Reihan Salam has a terrific post on why being a middle-class drug-addled screwup is not the same thing as being a poor drug-addled screwup:
White-Hot Brown Rage, or Here's Lookin' at Mnookin: Because I just turned 25 a few days ago, Seth Mnookin’s reflections on smack, or rather recovering from the smack, hit home. To those of you languishing on your parents’ sofas, watching an endless series of Pimp My Ride episodes when not weeping uncontrollably and contemplating when exactly everything went so terribly wrong, keep in mind that it could have been worse. Vastly worse.
And yet somehow, after reading of how Mnookin managed to claw his way, through sheer tenacity, back to sobriety and, in time, success—a really inspiring story by any stretch—I can’t help but feel as though he deserves a serious slap upside the head. Mnookin ends the piece with what strikes me as a smarmy gesture.
About two and a half years ago, I was in Lake Charles, La. I was on assignment for Newsweek, interviewing the warden at a local jail. He was explaining why they had so many lockdowns. These guys, he said, were lowlifes. Crackheads who sold their daddy's furniture. Dope fiends always working an angle. Most of them have no future. He was about to launch into a story about the latest mook he'd had to reprimand when he stopped himself. You wouldn't know about any of that, he said.
The subtext—it’s actually so blindingly obvious as to be much more than that—is, “You don’t even know, man. You don’t even know. I’ve hit rock bottom, man! I know what that shit is like, son!” I gather Mnookin would not, if pressed, claim to have faced the same indescribable difficulties faced by those prisoners, few of whom … Let’s get down to brass tacks. Few of whom “graduated from Harvard College in 1994 with a degree in the History of Science.”
Mnookin glancingly references the fact that his employers at a bullshit office job liked having a smart kid with a good degree, but he skips over what I consider to be a very salient fact. You don’t generally attend a selective school unless you’ve already internalized some basic bourgeois habits of mind. Mnookin describes his struggle with showing up on time. I share this difficulty. It’s not the relevant divide, though, between those who remain mired in poverty and those who don’t. The real pathology, to put things very sharply, derives from not thinking about the future. (Adrian Nicole LeBlanc wrote one of my favorite essays on exactly this subject.)
While down in the dumps, Mnookin was keenly aware of his ambitions. His ambitions were, I suspect, a big part of why he fought back against the idleness and self-loathing that very nearly proved deadly. In the end, it got him a job at a good paper, and it got him to bust his ass on “local color” stories that just as easily could’ve become his life’s work. That wasn’t enough. Here I’m imagining a plausible scenario. He had peers, a lot of whom were going from strength to strength. Over time, as his vision cleared and as he gained a steadier grip on living sanely, he may have remembered that he was at least as sharp and as good a writer as this or that character who had just reached some kind of jealousy-inducing career milestone. And so it goes. Survival spurred him on for a short while, and then the desire to make a life and make a mark took over.
The profoundest Ivy League screw-ups feel screwing-up in the gut. That’s why, unless death by overdose intervenes, they’ll eventually stop screwing-up. The anxieties of said screw-ups are dominated almost entirely by the weight of their own expectations. It’s painful and awful. Gut-wrenching is the word. It’s also provides an inner reserve, of intestinal fortitude and of inner “will to power”-esque overdrive energy. That’s something most very poor people don’t have. Those who have it don’t remain poor for very long. My concern is for the others.
Note the “thousands of dollars stolen from my friends and lovers and family.” Drug addicts without this kind of an infrastructure exhaust whatever meager infrastructure they do have early on, and then they prey upon strangers. Then they go to prison, with all the horrors that entails. What angers me, and I realize that I haven’t been very coherent, is that a middle-class person can mess up again and again, falling through safety net after safety net, and still thrive, given time and a bit of gumption and stick-to-it-iveness. If you’re not middle class, and you’re not from a stable, intact, literate, ambitious family, you will have a very, very hard time. Your likelihood of death is vastly higher, as is the likelihood that you’ll live at the mercy of a criminal justice system you scarcely understand. (That I, in my infinite idiocy, scarcely understand.) This is a grave injustice, and it derives at least as much from a cultural breakdown driven by middle-class people who’ve suffered virtually none of the consequences as from the unconscionable stinginess of a social policy oriented primarily towards social control. theamericanscene.com |
