Feeling At Home And Uneasy In LA

I have not been writing as much because I am currently on vacation in California. I have spent the last four days in Los Angeles, a city that I have very quickly learned to like. In a weird way, I immediately felt at home here.

I grew up on the Great Plains, in Nebraska, and the sky here too is a vast, Western sky. The clouds are Western clouds. The dry, dusty air is Western air. The scrubby mountains I see in the distance are Western mountains. This is a fundamentally Western city, not oriented towards the East, but to the Pacific. Here the weather and natural elements are scary and unpredictable. The tornadoes, heat waves, and blizzards I grew up with are mirrored here by earthquakes and wildfires. In the West you can never escape the feeling that someday nature will come and just wipe you off of the map, and are reminded of the unnatural fact of your very existence in a place not fit for millions of people to live in. (Nebraska draws its life-giving water from underground, Los Angeles from rivers many miles away. Neither is ultimately sustainable.) Los Angeles is Western too in that it is a new city with people born elsewhere and a kind of haphazard construction. Nothing here feels permanent.

I have seen a lot on this trip, from the beaches of Santa Monica to the tourist traps of Hollywood to the hipster havens downtown to the rarified culture of the Getty Center. I have eaten Korean fried chicken, tacos al pastor, and a Los Feliz brunch. I've shopped at Amoeba and been to a movie at a 1920s movie palace.

As much as I have loved being here, there is something else that makes me uneasy. The contrasts between rich and poor may be even starker here than in New York, and that is saying a lot. The other day we drove through Skid Row on our way through downtown, an area of squalor so vast that it is named on the map. There were blocks of tents and people living in them. I've seen smaller tent cities all around the city in practically every neighborhood we have visited.

If the West has always symbolically represented a place of opportunity and reinvention, California is both its culmination and its dead end, since you can't pick up stakes and go further west after you've hit the ocean. In a place like this my country's failure to live up to its promises of plenty are stark. Just a few blocks from Skid Row old warehouses are being converted into microbreweries and apartments rent for astronomical prices. Come to Los Angeles, then, and see what has become of the "American Dream," both its possibilities and its limits.

Taking A Drive on Springfield Avenue

I've been working like crazy on moving this week, which has also meant saying good-bye to living in Newark and the Ironbound.  Of course, I will continue to come visit, and we won't really be living all that far away.  In fact, the fastest and most direct way to get from our new house in Maplewood to our old apartment in Newark is to take a drive down Springfield Avenue.  It's a drive that also displays the grim reality of life in America today, and can bring tears of rage to my eyes.

In Maplewood, Springfield Avenue cuts through the town's lower-middle class/working class section (where we will be living) and is lined with some humble businesses, along with a few vestiges of Maplewood's trendier sections, such as yoga studios and the like.  Crossing the border into Irvington, stores remain, but are decidedly downscale.  Liquor marts and dollar stores prevail.  Irvington, because of its relatively small size, is less well-known than Newark, but is in worse economic shape.  That's reflected in its violent crime rate, among the worst in New Jersey.  As if to grimly underscore that point, early this Christmas morning three people were killed and two wounded by a shooter outside of a strip club.

Driving through Irvington can be a frustrating experience, mostly because there is only one light with a protected left turn, despite the fact that Springfield Avenue goes through block after block of commercial zoning.  It's as if someone somewhere decided that the people who lived there weren't deserving of decent traffic flow. 

That, of course, is the least of people's worries in Irvington.  Whenever I've been there (which is where my wife's grandfather lived until his death four years ago and where she lived until age ten) I've had the feeling that it's a place abandoned by the rest of New Jersey and rest of America.  Its problems and the lives taken by them don't really seem to concern anyone else.  That feeling only grows once you cross the border from Irvington into Newark.  Springfield Avenue becomes, in places, a kind of moonscape.  Derelict buildings look ready to collapse, empty lots are choked with weeds.  It looks worse the closer you get to downtown, where there are actually weed and grass covered hills that form a barren wasteland where high-rise housing projects used to be.  

Springfield Avenue had been the city's main commercial thoroughfare until the riots of '67.  It's a little known fact that many of the businesses were not torched by rioters, but were destroyed by National Guard troops who shot up businesses owned by African Americans, who had put signs attesting to such in their windows to ward off looters.  If you drive through the worst-hit parts of Springfield Ave today, you see that devastation with over four decades of neglect added onto it.  Every time I drive through this section, the anger begins to well up inside of me.  Anger over the oppression that led to the riots in the first place, anger over the abandonment of Newark by suburban New Jerseyans and Americans alike, and anger that so few people outside of Newark seem to care.  Case in point: a recent car-jacking at the tony Short Hills Mall that ended in murder has captivated the state, but the over 90 murders in Newark this year have received scant attention outside the city's borders.  You see, a rich white person isn't "supposed" to get shot at a ritzy mall, but poor black people in Newark and Irvington are expected to get shot from time to time.  Their lives are cheap.

