Democratic Capitalism

Democratic Capitalism is a contradiction in terms. Democracy wants us all to have equal power. Capitalism wants to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands. For the capitalist, success goes to the individual who can best exploit resources. For the democrat, success is a community that unites a diverse group of people who respect and value one another.

Democracy struggles against oppression: the good it pursues is freedom, the greatest personal freedom for each individual. Capitalism, on the other hand, is interested in only one freedom: free trade.

American ideology at the turn of the millennium bears an internal contradiction that runs so deep that our political and personal discourses cannot begin to portray accurately the most basic truths of our lives. The talking heads babble on about the wisdom of markets and the sanctity of the individual. They speak in reverent tones about the importance of freedom, but “freedom” is an empty concept, a meaningless, absurd, unintelligible idea. “Freedom” is not a thing in and of itself. It is not even an abstract intellectual thing.

It is, in fact, a kind of double negative, a form of emptiness: freedom is the absence of restraint.

We cannot, as a people, do anything about the slow collapse of our financial, political, and personal ways of life because we do not understand the nature of our institutions or of our values well enough to manage them competently.

We live by our myths: The Rugged Individualist is heir to The Pioneer Spirit. He is self-reliant. He eschews both government and charity, striking out to find his place in life, to stake his claim to a role in a society that he has invented. Everyone conveniently avoids mention that his ability to survive in this way rests on his taking, by violence, the natural resources (Land, Water, Air) from the Peoples previously living here. Our national hero is a conman and a cheat, a thief and a murderer.

Meanwhile the conventional wisdom holds that those who lack the vision, the stamina, or the will-power to chart such a course for themselves, (i.e., the poor, the uneducated, the most recent immigrants) are either lazy or morally decadent. Their poverty is proof of their moral failure.*

By “Individualism” I do not mean Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman only: I mean Wayne Dwyer, Oprah Winfrey, and Pastor Rick Warren as well. The “Left” is as much in thrall to the myth of fingerprints as is the “Right”.

As Gore Vidal once said, “We don't have political parties: we have one political party with two right wings called the Democratic and the Republican.”

REQUIRED VIEWING: “Money as Debt”

This hour-long lesson on the nature of our banking system looks and sounds like the kind of educational films I saw in grade school. (Remember “Our Mr. Sun?) Pay particular attention to the quotations that appear onscreen in print and to the names of the people being quoted.

If you learn this lesson thoroughly, you will understand Obama’s greatest failure. In the opening days of his first term, he clearly proved himself to be no different than John McCain or any other politician holding office today. I had expected nothing from a man who hails from the University of Chicago, but I was still sad to see the moment that might have revived the Republic pass. Never again will a President have the chance to nationalize the banks and allow the people to regain some control over their destiny.

Vale, Caesar!
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*MRM, my ex and nemesis, once told me that my poverty was proof of my moral failing. He also taunted me when I first applied for General Assistance, saying “Push out your lips. Push out your lips. Push out your lips. You’ve gotta practice so you can look like all the other niggers getting their welfare checks.”

　

Pennies from Heaven

Being poor, I miss a lot as I walk the streets.  Instead of observing the people around me, or the surrounding buildings, or the traffic, I find my eyes scouring the sidewalk, the gutter, and the street -- at least the first foot or so of pavement in front of me.

I am looking for coins or cash or anything else of easily realizable value.  I have found quite a lot of money on the sidewalks and in the streets, including a one-hundred dollar bill on the street where I used to live.  And in the past twenty-four hours I have found forty-four cents on the ground: nine pennies, one dime, and one quarter.  I also found an ATM card, which I will return to the next Bank of America branch that I pass. [OK -- so I held onto it long enough to use it to buy one bus ticket, which cost 75 cents, from a vending machine.]

When I was a little boy, I would, once in a great while, find a penny lying on the sidewalk.  I would grab it quickly, with great excitement, and my mother would proclaim, “That's good luck!  Hold on to that!”  When we got home, I would place it carefully in a special box or drawer, and I would treasure it for the luck it was sure to bring me in the coming days.

