Shooting the Dream

This is the week my American Dream died. Maybe yours is still fogging the mirror but mine is cold and stiff, prostrate, and staring up at me with fish eyes.

Like most other Americans, I dream of living better than the majority of you. I tolerate all of your social and environmental problems that rule over you by corporations creates, with the understanding that one day I may use the same laws that have let them become rich off all of you, by exploiting your labor, to also make myself richer than I deserve to be. You could call this philosophy Marxism for Number One.

Lately I have been browsing downtown condos looking for the home I would want to live in after I strike it rich, because I'm not much for suburban living. Under the guise of creating a photo album of Seattle's most interesting alleys (which I've been posting on the personal blog, the one nobody reads) I'm actually scoping out which condos look nicest from their backsides. Then I go online and check out the prices.

That led to the first blunt-force trauma to my American Dream. I'm really, really, going to have to exploit the hell out of you all to get a decent condo.

I was stunned to discover that a lot of the guys who brag about their high-rise condos are living in studios with fewer than 500 square feet, because that's all the poor suckers can afford. So it's like, they have trainer condos for the not-so-rich. I've seen bigger rooms in hospital wards. You don't even need a million dollars for one of these trainer condos. You can get one for a quarter million if you shop around. It's sad to see how far the reality is from the glamorous myth. I bet in some of these "luxury" condos you have to sit on the toilet to shower. You have to dress in bed because there's no standing room.

I'm going to need at least half a million to get me a one-bedroom with a view of a loading dock and dumpsters. I'm not sure I want to exploit people that much, it hardly seems worth it.

The hit that killed my Dream once and for all came in the news last week, with reports that a Milwaukee man was arrested and faces up to 6 years and 3 months in prison plus a fine up to $11,000, for shooting his own lawn mower, in his own yard, for not starting.

OK, witnesses say Keith Walendowski was intoxicated when he fired a "shotgun or rifle" into his Lawn Boy, last Wednesday morning. But that is no excuse for arresting him and charging him with a crime. It was his house, his yard, his shotgun and/or rifle, his intoxicant, and his Lawn Boy. And we know that the lazy mower, a glorified tin can, had it coming.

[Right: Our man's mug shot. He looks homeless, but he was housed when he was arrested. When he's released in 6 years, who knows?]

How can I enjoy dreaming about being able to own my own home if, when I finally get one, I can be arrested and put in prison for more than half a decade every time I shoot an insubordinate appliance or motorized lawn tool, even one that's asking for it?

What are they going to do next? Spy on us in the privacy of our own kitchens and arrest us when we shoot our worthless, non self-defrosting refrigerators? Is it now going to be against the law to throw your shoe through your stupid TV screen when your stupid team loses? Did you know that the last pope did that once? Would you lock the pope up for 6 years? Why should anyone even have a stupid TV? Why own a house?

As I despaired of ever being truly free in a home of my own, I realized that's why there's so much homelessness in America today. It just doesn't pay to have a home of your own. You can't do anything in it that you can't do on the streets.

Gentrification takes Imagination

Let’s talk about moral philosophy!

During my too many years of post high school education I got to know several philosophers as well as I could bear, and in all that time never met a moral philosopher. So it strikes me as a relatively unexplored field. That attracts me. It’s fun to shine light into previously unseen dark nooks of the world.

What I especially don’t see in what passes for moral philosophy is the flip side of moralizing: they’ll devote pages and pages telling me what I MUST or MUST NOT do, but never offer any ideas about making morality fun. What kind of philosophy is it that won’t tell you how to have a good time?

An unimaginative philosophy, that’s what. It’s an ingredient missing in most accounts of moral philosophy: they account for human failings, but not for human potential. You’d think that imagination plays no role at all in real world moral considerations, when it’s actually everything.

In fact some of the most interesting real world squabbles arise from conflicting imaginings of potential good. An interesting case has arisen in NYC’s East Village. For some time a Mr. Gregg Singer, a real estate developer, has wanted to replace an old East Village public school with a 19-story college dormitory. But locals have resisted, and now P.S. 64 has been declared a historical landmark.

That made Mr. Singer mad. While he sued the city to get the ruling overturned, he announced he would meanwhile use a previously obtained permit to strip the building of its ornamentation and promised to start up a new homeless service on the premises. He created a website showcasing the homeless agency he would start, naming it the “Christotora Treatment Corporation.” The name imitates the name of the Christodora Condominiums, where some of his local opponents live.

Gregg Singer claimed to have been inspired by the knowledge that the condominiums had long ago been a settlement house, established to serve the poor, and by the fact that his own Great Grandfather Louis Singer had once established a shelter for the elderly. But he has made it clear that his intent is to get East Village residents to side with his original plans by exploiting their NIMBY fears of the homeless. As he says of the battered woman who graces the front page of his website, “Yeah – she’s a bum.”

What we have here is imagination at work in unfolding history.

Settlement houses were themselves a work of moral imagination. The idea was that people who were so rich they had nothing but free time could move into poor neighborhoods and set up services for the poor neighbors.

Gentrification is an imaginative evil spawn of the idea of settlement houses. Once you can get rich people to come in to a neighborhood to help the poor, you can get more rich people to move in next to the first rich people, to displace the poor. Pretty soon no poor, not in that neighborhood anyway. Imagine that! People do imagine it, and many go on to the idea that they’re entitled to gentrification, entitled to live without any trace of poverty around them, and NIMBYism is born.

Then comes Gregg Singer imagining NIMBYism forward, turning it into a weapon. His idea for Christotora also springs from knowing one way to make morality profitable, if not fun: there’s money in selling shelter spaces to large non-profit corporations. Not as much as the money you can get from selling dorm spaces to non-profit universities, but it will do as an alternative. Hey, anyway, if you get enough money you can buy the fun, right?

Only the imagining doesn’t stop there. This is the East Village we’re talking about, not Boring Heights. They LIKE the shelter plans; they can see a great future in it. The residents of the condo are even lining up to volunteer at the promised shelter! What book on moral philosophy could have prepared you for that outcome?