Tunnels of the Underclass
My parents were rich, then poor, then middle class during my life. My father both made and lost a fortune in his thirties and forties. I went, paid for partially by the UN, to an elite private school. Then spent my twenties poor, often ill and on occasion only saved from the street by the kindness of friends.
When I think of class issues I think of them in terms of corridors. In every gleaming office tower they are there, in every upscale marble, glass and steel mall—they are there. They are dark concrete, engrimed, lit by harsh fluorescence behind steel cages, streaked with the residue of years of waste. They are the corridors that the service staff use—the maintenance staff, the cleaners, the truck drivers, the blue collar guys who cart the heavy boxes and fixtures around. They are ugly and often they stink.
The most disgusting set of corridors I ever encountered was in the Chateau Laurier. The Chateau Laurier, for those who don’t know, is an old hotel connected by tunnels to Parliament Hill in Ottawa itself. It is one of the hearts of power in Canada. And the sub-basement has a smell that is something between rotten meat and acrid cheese with something acid and chemical cutting through it. I quite literally gagged the day I delivered food meant for the gullets of the rich to the old majestic Chateau, that magnificent palace whose opulent restaurants are but feet from a stench laid down for decades.
It’s that squalor that underlies the worlds of both opulence and sterility – the opulence of the upper class, the sterility of the middle classes’ office buildings. It’s those corridors that those who earn little more, and sometimes less, than minimum wage work out of. For Lord save the clean little people in their white shirts and ties, their buffed oxfords and their clean fingernails—Lord save them from seeing the people who do the work to keep their white walled world clean and running—the people who keep the air conditioning and heat on, the carpets clean and the light fixtures working.
The trolls come out at night as the offices empty. Scurrying out from their tunnels they are allowed to move through the offices once the daytime denizens are gone, not to be offended by the sight of those who sweat for a living or those who deal with dirt and garbage. And when the daytime denizens do see you, if you are one of those night time trolls—they don’t see you. Their eyes don’t track, they move right over you as if you were a piece of moving furniture—an appliance. Only if they need something will they reluctantly approach you—then, after they’ve gotten what they wanted, whacked the machinery, as it were, next time you run into them you usually find you’ve gone back to being an invisible appliance with whom eye contact is to be avoided at all costs. And you are paid in scraps, for your labor you receive a pittance compared to those whose fingernails are clean, whose work involves the strain of typing on a keyboard, attending meetings and picking up the phone.
That’s my second world. It’s a world I inhabit no longer, but it’s a world that haunts me, that I know exists alongside the antiseptic office world. Those corridor dwellers are the ones whose labor makes that new world possible—they are the trolls of the modern world, who come out at night, or who scurry through tunnels in the day, never to be seen by those whom their work helps. If seen, they must be ignored.
And they are.
And so I listen to John Edwards and I marvel that he dares speak of the unspeakable, of the great fear—not just of the middle class, but of all Americans. For we choose not to look at that which we fear. It’s not that we fear the working poor, or their humbler cousins, the broken, those who don’t even have a bad job. It’s that we fear that in them, we might see people like ourselves.
For, to feel secure, in our beautiful world, we must believe that there is something fundamental that makes us different from the poor and the broken. We must think, “ah, but I’m smarter”, or “I work much harder”, or, less gratifying but still good “I have a better eduation than them.”
We must think, then, “I am more valuable than them, I am different, what happened to them could never happen to me! I’m different! I am!”
We cannot see them as humans like us. That many of them work hard, or worked hard when they were allowed to. That most are not stupid, and that many are no worse educated than we (and isn’t that the easiest thing to fix anyway, as if everyone had a high school diploma, or a B.A. or a Ph.D there would be jobs for them all).
But I worked among them, lived among them, was one of them. And what I know is that they work as hard, indeed harder, than most of the soft office workers whose lives they make easy. And I remember the screams from the soft pampered bewildered sots when something went wrong in their pristine worlds and their inability to pick up a heavy box, or use a plunger on a toilet, or confront someone violent. Oh, yes, they disdained the goblins, but they’d coming running fast rather than soil those soft hands.
And yes, this sounds bitter. And yes, it is. And yet, I’ve long moved on from that world. My hands are the soft ones now, I’ve not picked up a shovel in over a decade.
But I don’t think that what I do is somehow innately more deserving than someone who cleans toilets for a living, or who sits at a security desk and patrols to make people safe, or who digs ditches, or who… but why go on, make your own list of the underpaid and under-appreciated.
