The Asparagus Question

I'd have missed this, but the only reading available this morning in the Real Change bathroom was a three week old business section from the Seattle Times. Apparently, they couldn't find enough workers to harvest the asparagus this year, and about 7.5 million pounds of the stuff were plowed up. The amazing thing was that the story went on for a full twenty paragraphs without saying why.

Analysis stopped at the tautological level: There weren't enough workers because there seems to be a worker shortage.

"It's strictly due to the lack of labor," said Jim Middleton of the state asparagus commission. Jobs R Us owner Christin Esquivel agreed. "We are having a lot of trouble finding people," she said.

I walked into the production room, where Rosette was racing against a Real Change deadline, and waved the page in front of him. "This story goes on for twenty paragraphs about how there aren't enough workers to harvest the asparagus, but it doesn't say why."

"I know why," he said, wrinkling his nose.

As a father of four year olds, I knew why too.

"Because it's yucky," I said!

"That's right."

Sensing there may be more to the story, I called Carlos Marentes at El Comite Pro-Amnestia General y Justicia Social to ask what was up with the asparagus.

He didn't know.

He did, say, however, that about a third of California's crops had been left in the fields as well, and that Yakima growers were now using employment agencies and resorting to the desperate measure of actually raising wages.

Part of the issue, he said, is that the raids have taken their toll. But the bigger issue is that fewer people are coming north. "A lot of people have accepted that there is no place for them in this country," he said sadly.

Finding data on the impact of immigration policy on farm labor isn't easy, but Washington Employment Security Commissioner Karen Lee confirms that there is a shortage, and that prices are going up as a result. She cites the strong economy, an aging agricultural workforce, high gas prices, and immigration policies that discourage migrant workers as causes.

Fighting the Good Fight in DC

Maybe there's hope after all.

Tony Lee thinks so. Tony is the lobbyist for Poverty Action and is one of the distinguished old men of our movement. When he says something, it's usually a good idea to listen.

A few weeks ago we found ourselves at the same event, and as Speaker of the House Frank Chopp went on about something or another in the next room, we retreated to the food table and went to work on those little fruit tart pies that always show up at these things. I tried to sell Tony on my Phil Mangano bounty offer, and described how the homeless ten year plans were misleading our movement, ignoring poverty, and providing cover for the federally led slaughter of the poor. I admitted to having gone a little bit insane recently.

Tony said I should relax, because the national poverty agenda had new momentum and unity and would basically outflank the "advocacy" whores who have sold out poor people in the name of growing the poverty industry.

He didn't actually say "advocacy whores." But I'm sure that's what he meant.

There's some encouraging evidence that he's right. This Thursday, a beltway press conference will be held to mark the twentieth anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act. While an earlier post here compared national homeless advocates to yappy little dogs, that now seems unfair. It has been pointed out that yappy dogs have done little to deserve such a comparison.

But more to the point, a consensus statement of national level homeless advocates has been drafted, and the ten year plan strategy is nowhere to be found. In fact, the statement addresses the deficiencies of the federally driven policy alternative quite explicitly.

There is none of the rah-rah "we're winning against homelessness" crap that Mangano and company seem to live for. There is explicit recognition that McKinney-Vento is necessary but not sufficient. There is a call for the feds to dramatically expand their role in providing housing. There is recognition that the attack on poor people's programs must be halted and reversed. The civil rights crisis that exists for homeless people is named, and there is a call for a wage-led strategy to reduce poverty.

This is very good news. While the US Interagency Council on Homelessness and the National Alliance, by virtue of superior resources and political clout, have made the Ten Year Plan paradigm seem like the only game in town, a quiet revolution has bubbled underground.

I got a hint of this last week when a homeless advocate from a southeastern state called to talk. He found my blog when he Googled "philip mangano is the devil." Myself and the staff at WRAP helped him with material for a presentation at the NAEH conference.

Also revealing is the fact that an NAEH conference workshop on McKinney-Vento turned into a minor revolution. NAEH organizers had set up the workshop to only promote CPEHA (the version they favor), and dismissed alternative legislation with the following sentence: "There are two other proposals, the Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act of 2007 (HEARTH) (HR 840) and the Administration's Homeless Assistance Consolidation Act of 2007, which has not yet been introduced."

Workshop attendees revolted, and shared their own comparisons of the competing versions of legislation. As one person relayed, "The folks that I talked to were disgusted. That is sloppy, misleading, and irresponsible. That is pretty much how they felt and I know first hand that they complained about it."

This week's press conference is more evidence still. The Ten Things to End Homelessness list is basically a big fuck you to Phil "I love Project Connect and Ten Year Plans" Mangano. Take a look:

1. Assist currently homeless people by reauthorizing and doubling funds for HUD McKinney-Vento programs.

2. Create housing for low-income households by enacting a National Housing Trust Fund.

3. Protect, preserve, and expand existing federal housing programs that serve the lowest-income people.

4. Appropriate funds for at least 5,000 Section 8 housing vouchers forhomeless veterans through the HUD-Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing Program.

5. Expand access to addiction and mental health services for people experiencing homelessness through reauthorization of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

6. Increase homeless and low-income persons’ access to healthcare by reauthorizing and expanding the Consolidated Health Centers program.

7. Increase homeless persons’ access to mainstream disability income, temporary assistance, and workforce investment services.

8. Provide homeless children and youth with increased services and support by reauthorizing the Education for Homeless Children and Youth program in the No Child Left Behind Act and the Runaway and Homeless Youth Act.

9. Require the Administration to develop and publish a coordinated federal plan to end homelessness.

10. Require jurisdictions receiving federal housing funds to protect the civil rights of homeless persons.

This is a major step in the right direction. I like number nine in particular, which calls USICH on its strategy to devolve all responsibility for homelessness to the localities.

Here's the thing though. Better positions only take us part way there. To get these ideas off paper and into legislation, we need to broaden our political base and vision, build for power, and make poverty into the kind of issue that political leaders have to address or else.

Gimmicky press conferences alone won't make much of a difference, but if the signers of this statement can figure out how to back these words up with the kind of action that makes people listen, then we'll be getting somewhere.

What's So Great About Violence?

Sunday night I read the first chapter of Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects The State. Provocative title, huh? I thought so too. It's just out by South End Press, and I put in for my review copy the moment I got their postcard.

So far, my reaction is disappointment, amusement, and annoyance, but I'll try to keep an open mind. Perhaps chapter two, Nonviolence is Racist, will win me over.

The argument of chapter one, Nonviolence is Ineffective, rests on two prongs. The first is that the various wins generally associated with nonviolence — India's overthrow of colonialism, the civil rights movement, the non-nuclear proliferation movement, etcetera — weren't actually wins at all. They were all tactical capitulations to power that were spun as wins by the hegemonic victors.

Gelderloos dispenses with the civil rights movement, for example, in just four paragraphs.

The second is that nonviolence was not the only current within these examples, and whatever victories these movements did enjoy may be attributed to whatever more militant (read violent) tactics that may have been employed.

Writing this powerfully facile is best attempted by the very young. As near as I can tell, Gelderloos is about twenty-five. I found his affinity group photo from the Nov. 18, 2001 School of the America's action that put him in prison for six months, and he was 19 then. Since then he's shaved his head and become an anarchist. He's started the Signalfire site, and has developed an impressive activist resume.

His SOA stint led him to prison organizing, and for that alone I am grateful, since the attrocity of America's prisons seem to exist in some sort of magical twilight realm of which liberals everywhere are blithely unaware.

