Accounts Payable

 I could see the chairs through the windows that ran the full length of the Church Street side of the laundromat .  The chairs were hard, molded plastic of assorted bright colors, and they stood on shiny legs of aluminum tubing.  The obvious function achieved by their design was to lend a splash of color to the otherwise drab laundromat while also creating, for anyone who might sit in them, sufficient discomfort to prevent lingering.

The same ethos was evident outside, where the concrete planter boxes, which also ran the length of the laundromat, had iron grille work arching over them so that no one could make the mistake of getting comfortable while perched on the edge of the box..  (People sitting there would look so unattractive to passers by, don‘t you think?)  It is perhaps the most dominate fact about the design of virtually all public spaces in the United States:  any provision of seating must be awkward to use -- either too low or too high, or lacking any back support at all -- and must be made of hard, uncomfortable materials.

I certainly knew enough not to try to rest outside.  I knew that inside would be better.  I could see that he chairs inside at least had backs and could hold a seated body upright, allowing the legs to bend and the feet to rest flat directly below the knees.  So I entered the laundromat and sat in one of the chairs.  In the moment that I sat down I realized that I could not have continued walking, could not even have stood still, without soon collapsing in a heap on the unforgiving concrete

Our bodies will do most all that we demand of them up until the moment that we relax a bit.  Then the full weight of the burden with which we have laden them seems to settle like a leaden blanket all at once, forcing us to fall inward and sometimes outward as well.  I could not understand why I was so tired.  I had walked only half the length of Dolores Park along the Church street side (from approximately Nineteenth Street to the corner of Church and Eighteenth Streets) and all downhill.  I had waited for the traffic light and had then walked only one more block along Church Street, only slightly uphill, to the laundromat at the corner of Seventeenth Street.  Yet that small effort had overwhelmed me.

The night before I had not been lucky enough to find a place to be inside.  So I had passed the night walking through the city.  Block after block, street after street, crossing dozens of unmarked borders as I moved from neighborhood to neighborhood:  Castro to Lower Haight, Lower Haight to Hayes Valley, Hayes Valley to Civic Center to SOMA and down to the Embarcadero, then circling back up through SOMA, passing the Yerba Buena Gardens and the Moscone Center, looking in the windows of the Four Seasons and the W, then walking on out through the Mission and eventually, as morning broke, returning to the Castro.

I stopped at Dolores Park, where the Mission and the Castro meet.  I had walked for seven or eight hours, both to keep warm and to avoid becoming a target for mean or desperate people -- or rats.  Then, as the sun rose, I put down my backpack and my messenger’s bag, stretched out on the grass using them as pillows, spread my coat over me like a blanket, and at last fell asleep in the warmth of the new day.

When I awoke, I was surrounded by hundreds of people.  They were enjoying the midday sun in the park, talking about work and boyfriends and girlfriends and all the rest of their busy, young, bourgeois lives.  I remember becoming conscious of their voices long before  I opened my eyes.  I lay for a long time in a dreamy and luxurious kind of lassitude, the calm brought on by complete physical exhaustion.

Lying there, I listened.  The group nearest me had at some point all been at school together and had afterward scattered around the country, most along the eastern seaboard and the Pacific coast.  Some combination of business and pleasure travel, perhaps focused on some occasion marked by their Alma Mater, had now gathered them together.  They talked about their travels and their work, and the women gossiped about relationships or the personalities of friends evidently not present at the moment.

I remember being mildly bemused at the energy and seriousness with which they discussed the ephemera of their and their friends’ lives.  I rolled my eyes inwardly at the extended analysis they made of the choices they were facing -- whether to change jobs, whether to go on vacation now or in three weeks, how and where to travel when they did -- all embellished with detail meant to manifest their own importance.

It was when I eventually roused myself from that dreamy darkness and opened my eyes that I saw the throng of twenty and thirty year olds who had the leisure to enjoy a few hours in the sun on a weekday afternoon.  I had lain unnoticed, apparently, among them, some guy who had fallen asleep in the sun.  Did they see me as homeless?  Or did my general cleanliness and neat luggage, which looked for all the world like a gym bag and a kind of briefcase, allow them to take me as one of their kind, albeit a bit older?  Eventually I stretched and stood up, shouldered my luggage, and began that short walk to Church Street and the laundromat.

Sitting at last on one of the hard plastic chairs, I knew that I would not be able to rise without help, no matter how uncomfortable I might become. I pulled my phone from my pocket and for the first time in my life dialed 9-1-1.  My memory of the wait for help is cloudy, but I know that immediately after the call ended, I felt embarrassed, thinking that I hadn’t really needed to call, that I was being weak and self-indulgent, and that the emergency resources were doubtless needed by people who at that moment were far worse off than I.  I felt as though I had called in sick to work when I was really feeling pretty good but just didn’t want to go to work that day.  I know that my stomach and bowels were also increasing distressed.  I felt nauseated and had painful cramps.

*

The kindest man I met in Bruno was Chinese, with a taut, muscular body and many tattoos.  He had been born in Shanghai and had moved to the United States as a child.  He had, he told me at one point, made some bad moves in his youth, had become active in a gang as a teenager, and as a result had spent thirteen years in prison before being released a few years before our meeting.  He had turned his life around in prison and had lived within the law after his release.  He had completed his parole and was free.