And so I listen to John Edwards and I know why he lost twice. People don’t like you when you make them look at the other side, at the dark fate that may await them one day if they’re a little unlucky; if their company downsizes, if they’re 45 and the company wants a youngster, or if some guy in China is willing to do their job for one-tenth the wage.
Like the way the middle class says about death “she passed away”, we don’t want to look firmly in the face of poverty and see that the face is our face, that its fate echoes ours. If seen, it must be ignored.
Mustn’t it?
(A Reprint)
Powerful and compelling stuff, Ian. I wonder when you first wrote this if, as you indicate, it’s a reprint. Beautifully said.
Ian, being from Sweden, but now living in the US, with a lot of time spent in Canada… I am struck by how dirty and depressing “the bowels” of hotels and similar buildings are here in NA. On the other hand (I’m an engineer in the semiconductor industry) my office is pretty darn depressive - a metal box with flaking paint … now window - of course no window - they are for the managers …. all in all a huge contrast to working environments in Sweden … (cue IKEA commersial)
Hello Ian
Thanks for the complaint until lately I was one of those people that did the work at night or early morning and very few appreciated what we did. Then the 4 man crew was outsourced and if you wanted a job you could work for them at lower pay. I was lucky in that I’m 61 and live close to the ground. I received a small severance package that includes benefits and unemployment and I can live on this. It always amazes me when I’m dressed up who will talk to me thinking I’m one of them. Then I say what I do for a living and it’s like I’m not there, always good for a laugh. A good friend of mine gets the same treatment from his clients, he’s a contractor/carpenter and one customer would follow him around and tell how smart he was compared to my friend. Then on the last day of the job my friend ask what degree he had, oh a master he said and then my friend explained to him he had 2 masters degrees and BA and please make sure you pay the bill on time. Oh well time to run.
“We must think, then, “I am more valuable than them, I am different, what happened to them could never happen to me! I’m different! I am!””
It’s a rather uncomfortable thing to think that your well being is due to dumb luck and circumstance. Rationalizations are the easiest of lies told to ourselves.
Good stuff. You seem to have lived in places with hard class distinctions.
A few years ago I moved from Portland, which has moderate class distinctions, to Seattle, which has relatively strong ones. In Portland, you are more likely to have to warn people not to pick up things they can’t manage! In Seattle, though…if I wear jeans, a t-shirt, and a duck-billed cap, I look like a middle-aged carpenter. Dressed like that, different people talk to me, different people ignore me. I hadn’t been used to it, and it was startling.
The state of Washington also has the most regressive taxes in the USA; Oregon is more moderate. On average, a Washington household would have to make $80,000/year before its per-capita taxes were lower than the same household in Oregon. It’s not just fortune that creates class distinction; it’s policy.
One of the strongest policy-based class distinctions in the USA is between people who have the right to work, and those who don’t. In much of the western USA, much of the physical labor is done by undocumented immigrants who can’t talk back to their bosses for fear of deportation. It’s a toxic situation for any number of reasons, and one the USA so far isn’t willing to address compassionately and realistically. (My old article on this.)
Not really all that different from the Indian caste system.
Now that I think about it, this was originally written during the 2004 primaries, and started, then with Edwards “Two Americas” speech. So this is an old piece.
What was interesting about Edwards (setting aside the man’s all-too-human weaknesses that later imploded his life), was how the powers-that-be treated him. They made fun of his hair for weeks on end, completely ignored his ideas, and did their subtle best to suck all the oxygen out of his campaign. They toyed with him essentially.
Had he been able to turn this toying around, had he been able to be a powerful voice for the powerless, a la Martin Luther King (to name an example), or even able to work miracles (like Jesus Christ) the attacks would’ve scaled up dramatically, probably resulting in an assasination. Their mode of marginalizing Edwards was the soft treatment, proportionate to the threat, and it worked.
I’ve never felt that the rich were more deserving, although I’ve heard that self-righteous (and preposterous) argument many times. I am not Bill Gates rich, not even local-doctor or local merchant rich, but by the standards of many in my town (Los Angeles) I am very wealthy. I have a roof over my head and food in the fridge, clean water, and live in an area that is relatively safe. I was born into a working/middle class family in the most prosperous era (the 1950s-60s) of the most prosperous country on the planet at the time. Like many of my class, I was able to go to college, a gigantic public university, often the first in our families. I don’t consider myself deserving, just lucky. Extremely lucky in so many ways. One of my spiritual teachers says all of this was earned through hard work in past lives…I tend to agree, but it doesn’t matter. It comes out as being lucky in this lifetime.
