Washington, D.C., June, 1968. Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis two months ago, there were riots in a bunch of cities, Washington was one of the worst. I haven’t seen the burnt out storefronts yet, but I’ve seen the video – waves of looters, kids throwing rocks, bloodied heads, cops with truncheons. It’s there in the back of my mind.
I tell myself I’m not a racist; I’m a VISTA volunteer. I tell myself I won’t have any trouble with my African-American brothers, once they realize I’m there to help. There’s nothing to worry about, I tell myself.
But the truth is, I’m scared as hell.
I count five of them. Hanging on the stoop outside the liquor store. Today you call them homies, gangstas maybe; in ‘68 you call them guys, maybe even kids. In ’68, they’re first generation, up from Carolina, probably born on a farm. They aren’t crackheads; they aren’t dusted; they aren’t stone killers. Not yet. But that doesn’t mean they won’t beat the shit out of you if things go a certain way; it doesn’t mean they aren’t packing guns.
I look at the piece of paper in my hand, even though I know the address by heart. It’s up the block, across “D” Street, and if I start over there, these guys are going to come after me for sure.
I’m thinking, “How the hell did I get myself into this?” But of course, I already know that.
* * *
One thing about politics that hasn’t changed over the last 40 years, is that the bad news always comes out on Fridays. People go out Friday night; they don’t watch the news. After that, there’s still the weekend. And by the time Monday rolls around, however bad the news is, it’s not news anymore.
That’s how it is when they announce the end of draft deferments for graduate students in the middle of the Vietnam War – they do it on a Friday. February 16, 1968, to be exact. And as planned, I don’t hear about it until I pick up a paper on Sunday afternoon.
To men who have grown up in the era of the “All-Volunteer Army” it’s hard to describe what it feels like to find out that you’re about to be drafted to fight in a war you think is stupid. Before this war is over, 58,000 U.S. soldiers will die; 150,000 will be injured; over 20,000 will be permanently disabled. A quarter million South Vietnamese troops will also die, along with over a million from the North. But worse than that all of that, an estimated TWO MILLION CIVILIANS will perish before the war is over in Vietnam. And I am certainly not eager to earn the karma for that.
Sunday night, I sit at my desk in the dorms and dash off a letter to the editor of the New York Times wondering, tongue in cheek, how the generals expect that ending graduate deferments will assist in the design of tomorrow’s weapons of mass destruction (amazingly, the letter gets published). After that, I get down to considering the options. I can move to Canada (too cold). I can go to jail (ending my legal career). Or I can look around for another deferment. This leads me to VISTA.
VISTA stands for Volunteers in Service to America – a sort of domestic Peace Corps that, in these days, sets several thousand draft deferred kids a year loose on the knotty problems of poverty, illiteracy, disease, ignorance, malnourishment, discrimination, political disenfranchisement and probably a few others I’m leaving out. The program was created in 1964 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. (A few years later, Nixon will offer the nation his own – and very different – vision of a “war on poverty,” appointing a young Don Rumsfeld to head up the Office of Economic Opportunity. I will leave you to imagine the sort of war on poverty THAT produced.)
But those days are yet to come. When I join up, the OEO is in its halcyon days, the happy home of a panoply of ambitious social efforts – Head Start, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, Neighborhood Legal Services, and so on. All of these are part of something called “The Great Society” – a legislative agenda Lyndon Johnson has somehow managed to ram through Congress in the wake of John Kennedy’s assassination. And whether you love it or hate it, you have to admit The Great Society is a truly monumental collection of legislation.
To the Great Society program can be traced every major social, environmental and cultural initiative seen in the United States since the Great Depression. Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, the Public Broadcasting System, National Public Radio, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Federal Truth-in-Lending Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Preservation Act – all of them are part of the Great Society.
Looking back from a distance of forty years, you have to ask yourself, what in the hell Congress has been DOING ever since then. Were the Great Society programs all America needed? Maybe we were exhausted after that. Or maybe the whole thing was a big mistake, an aberration, a brief hiccup in the relentless trend line of American social Darwinism. It’s got to be one of these things, doesn’t it?
* * *
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’re still on “D” Street, figuring out how to deal with the guys outside the liquor store.
As I see it, the options are these: I can cross the street and hope to get where I need to go before the guys come after me. I can hang a U-and get the hell out of there. Or, I can get out of the car, walk down the street and see what happens.
