A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  The public is pretty much in the dark about the fact that our government is not just wiretapping and email snooping, but it’s also going through our mail. Judging from what Langone said about the postal money orders and what the complaint says about the phone calls with Spitzer about the package arriving, it seems Spitzer was mailing his checks and/or postal money orders. So, it seems likely the Feds were snooping in his mail. Opening this window to public scrutiny might disclose that millions of pieces of our mail have been opened without good cause.

  March 1

  The vast slum projects on Chicago’s South Side known as the Robert Taylor Homes, setting for Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day, no longer exist. The bulldozers started rolling in the early 1990s, only thirty years after the mini-city of twenty-eight high rises went up. It was constructed on French modernist principles, a two-mile by two-block concrete desert in which the Chicago Housing Authority had very loose authority over 27,000 people: 99.9 percent black, 95 percent jobless and on welfare, over 40 percent of the heads of household being single mothers.

  Venkatesh’s colorful and sympathetic memoir is a snapshot, like those you see stuck on posts alongside American highways where a car or truck took its human cargo into the hereafter. Born in Madras and raised in comfortable middle-class academic circumstances in southern California, Venkatesh embarked on his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago in 1989. The dominant figure in the department at that time was William Julius Wilson, famous for arguing in such books as When Work Disappears and The Truly Disadvantaged that, contrary to depictions of ghetto blacks in right-wing bestiaries, which spoke of psychological, intellectual, and even genetic deficits, the core problem was work. Without stable, well-paid jobs, any community will slide downhill, with blacks at the bottom of the heap.

  Venkatesh soon got bored poring over data sets and yearned to scrutinize actual poor people. Fortunately, Wilson was embarking on a big new study of poverty and told Venkatesh to put together a questionnaire and start interviewing. To the homeboys lounging about in the stairwells of the Projects, selling crack and fending off the competition, Venkatesh must have been an odd sight: a tall, dark-skinned fellow with a pony-tail and a tie-dye shirt, memento of his Deadhead cultural affiliations, flourishing a researcher’s clipboard and asking, “How does it feel to be black and poor?”

  They figure him as a member of a Mexican gang, or an Arab, and hold him till the gang leader, J.T., a college dropout with a talent for organizing, assays Venkatesh’s academic credentials and origins, and in short order says he can stay around—thus setting Venkatesh on a path that would eventually lead him to Harvard and then to Columbia University.

  Venkatesh does little more than gesture in a sentence or two about how exactly he earned the trust of J.T. and other powerful people in the Projects, such as the tenant leader, Ms. Bailey. In keeping with his laconic, understated mode—one has the sense now and then of a book written in something of a hurry—he does not broach the subject of his own ethnic origins, but it obviously helped that he is not white. At all events, the laid-back personality that led J.T. and others to trust young Sudhir emerges clearly from his descriptions—at once sympathetic and detached—of slum life and the endless battles of the very poor to make it to the end of the day in one piece. His dry Indian eye allows him to sketch in vivid detail the entrepreneurial hive at the Robert Taylor Homes.

  The Projects come alive in Venkatesh’s glancing descriptions: urine-soaked stairwells inhabited by squatters and cruised by hookers; the sixteen-story buildings’ bleak outside corridors savaged by Chicago’s winter winds; welcoming apartments in which heroic mothers raise their kids and cram Sudhir’s plate with soul food as he writes up his notes. His posture is genuinely one of respect. The gang members are not the “superpredators” demonized by the right-wing criminologists who dominated discussions of the ghetto and of the justice system’s stance toward gangs in the late 1980s and ’90s. They are humans given scant choices. “You want to understand how black folks live in the Projects,” Ms. Bailey tells Venkatesh. “Why we are poor. Why we have so much crime. Why we can’t feed our families. Why our kids can’t get work when they grow up. So will you be studying white people?”

  Declining a pose of moral affront, Venkatesh’s particular talent is to have figured out how the buildings function as a collective business enterprise; how the truly desperate squeeze a hundred dollars a month out of recycling trash; how the hookers rate their services. He had one huge stroke of good fortune in the form of a secret gift of the gang’s business accounts, conscientiously maintained by J.T.’s bookkeeper, T-Bone. Using T-Bone’s notebook, he established exactly what the junior drug vendors in J.T.’s army—the Black Kings—were making: minimum wage, hence the need to live with their moms. J.T. himself was pulling down from $30,000 a year up to as much as $100,000 at his apex. The books methodically recorded the levies extorted by the gang from local shopkeepers, from the squatters, from the hookers. Venkatesh explains how a vast urban slum was actually governed by innumerable quid pro quos and intricate contracts which, being unwritten and with the rule of law not accessible to its inhabitants, were enforced by the threat or the direct exercise of violence.