Yet, his book thus far just pisses me off. He moves way too fast from the position that working for change without building for power is useless to the notion that more violence is just the thing our movement needs.

Put simply, unless a movement is a threat, it cannot change a system based on centralized coercion and violence, and if that movement does not realize and exercize the power that makes it a threat, it cannot destroy such a system. ... The elite cannot be persuaded by appeals to their conscience.

So far so good. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree. But his evidence for the ineffectiveness of nonviolence and the salubriousness of its opposite, at least in the first chapter, is weak.

He makes the mistake of thinking in binaries, which causes him to dismiss King as an ineffective sellout and to embrace the Weathermen as bold revolutionary tacticians. He also makes the elementary mistake of confusing nonviolence with the absence of militance. Nobody who is familiar with, for example, the history of the Freedom Riders would make such a claim.

At some point (I'm thinking French Resistance here) we may have no choice but to form underground cells and fight fascism with violence. But we're a long way from that moment. At present, the state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and, as we saw here during WTO, violent tactics from a small romantic cult on the extreme left mostly just provide legitimation for the deployment of state violence against us all.

So let's not get ahead of ourselves, OK?

Working Poor in Waltham: Part One of Two

The summer between the Air Force and college was spent in a barely furnished third floor room in a Waltham SRO. There was a second floor bathroom shared by four of us. The landlord was a grizzled gray slob who had graduated to stretched out sweat pants. He managed a number of properties from a tiny Main Street storefront and would shove my weekly rent into a wallet the size of a doubled up fist.

Each week, the surly fat guy got about half my money. After a tank of gas, cigarettes, and food, the rest was gone.

I'd applied for state unemployment and been told that I didn't qualify, but might be able to get food stamps. I spent several hours in line, only to be humiliated by some state worker who looked at my military discharge and said "What's the matter? Couldn't you cut it."

That was enough for me. If this was what it took to get help, I didn't want it.

My hang-out buddy that summer was an impoverished gay balalaika-playing playboy who received a small stipend from his parents and lived on the floor below. His dad was a parking lot magnate in Maine. My new college dropout friend was embittered by the prospect of having to work for a living. His dad, he'd complain, should just give him one of the family lots. Then he'd be set.

This was 1983, and AIDS had yet to become a public issue. Anonymous, unprotected sex between gay men was still common. He told me how to flag down truckers for sex, and — during our long weekend bike rides — showed me the local cruising grounds at Prospect Park. This was a new world. I wasn't interested in the sex, but wasn't really put off either. He was someone fun to ride bikes and smoke a little pot with. I became his unattainable "het" friend.

I found work, and drove my decrepit Audi each day to an auto parts warehouse near Central Square in Cambridge. This being Boston, I made a game of seeing how many lights I could run in eight miles. My record was six.

One day, as I walked around the neighborhood on my lunch break, I wandered into Revolution Books, the storefront of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I didn't know what to make of the place, and struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter. Confronted with a real live worker, the bespectacled young man knew just what to do. He gave me a copy of Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and asked me to come back and discuss my findings. I took the book, but never returned.

I didn't need the RCP to teach me about class struggle and capitalism.

My days were spent packaging up pallets of radiators and fenders and such and putting away stock as it came in. There was a re-chroming operation downstairs where non-english speaking immigrants and other people of color worked with noxious chemicals all day in temperatures that made my warehouse seem balmy by comparison. It was common knowledge that acid and other chemicals were being dumped into the Charles River.

I worked alone. Three sales guys manned the phones in the adjacent air conditioned office while I'd sweat out the hundred degree heat. The dust that hung in the air turned to mud on my skin. Three days a week I'd drive a parts run to Springfield and back. I learned to speed without getting caught.

The administrative area had large offices for the owner and the head supervisor that overlooked a half dozen sales and accounting desks. This area was clean, well-lit, and air-conditioned. Their bathroom had fragrant soap and soft toilet paper. The laborer's bathroom, on the other hand, was filthy, smelled horrible, and had only paper towels.

My complaints were not well received. I hadn't been hired to advise management. I made a point of peeing where I wasn't welcome. Occasionally, the boss would mention that my bathroom was upstairs. I'd nod, but my rebellion continued. I knew something they didn't. In late-August, I'd be gone. The knowledge made me cocky. I was a wage slave, but I was a wage slave that was leaving soon for college, and that made all the difference.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

Zero Tolerance for Dehumanization

Today the police brought formal charges against my friends Rainee and Bruce. I can't remember the last time I've felt so angry about anything. The details surrounding their case are so outrageous that it's hard to accept that they are in great danger, but they may well be.

They could go to prison, lose their daughter, and have everything that they've struggled to achieve destroyed. But they probably won't. Their counsel is the lead medical marijuana lawyer in the area, and the media, Real Change included, seems to be taking a keen interest. For now, I'm optimistic.

"How could anybody do that to someone?"

The answer lies in the word "someone." Drug users, like homeless people, are considered subhuman. So we're not dealing with "someone" at all. We're dealing with the dehumanized Other, who does not merit our empathy.

Heather left a comment on last week's Drug Users in Belltown post directing me to an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled Your Brain on Drug Addicts. As it turns out, I'm a subscriber, and the article was in the pile below my coffee table.

Here's what it says. Brain imaging studies confirm what many of us already know. For most people, drug addicts and homeless people do not trigger empathy. They trigger disgust. They don't really even register as people.

With co-author Susan T. Fiske, also of Princeton, Harris chose which out-groups to show on the basis of stereotypes about them and the emotions they evoke. Fiske previously noted that the stereotypes of out-groups vary on two dimensions: warmth and competence. Warm and competent groups like American Olympic athletes inspire pride. Warm groups that are deemed unable to act on their warmth, such as the elderly or disabled, elicit pity. Cold groups that are nevertheless competent, such as the rich, induce envy. And groups that are low on both warmth and incompetence – drug addicts and homeless people – arouse disgust.

Fiske and Harris showed photographs of these four kinds of outgroups to 10 Princeton undergraduates as they lay in an fMRI scanner. To 12 other Princeton undergraduates they presented photographs of inanimate objects that aroused the same emotions as did the out-groups – for example, a sports car to induce envy, or an overflowing toilet to evoke disgust. They found that the pictures of the objects, homeless people, and drug addicts did not excite the mPFC, although they did activate brain regions associated with emotions.

So there it is. Were one actually dealing with another human being, the idea of manipulating an eight-year old who's beloved grandfather had just died to bust a couple who grow prescription medical marijuana for pain control would be unthinkable.

But if you're used to thinking of drug users as disgusting subhuman creatures who must be eliminated, then anything goes.

This is the issue that drew me to homelessness in the first place. Homeless people are widely regarded as subhuman. So are addicts and prisoners. When you have an expendable group of people who arouse disgust, terrible things can happen. The dehumanization of anyone leads to the dehumanization of us all.

Speaking of which ...

This week I fielded two press calls about downtown homelessness. The Downtown Seattle Association, as I said before, is on a new propaganda offensive over panhandling and public toilets. They are trying desperately to whip up some righteous indignation.

Thus far, they're not getting a lot of traction. But you can bet that they're not giving up. As the relationship between city and suburb changes, with cities becoming the new nucleus of upscale density, visible poverty is more unwelcome in urban centers everywhere.

