Turning Chinese, Part Two

One of my favorite anecdotes concerning modern China dates back to 1972 when President Nixon visited China and met with Zhou Enlai, the Premier of the communist state.  Though the exact exchange between the two men is disputed, the story is too delicious not to tell.

While walking about the grounds of the Forbidden City, Nixon is said to have asked Zhou what impact he thought the French Revolution (1789) had had on Western Civilization.  Zhou replied, “It is too early to tell.”

Even if this exchange did not take place exactly as I have told it (some who were present argue that Zhou thought Nixon was referring to the student riots in France in 1968), its widespread repetition and acceptance indicate at least the prevailing belief in the West that the Chinese take a much longer-term view of things than do we Americans.  We seem not to think or strategize much beyond the end of the current fiscal year (for the government) or, worse, the fiscal quarter (for private enterprise).

A few days ago I heard a lecture broadcast on our local public radio station, KALW.  It was a program from Alternative Radio, one of the very few sources of truly independent thinking about politics and social issues available today.  Richard Wolf was giving a talk entitled “Naked Capitalism”.  In the course of his talk, Wolf explained the fallacy underlying the idea of efficiency.

Efficiency, he said, is the idea that in deciding a course of action, one should weigh the costs entailed against the benefits to be gained.  This method of making a choice sounds rational but it is, in reality, a chimera.  No one can ever know all of the consequences to come from any proposed action.  Unintended consequences will, in fact, always far outnumber the intended ones.  Like the French Revolution, every action continues to have consequences ad infinitum.   So a “cost/benefit analysis” (which is, I learned in training to be a stock broker, a standard sales tool) can never be complete and is not a formula for making choices.

Remember DDT?  Eradicating mosquitoes and bed bugs, which carry disease and are annoying pests, seemed like a great idea to those who thought they could actually calculate ahead of time the costs and benefits of killing the bugs with DDT.  Few imagined the environmental disaster that DDT would end up causing.  Most people did not even see that disaster unfolding all around them until Rachel Carson published “The Silent Spring” in 1962.

This afternoon I awoke to another voice of reason, conscience, and knowledge telling me things that I did not know.  I had barely opened my eyes when I turned on KALW and heard the last 15 minutes of another broadcast from Alternative Radio, “Community Rights”.  This program was a talk given by Paul Cienfuegos.  I caught only the end of the question and answer period but was stunned by hearing a number of things entirely new to me.  In particular I learned that many federal laws that provide for what we take to be “rights”, including civil rights and the new health care system, are grounded in a single clause in the constitution, the interstate commerce clause.  I also learned that the conservative members of the current Supreme Court are looking for ways to redefine that clause to limit its scope in such a way as to render health care and federally mandated civil rights unconstitutional.

Again I wanted not only to hear the rest of the talk but to tell you to listen to it too.  (I have found that the Alternative Radio website at http://www.alternativeradio.org/ offers transcripts of its programs for only $3.00, a price even I can afford.)

I had two other thoughts as well.  One thought concerned my speculation that the United States is quickly – at least in historical terms – going the way of the old Soviet Union.  That is, the central government having bankrupt itself, the constituent republics or states will start to go their own ways as each struggles to establish full and competent government of its territories and population.

I have seen what I consider to be the beginning of this transformation take place over the last ten years or so.  In 2006 Governor Schwarzenegger signed an environmental protocol with Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain, thereby arrogating to the State of California a power specifically reserved for the Federal government under the Constitution, namely the power to make foreign treaties and alliances.  Similarly the assertion by a number of states of the power to legalize marijuana despite the federal government’s classification of the plant as an illegal substance provides another example of the Federal government’s impotence and irrelevance.

Beginning with Barry Goldwater (nominated for President by a Republican convention here in San Francisco just fifty years ago today) and flourishing under the Reagan regime, the conservative movement has sought to render Washington powerless, most effectively by making it bankrupt.  It is time to recognize that they have succeeded.  The United Staes of America is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

And here on the radio I heard the sound of its successor – or more properly successors – being born.  The Community Rights movement is the ultimate grass-roots assertion of authority by the people themselves, rejecting the federal government established by the Constitution.  If the world born out of the collapse of the US is anything like the one envisioned by Cienfuegos, the Republicans may come to rue the unintended consequences of their actions over the past half century.