But now he had been arrested for shoplifting, and seeing the long list of crimes on his RAP sheet (Record of Arrest and Prosecution), the cops and the judge were coming down on him hard.  He told me that he had been cheated of a good part of his earnings at work and in a pique of anger, he had made his way through Nordstrom picking up lots of luxury goods and heading out of the store without paying for them.  He was very clear about his mistake and the emotional turmoil that had motivated him to make it.  He was calm and at peace with himself, though he betrayed a sorry regret at having lost his self-control.

He was a strong, self-contained, and thoughtful man, keeping to himself for the most part.  He was the only one of us who did not have to share his cell.  I would watch him doing his exercise routine in his cell while the rest of us were in the central yard, talking, watching TV, playing cards or reading.  His workouts combined elements of western calisthenics and eastern martial arts, balancing strength and poise in disciplined physical actions. 

I attribute much of his kindness toward me to two things: respect, both for my age and for my education, and sympathy for a bewildered neophyte, someone who had no experience with the regime or the society behind bars.  When he saw that I was not getting sufficient food (indeed, I was so hungry that I could not sleep at night), he shared his food with me.  He even offered to let me stay in a spare room in his house in the Sunset District if I had nowhere to go after being released.

I remember that he displayed an attitude almost of astonishment when he learned that I was close to sixty years old and had never been in jail before.  I suppose he wondered how someone who had managed to avoid a life outside the law for so long could end up at this late date in the custody of the sheriff.  I think he had a sense of the Order of Things that served as foundation for building his life.  I think he found my fate to be a sign of a fundamental disturbance in the Order of Things.  And when he learned that I had a Ph.D., he became almost agitated and began to pour energy into finding me the best deal he could from a bail bondsman and telling me repeatedly with great conviction that I would be out within twenty-four hours.  (He was right.)

I will never forget what he said about this country:  “When you live in America, you have to learn to lie.”

*

I should have remembered his wisdom when the cops questioned me in the laundromat.  How did I feel?  Sick.  Did I need to go to the hospital?  I didn’t know: (I thought they should be telling me what the best course of action would be.)  Had I been using drugs?  Well, two or three nights before I had smoked meth (one of those occasions when getting high and performing sexually with great energy were the price of shelter for the night).  But it wasn’t much and enough time had passed for it to be clear of my system.

I should have lied.  In the moment that the words left my mouth, the cops lost all concern for me.  No longer a senior citizen who was suffering from the sudden onset of illness, I was now a drug user, most likely and out-and-out addict, and therefore deserved neither sympathy nor respect.  In fact I didn’t even deserve this emergency medical response (the ambulance just then pulling up) and was nothing more than a burden on society and the refuse of the streets.

I got the same cold shoulder in the Emergency Room at San Francisco General Hospital.  I was allowed to lie on a bed in a room full of beds and patients.  One patient was apparently a heroin addict well known to the staff who did their best to calm her while deflecting her rants.  After about an hour of neglect, I was told that since they could not identify anything wrong with me, I had to leave.

I shuffled slowly out into the pre-dawn light, bent forward with the cramps in my belly, hungry and aching and most of all tired, too tired to think.  I saw a bus at the curb and boarded it, falling asleep within a few blocks.  I was awakened by the driver telling me that we were at the end of the line and I had to get off.  I lifted my eyes and saw the empty interior of the bus and outside the morning light breaking soft and gray.  We were at Ocean Beach, and the cold damp morning breeze off the Pacific woke me as I wandered slowly toward the dunes.

There I found a sheltered concavity atop the dunes, the sloping walls topped with long, swaying grasses, that was deep enough to block the wind and open enough to let the sunlight, when it finally broke through the fog, warm me and comfort me.  I don’t know how long I slept.  It was not minutes but hours.  And I slept soundly.

I woke up awash in sunlight and quiet happiness.  The sound of the sea and the wet salt in my nose made me smile.  (I have always thought of the ocean as Mother.  I was born under the sign of Pisces, after all, but I also note that the Latin word for the sea, and thus the words of all the Romance Languages, are forms of “Mare,” e.g. mer, mar.  Or should  we say these words are all forms of “Mary”, as in the Mother of God?)

I allowed myself to rest in the warmth of the sun for a time, and only when I felt a positive desire to get on with my day did I rise.  I gathered my heavy clothes, which I had taken off and then piled back on top of me as bedding, and shouldered my backpack and my messenger’s bag.  I began to walk down off the dunes, planning to stroll along the beach for a while before deciding which streetcar or bus to take back downtown.  I had not gone far at all when my bowels let go and my pants filled with shit.  The heat and the stench made me feel helpless and deeply, deeply ashamed.

I tried to find a spot in the dunes where I would be completely hidden but could not.  I eventually found a place where I would be only partially exposed and took off my shoes, socks, pants, and underwear.  The socks were least soiled so I wiped myself as best I could with them.  By now the filth was drying and the stench lessened a bit.  Then I had to put my pants on again (underwear and socks had to be trashed), knock as much sand as I could off my feet, and put on my shoes.  I still stank so badly that I felt light-headed and queasy just breathing.

I called my friend A.B., who has been a true angel throughout these dark times, and he came to pick me up.  Even having opened all three windows of his pick-up truck (two side windows and the window at the back of the cab that gives onto the bed) the air inside was horrendous.  I did my best to sit on things that would protect the seat beneath me.  A.B. took me to a friend’s apartment and I showered there.