Thus the fixation on "chronic" homelessness, and the companion stick approach, an escalation in the policing of the urban poor.

Being the angry sort of guy that I am these days, I'm finding diplomacy less and less appropriate to the moment. Last winter I had numerous conversations with the DSA's Peg Dreisenger and Anita Woo about the panhandling education campaign they had in the works. They were being reasonable, and so was I. I'm not wild about panhandling either.

They wanted an endorsement, but I wouldn't go that far. If they did their campaign in a way that focused on positive alternatives, as opposed to negative stereotypes, I said, I would not organize against them. They arrived at Have a Heart, Give Smart, and were rewarded with my public neutrality. I liked their brochure.

During our last meeting, Anita Woo, the DSA's communications staffer, told a story about a woman panhandler who was spotted hopping into her SUV to make a quick call on her Blackberry.

I laughed at her.

"You can't tell that story," I said. "It's like Ronald Reagan and his Cadillac driving Black welfare queens. It's apocryphal bullshit." We all laughed nervously.

She went on the radio during the launch of the campaign and told just that story. She punched away at all the buttons that the lit itself avoided. They're making a lot of money off of credulous do-gooders. It's all a big lucrative scam. They're mostly addicts. Etcetera. It's like they couldn't wait to take the fucking gloves off.

That was last January. Since then, they've escalated. Their position now is that, despite their panhandling education campaign, downtown begging is up by thirty-eight percent!

Woo trotted out the Blackberry story to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter just last week. You gotta love a good story.

Here's another one.

The DSA is also opposed to handing out sandwiches on the street. Here's a handy DSA guide to public policy: if it's visible downtown poverty, they want it to go away.

We were talking about downtown feeding, and Peggy Dreisenger, the affable manager of DSA's street program, told me the real reason one doesn't feed the poor.

Chronically homeless people have, through their years of alcohol and drug abuse, undermined the viability of their digestive organs. If one, therefore, feeds one of these wretches a sandwich, their body will reject it. They will throw up in the nearest bush, curbside, or sidewalk, and someone, probably one of her employees, will have to clean it up.

The do-gooders, she said, don't understand this.

I contained my amazement, walked back to Real Change, and told our editor what she had said. He knew. She'd said the same thing to him several weeks prior.

Since then, I've had the opportunity to ask the opinions of various health care professionals, each of whom were appalled at the story.

This story is about one thing. Dehumanization. This isn't something we should tolerate. Politeness, even here in Seattle, has its limits.

Sometimes, Only This Will Do

This'll tell you a little about where I'm at these days. My favorite new way to test my car's speakers on the drive home is to see how loud I can play Watch Out For This Thing, the new CD from Seattle's The Whore Moans. I heard them for the first time a few months back live on KEXP and have to say, their front man sounded even better with his voice all rasped out with a cold.

Last night I was trying to think of the right superlative, and it came to me this morning: utterly fucking primal. This guy's got a punk rock shriek that runs from the upper range of a three-year-old's scream to the lower registers of an accelerating F-15.

You can hear the whole album on CD Baby. Ten songs and not a single dog. Listen to Sweet As A Peach — my favorite moments are when the vocals first come ripping into the song and the split second of dead silence before the key change at 1:24 — or the anthemic Disappear, which rises to Fugazi-ish levels of awesomeness. This is one of those releases that, like Iggy Pop's Raw Power, Mission of Burma's EP, Fugazi's Thirteen Songs, or Gang of Four's Entertainment!, is destined to be a classic.

The video is from The Comet last February,

Tragedy Strikes, Cops Screw Victims

Just as I was leaving the office today I got an emergency call from my friend Rainee Osman. "Watch King 5 news tonight. I don't have time to explain," she said. "I'll call you tomorrow."

Rainee and her husband Bruce are my favorite Real Change vendor hopeless-case-gone-good story. They started selling the paper in the mid-nineties. Both were heroin addicts. Rainee has dealt with chronic pain her entire life, and graduated at some point from prescription pain-killers to the stuff you could buy on the street.

Heroin addiction is never a great lifestyle choice. When I met them, they were homeless, but selling the paper gave them some dignity back and offered Rainee an alternative to working in strip clubs. They stuck with it for years.

Over that time, I saw them try to get clean and fail often enough to lose count. This had to have been really hard for them, because it was hard for me just to watch. They were good people who were struggling with addiction. They taught me that we are always more than the sum of our problems.

They had a baby while they were still addicted, and were fortunate enough to be able to keep her in the family. Chandler was raised on a ranch in Montana by Rainee's parents — a salt of the earth couple named Larry and Carol — until she was three. Their beautiful daughter was the inspiration Bruce and Rainee needed to finally kick for good.

In 2002, Chandler came home to live with mom and dad. Bruce and Rainee still come in every once in awhile to say hi. Last Christmas, Rainee dropped off two handmade embroidered jeans jackets she had made. Chandler had outgrown them, and Rainee wanted my girls to have them. I was very, very touched by the gesture.

They have a normal life and live in Kent. They are the sort of people you might bowl with, or meet at a little league game. Typical working parents, trying to make ends meet like everybody else.

Both Rainee and Bruce have medical marijuana prescriptions for active Hepatitis C and other disabling pain issues. A few years ago, there was a problem around this that could have led to the loss of their housing and daughter, but the courts ruled in their favor.

Tonights' News on King 5 story was about tragedy compounded by pure meanness.

Rainee's parents were visiting, and Chandler was up near Snoqualmie Pass with Grandpa when their truck broke down. Larry was crushed to death as he futzed around with the trailer hitch. Chandler sat in the cab of the truck, unaware of what had happened, with the cel phone she had been handed. After a while she called mom to report that Grandpa never came back.

The State Troopers brought her home. On the way, there was an interrogation. Eight-year-old Chandler revealed that mom and dad grow marijuana.

It's all too easy to see how this happened. The call comes in to the Troopers. Bruce and Rainee's records come up. There are several hours alone with the kid in the car without a lawyer. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.

The troopers busted in, violently cuffed Bruce and Rainee, and viciously trashed their home. They weren't interested in the doctor's authorization. Their lawyer says the seizure of the plants, the entry without a warrant, and the ransacking of the home were all illegal.

Mom, dad, and Chandler are all back home, putting the pieces back together and coping with their loss. Rainee came home today to find a business card from Child Protective Services stuck in the door.

Motherfuckers.

Chalk up another "win" for the war on drugs. I feel so much safer. Don't you?

Collaborating With The Enemy

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the McKinney-Vento Act, the landmark 1987 legislation that set the template for the federal response to homelessness. Twenty years ago, this legislation was the movement against homelessness’ biggest victory ever, but what should have been a beginning became an end in itself. McKinney-Vento has become a deal with the devil, and not an especially good one.

The past thirty years has seen a relentless assault upon the poor. Name a program that serves low-income people — Social Security Insurance, Medicaid, Community Development Block Grants — and you’ll see a history of steady attrition.

While the centerpiece of the Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness is “Housing First,” federal funding for housing has been cut by $52 billion since 1979. Between 1996 and 2005, 100,000 public housing units have been lost. There has been no new funding for public housing since 1996. The federal strategy of devolving the responsibility for housing to the localities is seldom questioned.

For all our talk of "ending homelessness," advocates have grown appallingly complacent. We have settled for McKinney-Vento, an insider’s game designed to divide and conquer that has never exceeded $1.5 billion in annual funding. We win a battle here and there while the war on the poor rages on unchecked.