  Adopting a modified Candidean posture as the West Coast naïf in darkest Chicago, Venkatesh lets the reader know early on that, yes, he witnessed more or less mutely some bad stuff, initially when J.T. beats up an elderly squatter called C-Note who refuses to quit working on a car in an area the gang want to use for basketball: “ ‘I told you, nigger,’ J.T. said, his face barely an inch away from C-Note’s, ‘but you just don’t listen, do you?’ He sounded exasperated but there was also a sinister tone to his voice I’d never heard before. ‘Why are you making this harder?’ He started slapping C-Note on the side of the head, grunting with each slap, C-Note’s head flopping back and forth like a toy … then J.T.’s henchmen pushed him to the ground. They took turns kicking him, one in the back and the other in the stomach …”

  It takes C-Note two months to recover from the beating. Venkatesh writes a few pages later: “J.T. and I resumed our normal relationship … I kept my questions to myself … While I was by no means comfortable watching drug addicts smoke crack, the C-Note affair gave me greater pause. He was an old man in poor health; he could hardly be expected to defend himself against men twice his size and half his age, men who also happened to carry guns … But I didn’t do anything. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t confront J.T. about it until some six months later, and even then I did so tentatively.”

  This observer/participant theme weaves its way uncertainly through the book. Venkatesh’s academic advisors remind him that witness of criminal activities renders him liable to subpoenas and even charges of criminal conspiracy. More experienced ethnographers caution him against excessive involvement with his subjects. Venkatesh’s own entrepreneurial instincts prompt him to assert too shrilly the originality of his research methods (i.e., directly observing poor people), and also to contrive the signally unconvincing chapter that gives the book its title, Gang Leader for a Day. It is plain enough that Venkatesh was nothing of the sort. Under the careful eye of J.T. and his lieutenants, he is allowed to make a few inconsequential decisions before surrendering the imaginary role.

  It is as a participant that Venkatesh makes the astounding move of revealing to J.T. and Ms. Bailey the actual earnings disclosed to him by the small-time hustlers, hookers, and marginal players, whose confidence he has fostered down the years. Furious at the news of tiny profits undeclared to them, J.T. and Ms. Bailey promptly exact retribution, thus earning Venkatesh the well-merited suspicion of his erstwhile informants. Remorseful across several pages, he never really explains his shameful conduct, and one can only conclude that it was the pride of the business analyst that led him on. He could not resist strutting his stuff to J.T. and Ms. Bailey.

  History sidles briefly into the book. Old black men muse nostalgically about the days of the Black Panthers, who offered
the ghetto social services along with incendiary politics. An older woman, Cordella Levy, recalls how women used to run social life in the Projects before the possibility of decent local employment disappeared and the drug gangs came in, establishing the cash nexus and rule of force as the motor of social relations. “It was a time for women,” Levy says, “a place for women. The men ruined everything.”

  This brings us back to young men like J.T., who beats up C-Note. Eventually Venkatesh asks him why, and J.T. answers: “C-Note was challenging my authority … I had niggers watching me, and I had to do what I had to do.” The sense of insecurity and impermanence—in jobs, relationships, lodging, life itself—that so imbues the lives of poor people takes over Venkatesh’s book in its final chapters. The Robert Taylor Homes are now demolished, and amid the rubble lies J.T.’s empire, as a federal onslaught puts many of the Black Kings behind bars.

  T-Bone got ten years for drug trafficking and died in prison. J.T. got out of the gang business, but his barbershop failed. He thought he was going to be the hero of Venkatesh’s book, but presumably by now has realized that this was a role the author had reserved for himself, crowing on the last page that he was “a rogue sociologist, breaking conventions and flouting the rules.” Of course, the roguery has done him no end of good, and Gang Leader for a Day will probably end up as a movie. And the moral is … But no, there is no moral of the sort Venkatesh’s supervisor William Julius Wilson might have written about how to fight poverty.

  March 26

  Suddenly everyone is having a “conversation.” The word has come of age. I see it bowing and scraping on the opinion pages and TV talk shows three or four times a day.

  Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia about race stuck pretty carefully to the unwritten rules of a national conversation, in marked contrast to the sermons of the Rev. Josiah Wright whose stimulating rhetoric has caused such extraordinary affront—if you will—to the conversing classes.

  The junior Senator from Illinois is a master at drowning the floundering swimmer he purports to rescue, while earning credit for extending a manly hand in human solidarity. Obama’s fake-rescue technique is reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century lines about Joseph Addison: “Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.”

  Our tragedy is that we have three neoliberals left in the presidential race, at a time when neoliberalism has collapsed and life-giving divisiveness is top of the Wanted list. I suppose, out of the three of them, I prefer Obama. McCain is an idiot and HRC wants Volcker, Rubin, and Greenspan to lead a “high-level emergency working group” to recommend ways to restructure at-risk mortgages to help avert more foreclosures. But I don’t think Obama is a real fighter. He’s too pretty, and he doesn’t want to get his looks messed up.

  May 3

  Every few years New York City cops hear the growl of clear and present danger and subdue the threat with powerful volleys of lead. With Sean Bell, an African-American, in November 2006 the fusillade rose to fifty shots, deemed necessary by the men in blue to lay low Bell outside a nightclub in November 2006.

  In Queens last week a judge ruled that the cops who turned young Bell into a sieve on his wedding day had been filled with a most understandable apprehension, even though Bell turned out to be unarmed. As usual the cops walk and sometime later the victim’s family may get a settlement from the city. The important thing is that justice is seen not to have been done. Power needs the periodic buttress of irrational, uniformed violence.