Throughout this ordeal, I could not stop mentally lecturing both the cops and the staff at the E.R. angrily.  I longed to be standing right in front of them, close enough to violate their personal space, my right index finger stabbing the air with emphasis at every word while the stench of my diseased shit rapidly filled the entire workplace, bringing them all close to retching.

“You see?” I imagined myself saying.  “I really was sick.  You should have let me stay in the E.R. so that I could run to a toilet when I had to.  Just because I was honest about having been high a few days before, you all judged me, found me wanting, and neglected my very real medical needs.”

Of course I would never have a chance to make my speech.  And even if I did, I doubt that a single instance of speaking truth to power would actually change any of their bourgeois prejudices.  Speaking truth does not always result in anyone hearing the truth.  More often than not, no one is really listening.  Instead of hearing the argument or exposition of facts that a speaker carefully develops, most people hear only the few words that carry the greatest emotional or moral charge at the moment.  So it was that my interlocutors heard bogey-man words (“crystal meth”) and jumped to their conclusions.  I would have been more politely helped by the police and would have received better medical care if I had not been completely honest.

“When you live in America, you have to learn to lie.”

*

These days calls from collection agencies mostly make me laugh.  Mostly -- but not always.  After all, I do feel bad about being unable to pay my bills.  Even though in years past I did not always pay my bills on time, I always paid them eventually.  But when I found myself actually going broke and getting evicted three years ago, I sometimes lashed out at the caller who was trying to bully me into sending money that I did not have.

I did not want to duck the calls.  I thought that I should answer them because I believed that my creditors had a right to know what the facts of my financial situation were.  I thought that I should explain my situation so that the lender and I could work together on a course of action for the future.  I expected the caller to make notes on my account in order to make sure that when I was able to make payments again, everything would go smoothly.  Some institutions did work in this fashion, but others did not.

I remember one phone call vividly.  A woman employed by Discover Card, in Reno or Las Vegas no doubt, demanded that I send money that I did not have and then began to berate me.  “Did you think you could just buy things even though you didn’t have the money to afford them?  That’s like going into a restaurant and ordering dinner when you don’t have the money to pay for it.”

Already living in a state of panic that did not let up at any time day or night, I lit into her good.  I began, I seem to remember, with a few choice four-letter words casting aspersions on her humanity.  Then I told her that when I had made the purchases on my card, I had every reason to believe that I would be able to make the payments.  I explained that circumstances had changed and that now I was not able to make the payments which I had fully intended to make.  (No kidding circumstances had changed:  this was in late 2008 or early 2009.)

“But some of these charges date back only a month or less.  How could you think you had the right to do that?  Did you think you could get away with that kind of fraud?”

“I guess you have never been hungry,” I replied sarcastically.  When I continued, I lowered my voice and spoke at a measured pace while also forcing each word out through clenched jaw so that the effect might be something like hearing a furnace or boiler slowly building up greater and greater heat, greater and greater pressure, thus igniting the listener’s anxiety as to what magnitude of explosion might be about to erupt.

“When you are running out of money,” I said, “you still pay your bills and rent and things until the very last.  And you do what you must, using every tool you can, to keep eating and to stay in your house.”  I knew that the words were reasonable, but I hoped that what she really heard would be the barely contained fury seething beneath them.  I think I ended by expressing my fondest hope that she would become homeless and find herself starving some day soon so that she might understand what life is really like.

Then I hung up on her.

Well, low and behold, what should I get one day last week but a call from the San Francisco City Government, Bureau of Delinquent Revenue, demanding that I pay over $1200 for an ambulance ride a year ago.  At first I thought it might be the ride I had when my detached retina needed emergency surgery, but the wheedling bully on the other end of the call soon supplied enough detail to remind me that the cops at the laundromat had called an ambulance to take me to General.

I was casually letting her know that she could demand anything she wanted but that she could not, as they say, squeeze blood out of a stone.  Then I heard her say something that flipped my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder switch from “Bumbling Along in Everyday Mode” to “You Dare to Attack and Belittle Me Like This and I Will Rip Your Tongue Out and Jam It Down Your Throat to Shut You Up Mode.”

She said,  “That’s like going into a restaurant and ordering dinner when you don’t have the money to pay for it.”

My wrath erupted in a lahore of molten rock and boiling mud, carrying within it the remains of half a dozen villages that had previously graced the slopes of the volcano but which now slammed into her mangled body.  But the witch would not give up.  In fact she again disrespected me with a taunt:  “Who pays for the phone you are using right now?”

This time I maintained control of myself and the situation with a split-second decision to tell her that I got my phone through the California State “Access” service, which provides poor people with voice and text services, subject to reasonable limits, for $5.00 a month because my only income is General Assistance..

The entire conversation changed abruptly.  She informed me that if I brought a certain document from the County showing the amount of my monthly income, she would see what she could do to eliminate the bill.

The truth is that I have a simple no frills “Dumb Phone” from  ATT. (i.e., it has no internet capability and so is not a “Smart Phone”) which costs me $65 a month.  I know about the state program but have not taken advantage of it.

“When you live in America, you have to learn to lie.”