One routinely hears our "political realists" lament that the feds are simply out of the housing game and it's up to us locally to solve homelessness. Homeless and poor people deserve better than a self-defeating advocacy that decides the limits of the possible before even trying.

Our own Patty Murray chairs the Senate Housing committee, and is in a tremendously powerful position to influence federal policy. Murray should be the target of a grassroots national campaign to up the federal ante. And yet, she is not.

Homeless advocates (and I am tempted to put the phrase in quotation marks) have allowed the terms of the debate to be set by the representatives of the Bush administration. Does anyone really believe that the US Interagency Council on Homelessness is some sort of fifth column burrowing from within? That their agenda is somehow at odds with everything else that Bush does?

The struggle to end homelessness and poverty should be housing and wage led, and should link to the struggles of kids, the elderly, immigrants, people of color, working people, and prisoners. Homelessness is about economic insecurity, and almost everyone can relate to that.

But that's not what we're talking about, is it?

An end to homelessness will not be found in better data, more specialization, and an obsession with the personal dysfunctions of the poor. These priorities might be where the federal funding is, but they do not lead to economic justice or greater equality.

$52 billion lost in public housing funding. Steady cuts to other programs that serve the poor. And $1.5 billion gained in McKinney-Vento. This is the definition of winning the battle but losing the war.

Let's take that analogy a little further.

In war, collaboration with the enemy is a capital offense. But this, apparently, isn't a war at all. It's a cozy little Hyatt-Regency tea party of the well-paid and comfortable. And we don't just collaborate with the enemy. We invite him to keynote our conferences.

People On Drugs In Belltown

At 9:30 this morning, I arrived at my bargain lot a block from Real Change just in time to snag the last space. On clear summer days the tourists and suburbanites descend on Belltown to take in Pike Place Market, gaze across the Sound at Mount Rainier, and drink themselves into a shopping frenzy at Starbucks. Parking becomes scarce.

An SUV spread itself across the remaining spot as an older couple haggled with a man pretending to be the lot attendant. After a moment, the driver shut his door to allow my '92 Corolla into the space. I headed to the pay box. They could fend for themselves.

As I punched the buttons, the nervous "attendant" jogged across the lot to stand just behind me. "That's fine," he boomed. "We accept credit cards too."

If there's an acting career in this guy's future, it's in a bottom feeding porn flick.

I turned to stare. "I park here everyday." Our eyes locked. I turned back for my ticket and, poof, he was gone.

The SUV guy walked over and regarded the machine as if it were the cockpit of the space shuttle. "How does this work?"

I took pity and went into "helper" mode.

"You put your space number in here and hit enter," I said, punching it in for him. "I was 47, so you must be 46. Then you choose your option. It's $8 for all day. Are you parking all day sir?"

"Yes," he said, "I think so."

"Great," I said, punching number 4. "Then you slide your credit card in and out of here, take your ticket from there, and put it on your dash. Simple."

He looked at me uncertainly. "That man said we could park all day for $10 cash?"

"Yeah," I said. "He doesn't work here. He's a junkie."

He walked away from the machine without completing the transaction. For some reason that annoyed me. I put my ticket away and locked the car door.

When I looked up, the man and his wife were in front of me. She was a little panicked, The encounter with the fake attendant had put her on edge, and now her eyes were wide in anticipation of further danger.

"That man over there," she waved to a guy smoking on the Macrina loading dock, "says this lot isn't safe. He says there are people on drugs who go up and down this alley all day."

She said "on drugs" as if it were something extraordinary. Something akin to masturbating in public. Or eating dog shit.

They looked at me and waited. I had become their urban sherpa.

It was true. People on drugs do go up and down that alley all day.

"This is Belltown," I said.

They stared blankly.

"Look around you," I offered. "The lot is full. It's safe. I've parked here everyday for years and nothing has ever happened."

The man looked reassured, but his wife seemed doubtful.

People on drugs were walking up and down the alley. And they had a decision to make.

I left them standing there. What they did next is anyone's guess.

Part of me hopes they left for the $16 lot three blocks closer to the Market. Another part of me fantasizes that they got back into their SUV and hightailed it back to Minnesota or Issaquah or whatever comfort zone it is they prefer.

But mostly, I hope they just paid their eight bucks and stopped being afraid. Nothing good ever comes from being afraid.

Criminal of Poverty

I’d wanted to meet Lisa Gray-Garcia for a long time. The San Francisco anti-poverty activist came recommended as a friend of a friend and is the founder of Poor, an occasional magazine produced by Bay Area “poverty scholars” that puts their experience into words.

My chance came when “Tiny” was in town last month to read from Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America. She was sitting alone at the Elliott Bay Café when I arrived and we had a chance to connect. We could be friends.

She’s the real thing. Fiery and authentic. A great writer. An electrifying speaker. She is a poet and a revolutionary, a mother and a leader, an author and an activist. There’s a lot to admire.

Her beautifully written memoir should be cut into digestible pieces and force-fed to every victim-blaming poverty bureaucrat who ever looked down when they should have been looking across.

For the rest of us, a more leisurely read will do. I tore through the thing in a day, mesmerized.

She begins with her mother and her mother’s mother and the abandonment, poverty, and vulnerability they experienced in their own survivor’s tales. Her mother, Dee, a vivacious beauty who was sometimes able to hide the pain of her origins, briefly rose into the middle-class as a doctor’s wife. When the relationship soured, she was dumped back into poverty with a four year-old along for the ride. She and little Lisa became each other’s everything.

This is where the story behind the story becomes as intriguing, at least for me, as the story itself. Lisa and her mother (Tiny was chosen as a street name to rhyme with Dee) become joined at the hip and heart as a single, survival-oriented, unit. While there are good years and bad years, the bad years eventually become more of an unbroken line, and Tiny becomes her mother’s confidant and caretaker.

At six, she is working the phones in search of resources. By twelve, she knows how to put on a suit and pose as a model renter who is twice her age. School was always off and on, but after sixth grade, there was just no more time. Survival and taking care of mom trump all else. As Tiny moves into her teens, she and her mother become street artists and peddlers, staying half a step ahead of the landlord. They are reduced to living in their car, and eventually, Tiny is jailed as a poverty criminal.

There is a striking absence of bitterness over the missed childhood and lack of normal teen relationships. Instead, there is only fierce mother/daughter love, which survives in all of its complicated intensity all the way through Tiny’s twenties to her mother’s death.

What to most people would look like completely dysfunctional co-dependence is defended as placing family relationships ahead of selfish individualism. To Tiny, the equation is simple. Her mother needed her, and she was there for her. End of story.

The last several chapters describe the Poor Magazine years, after Tiny and Dee found their voices and were able to help others articulate and publish their experiences. She describes a rollercoaster of foundation funding received and withdrawn and stability won and lost. The twelve year-old who learned how to show landlords what they wanted to see becomes the twenty-something nonprofit grant writer and poor people’s leader. As a reader, one gets the sense that this part of the story is incomplete.

This is a haunting read — equal parts love story and poverty memoir — that gets at the realities of class in America. Poverty and law enforcement are the rock and the hard place, and the poor are in the middle, getting squeezed off of the streets and into the jails. If you don’t understand this, you understand nothing. This book will help you to understand.

The Return of Classics Corner

In the mid-nineties, as I was settling into Seattle and getting Real Change going, I decided to make a point of having a life outside my work. The best idea I could come up with on how to do that was to cultivate an interest in ancient lit, and find a group of folks who shared my obsession. Some people play bridge. Some people golf. I looked for people who wanted to discuss Thucydides. Call me a freak.