My maternal grandmother told the story (though I believe I only heard it second-hand from my mother) of her Uncle Lou's disgust when the one cent coin was introduced in 1909.  Whenever he received them in change from a merchant, he would toss them with contempt into the gutter and say, “Worthless coppers!”

Inflation and deflation have cycled 'round more than a couple of times in the years separating Uncle Lou's worthless coppers and the penny of my boyhood from what I find today.  But I have been struck by the apparent evidence in the street that we are once again in Uncle Lou's world, at least economically.  For most people, it seems, a penny is once again not worth the effort of bending over to pick up, or at least not worth carefully holding on to.

I have considered whether the penny's worth depends on the class of the holder, but the fact is that I have found them on the streets of every kind of neighborhood.  It seems that today all classes share Uncle Lou's low opinion of the coins.  (I must here note that the exception is the wealthiest neighborhoods, where their absense is probably due to the fact that no one walks along those streets anyway, and if they do, they are not fishing through their pockets or purses for coins to feed a parking meter or to pay bus fare.)

I have however also discovered a couple of differences between the classes in the course of my search for money on the street:

In poor neighborhoods, such as the Tenderloin, you will find no money on the street late in the month.  In the days immediately following the first and the fifteenth of the month, however, at the time when General Assistance, Social Security, Disability, and other state income programs send out checks, a veritable thunderstorm of coppers seems to have descended overnight.

In middle and upper-middle class neighborhoods one finds not pennies but currency, even large denominations, suggesting of a carelessness about money that could obtain only among those for whom money is so abundant as to be almost unnoticeable.

When I say "unnoticeable", I am thinking of Heidegger's (or is it Husserl's?) observation that we only notice things that have broken.  His example is his pencil.  As long as the pencil is working, he writes page after page unaware that it is in his hand.  He doesn't notice the pencil until the moment it breaks, when it suddenly leaps into his awareness.  His attention is no longer on his ideas and the words that communicate them but on the piece of wood and graphite squeezed between his fingers and thumb.

Money must be like this for the privileged classes: invisible, because for them it works so effortlessly.  But wait until you've made that one mistake, trusting in someone too easily perhaps.  Only then will you begin to learn what money is.

*

 

I see a certain man from time to time, usually just around the corner from my hotel and half-way up the block. It is always night, and he terrifies me.

I do not know whether he knows that I am there when I see him. I have never seen more than a quarter of his face, by which I can tell little more than that he is of Asian descent, but beyond that I couldn't identify him. He is always looking down at the pavement and is always very close to it. He squats on his heels, balanced on his toes, and his hands are busy with a miniature broom and dustpan.

He is sweeping the cracks in the sidewalk and examining the dirt closely. On two occasions I have seen him pick something up with his fingertips. My guess is that he is looking for crack cocaine or crystal meth.

The block on which he prospects is crowded most times I walk up it. Since my favorite neighborhood market, "Amigo's", is at the end of the block, at Ellis Street, I walk that way most every night or two.

The crowd is almost exclusively African-American, 90% male, and arranged in clusters that force the pedestrian to swerve and say "excuse me" four or five times in the block. One sees something being handed off, and hands disappearing quickly into clothing, as one makes one's way through the gauntlet. Occasionally hands are cupped around a flame which is also quickly withdrawn and whatever it was lighting or heating disappears just as quickly.

So I assume that the crouching prospector is seeking bits of what is passed between hands or heated or lit in the hopes that they might have fallen to the ground. In some ways he is heir to those who first created the city in the 1850s. And I would wager that he, like most of them, will find little more than fool's gold.





A Lesson from the Past Year

I know now why guys who have returned from battle go into malls with guns and begin shooting people.