*

One evening last week I watched “Check Please, Bay Area,” a show produced by the local public television station in which three “ordinary San Franciscans” (i.e.,  well-heeled bourgeois) each recommend a favorite restaurant, and the other two go check it out.  The three sit at a round table and discuss their dining experiences with a perky blonde hostess.  All four drink wine throughout the show.  The hostess flaunts her expertise as a connoisseur of wines.

[I have to say that in my ‘hood, the TL, the blonde would be just another drunk and would be treated off-handedly at best.  She would probably be required to attend harm-reduction or abstinence meetings three or four times a week as a condition of having housing.]

I cannot watch the show without fantasizing about the episode on which I would appear, the one that reviews St. Anthony’s Dining Room, the meals served at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, and the frozen meals distributed by Project Open Hand.

On the episode that aired the other night, one of the guests, a black woman who works in an office near Civic Center, recommended the Turk and Larkin Deli.  She must be a conscientious and reliable worker, for she has eaten lunch at the Turk and Larkin Deli for thirty years and must therefore have managed to keep her job in the Civic Center area for that length of time.  She was one of the few guests I have seen on the show who was clearly no higher than solidly middle-class and was also refreshingly down to earth.  She emphasized both the quality of the food and the economical prices.

Both of the other guests loved the food and the atmosphere in the restaurant itself.  One of them, however, doubted that he would return because the neighborhood was dangerous.  I kept thinking that he should be embarrassed to say what he said.  This guest, an accountant (Strike One) for a pharmaceutical company (Strike Two -- and in this case “You’re out!”), got me riled up.  It was only natural that my hackles should rise as I heard him disrespect my ‘hood.  But my reaction went beyond that.

First, I felt that he was  making a fool of himself.  This fellow was a tall, sturdy young man without a hint of weakness or even effeminacy in his bearing.  Nothing about him would mark him as a target.  Keep in mind also that he was going to the Deli to eat lunch, which means that he was walking in broad daylight, and that the Deli is but two short blocks from the huge Civic Center, which includes the Asian Art Museum, the Main Library, City hall, and State and Federal office buildings, all of which are heavily guarded.

My second reaction was bafflement as to why he would have thought or, more accurately, have felt himself to be a target for any kind of malfeasance.  (By the way, the other guests and the hostess clucked and “Awwww”ed sympathetically as he spoke.  I was pissed that nobody argued against him.)

I reminded myself that he was an accountant and therefore probably wildly overcautious about most everything in his life, but his annoying disparagement of my home would not let me end there..  I wanted to tell him to get in touch with reality.  I have said countless times to friends and acquaintances who ask me about the safety of the Tenderloin that unless you have recently burned somebody in a bad drug deal, or are so intoxicated that you start picking fights with the other drunks and the crack-heads you encounter, you really aren’t important enough to notice.  Folks around here wouldn’t have given Mr. Fraidy-cat Big-pharma Numbers-cruncher a second glance, let alone a second thought.  He -- and you -- just aren’t worth bothering about.

I was then led to the obvious question:  what makes these honkeys think they’re important enough for a stranger to go to the trouble of doing whatever it is they are so afraid of?  My neighbors know that throwing a punch is as likely as not going to land them in jail, especially if you do it at noon just two or three blocks from City Hall, and they just don’t do it.  The bourgeoisie must think that they appear to us po’ fo’ as magically powerful presences whose manna we would want to get from them by violence.  The egos!  The delusions of grandeur!

Or could it be, I then found myself wondering, that they project hostility on us because they feel guilty?  Perhaps they feel fearful because their unconscious minds, their moral consciences, tell them that their privileged and luxurious way of life comes at the cost of the suffering of the poor.  Perhaps hidden somewhere deep in their shallow souls they hear the knocking and banging of wood on iron as the wheels of the tumbrels bounce and lurch along the street, laden with them and their kind, standing awkwardly with their hands tied behind their backs, approaching the huge open square in front of City Hall, where the already wet blade of the guillotine is being hoist once again and the latest severed head, having been shown to the crowd, is being tossed into the dumpster behind the platform.

*

Later that evening the same station broadcast a show about statistics.  A Norwegian professor enthused about the ways that statistics can be used to improve your lives.  He named San Francisco as a place where high-tech innovations are making statistical information available to the general public in easy to use “apps.”  He cited with get excitement the availability from the City of maps showing the locations of all reported crimes.

He showed us video of someone driving down Jones Street, a block from where I sit writing this essay, from Nob Hill to “the flats,” i.e., the Tenderloin, with his GPS device showing the surrounding blocks peppered with tags at various addresses naming the kinds of crime reported at each.  I watched closely wondering whether I would recognize any of the pedestrians they were driving past -- or even catch a glimpse of myself!  But I was disappointed.  The professor bubbled over with a naïve glee at what he took as a matter of citizens being able to live better by avoiding dangerous areas.  He thought that such information would stir people to become active citizens and to press their government to improve the life of the polis.  I just saw another way for people to avoid encountering those of their fellow human beings who might need their help.  It struck me as inhumane. 