One by-product of this fateful decision was my Classics Corner column, which I wrote for Real Change from 1999-2004. This was a literary column of sorts in which I referred to myself in the first person plural and tried to be funny while discussing current affairs and, mostly, ancient Greek literature.

It doesn't sound like it would work, but it did. People started buying the paper for the column, and three years later I still meet people who ask for it back. My twin daughters came along in March of 2003, and within a year it was clear some things had to go. These included practicing the guitar and banjo, teaching myself ancient greek, and writing the damn column.

I put the old columns up on a website, but no one really seemed to care or notice. When the renewal notice came this month, I decided to let it go. But today, as I scraped moss off my roof and meditated on my love of the Northwest, it occurred to me that I could put all those columns on a blog for FREE!

So I did. The Classics Corner blog now lives, and I put a link underneath my profile. Today I put up most of the columns from 2000. It was bittersweet to come across a column where I prognosticate that G.W. Bush could not possibly become President. A few favorites include a column on King Lear, a short history of the town of Sappho on the Olympic Peninsula, and the Socratic proof that Slade Gorton has no soul. As I find time, I'll get all the Classics Corners I ever wrote onto the blog, even the ones that sucked.

It's still hard for me to imagine me taking up this column again, but this, I suppose, moves me a step closer.

Marty McOmber: Nickels' Media Bully Boy

So bright and early Friday morning, this congenial little note shows up in my email from Rick Hooper over at Seattle's Office of Housing:

Attention Timothy Harris: Please see attached; correction needed in story published in the June 27 / July 3 edition.....

"Attached," is something that looks a lot like a press release. It has all the tell-tale signs: The city stationary, the bold headline, the contact for more information, the business-like style, that "###" thingy at the end that they teach you to do in J school. I might not be a big time pro like Martin McOmber, who used to be a journalist, but, hey, I've been doing this newspaper thing for awhile, and it looks like a press release to me (click to enlarge).




But here's the thing. Neither point in this "Correction" was actually in error. The whole point of this communication, it seems, is to impute error where there was none. As Cydney Gillis, the Real Change journalist whose work is being questioned here so delicately put it, "I feel like I've just been sprayed by a cat."

Meaning, I think, that this is all about claiming territory and making a bad smell.

Cyd's story, Two Opposing Sides vie for Future of Historic Building, published in the June 27 issue of Real Change, describes how the Mayor will soon decide who gets to develop an historic building that once served as an immigrant processing center. One proposal is from a wealthy developer of office buildings, Greg Smith, and the other is from a community organization, the Seattle Chinatown-International District Preservation and Development Authority, which would create workforce housing.

Rick Hooper is quoted as saying that the Mayor's Office is inclined toward Smith's proposal because it winds up being a simpler, and thus more attractive, transaction for the City.

The press release identifies two "misstatements." The first complaint is this:

Federal Government responsibilities under the federal McKinney Homeless Act were met. Availability of the building for homeless related uses was advertised and ultimately there were no takers. As a result the Federal Government turned to the City---the City was interested in facilitating community based ownership and has proceeded with a process to identify a new owner.

Well, this is odd, because Cyd says pretty much the same thing.

The mayor’s office called for the proposals in March to facilitate transfer and redevelopment of the INS Building, which closed in 2004 and is currently at the disposal of the federal General Services Administration.

GSA Realty Specialist Fred Zderic, who is negotiating the transfer with the city, says the agency put out a notice last year to try to meet the McKinney requirement. But the only homeless housing proposal it received was from the Salvation Army, which Zderic says backed out over the high cost of rehabilitating the old structure, which is a protected landmark listed on the National Register.

Nowhere does Cyd state that "McKinney responsibilities weren't met." She does say, "But both proposals depart from what the 1987 federal McKinney Act calls for – turning retired federal property into housing for the homeless." Which is true. They do.

Next, McOmber's press release takes issue with the accuracy of our reporting as to the current state of the two proposals.

Both proposals submitted in response to the City’s Request for Proposals (RFP) continue under review. The Mayor’s Office is continuing to evaluate and have conversations with SCIDpda, the applicant for workforce housing and an interpretive center and Urban Visions, the proponent of a sustainability center and interpretive center. Contrary to assertions in Real Change’s article, the Mayor sees great strengths in both proposals and is looking for ways to have the process result in a positive outcome for the Community, the City, and the Federal Government.

This, again, is strange, because Cyd says that "Mayor Greg Nickels will choose between" the development plans "in the next few weeks," and quotes Hooper saying that the Mayor wants to be “open to all the different possible uses of the building.”

The really odd thing is that the assertion in Cyd's story that the City may be leaning toward Greg Smith is backed up by quotes from Rick Hooper himself:

While Zderic believes the city is leaning toward the PDA proposal, Hooper says that route would involve the city taking charge of the property and leasing it to the agency – a more complicated transaction to which the mayor’s office appears less inclined, according to Hooper.

Smith’s plan “is the best route to take for the sale to go to a private developer without any long-term city ownership,” Hooper says. “We envision a simultaneous closing,” he says, in which the property would immediately pass from the city to Smith and his company, Urban Visions.

So, what? Have we misquoted anyone here? No. That's not the assertion. Hooper said it and he's not denying it. But tracks need to be covered and press releases sent.

So here's how it looks to me. Hooper said the city was leaning toward Smith, Cyd reported that, and Marty McOmber, who used to be a journalist, is using his skills to undermine the credibility of our reporting and blow some smoke for his boss.

Show me the "misstatement."

All I see here is one bureaucrat getting caught talking out of turn, and another bureaucrat working to cover his tracks.

Once a Loser: An ADHD Success Story

Those of you who have slogged through my five-part Air Force Years memoir might be wondering, "Who the hell is this guy, and why is he such an irresponsible drug abusing jerk?"

I've often wondered that myself. The answers didn't really fall into place until this past year. That's when I learned, at the ripe age of 46, that I have a "disorder." Last December, after I self-diagnosed about six months earlier, a licensed shrink confirmed that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and gave me drugs to fix it. Sometimes they even work.

One of the downsides of being ADHD is that minor feats of cognition, such as remembering to bring one's lunch to work, go to an appointment, or pay a parking ticket, are inordinately difficult. Successful people with ADHD, and there are many of us, find ways to adapt. Back in 2000, for example, I started using this huge Franklin-Covey planner, which I carry everywhere despite the fact that it weighs about six pounds. It helps, but I need a lot more than the Seven Habits of Success to fix my problem.

Today was classic. I'd written a 1:15 appointment with my shrink, a guy named Marty, down in my July Calendar. Last week, I made a lunch date with another guy, a marketing guy for a local publication who is also named Marty, for 1:00. I put that in my calendar too. So I look at my huge fucking planner, and I have a 1:15 with Marty on the master calendar and a 1:00 on the daily page, and I figure 1:15 being the more precise time, that must be when I'm due at the shrink. So I go, and he signs me up for more Adderall, and I return to a message from Marty wondering where the hell was I?

Two guys named Marty scheduled for around 1:00 today. What are the odds?

The thing about ADHD is that one doesn't suddenly contract this. It's about brain structure. It shows up when you're a little kid. There are problems with focus, hyperactivity, thrill-seeking, and, secondarily, esteem, that start early and don't go away.

