On the California Coast? The ennui of the rich. It smells and tastes a lot better than the ecstasy of poverty. The locals, if they are completely lacking in self-awareness, sometimes, as in Wilde’s critique of the poverty campaigners of London’s East End, attempt to engage with the hispanic ranch workers. These farmhands, wives and children, the victims of racism, must be invited to local meetings; agendas will be printed in Spanish; their opinions will be formally surveyed. Of course, if they speak publicly of the conditions of their employment or housing on a ranch -- they will lose both. A double bind -- they must speak, but know they will be punished if they do. Thus, when they remain silent or equivocate, their liberal champions despair of ever helping them.
That ecstasy of poverty, that every sinew stretching, on fire. When the sudden mania for “Anti-Racism” lifted its inane eyebrows, I thought of Flint, Michigan. People there live day to day, some, hour to hour. Of that indicator of the decline of the middle-class: “Did you know how many people live paycheck to paycheck?” (it hovers between 60-80% in the US), living paycheck to paycheck is “making it” in Flint. It means, not only is there one paycheck, but two week later, there is another! It is a level of wealth and security very rare in that town.
At the Walmart that serves Flint (in Flint Township, which is considered a safer place to locate a business), a black woman in her fifties and a young black man in his early twenties explained to me, as they were ringing me up, that the traditional checkout line was preferable to the self-checkout area, where people used the immediate absence of humans (just you the shopper scanning the barcodes of products) to steal. They called it the “bullpen”. The employees in the bullpen had to spot thieves moving through the techno-corral and confront them. The twenty year old (if that) had just been taken off the “pick-up” section -- where people came in for pre-orders. If a customer has the money to think that far ahead, he or she is generally more civilized. He had made a mistake, he explained to the cashier, a failed performance evaluation. He was headed back to the bullpen.
Could you take members of the majority black population of Flint off the street, whisk them into an office, and there in some white walled antiseptic chamber, have a conversation about “racism”? Probably. They would understand. But to what end? Contextualizing instruments of hierarchical control mean very little at the heavy stone end of those pyramids. Back to work, if you are lucky.
On a Friday in July, in a place like that, a hot humid endless afternoon, I would sense, as a teenager, the delight of mischief and fear. Something bad was going to happen, and it might very well be fun. You experience poverty, in youth, as possibilities in chaos. If the cretins of Silicon Valley want a gestalt of “multiple universes”, it is to be young in the hour of sunset, there in the spalled and crumbling concrete slabs and abandoned brick factories of a violent, drunk and high, extremely poor city.
As for California, there was a Black Lives Matter march in the tiny enclave I live in. A group of white people walked along the sides of a quarter mile of road, as they had been asked by the local sheriff’s deputies not to walk in the road. I didn’t bother to attend this sad pageant, but one neighbor mentioned what another, a non-native English speaker, who no doubt thought they were expressing something profoundly humane, “We have the wealth, and we have each other!”
There is one black man in town, thankfully with a sense of humor. I said, ‘We’ll do a “Black Life Matters” sign for you. We only have one! We can’t be too careful.’
Here, in the ever even temperature of coastal California, I occasionally see the person who wanted the hispanic ranch workers to “speak for themselves!”, sitting on the end of the dock of their multi-million dollar home, sometimes with a book, sometimes with a spaniel, pondering, “Why am I not interesting?”
Well, being interesting is something you have to cultivate. Expensive schooling is just your parents paying other people to pretend that you are interesting. I frequently encounter this baffled rich person. They are forever searching for their interesting quality, that they know they must possess, and never finding it, because it isn’t there. I mention this, because the source of that person’s wealth -- the one with legs dangling over the Pacific staring out wondering why their anti-racist campaign has stalled -- the inherited money that produced their unaccountable smugness, is General Motors: founded, Flint, Michigan, 1908.
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