The ride down Jones Street was followed by a glimpse of a professor at Stanford University who believes that he has found a way to measure human happiness using the internet.  He is studying human happiness by mining data from blogs, tweets, Facebook pages, etc., and quantifying how many times people call themselves, “happy’ or “better” or “good,” on the one hand, and how many times they refer to being “down” or “not feeling well” or “sad,” on the other.  Leaving aside the obvious problem that the messages he counts are consciously crafted to present a desirable image of the writer to her family, her friends, and the world at large, the idea that the narcissistic self-disclosures coming from the richest segment of our society are good evidence of the society‘s well-being is not only absurd but completely lacking in any moral sense. 

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members."
~ Mahatma Ghandi

*

I have said since I was in high school that we live in a Dark Age.  The 20th (and now the 21st) century, at least in this country, has nothing in common with the Athens of Pericles, the England of Elizabeth I, or the Italy of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Galileo.  Our times have seen the mechanization of human life, a wholesale rejection of nuance, the deification of the individual ego, and inconceivably brutal violence on a planetary scale.  Our physics has become as convoluted and counter-intuitive as any 13th-century theologians catalogue of the hierarchies of Seraphim, Cherubim, et al.

I would guess that little or nothing we have done will stir the imaginations of future generations.  Our devotion to scientific explanation and technological salvation will be rightly described with the attitude we ourselves use when we speak of the medieval debate as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  I can hear T.S. Eliot’s voice lamenting our “the information Age”:

The wisdom lost in knowledge

The knowledge lost in information

The Great Experiment, Part One

What might a group of ordinary Europeans, given no government and a vast continent to despoil, achieve?

John Locke (1632 to 1704) described the individual human mind as a “blank slate” (“tabula rasa”) at birth, rather like an unsettled continent.  He believed that an individual’s knowledge consisted entirely of information printed on his or her mind by the experiences of his or her lifetime.  In Locke’s view, we are all very much like personal computers before networking:  the contents of each mind consists only of data entered by life on that unit’s hard drive.  No Platonic “soul-knowledge” carried with us at birth.  No mysterious perceptions of an “extra-sensory” origin.  In this regard he is just picking up where Rene Descartes (1596 to 1650), who said “I think; therefore I am”, left off.

The image of this Cartesian world that comes most freely to my mind is one of a group of bathyspheres, each containing one person, bobbing and swaying gently in the undersea currents, each emitting little lines of bubbles, the absolute silence of the ocean depths allowing no direct communication between submariners, each of  whom communicates with the others by peering through the thick glass of the circular window of his or her bathysphere trying to see through the thick glass on each of the other bathyspheres to determine whether anyone inside them is waving or trying to make hand signals or mouthing words.  Communication between us is thus in effect a heavily handicapped version of charades.

Frederick Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) said that Descartes’s error was a mistake of grammar. Given an action, a verb, language must have a noun, a subject performing the action.  But the existence of thought does not necessarily presuppose a thinker, a single, unified “I” doing the thinking.  After all, the wise man continued, we say “Lightning strikes,” but there is no “Lightning” floating around up in the clouds waiting for the moment to “strike.”  All that exists is the flash, the discharge of energy in the atmosphere.  Thought, Nietzsche suggested, is like lightning.

Sigmund Freud (1856 to 1939) said that he got all of his ideas from two or three remarks of Nietzsche’s.  One of his most important ideas was that much thinking comes from sources we would not call “I” (or, to use Descartes’s word “Ego”) but from what Freud called the “Unconscious Mind.”

But what if the sea were not an obstacle to thought but the very medium of its communication?  What if the thoughts we hear in our heads were not different from the sounds we hear in our ears?  If it is not “I” who thinks, why might it not be “we”?  Why do we think that we hear only our own thoughts and not the thoughts of those around us?  What if we are all swimming about in a “stream of consciousness”?

*

Most people today still believe in some version of the Cartesian myth, which would be a comic instance of the folly of our philosophies had it not given rise to a culture of narcissism, bad governance, and moral corruption.  I take a personal interest in one particular permutation of a society that has taken Locke‘s idea of the tabula rasa“ seriously.

The custom of imprisoning criminals in order to “correct” the programming etched on the circuit boards of their minds by unfortunate life experiences has given rise to a corrupt, idiotic, inhumane, impractical, and vicious subculture of judicial and security institutions that actually cause crime to increase and lives to be wasted.  Jails and prisons breed criminals more successfully even than poverty, failed educational systems, bigotry, and the sadism that defines American culture.  (See Bruno.)

*

In the 18th century, the intellectual movement we call “The Enlightenment” inspired even country gentlemen, like those who owned plantations in the “New World,” to ask whether the individual man wouldn’t be better off if he ignored the traditional thinking that comprised most of his education and instead relied more exclusively on his own experiences, on the facts that he observed, for his understanding of the “real world.”  “Experiments,” that is, carefully manipulated and controlled experiences, would replace the authority of wisdom handed down from past generations, and the world would be understood anew.

If a man could see that the ground beneath him consisted of layers of rock laid down over millennia and that the fossils found in each of the different layers showed the progressive development of the current variety of life forms on the planet, shouldn’t he reject the Biblical account of creation and believe instead the record of evolution recorded in the earth itself?  If people weren’t born bad or made that way by Satanic forces of Evil, but were pushed into crime by the experiences of poverty, denial of education, and a corrupt social environment, shouldn’t they be housed in Correctional Institutions which could take away their names, separate them from bad company, in effect wipe that slate as clean as it had been at birth, and then re-educate them to live as law-abiding, prosperous, and beneficial members of society?  And if the prejudices and lies of religious traditions had caused so much war and suffering through history, wouldn’t that State be best which divorced itself from religion and held purely secular power?

