Two men: slim, brown, middle-aged, walking down Germantown Avenue, one pushing a mountain bike while the other carried an oversize can of beer in the kind of flimsy black plastic bag you get from a corner store. It was the second or third time I’d seen them this week, at the same place on the same route, walking, laughing, and sharing a tallboy.
The contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night of April 14, 1865: two pairs of eyeglasses, a lens polisher, a pocketknife, a linen handkerchief, a watch fob, a brown leather wallet, nine newspaper clippings, $5 Confederate
The contents of Trayvon Martin’s pockets on the night of February 26, 2012: $22 U.S., a bag of Skittles, a can of iced tea
I first happened upon The Dubliner Irish Pub (520 N. Capitol St., Washington DC) during a layover between Megabus rides en route to North Carolina. The Au Bon Pain in which I’d planned to pass the time turned out to be closed, and since it was Sunday, pretty much everything else in that sector of Federal City was as well. Having few other options, I walked another couple of blocks, saw this place, and figured it was as good a place as any to have a beer, a Scotch, and a soup (my standard bus travel restorative). I liked it, and I’ve stopped back in a few times since.
As soon as I heard that President Obama had dropped in at a local Irish pub to have a Guinness for St. Patrick’s Day, I knew it had to have been at The Dubliner; they proudly proclaim to be America’s largest purveyor of Guinness Stout, a good number of the bartenders are actually Irish, and really, with a name like that how could he have gone elsewhere? What I did not expect was that I’d be able to see a Google Maps Street View of the interior.
I got progressively (no pun intended) more uncomfortable as I listened to this story on NPR last week, and yes, the kicker was when the story mentioned that her mother had paid for half of the house, with the idea that the kid would buy out her share over the coming years. Interest-free loan from a maximally benevolent creditor, underwriter, and guarantor, anyone? What’s so fascinating to me is that for many listeners/readers, this level of privilege is common enough to be unremarkable, subliminally expected, baked into the culture (and the cake it recommends that the luckless go eat) so that the messy questions of who has access to capital and opportunity, and why, rarely arise and everyone can skip to celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit of a teen-aged landlord who offers to sell her tenants a bed she got for free.
For this to make any sense, you need to click and read this article. If you’re pressed for time, here’s the short version. A 14-year-old girl, with a real estate agent mother, figured out this way to make money: she went around to foreclosed houses, often full of furniture that got left behind, and asked investors if she could take the furniture off their hands. Then she sold the pieces on craiglist for profit. By gutting furniture and selling it at profit, she accumulated enough money to realize, hey I could actually buy one of these foreclosed houses! and she did, in Florida, for $12,000 (a house originally sold for $100K). Now she’s these poor people’s landlord, raking in $700 in rent. What do you make of all this? The comments section was all over the board - some praising her entrepreneurial spirit, others saying they didn’t like it, but at least the house wasn’t sitting vacant, others noting if she didn’t have a real estate mother who specialized in flipping foreclosures, she wouldn’t have thought of this. To me, what jumped out, was this notion of how economically privileged people never think about their privilege getting them anywhere. They mistakenly overemphasize their hard work, and business acumen, over the privileges bestowed upon them. An example of this is all the WWII vets who came home and got schooling on the GI bill — that set that generation up for higher wages, American-dream type houses and prosperity. Without the GI bill, many wouldn’t have had a chance, but almost no one talks about the GI bill as this indicator of future wealth. Similarly here, this kid has the power that comes with money and station in life (it often comes with race too, but that’s a different post). She would not have ever seen the opportunity presented by the furniture in the foreclosed homes, if she hadn’t had a mother doing foreclosure real estate. She probably wouldn’t have gotten the ok to gut the houses of other peoples’ belongings, if the investor hadn’t been friendly with her mother. How did she get the furniture out of the houses and into the craigslist customers’ hands? By some kind of truck, which you can bet she didn’t buy for her ‘business’ but probably belonged to her family, and which she could not even drive herself. How did she post the craigslist ads? On an internet connection that I wager was not accessed via a public library. She saved money, and yes this is great, but of course she was able to do this because she wasn’t a member of a low-income family where an outside job like this would go to the family’s expenses (low-income teenagers often take jobs to help with food, utilities, rent, etc.). So she was allowed to save, probably in a bank, probably in an account that needed a minimum balance. Some poor people in this country are ‘unbanked’ because they never have enough to make the exercise worthwhile. So now Willow has money accruing from a business, that, lest you missed it, is a resale business where