For millions of Americans, the holiday weekend wasn’t cause for celebration.
The expiration of emergency federal unemployment benefits condemns scores of recipients to once again ponder precarity. And at a time when the nation faces an eviction crisis. Piecemeal, state-level efforts to extend eviction protection offer a measure of hope, as does billions in rental assistance approved by Congress, but for many renters, this is a Kafkaesque nightmare.
If you sit near the top of the social hierarchy, you might be genuinely bemused. After all, those who need help “still have options,” to quote a generic CNBC article published last week. Is it not incumbent on those folks to do the “leg work,” so to speak? Is that too much to ask? If someone doesn’t take the initiative and avail themselves, what else can society reasonably be expected to do for them?
For the fortunate, those are rhetorical questions. For the less fortunate, they’re oxymoronic.
Navigating bureaucracy is the bane of everyday human existence. Even something as simple as renewing a driver’s license can be a maddeningly surreal experience, even for those with resources and time to spare. Things like high-speed internet, reliable transportation and a job that allows you to simply declare yourself unavailable for a day, are critical facilitators. Without such luxuries, “getting stuff done” (in a generic sense) can be daunting, if not mostly impossible.
The more precarious your situation, the less likely you are to successfully and expeditiously navigate bureaucracy. Consider that the rich don’t even try. Generally speaking, the well-off pay other people to deal with bureaucracies — and everything else for that matter. Where I live, the rich don’t even go to the grocery store. And not because there’s a virus going around. Thanks to her personal shopper, one of my neighbors claims the last time she went shopping for her own food, the store doors weren’t automatic. I doubt that’s actually true (she’s not that old), but it could be, and that’s really the point.
Several weeks back, an old girlfriend sent me a desperate text message. “I need a lawyer,” she said. It was something about a custody battle. Some 15 years ago, her circumstances deteriorated so dramatically that our lives became completely incompatible. It wasn’t that I was “haughty” or even that I didn’t want to stay in touch. Rather, there were simply no points of intersection, let alone overlap. As far as I was concerned, she lived on the moon. And me on Mars from her vantage point.
I wasn’t surprised to discover that her situation hadn’t improved over a decade, nor was I prepared to offer any financial assistance in this instance, blind as I was to the situation. I did, however, advise her about the expansion of the Child Tax Credit. I tried to explain what that meant, but it didn’t occur to me until later how manifestly absurd I must have sounded. For ten or so minutes, I regaled her with the political backstory behind the change, how it was designed to help people like her and how, more broadly, it was part of an ongoing effort to expand the social safety net. (I actually used the phrase “you should avail yourself.”)
Finally, she cut me off: “Honey, I think you might be slightly confused.” That was a favorite phrase of hers two decades ago, during her brief stint as a member of America’s suburban pseudo-elite. The supercilious tone seemed out of place now, though, inapt as it was to her circumstances. So, I hung up.
Later, I realized I’d failed (again) to live up to my own exhortations that America’s prosperous attempt to empathize. She was speaking condescendingly to someone up the social pyramid. An affront to the delicate sensibilities of the upper-class. A strain on well heeled ears much as Escher’s “Waterfall” annoys the eyes.
And I was instinctually speaking down to her, by suggesting that the remedy for her situation was as simple as checking the box marked “Yes” next to the question “Do you want free money?”
In fact, there was something entirely appropriate about the seeming paradox of someone adopting a patronizing cadence towards her societal “better.” Her condescension was apropos. It was me who didn’t understand.
I can assure you she’s never read “The Trial,” nor “The Castle.” But in very real sense, she knows them better than I do.
Bloomberg described America’s jobless as “stranded in a bureaucratic nightmare.” For some, the situation is likely just that: A constantly foreboding, oppressive, surreal bad dream.
For others, like the acquaintance from “Charlie Brown Christmas Tree,” who told me in June she wasn’t interested in returning to a regular schedule in the restaurant business, favoring instead sporadic weekend shifts at a bar and an under-the-table cash wage earned serving sandwiches a few hours a week, it’s less “nightmare” and more tragicomedy. More Magnus Mills than Kafka.
I’m not sure that’s much better, though.
With Kafka, you trudge deliberately and frustratingly through the absurd on your way to a kind of dull madness.
With Mills, the absurdity of your circumstances is a source of continual amusement. Right up until it’s not. By the time you realize you’re in hell, it’s too late.