So it was that a great sociological experiment called “The United States” or, more commonly, “America,” began in the late  17th and early 18th centuries.  The question with which I began this post was answered by this experiment.  The achievements realized include the virtual extermination of the few humans already occupying the North American Continent; the destruction or near-destruction of all ecosystems on that continent and even across the globe; the ruthless domination of people everywhere and anywhere in order to take their natural resources and bind them in economic servitude; the military conquest of the whole world by often unimaginably brutal means, such as the use of atomic weapons against civilian populations; and the creation of a nation whose people suffer from depression, anomie, and suicidal fixations.  Mass murders become commonplace, as does the fatalistic belief that nothing can be done to prevent them.  And the most horrendous murderers occupy the highest offices, wrapped in the trappings of religious piety and ending every public statement with the words “God Save America.”

God save Humanity from America!

And God Save America from itself! 

R.L.S.

After nine days in bed with the flu, and a tenth only partially out of bed, I am finally well enough to come before you again.

The seventh of those days, Friday the 25th of October, marked the 102nd anniversary of my father’s birth.  A number of things made the occasion a melancholy one for me.  My illness and resulting exhaustion of course depressed my spirits.  So too did the realization that I felt grateful that neither he nor my mother was alive to see where my life had led me.  To miss beloved parents and grieve their loss while aware of feeling relieved by their absence is another measure of what I have referred to above as “The Distance.” Happy are they who need not feel that particular kind of shame.

*

I discovered some months ago a reference in my father’s memoirs to “RLS” (Robert Louis Stevenson) as his hero.  Not knowing the man’s work, other than “Treasure Island", which my father read to us children over the course of two weeks one summer vacation.  When we had finished dinner, we continued to sit at the table while mother cleared the dishes, wrapped the leftovers, and cleaned up the kitchen.  Dad would read a chapter or two each night at that time.  If we were very lucky, and if the tale had reached such a crisis that our excitement might keep us from falling asleep, he would read more.  These evenings took place at Lake Tahoe, in a cabin which my father rented every summer from one of the secretaries in his office.

Such were the joys of living without television, computers, video games, handheld devices, and all the rest of the electronic gadgets that are trashing our relationships as well as  our minds.

It has only been in the years since my father’s death that I have learned a couple of things about him that are wrapped up with this memory.  One is that as a young man my father he chose to do volunteer work reading to blind people.  While in High School and after, he would visit these folks in their homes and read to them whatever they wanted to hear -- newspapers, books, magazines, et cetera.  And while I had known that he majored in journalism at U.C. Berkeley, it was not until I began to do some research into the life of his great-grandfather that I understood his (and thus my) literary bent as most probably genetic:  his mother’s grandfather, whom she idolized, had been an owner and publisher of newspapers in northern California and the Nevada Territory throughout the second half of the nineteenth century..

But back to Stevenson.  Curious about what kind of writer my father would have so admired, I looked for anything of his that I could find at the Goodwill Store on Mission at Van Ness.  I bought two volumes, one a copy of “Treasure Island” (which I re-read with joy) and the other a collection of essays and reviews.  In an essay on “The Profession of Letters”, I found the quotation below.  In it I recognized much of my father’s character. The humane values and the tone of this passage, and of Stevenson’s work generally,  his voice both congenial and charitable, justify my father’s -- indeed, anyone’s -- admiration.

“Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the course of a year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating.  We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind.”

Few voices in our day can be heard saying such a thing.  Today the Religion of  Markets declares that if a thing is valuable to mankind, mankind will bid up its price.  Our political debate, especially on the subject of taxes, declares people will not do a thing if they cannot make money, a practically unlimited amount of money at that, by doing it.  People argue seriously that any reduction in the money to be earned from a given activity will cause people to cease performing it.  Motives such as pride of workmanship and of innovation, honor and self-respect, concern for the well-being of others or of the natural environment, and all values other than the purely mercenary are assumed to be trumped by the question of wages.

Do you know how much Jonas Salk raked in for inventing the polio vaccine that virtually eradicated a disease that had crippled and killed millions every year around the world? Nothing.  He had found a way to rid humanity of much suffering, and his pride in that accomplishment and the knowledge that he had honorably performed a service for humanity were enough for him.

So too Theodore Geisel, “Dr. Seuss”, was offered a million dollars for the rights to make a movie of his book “The Cat in the Hat.”  His attorney said, “You will go down in history as the first person ever to be paid a million dollars for the rights to a book.”  Geisel answered, “I’d rather go down in history as the first man who turned down a million dollars.”

Geisel thought that children who had seen the story in a movie would be less likely to take the effort of reading it for themselves in book form.  Since Geisel wrote books for children because he wanted children to learn to read and to love reading, he thought that anything that might interfere with that purpose was not worth any amount of money. Indeed, it has always been the case that writers have written because they thought that what they had to say was worth the trouble of saying it -- certainly not because they thought writing was the surest way to get rich.

So it is with me.

Thanks, Dad.

The Philosopher of San Francisco, Part Two

The Portuguese are migrating to Mozambique.  One man invested $1.5 million (the price of a middle class house in San Francisco) in a restaurant business and now employs 100 people. A Portuguese woman has begun exporting the handmade scarves worn by Mozambiquan women.  This morning’s report on CCTV cited high unemployment and high taxes in Portugal as the emigrants' primary motives.

