in Washington, DC, Brooklyn, Seattle, Detroit, Boston, San Jose, and so many other places across the country. But with little to no benefit for the people living in these cities, especially the poor. As a result of the inflation that came with gentrification and these commercial building ventures, millions of America’s poor have been forced to move out into poorer suburban communities that often border major cities.

Maybe it’s just me. I just don’t find much to celebrate about the business side of sports today, because it reflects the trends of growing economic inequality and much more difficult social mobility. It shows how desperate the mayors of declining cities are for growing their municipalities, without regard for its poor and working-class residents. It’s emblematic of our culture’s inability to see that the shift from industrial work to service industry work has left millions without the ability to live decent lives in city or suburb, whether they migrate to Houston or stay in New York. Sports is a reflection of these trends, but they also exacerbate them as well.

The Quest For Work, Past and Present

21 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne University College of Education, Economic Inequality, Hard Work, Individualism, Joblessness, Marginalization, Mount Vernon Hospital, Pittsburgh, Psychological Impact, Psychological Scars, Social Safety Net, Underemployment, unemployment, Unions, Welfare

Down and out on New York pier, 1935, June 2009. (Lewis W. Hine via FDR Presidential Library). In public domain.

Election ’12 should be about how to generate more jobs and how to grow the economy. Sadly, it hasn’t been about these issues, and given the toxic political and cultural climate, it will not be about jobs or the economy when this cycle ends on November 6.

I’ve seen this horror movie of economic downturns and mini-depressions in American society and in my own life now three times in the past thirty-five years. Each time, I’ve been better prepared, more informed, more able to ride out the storm. And each time, I’ve seen the ugly side of what we call the United States of America, a place that has and will continue to punish the unemployed and underemployed for problems beyond their control. Especially if they were and are women, young, over forty, of color, and among the poor.

In the period between ’79 and ’83, when the effective inflation rate for that four-year period was more than thirty-five percent, when we experienced a double-dip recession, when interest rates reached 22.5 percent. My mother’s meager income of $12,000 in ’79 didn’t keep up, even as it reached $15,000 in ’82. We were late with our rent at 616 by an average of three weeks each month and didn’t have food in the apartment the last ten days of any month, going back to October ’81. Things were so bad that my mother, a supervisor in Mount Vernon Hospital’s dietary department, brought food home from the hospital kitchen for us to eat for dinner several times each month.

“Negro Women,” Earle, Arkansas, July 1936, August 21, 2012. (Dorothea Lange via Library of Congress/http://libinfo.uark.edu). In public domain.

The good news was, Mount Vernon Hospital’s employees went on strike for higher wages and increased job security in mid-July ’82. The bad news was, although Mom was a sixteen-year veteran, nearly fifteen of those as a dietary department supervisor, Mom never joined the union. She didn’t want to pay “them bloodsuckers” dues, and said that she “couldn’t afford them” anyway.

I can only imagine how much spit and venom Mom faced on her way to work every day for three weeks. Considering our money situation, which I knew because I checked the mail and looked at our bills every day, picketing and getting union benefits might have been better than working. It wasn’t as if there was food in the house to eat anyway. As much as I enjoyed Mount Vernon Hospital’s Boston Cream Pie, I thought that picketing for a better wage was the way to go.

Soon after I started eighth grade, the other shoe dropped. Mom, so insistent on not joining Mount Vernon Hospital’s union, was the odd woman out. The hospital’s concession of five percent increases per year over three years left them looking to cut costs. The only personnel left vulnerable were non-union service workers and their supervisors. My Mom had been cut to half-time by her boss Mrs. Hunce. Mom was screwed, but it was a screwing partly of her own making. It was the beginning of a two-decade-long period of welfare, underemployment, unemployment welfare-to-work, with an associate’s degree along the way. So much for hard work leading to prosperity!

I’ve gone through my own periods of unemployment and underemployment over the years. The most severe one for me was between June and September ’97, right after I finished my PhD. It was the first time in four years I hadn’t had work or a fellowship to rely on, and it was brutal. I did interviews with Teachers College and Slippery Rock University for tenure-track positions in education foundations, only to finish second for one job, and to see the folks at Slippery Rock cancel the other search. In the latter case, I think that they felt uncomfortable hiring someone of my age — twenty-seven — and my, um, ilk (read race here).

