A Colossal Wreck (58 page)

The Projects come alive in Venkatesh’s glancing descriptions: urine-soaked stairwells inhabited by squatters and cruised by hookers; the sixteen-story buildings’ bleak outside corridors savaged by Chicago’s winter winds; welcoming apartments in which heroic mothers raise their kids and cram Sudhir’s plate with soul food as he writes up his notes. His posture is genuinely one of respect. The gang members are not the “superpredators” demonized by the right-wing criminologists who dominated discussions of the ghetto and of the justice system’s stance toward gangs in the late 1980s and ’90s. They are humans given scant choices. “You want to understand how black folks live in the Projects,” Ms. Bailey tells Venkatesh. “Why we are poor. Why we have so much crime. Why we can’t feed our families. Why our kids can’t get work when they grow up. So will you be studying white people?”

Declining a pose of moral affront, Venkatesh’s particular talent is to have figured out how the buildings function as a collective business enterprise; how the truly desperate squeeze a hundred dollars a month out of recycling trash; how the hookers rate their services. He had one huge stroke of good fortune in the form of a secret gift of the gang’s business accounts, conscientiously maintained by J.T.’s bookkeeper, T-Bone. Using T-Bone’s notebook, he established exactly what the junior drug vendors in J.T.’s army—the Black Kings—were making: minimum wage, hence the need to live with their moms. J.T. himself was pulling down from $30,000 a year up to as much as $100,000 at his apex. The books methodically recorded the levies extorted by the gang from local shopkeepers, from the squatters, from the hookers. Venkatesh explains how a vast urban slum was
actually governed by innumerable
quid pro quos
and intricate contracts which, being unwritten and with the rule of law not accessible to its inhabitants, were enforced by the threat or the direct exercise of violence.

Adopting a modified Candidean posture as the West Coast naïf in darkest Chicago, Venkatesh lets the reader know early on that, yes, he witnessed more or less mutely some bad stuff, initially when J.T. beats up an elderly squatter called C-Note who refuses to quit working on a car in an area the gang want to use for basketball: “ ‘I told you, nigger,’ J.T. said, his face barely an inch away from C-Note’s, ‘but you just don’t listen, do you?’ He sounded exasperated but there was also a sinister tone to his voice I’d never heard before. ‘Why are you making this harder?’ He started slapping C-Note on the side of the head, grunting with each slap, C-Note’s head flopping back and forth like a toy … then J.T.’s henchmen pushed him to the ground. They took turns kicking him, one in the back and the other in the stomach …”

It takes C-Note two months to recover from the beating. Venkatesh writes a few pages later: “J.T. and I resumed our normal relationship … I kept my questions to myself … While I was by no means comfortable watching drug addicts smoke crack, the C-Note affair gave me greater pause. He was an old man in poor health; he could hardly be expected to defend himself against men twice his size and half his age, men who also happened to carry guns … But I didn’t do anything. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t confront J.T. about it until some six months later, and even then I did so tentatively.”

This observer/participant theme weaves its way uncertainly through the book. Venkatesh’s academic advisors remind him that witness of criminal activities renders him liable to subpoenas and even charges of criminal conspiracy. More experienced ethnographers caution him against excessive involvement with his subjects. Venkatesh’s own entrepreneurial instincts prompt him to assert too shrilly the originality of his research methods (i.e., directly observing poor people), and also to contrive the signally unconvincing chapter that gives the book its title,
Gang Leader for a Day
. It is plain enough that Venkatesh was nothing of the sort. Under the careful eye of J.T.
and his lieutenants, he is allowed to make a few inconsequential decisions before surrendering the imaginary role.

It is as a participant that Venkatesh makes the astounding move of revealing to J.T. and Ms. Bailey the actual earnings disclosed to him by the small-time hustlers, hookers, and marginal players, whose confidence he has fostered down the years. Furious at the news of tiny profits undeclared to them, J.T. and Ms. Bailey promptly exact retribution, thus earning Venkatesh the well-merited suspicion of his erstwhile informants. Remorseful across several pages, he never really explains his shameful conduct, and one can only conclude that it was the pride of the business analyst that led him on. He could not resist strutting his stuff to J.T. and Ms. Bailey.

