Somewhere in between, something is missing. The answer might be about being at home in the world, an answer that immediately questions homeland security, with its portrayal of everything outside a neatly defined home as a threat, and also questions homelessness, for these people are out in a harsh world that is adamantly not home, made unwelcoming by the retreat from any embrace of common good and civil society. The retreat is spurred by the twin forces of privatization and what I now think of as the fear economy, the governmentally produced fears—cold wars, terrorisms—that make for a more docile populace (and the government policies that have made the world genuinely less safe). Docile people are less bold about challenging authority or otherwise venturing into the public realm, a nice spur to the privatization that affects not only resources and rules but psyches. It is the abandonment of this public sphere that has left the corpse of democracy to be gnawed by the CEOs who are now also our federal government.
The forester and poet Gary Snyder likes to say that the most radical thing you can do is to stay home. This implies a fine bioregional localness—but not as local as the interior of your home. Rather, I think he means home as a foundation from which to venture, a ground to stand on so that you can stand for something; and home as a sense of community, of knowledge, of belonging through commitment rather than only privilege. And this implies what it might mean to be at home in the world, to have what for nomads is a winter camp—a familiar place to come back to, but in part so that you can venture out and broaden your horizons, make your peace with the world, embrace difference.
And here I think the literal public sphere—streets, subways, plazas, libraries, post offices—matters as the staging ground for the imagined public sphere, the arena in which people think about politics and public life and feel a sense of embeddedness in it as both beneficiaries and caretakers. I think about this sense of home in my own city as I cross paths constantly with people who live in a different sense of the same place—the undocumented immigrants who know the Mission District, the construction sites, and the routes to their villages in Mexico; the African American kids who often have hardly been out of the city at all, even to the hills and beaches immediately across the Golden Gate, but have a careful social map of their peers across the city. But they live in part in public.
I think about it too as I encounter the more suburbanized of my fellow citizens, who believe in home as what you have a mortgage on, with the rest of the world beyond the bounds of that own secured homeland, these neighbors who seem to leave their houses only to get into their cars to go to places they know—perhaps know from other cities, the Starbucks and Walgreens that make everywhere into nowhere nowadays. Nothing on earth is sadder than their rummage sales, where they sell off the Ikea and Pottery Barn trappings they will replace at the next stop in this world, which for them must seem so much like an infinite airport without exits, familiar to the point of endless repetition but hardly home in any more passionate or particular sense. In the affluent world, you are never really at home but also are never really away, for the homogenizing forces of global capital bring the familiar lattes and logo products to the far corners of the globe.
In the Bay Area, one of our more annoying Silicon Valley billionaires recently announced plans to build a 72,000-square-foot home that will essentially be a city made for one man and his family, but an impoverished city, empty of encounters, limited by their own imaginations. Kierkegaard once announced that thieves and the rich have in common that they live in hiding, and in this regard you can see that in some ways the rich are poorer than the ordinary citizens who don’t fear to mingle with strangers and therefore own their cities or towns—who are at home in the world. Some of the less affluent children of suburbia embrace my city wholeheartedly, the kids living with lots of roommates who hold their cell phone conversations and smoke their cigarettes on the front steps, do their homework in cafés, and barrel around on bikes.
When I wrote about walking, I learned that one version of home is everything you can walk to. Thus I, with my few hundred square feet of rented space, can also claim a thousand-acre park that ends at the Pacific with a beach full of seabirds; four or five movie theaters; hundreds of restaurants, bars, and cafés; a big public library; way too many tattoo parlors; a fine collection of monuments, views, promenades, and more.
The Latinoization of the United States poses the interesting question of whether Latinos will urbanize us with a more dynamic life on the street before we suburbanize them—both forces are at work in the Southwest. Here is where we see that infrastructure is not enough, for different communities can privatize or socialize the same spaces; you can’t design civil society, though you can design civil society’s habitat out of existence.
An urban activist recently said to me, apropos of something else, “But they don’t make kids with legs anymore,” speaking of how the kids in the immigrant Latino community where she has spent her life don’t walk around much anymore, kept inside both by television and by their parents’ fears. I fear what will become of a generation kept under house arrest: Who will they be without the education in adventure, unfamiliarity, straying and finding the way back, damming creeks and climbing trees that was practically a birthright for most American kids (except the urban ones who had their own turf of tramlines and vacant lots)? How will they care about an environment they have barely encountered—for, after all, so many naturalists and environmentalists began by turning over logs to look at insects, by wandering the hills, by finding their way into a world in which human beings were not alone? How will these kids be at home in a world they have hardly visited?
There are no grand solutions, only everyday practices of paying attention, of valuing difference and the openness that comes with some risk, of rethinking home, and of refusing to be afraid.