The other thought I had was about the medium through which I encountered these ideas.  I thought about how much more I get when I turn on the radio than when I launch my browser and go online.

Radio gives me the unexpected.  When I turn on the radio, I have no idea what I am going to hear.  Day after day I hear voices that I would never have sought out and learn things that I would never have known were there to learn about.  The internet is a reference:  when I want to know about a subject, a search engine will retrieve a huge number of sources from which I can learn about my subject.  Radio, on the other hand, is a teacher:  when I turn on the radio, I hear about subjects which I had not previously imagined discussed and explained by intelligent and informed people.

Even when I went to the Alternative Radio website, I would not have known to click on the program called “Community Rights”.  The speaker’s name meant nothing to me, and neither did the title.  But when I turned the radio on before getting out of bed, I heard ideas and information that were wholly new to me and which I immediately recognized as true and truthfully important.  Knowing that I wanted to learn about “Community Rights”, I could then use the internet to gather the information I sought.  But it was radio that taught me that the subject was there to learn about.

Thank you, Mr. Marconi.

Forty Thousand People

San Francisco has a preeminent place in the history of the labor movement.  Men and women who fought – literally – for the right to form unions and bargain with management collectively overcame the combined forces of capital and the state in this city.  Their story is long and rich and powerful.  And after posting my thoughts yesterday, I found my mind dwelling on them throughout my shift, through the afternoon and evening and on into the night.

I knew that I wanted to spend the few minutes I have her today to tell you about one moment in that history.  I knew that I wanted to tell you about Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise.  When I took my dinner break, I looked up the events I am about to relate in order to get the details right.  I saw that what happened took place on the fifth day of July, which was also yesterday’s date.  Those men were on my mind constantly throughout what was the eightieth anniversary of their deaths.

Up until the development of containerized shipping, the cargo on board every ship that docked in every port had to be off-loaded by individual men picking up and carrying each item (crates, barrels, furniture, etc.) off the ship and onto the dock.  The sailors operated the ship itself, but all cargo was handled by men who worked along the shore.  These men came to be called ’long shore men.

I know that you have not had time to read the novels I mentioned in my last post, but I hope that by the time you read my next post you will have purchased at least one of them – or checked it out of the library.  You cannot understand life in the industrialized world without understanding the position of working people vis a vis their employers.  Steinbeck’s novels will teach you that truth – and they will enrich your heart and advance your understanding of the nobility of the human spirit.

In the early 1930s, unemployment in the United States reached 25%.  One out of every four people you passed on the street had no income, no way to pay rent, to buy food, or to pay for any of the other necessities of life.  As a result, employers could and did cut wages lower and lower and lower.  Many did not pay their workers enough to live on, and in addition drove them relentlessly to work harder. 

You and I cannot imagine what it was to live through those times.  We find the tensions between the haves and the have-nots today bad enough, but they pale in comparison to the hostility that grew steadily on both sides during the Great Depression.  By 1933 the coal miners, then the sailors, then the longshore men began spontaneously to organize themselves into unions to demand better wages and better working conditions from their employers.  As for the employers, they had the police and military force of the government, their own private armies of “security” companies such as Pinkertons, and squads of vigilantes on their side.  Tense stand-offs boiled over into violence on many occasions, one of which was “Bloody Thursday” on San Francisco’s Embarcadero.

Since early May, every port on the west coast of the United States had been shut down by strikers.  Not a single piece of fruit, not a vegetable, and no manufactured products of any kind was shipped out of Seattle, Portland, Everett, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Pedro, Oakland, San Francisco or any other port.  The police attacked strikers with tear gas, special vomiting gas, and finally with guns.  On July 5, 1934, Howard Sperry was shot by a policeman at Steuart and Mission Streets.  He later died of his wounds.  About the same time and only a short distance away, in front of a kitchen the strikers had set up to feed their men, Nick Bordoise, an out of work cook who was helping out as a volunteer, was also shot and killed.

Two days later, on Saturday the 7^th, two plain wooden coffins containing the bodies of Howard and Nick were loaded on wagons and drawn by horses at a solemn pace from the Ferry Building up Market Street to Valencia.  Forty Thousand people – union men, the families of the dead, and many who joined spontaneously as the procession made its way up the great thoroughfare – marched in uniform rows, eight abreast, in silence.  The street was lined by as many as a hundred thousand more who took off their hats, bowed their heads, and mourned the fallen workers.