History sidles briefly into the book. Old black men muse nostalgically about the days of the Black Panthers, who offered the ghetto social services along with incendiary politics. An older woman, Cordella Levy, recalls how women used to run social life in the Projects before the possibility of decent local employment disappeared and the drug gangs came in, establishing the cash nexus and rule of force as the motor of social relations. “It was a time for women,” Levy says, “a place for women. The men ruined everything.”

This brings us back to young men like J.T., who beats up C-Note. Eventually Venkatesh asks him why, and J.T. answers: “C-Note was challenging my authority … I had niggers watching me, and I had to do what I had to do.” The sense of insecurity and impermanence—in jobs, relationships, lodging, life itself—that so imbues the lives of poor people takes over Venkatesh’s book in its final chapters. The Robert Taylor Homes are now demolished, and amid the rubble lies J.T.’s empire, as a federal onslaught puts many of the Black Kings behind bars.

T-Bone got ten years for drug trafficking and died in prison. J.T. got out of the gang business, but his barbershop failed. He thought he was going to be the hero of Venkatesh’s book, but presumably by now has realized that this was a role the author had reserved for himself, crowing on the last page that he was “a rogue sociologist, breaking conventions and flouting the rules.” Of course, the roguery has done him no end of good, and
Gang Leader for a Day
will probably end up
as a movie. And the moral is … But no, there is no moral of the sort Venkatesh’s supervisor William Julius Wilson might have written about how to fight poverty.

March 26

Suddenly everyone is having a “conversation.” The word has come of age. I see it bowing and scraping on the opinion pages and TV talk shows three or four times a day.

Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia about race stuck pretty carefully to the unwritten rules of a national conversation, in marked contrast to the sermons of the Rev. Josiah Wright whose stimulating rhetoric has caused such extraordinary affront—if you will—to the conversing classes.

The junior Senator from Illinois is a master at drowning the floundering swimmer he purports to rescue, while earning credit for extending a manly hand in human solidarity. Obama’s fake-rescue technique is reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century lines about Joseph Addison: “Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer / And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer.”

Our tragedy is that we have three neoliberals left in the presidential race, at a time when neoliberalism has collapsed and life-giving divisiveness is top of the Wanted list. I suppose, out of the three of them, I prefer Obama. McCain is an idiot and HRC wants Volcker, Rubin, and Greenspan to lead a “high-level emergency working group” to recommend ways to restructure at-risk mortgages to help avert more foreclosures. But I don’t think Obama is a real fighter. He’s too pretty, and he doesn’t want to get his looks messed up.

May 3

Every few years New York City cops hear the growl of clear and present danger and subdue the threat with powerful volleys of lead. With Sean Bell, an African-American, in November 2006 the fusillade rose to fifty shots, deemed necessary by the men in blue to lay low Bell outside a nightclub in November 2006.

In Queens last week a judge ruled that the cops who turned young Bell into a sieve on his wedding day had been filled with a most understandable apprehension, even though Bell turned out to be unarmed. As usual the cops walk and sometime later the victim’s family may get a settlement from the city. The important thing is that justice is seen
not
to have been done. Power needs the periodic buttress of irrational, uniformed violence.

The crowds protesting in Queens after Judge Anthony Cooperman let Bell’s killers go free a week ago were orderly, as instructed by an African American. “We’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down,” Barack Obama said when asked about the case by reporters in Indiana. “Resorting to violence to express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely unacceptable and is counterproductive.”

Spoken like a president of the
Harvard Law Review
. In fact Obama’s white rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, put more juice into her press release: “This tragedy has deeply saddened New Yorkers—and all Americans. My thoughts are with Nicole and her children and the rest of Sean’s family during this difficult time. The court has given its verdict, and now we await the conclusion of a Department of Justice civil rights investigation.”

