SITTING PRETTY

MY FATHER AND MY UNCLES had many tales about the Great Depression. They remember being lucky because their father ran a business people needed as long as rain fell – roofing. Even so, the Depression was a threat to everyone. Grampa’s family brought in the outliers – Great-grandma Baltz, Great-uncle Valden and a few others that fit under the wing. They scraped and scrimped but were better off than most. Nevertheless it left an indelible mark on the Adkins Boys.

A lot of their tales were happy – odd ways of making a dollar, “making do” creatively, losing a dime through a crack in the stairs and hunting all afternoon for it. Scrimping folks stayed at home, so the Boys remembered a lot of family times, laughter around the card table, working on some new invention made of scrap from the shop.

Some were not so funny. It seems that there was a stratum of the white-collar unemployed who couldn’t admit, even to their family, that they’d lost their jobs as managers, clerks, bookkeepers. The Boys told about men who dressed in suits and ties every morning, kissed their wives and children, and went off to “work,” even though they were no longer employed. They spent their days trying to find menial jobs, selling what personal possessions they could, peddling fruit and vegetables from a basket (an odd apparition, the suit-and-tie potato peddler) and, yes, begging. They were proud men who stayed away from soup kitchens and from social workers. They weren’t part of anyone’s statistics, off the books. Some couldn’t bear the shame and dropped from one of Wheeling’s bridges into the Ohio River. Only then would their family and friends learn they hadn’t been at the plant or the office for months.

We’re careful to call our own financial storm a “recession,” as if this word will make it less toxic than That Other Word.

A friend recently described one of her colleagues to me, a figure from the boom 70’s, a high-rolling consultant to major corporations. I’ll call him Calvin. She’d had several lunches with him over the past few weeks and he seemed chipper, snappy in a cashmere sport jacket, tie, fresh shirt. Business as usual.

But she tripped over an open seam in Calvin’s narrative and plucked at the edges until a new truth emerged. Calvin no longer has clients. Or a home or a bank account or a source of income. He lives out of his car, a small import. The driver’s seat reclines. This is his bed.

How did this happen, she asked.

“I’ve been sick. I got sick and my health has just never gotten back to where it was,” he said.

Calvin doesn’t look sickly. Indeed, he’s gained a little weight. He’s managed to establish a blog, working from library computers, and it rates food at various shelters as if he’s filing for Saveur, but charity cuisine is heavy on starches.

He’s proud of his very toney address, a short block in an extremely wealthy neighborhood near the Presidio. This is where he parks his car at night, reclines his seat, and lays him to his rest.

What’s even more surprising about his address is that there are four other car-dwellers who “inhabit” the block. The residents must realize there are mobile squatters among them, something they didn’t expect as owners of select San Francisco property. They must see the same cars each morning with their windows opaque with vapor. It’s likely that, seeing them every morning, they recognize the drivers/livers. It’s doubtful if the car dwellers and home owners speak as neighbors. Well-off owners may not know quite what to say or what the Law might stipulate for pavement dwellers. The mobile homeless avoid calling attention to their situation. They don’t want to back the brick-and-mortar residents on “their” block into calling the police. If it remains unspoken it w-rung position.

Calvin has neighborhood pride in his “home” address. It’s a safe neighborhood, handsomely landscaped lawns, very low crime. He feels secure there. His sense of place is important. Some of the property owners are probably more ambivalent about the block than he is. He shakes his head about less desirable neighborhoods. Hundreds of inhabited cars park street on warehouse streets near the Bayside docks, close to the ballpark. Rough neighborhoods. “Those guys get rousted, robbed, beaten. That’s what you get with easy parking. Those guys don’t want to risk finding a good neighborhood.”

He gives himself some credit, here, and a ghost of the old consultant’s confidence returns: he’s feathered his nest cleverly, found safety in boldness and decision, he’s sitting pretty.

My friend is among the most generous souls I know. Immediately she offers help: he can sleep at her house until things get better.

No, he thanks her, he’s already been offered similar shelter – rooms in other friends’ homes. Calvin insists that his new life is brave, refreshing. It’s free and open-ended. Then he continues in a less adventuresome tone, “It’s better in my car. If I had a real room I’d get a computer and I’d be on the Web more than I am, maybe all night. No, this way I’m out in the world among real people, doing real stuff.”

What does Calvin do during business hours? He spends a lot of time at library computers blogging about his brave new life. He also does research – web-topics like current business theories, New Age beliefs, and of course his health.