When I am on the subway platform, I search for his face through the windows of each train as it enters the station, desperately trying to see them all before it comes to a stop. As I walk anywhere in the city, I am searching the oncoming figures to see whether he is approaching me. Every slightly over-weight, middle-aged Latino is him from the distance of a half block -- and there are a lot of slightly over-weight, middle aged Latinos in this town!

I don’t know why I search for him. Do I want to see him? Or do I want to make sure that I can avoid him before he gets too close?

I have a few hundred things that I would like to say to him: some defending myself against his slander and accusations; some reminding him of his many, many betrayals; some describing my disgust at him; some declaring that I did all I could to show how much I cared for him once-upon-a-time.

The fact that I feel bound to abide by the mutual stay-away order has left me vulnerable to his harassment by text and email. I cannot reply to defend myself or to accuse him without risking the loss of my own credibility in court, and yet he suffers no consequences for his abrogation of the order. He gets away with it all. He can even frame his lies in the right way to have me arrested when I have done nothing.

He has attacked me in ways that I would never have thought possible, ways that I never could have imagined. I live in a continual state of anxiety, bracing myself for something completely unknown and unpredictable.

So I get it. That kind-looking woman approaching to receive her ration of fresh water or food turns out to be a walking bomb that blows your closest friends to pieces right next to you. A year later, back home, you see kind-looking women approach and every nerve in your body braces for the explosion.

You can live with that kind of stress only so long.

Today I got an email telling me the gate code to get access to my storage space, which he broke into just about a year ago, smashing some things he knew to be of particular sentimental value to me and stealing a computer.

I had not requested the gate code.

He has hijacked my email accounts before. He may have found out about this blog and be angry about it. I have to work long days tomorrow and the next day and have no way of checking on my storage space.

I will not sleep easily tonight.

Some (More) Context

This afternoon I walked the four blocks out Eddy to Van Ness.  In my real life, when I had a car, I avoided Van Ness because they do not time the traffic lights, and the traffic itself is heavy.  But Van Ness is now part of my neighborhood, and every time I reach its sidewalks, I remember my grandmother.  I remember her talking about her youth in San Francisco and, in particular, talking about the two kinds of places where she had lived while growing up.

Born in 1892 to a mother from Illinois (herself born in 1875) and a father, Johann Van Drost, from Germany, this grandmother, whom I called “Nana”, spent her early childhood on Van Ness.  He father was a successful druggist, and their house was both large and grand.  Though her parents had met and married in San Francisco, my grandmother had been born in Aspen, Colorado, to which her mother traveled frequently to visit relatives.  Nana's mother, whom we called Uma, was not concerned about traveling such a distance (by ferry, then by train, and finally by stagecoach) despite her pregnancy because the baby was not due for another two months.  Nana, was, however, born prematurely. She told me how her uncle in Aspen, also a druggist, lined a cigar box with blankets, placed my infant grandmother in it, and kept her in the oven as a kind of make-shift incubator.

Nana and her mother, Uma, returned to Colorado to visit those same relatives when she was eight years old.  It was spring time, and the thawing Rockies were magnificent.  It was also 1906, and on April 6th, they got the news that San Francisco had been destroyed by an earthquake and that the hundreds of fires, which began in collapsed buildings that had kerosene lamps and gaslights, had rapidly become a holocaust consuming the few structures that had survived the quake as well as those that lay in ruins.

The telegraph operator in Aspen posted a map of San Francisco in the Telegraph Office window, and four times a day, when the latest reports on the progress of the fires came in, he would take the map down and blacken those areas that had burned.  Nana and Uma watched with increasing anxiety as the black stain spread toward Van Ness.  It was at that wide boulevard that the Army and the Fire Department were finally able to stop the monstrous flames.  They stopped them by dynamiting every structure on both sides of Van Ness, thereby creating an empty space wide enough to form a viable fire-break.  My Nana’s house, and everything in it, including her prize possessions, a collection of Dresden China dolls, was gone.