Not a single word was spoken.  Not one of those thousands and thousands of people broke the silence.  All one heard was the slow, steady clopping of the horses hooves and the sound of the wagon wheels on the pavement for the entire length of the procession, over two and a half miles.

Within a few more days, the entire city of San Francisco was closed down by a general strike.  Not only the workers trying to win recognition of their unions but even small business owners, Mom and Pop stores, put signs of support in their windows and remained closed.  Shortly thereafter, having closed the west coast for 83 days, the longshoremen won the right to manage the operations of the ports themselves.

Such is the power for people who are together.

Last Rat

I had the last two days off.  I worked on another of my long-winded essays, this one on language, the law, and some of my experiences with the latter.  It is not quite finished, and today I start back to work, which means that I do not know when I will have time to finish it.

Every day that goes by without a new post feels like yet another failure in a life-long string of failures.  So I have decided to sit down here for the roughly fifteen minutes I have before I must hit the shower and get ready for work, to say what is foremost in my mind.  You have probably heard the adage that defines news as “Man Bites Dog” – a dog biting a man is not news, but a man biting a dog is.  So my thought today takes the form of a headline:

LAST RAT BOARDS SINKING SHIP

The rat in question would be me, and the ship the taxi industry.  Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar seem to have killed the traditional cab business.  Of course, the rudeness, ignorance, and bad driving of many cabbies in years past played a role, too.  And the industry’s resistance to increasing the number of cabs in this city meant that most people have had the bad experience I often had of calling for a cab and waiting, calling again and waiting, and often being left without a cab ever showing up at all.  Nor could you ever just step to the curb and hail one, as you can in New York, because there were so few that an empty one would never come your way.

I have much more to say on this subject – complaints about the ability of companies tied to the internet to operate illegal businesses without any legal ramifications at all and observations about the ways in which the structure of the business has over time stripped drivers, who were once unionized workers paid an hourly wage, of any benefits or protections and left them supporting the owners of the companies for whom they drive first and themselves only second.

Here is how it is.  I have to pay to go to work.  The amount varies, but tonight, Saturday, the most expensive time of the week to work, costs me $135 up front.  I pay that amount to rent the cab for twelve hours.  I also have to return it full of gas, which costs about $15 to $20 a night.  Thus I begin my work week in a couple of hours already $150 down.  There are nights that I do not take in $150 in the whole twelve hours.  Last Saturday I did well because a million people were in town for Gay Pride weekend, but the Saturday before I made $9.00 in the whole night.  The week before that, I made $1.00.

I hate Saturdays.  My stomach is already churning.  I am angry at people who use their smart phones to call the cab companies that claim they are not cab companies and operate illegally (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar), angry at the drivers for those companies, and angry at the absence of any recourse.  I had breakfast a couple of weeks ago with a wonderful friend who said that she did not really understand the importance of unions.  This is the importance of unions: right now, given the complete laissez-faire, unregulated competition within the taxi business, we the working drivers are driven to take any work we can get for any amount of money, no matter how little.  And our employers, both the companies and our passengers, can offer us next to nothing – or less than nothing, actually, since my employer offers me a loss of $150 to go to work.

Without organization as a single unit, labor is divided into individuals who will be driven to work for lower and lower wages because even those wages are better than nothing at all.

Read The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle, both by John Steinbeck.  I have to go to work.

Turning Chinese

I remember pictures of Peking from the 1960s and 1970s. The streets were crowded with bicycles with nary an automobile in sight. Now the streets of San Francisco are being reconfigured with fewer lanes for cars and more for bicycles.  I ride my bicycle to work.  I can no longer afford a car.

My commute is not bad.  When I first got the bike, I would start by following Valencia from 15^th Street, where I live, to 25^th Street, where I would turn left and head straight down to Hampshire Street.  There I would jog over to Cesar Chavez, which would take me to Potrero, then Bayshore, the Jerrold, where I work.

On my way to work, at 3:30 in the afternoon, Valencia was crowded with pedestrians, cars, and, squeezed between the two, bicycles.  I tensed up, my ears pricked to catch the sounds of cars approaching from behind, my head swiveling on my neck like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” as  I attempted to look in all directions at once.  So I changed my route and now leave Valencia to steer a course through side streets.