In my case, I was the last kid in the 4th grade to memorize the multiplication tables, despite routinely getting the highest scores in my class on the standardized tests. By the second grade, I was labeled as the weird smart kid who doesn't apply himself to anything. In a Catholic grade school populated by sadistic nuns, this is not a good thing.

I was a failure at being a Cub Scout, since follow through on merit badge attainment was pretty much beyond me. By the sixth grade, I was smoking, coming home during school to huff Pam with my friends, and driving around in the family car without a license. By the eighth grade I was a pothead and a chronic truant. In the tenth grade, I got myself kicked out of my Catholic high school and both of the public schools, one right after the other.

As you would imagine, none of this endeared me to my parents. Three phrases are burned into my memory.

"You're too smart for your own damn good."

"If there's a half-assed backwards way to do anything you'll find it won't you?"

"Stop that god damn jiggin' around."

By the time I was seventeen, things at home had deteriorated to the point of no return. I dropped out of high school altogether and left. The period of couch and porch surfing that followed was brief, and turned into a few years of SROs and other cheap housing. I moved seven times in two years and then went into the Air Force.

Through a number of minor miracles, I found ways of being in the world that made an asset of my congenital extremism. The most interesting part of getting a diagnosis was that my life history suddenly made sense. I was "portrait of an ADHD guy."

I'm lucky. My tendencies led me toward work that I love, and because there are people around who compensate for my deficits, I've been able to adapt. The big picture vision, the intuition, the attraction to risk, the tenacity, the comfort with conflict and ambiguity, etcetera. I've learned to see my blind spots and figured out how to make it work.

There are those who dispute that ADHD is even a disorder. They see it rather as an alternate way of being. They talk about how Leonardo da Vinci was ADHD, and how people like me are these Superman characters who, in our visionary rebellious distraction, are the vanguard of humanity's next great evolutionary leap. That strikes me as the smug perspective of the ones who don't know how lucky they are.

Tonight my wife was telling me she had news of an ADD kid she grew up with. He's a bit over forty and, as his family puts it, he "still hasn't found his groove." Their family Christmas letters say something like, "Mark has started graduate school, Amy's theater group performed Doll's House to rave reviews, and Bill has a new mustache."

Lots of people, having been defined as a fuck up, come to own the label.

I'm sure that we have plenty of Real Change vendors that this describes. I sometimes feel much closer to them than I do to many of my middle class allies and colleagues. The outsider perspective is something I get. And, were I less lucky — if I didn't get into college, if I were more predisposed to alcoholism, were I less gifted, if I didn't get a few key breaks, if I weren't a tall, white, male — things could have gone very differently.

Dr. Wes Unplugged

This come hither shot of Dr. Wes Browning was taken around ten years ago at the Real Change office. I think we were trying to get a speakers bureau photo. You want this guy coming to your kids' school. Right?

My favorite blog anywhere these days is what Wes calls his Runoff Blog. Between Wes' weekly Technocrati Sucks feature, in which he always finds a new, innovative way to say, well, Technocrati Sucks, his ongoing childhood memoir (Wes' parents tried to kill him when he was one year old, but only succeeded in causing brain damage that resulted in perfect recall of events through the age of four), and his always astonishing and incredibly eclectic UTube video offerings, I find myself dropping in around five times a week to see what's new. One of his latest video posts, a 1932 Max Fleischer cartoon built around an appearance by the Mills Brothers, is simply jaw dropping, as is this post of a Lindy Dance competition of kids going nuts over Sweet Georgia Brown. You can't watch either of these without feeling very, very happy.

Zippity Doo-Dah

One of our long time Real Change vendors has been doing very well lately selling the paper in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood. "The people are beautiful," she said. I asked what she meant. "All the men have pink skin and white hair and the most beautiful shoes you can imagine." Such exfoliated well-shod splendor.

This made me wonder what's really going on in Magnolia. Due to the magic of city-data.com, I can Google a Magnolia zip code and find out. The median age, at 40.5, is about five years over the mean for Washington. The average home value is $521K, and the average adjusted gross income is $90,931, with 5.1% living below poverty. If you believe this, there a fewer poor people in Magnolia than anywhere else in the city. Charitable giving is 2.9%, which puts the Magnolians in competition with those cheap-asses in West Seattle and the skin-flint Swedes in Ballard for least giving neighborhood. There are 53 white people for every Black, but one in 16 is Asian. Lesbians and gays make up 1.4% of the population.

This being a lot like eating potato chips, I kept going. What happens, I thought, when one crosses the ship canal into Ballard? Having several choices, I chose 98117 as representative. Median age is 38.4 and adjusted gross income is $61,206. 5.7% live below the poverty level. Charitable giving is just 2.7%. Here, there are 67 whites for every Black. This is remarkable. Statistically speaking, one could go to a Starbucks every day for 5.8 days without ever seeing a Black person. Asians are again in the number two position at a 1:18 ratio. Almost 2% are gay or lesbian, as near as anyone can tell.

So what happens if I go downtown? I tried 98101, which is the neighborhood just south of Real Change in Belltown. This would be, I suppose, the marketing term known as the West Edge, over by Pike Place Market. The median age goes up to 42, and income climbs to $115,946, with 24% below poverty. Wow. 4.5% goes to charity. Hmmm. Almost one in seven are Black, and one in nine are Asian. Just 1.2% homos. A little repressed maybe, but compared to Ballard and Magnolia, it's the United Nations.

How does my neighborhood in Shoreline compare? A 1:17 Black/white ratio but 1:5 Asian to white. We're about 38, and earn $42,485, with 3.4% going to charity. Almost 11% live below the poverty level, and the queers apparently prefer neighborhoods with better aesthetics because we're down to 1.1%

A bit south and over on the other side of Aurora, where lower-end condos are sprouting up like dandelions in the springtime, there's a few more Blacks and about the same number of Asians. They're a year younger, 13% richer, 3.2% goes to charity, and they are no more queer than their brethren in Shoreline.

Moving southward across Lake Union, we arrive at Capitol Hill, the epicenter of which is The Stranger in the 98122 zip. Here, incredibly, the Black to white ratio is 1:2. These are 1999 figures, and I'm sure this is no longer the case. The median age is just 32, but incomes soar above Shoreline levels to $53,718, or just below the Washington State average, with 3.9% going to charity. Nearly 20% are living below poverty. Official figures are that 3.9% are gay or lesbian, which is, of course, ridiculously low.

Further south still, we have the Central Area/International District, and to avoid the skewing effect of water front property, I'll go with 98108. Here you have three Blacks to every two whites and the Asians outnumber everyone. Incomes drop to $37,706, the lowest in the city, with almost 15% below poverty, but charitable giving is 4%. 1.5% report as unmarried same sex households.

Over in Rainier Valley at 98118, Blacks, whites, and Asians are in a virtual dead heat, with Asians being slightly ahead. 38% rent. Median income is $43,653, which is actually better than in my neighborhood. 3.5% goes to charity. The average is, of course, radically skewed by all those beautiful waterfront homes with a view of the Cascades where the white people live and the black people tend the grounds. If you don't believe me, drive through there sometime and look for yourself. You'd think you were in 1954 Georgia. 2% gay and lesbian. 14% live below poverty.

Coming around to West Seattle, which is rumored to be a part of this city, I've gone for the center at 98126. Here, there are ten whites to each Black, and a 1:5 Asian ratio. Incomes are damn near average at $53,623, with 13.5% below poverty and 2% queer. Charitable giving is 2.6%, the lowest in the city.