What made it worse was the fact that I couldn’t simply apply for any old job. I did actually try, too. McDonald’s, UPS, FedEx, Barnes & Noble, among others. I couldn’t even get Food Stamps in July, because my income threshold for March, April and May ’97 — $1,200 per month — was too high. And because I technically was a student for tax purposes my last two semesters at Carnegie Mellon — even though I was adjunct professor teaching history courses — I didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits either.

Shuttered Homestead steel mill, 1989, August 21, 2012. (Jet Lowe/Historical American Engineering Record). In public domain.

I had to omit the fact that I had a PhD to get a part-time job at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which began after Labor Day ’97. I ended up teaching as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University’s College of Education the following year. Still, my income level did not return to where it was my last year of graduate school until June ’99, when I’d accepted a position with Presidential Classroom in the DC area.

I am nowhere near those times of being considered or treated as a statistic, marginalized in media and in politics as being lazy, shiftless, not smart or hard-working enough. But as a person who teaches near full-time and has more than occasional consulting work, I know how precarious and temporary work can be.

Ironic, then, that the people making decisions that have put people like me and my Mom in terrible financial straits have never missed a meal or not paid a bill because they were choosing between heat and not making phone calls. That most Americans regardless of party affiliation shun the poor, unemployed and underemployed is a shame and a pitiful example of how we really don’t pull together during tough times.

These attitudes are why rugged individualism and hard work aren’t enough to get and hold a job. An education, a real social safety net, even regulation of the job market, would help level the playing field for millions. Or, maybe some of us should learn Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Arabic or Portuguese and move to where the jobs really are.

The Human Race Addendum

13 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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Barry Switzer, Economic Inequality, Hard Work, Human Race, Individual, Leveling Playing Field, Marathon, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Romney-Hood, social mobility, Track & Field, William H. Holmes Elementary

2008 NYC Marathon. Source: http://ingnewyorkcitymarathon.files.wordpress.com

Two years ago, I wrote a post about a curious observation I made about inequality, unfairness and humanity, all courtesy of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Pierce (“Hard Work and the Human Race,” September ’10 – see below). In the thirty-four years since this observation, it’s fairly obvious that the great college football coach legend Barry Switzer was right about how people like Romney think about their station in life. “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”

GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan as his vice-president is a confirmation of the idea that there are folks in America who truly believe that their success came only as a result of hard work, luck and prayer. But to use a better analogy, it’s easy to be a winner when your born in middle of the fourth lap of a 400m race, while someone like me had to fight just to get in the starting block. Politically, Carter and Reagan was the spark for my understanding of economic inequality. Three and a half decades later, the Romney-Ryan ticket reflects the long and winding road this mythology of “equal opportunity, not equal outcomes” has taken our nation. Only, equal opportunities do not exist for most of us, as the track and field analogy illuminates.

===========================

When I was nine years old, my fourth grade teacher at Holmes, Mrs. Pierce — a grouch of an older White woman, really — talked about the human race and attempted to describe our species’ variations. She tried to do what we’d call a discussion of diversity now. It went over our heads, no doubt because she didn’t quite get the concept of diversity herself.

Holmes Elementary School, Mount Vernon, NY [Top left corner was Mrs. Pierce’s classroom in 1978-79 year], November 22, 2006. (Donald Earl Collins).

Like the fourth-grader I was, I daydreamed about the term, human race. I thought of Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, young and old, male and female, from all over the world, all on a starting line. It was as if four billion people — that was the world population in ’79 — were lined up to run a race to the top of the world. In my daydream, some were faster than others, or at least appeared to be, while others hobbled along on crutches and in wheelchairs. Still others crawled along, falling farther and farther behind those who were in the lead, the ones that looked like runners in the New York City marathon. Before I could ponder the daydream further, Mrs. Pierce yelled, “Wake up, Donald!.” as if I’d really been asleep.

