A couple of weeks ago I was commenting on a discussion amongst liberals about what proportion of urban poverty should be blamed on culture (here and here). The nuanced debates between Jonathan Chait and Ta-Nehisi Coates have been all but swamped by the cartoonish caricatures coming out of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy. According to him, “the Negro” is lazing around on Las Vegas porches collecting federal benefits when he should be picking cotton in the antebellum South.
Bundy, of course, is an overt racist but, drawing on Richard Price’s fine novel Clockers, I want to challenge him from an unexpected perspective. According to Clockers, the American work ethic goes so deep that even the criminal classes buy into it. (Come to think of it, the federal lawbreaker Bundy illustrates this himself.)
But first a note on Bundy’s views, which are different in degree but not in kind from Paul Ryan’s belief that “[w]e have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” The New Yorker’s comic satirist Andy Borowitz had the best headline after former Bundy supporters like Rand Paul and Rick Perry started backpedaling from the incendiary statements: “Republicans Blast Nevada Rancher for Failing to Use Commonly Accepted Racial Code Words.”
As my friend Rachel Kranz notes, there’s a ready way to put Bundy’s and Ryan’s theory to the test: make decent jobs readily available. We all know that, if you want to form a long line in an urban area, just open a new hotel and advertise for jobs. Sure, there will always be some lazy people, but bring the country to full employment and I suspect that most of the culture of poverty talk will vanish.
This talk really took off in the late 1970s when the economy soured. Ever since the Reagan years, when we started shifting money from social, education, and infrastructure spending to tax breaks for the wealthy (“voodoo economics,” as George H. W. Bush called it before he saw the light), we’ve seen an uptick in blaming the poor. After all, accusing people is easier than fixing the economy.
Price’s novel shows the perils of wholesale generalization about any group of people, even those involved in the drug trade. Clockers depicts inner city drug dealers as people working tirelessly and having the same kinds of problems that one finds in legitimate businesses. In fact, these people seem a lot like good capitalists who just go where the money is.
The main character is a mid-level dope dealer named Strike who swigs yoo-hoos and suffers from ulcers as he tries to juggle his many balls, which include staying on the good side of his boss and supervising various dealers under him. Think of him as a modern day Moll Flanders. Here’s a small sampling of what his life is like:
Walking the three blocks to his car, Strike performed casual 360-degree turns every minute or two to see if anybody was walking behind him. He had no money on him, no dope, but he was known.
He kept his car in an old lady’s driveway, paid her a hundred a month to keep it off the street. The lady was seventy-five, half blind, liked to listen to gospel radio and sit in her window, watching the two-year-old Accord as if it might drive away by itself. Strike liked old people. They were more sensible, less likely to be greedy, had no taste or inclination for getting high. He had six of them on his payroll: this one for the car; three others to keep Sears-bought safes in their houses, for his money; another to keep a safe for his surplus bottles; and another to do his laundry. Old people were his biggest expense, $2000 a month. But he was making between $1500 and $2000 a week now, his cut for selling anywhere from fifteen hundred to two thousand bottles, depending on what kind of shorts he encountered—thefts, breakage, police. He was afraid to do anything with the money, didn’t want to flaunt it or acquire anything that could be taken away from him, so all he had to show for his hard work was cash, more cash than he could count. His car was used and leased; the cops couldn’t confiscate a leased car, and a used car didn’t draw that much attention anyway. His apartment was rented in someone else’s name, in a bad but quiet neighborhood, a whore strip, but there weren’t any clockers and a bank of pay phones stood right across the street.
His apartment was spotless and spare. No great sound machine or television setup, no phone, nothing hanging on the walls, just a three-piece bedroom set and a four-piece living room ensemble, all bought in a half hour at the House of Bamboo in a shopping center over in Queens where no one knew him. He had moved in six months before, after a showdown with his mother over his dealing. Even though he was only nineteen, he had enough money to buy himself a house somewhere, but if he got arrested the house would be confiscated; even if he bought it in someone else’s name, jail time would mean no cash flow, no payments to the bank, and the place would be repossessed. But at least Strike had considered the idea: most of the dealers he knew never even thought about houses. Like Horace, they spent all their money on toys—man-toys maybe, but lightweight vanity buys—living in dumps and wearing too much gold. They couldn’t get out of that minute-to-minute survival head long enough to take the money and buy something substantial. “They don’t have no future because they don’t believe in no future” was the way Rodney [Strike’s boss] put it, although in Strike’s mind Rodney wasn’t really anybody to talk.
Whatever else one thinks of Spike, one can’t say that the welfare state has made him lazy. True, as in any work environment, some under him don’t work hard, but there are also plenty of others who do. Some show up on time and some don’t, some are reliable and some are not, some exhibit imagination and some just follow orders. As in any work environment.
In short, free enterprise at work.