Piecework

But your main target should be the welfare system. This seems to an outsider the single most degrading and corrupting fact of life in the Underclass, and the goal should be its virtual destruction. Human beings must work. It is as necessary to life as food and drink, sex and rest. You would have to stop the nonsense about “dead-end” jobs. There are no “dead-end” jobs for people who want to make something of their lives. When I was a kid I worked as a messenger, a delivery boy, a bank teller, a lowly assistant in an advertising agency’s art department, a sheet-metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. I didn’t make a career of any of those jobs, but they taught me how to work. That is, they taught me how to get up in the morning when I wanted to sleep another few hours. They taught me how to perform tasks that didn’t personally interest me. They taught me how to understand the needs of other people and their expectations of me. I say this as a man of the Left, knowing that the dogmatists will accuse me of collaborating with the neocons and other dogmatists of the Right. I can only answer that social justice must be based on work, not welfare. To demand the expansion of the welfare system, instead of its elimination, is to consign the Underclass to permanent darkness.

Where would the jobs come from? Obviously, many of them at the beginning would have to come from the government. There is an extraordinary amount of work to be done in the United States, repairing the collapsing physical infrastructure of streets, bridges, highways. This is work that does not require a high school education. In every major city, in those places where the Underclass resides, there are hundreds of abandoned buildings, structurally sound but gutted by fire; they could be reclaimed through the use of sweat equity, converted into condominiums for a resurgent black and Hispanic working class. The current generation might never be able to enter the high-tech world of the modern service industries, but they can work, men and women alike, with the sweat of their backs and the power of their hands to make certain that their children will be able to function in the twenty-first century. The money now being wasted on welfare could be used for the creation of jobs; if that is called “workfare,” so be it. You must start somewhere.

The time to begin is now. Waiting will only worsen the disaster. You cannot, for example, wait for a day-care system to be created; somehow my mother raised seven kids and worked all her days; my father lost a leg in his twenties and kept on working. They didn’t have day-care centers. They didn’t take welfare, either. Too busy for self-pity. They had no more advantages than anyone else (my mother arrived as an immigrant the day the stock market crashed in 1929), unless you insist that being white was some immense privilege. If it was, it did them no good. All they knew was that in America, they would have to work.

In the best of all possible worlds, of course, the federal government would help fund this immense project, including the building of day-care centers. To say that the richest nation on earth can’t afford this is ludicrous. As just one example, they could scrap the idiotic Star Wars program and use that trillion dollars (over ten years) to guarantee full employment, even at the risk of fueling inflation. Jobs are everything. A job for one man could take four people off the dole. Jobs would take more pistols out of the hands of young men than another hundred thousand police. Any sensible citizen knows that the Underclass is a greater threat to our national security than the Russians. The Russians aren’t killing people on the streets of our cities. They aren’t spreading AIDS. They aren’t presiding over the deaths of American infants.

But the War on Poverty taught us that bureaucrats are not very good at repairing holes in the human spirit. That is why the most important part of this must be up to you and to the rest of the black middle class. In the end, out of self-interest, white America will pay the price for domestic tranquillity. But there is very little now that whites can do in a direct way for the maimed and hurting citizens of the Underclass. For two decades, you have called them brother or sister. You have said they are family. If you believe these sentiments, you must go to them now. They need you more than they need white pity. Or white social workers. Or white cops. They need someone to love them. Soon. If you do not go, neither will anyone else. And then they will surely be doomed. So, in a different way, will all of us.

ESQUIRE,

March 1988

THE NEW VICTORIANS

Here they come, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions: the New Victorians. The Cold War is over and Americans are desperate for a new enemy. The New Victorians have found one and, as usual, it is other Americans.