For What It's Worth

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

As the winner was quick to point out last night, something very like a revolution--the clean, mostly bloodless small-d democratic kind--may have begun at last. "Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment, this was the place where America remembered what it means to hope," Senator Obama said last night. Wouldn't it be great if that were true? If it were actually true?

John Edwards, who came in second in the Iowa caucuses, pointed out that by a two-thirds majority, the people of a staid, mostly-white, conservative state have voted for "a change candidate," by which he of course included himself. The same can be said on the Republican side, where Mike Huckabee (whose name, I just can't help it, always makes me think of Python's "Eric the Half-a-Bee" song) posted a win that the Wall Street Journal snarked was a victory for the evangelical left. And if the very idea of an evangelical left makes your head spin a little, then that could be taken as yet another endorsement of this notion that there's a groundswell for change, beginning right there in little ol' boring ol' Iowa.

It's the sort of thing that a lot of us dared to hope, just a little bit, after Obama's now-legendary keynote speech at the Democratic convention in 2004. His rise was so meteoric that, even as a former Chicagoan (I moved away in 2002), I really wasn't aware of him till that keynote moment. But I sure was aware of him after it, and I was delighted when he was elected to the Senate--but found his actual career in the Senate a little disappointing. I was hoping for fireworks, but he seemed to settle into the career Washington path a little too easily.

So when he announced for President, I was, initially, a supporter. Then came the Jefferson-Jackson event on November 10th last year. Purely by chance, I was home that night doing nothing, just switching channels at random, which I really don't do much since the advent of TiVo (I've got 20-plus movies stored on it right now, waiting for me to get to them). Even less often do I check in on C-Span, but that night I did, just in time for the Jefferson-Jackson speeches. Where I was surprised to find that Obama's speech, while excellent (right from the git-go, with the Chicago Bulls-style loudspeaker announcement), was only the second-best of the night.

The best? For me, it was John Edwards. (You can catch the whole thing here.) Now this, this was a man breathing fire. And given how bad things have gotten over the past eight years, fire was and is my minimum requirement for taking office. (For the record, my mom is a Ron Paul supporter, who is also most definitely a fire-breather--but I just can't quite bring myself around to the whole libertarian thing.)

As I've said any number of times here, I am now firmly of the belief that poverty is, worldwide, the key problem that sits underneath every other problem--and all along, for years now, Edwards has been talking about poverty in much the same way that Al Gore talked about the environment. He has credibility on this issue because it's not just something he tossed into a stump speech while running for office, it's something he's been actively working on for years. And yes, I know there have been presidents who've tried to tackle poverty before--most notably Lyndon Johnson's failed "War on Poverty" forty years ago. But past failure doesn't at all mean that the fight should be abandoned, and even a good effort that doesn't accomplish what it seeks is vastly superior to no effort at all--which is what we've had for way too long now.

So I already knew this about Edwards, and every once in a while I would think to myself that I really should take a closer look at him. But the Jefferson-Jackson event was the moment that did what the 12,000 debates didn't--it allowed every candidate to speak for several minutes at a time, not several seconds at a time, but the evening was still compact enough that everyone could get a turn without wearing out the audience. So that where the debates did nothing to change my thinking about any of the candidates, this event did. Because although Obama's speech was good (and so was Hillary's), Edwards was fired up and saying things I believe desperately need sayng. For example: "...we do not believe in allowing lobbyists to write the laws of the United States of America...."

This was part of a rhetorical run in which Edwards attempted to define what progressives like himself stand for, in a speech I've wished for years that a Democrat would make. It's a truism that he who defines an argument wins the argument, and for too long now, conservatives have been brilliant at defining the argument. "If you don't support the war in Iraq, you're not a patriot" is only one absurd example. By making that argument stick, they made every reasoned objection to the war into an emotionally-packed declaration of anti-Americanism, so that reason went out the window and people only heard what they had already been emotionally primed to hear. In such an environment, for years now I've been desperate for a progressive to make a positive affirmation of what we're for, and why we're for it. Edwards finally did that.

So I came away from that C-Span session with a new candidate to back. And although he only came in second last night, I think he's right that he and Obama represent the "change candidates." And that although Obama was speaking specifically of his candidacy, this night may in fact represent that broader change that could signify a real revolution in what this nation is about--a change to something that might actually represent the promise of America, the fulfilled promise rather than the promise betrayed over the last eight years.

"Hope," Obama said last night, "is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be." Every single commentator last night seemed awestruck by this speech, and while it's still much too early to declare that a revolution is really underway, still, I feel just enough cautious optimism to dare to set it forth in print.

Edwards or Obama, in the end I will enthusiastically vote for either one. And if in the end they could maybe pair up somehow, well, that would be pretty great too.

Wealth

I am, as I have said before, not-yet-rich. I live from paycheck-to-paycheck like so many people do, and when a change in my expenses happens (as it will next month when my rent goes up--even though it's rent control--and my parking space gets more expensive as well), then it's a real struggle to find the extra money. Extra money that buys me nothing extra, it just keeps things as they are. This struggle gets truly depressing sometimes, like when friends invite me somewhere and I don't go because I can't afford it.

But for perspective, there's this: the Global Rich List, a website that allows you to plug in your annual salary and see where your income ranks against the rest of the world. My income--my not-yet-rich income that just barely covers what I need it to cover, with almost nothing left over--nonetheless puts me in the top 1% of everyone on the planet. And if that don't turn your head and make you feel a little stupid about your belly-aching, then there's no hope for you.

Go to the site. Put in your income. Marvel at the result. Then go and donate some money somewhere--you are far more blessed than you ever realized, and it's time to give something back.

Poverty and Peace

I have written before about my growing awareness of the poverty problem, and its link to violence. Today the Nobel Peace Prize committee has made that link explicit yet again, by awarding this most estimable of prizes to Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who pioneered microcredit.

