MOLLY IVINS TELLS me that you actually listen. So I’m suggesting some people who need to be heard. And I’m not going to bother you with my own interest group, the “delirious professions.” I went down to Washington, D.C., for a meeting of the National Council on the Arts, shortly after your election, and they could hardly wait. No more rifling of filing cabinets and knocking over desks truffling for lesbians. A vigorous nation invests in the arts not because it’s cost-efficient (a sort of seeding for a gross national product of mystery and magic), but because that’s how we dream our Republic. These difficult people constitiute an antimarket. Their business, instead of selling short, is to surprise us. If we could imagine what they will do next, we wouldn’t need them, and we do, not only for pleasure and beauty, or to bind up our psychic wounds, but to bear witness and discover scruple and imagine the Other—all those archeologies of the unspoken and enciphered. And they are also stormbirds, early-warning systems on the seismic fault lines of the Multiculture, before the cognitive dissonance and the underground tremors convulse us.
But artists are noisy. You’ll hear them whether you want to or not. I’d like you to listen to the dispossessed. The world is full of them—Haitians, Palestinians, Muslims in Bosnia, Turks in reunited Germany, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi in obdurate Myanmar, old dry bones of high-school principals cannibalized by Red Guards in the Guangxi province of China, everybody on the Indian subcontinent, and, especially, Salman Rushdie, a Flying Dutchman astronaut of all our fevers—but we know you’ve got the Justice Department to fix up first off, and then health care, and after that (who knows?) maybe campaign financing so that the greedhead lobbyists won’t disembowel every other program you propose. So I’ll stick here to the domestic dispossessed, even though, now that you’ve finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, it’s time to read The Satanic Verses.
I suppose I don’t have to remind you to listen to the women, not with Hillary around. Nor to the children, not with Marian Wright Edelman standing right next to Hillary. But you ought to be listening to the inner cities, at which you blew smoke from your saxophone after the Day of the Locust in Los Angeles. And what you will hear from those inner cities is not a demand for enterprise zones. Enterprise zones! More tax breaks and zoning variances for a handful of fast-buck businessmen to build something ugly on cinder blocks, surround it with barbed wire, bring in a few managers from outside the neighborhood for the high-paying jobs, hire a couple of hundred locals at minimum wage (nonunion, of course; no health plan), and so compete, on a Third World level, with the sweatshops of Santo Domingo and Singapore.
The median household net worth for Anglos in Los Angeles in 1991 was $31,904; for non-Anglos, the median household net worth was $1,353. Imagine that. In the last decade, a million immigrants have crammed into older black Chicano slum housing, without the ghost of a social policy to accommodate them, with federal housing asssistance slashed 70 percent since 1981, without a single new public housing unit since the 1950s. In black Los Angeles, unemployment has risen by nearly 50 percent since the early 1970s, in a city that spends nothing on social programs for the poor.
Nobody at your economic summit on C-SPAN seemed to have read Michael Katz’s The Undeserving Poor, and so nobody mentioned that only 0.8 percent of our gross national product is spent on welfare, mostly for Social Security. That, since 1972, Aid to Families with Dependent Children has declined 20 percent. That most poor people, 69 percent, are white, though almost half of all black children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. That, between 1970 and 1980, the birth rate of unmarried black women dropped 13 percent, while the birth rate of unmarried white women increased 27 percent.
Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out that the number of rich white men who have never married is almost exactly the same as the number of poor black single mothers: “In the absence of all the old-fashioned ways of redistributing wealth—progressive taxation, job programs, adequate welfare, social services, and other pernicious manifestations of pre-Reaganite ‘big government’—the rich will just have to marry the poor.”
Listen to the homeless. They’re invisible again, but you can hear them if you really want to: at least a million out there; as many as 3 million homeless off and on; as many as 7 million at “extreme risk.” Although most are single men, many of them Vietnam vets, single women are increasing, and about a third of the homeless are families with children. This is the way we’ve dealt with the problem in New York City: Grand Central Station has reduced its public seating to six benches. The Port Authority Bus Terminal refuses entry to anybody, after 1:00 A.M., without a bus ticket. The transit cops have cracked down on anyone trying to beg, sleep, or sing in the subways. In the parks, we burn them alive.
If you can’t bring yourself to listen to these dispossessed, then at least listen to Molly Ivins, who told me you’re such a listener. In Molly’s opinion “there’s not a thing wrong with the ideals and mechanisms outlined and the liberties set forth in the Constitution of the United States. The only problem is the founders left a lot of people out of the Constitution. They left out poor people and black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.”
Include us; exalt us—your office an agency of levitation.