A high school friend recently gave me some much-needed feedback on my Boy @ The Window manuscript. Her feedback was helpful and insightful, and very much appreciated. But some of it reminded me of the realities of having someone who’s a character in a story actually read that story. Their perceptions will never fully match up with those of the writer, which is what is so groovy and fascinating about writing in the first place.

One of the things that struck me as a thread in her comments — not to mention in so many conversations I’ve had with my students about race and socioeconomics — was the theme of individual hard work trumping all obstacles and circumstances. As if words, slights, and mindsets in the world around us don’t matter. As if poverty is merely a mirage, and bigotry, race and racism merely words on a page. Sure, a story such as the one I have told in this blog for the past three years is about overcoming roadblocks, especially the ones that we set ourselves up for in life, forget about the ones external to our own fears and doubts.

At the same time, I realized what my weird daydream from thirty-one years ago meant. Some people get a head start — or, in NASCAR terms, the pole — before the race even starts. That certainly doesn’t make what that individual accomplishes in life any less meaningful, but knowing that the person had an advantage that most others didn’t possess does provide perspective and illuminates how much distance the disadvantaged need to cover to make up ground. Those who limp and crawl and somehow are able to compete in this human race have also worked hard, likely at least as hard as those with a head start, and more than likely, harder than most human beings should ever have to work.

2009 London Marathon. (http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/)

Plus, there are intangibles that go with race, class and other variables that determines how the human race unfolds. “Good luck is where hard work meets opportunity,” at least according to former Pittsburgh Penguins goaltender Tom Barrasso. Most human beings work hard, but all need opportunities that may provide a real sprint to catch up or take a lead in the human race. Family status, political influence, social and community networks, religious memberships, being in the right place at the right time, all matter and are connected to race and class, at least in the US.

The moral of this story is, hard work matters, individual accomplishment matters. Yet a panoramic view of the race in which humans are engaged matters more in putting our individual successes and the distance that remains in some reasonable perspective. Without that, we’re all just pretending that individual hard work is the only thing that matters, when that’s only half the battle, or half of half the battle.

On Hugs and Walks

01 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adulthood, Bronxville, Chester Heights, Child Abuse, College Plans, Crush #2, Dreams, Eastchester, Economic Inequality, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Pelham, Poverty, Puberty, Self-Discovery, Shuckin' an' Jivin', Tuckahoe, Walks

Commodus hugging Maximus as he plunges dagger into back (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution of picture.

The beginning of August for me thirty years ago was the beginning of adulthood for me. I had little choice. After five weeks of emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual abuse, my choices were to either allow myself to be broken or to find something to hope for. Otherwise, my life would’ve been over before my thirteenth birthday.

I thought hard about how to end the summer of ’82’s abuse. I figured that I could pretended to be something I wasn’t — a loving, wayward stepson. I begged for my stepfather’s forgiveness and even called him “Dad” while he beat me for the sixth time in a month, on August 1, ’82. He stopped, finally, and gave me a hug. I cried tears of rage and hate, because I couldn’t even stand to touch or smell the man, much less being pressed against his overabundance of fat. I prayed for his death to be long and painful, as if I had a dagger in my right hand, ready to plunge into his back left ribs.

Dagger through back rib and heart (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution of picture.

If masturbation were the only thing that I discovered that month, I might’ve begun aspiring for some other kind of life. Instead, I decided on a boring early August day to do something else novel. I didn’t want to go to Wilson Woods again. We didn’t have any money anyway. I decided to take my siblings on a walk on the wild side, to walk outside our immediate neighborhood. Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616. We walked and strollered down East Lincoln Avenue, across the stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway into Pelham, and turned left on Fifth Avenue to go north. This was uncharted territory for all of us, especially me. North Pelham might as well have been Helena, Montana to me.

“We don’t know where we’re going,” Darren said.

“Yeah, and?,” I said in response.

“Okay, but it’s your fault if we get lost, Donald,” Darren said.

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, August 1, 2012. (http://slc.edu). In public domain.

We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester, and then Bronxville. It was amazing in that it was much more suburban than Mount Vernon or the part of Pelham that I’d known up until that moment. The homes were luxurious by my standards. Everyone seemed to own a BMW, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, or Peugeot. There weren’t many sidewalks around, only well-manicured lawns. We had walked into several ritzy communities without any warning.