Calvin may be too old to retread with an entirely new trade. Perhaps he could manage as a retail clerk or a waiter but the competition for these jobs is brisk; they usually go to young people. Age discrimination is illegal but very real in hiring practice. He manages to get a few hours of spot work now and then but he wants to keep his “research time” free, his self-imposed computer vigil on the Trends: vast and mysterious political cabals and conspiracies, miracle cures forgotten by Western Medicine, and the unsubstantiated digital folk tales that grow like hothouse flower in cyberspace. He’s looking for a wormhole, a backdoor to employment in a New Age, honorable profession. It’s a slim hope but he’s probably correct in assuming that only an extraordinary path, a chance encounter or a message on the jungle drums, will set him up again.

My friend begins to perceive the tics and tells of serious mental problems in Calvin’s affect. Your health, she asks, are you seeing a doctor?

“No, no, no,” he rejects this notion hastily, “They don’t really know what’s wrong with me. I’m researching it on the Web. I’m taking care of it, myself.”

She has a sense that she’s talking to a man about to step into an open manhole.
She throws another line of help toward him: There must be social services that could help you, places you could go, have you applied for any help at all?

“Oh, yes,” he’s casual about this, “I had a case-worker.” Obviously the social worker is no longer in his orbit. He’s not resentful about the case-worker though he may be as ill-disposed toward her bureaucratic methods as he is toward Western Medicine. When he first approached the social service system’s formidable stone face he filled out dozens of forms listing homely data, personal facts, exhaustive description of his penury.

Quantifying this data upset Calvin, who feels his is a regular fellah weathering a few hard knocks. Filling out even more forms, waiting for the vast system to creak into movement in his behalf, he began to wonder if he needed help after all.

This is the pride of the suit. He isn’t a single mother with many children. He’s not in a wheelchair, not desperately sick. He’s sitting pretty. Declaring himself a social incompetent rankles him. The machine of State won’t, can’t help him. Why? Why must he supply the evidence of his failure, or document catastrophic poverty? He’s disinclined to hound case workers, bureaucrats, clerks and supervisors to receive the dole. He’s educated, worldly, and he has no focus to spare on the byzantine welfare process. He won’t, can’t let the state help him for reasons that probably aren’t clear to him.

Calvin was once a recognized figure in the hard-waxed halls of commerce and finance but as of this moment he registers on no one’s radar. He’s not a statistic because he no longer has a file. The State doesn’t know him. He no longer exists except as a name on a car registration and a driver’s license, uncorrelated with employment records. He’s not part of a “recession” because he doesn’t officially exist.

Those of us still clinging to our conventional stations assume that anyone in a suit and tie, clean and smart, must be normal. This is our delusion. The reality is that this current version of the Great Depression targets the mid-ranks of management especially – those below the decision-making ranks and above essential blue collar workers. Consultants, those “what if” speculators of theory and betterment, are always dispensable. For white collar employees this “recession” may be more dangerous than the Great Depression.

Trade and government have quietly defanged the unions over the past few decades. Workers can count on little help from organized labor which, at its own decision-making levels, has become indistinguishable from Wall Street speculators. The old bare-knuckle union bosses have given way to MBAs who share the same club locker rooms with corporate management.

The glue of job security, that momentum of employee loyalty that created a shared business voice, has been worn away. Most employees have become accustomed to three or five year commitments, and to skipping from one job to another in search of the Big Break. It was once a common belief that a man had two marriages: one to his wife, another to his job. The glue has gone out of both unions.

Calvin’s car is his home in a bleakly modern sense. He has no home. He has an ex-wife, ex-kids, ex-parents, and an ex-hometown. The shit has demonstrably hit the fan but for this respectable man in his jacket and tie there’s no going back to Smallville. In “The Hired Man” Robert Frost said, “Home is where they have to let you in.” But he doesn’t have a reconciliation to make, he can’t return as a prodigal son, no amount of mea culpa will convince his ex-wife’s new husband to take him in. Home is no longer a continuum. Calvin has no hearth or doorstep to which he can return. Returning Odysseus will find that Penelope married one, then several of the suitors, and that Ithaka has been leased by Club Med.

The factor that amplifies employer/employee alienation is the business school abstraction, “hours is hours.” Belief in the wunderkind, the prodigy, the extraordinary employee has faded. Ten hours from employee 415242A is the same as ten hours from employee 655773H; they’re interchangeable elements, no better or worse. Both are regarded with equal suspicion and reduced to corporate-friendly statistics by that corporate food-blender, Human Resources.