Given the fact that I’m supposed to be living on this street for the next six weeks, avoidance isn’t really an option. I’m going to have to deal with these guys unless I cut and run altogether. And given my draft status, cutting and running isn’t going to work, either. So, I take a deep breath, get out of the car, pull my duffle bag off the passenger seat, and head down the block to start my life in the inner city.
It starts out friendly enough. “My man. How y’all doin’ today?” The Big Guy gives me a smile.
I nod. “Alright, how you doing?”
“Awright, awright.” He nods. Then, he points to my duffle bag. “Whatch’all got in there? Looks like you done held up the laundry.”
I laugh. “Yeah. Too bad the stuff I got wasn’t washed yet ….” I get an idea. “Hey, maybe you guys can help me out.” I pull a paper out of my shirt pocket and read the address off it, even though I know it by heart. “1670 D Street Southeast – you know which one that is?”
He shrugs.
“Farris house? That’s where I’m going.”
“Farris.” He repeats it doubtfully, turns to his friends. “Any you heard of Farris?
His friends all shake their heads.
“Martha and Rodney,” I point. “Should be across the street somewhere.”
The Big Guy looks at his friends. “Anybody know what this white boy talking ‘bout?”
Silence, then a little kid mumbles, “Betty’s sister.”
A moment later, another one chimes in, “Yeah, yeah, Martha. Married that fool drive the panel truck. In the tile bidness. ”
I jump in. “Right, right. Rodney. I’m going to be living with them awhile.”
“Say what?” The Big Guy cocks his head at me.
I nod. “I’m going to be living over there. A month is what they tell me. Maybe six weeks. They’re putting me up. They’re getting paid to do it. By the government.”
“Paid? By the gov’ment?” The big guy looks at me. “Shit! You pulling my leg, motherfucker!”
I shake my head. “I’m in a training program …with the government. This is where they’re putting me up.”
The Big Guy looks at his friends. “Training program, huh? What they trying to teach you, how to get a cap shot in your ass?”
Everybody seems to think this is a tremendous joke.
Actually, it seems like a joke to me, too. Hey, I’m on their side. I shrug, “Hey, I don’t know what they’re trying to teach me. All I know is it’s a ticket out of the Army, okay? They were gonna send me to Vietnam.”
“You don’t wanna go to Vietnam?” The Big Guy laughs. “Look around you, motherfucker, you on “D” Street. Pigs around here day and night, popping off they riot guns, rolling brothers didn’t do shit down the motherfucking station. You don’t got to go nowhere! Got Vietnam right here in the Nation’s Capitol!”
The Big Guy thinks a minute, shakes his head. “White boy don’t wanna go to Vietnam, so they send him down here, train with the niggers on D Street. Motherfucker, I got to be writing this shit down for my comedy routine.”
A stocky kid speaks up. “Boy here for training, we got to stomp his honky white ass, train him how things go down ‘round D Street.” Some of the others nod in agreement, but the Big Guy holds up his hand in a benign gesture.
“No, now my brother, be cool, be cool,” he says. “Any fool look at this shit got to realize there be some fundamental discrepancies involved in the motherfucker. Boy roll on in here, park up the block there, fine as you please, parade on down the street, cool as a jive ass motherfucker. Look at it, you KNOW there some facts the motherfucker not taking into consideration.” The Big Guy pauses, finally nods. “So, this being our place of business and what have you, I’m feeling it be up to us to give the boy some education, you know, ‘splain the rules of the game to the motherfucker.”
The homies start to smile, getting a sense they have an idea where this might be going. “Yeah, yeah,” they say.
The Big Guy looks at me. “You down with that?”
I nod. “Education.”
“My man.” The Big Guy pats me on the back, then puts an arm around my shoulder in friendly fashion, and turns me in the direction of my car. “See now the first thing is, you parked your car on the motherfucking STREET.”
I nod again. “I did.”
The Big Guy shakes his head gravely. “You can’t do that.”
“I can’t?”
“Use your head.” He points up the street. “Don’t you see each one of them spots on the street got a motherfucking HOUSE next to it?” I nod. “Awright, now ask yourself, if you park your motherfucking car next to that motherfucking house up there, where the motherfucker LIVE in the house gonna park HIS car?”
I smile and, in a flash of wit, point to an empty space across the street. “How about over there?”
Whap! The big guy smacks me in the back of the head, but in a friendly fashion.
“See now, that be the wrong answer, motherfucker. Looka here, say the man do park his car over there, okay? What’s gonna happen, the man live in THAT house come home? Where that motherfucker gonna park? Understand what I’m saying to you?”
