Poverty the "American" Way

In the movie, “The Mask of Zorro,” Anthony Hopkins, in the role of Diego de la Vega the old Zorro, is instructing the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, concerning a party they will attend in disguise. Raphael Montero, the story’s villain, will not recognize his old enemy de la Vega, Hopkins says, because a member of the Spanish nobility “would never look directly at a servant.”

A few months ago, I happened during a trip to read the “Letters to the Editor” section of the San Angelo, Texas newspaper. A lady wrote indignantly that the poor in the United States had, “house, cars, even televisions sets.” Poverty in the United States, she said, was different from poverty elsewhere. A couple of days ago, referring to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, another American Hidalgo, this one a columnist, expressed the same opinion. It fascinates me.

You see, it is like so many other things in our benighted nation. We live – evidently (and I mean the evidence is, not that this is a mere figment of imagination) – in a state of virtual reality. For nearly ten years, the victim of IRS and federal government excess, I was one of those poor our ivory tower talks about. I lived off the wilderness, often digging squaw root and other tuberous plants for food. I hunted and fished, planted gardens on public lands and in forests. I also walked into pizza parlors, to glean off the tables left-over slices of pizza. I gleaned coins in the parking lots of the malls, where the wealthy people lose carelessly enough money to provide someone like I was a meal.

I did not have a television set. I did not have a car (I walked or rode a bicycle everywhere I went). I lived either in a tent or an old RV (1971 Ford), a gift from a friend.

And I lived among the nation’s poor. I met engineers, lawyers, a doctor of medicine, an aerospace technician (Ph.D. degreed), farmers, auto mechanics, several ex-professional athletes (one who once made more than a million dollars a year), and one ex-showgirl. I met, and occasionally cared for, dozens of children. Several stray dogs, too. None had a television set, none a car, none a roof to sleep under. All were primarily concerned with their next meal.

Oh, I also met a lot of drunks, alcoholics who simply couldn’t save themselves from the “couple of quarts” they desperately needed. I met druggies, too, pushers and pimps, a few outright thieves. I met dozens of people just out of jail, people who knew damned well there was no way to get by outside of crime. I knew what they meant. I was very, very close to crime a number of times myself, pretty pissed off.

I discussed the ethics of poverty a number of times, with some very bright people. All poor. When you can’t get an honest job, it’s a crime not to have housing, and the only way to get money is to find or steal it, ethics takes on a whole knew meaning. I also discussed poverty with the capitalist ivory tower. And the rich (not always the same people). When you have three cars, live in a house with six bedrooms, vacation in San Moritz, and jet to San Francisco from Texas in order to have fresh lobster, ethics has another meaning. When you’ve commissioned the construction of your own $17,000,000,000 island (built by dredging up the ocean floor) in the Philippines or off the coast of Dubai (in the shape of a palm tree, no less, so everyone can have ocean-front property), and your income is $1,000 a second, ethics has still another meaning. In fact, you need to have few ethics at all. “Poor” doesn’t really have a meaning. You don’t see it, because you never have. You’ve never looked.

One of the conversations I had with the rich was with a retired Air Force officer, a graduate of West Point. Another, almost identical in topic to the one I had with the officer, was with the owner of a National Basketball Association franchise. Drawn out on the subject of whether I could steal a million dollars and get away with it, I gave each of the men ten ways to succeed. Both professed astonishment, but agreed that I was right. I could get out of poverty, and be a millionaire, in less than a year. I would only have to pay what every other rich man pays. It goes without saying that, for me, the price was too high (it wasn’t for one of the gentlemen, incidentally – he used one of my ideas to “earn” just under six million dollars).

Ethics is not only a different thing to different people, it varies a great deal with the nature of the test given it.

Poverty is the natural result of what is now known as capitalism. If there are twenty people at the table, and one or two eat all the food, the rest eat nothing. The fact of there being only so much food and so many people is an obvious one, too. That’s when the table is just a table; when it’s a planet, the obvious isn’t so obvious. The ethics change. Capitalism was once referred to as the Law of the Jungle, but with riches, ethics become a matter of justification. The poor must be their own victims, not those of the rich. The rich not only seek comfort for the body, they seek comfort for the mind, too. The legerdemain is simple, easy, a matter of rhetoric.

But they mustn’t look at you. Oh, they can be near you every day, walk by on the street so close you could reach out and touch them. They speak to you, even eat and drink, sometimes, with you. They might even give you something. Money. But they don’t look at you. Not really. Reality would explode in their faces.

In my book, “Letters to Aaron,” I recall the morning a van (the eight or ten passenger kind) “blew” a stoplight and rammed me as I crossed a street in a protected crosswalk. Hurled sixty-one feet and ten feet into the air by impact, I landed on the street to be hit again by the same van. It left eighty-four feet of skid marks. The aftermath was fascinating, and a warning microcosm of a society in denial, virtual reality created by ideology.

An old man (I have gray hair, and wore a jacket – you couldn’t see the muscles) has been hit in a crosswalk by a vehicle that was speeding and ignored a stop light. As he lies on the street, one of the men in the van attacks him viciously, smashing the vehicle’s door into his face, then proceeding to kick him in the stomach several times. Desperately (that’s admitted, I was scared), the old grabs his assailant, pulls him down into the judo hold (one of my own invention). Struggling against the grip that he realizes could break his neck, the assailant punches the old man in the groin several times. What do you think quickly gathering, and gaping, passersby do?

Well, working at the time on my van, I was on the way to an auto parts story, and dressed in old, dirty clothes. I was also a frequently seen sight in the area, riding my bike and carrying on it groceries in small bags. There is little doubt (I was stopped several times and searched while leaving a nearby H.E.B. grocery) that denizens considered me a bum. The man above me, the one beating hell out of me so far as anyone can see (it’s highly unlikely that any recognized my hold on the man as anything potentially lethal) was well dressed, and had just stepped from a brand new Dodge van. So you tell me what happened. It’s your country.

Fortunately, an ambulance called by personnel at an auto parts store also nearby
arrived in only minutes. In the intervening time, I had pleaded again and again with people standing over my assailant and me to “get the names of witnesses.” No one did. When police arrived at the hospital emergency room where I was taken, I was questioned closely about what I was doing in the area. Days later, when I obtained a police report, I learned that no charges had been filed (as a matter of fact, I also learned that the name of the driver had obviously – for me, that is - been falsified).

Uh-uh. When you’re poor, no one looks at you. If Katrina changes that, I’ll be amazed. So should you. No matter what the media and your president tell you, the United States is not only NOT the Land of the Free, it is a nation of hypocrites.