  The crowds protesting in Queens after Judge Anthony Cooperman let Bell’s killers go free a week ago were orderly, as instructed by an African American. “We’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down,” Barack Obama said when asked about the case by reporters in Indiana. “Resorting to violence to express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable and is counterproductive.”

  Spoken like a president of the Harvard Law Review. In fact Obama’s white rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, put more juice into her press release: “This tragedy has deeply saddened New Yorkers—and all Americans. My thoughts are with Nicole and her children and the rest of Sean’s family during this difficult time. The court has given its verdict, and now we await the conclusion of a Department of Justice civil rights investigation.”

  Obama is now well advanced along the path of reassurance, where each candidate nearing the White House makes clear their fidelity to the standard of irrational violence. As with McCain and Mrs. Clinton, this year he has affirmed his willingness to wipe out America’s enemies with nuclear bombs and missiles, though he drew some rebukes for saying he was not in favor of nuking the Hindu Kush, thus casting a disquieting flicker of reason across the path of reassurance.

  Since he is, though half white, black in appearance—and in such matters appearance counts for everything—Obama has dealt with the pigmentation problem by declaring that race is no longer a troubling factor in America, and should be low on the fix-it list of any incoming President. In Selma, Alabama, he declared that blacks “have already come 90 percent of the way” to equality. Indeed he’s already issued white America a loss damage waiver. “If I lose, it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail.”

  June 7

  Obama inspires young people who flock to his rallies. He promises not only to “create a new kind of politics” but to “transform this country,” “change the world,” “create a Kingdom right here on earth.” Comingled with these doses of uplift are the familiar coarse pledges to crucial interest groups, such as the Miami Cubans. Obama’s speech to them on May 25 was a dismal exercise in right-wing demagoguery.

  Take his speech to the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami on May 23: “Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom … This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century—of elections that are anything but free or fair … I won’t stand for this injustice, you won’t stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba … I will maintain the embargo.”

  Obama also had words of specific comfort for the Uribe regime in Colombia: “When I am President, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program, and update it to meet evolving challenges. We will fully support Colombia’s fight against the FARC. We’ll work with the government to end the reign of terror from right-wing paramilitaries. We will support Colombia’s right to strike terrorists who seek safe-haven across its borders.” Note the endorsement of Columbia’s foray into Ecuador to assassinate a FARC leader.

  After invoking hope and change in St. Paul, Obama rushed the next day to Washington for some ritual groveling to the AIPAC: “We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. Everything and I mean everything.” Israel should get whatever it wants and an undivided Jerusalem should be its capital.

  We can look ahead to months of Obama deflecting McCain’s onslaughts on him as a starry-eyed peacenik by insisting that what the beleaguered Empire above all needs is efficiency, ruthless if necessary. “The [US] generals are light-years ahead of the civilians,” he reassured one of his fans, the neoconservative New York Times columnist, David Brooks. “They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

  Can a black man get elected President in 2008? Hillary Clinton said No. In the last weeks she ran up some impressive totals of white voters agreeing with her, as in West Virginia where Obama scarcely campaigned, just as he remained invisible to voters in Kentucky, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Wisconsin.

  Obama right now has an edge in electoral college votes, though this somewhat depends which faction of number crunchers you believe. By almost every yardstick, except the wild card of his skin color, he’ll win. It should be incon
ceivable for a Republican to capture the White House for the third time in a row when the price of gasoline is headed towards $5 a gallon, food prices are soaring, and most Americans reckon things are going to get a lot worse.

  At least for now, the Clinton dynasty is headed for the retirement home. None too soon, I say, however Obama turns out.

  June 22

  The delirium in the press at Tim Russert’s passing has been strange. As a broadcaster he was not much better than average, which is saying very little. He could be a sharp questioner, but not when it really counted and when courage was required. He was tough with George Bush in a February interview in 2004. He taxed with him with faking the reasons to attack Iraq. But in the years before the 2003 attack, I used to hear him being merciless with those questioning whether Saddam Hussein had the nukes and bio-weapons alleged by the Bush administration and its conspirators in the press, prominent among them Russert himself.

  If Russert had rocked the boat in any serious way he’d have had more enemies. The right-wingers didn’t care for Walter Cronkite, but they had no problem with Russert. Rush Limbaugh nuzzled him respectfully on the air and so did Don Imus. Russert was always there with his watering can to fertilize myths useful to the system.

  Russert spent many years working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who played the greasiest cards in the political deck, whoring for the Israel lobby, and race-baiting for Nixon. Few were more zealous than Russert in shredding anyone with the temerity to criticize Israel. Obama, now shuffling Moynihan’s greasy deck with his Father’s Day sermon about black responsibility, himself got a dose of Russert’s own race-baiting earlier this year, with a ridiculous volley of questions about Farrakhan and Wright in the February 26 debate. Any white telly pundit can make hay with Farrakhan, but when it came to high gasoline prices Russert was meek as a shoeshine boy, lining up the oil execs and tugging his forelock.