I began to think that the world was a cruel place, having rich Whites living so close to us yet their lives were so far apart from ours. But instead of becoming depressed or angry, it made me introspective. “Look at these houses!,” I said to Darren as we walked by one Tudor-style home after another three-story mansion, broken up only by a few cul-de-sacs. Darren, having been around rich Whites through Clear View for nearly eight years, didn’t think too much of it.

That’s when it hit me. If I wanted to live a better life, to have a nice house and a car and a family, it seemed to me that I needed an education, a college education. I wasn’t going to get there just graduating from high school, especially in Humanities, where the expectations for college were so high that some kids already knew that they were going to law school. I just knew that I couldn’t go through another summer of abuse. So I said to myself, “I’ve got to get through the next five years. I’ve got to go to college.” Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

As we meandered our way back toward Mount Vernon, we ended up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22. That’s when we passed by a ranch-style home with a stone facade. I looked and saw someone out in front I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. It was “P,” my eventual Crush #2, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. This was the first Black family I’d seen during our two-hour walk.

Of course I didn’t go into any detail about what we’d been up to. After all, the one thing that the past year had taught me was not to open up my mouth and say everything that was on my mind! So I let her and her older sister do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere down South to visit family.

“Do you live around here?,” P asked.

“Oh, we’re on a long walk and just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said.

“Okay,” she said in response.

The Denzel Washington Walk, American Gangster (2007), August 1, 2012. (http://variety.com)

“In the neighborhood.” Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, were all one gigantic neighborhood! After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing my eventual Crush #2 and her sister than I was.

I wasn’t unexcited. P was far and away the nicest person to me in 7S all year. She stepped up when others made fun of me. I just took her being nice to me the same way Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie probably took it when Mrs. Olsen was nice to her.

Still, I finally had a plan. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, though. But in looking at where P and her sister lived, I at least knew that someone in their family must’ve taken similar steps in the not-too-distant past.

The Third Armpit of Hell

27 Friday Jul 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Work, Youth

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Coming-of-Age, Dante's Inferno, Economic Inequality, Growing Up, Home, Metro-North, Neighborhoods, New York, New York City, NYC, Poverty, Race, Self-Discovery, Subway Trains, The City

Illustration of Dante’s Inferno, Map of Lower Hell, 16th century. (Giovanni Stradano via Wikipedia). In public domain.

During most of my Pittsburgh years, whenever someone I knew asked me what it was like to live in the New York City area, I often said two things. One, that “New York was a great place to live if you have money.” But, “if you don’t have money, New York could be like the third armpit of hell.”

I didn’t even bother to discuss Mount Vernon until I was well into graduate school. Too unknown, too complicated to explain its proximity to the Bronx and to midtown Manhattan. And from the average Pittsburgher’s perspective, it was a distinction without a difference. As far as some were concerned, Mount Vernon could’ve just as easily been outside of Buffalo as it could’ve been in the heart of Harlem.

But I definitely knew better, that my relationship with Mount Vernon and “The City” was a love-hate one, born from my growing-up experiences during the Reagan years. The lens with which I viewed the New York City area, a trifocal one of race, poverty and “outsider” status, made me ambivalent about my times growing up in Mount Vernon and all of my times in New York.

2 NYC subway train with graffiti (cropped), 1980s, December 20, 2009. (Cope2 via http://www.doobybrain.com/). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution picture.

I have my father Jimme to thank, though. Without him, I would still be afraid of New York, not just ambivalent about it. Drunk or not, working or on his way to a hole-in-the-wall bar. Jimme would take me and my older brother Darren out and down to the city often enough, to ride the Subway, to hang out with him in Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and especially Midtown. Whether it was to help him with his janitorial work on weekends, or just to hang out, we frequented Manhattan and other parts of the five boroughs off and on between ’80 and ’85, ’82 — the year of abuse — excepted.