When the Great Depression clamped down on my grandfather’s family he dipped deeply into his savings. Most middle class Americans maintain credit card, mortgage and car loan debt that, even in adjusted earlier dollars, would have appalled our grandparents. Yet the index of normality moves with us, our own horizon of what’s real. Service-level banking has encouraged and, in a few subtle but powerful ways, enforced debt as a normal and even desirable situation. We’re told by bankers and we’re reminded by credit reporting databases that unless we borrow, we won’t be able to borrow. This only appears to be circular logic; the financial reality is that year-corrected wages are lower, buying power is reduced, prices for homes and transportation have ballooned, and borrowing is often unavoidable.

The indispensible membership card to our society is the car. Unless you live in one of the few cities with a good subway or light-rail system you need a car to shop, work, take kids to school, everything. There was a brief flurry of outrage in the 70’s and 80’s about superstores and malls draining business from Main Street, leaving town and city centers shuttered, derelict. The more lasting consequence is that downtown neighborhoods are no longer functional living places but bedroom bases from which services are available only by car.

Our “recession” stuns middle class citizens at their most vulnerable: they owe more than they can make, their deepest investments are worth less than the paper on them, they have a long way to fall and bankruptcy is only a stopgap solution.

My friend is concerned that the “health” Calvin worries over is a cipher for mental derangement. She believes he may be clinically disturbed. He is.

Is his psychiatric imbalance organic? Perhaps not. It’s possible that he’s been unbalanced by cognitive dissonance – the difference between what we’ve learned and what we see.

For more than forty years Calvin was inculcated with society’s virtues. One of the central articles of faith has always been the rewards of labor: work hard, stay honest, play nice and you’ll make your way in the world. With luck, you’ll prosper, but even if the breaks go against you, work is your salvation. This is the unquestioned dogma of the middle class and the central component of the “American Dream.” Our economic bad times have confuted all our inherited assumptions. Calvin may have been forced into a psychotic break by clinging to social faith when economic reality began to diverge more and more..

The upward migration of wealth and the weakened financial situation of most workers have made the old assumptions inoperative. Yet the Salvation of Work and the Cult of Progress may be an essential, indispensable part of our American vision, a central article of belief, our worldview. Accepting new realities too readily may be mentally dangerous, a contradiction of basic verities that are part of us.

Work is not a hotshot salvation today. A very few bad breaks can put a comfortable consultant with a cashmere coat and nice habits on the street in a few months. It’s not just Calvin who’s been shaken by cognitive dissonance. We’re seeing that our conception of society, most of what we were taught about America the Beautiful, is no longer operative. Most of us are shaken. Is it possible that a significant percentage of the population is experiencing a kind of mass psychotic break? Has this society become seriously dysfunctional?

We can hazard the question, how far are we from this kind of break? We’ve watched years of ideologue economics bring our culture to the brink of collapse. We voted for a candidate who promised to turn it all around but we’ve discovered that he’s continuing almost every policy, business as usual. Even though we elect leaders the global corporations hold all the cards and all the legislators. What we believed as basic to our national identity is no longer relevant.

When we were young we were told that any one of us could be President. But you had to be smart and brave and tireless. Today, the bar seems to have been lower than we expected. Would our young selves ever believe a real President could be so embarrassingly inept and crassly ignorant as George W? Would any of us in our middle-school classrooms believe that the Attorney General of the United States of America would redefine torture as a law-enforcement tool? Would we have believed that even an apocalyptic catastrophe like 9/11 would be enough excuse to dispense with rights of privacy, search and seizure, and even the suspension of old black-letter Magna Charta’s assurance, habeus corpus? Weren’t those values of intelligence and fairness and decency the fabric of our country?

Calvin is proud of his new life, his neighborhood, his tiny makeshift mobile home. He feels that he’s sitting pretty, ignoring consumer hype, perhaps even making society work for him, for a change. He’s also a danger to himself. The cold wind of Reality will, more than likely, blow through the cracks of his cashmere armor and, sometime soon, confront him with the alternate view of his brave new urban world. Can Calvin survive his adventure? Can we?

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself has somehow been repoliticized by the Occupy Wall Street Movement. His mother, Dixie, was a crypto-socialist and perhaps even a proto-anarchist who despised the rich as "hypocrits." Who know what we inherit in the hard-wiring? But he's convinced that the entire system is evil and unworkable and, alas, unfixable, since the only workmen available are the Party Pols who feed off the system. I'm not so concerned about the faceless Calvin as I am about his cognitive dissonance and disillusionment with his profession and the economy.