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February 04, 2005 Poverty ho! In 1962, according to legend, Michael Harrington discovered poverty. That was the year that Harrington (then a freelance writer for Commentary magazine) released The Other America, a snapshot of the tens of millions of people who, despite the American Dream affluence that had supposedly spread across the land in the 1950s, remained stubbornly, grindingly poor. In certain circles - especially among liberal academics of the sort who preferred to venerate one of their own - Harrington became an instant hero for revealing to an unwitting nation that poverty, indeed, still existed.If "discovering" poverty seems a bit presumptuous to you, like Columbus discovering America - the poor, like the pre-Columbian Americans, no doubt knew damn well that they existed, thank you very much - then it always did to me, too. Especially growing up as I did, in New York City of the 1970s and '80s, where poverty was an inescapable fact of life. There were "bag ladies" (the term "homeless" wasn't widely used yet); and President Reagan bemoaning the single moms who bought Cadillacs with their welfare checks, or picked up their welfare checks in their Cadillacs - something about Cadillacs, anyway - and entire swaths of the Bronx considered so hopelessly impoverished that they were forced to slap giant decals of windows and house plants over their boarded-up windows, so that the neighbors wouldn't know. In those days, the notion of a pre-Harrington utopian delusion of universal wealth seemed as far-fetched as ... well, as the U.S. embroiling itself in another Vietnam-type quagmire. Who knew? Times, as you may have noticed, have changed. Even as recently as the mid-1990s, during the brief national obsession over "welfare reform," the poor were everywhere, the subject of national hand-wringing over What Was To Be Done with them. Soon thereafter, though, they vanished from the national radar screen, largely disappearing from the news but for occasional cameos on holidays (in their guise as "the needy") and as victims or perpetrators of crime. The economy remains a hot issue, of course, but even then it's framed mostly in terms of the ever-popular "middle class," by which is usually meant "people who earn as much as newspaper editors." (To get a sense of the respective size of the disparate Americas, it's worth taking a look at the so-called income pyramid, which these days resembles an impossibly tall gooseneck lamp.) When In These Times magazine, during the last presidential campaign, asked me to look at the poverty policies of the various Democratic contenders, I discovered that with few exceptions, they didn't have any - unless you count suggestions that America "restart our economic engine" as a policy. While the twin moments of Clinton's declaration of welfare-reform success and Bush's obsession with the "War on Terror" - the two "Mission Accomplished" banners, if you will - have performed the clever alchemy of making poverty disappear from the news media, it is very much intact in the real world. The end of welfare as we know it notwithstanding, reporters on the poverty beat, if there were still a poverty beat at today's downsized daily newspapers, wouldn't have to go far to find evidence of distress amidst the iPods:
If it weren't people's lives at stake, it would be funny. Actually, it is funny, and I've met plenty of welfare recipients and advocates for the poor who swap bitter stories and laugh at the absurdities of a system that would rather spend money to keep people poor than to help them escape poverty. This is, of course, exactly what the critics of "old" welfare accused it of doing. The goal of this page is to lead a weekly adventure into this bizarro world, while taking the week's headlines and exploring how they're likely to affect real, live people. (If you notice me straying into either of the two journalistic cliches for writing about the poor - spewing dry statistics, or treating human beings into walking morality tales - please drop me an e-mail and tell me to knock it off.) While I neither pretend nor aspire to be Michael Harrington, I do have some credentials for serving as tour guide: More than ten years of reporting on welfare and poverty issues for publications like In These Times, Z, Extra, and City Limits, and a long list of contacts who know the American way of poverty inside and out. My most recent essay, "You Are Dirt Here," will be appearing in an anthology of writings on the Rudy Giuliani era that is scheduled to be published later this year. See you back here, same time next week.
COMMENTS
Dear Neil, many thanks Posted by: Ann Eagan at February 17, 2005 02:08 PM I don't know the answer to this, but if you ask in an Olympic-related item over at my other website (http://www.fieldofschemes.com), someone there might. Posted by: Neil deMause at February 20, 2005 01:02 PM |
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