Your reprint is timely for me. I saw a movie last night on the Sundance channel, “Liberty Kid”, which was about two young men from the underclass in New York City. The movie was set in a hardscrabble world much like you described, far away from the antiseptic pleasant spaces that ride on top of it. It wasn’t easy for me to watch it, because the entire setting reeked of tension, fear, and strife. Entire lifetimes spent in this tough environment.
The people who inhabit the pleasant spaces, and who treat the underclass like trolls do so out of fear. Fear that everything they have could be lost, if they dare in some way share what they have. Fear in knowing that despite their many advantages, they are incredibly weak, and wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight with these people who have had to scrap for everything their entire lives.
My spirituality is much broader than Christianity, but Luke 12:48 is a verse that has always spoken to me: “From those to whom much has been given, much is expected”. It (along with many similar verses from the new testament as well as wisdom from many other teachers) provides the spiritual basis for why I am a liberal. As I explained, my upbringing was extremely fortunate, and not only do I practically know that the world becomes a better place when this fortune (in its many forms) is shared, thus benefitting me and everyone else, I know that someday I will have to answer for all that has been given to me (loaned to me actually) - what did I do with it? Did I hoard it out of fear, and make bogus rationalizations for why I deserve it? Get real.
Beautifully written and says so much. I have felt that John was taken down for his message and not his behavior. There are too many that exhibited this type of behavior that have gotten a complete pass.
Back corridors for the servants was an architectural introduction of Victorian England for the insecure and aspiring noveau riche industrialists of the time. The houses were so designed and the servants below a certain level were instructed that they never be seen by those whom they were serving. Adequate back corridors and hidden stairs were designed into the building just for this purpose. I have read that at least some chambermaids were dismissed because they were seen by their masters.
The old aristos lived in their 18th Century and earlier houses (palaces) where everyone traversed from room to room without corridors or everyone shared the same corridors and stairs.
Architectural expression of class status is a fascinating subject.
I just saw the George Clooney film, Up in the Air, and the director of that film used corridors to say a lot about isolation, alienation and class differentiation.
I didn’t know that about 19th century architecture. Fascinating. Thanks John.
Ian
And so I listen to John Edwards and I marvel that he dares speak of the unspeakable…
alyosha
Had he been able to turn this toying around, had he been able to be a powerful voice for the powerless, a la Martin Luther King (to name an example), or even able to work miracles (like Jesus Christ) the attacks would’ve scaled up dramatically, probably resulting in an assassination.
These two comments brought to mind a book I’m reading now, James W. Douglass’s “JFK and The Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why he Matter”. In the introduction he quotes from a letter written by Thomas Merton 10 months before the Cuban Missile Crisis:
“What is needed is really not shrewdness or craft, but what politicians don’t have: depth, humanity and a certain totality of self-forgetfulness and compassion, not just for individuals but for man as a whole, a deeper kind of dedication. Maybe Kennedy will break through into that some day by a miracle. But such people are long before marked out for assassination.:” (p. xiv.)
Morlocks, not trolls.
As for Edwards, judging from his 2004 performance he was (and possibly still is, despite the repeated and excessive shocks to his system) largely a scam, from the same mold as Obama, but without the establishment endorsement - admitteldy due to him responding to the need to differentiate by an increasingly elaborate message the implications of which challenged the establishment; a self-reinforcing dynamics. I have my doubts that this would have turned out to be The Education of Franklin Delano Edwards, in the end.
Get over the Savior reflex. Some of The Candidates are less sunworthy than others (see Dean, same need to differentiate in the primaries, somewhat more authentic if still dominantly system-conservative foundation to build upon), but one of the fundamental flaws of the US political system is that it is a Pageant of the Unfittest. Nobody who should be stuck with The Job wants it, anybody who runs disqualifies himself.
Ian,
thanks again for such a thought provoking post. I too have seen the class standard from different angles. Living in DC class bias was a very palpable reality, I am so grateful to be back in the midwest where I am free of most of it. My reason for posting is in response to b., what wonderful cynicism! Seriously, I too clung to the hope that Edwards, because I liked what he said, was somehow associated with his message. Your comments reminded me that they are essentially actors playing a part to get elected. From Edwards actions post-election, I am glad he didn’t get elected. It would have been far more disappointing than what we got (who I never believed in the first place).
That smell, what the hell is it? Pungent, sour, acrid, biting, impossible to identify. It smells like bile tastes.
The only other place Ive ever found it is around the large green dumpsters parked behind food-service establishements, in the summertime.