Because of that year, the longest time I spent outside of the city growing up was between April ’81 and July ’83. After not making it down to Manhattan in all of ’82, we went to Midtown in July, where we learned about two of my father’s watering holes between 43rd and 47th. They were both near Mickey Mantle’s restaurant on 47th. He also had an Irish pub he’d like to go to around East 59th and Third, a drinking bar near his job on 64th and Columbus, and a couple of places near Macy’s on 34th Street. Because of our height and the times, when it was still legal for eighteen-year-olds to drink in public watering holes, me and Darren were allowed into these fine establishments. I learned a lot about vermouth, vodka, Cosmos and Long Island Iced Tea that summer.

Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse in New York City, March 4, 2006. (Janke and Diliff via Wikipedia). Permission granted via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

I also learned a lot about the not-so-nice side of New York in those years. I recognized this as I’d board the Uptown 2 Subway from West 42nd Street and 7th Avenue in Manhattan at the tail end of rush hour. As I’d board the train, I’d notice the crunch of humanity in all of its oblivion, self-absorption, and diversity. As the doors close, I’d watch as the express train passed 50th, 59th, and 66th Street before it would grind to a halt at 72nd Street. I’d notice that a fair number of the White passengers alighted here. Between 96th and 125th Street, the load of the train would gradually lighten as about half of the passengers who’d crushed me between a tall, stale-breathed smoker and a woman who wasn’t my girlfriend were now at street level.

About three-quarters of the passengers for the rest of my trip would be Latino and Afro-Caribbean. After another hour of endless stops in the Bronx, the 2 would pull me out of my slumber as it would slowly roll into the rickety East 241st stop.

By the time I was a rising senior at Pitt, I certainly didn’t need my father to accompany on my trips into Manhattan. I also avoided the long trek from 616 across Mount Vernon to 241st to take the 2 whenever I could afford to. Metro-North was a luxurious godsend compared to the puddles of piss and infinite amounts of graffiti on the Subway I’d seen throughout the ’80s.

Toph’s “Hairy Pits” from Avatar: The Last Airbender (screenshot), July 26, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use — low resolution picture.

But it introduced me to other odious issues. Like Grand Central Station, which by the summer of ’90 was in desperate need of renovation. Especially the restrooms, festooned with enough garbage, feces and bodily odors and fluids to make a coroner vomit.

Off a return trip from Pittsburgh that summer, I made the mistake of having no choice but to use the almost unusable facilities there, which in the end I couldn’t use. Meanwhile, I observed homeless males hanging out in the restroom with carts, along with an individual who looked to have Kaposi’s sarcoma, an obvious sign of full-blown AIDS.

That’s when I coined New York to be “the third armpit of hell,” the place where poverty had meant your dreams were dead on arrival. For once, it made me content that I was from a place where many smug New Yorkers disdainly considered “upstate.” Though the New York City area has changed — and mostly for the better — since ’90, it’s still a place where economic inequality can easily grind the life out of people.

The “Invisible” Poor & The Middle Class Mythology

19 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, race, Work, Youth

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American Dream, Aspirations, Chris Hayes, Creflo Dollar, Economic Inequality, Gospel of Prosperity, Journalists, Media, Media Coverage, Middle Class, Mitt Romney, MSNBC, Political Optics, poor, Poverty, President Barack Obama, President Obama, Social Castes, social mobility, Up with Chris Hayes, Uppers, Wealthy

Transparent (or invisible) Woman (cropped), July 19, 2012. (http://cgtrader.com).

This past weekend, I found myself drawn into the discussion of the middle class and middle class aspirations on MSNBC’s Up with Chris Hayes (otherwise known as “Uppers”). It was a good and yet wholly unsatisfying discussion of technical definitions of what middle class is and of the political optics of only discussing the middle class as a socioeconomic category. Chris Hayes and his guests justified this with an all-too-common refrain. “If you’re poor, you’re aspiring to be middle class,” Hayes said on Saturday. With that, Hayes and his guests rendered America’s poor invisible, and failed to see beyond the politics of invisibility in the process.

There are two issues here, and many layers within them, about America’s poor, working, on welfare, or otherwise. One issue is that journalists, commentators, political operatives and most politicians treat the poor as if they are an unknowable group of people. It’s as if they all think the same way, as if there are all Black or of color, and a complete drag on the American economy and the federal budget. And that’s on a day in which the media and politics deem America’s poor as discussable. Most of the time, America’s poor are invisible, shoved into the middle class category by commentators and politicians at every turn.