When I must use major streets, even the designated bike lanes do not help me feel safe from the tons of glass and steel bearing down on me, guided by people whom I can barely see, ensconced in their juggernauts, their tiny hands gripping the steering wheel as their tiny heads attempt to peer out through the windshield.  I have no way of knowing whether these drivers can see me unless they alter the trajectory of their vehicle and clearly aim it away from me.  This happens about as often as they steer toward me deliberately, taking aim at me.  At such times I often respond by aiming my bicycle and myself right at them, challenging them to join in a spontaneous game of chicken in the hope of causing fear of hurting me to rise in them as a rebuke.  I probably only cause them to get angry at me instead.

So I turn off Valencia onto Sycamore and jog over to Lexington.  Lexington is one of those charming residential streets that one finds scattered through the Mission – indeed, throughout all the older parts of the city.  These streets are usually short, five or six blocks long at the most.  They are not alleys, for houses front on them, but neither are they thoroughfares.  They are not wide enough for two-way traffic, automobile traffic that is, and often they run a few blocks as one-way streets in one direction and then become one-way streets running in the opposite direction.  They also often hit a dead-end at a major street but then suddenly appear again a block or two farther on.

So I take Lexington, on which I am going the right way, to 21^st Street, where it ends.  I jog a little bit to the left on 21^st and then turn right on Bartlett, where I am now going the wrong way.  I ride the wrong way on Bartlett all the way to 25^th, where I turn left and complete the trip as described above.  Only once has anyone complained to me about riding the wrong way on a one-way street, and although I am always guiltily conscious of my violation of the law, I also know that I am much safer doing so than I would be riding in the bike lane between parked cars (whose doors may at any moment be flung open) and the cars rushing past me.

*

The ride home, at 3:30 or 4:00 or even 4:30 in the morning, presents no such dangers from traffic.  I fear it, however, much more.  What frightens me are the rats.

I encounter them on the path that goes under the freeway.  This path runs under US101 at the intersection of Chavez and Potrero/Bayshore.  It is at this point that Potrero becomes Bayshore:  Potrero rises up as an elevated ramp, one lane of which connects to the freeway and the other lane of which drops to earth again as Bayshore.  Chavez dives down under it all in a great swoop like a sudden dip on a roller coaster.  Indeed, navigating the complex of elevated roadways, ramps, and underpasses is called, especially by cyclists, “shooting the rapids.”  Running this gauntlet in the daytime is no problem, and the night ride home in general feels relaxed.   But at night this little path poisons the whole ride home.  It raises a shadowy fear ut which swirls about one almost imperceptibly until it takes sudden and concrete shape and inspires a spasm of lasting dread.

A couple of weeks ago, there came a night when as I was leaving the taxi yard, I had mounted my bike and then suddenly stopped still, unwilling to put my feet on the pedals and push.  I felt so exhausted that if I could have found a place to lie down at the taxi yard or even a comfortable chair in which to rest, I would have slept there.  The sun would have risen within an hour or two, and then I could have bicycled home in the early light.  Instead I locked my bike to the rack at work and took the bus home because of the rats.

For the next week and a half I rode the bus, or rather buses, home.  It takes two buses to travel between my hotel and the taxi yard.  I have to wait at the point of transfer between the two lines for ten to twenty minutes.  Furthermore, the bus I catch near the taxi yard comes only twice an hour in the early morning.  So a trip that takes twenty minutes on a bicycle takes at least forty-five minutes  and sometimes more than an hour by bus.  It is tedious, tedium is nothing compared to the rats.

I did not see them for the first month or two, but lately – probably because homeless people are camping under the overpasses again – I never see fewer than three each night.  The path is narrow, and ivy grows along the base of the fences on either side.  The rats appear suddenly on the pathway as I ride, scurrying alongside me until they dive into the ivy.  It is the fact that they run alongside me that unnerves me the most.  If they would scatter away from me, I wouldn’t mind so much.  But running alongside me they seem brazen, which makes me doubt the encouraging nostrum from my childhood that such creatures “probably fear you more than you do them.”

