Words&Dirt

“‘Who’s this?’

‘Sokolov,’ said the Russian into the phone.  ‘We met earlier when I killed half your men.  Ten minutes ago I killed the other half.  Now there is just you, motherfucker.  A fucking piece of shit who uses phone to send better men to die.  Then runs away to airport.’

Olivia, watching interestedly from the opposite side of the boat, wondered how Sokolov knew that the person he was talking to was at the airport.  Maybe he could hear jet engines in the background.  As it happened, they were just now swinging around the northern end of Xiamen, where the airport was; and realizing this, Sokolov started looking around, just in time to see a 747 come rocketing up off the tarmac and angle up into the night sky.  Sokolov’s arm jerked toward the place where he had stashed the submachine gun and Olivia shrank down lower on the fiberglass bench, anticipating with a mixture of terror and awe and delight that he might pick up the weapon and try to bring down the plane.  But then his rational mind seemed to get that particular bad idea under control.  ‘Running away like fucking rat while brave men are dead in city below.  What a fine man you are, Jones.  Still have Zula?  Are you being nice to her?  I suggest you be nice to that girl, Jones, because when I find you, I will kill you fast if you have treated her well and if you have harmed her in any way, I will do it in a way that is not so nice.  I have sent a thousand jihadists to heaven to be with their virgins, but you I am going to send to hell.’  And he hung up the phone and threw it into the sea.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 463-4

“Since the 1970s, the demoralizing effects of growing poverty and unemployment have been magnified by ‘hyperghettoization.’  Ironically, some authors argue, the victories of the civil right movement have combined with cutbacks in antipoverty programs and economic deterioration of industrial urban centers to exacerbate destruction of the old integrity of inner-city neighborhoods.  People who had made gains in the 1940s and 1960s were finally able to move out to areas of more desirable housing, but no new jobs or social mobility programs opened up for those who were left.  Simultaneously, white professionals, financial specialists, and well-paid workers in high-technology industries moved back into some urban conclaves, stimulating ‘gentrification’ programs that further decreased the supply of affordable housing in the cities.

Increasing isolation of low-income blacks from middle-class blacks has been a trend characterizing the period since 1970; however, this factor should not be misunderstood as the primary cause of deterioration in the ghetto.  Most of the concentration of poverty in the inner cities is a result of job and income loss there, not the mobility of moderate-income blacks.  The spatial mismatch between growing numbers of workers permanently marginalized and discouraged, no longer even counted in the unemployment statistics.  Detroit, for example, has lost half of its jobs to deindustrialization and a third of its population to ‘white flight’; today the inner city is in a crisis far worse than that which sparked the riot of 1967.

In both the 1970s and 1980s, the effects of deindustrialization and urban decay were magnified by city governments that consciously put low-income housing, prisons, homeless shelters, methadone clinics, battered women’s shelters, and drug treatment centers in the same already destitute neighborhoods, in order to avoid the ‘not in my back yard’ protests of more organized and prosperous communities.  The resultant concentration of poverty and social problems has led to an isolation of poor blacks unprecedented even in the most racist periods of American history.

These circumstances simply foreclose the possibility of individual economic mobility for inner-city residents, aside from the occasional athlete, rap singer, or especially disciplined drug dealer.  Inner-city homeowners face plummeting house values; nonhomeowning families can barely afford housing rentals, much less job training, child care, or savings; only 18 percent of the jobless have access to cars.  As sociologist William Julius Wilson points out, neighborhoods that lack networks of employed acquaintances to pass on job tips and personal recommendations, offer mutual assistance, or provide a population and revenue base for schools, shops, churches, and recreational centers cannot support stable social ties, resist the influx of drugs, or offer positive economic and educational options to their inhabitants.  Many residents scrape by only through welfare or crime; others turn to drug or alcohol abuse.  Still more live in constant fear that they or their families will be victims of crime or will surrender to the chemicals that offer temporary transcendence of the filth, poverty, pain, and despair around them.”

––The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Stephanie Coontz, pg. 245-6