The Shape of Things to Come
by Gary Phillips
Just when I’m ready to ignore one more overdue notice from the L.A. Times, and duck yet another phone call from their outsourced collection department (for in these days of diminishing newspaper subscriptions whoever the hell owns the Times has the damn thing still delivered to my crib in hopes I’ll finally pony up), son-of-a-gun if they don’t prove there yet remains a reason for the daily newspaper. In the first of four parts published this past Sunday, reporter Clifford Goffard tells what happens to various homeless participants chosen for a pilot program called Project 50. Begun at the end of 2007, homeless outreach workers went out among the street predators and the mentally off to select the 50 people for this project.
Operating in a area with Main Street on the west, Central Avenue to the east, between 7th and 3rd Streets, the workers gleaned an initial 471 people down to the 50 most desperate in need. The mandate was the get these 50 housed and hooked up with various support services. A good number of those selected, like a good number of the homeless, were in need of psychiatric care. Naturally the series of four articles gives us snapshot glimpses of the lives and make-up of the men and women chosen for Project 50, their successes and setbacks over the course of the program.
What’s telling about this project is how strange and rare the bureaucracy can work when it wants to, when political will is there to make things happen. Particularly at a time when a week doesn’t go by and there’s some awful story about a child being killed because of the failures of our overworked and overburdened child care apparatus, and the city and county are furloughing and laying off public sector workers and cutting services. But the fact Project 50 could happen is an aspect of a hydra-like infrastructure like ours when there’s dedicated money in the pipeline for a pet program, though often has the funds on the other end to codify the results but none can be found to replicate and broaden such experiments.
What’s telling about this project (supported by County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky and initially funded by a one-time three million dollar grant) is how strange and rare the bureaucracy can work when it wants to, when political will is there to make things happen. Particularly at a time when a week doesn’t go by and there’s some awful story about a child being killed because of the failures of our overworked and overburdened child care apparatus, and the city and county are furloughing and laying off public sector workers and cutting services.
But the fact Project 50 could happen is an aspect of a hydra-like infrastructure like ours when there’s dedicated money in the pipeline for a pet program, though often has the funds on the other end to codify the results but none can be found to replicate and broaden such experiments. Though according to an AP piece that ran in the weekly L.A. Watts Times by Christina Hoag, the program will continue via cobbled-together county monies and federal scratch, and expand to a new round of 74 people. Other cities are looking at the program and the Department of Veteran Affairs is starting up a similar program for long-time homeless vets in L.A.
I suppose the boosters and entities like the publisher of the L.A. Times, Harrison Gray Otis, who built up Los Angeles in the early decades of the last century, didn’t foresee we’d be the home of the largest homeless population (when you include the county) in this country. Maybe as in the silent classic sci-fi film Metropolis, they envisioned living in their skyscrapers, having their galas and high teas while the workers lived in ground level slums or underground warrens to emerge to do drudgery to maintain the mighty machine—but at least they’d have work.
photo by Robin Donyo
This contention of industry being able to provide on its own terms and create a working to lower middle class buffer of citizenry buying into the Golden Dream of California is borne out in a quote found in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. The book is his seminal work about this place.
Thus when the United States Commission on Industrial Relations visited Los Angeles in 1914 it heard F.J. Zeehandelaar of the Merchants and Manufacturers Association brag that working-class home ownership was the keystone of the Open Shop and a “contented” labor-force.
Open shop is a euphemistic term where supposedly it’s the workers who through no intimidation or tactics by the bosses, decide not to affiliate with a union. What that meant in reality was legal and shady methods were used to keep workers, the L.A. Times printers as an example, from unionizing. Certainly it can be demonstrated that this town, like other great urban centers such as New York and Chicago, post World War II and the Great Depression, grew because it had those attributes endemic to expansion—ports, rail, trucking and warehousing. Where able-bodied ex- GI’s and others workers arrived in need of jobs that were then available due to a country as center of power in the west and a robust manufacturing base.
But sixty-some-odd years later, our infrastructure is in need of retrofitting and China is kicking our ass in the manufacturing sector—albeit not without detrimental costs to its society. Back on the mico level, it’s not happenstance that judging from the pictures accompanying the series in the Times, most of the Project 50 participants are black. This is not simply conjecture, given in 2007 the United Way’s Center for Community Research and Solutions policy brief by Joseph Martinez and Bill Pitkin cited that over 50% of our homeless population is African-American with only 9% of the overall population being black. As we are now in the Great Recession, the homeless stat for black folk in the greater L.A. area must have increased a few points.
This stark racial component of the haves and have-nots is a factor missing from the various versions of Blade Runner, an ’80s sci-fi film (adapted as a Marvel comic book as well) set in a near future Los Angeles based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? The look of the film is high tech noir by way of Metropolis with a skyline of mammoth highrises and the hoi polloi teaming on the streets far below uttering their Cityspeak. As Deckard, the cop whose job is to hunt down replicants, artificial humans trying to pass among us, says in voiceover as another character speaks to him: “That gibberish he talked was Cityspeak, gutter talk, a mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you ...”
In the remake of Blade Runner, Blade Running, Deckard would be a ballsy half Chicano/half Vietnamese woman, who talks in Spanglish mixed with Internet derived words, hunting down white collar criminal CEOs who paid big bucks to have their replicants caught and do hard time while they had their own features changed to stay free. This amid a miasma of the Beaux Arts skyline, floating ever-changing billboards, and a walled-off section of the city of mostly black lower classs denizens and undocumented workers. With a nod to Isaac Hayes as the Duke in Escape from New York, Samuel L. Jackson would be the Baron of Main Street who rules this area.
Science fiction novels and films have long tussled with the look of a dystopian future. H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, written in 1933, predicted missiles fired from submarines and a World War II but saw the conflict dragging on until the 1950s which by then precipitates a political collapse of various governments across the globe. Then there’s a plague that wipes out millions and it looks like everything is going to hell fast. But a consortium of what’s left of the world’s transportation gurus comes together—and it would take a world-wide catastrophe to have our MTA work with say, the Swedes or other parts of the City—to become the Dictatorship of the Air—one mother of a bureaucracy.
Through enlightened iron hand in the velvet glove means, the Dictatorship eliminates the various religions to eliminate barriers in the world while establishing a one world government. The future as portrayed in the original Star Trek (circa the 1960s) also has a rugged backstory to a 23rd century Earth of little or no racial or political divisions. Such had been achieved at a great cost as Trek’s Earthers had been through the horrors of the Eugenics Wars, where the genetically altered “superman” Khan Noonien Singh (KHAN!!!) leads others of his ilk to overthrow us mere mortals and, at least in some of the several, contradictory Trek timelines, a nuclear holocaust totaling some 600 million dead had also occurred.
Hopefully a nuclear holocaust doesn’t have to happen to solve the homeless problem. Whether Project 50 gets renewed, the work in the trenches by the likes of homeless advocacy groups L.A. CAN, Los Angeles Community Action Network, and others in the struggle goes on, day in, day out. No special series for them. Meanwhile, on a far more mundane note, I guess I’ll pay my L.A. Times bill.
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