Field Work

I’ve been silent on this site for a very long time. I’ve been busy doing field work.

Were I Dr. Leakey, passports would have been required. But since since I live in Kansas City, Missouri, all that was called for was a ten-minute drive across town, to what practically all the metropolitan (if not cosmopolitan) white people call “east of Troost” — Avenue, that is.  As I learned, unless you’re a cop — or a field-worker — white people just won’t venture there.

There’s really not much reason to go, if you don’t live there. Even those who do would confirm that that’s true. East Kansas City is more like the Indian reservations of my native South Dakota than any urban area I have ever experienced. (And you must remember that before moving here, I lived in Richmond, California, the homicide capital of Northern California, ahead of only Compton and Watts in the State of California.)  Practically every public building has long since been boarded up, not to mention many, many private homes. It is a scene of urban desolation that one would never imagine in a place whose name sounds so quintessentially midwestern to outsiders’ ears, and which styles itself as the “Heartland of America.” All I can say, after three years of living here, is that America is suffering from a terrible heart condition.

At the same time, I have returned to graduate school in history and political science; because of this, in a kind of double life: I have been studying the foundations of the conditions I’ve been experiencing in the field. Monday night, at the final meeting of a highly stimulating but blandly titled graduate “Seminar in American Government” — taught by a committed progressive, Dr. Max Skidmore (himself a convert from youthful Show Me state Republicanism) — the meaning of all this crystallized for me. Our discussion of the social costs of our public policy of not caring about anything but profit hit me on an emotional level I have not felt since my childhood visits to Pine Ridge and Rosebud. Discussing the political state we’re in, I thought of the people I’ve fallen in love with across town and could barely hold back my tears.

The force of the universe brought me to study even more deeply the terrible political sickness plaguing America just at the time that I fell in with a community of artists who have been deeply injured by the heart of America, and to taste of the cultural milieu from which they sprang. In contemplating the costs of three decades of post-Reagan retreat from all that is best in this country, I have finally seen and felt very, very deeply the real human costs of the car wreck unfolding around us.

My field work is not without personal cost. I have been robbed multiple times, and assaulted twice. Having forsworn violence all my life, I’ve stepped forward in the past six months into three physical fights for the first time in nearly six decades of life. I’ve had to call upon the court for protection from stalking. At the urging of my East Kansas City friends, I have also used the “social justice” system to press charges against those who have attacked me, though I have yet to see how this comes out. The taste of of (hopefully) the waiting game lies thick on my tongue, but I’ve also learned that the social-justice messiah may never come. Politics and policy cannot be merely theoretical — ideological — in this setting: they affect us deeply and personally.

The elusive truth I realized in our seminar room on Monday night is that the hidden cost of America’s refusal to care is felt well behind the headlines, in our families. Those who suffer should not be blamed, especially not from the relatively safe suburban roosts occupied by most Americans. People are struggling for survival in the heart of America, and the human costs are incalculable. Gifted people have been turned back upon themselves and each other. Talented dancers are turned to a an anguished danse macabre while the rich play with resources robbed from the 99% who have allowed it, with the poorest and most powerless paying most of all. I have understood this in theory from childhood, thanks in large part to visiting South Dakota’s reservations, but only in this past year have I been required to view it not only intellectually, but also emotionally, from inside. When — how — will this struggle end?

The dangers of the path we’ve been following have been known for a long time. This was the resurgent  idiot savant insight of The Sixties, though Looking Out for Number One — licensed by the Right — has taken most of us idiots out of the political game just when wider insight and knowledge should have flowed into the vacuum defined by the ignorance of our youth. Instead, the brainwashers of the Fifties came back with a vengeance in the Eighties and have held sway ever since. I thank God for the pain and suffering of my personal experience, right here in river city, for revealing to me freshly the deep cost being paid by well-meaning innocents, struggling to survive.

As a country, we are not so young any more. From abroad, our cracks and wrinkles — and those of the false ideology that corporate America has crafted for us — are all too apparent. But in truth, we don’t even need a passport to see what they mean: just drive across town, to those quarters we generally avoid, eyes open, and perhaps we can see the truth.  Maybe then, we can act — before it’s too late.

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