All of this confirms that Magnolia is indeed rich, white, and somewhat cheap. Maybe if they saw more of what the rich people downtown see they'd give more of their money away.

The Universe in a Pebble of Quartz

I thought that tonight I'd write about something beyond words to see if I can pull it off without sounding like a new age half-wit. This would be the time, in the summer of 1989, that I took mushrooms and glimpsed the Oneness of the Universe.

A scientific study that was published last year confirmed what has been long known: mushrooms can be a shortcut to mystical experience. I have a contemplative Buddhist friend who seriously practices yoga and meditates several times a day. She can feel the life energy coursing through her various chakras and is, in every way imaginable, my spiritual better. And yet, my cheap date with a few grams of shrooms did produce what her disciplined inner-life has not: a genuine kensho moment.

In kensho, one knows at one's core that our separateness is illusory, and in that moment is changed. This glimpse, my friend tells me, is often confused with satori, or more commonly, enlightenment. This makes sense to me, because if you want to meet an unenlightened being, look no further.

So, on this day in 1989, a friend — who shall go unnamed on the grounds that she didn't ask to be dragged into all this gratuitous self-revelation — and I decided to take mushrooms and drive from Somerville, MA to Horseneck Beach. Since I was a teenager, I'd prided myself on my ability to drive and take hallucinogens. I'm sure its a guy thing.

We made it to Horseneck without getting lost. Our sound track was the very appropriate Big Night Music by Shriekback. It was a warm but cloudy day, and the closer we got to the beach the more overcast it became. We got out of the car with our cooler and beach towels and staked out a spot around ten feet from the water.

I have no idea what my dose was. Measurements by the gram have always confused me. If the United States ever goes metric I'm screwed. I was blissed. There is something about taking the filters off to let the world in whole that I found very attractive back then. I'm a sensation slut. Always have been.

Before long, I was staring at my hands, which, like everything else, were amazing and beautiful. I picked up a small rounded white quartz pebble and held it warmly in my palm. It pulsed with life. The outside of the pebble was a thin translucent membrane that gave form to the energy thus contained.

I remarked on this to my companion, who then realized that she should have been the one driving.

This pebble was the most remarkable, amazing thing I had ever seen. I felt great love toward the small smooth white rock.

Then, I began to experience what I can only describe as geometry. It began with the beach before me. As the ocean ebbed and flowed onto the land in its slow licking waves, I watched the water saturate the sand and then slowly pull back from the shore as gravity did its work. The vast ocean defined itself though a series of lines that, while contoured to the gentle rolling waves, had a precision that extended perfectly toward the curved horizon and then upward. Land, ocean, and sky merged into a single matrix that contained myself and the seagulls that wheeled and shrieked above and everything else in this amazing animated place that we call being, and for that fraction of a moment, the unity of all things was as obvious as the sunburned nose on my face.

My friend and I noticed that we were more or less alone on the beach, and that lifeguards were conferring about twenty feet away. That's when the sky opened up and water fell to the earth in huge wet sheets that drenched us and everything else that they touched. We found it funny that everyone seemed so concerned about getting wet at the beach. The lifeguards shooed us away, and we retreated to the car. I pointed the wheels straight to align with the highway and drove. The wipers struggled to keep up with the rain.

Strangely, this, which was unquestionably my peak experience with hallucinogens, was my last trip. Maybe I found what I was looking for. I was twenty-nine. I kept the rock so I wouldn't forget. It is an ordinary, small, round, white quartz.

Messy, Messy Reality

I read Poor Magazine founder Lisa Gray-Garcia's (aka Tiny's) remarkable Poverty Criminal memoir this weekend, and am reminded of how complicated reality can often be, and how, in our puny inadequacy, we create categories of meaning that serve as placeholders for what remains beyond our grasp.

What on earth do I mean by that?

That reality is seldom as neat and clean as we'd like. As a result, we often collapse complexity into simplifications that are based in wishful thinking, denial, and the intense need to make sense of the mess that we're in.

Take Iraq, for example. Richard Lugar, in his carefully calibrated call for troop withdrawal, has upstaged the Democratic field by acknowledging the need to end this war without resorting to the dishonest wishful thinking and victim-blaming that has, sadly, permeated the more leftward "troops out now" position.

Hillary Clinton, for example, talks about how we've done our part by liberating the Iraqi's and bringing them democracy, and now they need to step up and take responsibility for running their own country so we can bring the troops home now. This is the brain dead liberal logical extension of Bush's "as they step up we'll step down" mythology, and contains the fatal flaw of accepting the premise that the US being in Iraq has something to do with freedom and democracy.

In making this error, which seems common to the liberal-democratic "left," the mushy position that follows looks, to most thoughtful people, a bit like victim-blaming idiocy, and thus cedes the legitimacy in this debate to realists like Lugar.

In an NPR interview, I heard Eric Ricks, the author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, offer this metaphor for the liberal-democrat position. It's like we've amputated a guys legs, and now, because we've given him a really expensive new pair of sneakers, we're complaining that he isn't running fast enough.

Democrats can't and won't say that this is a war of empire and advocate for the radical solutions and atonement that follow from that sort of honesty. This leaves them arguing from false premises, looking like childish idiots, and again, ceding the legitimacy to the likes of "realists" such as Lugar.

Messy, messy reality.

How does this relate to Tiny's beautiful and thought provoking memoir? This, more than anything, is a book about her incredibly dysfunctional relationship with her mother, which is also an amazing and moving story of intense and unconditional love. Both things, paradoxically, are true at once.

Tiny's mother, Dee, was plunged into poverty by divorce and single-motherdom when Tiny was four, and the PTSD demons of her own history of abuse often rendered her unable to cope. Dee and Tiny became Dee-and-Tiny, a single entity so thoroughly entwined in their co-dependence that Tiny was unable to attend school or form normal teen relationships. She basically cared for her mother from the age of five forward.

Tiny describes their relationship in terms of embracing non-western notions of multi-generational family and rejecting the cult of individualism that places self-advancement over community and family. While these ideas have some legitimacy, they also feel like an overly simplified PC-speak rationalization for a relationship that was unhealthy at its very core.

And yet, who's to say what would have been better? Garcia (Tiny) is probably right in that the alternative was a State intervention that would have defined her mother as unfit. The State rarely offers poor families what they need to succeed. It is less complicated and expensive to "protect the interests of the child" by punishing the damaged and poor and pulling their families apart. The realities of multi-generational poverty and dysfunction are often beyond its capacity.

So, what do Tiny and Iraq have in common? That neither chose their realities. And that not every problem has a good solution, and that we play the cards we are dealt as well as we can.

The Air Force Years: Part Five

The break-up with Cindy was a stop and go sort of thing that resembled a slow amputation with a dull knife. We were all about sex and co-dependence and the idea of her being with someone else made me insane. After several rounds of attraction and repulsion, the accumulated tension of our negative polarities finally blasted us apart.

Cindy threw herself into AA and I dropped out of my old circle and went off on my own. Although I attended a few meetings, the Twelve Step route never felt relevant to me. As my priorities shifted, the "partying" lifestyle just stopped being interesting.

Which isn't to say that any of this came easily. A nasty depression led me to a mental health counselor who drew me a map of grief, loss, and emptiness. This is what happens, he explained, when a hole is ripped from the center of one's own heart. The good news, he said, is that it usually fills back in.