This has a certain logic. “So where am I supposed to park, then?” I ask.
The Big Guy smiles benignly. “See, NOW you asking the right question. On account of, as luck would have it, that be one of the services WE providing.”
“You tell people where to park on the street.”
He nods. “Could be. But we also be taking CARE of the motherfuckers, understand what I’m saying to you? Make sure nothing happen to ‘em, vandalism, shit like that.”
I smile and nod back. “You take care of the cars. How about the sidewalks, you take care of them, too?”
The Big Guy chuckles, turns to his friends. “Motherfucker ain’t as dumb’s he looks.” Then back to me. “Sidewalks, street corners, store fronts, alley ways – whatever the fuck going down, if it’s round D Street, we take care of it. . … Understand what I’m saying to you?”
Anyone who thinks the entrepreneurial spirit is not alive and well in the ghetto has never spent any time there. The truth is, the ghetto is every bit as entrepreneurial as Wall Street. The only difference is, the folks in the ghetto don’t get to make up the rules that govern their behavior. If they made up the rules like they do on Wall Street, things would go a lot better for them.
So I’m thinking, “I understand what you’re saying, alright. An economic exchange. You provide the protection, and you want me to pay for it.” And I can tell you, standing there on the street corner trying to hold on to my draft deferment, the deal he’s offering looks like a lot more attractive than the one I’m getting from the government.
* * *
For the most part, my days in Washington are spent trudging around public housing projects in unrelenting heat, trying to get people to tell me how shitty their living conditions are. This is in support of a lawsuit the local Neighborhood Legal Services office is going to bring against the National Capital Housing Authority. The lawsuit will claim the Housing Authority is failing to provide “decent, safe and sanitary housing”, as required by the National Housing Act. The Authority will claim it’s doing what it can within the constraints of its budget.
As we work our way through the housing projects, most times no one answers the door. Or if someone does answer, it’s a kid, barely old enough to talk. The kid tells us no, Mama ain’t home and unh-uh, I don’t know where she is, or when she’ll be coming. It doesn’t take long before we begin to suspect that Mama actually is home, but there’s nothing she’s willing to tell us.
At first, I can’t understand why it’s so hard getting these people to talk. Then, one time, an old, hard-eyed woman indulges me.
“Lemme see if I understand this, she says. “You saying the GOV’MENT ain’t going by the law ….”
“That’s right, Ma’am.”
“And you bringing a law suit gonna MAKE the gov’ment go by the law?”
I nod. “Right again.”
She shakes her head. “God DAMN, boy,” she says. “What make you think the gov’ment gonna go by the law AFTER the law suit, when it ain’t gone by the law to begin with?”
In the evenings, we have classes conducted by people introduced to us as “community organizers”. These people do not look like hippies. They do not sport bell bottom pants. They pride themselves on looking ordinary. They mistrust theory. If they quote at all, it is from Saul Alinsky. They tell gritty stories about civil rights marches and voter registration drives and union elections and their stories are more cautionary than uplifting, floating in an irony as thick as the smoke from their unfiltered cigarettes.
Despite their passion, it is hard to understand what these people believe in. They see judges as asses and politicians as crooks. They see reporters as lazy, their editors as pawns, and their readers as fools. They say they want to give power to the people, but I cannot figure out exactly which people they have in mind. But the thing I wonder about most of all, is how these people managed to get the United States government to pay them to share with us their revolutionary vision.
In America, I think, even the revolutionaries are entrepreneurs.
After the meetings, I return to the airless, little row house on D Street that has become my temporary home – the house where I was going when I ran into the Big Guy and his fellow entrepreneurs.
The house is owned by a wiry, mean spirited little tile installer by the name of Rodney Farris. Rodney lives with his wife, Martha, and three small children – a son he has fathered (and dotes upon), and two daughters that Martha has borne prior to their marriage (and whom Rodney tolerates at best). Relations in the family are strained. Even in front of strangers, Rodney never tires of reminding Martha how he “picked her up out of the gutter” and “got her off of welfare.” Somewhere in this reminder, there is usually a comparison of Martha with her sister, Betty, whom Rodney regards as a whore.