I was lucky to be employed on the side as a consultant by the same bank CEO for over 20 years. Whenever I could I would drop off my regular strategic planning reports in person. So one day as I handed in my latest report, the boss asked me if I needed anything else so I asked him if he had any free money. To my surprise he said, “As it happens I do.” He turned an opened a drawer in his credenza and pulled out a coin folder with the first five state quarters in it and said, “Here.” I’ve still got that folders, now filled. All free money is great even if one is not poor.
In France, post the GFC, it became a type of genre article. Formerly well to do bourgeois confronted to the nightmarish bureaucracy we’ve built to make sure the poor don’t mooch…
And more than one of these former bourgeois was writing furious articles about the dehumanizing process and the petty humiliation and how these inferior state employees dare speak to me in that tone?
… which was making one of my poor but super educated friend laugh green. She was like, “yeah, welcome to my world, b*tch”. Oh and according to her, we haven’t build a kafkaesque administration to make sure the poor don’t mooch but to make sure they know they’re poor and thus worthless.
The cruelty is the point, a feature, not a bug.
I’m not that cynical. Yet.
@fredm421 Your last two sentences are killer. Alas, I think I’m more cynical than you are. Happy Labor Day, all.
Err… Thanks! 🙂 Happy Labor Day to you and yours too!
The cruelty is the point as without sufficient dehumanization they would realize they can easily take the necessary materials for guillotines and have sufficient numbers to once again drag out the offending parties to meet them.
That’s her pov. The money offered creates a dependency (easier to beg for state relief than to revolt and rob or kill bourgeois) and the bureaucracy’s cruelty desensitizes and annihilates the will to revolt…
As she puts it, it makes the urban jungles into zoos. Not necessarily great for the animals there but so much safer for the visitors/neighbours.
I tried pointing out she wouldn’t necessarily be a predator and more likely be a prey in a jungle (she’s a petite woman) but she sometimes counters she’d rather die fighting than being forced to beg for a pittance…
FWIW, though, don’t get too dark an image of our urban problems. It always amuses visiting Americans. Our poor neighbourhoods are infinitely better than their US counterparts. This is not a criticism per se. Our societies made different choices and, well, we may not have found the secret to happiness but our urban jungles are indeed fairly tame, certainly compared to the USA.
I started to type something flippant and callous, along the lines of “that’s why they’re poor”. But stopped.
Because H is right. As we speak, millions of renters are headed to eviction while $40 BN of rent assistance sits untapped. Because, bureacracy.
In my state, Oregon, there is appx $500 MM available for rental assistance. Maybe $30 MM has been disbursed. Our state government offloaded the job to a motley plethora of non-profits who were unprepared for the task and saddled with a maze-like state online system that not even trained volunteers could navigate. Most renters have no idea that assistance is available or how to get it. Tenant advocates are trying to organize door knocking campaigns, which will fail. Landlords are either licking their lips at being able to evict and replace at much higher rents, or struggling to pay their mortgages and unable to help their tenants (the former are the big institutional LLs, the latter are the small mom ‘n pops). This winter, we’re going to see a lot more tents and occupied cars on the streets. All because of bureaucracy.
I personally know a number of local and state politicians. Most of them are aware of how much of a mess things are, but are themselves unable to fix it. Everyone is frustrated. Or claims to be. But most of them won’t suffer any consequences for this fiasco. There’s no accountability at the top, and no power at the bottom.
Could one ponder that the largesse of the Federal reserve and their prompt attention to our
losses….I mean dual mandates…. during liquidity events/financial crises is what protects us from the Kafkaesque abyss of dull madness…just a simplistic notion I guess.
From my POV, it’s been the movie “Brazil”. Or maybe it’s that famous Apple commercial with the woman in running shorts and the hurled hammer, for decades. Try dealing with the USDA, Customs, the FDA, FedBiz (now SAM) and assorted versions of these octopuses in other countries too. I understand the anguish, despair and sense of hopelessness that the average (un)educated American now carries around during “The Age of Sludge”.
There will be no mass revolt. “Let them eat cake” was the only foodstuff (cake flour) remaining in the French aristocracy’s stores/reserves. There was 3 year mini-ice age at the time. We now have droughts, wildfires, and a shortage of low-cost housing.
If I was in my 30’s, I would be building Tarrytown-ish inner city housing; all on government guaranteed low cost bonds. Timing is everything.
Wise is the person who recognizes the best way to help.
One such wise person / friend of mine taught me a great lesson. We were discussing the homeless situation, and I naturally commented “if you give a homeless person some change, how do you know they’re not just going to go buy a drink with it?”
She responded, “Maybe at that moment that’s exactly what they need”