Obama is now well advanced along the path of reassurance, where each candidate nearing the White House makes clear their fidelity to the standard of irrational violence. As with McCain and Mrs. Clinton, this year he has affirmed his willingness to wipe out America’s enemies with nuclear bombs and missiles, though he drew some rebukes for saying he was not in favor of nuking the Hindu Kush, thus casting a disquieting flicker of reason across the path of reassurance.

Since he is, though half white, black in appearance—and in such matters appearance counts for everything—Obama has dealt with the pigmentation problem by declaring that race is no longer a troubling factor in America, and should be low on the fix-it list of any incoming President. In Selma, Alabama, he declared that blacks “have already come 90 percent of the way” to equality. Indeed he’s already issued white America a loss damage waiver. “If I lose, it would not
be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail.”

June 7

Obama inspires young people who flock to his rallies. He promises not only to “create a new kind of politics” but to “transform this country,” “change the world,” “create a Kingdom right here on earth.” Comingled with these doses of uplift are the familiar coarse pledges to crucial interest groups, such as the Miami Cubans. Obama’s speech to them on May 25 was a dismal exercise in right-wing demagoguery.

Take his speech to the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami on May 23: “Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom … This is the terrible and tragic status quo that we have known for half a century—of elections that are anything but free or fair … I won’t stand for this injustice, you won’t stand for this injustice, and together we will stand up for freedom in Cuba … I will maintain the embargo.”

Obama also had words of specific comfort for the Uribe regime in Colombia: “When I am President, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program, and update it to meet evolving challenges. We will fully support Colombia’s fight against the FARC. We’ll work with the government to end the reign of terror from right-wing paramilitaries. We will support Colombia’s right to strike terrorists who seek safe-haven across its borders.” Note the endorsement of Columbia’s foray into Ecuador to assassinate a FARC leader.

After invoking hope and change in St. Paul, Obama rushed the next day to Washington for some ritual groveling to the AIPAC: “We will also use all elements of American power to pressure Iran. I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Everything in my power. Everything and I mean everything.” Israel should get whatever it wants and an undivided Jerusalem should be its capital.

We can look ahead to months of Obama deflecting McCain’s onslaughts on him as a starry-eyed peacenik by insisting that what
the beleaguered Empire above all needs is efficiency, ruthless if necessary. “The [US] generals are light-years ahead of the civilians,” he reassured one of his fans, the neoconservative
New York Times
columnist, David Brooks. “They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

Can a black man get elected President in 2008? Hillary Clinton said No. In the last weeks she ran up some impressive totals of white voters agreeing with her, as in West Virginia where Obama scarcely campaigned, just as he remained invisible to voters in Kentucky, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, and Wisconsin.

Obama right now has an edge in electoral college votes, though this somewhat depends which faction of number crunchers you believe. By almost every yardstick, except the wild card of his skin color, he’ll win. It should be inconceivable for a Republican to capture the White House for the third time in a row when the price of gasoline is headed towards $5 a gallon, food prices are soaring, and most Americans reckon things are going to get a lot worse.

At least for now, the Clinton dynasty is headed for the retirement home. None too soon, I say, however Obama turns out.

June 22

The delirium in the press at Tim Russert’s passing has been strange. As a broadcaster he was not much better than average, which is saying very little. He could be a sharp questioner, but not when it really counted and when courage was required. He was tough with George Bush in a February interview in 2004. He taxed with him with faking the reasons to attack Iraq. But in the years before the 2003 attack, I used to hear him being merciless with those questioning whether Saddam Hussein had the nukes and bio-weapons alleged by the Bush administration and its conspirators in the press, prominent among them Russert himself.

If Russert had rocked the boat in any serious way he’d have had more enemies. The right-wingers didn’t care for Walter Cronkite, but they had no problem with Russert. Rush Limbaugh nuzzled him respectfully on the air and so did Don Imus. Russert was
always there with his watering can to fertilize myths useful to the system.