As it happens, Martha's sister, Betty Thomas, lives half a block up D Street, almost exactly across the street from where I first parked my car. Most of the houses on D Street are, like Rodney’s, narrow two-story brick affairs with featureless facades and cement steps. But Betty Thomas’s house is an exception. It’s a rambling old clapboard place, with innumerable bedrooms and a wide wooden porch that serves as a kind of meeting place for the neighborhood. Betty, herself a wide-hipped, welcoming woman, lives in the house with her mother (universally called Mama), her brother, James, and a rainbow coalition of thirteen children who, Betty proudly tells you, have almost as many fathers. “And Sharonda, here? her daddy is a sailor from the PHILIPPINES!” (There are also an indeterminate number of cats.)
Today, Betty would be considered a walking advertisement for welfare reform. In 1968, she is considered a victim. To me, she is just another entrepreneur.
For those who don’t remember, in the days prior to Clinton’s welfare reforms, the dominant form of federal assistance is called AFDC, which stands for Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The idea behind the program is to provide support for CHILDREN whose families have little or no income. In theory, the benefit goes to the CHILDREN. (After all, it isn’t their fault their parents are poor). In practice, however, it’s the MOTHER who receives the payment. This is where the problems come in.
First of all, it is the nature of the system that the more children a mother has, the more money comes in the door. Since there’s no expectation in 1968 that a mother with young children should work, the program creates an incentive to keep having children so that some of them will always be young. As an entrepreneur, Betty understands this, and she produces the commodity the government will pay her to produce. (Don’t get me wrong, Betty loves kids (she also loves men) so this is an incentive she is not only willing, but extremely happy to exploit.)
The second problem with AFDC is, since the MOTHER gets the money, it isn’t a sure thing she’ll actually spend it on the CHILDREN. She may, for example, spend it on a new dress or a TV set. To prevent this from happening, a caseworker is assigned to check up on her. But if the mother buys the TV anyway (as Betty once did), and the children don’t have winter coats as a result of it, there isn’t much anybody can do but give the family a special needs grant for the coats. As an entrepreneur, Betty understands this, of course.
The nature of AFDC is that you can only receive assistance if you don’t have income. If there’s a man living in the house, there’s an assumption that the man is (or should be) working, and therefore if a welfare inspector happens to drop by at, say, three or four in the morning, and finds a man in the house, your benefits get cut off. This so-called “man in the house rule” creates one-parent families almost as an instrument of federal policy. The intelligent ability to adapt to government regulations is apparently lost on the people who write them. But it is not lost on Betty. The only man a welfare inspector will find in her house is Betty’s brother, James, who has managed to get himself on disability. As those who have read thus far may suspect, James is also an entrepreneur.
James is bright, engaging and funny, but he never seems to have much to do. The reason, of course, is that if you’re on disability, you’re not allowed to work. After all, if you can work, then you’re not disabled, right?
There’s a saying around the neighborhood, “The eagle shits on Friday.” As I quickly learn, this does not refer to the government’s propensity to announce bad news on Fridays, but rather, the fact that this is the day the government checks come out. Even though public assistance is money for nothing, nobody is overjoyed living on these checks. Welfare is something you can get by on, but you can’t get ahead. The only way you can do that is pimp whores or run drugs.
One time I ask James if he wouldn’t be better off getting a job. He looks at me like I’ve got a disability of my own. “Job?” he says, “What kinda job they gonna give me? Parking cars? Running a elevator up and down someplace?”
“No, no,” I say. “You’re a smart guy. You could get something better than that.”
He looks at me. “With a criminal record?”
I don’t have a comeback for that, so I ask him. “What did you do?”
“What’d I do?” He laughs. “What’d anybody do?” He motions vaguely. “Look around, man. Everybody round here been to jail for one thing or another.”
Actually, this is true. Rumor has it, even Rodney was in jail for stabbing a man in Carolina before he started his tile business. The way James sees it, he produces what the system pays him to produce – in his case, that happens to be a disability.
* * *
As I think about all this at the time, I conclude that I am also an entrepreneur -- selling what it is I have to sell for the best price I can get in the marketplace. Certainly, an impartial observer looking at my situation would have to say, my motive for engaging in social service is perhaps somewhat less than pure.
I think of classes in the drafty caverns of Harvard Law – purgatories where students are called upon to state abstruse appellate cases before hundreds of their peers while quick witted professors do their best to convince the assembled multitude that they are fools. Whatever principle the student says the case represents, the professor suggests it is something else. If the student says the case is right, the professor shows why it might also be wrong. If the student asserts the case is consistent with prior authority, the professor demonstrates it almost certainly is not. Or, for variety, he might tell the student to take a seat and call on someone else. In this process, the only sure thing is that an answer will never given.