The drive into downtown on Springfield Avenue ends with a glimmer of hope, although it may well be false.  The area right next to downtown is getting developed, complete with shiny new apartments and an Applebee's.  It appears, however, that this is a project of gentrification, rather than regeneration.  There are a lot of attempts these days to bring young people to downtown Newark, but so little to improve the lives of native Newarkers, who have pretty much been left to fend for themselves.  With the departure of celebrity mayor Corey Booker, the little positive attention that Brick City has been getting will be cut off.  Springfield Avenue will still be devastated, and will still be the street that says more about the reality of the American Dream than any other.  

"The Socialism of Idiots"

One of my favorite political quips of all time is "anti-Semitism is the socialism of idiots," spoken by August Bebel, the leader of Germany's Social Democratic Party in the late 1800s. What he meant was that anti-Semites were blaming economic inequality on Jews rather than on the real culprit, capitalism.  These bigots understood that they were getting shafted by the system, but their hate-filled response only made matters worse.

I think a similar phenomenon is afoot today. The financial collapse of 2008 revealed the failure of laissez-faire capitalism, but in its aftermath both politicians and the masses have spent more time attacking immigrants, teachers, the poor, and public employees unions than Wall Street and its political puppets.  Unfinanced wars and tax cuts for the rich have pushed out current deficit spending to worrisome levels, but it is those battered by the recession living on food stamps who are targeted and castigated.  Instead of calling the banksters to account, teachers and other public employees have found themselves savagely assaulted in the public sphere.  

The economic elites who shorted the market, still retain their Bush era tax cuts, and are experiencing record profits could not be more pleased.  Four years after the collapse, they are still bulletproof, even when engaging in the same reckless behavior that got us here in the first place.  Case in point: Jamie Dimon's JP Morgan chase lost billions of dollars in irresponsible trading, but he was still able to go to Capitol Hill and get elected officials to kiss his ring and ass in equal measure.  That such a thing could happen no longer ceases to surprise me.  After all, it's just been revealed that London banks fixed interest rates in the biggest case of financial fraud in history, but that fact barely entered the political conversation.  

We need to get the finger pointed in the right direction before the current crisis can be resolved.  Until then, many people who are already suffering from the immoral behavior of our economic ruling class will only be made to suffer more.

The REAL Job Creators (A Bastille Day Message)

Like Mike Myers from the Halloween movies, the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy -largely responsible for our current deficit- still live to strike again despite the attempts to kill them.  Yet again, we hear from the GOP that our nation dare not raise taxes on the "job creators," which is their term for the super-rich.

This phrase is one of the perfidious Orwellian slogans preferred by the Right, almost as nefarious as "right to work."  In case you haven't heard, the wealthiest one percent of American society has seen its after-tax income increase by almost three hundred percent.  Despite the economic pain being felt by most of the population, corporate profits are soaring.  It seems that the "job creators" are doing better than ever, but they still haven't waved their magic wands and created more jobs.

The reason is simple: they make money by NOT creating jobs.  Without a strong labor movement corporations are free to make workers toil harder for less money.  They ship the jobs overseas to make more loot and pocket the difference as profit.  Giving them even more money and expecting jobs to magically appear is just about as feasible as turning lead into gold.  You would think that the experience of the last thirty years in this country would have taught our politicians this, but there's no use reasoning with ideological fanatics.  In their minds taxes on the wealthy are evil, and their plutocratic benefactors bribe them with millions in campaign donations to keep it that way.

There are real job creators in this nation, and they are regular folks like you and me.  If the average member of the middle class is doing well, they can spend money on goods and services, reducing supply and driving up demand.  The corporate overlords hoarding their dough have an incentive to hire more workers if it looks like they can move more product.

When a middle class person can afford to buy a new car, they are a job creator.  When they purchase a new home, they are a job creator.  When they can go shopping more often and spend a little more money, they are a job creator.  When they can afford to take a vacation, they are a job creator.

And not only that, government can actually create jobs more efficiently than corporations.  One thing dragging down the economy is the spate of layoffs of teachers, cops, and firefighters around the nation as state and local governments cut jobs.  The scrapping of public works projects has cuts of thousands of the "private sector" jobs that conservatives are so obsessed with "creating."  To take the money that could be used to keep these jobs or even expand them, and instead hand it over to barons of capital to throw onto their growing piles of idle lucre isn't just immoral, it's downright moronic.

On this Bastille Day, let us remember the motto of the French Revolution: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."  For too long we have neglected equality, and no true democracy that does so can long survive.