Yes, America’s middle class is struggling too, fighting tooth and nail to not slip into the class of the invisible working poor, treading water to avoid food banks and food stamps. But they have something to struggle with — and for — at least. Their homes, their cars, a retirement account, their families’ net worth, all accoutrements of being middle class in America. America’s poor don’t possess anything to struggle with or for.

Chris Hayes on a train in Switzerland, November 10, 2008. (Matthew Yglesias via Wikimedia Commons/Flickr.com). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Except, maybe, with their vote, if they care to vote at all. Yet no mainstream commentator nor presidential candidate has truly spoken to their needs, their plight, to how their situation is completely interconnected with the struggles of the American middle class, not their aspirations. Not Chris Hayes, nor his weekend compadre, Melissa Harris-Perry, not President Barack Obama, and definitely not the presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.

It’s a story I’m all too familiar with, as someone who grew up in poverty in Mount Vernon, New York. Not to mention as someone who had to go to college and graduate school and then struggled for two years at part-time work before finding a job with a Ph.D. in ’99 (see my “The Five Senses of Poverty” post from July ’10). I was thirty years old by the time I earned a middle class income. Yet in all of that time, the only mainstream politician who spent time on the issues of the American poor as if these were real people was President Jimmy Carter, and we know what happened with him. Outside of my degrees and my publications, I was invisible until the fall of ’99.

Otherwise, it’s been four decades of Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton concerned with “welfare queens,” “pink Cadillacs,” and “mend it, don’t end it” welfare policies, and the media following suit. It’s like being kicked hard by someone as one is laying on the ground with broken ribs and internal hemorrhaging, as if they want to poor to die, painfully.

But it’s not just the ones with microphones and word processing programs that kill America’s poor by rendering them invisible. Despite the general notion that the media and politicians nurture — that everyone not rich aspires to be firmly entrenched in the middle class — most Americans middle class and poor aspire to be rich, wealthy, well-off.

Creflo Dollar, pastor, World Changers Church International, November 1, 2010. (Zwicky Institut via Flickr.com). In public domain.

This is the other neglected issue, whether inadvertent like with Chris Hayes and his guests on Uppers, or deliberate on the part of President Obama and Romney. Why so? Because they don’t acknowledge that it’s hard to be truly middle class in America these days. To be in the middle class, one must borrow, borrow, borrow, beg and sometimes steal while struggling to pay student loans, car notes, a mortgage and child care costs.

This wasn’t the case even thirty years ago, before the severe double-dip recession, high interest rates and inflation and Reagan Revolution took full hold. Then, a high school diploma and raw initiative was all most folks needed to find a job at a GM plant or to get an administrative job in government or with a large corporation (although, typing at 90 words per minute enhanced a woman’s chances, at least). Now, two years of college or postsecondary technical training, some experience in a specialized field, and a personal connection is the floor for a living wage — not exactly middle class. Of course, no one wants to be in the basement with nearly one in five Americans, 50 million in all, working just to be poor.

Stacks of money, April 13, 2008. (Allureme via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution 3.0 License.

America’s poor and fledgling middle class both aspire to be rich (or die tryin’), and not just middle class. The rise of fundamentalist Christianity, mega-churches and the cult of prosperity as these pastors reimagine the New Testament. The endless lines for Powerball and Mega Millions whenever the pot is more than $100 million. The fascination with reality shows about the well-off or about competing to be well-off. All of this is the manifestation of the warping of the American Dream since the early 1970s, where the pursuit of riches has led to debt slavery for millions.

The old American Dream has become myth, and the old American middle class is but the story of Camelot, Timbuktu and Shangri-La. In our new world, “the poor will be with us always” has been made a plain and unyielding truth by those in power, reinforced by those with a media platform.

Oligarchy: The Future Is Now

28 Thursday Jun 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, race, Religion, Work

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Affordable Care Act, Citizens United, Corporate Interests, Corruption, Divide & Conquer, Economic Inequality, Fascism, Neocons, Neoconservatives, Obamacare, Oligarchy, Plutocracy, President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, President Obama, Seeds of Discontent, Supreme Court

“History Repeats Itself: The Robber Barons of the Middle Ages and the Robber Barons of Today”, Puck, Samuel Ehrhardt (1889), June 28, 2012. (http://http://www.library.gsu.edu). In public domain.