At some point, it occurs to me that the goal of this Socratic process is to teach the student that in the practice of law, there are no answers. There is no right and wrong. There are only good and bad arguments. And as I think about this, the most disturbing part is not that students are terrorized and bullied; it is not that their self-esteem is placed under constant assault; it is that virtually no one involved in the process seems to care about the fundamental question – how a system that rewards the ability to argue either side of an issue without troubling itself about right or wrong can be justified on moral grounds.
And I begin to think that America has the best legal system money can buy. Later, I realize it also has the best political system money can buy and the best medical system money can buy. I realize that in America, you get what you pay for. Money is not only a medium of exchange or a store of value. Money is an expression of American freedom. This is what has become of the pursuit of happiness.
* * *
A lot of people will wind up getting shot in 1968 – Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Andy Warhol, not to mention the entire population of My Lai Village No. 4.
The only one who will not die is Andy Warhol. 1968 is that kind of year.
Standing there with the Big Guy and his buddies, I can’t help thinking how easy it would be to reach in my pocket and give these guys my money. The problem is, I know economics. If I give them my money, I’ll be creating the wrong incentive. If I give them money, they’ll shake me down every time they see me on the street. Sooner or later, I’ll have to say no. And when I do, it’ll go harder.
So I tell them the truth (something the system never tells them). “Look,” I say. “I’m gonna be living here. How am I gonna pay you guys every time I walk down the street?”
“How about we pop a cap in your ass right now, then see how you gonna walk down the street,” the stocky kid says.
The Big Guy looks annoyed. “Jo-Jo, you pop a cap in somebody’s ass, you gonna do it when I tell you to.”
The stocky kid gives the Big Guy a look, but he doesn’t say anything.
Finally. the Big Guy turns to me. He smiles a friendly smile, takes me aside. “I tell you what,” he says. “How about you pay this time, twenty dollars, we call it even.”
This is tempting. I take a minute to think about it, but I finally shake my head. “I wish I could do that,” I say, “but there isn’t any ‘one time’ and we both know it.” Then I say, louder, so his friends can hear. “Look, man, this is your place. I understand that. But like I said, I got no money and I got to get down the street. So this one time, I’m gonna ask you to let me go.”
We look at each other, the Big Guy and I, neither one saying anything. Finally, I pick up my duffle bag and start walking.
When I’ve taken maybe five steps, The Big Guy calls out behind me, “Nobody gonna be looking out after your car, now you understand that.”
I stop, turn around, and smile. “Yeah. But I figure you’re the man. And nobody on this block can touch that car without your permission.”
The Big Guy folds his arms, then he shakes his head, smiles. “You taking money out my pocket, motherfucker.”
“I’m just asking.”
He nods, turns away, then turns back again. “What kind of program you say you was with, anyway?”
“Called VISTA,” I say. “But I’m working with Neighborhood Legal Services.”
“So you a lawyer.”
“Trying to be.”
He shakes his head, laughs. “Motherfucker! I shoulda KNOWED that.” He points at me. “You owe me one.”
* * *
The set-up in America is – and from what I can tell, always has been – that people fall into two main categories: the ones who beat the system, and the ones who get beat. Laissez faire plus human nature doesn’t leave room for anything much in between.
Viewed in hindsight, the Great Society was a fleeting experiment that even its intended beneficiaries viewed with a measure of scorn. To those of us who worked in the trenches, its greatest utility was probably the unique excuse it gave us to look the other way. After all, the Great Society didn’t create a great society, did it?. We still had poverty; we still had crime; we still had injustice. The economic class system remained.
Only our idealism was lost.
As hippies became yuppies, the charm of voodoo economics took hold. Regulations were gutted, criminal penalties were toughened, and, oh yeah, welfare was reformed.
When I look back on those days, I can’t help but think the Great Society really was an aberration. We Americans don’t believe in collective responsibility. In fact, we have a problem with any sort of responsibility at all. Look at our heroes. They aren’t Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi. They’re Bonnie and Clyde and the Godfather. They’re not Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. They’re Dillinger, The Notorious B.I.G. and Al Capone. We’d give a hundred Sergeant Preston’s for a single Dirty Harry. We don’t like the cops from Internal Affairs Division. We like the ones who break the rules and get thrown off the force.
We’re Americans. We like the tough guy, the hard ass, the gangster, the wise guy. We like the gambler and the con man.
We like the entrepreneur.