I had trouble eating and sleeping and became volatile at work, and started running to keep my raging emotions in check. I switched from Kools to Marlboros and cut back to a pack a day.

Meanwhile, Captain Stankovich had identified his problem Airmen and was working a strategy. When the arrests began, it started with room searches and drug dogs. One raid turned up photographic evidence that two members of our group were gay. They were swiftly discharged. One was devastated, and openly sobbed at Logan airport as we saw him off.

As my former friends were arrested or threatened with arrest, detectives from the Office of Special Investigations did everything they could to make us rat each other out. Cops would arrive at my work without warning to take me in for questioning.

They were always big on ritual. I'd be taken in the backseat of their military vehicle to their cramped offices and be seated in a straight-backed chair. One would offer me coffee and light my cigarettes while the other would lie and threaten. It was like a bad TV drama.

While the interrogations were stupid and transparent, they offered enormous incentive to stay my course. I was clean as a whistle and had made a decision months before to keep to myself. Consequently, I had little to hide and nothing to say. My goal was to stay straight and sober, finish the four years without arrest, get my discharge, and go to college.

My boss' boss at Travel Pay, a thin Tech Sargent with a John Waters mustache named Mort Zuckerman, did what he could to make things work. I was teamed with John Gallagher, the other office whiz-kid, to come in nights and work through piles of overdue travel vouchers.

We'd arrive at around midnight and leave for breakfast at seven AM. I barely even had to wear a uniform. Sometimes we'd come to work directly from a show in Boston or Cambridge. The idea was that we'd trade stacks toward the end of the night and audit each others calculations, but instead, we'd each just initial them without looking.

This was an enormous time saver. We cleared the backlog and were the heroes of Travel Pay.

I took a job at the base library. Hardly anyone ever came in. My boss was a quiet civilian who could always think of a good book for me to read. V.S. Naipaul, Saul Bellow, John Updike. His tastes were mainstream but solid. I'd walk around straightening the shelves, help the occasional patron, and sit reading at the desk. I accelerated my community college course load to three classes a semester.

My survival strategy was to avoid the old crowd and fill my time with work and school. I was cruising toward the end of my enlistment. In military parlance, I "got short."

In early-March of 1983, I was assigned a random detail. Instead of going to my office job, I wore fatigues to an airplane hangar to clean up after an indoor street fair. I was a Senior Airman, which meant that I wore three stripes. I seldom wore fatigues, and the rank on my uniform was one stripe out of date.

The First Sargent from Squadron Headquarters noticed, and two days later I was informed that I was busted down to Airman First Class with an Article 15 under the UCMJ for an offense that would normally draw, at most, a letter of reprimand.

When I sought counsel, a sympathetic military lawyer said this only made sense if they were moving toward a discharge. The Article 15 would make two on my record, and offer the legal grounds to kick me out at the commander's discretion. His advice was to start making plans.

He was right. The notification of disciplinary discharge proceedings came six weeks later.

The process that was pending meant that I couldn't take leave, and that the vacation time that exceeded what could be sold back could no longer be used toward an early release date. Several weeks of pay were forfeited.

To compensate, I'd come to work in a perfectly pressed uniform and preternaturally shiny shoes and do nothing but smoke and crack jokes and listen to the radio. I figured if they weren't going to give me my vacation, I'd just take it at my desk.

I was administratively held for two weeks past what would have been my release date so that they could kick me out.

As the paperwork neared finalization, Captain Stankovich came by to see Zuckerman. On his way out, I stopped him at the door and said I didn't understand why he was doing this. At that point, the fact that he was a Captain and I was an Airman didn't impress me anymore. To me, he was just a college educated asshole who drove a hot car and liked power.

He became red-faced and heatedly complained to Zuckerman, who just looked at me and shook his head. The politics of going out on a limb for me, he said later, had no pay-off. I understood.

Stankovich's Recommendation for Discharge document is worth quoting at length:

iii) I assumed command of the Hq Sq Section on 31 Oct 81 and therefore can't comment on the circumstances regarding A1C Harris' Jan 81 Article 15 for causing a breach of the peace or his May 81 Letter of Reprimand (UIF) for destruction of government property. However, my involvement with him has shown an increase in the severity of measures I have had to use in responding to his UCMJ violations. I counseled him regarding his unprofessional behavior at the Base Service Station in Mar 82, issued him a Letter of Reprimand (UIF) for a failure to go as directed by his TDY orders (he knew how to read such orders by virtue of his being a travel computation specialist) and nonselected him for reenlistment in Sept 82 for substandard conduct and constant AFR 35-10 [ed. note: these are the grooming regulations] noncompliance. Clearly, he proved unreceptive to these measures. Similarly, his his duty performance and ratings have shown a downward trend with a 8, 8, 7, and 6. All but one, comment on his failure to improve upon his military bearing, and/or self-discipline, even after counseling.

This individual is technically competent and intelligent, pursing a degree from Northeastern University. Consequently having control over his behavior, A1C Harris still has on numerous occasions, involved himself in a number of incidents that have brought discredit to his duty section and the Air Force. I call attention to his second Article 15 where he even admitted in his own appeal that he went a head in wearing an improper uniform even after the First Sergent previously told him that he was out of uniform. I strongly recommend his administrative discharge immediately. A1C Harris has been aware of his normal July 30 DOS [Date of Separation] but this has not stopped his UCMJ violations and frequent lack of courtesy and respect towards his customers that have reflected poorly on the entire ESD/ACF Travel Pay Section. My recommendation for a General Discharge based upon review of his inconsistent duty performance, resistance to rehabilitative efforts, and numerous discreditable UCMJ violations. A recommendation for a better character of discharge would be an insult to those AF members who complete their enlistments without any serious incidents whatsoever, and thus earn the right to an Honorable Discharge.

4. I have counseled A1C Harris as required by AFR 110-1.

5. I do not recommend probation and rehabilitation for A1C Harris according to the provisions of AFR 39-10, Chapter 7. His retention on active duty in a probationary status is inconsistent with the maintenance of good order and discipline. I believe the comments written by a field grade officer on A1C Harris' last APR sum up the nature of A1C Harris' tour of duty in the Air Force explicitly, "Amn Harris has continually proved very competent in the Travel Branch but also has continual difficulty conforming to military standards. He has been counseled on his deficiencies, but it is apparent that Amn Harris has no desire to improve." Any continued involvement with A1C Harris would be counterproductive and actually could be viewed by his fellow workers as a reward for an enlistment full of failures to maintain the proscribed standards of military deportment and professionalism.

ANTHONY D. STANKOVICH, Capt, USAF
Commander, Hq Sq Section

On May 13, 1983, I received my general discharge under honorable conditions and was ordered to leave the place I'd spent the past four years by noon. The real prize, however, was a letter signed by Base Commander Colonel Jerry L. Records describing my "lack of regard for lawful regulations and statutes of the United States," and informing me that my continued presence "poses an undesirable influence upon the discipline and morale of the personnel assigned" to Hansom Field.

Any return to the base within the next year would be regarded as a crime punishable by up to six months in prison.

It was a warm sunny day, and I was packed and ready to leave before I had the paperwork. My 1971 Audi easily contained all that I owned. As I turned the key The Clash came on the radio. Their big hit that spring was Should I Stay Or Should I Go?

Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double
So you gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?

I drove off through the East Gate and didn't look back for a very long time.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two