African economies are among the fastest growing in the world, many expanding by 7% or more annually, but their people continue to live in poverty.  In fact, rates of poverty have remained unchanged  or even increased.  South Africa’s unemployment rate is 27%.  It is the economic powerhouse of the continent.  Many foreign companies have well established businesses there.  CCTV reports that French businessmen are there en masse this week for a business development conference.  Yet the rate of poverty among South Africa’s people has actually increased over last year’s rate.

This anomaly -- an increase in economic progress being met with a corresponding increase in poverty -- sparked Henry George’s work in economic theory, first fully set forth in “Progress and Poverty” and published in 1879.  George had come to San Francisco from his native Philadelphia, where he had not been able to find work that was both remunerative and at the same time meaningful to him.  After working in a relative’s dry goods business for a time, he found his calling as a newspaper reporter, editor, and, eventually, owner and publisher of newspapers.  He wrote skillfully, truthfully, and with a passionate sense of justice for all.

One day he was out riding his horse in the hills above Oakland, taking in the expansive views of the entire San Francisco Bay.  (My grandmother’s grandfather published “The Oakland Daily News” in Oakland from 1871 to 1877, and I like to think that he and Henry George were at least acquaintances, if not friends.)  Rounding the flank of a hill, George came across a teamster busy repairing a broken axle on his wagon, his horses idly munching the grass to one side.

The newspaperman had been contemplating the rapidly expanding cities and the throng of ships on the bay, their masts a huge forest taking the place of the now eradicated redwood and oak forests that had covered these denuded hills a mere decade before.  He asked the teamster, “How much is the land here worth?” to which the laboring man replied, “I got no idea what’s worth.  But there’s a man down there,” waving a hand covered in black axle grease in the general direction of a small farm lower down the slope, “who’ll sell you an acre for a thousand dollars.”

That teamster’s remark held the kernel of what would become the life work, first in his thoughts and then in his writings, of Henry George.  The difference between the value and the price of land, the fact that a single man had the authority to dispose of acres and acres of land at his discretion, and the inherent motivation to leave land unused while awaiting a higher price, explained why economic development was bringing poverty to the Golden State.

George had observed in his short time here that there had been no poverty in California when he first arrived, at least what might be called “urban poverty.”  The rural poor may have tattered clothing and few possessions, but they have clothing, food, and a home in which to sleep.  The poor people whose fate so weighed on George lived by contrast in abject misery, the children begging for food and eating out of garbage bins, the women forced into prostitution, the men hopeless, staring blankly on the filth and degradation in which they and their families were mired.  The lives of these people and the economic conditions that led to such ruin could not be explained.  Shouldn't the growth of a huge city, the arrival of trading ships laden to the Plimsoll line with goods from around the world, and the opening of the trans-continental railroad bringing the wealth and power of the United States to this place have improved the living conditions of even the poorest folks?  Why was there not, in Ronald Reagan’s phrase, a “trickle down” effect?  Why didn't the tide lift all ships?

The teamster’s remark led George to realize that “progress” increased the incentive for landowners to make the resource they controlled scarce and thereby to increase rents.  He also realized that there is no need for private ownership in land.  The institution amounts to nothing more than a monopoly granted by the State to individuals who can thereby enrich themselves without labor, without making any contribution at all to the society.  Landlords themselves he compared to the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Maharajahs of India as a parasitic class of people who extort their riches from the working class and employ men at arms and entire judicial systems to keep the oppressed subservient, to prevent revolution.  It is this system that causes poverty.

George believed that no one should escape the duty of working to benefit his fellow citizens by virtue of holding “title” -- a designation on paper created and enforced by the State.  You are entitled to own anything  you make or anything you can get by trading what you have made with someone else.  If you build a house, you can own that house, but you cannot own the land under it.  If you plant a crop on a piece of open land and harvest it, you have full ownership of that harvest.

George showed that it is labor that creates capital, not capital that creates jobs.  Reagan’s lie that  tax cuts for the rich would spur job growth has been decidedly disproved, despite the fact that the business media and politicians still cite the idea as unquestionable truth.  So too George laid to rest the idea that immigrants impoverish a nation’s citizens by taking up resources that would be available for the native born.  “Every mouth arrives in this world with two hands,” he liked to say.  The result of immigration is increased economic growth and more goods for everyone.

I find myself wondering most every day how George’s ideas would play out if implemented in this country now.  In fact, these imaginings are the raw material for my next novel.  In it I also imagine the magical transportation of Jose Cornelio Bernal, holder of a land grant (first Spanish and later Mexican) making him owner of a full quarter of what is now San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the world.  When the Americans took California from the Mexicans, his family lost ownership of the land, though after decades of battling their way through the American judicial system, they ultimately won:  the Supreme Court upheld the validity of their claim.  But by then they had either sold it all to pay lawyers or had seen it foreclosed on by lenders.  (The first to foreclose having been one William Tecumseh Sherman, who would later visit a terrorist campaign of violence and plunder on the Confederate States as he burned his way to the sea.)