*

Fear excites the imagination, and the imagination in turn compounds the fear.  Because I am riding my bike, I have my right pant legs rolled up to my calf so that it won’t get caught in the chain.  So when the rats come scurrying out alongside me, I become extremely aware of my exposed ankle.  The wind immediately feels colder on it, and I can almost feel sharp teeth clamp down on either side of my Achilles tendon, closing together under it, holding on tightly to my flesh as blood begins to flow into the mouth, and I want to jerk my leg sharply out to the side in an attempt to shake the vicious rodent off, but if I do I might throw myself off balance, fall from the bike, and lie helplessly on the path, stunned for a few seconds, long enough for all of them to come swarming over me, to begin feasting.

After I emerge from the labyrinth under the freeway, I seldom see another rat, except on the nights when garbage is collected.  I hate those nights.  Not only are the garbage trucks terrifying (they are huge, and the drivers charge at great speed from one group of bins to the next) but the rats know that some garbage is always spilled, a lump of this or that fallen in the middle of the street, and so they congregate and feed.

And though I see them on the streets only once in a while, I constantly think I do.  Any dark stain on the pavement – oil or anything else – for the first split second, out of the corner of my eye, is a rat, especially if it is somewhat oblong in shape.  So for a couple of weeks I rode the bus.

In the last week, however, I noticed a footbridge that spans the same distance under the freeway but is on the far side of Chavez and, most importantly, is elevated above the ground.  I figured out that by backtracking on Marin Street for a block and the turning onto Chavez, I could get to the elevated footbridge.  Crossing Chaves and cutting across an onramp to the freeway, I am exposed to huge trucks speeding toward the freeway as they leave the industrial area and the Produce Mart in the midst of which the cab yard sits.  But for some reason I feel safer in their path than with the rats.

Heading home, pedaling uphill and into a headwind so cold that my ears stiffen, feel bloodless, and my head aches, I fight exhaustion.  My days last twelve hours, thirteen to fourteen if you count the whole time that I am gone from home, the hours commuting and  the hours of work.  Often I am sitting here typing long after the sun has come up, for it is the only time that I have quiet time in which to open the gates of my thought and my imagination and let it pour forth onto this page.

LA CALLE DE RATON

The Airport Line

Men are strange.  They don’t like to ask for help, and they don’t often offer it.  Men are expected to figure it out for themselves.  In prison, in the military, and here in the taxi line, no one teaches you anything.  You attempt to follow the man ahead of you, and when you make a mistake, someone yells at you.  Each rule is learned only through infraction; you know that there is a rule only when you have broken it -- and you may well misunderstand the shouting and take away the wrong lesson, only to make the mistake again.  And when a man asks another to help, that other will not give it automatically, What help is given will be consciously decided, measured deliberately, and always with some temerity if not misgiving.

[I should make it clear that when I speak of men in general, I refer only to American men of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  What I say may also apply to American men of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the influence and experience I gleaned from my father, who himself was passing on those things that he had received from his father and his grandfather before him.  I can say nothing of the men of France or of Uzbekistan, or even of Canadians and Mexicans.]

Men carry about with them a prehistoric sense of scarcity and a fear that anything given to another man is something taken away from him.  He fears the possibility that he will find himself unable to provide for himself and for those dependent on him.  Thus all other men become competitors, if not for the immediate needs of food and shelter, or for the most fecund and arousing women, then for the positions within any group that carry the power to allocate benefits among the members of that group.  

You often see men walking with studied non-chalance, an attitude that looks more like the sad bravado of pretended pride, like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp brushing off his coat, straightening his shoulders, and walking away from a disastrous failure with a jaunty step, whirling his cane, his chin held high.  So it is with Cabbies.

*

My first impression of the taxi line at the airport was dreamlike. It was like one of those “exam dreams” – you know, the ones in which you find yourself taking a final exam, but you somehow never attended a single class and did not even read the textbook.  My first day in the airport line was like finding myself participating in a Byzantine ritual with a Disneyesque twist.

You begin the process by going to an office in the airport where you register and receive a “smart card” that will allow you to enter the section of the parking structure in which the taxi line forms.  Having taken your place in line, you sit in your car while more than a hundred taxis pack themselves in around you.  You can see the car directly ahead of you and the first three or so rows of cars to your left and right.  Now and then you glimpse movement in the distance, a string of automobiles rolling quickly along a winding path and flashing with sunlight as they pass out of the parking structure and disappear.  As you sit, many of the drivers around you get out of their cars and walk around, greeting one another, smoking, haranguing one another in a dozen languages, none of which can you identify.  These are not western European languages but ones that come, most likely, from the vast interior spaces of the Eurasian continent, which stretches from the Balkans to Siberia, from the North Sea to Mongolia, or from Africa.  You start to wonder what the hell is going on.