I wish I could find out what the address of the Van Drost family residence was, but all city records were destroyed in the earthquake and fire. The closest I have come is an insurance map from 1905 that shows the location and type of every structure in the city approximately six months before the disaster.  If Nana's decription was accurate in saying that nothing stood behind her house but sand dunes to the ocean, they lived somewhere out by Lombard. 

[The importance of history and of its Muse, Memory, cannot be overtsated.  I have recently learned about Up from the Deep, a blog that has built and is building a monument of history and of personal memory about the Tenderloin.  I am fascinated by the wealth of facts about San Francisco to be found there.  Check it out!]

Johann himself had died in '04, and when everything was lost in '06, Uma relied on the advice of a friend who told her not to take the settlement of 10 cents on the dollar which was offered by the insurance company. Instead she held out for more and ended up with nothing. Making her living as a milliner, which did not pay much, Uma and Nana had to live in hotels

When Nana spoke of the other home of her childhood, she did so with a mixture of distaste and regret.  “After Father died and we lost the house in the earthquake and fire,” she would say, “we lived in hotels.”  I could think of nothing more adventurous, more luxurious, or more wonderful than growing up in a hotel.  But Nana was not talking about the Fairmont, the Huntington, or the St. Francis.  She was talking about buildings exactly like, and possibly including, the one in which I am living now.

San Francisco has been from its earliest days a city of single men.  They required no kitchens or parlors, not even private baths, in their lodgings.  They needed a place to sleep.

They ate in restaurants.  They entertained themselves on the Barbary Coast or, for those more refined, at the Opera Houses, at Woodward's Gardens, or at the dozens of theaters that crowded the town.  I can imagine how a child in such quarters, an only child without playmates, would be bored and lonely most of the time.  But I can also imagine that for Uma, an attractive young widow, free of any need for chaperones or the other restrictions pressed on an unmarried girl, might have had a marvelous time.

I never knew Uma, who died when I was only two, but I remember being told that she had been a happy and fun-loving woman, who would “stay up until 4 in the morning playing cards” whenever she had the chance.  Now I realize that playing cards for her was not like my mother’s bridge club.  I see Uma shuffling the deck, joking and flirting, in the company of single men, her neighbors and having, I am sure, fun.

If only I could spend one night playing cards with her until four in the morning.

A Day Off

For more than a year I have said that all I really wanted was a room of my own, a place in which to write. Today I awoke at noon, ashamed that I had slept through half the day. I reminded myself that I had not missed any appointments or failed to keep any commitments. I also felt badly that I had only a few dollars left, and I don’t get my paycheck until Friday.  I know where I can get food today and tomorrow. But on Wednesday and Thursday I will have to pay bus fare to work and back, and I will be in Sausalito without access to the food resources that I have here in San Francisco.

Let the Right decry “San Francisco Liberals” and the Left regret the gentrification and (St. Herb’s word) “Manhattanization” of our fair city, I am here to tell you that no one need go hungry in San Francisco.

How many cities are there who citizens can boast that hunger has been eradicated in their territory? I know only that being a San Franciscan means living among people who believe in the dignity of all persons and in the inherent right of all to the basic necessities of life. I am here to bear witness to the fact that even an old fool (and probably a scoundrel) like myself is cared for by the City of San Francisco (whose patron Saint himself threw off the expensive clothing his father had supplied for him and walked out naked into the world.)

San Franciscans give more than lip-service to these words from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, less than two years after  that agency of peace and brotherhood among nations was born here in San Francisco: 
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care . . . .”

Nowhere on earth could there be a better city.

*

Back to that moment of waking (pace, Marcel): I am here.

*

 

I get seven frozen meals each week from Project Open Hand.  I heat them in my microwave and have at least one well-balanced, nutricious meal a day.

 

Yesterday I had Easter dinner at St. Anthony's Diningroom, which serves hot lunches every day.  They also have a technology Center at which I am able to go online daily.

 

And Glide Memorial serves breakfast daily.

 

Please support their efforts.