Mirror in the Street
[2004]
Nineteenth-century Paris was often compared to a wilderness by its poets and writers. They sensed that the city had somehow become so vast, so magical and unpredictable, that one could wander it as though it were not made by human beings and reason, but rather had sprung up with all the mystery and intricacy of a jungle. And the feral city was perceived as a pleasure, at least for those bold and free enough to venture into its byways and dangers. Alexandre Dumas wrote about “Les Mohicans du Paris,” and many saw themselves as explorers.
Before gas lighting, European cities had been as dark as a forest at night—darker than much of the countryside, for the buildings blocked starlight and moonlight—and predators roamed the byways, pouncing on unsuspecting stragglers. You dressed down or hired a torchbearer and guards, or both. Or you stayed home—if you had one. In the mid-twentieth century, the great German-Jewish cultural theorist and Parisian Walter Benjamin wrote again and again of Paris as a labyrinth, a forest, a mystery, and a joy. He once reminisced, “I saw sunset and dawn, but between the two I found myself a shelter. Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me.”
In recent years, American cities have become a wilderness of another sort. The homeless live in our built environment as though they are not the species for which it was built. Doorways are their caves, boxes their beds of boughs, fountains their pools, sidewalks their porches and dining rooms. Like backpackers and nomads, they must carry their goods with them in bags or shopping carts. Like jackals and buzzards, they live by scavenging the leftovers of more privileged predators. They roam exposed to the elements, mapping the small routes of daily survival—the recycling center where cans and bottles turn into cash; the places that serve free food, offer social services, or allow congregation. The homeless live in the city as though it were a wilderness: not a wilderness of symbiosis, of beauty, of complexity, in the way hunter-gatherers might live in a landscape too well-known to be a wilderness, but a wilderness that is not safe, not reliable, not made for them. It is the wilderness into which Old Testament exiles were driven. I
t’s the world we’ve made of late.
But it is not they who have become savages in the wild city. We have. They are there because we—the we who elected Ronald Reagan, who chose to vote for the tax cuts that meant drastic social services cuts, who allowed the New Deal and the Great Society to be canceled, the we who looked the other way or did not resist hard enough—decided to create this wilderness for them. I remember that twenty years ago, when the huge army of the homeless was first being turned out into American cities, a writer expressed shock that this wealthiest nation had become like Brazil or India, a place where the affluent stepped over the dying on their way to the opera. I thought of this recently when friends from suburbia came to town and I guided them around my familiar haunts. They were shocked and a little alarmed by the homeless, and I realized I’d grown accustomed to people living on the street. I was not afraid of them and tried to give them back, in conversation and body language, a little of the dignity that had been stripped from them. But I was also troublingly accustomed to a society in which people suffer, overdose, go mad, and die in the streets.
Perhaps my friends were frightened by the homeless because the sight of dirty, deranged people was so unfamiliar to them. Or maybe they couldn’t distinguish between suffering and danger, and the homeless are often portrayed as dangerous. In all my years of walking the city streets, often alone, often at night, I’ve never been menaced by an evidently homeless person (as opposed to, say, careening luxury cars). Some of them become landmarks: the older man in the wide felt hat who was always on the park bench when I went running, seeming more like a country squire than a desperado; the sad woman sitting cross-legged on the same corner near city hall for years, day and night, rocking back and forth and holding a stuffed animal amid all her tattered belongings.
The homeless may indeed be a danger, but only to our idea of ourselves. They represent how deranged, how desperate, and how dirty human beings can become, something that most of us would rather not know. They represent how wide the spectrum of human nature is and how fragile our own civility is—though many of them are among the most polite and gracious people I encounter every day. Some of them seem to be homeless because they lack the initiative and cunning to survive in a world where security—long-term employment, unions, blue-collar jobs, affordable housing—is vanishing and we must all fend for ourselves, not just by working but by calculating, by planning, by competing, by abandoning and reinventing our sense of self. They are anachronisms, the people who might have done well in stable jobs that no longer exist, and when I give them food or money, they say, “God bless you,” a lot of them, an old-fashioned response.
In parts of Asia, beggars are necessary to society because they allow others to honor their obligation to give. The Buddhist monks of southeast Asia, for example, take a vow not to deal with money and allow nonmonks to receive the spiritual benefit of giving: poverty and spirituality have a long acquaintance. Gavin Newsom, the restaurateur-businessman who is now San Francisco’s mayor, built his career by beating up on the homeless (though he has since somewhat redeemed himself). John Burton, who represents San Francisco in the state Senate, was disgusted enough to fight back. “St. Francis was a beggar,” said the signs he put up on the streets, and “Jesus gave alms to the poor.”
In cities around the country, the homeless are most often treated primarily as an eyesore for others. Policies often focus on moving them away or making them invisible, as if they were a problem of aesthetics, not ethics, as if our comfort, not theirs, were all that is at stake. The homeless also signify that the distribution of wealth in this wealthiest society the world has ever known is itself an atrocity against humanity as well as against the environment, for the armies of the homeless were produced in large degree by decisions made by the affluent. Their decisions to defund mental health programs and dump the patients, to turn basic human needs for housing and health care into speculative commodities whose upward spiral has enriched the few and burdened the many, were decisions to break the social contract and try to buy their way out of it.