Suddenly you hear engines starting.  Drivers begin to make their way back to their cars, sauntering with a swagger that says “Yes I know that I have to get back to my car, but I want to make it clear that I am my own man; I do not scurry like a fearful mouse.”  You do see some drivers, however, who are running frantically to reach their cabs before the cab ahead of them moves out and all the cabbies behind are stuck and honking and yelling in protest at being delayed.

Then you notice that, two rows over, the line is pulling out, and when the car ahead of you finally moves, you do the one thing that you know you are supposed to do:  you follow it, driving along a tortuous path through the parking structure, a path that winds back on itself senselessly over and over again before finally breaking into the sunlight.  You are now in the open space in the center of the donut-shaped parking structure. Here again the cabs are parked in a series of rows.

Again you park behind the same cab as before and sit and wait while other drivers begin to mill about or recline their seats to nap and wait.  You are reminded of the lines at Disneyland lines that lead only to waiting areas that had been hidden from view and to more lines of which you had no idea before.

Eventually you find yourself rolling into the last waiting area.  Here you hold up to the machine beside the empty toll booth the “smart card” onto which you have loaded money for your $4.00 fees.  Once the gate has deducted $4.00 from your card, you move on to what turns out to be the last line.  When you finally move again, you pass an attendant who either waves you on out into the road that circles from one domestic terminal to the next or stops you and hands you a ticket to go to the international terminal.  If you are assigned to the international terminal, you have one last chance to make a big mistake.  No one has told you that to get to that terminal you have to pass around all the domestic terminals, leave the airport, and then catch a ramp that circles back and drops you at the international terminal.  If you miss that little unmarked ramp, you find yourself back on U.S. Highway 101 and have to begin the whole process over again.

*

At no point in the process does anyone explain anything to you.  You just follow the guy ahead of you and hope for the best.  On the day I registered for and got my smart card, I tried to use it to open the gate to exit the airport  The clerk who had handled my registration and shown me the instructional video had told me that I could use the card for that purpose.  But the card didn’t work.  I had to back out from the gate, to the annoyance of the two or three cabs that had lined up behind me while I was trying to get the card to work.  I had to leave my cab to one side, its flashers flashing, to trot back to the main lot trying to find someone who could tell me what to do, and then to trot all the way back to the office in the terminal basement where the same clerk/receptionist informed me that of course it didn’t work because I hadn’t gone to one of the machines in the parking lot that would take my cash or debit card and add money to the smart card.  I then had to retrace my trotting steps, find the machines, add the money, trot to my cab, around which an river of cabs was now swirling as it flowed through the gates.

Embarrassed, feeling the way I did so often as a little boy:  shamed, shy, and wishing I could hide.  I was talking to myself, silently, trying to refine an explanation for my mistake that would be quick, clear, and forceful so that I could regain my pride by justifying myself to – to whom? – to some other driver or drivers?  The conversation I was endlessly rehearsing was never going to happen.  No one would even notice or remember me or my stranded, flashing, humbled, and impotent little taxi cab, lying to the side of the river of traffic, trying to regain its strength.  The ridiculousness of the line ritual, the serpentine paths, the institutionalized confusion, leaving each driver ignorant of the overall endeavor and forcing each to rely on following in the footsteps of the man ahead of him:  all of this is nuts -- and very male.

*

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man will not ask directions.  A man who does so humbles himself not in a virtuous Christian way but in the shameful way of humiliation.  Thus the seemingly instantaneous universal acceptance of GPS technology in automobiles and in mobile phones, for, oddly enough, the information given by these devices seems to belong privately to the person using it.  He acquires the information he needs without turning to his fellow man and asking for it.  He needn’t feel ashamed because no one – or at least no other man, physically present – is involved even as an observer.

As a result, the man trusts his GPS device implicitly.  I remember hearing a news report on NPR when GPS devices were first made available to the general population.  A German driver had driven his Mercedes off the end of an unfinished bridge because he had followed the instruction given by his GPS navigator rather than attending to the road on which he was travelling.  (I think of him whenever I see the passersby on the sidewalk in my neighborhood staring at the screens in front of them instead of looking around at the world through which they move, the world which we share.)

