Last night, I got sent our for a few grocery items. The car radio was set to NPR--yes, yes, I drink lattes from Starbucks and vote for the Democrats, too--so I began listening to this, an interview with current Met and former Twin R.A. Dickey. I found myself wishing the store was farther away. When I got there, I sat in the parking lot and listened for another half hour or so till it ended. Are you ever disappointed when hearing an athlete interviewed? You admire their performance and for some dumb reason think the excellence must be comprehensive. It's just the opposite, however: to get that far out at one end of the spectrum in one endeavor generally requires a certain one-sidedness. Dickey is obviously an exception. I could listen to that soft, modest Tennessee drawl of his till--Target closes. Who thinks, while watching a game on tv, that as a kid the pitcher found empty houses to sleep in by reading "homes for rent" in the newspaper at the school library? He'd gather up a few candidates, then check them out after sports practice. If the house seemed empty, he could usually find a key under a mat or potted plant, and he'd let himself in and sleep. He wasn't homeless, just damaged, and his story might remind you of Hemingway's dictum concerning how "the world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."
Meanwhile, at the always stimulating New Yorker site, George Packer writes about the Titanic and contemporary American inequality. He links to this Times story on welfare reform and what it has wrought in the lives of those who have fallen out of the middle class, or never risen to it:
They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners--all with children in tow.
Those who point to the "success" of welfare reform point to the shrinking welfare rolls, as if welfare, not poverty, was the root problem. If the success of welfare reform is to be measured by the number of people who get it, then let us just end it all as of a certain date; when the day comes, the rolls will go to zero, and we will have achieved a perfect success. But people will still be poor.
That's it. One recommended listen and a couple recommended reads.