More and more often, the wealthy try to buy replacements for a functioning society—armed guards and gated communities in place of social justice, bottled water and expensive cancer cures in place of unpolluted resources, private schools in place of the good public education that was once a backbone of this nation, the stock market in place of social security. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt through at least Richard Nixon (who was considering universal health care and passed the Clean Water and Clean Air acts), the United States became more of a society, a place that recognized interdependence and obligation toward each other. From Ronald Reagan’s presidency on, we have dismantled that social contract. The homeless are frightening because they are a mirror: in their fear, in the uncertainty of their predicament, in their hunger, in their desperation, we see that we have gone feral.
Liberation Conspiracies
[2005]
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, by Adam Hochschild (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 480 pp.
LABYRINTHS
Mark Lombardi’s art consists of colossal drawings of networks of power, connecting politicians, capitalists, and corporations into intricate maps, like medieval cosmology or Kabbalah diagrams, whose huge arcs and circles linking the small handwritten names are as visually beautiful as they are politically daunting. His most famous work was about the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International, also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals) banking scandal. It linked up the bin Laden and Bush families long before the film Fahrenheit 9/11, even before the 2000 election and Bush’s illegitimate apotheosis as president.
New York critic Frances Richard wrote of this work:
Lombardi’s drawings—which map in elegantly visual terms the secret deals and suspect associations of financiers, politicians, corporations, and governments—dictate that the more densely lines ray out from a given node, the more deeply that figure is embroiled in the tale Lombardi tells. . . . The drawing is done on pale beige paper, in pencil. It follows a time-line, with dates arrayed across three horizontal tiers. These in turn support arcs denoting personal and corporate alliances, the whole comprising a skeletal resume of George W. Bush’s career in the oil business. In other words, the drawing, like all Lombardi’s work, is a post-Conceptual reinvention of history painting.
After September 11, 2001, the FBI visited the Whitney Museum to examine Lombardi’s drawings for clues they might yield about the conspiracy that gave rise to the catastrophe.
Lombardi committed suicide in March 2000, for complex reasons, but it’s easy to imagine him as a character in a Jorge Luis Borges story dying of Borgesian reasons, for Lombardi’s drawings recall Borges’s library of Babel, his Garden of Forking Paths, the Zohar, Zeno’s paradox, or the Pascal aphorism that Borges loved, “The universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.” Borges’s parables and stories are attempts to grasp the infinite complexity of the world, and his version of Lombardi would have died of despair of ever approximating the reach and intricacy of these networks.
Lombardi’s work is often regarded as evidence of sinister conspiracies by people who assume that “they” are thus linked up but “we” are not. We are, actually, at least when we try to achieve anything political. Politics is networks, rhizomes, roots, webs, to use a few of the popular metaphors from the increasingly popular studies of complexity. A more cheerful Lombardi might have charted the links that connect Naomi Klein, the Argentina Horizontalidad populist movements against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas, the Yucatán campesinos who opposed the WTO in Cancun in 2003, the internationalistas who joined them, the U.S. campus-based anti-sweatshop movement, the Sierra Club, Arundhati Roy, anti-Monsanto agriculturalists in India and Europe, on to Nigerian activists now shutting the operations of Chevron (based in San Francisco) and San Francisco activists against Bechtel Corporation (also based here), which links us back to the Bolivian ac
tivists who beat Bechtel a few years ago. (Thanks to the Internet, speaking of networks, the global justice movement has been able to link causes and confrontations into an unprecedented meta-community able to act in concert internationally.)
In fact, right-wing think tanks are probably lining up these affiliations and solidarities right now and portraying them as a conspiracy, as they have before. That’s the rule of thumb: when we talk, it’s a network; when they talk, it’s a conspiracy. The sinister thing about Lombardi’s BCCI drawing isn’t that all these people, banks, and governments are linked up, but that they’re linked up to screw you, me, and the world. That is to say, it’s complexity that makes the drawing itself overwhelming, but intent that makes the denizens of the drawing scary.
AWAKENINGS AND COINCIDENCES
One can imagine the characters of Adam Hochschild’s wonderful new history, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, as they might have been drawn by Lombardi, such is the complexity of the network Hochschild depicts while tracing the British antislavery movement from Quakers in London to slave rebellions in the Caribbean, from the 1780s when the movement began to the final, long-delayed abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1838. The book is both a gripping history of a particular movement and a beautiful embodiment of the erratic, unlikely ways movements unfold—an unfolding that consists of multiple kinds of linkages. If Lombardi’s is post-conceptualist history painting, Hochschild’s book is likewise a kind of post–Great Man history writing, one with crowds, coincidences, and ocean currents looming up behind the key activists he delineates.*
Storming the Gates of Paradise Page 22