Since I cannot imagine that anyone would design a process as confused as the taxi line, I try to understand it by regarding each stage in reverse order, like an archeologist relating the artifacts found at different levels in a dig.  I assume that the line must have taken shape over a number of years through a process of solving various problems as they arose out of conflicts between men arguing over who had what place in line.  I would guess that these conflicts were adjudicated by one or more other drivers who established various rules and procedures by a general consensus.  he line is like something constructed by a vanished tribe, a Stonehenge or a Machu Pichu, whose true nature and significance can only be guessed at.

I have heard that there was once a Taxi Driver’s Union, and everything about the airport line looks, feels, and even sounds like a union operation.  The sounds I refer to above are specifically the voices of the men who run the line.  Whoever they officially work for now, their accents are pure Teamsters – part Jersey, part Chicago, all brash, forceful, and decisive.  I noticed this when I first went to register for the smart card.  The only instruction I was given, the only information about the line and its operation I ever formally received, was a video that the clerk/receptionist put on in a conference room and told me to watch.

The video is a remarkable artifact.  The camera is trained on the man who obviously runs the line.  He is clearly the authority, the “big boss”.  He looks and sounds like a union boss from the Javitts Center or the Meadowlands.  His mouth seems to shape words by rolling around them without ever really closing down on them, so that they sound blurred and malleable.  In front of him are ranged the tops and backs of the heads of a couple dozen men: this is clearly a recording of a talk given to the drivers years ago.  The big boss has memorized the text and delivers it with a ritualized oratorical style.  For example, after making one of his main points, he stops and says loudly, each word dropped individually in front of the group assembled before him, “Do -- you -- understand – me,” which phrase is uttered without the rising intonation usually indicative of the interrogative voice.  You understand that he is not asking a question:  his phrase is a euphemism for “You better remember this or you assholes are gonna get whacked upside the head.”

The talk explains how the smart cards electronically accomplish various functions previously performed by human cashiers and fee collectors.  You start to realize that the ritual of the line that now exists is haunted by the ghosts of jobs lost to “smart card” automation.  The big boss does still oversee dozens of employees who stand at various stations along the line, herding drivers along with shouts or incomprehensible hand signals.  (Each apparently improvises these hand signals without any correlation to the signals given by his fellow line monitors)  And you understand why you have to pay $4.00 each time you get into the airport line when the boss says “You pay me the $4.00 because you want me to run a fair line.”

Sitting in line that first night, I wondered whether any of the drivers around me knew the history or even remembered personally the union and the way it worked.  I wondered whether it had been part of the Teamsters and had disappeared during the federal persecution of that organization the way people disappeared in Chile under the military dictatorship we put in place after assassinating the duely elected Marxist President Allende on September 11, 1974.

What a sad defeat for us all the loss of unions has been.  How grievous the wrongs done to working people by the union-busting power elite.  All of them, from FDR and the Kennedys to Reagan and the Bushes, bear the blame.  None of them has been a friend to you and me.

*

I walked among the young on Valencia Street the other night and smiled to myself at all the memories of my own youth, especially my years in New York, that they evoked.  I felt myself slough off the resentment that I have so often felt at their (to me) atrocious manners and their (I think) undeserved wealth.  Instead I found myself wishing them well, wishing them the joy of their youth, of their messy emotions and their anxious labors, and of their flesh.  I too was once young and doubtless appalled my elders in many ways.

Seeing them charge ahead ignorant of the history that hems them in on every side, seeing them let fall by the wayside the standards of reason, of morality, of social propriety, and of politics without which they cannot understand themselves or their lives clearly, I cannot judge or reprimand them.  The world is now theirs, and I leave it to them gladly.  They may very well run it better than I or any of my generation could do or have done.  And in any case, what they do will happen to them and their heirs, not to me.  I only hope that they might forgive me and my –their – forbears.

When I was young, I thought it horrible, and horribly unjust, that people have to die.  Now I only think that I do not want to be here in 50 years.  I do not want to suffer their future.  I will sit a while longer on the hillside, so to speak, at the single window of my tiny room in this SRO Hotel, looking down on the Promised Land, on a future that I will not inhabit, watching the young scurry through the cities and the fields, through the mountains and the plains, living their lives in their time.