Though many of us have been fighting this long war against neocon, reactionary, even fascist elements in American society over the course of the past four decades, it appears that, like the Fire Nation in the Avatar: The Last Airbender series (2004-08), that we’ve lost the war. I’m not predicting that Romney will beat Obama in November. But this election will be closer than it ought to be, thanks mostly to the SuperPAC maelstrom stirred up by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (2010) and our own get-rich-quick apathy with politics and responsibility in this country.

More importantly, though, is the reality that this election, even with an Obama win, is merely a chink in the armor that is our American oligarchy, now firmly established. With so much in regulations, social welfare, education, unionization, and other protections for the ordinary American rolled back, it’ll take at least a generation to undo the damage done since the Nixon years to our society, economy and environment. With so much wrong, though, it may well be too late to make course corrections without significant consequences for our nation and for the world.

That only in the past couple of years folks who weren’t staunch progressive or true leftist liberals have come to realize that the neocon endgame was a powerful plutocracy is testimony to the long, successful war of identity politics, wedge issues and other distractions that they have fought since ’68. The funny thing is, though, that for most of American history, our government has been a representative democratic oligarchy, especially for the poor or those whom are of color. How can you explain the history of slavery, even the half-century it took for non-landowning White males to get the right to vote?

“The ‘Brains'” Boss Tweed, by Thomas Nast (1871), June 28, 2012. (Vizu via Wikipedia). In public domain.

There have only been brief periods in American history in which the federal government has been responsive to the ordinary American citizen, a protector of the rights of the many and the minority over the rights of rich individuals and powerful economic interests. One of them came as a result of the Great Depression, the start of a nearly forty-year run where our government, despite its flaws and lies, frequently erred on the side of ordinary citizens. People can talk about the Clinton years being an oasis in the middle of a neocon desert, but between the vast expansion of credit, the tearing down of Glass-Steagall, NAFTA and other corporation-friendly policies, we now know that much of what occurred in the ’90s was a mirage.

What is different now — but not so different from the turn of the twentieth century — is the brazenness with which the rich and powerful flaunt their control over our lives. It’s as if they’ve drugged us, tied us down, and occasionally even tortured us, expecting no response or retaliation. And the media has played its role in this, too. From Kim Kardashian to the Real Housewives of RichLandUSA, and from American Idol to Mad Men to Dancing With The Stars. The rest of us just live vicariously through the oligarchy, or become raging and jealous while laughing at the folly of the rich in the process.

Even the wars we fight and the Supreme Court decisions made are steeped in oligarchy and the privileges of the rich and the corporate. That’s why we spent a decade in Iraq, billions on a military fighter we don’t need (F-22), and think that decisions that treat corporations as people and lower taxes for the wealthiest Americans are good for the country.

That’s why today’s Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act of 2010 — otherwise known as Obamacare — matters little in the larger scheme. Of course it matters that millions of Americans have access to healthcare. But even before the Supreme Court decision, the best most un- and under-insured Americans could hope for is a system in which they pay less for crappy health insurance. And health insurance isn’t same as healthcare, folks. Either way, the real winners long-term are private health insurance providers, and not ordinary Americans or the Obama Administration.

It is an unfortunate reality that over the past forty-five years, every aspect of government in this country has been infused with oligarchy. It takes tremendous and unyielding pressure for even a city government like New York (e.g., Rockefeller Laws, stop-and-frisk policy, decriminalization of marijuana) to bend to the demands of its own citizenry. Even then, protests, sit-in and petitions don’t always work (see Occupy Wall Street and the fifteen million protestors before the Second Gulf War as examples).

Mitt Romney Bain Capital “money shot,” October 13, 2011. (http://theatlantic.com via Boston Globe).

So, what to do? I haven’t given up hope, but I can’t spend the days I have left — whether it be moments or decades — waiting for the worm to turn. Next best thing is to hope that my son will drink of my wisdom and learn to fight against this kind of ruling class when he is old enough to do so.