I won't repeat my arguments about the crucial importance of poverty from July, except to add that nothing I've learned since then has changed my opinion--unless deepening that opinion constitutes a change. (And by the way, this is completely gratuitous, but Stephen Baldwin's idiotic rantings that efforts to end global poverty and violence are "stupid arrogance" just leave me breathless with stupefaction.)

I happened to catch the 60 Minutes report in 1989 about Dr. Yunus, and the self-evident brilliance--and inspired simplicity--of the microcredit idea were immediately impressive, even though at the time I had not yet had my "conversion" to the depth of the poverty problem. So I was just plain thrilled this morning when I heard the news--it was pretty much the first thing I heard when my radio/alarm came on--and of course it's no surprise at all that Dr. Yunus has already pledged to use the prize money for the furtherance of his work.

For years, it was the Literature prize that most caught my attention. But there's been a little change in my perspective lately, and now it's the Peace prize I'm most interested in. And this year's selection, with its implicit recognition of the links between poverty and violence, and how fighting the one fights the other, is dead right.

The Poverty Trap

In Signal to Noise, Marc and I wrote a scene in which a film director, during a Q&A with audience members, poses a question to them: "What's the purpose of film?" he asks. After a little back-and-forth, he finally says something like "The purpose of film is to make you feel. If it also teaches you something, well, that's gravy."

The other night I watched City of God, the spectacular film from Brazil directed by Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund. Because I sometimes do things backward, I had already seen (and admired) Mereilles's follow-up film, The Constant Gardener; finally I got around to this earlier film, and thought it was fantastic. But on the DVD there is also a documentary titled "News From a Personal War," and by the time I had finished watching everything my head was spinning.

The movie and documentary focus on the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the horrific slums that are so bad they have become societies unto themselves where only the police dare venture, heavily armed and in numbers. As the favelas grew shack-by-shack, outside of commercial or governmental development plans, usually there is no plumbing, no electricity, no phones. One character in the film mentions that he has never taken a hot bath in his life--and because the actors were non-professionals recruited directly from the favelas, that happened to be a real comment that the camera managed to capture.

What was most fascinating, though, was the society that grew up within this awful poverty. Drugs provide the capital, and plenty of it: middle-class Brazilians pay good money to feed their coke habits, and that money travels up the hillsides into Rocinha or Cidade de Deus and become the basis for a new society, with the druglords at its head. The documentary featured several residents telling about the essential services provided by the druglords: if someone's shack needs repairs, or a family needs furniture, or a resident needs new shoes, or a family needs a funeral, they come to the druglords and are given money to take care of things. When a druglord's territory is well-established, a very real peace will settle onto that territory, as random crimes are suppressed and folded into the larger efforts of the druglords. Only when territorial disputes erupt does major violence flare up, though at these times the violence is very bad indeed.

Teenaged members of the crime gangs were interviewed for the documentary, each one a perfect fatalist. Life expectancy is about 25 years, and several of the young men interviewed expressed some variation of the "We all die sometime" mantra, using that to justify a life in which absolutely anything goes so long as it serves their private needs. Murder is just part of a day at the office, essentially; indeed, in one startling juxtaposition in the documentary, a young gang member talks about how his first murder really didn't trouble him at all, then the film cut to a policeman who said exactly the same thing about the people he has had to shoot in his quasi-military engagements in the favelas.

It didn't take long for me to begin noticing some patterns in the favelas that also play out in the rest of the world. Why, for example, did Hamas win seats in the Palestinian parliament? Because Hamas has for a long time been providing school and medical facilities for the impoverished people of the territories, filling a need that the established authority, the PLO, had ignored or been unable to provide for. The same is true of Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon, and we see the results playing out in news reports every day now: these well-armed militias have so become a part of daily life in these areas that they are heroes to the people, and the established authority--be it an invading Israeli army or the nearly-impotent government of Lebanon--are an enemy to be defeated. With the same lack of remorse that characterizes the young hoodlums of the favelas.

This is true in Iraq, where the militias of Muqtada al-Sadr and others are largely responsible for the brewing civil war, and in Somalia, where the Taliban-styled Islamist militias have now almost entirely succeeded in ousting the "real" government. How do you think the Taliban was able to take over Afganistan in the first place? The riots in France last year had a lot to do with immigrants suffering from societal poverty who felt they had no option but to rise up against a new set of laws that would have made their lives even worse. And Columbia has essentially belonged to the drug kingpins for decades now.

Obviously, yes, I know: I'm hardly the first person to discover that poverty and economic inequality are big honkin' problems the wide world over (hello, Marx and Engels!). But there's a difference between understanding a thing intellectually, as a thing you recognize from having read some books, and that moment when suddenly you see it all laid out, each link in place, and the pattern becomes clear. For every person, that moment is always individual and distinct. For me, the combination of City of God, the documentary that accompanies it on the DVD, and the hundreds of news reports over the last several years, created that moment: link to link, the whole chain of poverty and its awful effects, wrapping itself around the world.

After all, let us not forget that there is poverty almost as bad here in the U.S. There are parts of Los Angeles where the police almost never go because it's just too dangerous, and the same is true of places like the Robert Taylor projects in Chicago or parts of Harlem. Anyone who's seen The Godfather knows that the Mafia often fills a whole range of needs in poorer communities, as do the Crips of L.A. The favelas are perhaps a step further along than we are in that line that marches from poverty to organization to rebellion, but it's worth remembering--as the differences between American haves and have-nots continues to grow and grow--that there is in fact a direct line to be drawn between poverty and the Taliban, and that if we just sit back and enjoy our comfy lives, ignoring what's going on in our own favelas, one day we might find that our comfy lives have disappeared right out from under us.