the raw product is free, taken belongings from people who were foreclosed on. Why did those people leave their couch behind? We can speculate that maybe they didn’t have a car that would fit it, so they had to leave it behind - another loss of asset to that family. Or maybe they came to the house one day and saw the sign on the door, the locks changed on it by the bank, and maybe the foreclosed people asked to get back in but some paperwork roadblock prevented it. For whatever reason, this privileged kid pulled someone else’s belongings out of a house that didn’t belong to her, for an almost 100% profit turnaround. And since she’s living under her parents’ roof and doesn’t have to contribute to family expenses, that 100% profit could be saved at a 100% level. Few, if any businesses, can operate this way, so she as a young entrepreneur, isn’t much of one. Then you get into this business of she bought half the house, and her mother bought the other half. They fix it up a bit to make it livable (and where did THAT money come from?) and now they’re renting it out for $700/month. So there’s just more profit to be had. She will get richer and richer, shelling money only when something is too broken in the house to be livable…enough to invest in the stock market probably, which we all know, the longer you stay in, the more you make. The money will compound, all because she was born to a real estate mother with foreclosure connections and no one saw anything morally repugnant about reselling the belongings of people who had the bank seize their home, only to gut the house and rent it right back out to poor people. In this way, you can legitimately make thousands off the misfortunes of other people, and at least some NPR readers will applaud your capitalist drive.
6 In the soft, sherbet light of an arc-sodium lamp, a homeless man dozing under blankets at the lip of an abandoned loading dock. Just below him, tucked between the concrete staircase and a safety bumper, were two stacks of neatly folded clothes.
In an attempt to encourage/nudge/cajole/trick/force myself into writing with more consistency and discipline, I’ve been finding and re-reading things that, when I read them for the first time, made me think “Jesus, I wish I’d written that.”
She Was My First Kiss, for Christ’s Sake By Joe Donnelly
I happened upon this piece sometime in early 2002 while I was working in a library, aimlessly googling Wilco lyrics behind the circulation desk. Anything that quotes from the opening track on Being There would’ve had me from the beginning, but the way Donnelly uses those lyrics as a kind of instant shortcut back to the feelings and experiences of a suburban, idyllic childhood, and they way he conjures up a teenage girlfriend from a decade or more in the past with such immediacy and vitality…yeah.
The best lines, in my opinion, are just before the end.
Incidentally, I’d wondered for years whether or not this was non-fiction/memoir. I did a bit of searching, and the essentials at least are absolutely, heartbreakingly true.
Based on a hazy memory from a rainy afternoon of homework, television, and grilled cheese at my grandmother’s house, I’d been searching for and trying to identify this clip periodically during the last three or four years. I don’t care to describe how much time I spent poring over the Wikipedia entries for Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Pinky and The Brain this morning to finally track it down, but it was absolutely worth the effort.
The U.S. came in 47th in the annual Reporters Without Borders press freedom rankings.
“The crackdown on protest movements and the accompanying excesses took their toll on journalists,” the group explains in the annual report. “In the space of two months in the United States, more than 25 were subjected to arrests and beatings at the hands of police who were quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behaviour, public nuisance or even lack of accreditation.”
Hmm.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” - Chomsky
(via Wonkette)
A man, patiently salvaging potted Christmas poinsettias from the curbside trash and walking them to his doorstep just down the block. Which, in turn, reminded me of the woman who (after asking politely) picked through my rubbish a couple of weeks ago, meticulously sorting out the bits of recyclable metal and placing them into a shopping cart, all the while murmuring to herself “thank you Jesus, thank you Lord.”
i have a lot of thoughts (and very probably a long post) about Occupy Wall Street and corollary topics stirring about in my head.
while i get all of that sorted out: have you ever wondered what would happen if most or all of a professional sports team were lost in an accident? i always have, because i’m a nervous flyer, and even on the ground i’m frequently given to ponder the worst. as it turns out, i’m not alone in the latter; according to this article, all of the major sports leagues have contingencies in place for such a loss.
all of which reminds me of a story about a team that almost crashed, the 1959-60 Minneapolis (soon to be Los Angeles) Lakers:
The pilots had to open the windows of the cockpit to brush off the snow, because the windshield wipers were inoperative. One of the pilots was frostbitten across half of his face. No one knew where they were, but everybody knew the plane was running out of fuel and had to land soon.
team member Jim Krebs wrote a pretty amusing account of the incident, which was later published in Sports Illustrated.
