Sacred Disorder

This is what Federico Garcia Lorca wrote while living in New York City during 1929 and ‘30,when the stock market crashed. It sounds awfully familiar.

“The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.”

I was driving home today and came upon this strange tableau on Bell Street, near Grady Memorial Hospital. Bell Street used to be home to a public housing project that has been razed to make way for yet another mixed-use development.

This scene, which is larger than the picture denotes, is next to the bridge on Bell Street where homeless people have frequently encamped. I’ve seen as many as 50 people sleeping under the bridge. The police clear them out but they usually return a few weeks later. Lately, though, I haven’t seen so many.

I’m not sure what to make of this. It looks kind of like a hybrid of hobo art and installation art, although there is nothing present to suggest that it was actually undertaken as an art project. If it’s someone’s spontaneous creation, it’s certainly a perfect expression of what’s going on in our increasingly soulless culture.

From a distance, the central image looked like a bar, but, on closer inspection, it could as well be an altar devoted to consumer culture. What is certain is that a television, vacuous even when working (like most of the media), belongs amid the refuse that completely litters the scene. Indeed, the TV is the only organizing presence, but it basically functions only to prop up the hideous flotsam of the culture. (And people wonder why the mainstream media are in such decline.)

Much of the refuse scattered about the altar-bar is, like the bottles atop it,  food and drink containers. I assume these were salvaged by homeless people in their day-long hunts for food and drink — for survival. But when I look at the scene, I see the degradation of American life generally.

There is nothing here that wouldn’t be in the average American’s home and pantry and, as our economy continues to tank and the dying middle class empties food banks, the so-called underclass swells. Welcome to the new dystopia, where anyone can end up homeless and sick under a bridge, a few blocks from an underfunded public hospital in a culture whose politicians and journalists can’t quite bring themselves to view health care or food or shelter as basic rights.

I have stopped a few times during the last year to talk to people who were sleeping under the bridge. (I wrote about them in my cancelled “Headcase” column.) Contrary to the usual assumption, they weren’t all unemployed. That you can be employed full-time and still homeless and hungry in America is shocking.

I look at this scene — directly across from the building site of the shiny apartments that will replace public housing — and find it both sad and bitterly funny. I wonder how long it’s been there, how long it took me to notice it. We really do need to open our eyes.

If you’re not following Paul Krugman’s column and blog, you should be. We can hope his assessment of the Geithner Plan is faulty, but I’m not betting on it.

I read a good bit about how out of touch the political, corporate and pundit classes are, and I always tend to take it with a grain of salt. Glenn Greenwald often borders on shrill in his rants about this.

Then I read something like David Brooks’ latest column and I feel beyond flabbergasted. Here’s some of it:

In short, the United States will never be Europe. It was born as a commercial republic. It’s addicted to the pace of commercial enterprise. After periodic pauses, the country inevitably returns to its elemental nature.

The U.S. is in one of those pauses today. It has been odd, over the past six months, not to have the gospel of success as part of the normal background music of life. You go about your day, taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs, and only gradually do you become aware that there is an absence. There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around. There are no new how-to-get-rich enthusiasms. There are few magazine covers breathlessly telling readers that some new possibility — biotechnology, nanotechnology — is about to change everything. That part of American culture that stokes ambition and encourages risk has gone silent.

We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended. The public culture is dominated by one downbeat story after another as members of the educated class explore and enjoy the humiliation of the capitalist vulgarians.

Washington is temporarily at the center of the nation’s economic gravity and a noncommercial administration holds sway. This is an administration that has many lawyers and academics but almost no businesspeople in it, let alone self-made entrepreneurs. The president speaks passionately about education and health care reform, but he is strangely aloof from the banking crisis and displays no passion when speaking about commercial drive and success.

But if there is one thing we can be sure of, this pause will not last. The cultural DNA of the past 400 years will not be erased. The pendulum will swing hard. The gospel of success will recapture the imagination.

Hello? Is he not aware that for the last eight years, American enterpreneurship of the type he’s describing was quashed by an administration that did all in its power to create a plutocracy?

I love this comment someone left. It says in part:

When we recover from our debilitating malaise, Mr. Brooks, should we return to our former greatness, producing bigger houses, bigger cars, and more objects to fill them, consigning ourselves to an ever-churning, insatiable obsolescence?

What happened, Mr. Brooks, to the conservatism that once treasured family, love, beauty, and virtue? Were they just a veneer, hiding from us the great gifts of production?

I hope your America never returns. This country, at its heart, is a wonderful nation – for so many reasons that you fail to mention and may not fathom. And none of those reasons are commercial in their provenance.

Seriously, read Brooks’ column and the entire comment (#38).