Of course, now-a-days, Bernal would have no choice but to find work in the Mission as an undocumented alien.  From there he could watch the civic turmoil wrought by rising housing costs and reflect on the justice or injustice of what had been, he thought, his rightful prerogative and a birth-right he would hand down to his children and their children, the private ownership of land.

But that tale will have to wait for now . . . .

The Philosopher of San Francisco

At 9:0AM yesterday, the court dismissed the case against me at the request of the District Attorney, who said that she could not “sustain the burden” of proof “due to a lack of corroboration.”  So ended fourteen months of anxiety and hardship (difficulty finding work, inability to find permanent housing) caused when MRM walked into the Ingleside Police Station and filed a false police report.  He did not even have to show up for any of the court dates – approximately one every three weeks during that period.  He knew that if he accused me of physical violence and said the magic words (I am afraid of him) I would be arrested.  And he gets away with it all.

The “Justice” system.

*

I now begin a new phase, the second phase, of this work.  I started writing this blog just over six months ago and became somewhat entangled in a need I felt to identify myself and the circumstances of my current life to establish my bona fides for my reader.  I have no idea whether that project is complete or was successful, but my muse, a stern mistress, drives me on.  A friend of mine chided me last month for my failure to deliver on the promise of advocating for social justice and exposing inequities in our unacknowledged class system.  So by way of a mid-course correction, let me tell you how I came to upon the quotation from Tolstoy that stands at the head of this work.

In the summer of 1977 or 1978, I stopped at a used book store in New Hampshire.  As I browsed the selection, a copy of "Progress and Poverty" by Henry George caught my eye.  I had heard of George and his economic philosophy while studying Ezra Pound with Hugh Kenner at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.  I picked the book up and noticed that among the "blurbs" of praise printed on the dust jacket were quotations from Helen Keller and from Leo Tolstoy.  The praise offered was unequivocal:  Tolstoy said that George’s ideas were so fundamentally sound and so clearly presented that no one who read his work could fail to accept their truth.

I marveled at the fact that a work admired by such seminal figures should have become relatively unknown in the intervening years.  I bought the book, but I did not actually open it and begin to read until sometime between 2005 and 2008, about thirty years later.  It was then that I discovered that the thrust of George’s teaching was that the grinding poverty we see in modern societies results from the private ownership of land.  Henry George held that we would not see real social justice until we abolish the private ownership of land, and he supported his arguments with both rigorous philosophical integrity and with convincing historical scholarship.  Once I knew the essence of his teaching I understood completely why his ideas have been ignored and his books forgotten, at least in these United States.

In his own time, George was called “The Philosopher of San Francisco” much as Warren Buffet is today called “The Sage of Omaha.”  He was an autodidact economic philosopher who made his living as a newspaper man in nineteenth-century San Francisco, and he was  regarded highly enough to come close to being elected the Mayor of New York City.  His ideas were encoded in the laws of Ireland and of Australia, both of which were shaping major land-reform legislation during his lifetime.  But the ruthless and rapacious forces of capitalism have dominated his own country, my country, from his time through mine, and so once again the prophet is rejected in his own land.  It is estimated that 100,000 people attended his funeral.

My interest in George had been sparked in part by Tolstoy’s admiration for him, yet I also had little real knowledge of Tolstoy.  I had read only a short story or two of the Russian master’s work.  I knew about "War and peace" and "Anna Karenina" but had not read either one.  And I had not even heard of "Resurrection" until I was listening to NPR one day last winter and heard it recommended by George Saunders.  Having recently experienced the reality of incarceration myself, I checked the book out of the library and read it in a few days.

"Resurrection" tells the story of a man whose encounter with the reality of courts and prisons changes him materially, psychologically, and spiritually.  The hero, Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov, finds himself sitting on a jury in the trial of a prostitute for murder.  He recognizes her as his aunt's maid, with whom he had an affair while a young student, dismissing her casually with a bank note as he went on to military service.  He realizes that it is he who caused her suffering, and when she is sentenced to fifteen years in Siberia, he resolves to give up all he has and follow her into exile.  The novel tells the story of their journey to Siberia, in the course of which the Prince sees the full range of human misery and depravity thriving within the prison system.

I will have more to say about Tolstoy’s ideas about criminal courts and prison systems in the future, but for now I must mention another element of the novel.  At the beginning, Prince Nekhlyudov is leading a life that is meaningless to him and thus also a life lacking any real pleasure and providing no sense of self-worth.  Ironically, his discovery of his own guilt, his sinful nature, restores to him the sense of purpose and pleasure in life that he had as a youth and ultimately brings him both great peace and great joy.  And one of his greatest joys comes from the one thing which he thought at first would be so hard that he almost gave up the whole project:  giving his estate to the peasants who work the land.

He discovers the proper way to do this so as to benefit the entire community without merely shifting the role of landlord from himself to someone else, who would then necessarily exploit the peasants as much as he had.  He finds the answer in reading “Progress and Poverty” by Henry George, and he follows George’s prescription for true economic justice:  the land will be held in common by the entire community of peasants, and the rent that they would have paid to him or any other landlord they will pay instead to an account set up for the benefit of the entire community.  This is George’s idea of the “Single Tax”, a tax of 100% on all land rents, the proceeds of which are used to finance all the necessary functions of government, e.g., to build roads and other infrastructure and to provide education, health care, and other necessities of life for all citizens.

Check out the Wikipedia article on Henry George – and then read his books!