The “Shame” Culture Of Poverty- Down In The Base Of Society Life Ain’t Pretty

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late Irish-American writer and my muse on this post, Frank McCourt.

Peter Paul Markin comment:

A few years ago in reviewing Frank McCourt’s memoir of his childhood in Ireland, Angela’s Ashes, I noted that McCourt’s story was my story. I went on to explain that although time, geography, family composition and other factors were different, in some ways very different, the story that he told of the impoverished circumstances of his growing up “shanty” in Limerick, Ireland, taking all proportions into consideration, was amazingly similar to those I faced growing up “shanty” in a Boston, Massachusetts suburb, North Adamsville, a generation later. A recent re-reading of that work only confirms my previous appraisal. The common thread? Down at the base of modern industrial society, down at that place where the working poor meets what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, the sheer fact of scarcity drives life very close to the bone. Poverty hurts, and hurts in more ways than are apparent to the eye. No Dorothea Lange Arkie/Okie Dust Bowl hollow-boned despair, hardship windowless, hell, door-less, hovel, no end in sight, no good end in sight photograph can find that place.

I also mentioned in that McCourt review that the dreams that came out of his Limerick childhood neighborhood, such as they were, were small dreams, very small steps up the mobility ladder from generation to generation. If that much, of step up that is. I immediately picked up on his references to what constituted “respectability” in that milieu- getting off the the soul-starving “dole” and getting a “soft” low-level governmental civil service job that after thirty some years would turn into a state pension in order to comfort oneself and one’s love ones in old age.

That, my friends, is a small dream by anybody’s standard but I am sure that any reader who grew up in a working poor home in America in the last couple of generations knows from where I speak. I can hear my mother’s voice urging me on to such a course as I have just described. The carping, “Why don’t you take the civil service exam?,” so on and so on. Escaping that white-walled nine-to-five, three-week vacation and a crooked back cubicle fate was a near thing though. The crushing out of big dreams for the working poor may not be the final indictment of what the capitalist system does to the denizens down at the base but it certainly will do for starters.

In the recent past one of the unintended consequences of trying to recount my roots through contacting members of my high school class, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964, has been the release of a flood of memories from those bleak days of childhood that I had placed (or thought I had placed) way, way on the back burner of my brain. A couple of year ago I did a series of stories, Tales From The ‘Hood', on some of those earlier recalled incidents. Frank McCourt’s recounting of some of the incidents of his bedraggled ragamuffin upbringing brought other incidents back to me. In Angela’s Ashes he mentioned how he had to wear the same shirt through thick and thin. As nightwear, school wear, every wear. I remember my own scanty wardrobe and recounted in one of those stories in the series, A Coming Of Age Story, about ripping up the bottoms of a pair of precious pants, denims of course, one of about three pair that I rotated until they turned to shreds in the course of time, for a square dance demonstration for our parents in order to ‘impress’ a girl that I was smitten with at Adamsville South Elementary School. I caught holy hell, serious holy hell for weeks afterwards, for that (and missed, due to my mother’s public rage in front of everybody, my big chance with the youthful stick girl “femme fatale” as well-oh memory).

I have related elsewhere in discussing my high school experiences as also noted in that series mentioned above that one of the hardships of high school was (and is) the need , recognized or not, to be “in.” One of the ways to be “in,” at least for a guy in my post-World War II generation, the “Generation of ’68,” and the first generation to have some disposable income in hand was to have cool clothes, a cool car, and a cool girlfriend. “Cool,” you get it, right? Therefore the way to be the dreaded “out” was to be ….well, you know that answer. One way not to be cool was to wear hand-me-downs from an older brother, an older brother who was build larger than you and you had to kind of tuck in that and roll up that. Or to wear, mother–produced from some recessive poverty gene Bargain Center midnight fire discount sale, oddly colored (like purple or vermillion) or designed (pin-striped then not in style or curly-cues never in style) clothes. This is where not having enough of life’s goods hurts. Being doled out a couple of new sets of duds a year was not enough to break my social isolation from the “cool guys.” I remember the routine even now-new clothes for the start of the school year and then at Easter. Cheap stuff too, from some Wal-Mart-type store, like the Bargain Center mentioned above, of the day.

All of this may be silly, in fact is silly in the great scale of things. But those drummed-in small dreams, that non-existent access to those always scarce “cool” items, those missed opportunities by not being ‘right,’ meaning respectable, added up. All of this created a “world” where crime, petty and large, seemed respectable as an alternative (a course that my own brothers followed, followed unsuccessfully for life, and that I did for a minute), where the closeness of neighbors was suffocating and where the vaunted “neighborhood community” was more like something out of “the night of the long knives.” If, as Thomas Hobbes postulated in his political works, especially "Levithan," in the 17th century, life is “nasty, short and brutish” then those factors are magnified many times over down at the base.

Contrary to Hobbes, however, the way forward is through more social solidarity, not more guards at the doors of the rich. All of this by way of saying that in the 21st century we need that social solidarity not less but more than ever. As I stated once in a commentary that I titled, Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?, one of the only virtues of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks among the working poor is that I am personally inured to the vicissitudes of the gyrations of the world capitalist economy. Hard times growing up were the only times. But many of my brothers and sisters are not so inured. For them I fight for the social solidarity of the future. In that future we may not be able to eliminate shame as an emotion but we can put a very big dent in the class-driven aspect of it.