Sleeping on Subways

Not everyone sleeps on the subway. Many people stare at those extensions of their hands with the ubiquitous little screens – although no more than the population at large. Quite a few read books, and a surprising number appear to be doing homework or cramming for exams. Still, it is remarkable how many people are sleeping – and the positions in which they seem able to do so. They sleep standing up and sitting down, leaning against a pole or simply propped up in the crowd. They sleep with their heads flung forward, pushed back, straight up or on the shoulder next to them. They sleep clutching their handbags. I live pretty far uptown, and if I get on the subway in the morning, the sleepers are already on board; and when I ride back in the evening, the sleepers keep on going after I get off.

Sometimes I ask myself why these people are so tired. I mean, being on food stamps can’t be that exhausting. And these folks are obviously on food stamps because they look exactly like the people whose lives Rick Santorum said he didn’t want to make “better by giving them somebody else's money." And they are surely the people Newt Gingrich said must learn to “demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

So why do I think that maybe these people are riding from someplace they can afford to live to the best – and maybe the only – job they can find?  And they are tired.

Walking

I am an inveterate walker. When I am in the country I walk nowhere in particular – like Henry Thoreau, who wrote of “sauntering,” a word derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre – to the holy land.” The land I walk across is holy to me, but it is also mostly private property. No one has yet thrown me off, however, so I walk where I please. I tread carefully, mindful of others’ privacy and of the fact that I am a visitor in every sense of the word. I walk in the clouds, lost in my surroundings and in my own head. In the city, where I walk more often now, it is different. The streets are alive with people and filled at all hours with sounds. The tabloids scream out their headlines (“Dumped” “Thighs the Limit! “Tom Talks Trash”). Here I don’t saunter; I am going somewhere. I am seeking vitality not serenity. “The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, and our cities have always seemed the foster children of America’s landscape, places for those who don’t really belong.

But as someone who just walks around, I believe that America needs both the energy of the city and the reflective peace of the wild.

Back to the Future?

While I know little about China, the press it has received over the last few weeks has fascinated me. There seem to be three Chinas:

• China, the model to emulate
• China, the competitor to fear
• China, the human and environmental tragedy

Clearly, the three Chinas are interconnected, since they are all the same country. The question for me is: how dependent are the first two on the foundation of the third?

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Photos by Lu Guang

The descriptions of China remind me of 19^th-century America, when the nation underwent enormous growth based on technological and financial innovation, the exploitation of natural resources and the abuse of human labor. It was a time characterized by the creation of massive wealth, with unprecedented chasms between rich and poor, and with almost no regulatory protection for workers, consumers, children or the environment. The period experienced harsh labor violence from Homestead to Cripple Creek. In 1886 the U.S. Supreme Court implicitly recognized the personhood of corporations in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, and a decade later in Plessy v Ferguson, the court endorsed the Jim Crow South. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire in Manhattan burned 146 young seamstresses to death.

Our economic prosperity is also built on the foundation of that era, but it is hard to imagine returning to such unregulated times – as some of our aspiring leaders are urging us to do.

New York, No Bikes, 'Nough Said

Aging

I was planning to write about Christy Whitman’s comment that if legislation irritates both extremes, it’s probably a good bill. That will have to wait because my computer disappeared at the airport. I got to the gate with plenty of time to write, took the computer out of my backpack, put it down, and got briefly distracted. Ready to work, I went to get my computer . . . It wasn’t in the pack. I looked all around. No computer. I remembered putting it in the tray at security, but after that. . . ? My entire professional life is on that computer, so I raced back to security. They looked high and low. No computer. Now they’re concerned because somewhere in the airport is a black box that someone might mistake for a bomb. I’m concerned because whoever stole it now has access to my bank account. I report it to the police, who look at me skeptically. “How old are you?” one asks. “Sixty-six,” I reply, suddenly not quite sure. Then it dawned on me: they think I’m senile. “What’s your phone number?” I pause – just briefly – is the prefix 563 or 963? They smile. I fill out a report and return to the gate, where boarding is almost complete, but I give it one more shot . . . and under the seat, upside down, blending in with the carpet, is my Mac. I’m relieved, of course, but I worry about these things.

Gladiators

I was listening to the New York football Giants on the car radio on Sunday afternoon, when Hakeem Nicks caught a short pass from Eli Manning and jigged and hurdled his way to a 72-yeard touchdown run. It sounded like a pretty spectacular play, and here is how color analyst Carl Banks described Nicks’ run: “He made the routine look exceptional.” “Heck,” I said. “In my day, I could make the routine look impossible.”

At 6’2”, 165 pounds with unimpressive muscles, I am rarely mistaken for a football player. But I was once, albeit a long time ago in a very small high school. I weighed 30 pounds more then – about the same as “Night Train” Lane and Johnny Unitas, who are in the Hall of Fame.

Like most Hall of Famers, I also had a concussion. I told the coach that I couldn’t remember the play from the huddle to the line of scrimmage, which clearly made me a liability to myself and to my teammates. So the coach sent me to the infirmary, where the recommended treatment for almost any ailment was an enema . . . which almost killed poor Stephen Pierce when he went in later that fall with appendicitis.

Like all football players, we thought of ourselves as gladiators who played through pain. But football was a game, and it was supposed to be fun. It’s not a game anymore – it is a very big business. It is also a way to keep the people entertained. It’s an old trick. As millions of modern-day Romans watch gladiators try to kill each other in the coliseums below, Tiberius must somewhere be very proud.

"Bipolar America"

That was the collective title of two reviews of three books in yesterday’s New York Times. All deal with the rightward shift of the Republican party and the destruction of its moderate wing. Michael Kinsley’s review of Thomas Frank’s Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right asks: what causes so many working-class people to vote against their own interests? The same thing that always has, I thought: big money and the race card. But Timothy Noah’s review of Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, rattled my self-satisfied mind. Tea Partiers, it seems, want to do away with all entitlements . . . except their own. The reflexively oppose all new taxes . . . except those levied on other people. How unconscionably selfish, I thought, until I realized they weren’t so different from me. I know we need entitlement reform . . . but Medicare is the best health insurance policy I have ever had (of course, I’ve never been in Congress), and social security is a safety net. We need reform . . . but this was a promise. These are not isolated thoughts. As a committed environmentalist, I have reduced my footprint . . . but not quite to the point of inconvenience. I abhor what is happening in our inner cities . . . but I lock my car doors when I drive through them. I am not as self-sufficient as I think I am. I need more inconvenience . . . and to unlock the doors.

The American Dream

It is harder for Americans to rise from poverty to prosperity than citizens of almost any other nation in the so-called first world, according to an article in today’s New York Times. Actually, scholars have debunked the “rags-to-riches” story for years, beginning with studies showing that Horatio Alger’s heroes rose not to great wealth but to middle-class respectability. The lesson of the stories was more about hewing to the corporate line than accumulating great wealth. Ragged Dick was not the last tycoon so much as the first organization man. And even though upward mobility might mean only a slightly better life for your children, the American Dream was that opportunity was there for all to seek. But now even that fluidity seems to be going in the wrong direction. Because the frailty of America’s safety net condemns the poor, and our current tax policies insulate the rich, we live in a society that looks ever more like a banana republic than the land of opportunity. America’s poor have become not just a separate class, but a distinct caste – especially in the cores of our cities, where crime, poverty and vast and chronic unemployment are both epidemic and ignored. And yet we continue to insist that our politicians demonstrate their reverence for an American Dream that has become a nightmare for so many.