We live in a culture dominated by a deep belief in its own meritocraticness. America is the "land of plenty", the "promised land", the "land of the free and the home of the brave", the "land of opportunity". We are inculcated in the mythic greatness and equity of our nation from early childhood. Countless songs celebrate the popular myths that we are raised to cherish: from the schmaltz of Tom Jones belting out "Only in America" in a leisure suit, to the old Kapelye klezmer tune I found on an LP that describes in Yiddish how an uncle has left the shtetl "...zum Amerika den golden land..." (followed by a clarinet flourish)
Every year thousands of immigrants land on our shores - or more accurately airports - longing to carve out their own piece of the American Dream. Many find reasonable success, and at the very least the robust American economy provides earnings and standards of living that most of the world's people can only dream of. We are a nation of immigrants - with the noted exceptions of the American Indians who survived centuries of genocide and lived to tell the tale, and African Americans who were kidnapped and shipped here against their will to pick the cotton that propelled us into being an industrial power. Give us your tired, your poor, your wretched huddles masses longing to work scary 12-hour shifts at the all-night convenience store so that after five years they can open a bleak laundromat in the ghetto and feel that they have arrived.
Home ownership is another biggie in the American Dream pantheon. Americans, unlike Europeans and many in other wealthy nations, tend to have most of their life savings invested in their homes. For most Americans a house is an investment, a home, and a symbol of arrival in the middle class. Because we all want to believe we are middle class. Somehow this includes everyone from my father, a municipally-employed backhoe operator, to my classmates attending college on their neurologist/lawyer/car-dealership-owner parents' dime.
On my father's side my family is steeped in the mythic importance of owning one's own home, and taking meticulous care of it. Many of the men in the family were and are carpenters and my grandfather and my uncle both built their own homes themselves. That side of the family, like most of white Cincinnati, is German Catholic. Maybe that explains it. I saw a show on the BBC recently about how those crafty Germans love to build their own houses, so that they can obsess over the pride they take in their workmanship. A local German homeowner/builder was explaining to BBC reporter, via translator, how if he did the work himself he could know it was done right. This obsession with craft, thrift, and discipline feels very old-school German to me.
But the real reason home ownership is so important to my family is because it is a status symbol. None of them have been to college, they don't travel, and they have pretty unsophisticated, blue-collar lives. The fact that they own a home is one of the few major things that makes them anything but plain working class. I have come to the conclusion that my father's side of the family is wracked with a very psychologically deep sense of class anxiety. They are terrified that Others will see them as trashy, or that they will somehow slide back down the class ladder into the searing poverty their dilligence has delivered them from. When I bought a house two years ago my dad was so worried about the bedraggled and decrepit state of my yard that he used to come by and clean up the crap laying around in it when I wasn't home. He was that terrified of the potential shame of us looking like we were urban hillbillies. That's pretty deep in my book. And I resented the interference on several levels. Plus I like urban hillbillies, some of whom are among my best friends.
Why did I buy a house as a working college student? Good question. It was a horrible idea, especially since I bought with my then-fiancee - with whom I broke up several months later. That part of the whole shebang has been a straight nightmare.
But I was raised to believe that home ownership signaled arrival, adulthood, success, independence. I am only now coming to understand how much the blue-collar values I was raised with are a hindrance to my future goals. I am leaving Cincinnati for grad school this summer; in a few years I will be a Ph.D. and plan to teach in academia somewhere. And as I look around me I see my friends - who are mostly middle-class - perceiving their own life paths very differently than I have perceived my own. They mostly own next to nothing, have a lot of support and stability from their parents, and anticipate traveling and moving around before eventually settling down somewhere - years down the road. They have few responsibilities and see no reason to accrue any. In contrast, adulthood comes early to my people. My mom kicked my little sister out of the house the day she turned 18 - a relatively common practice that many among the working-class believe is sometimes necessary to get one's offspring to learn the independence they will need to survive. Friends of mine from high school have been appearing on my Facebook account lately: apparently it has now trickled down to rural blue-collar America. They all have kids and look a lot older than I thought they would this young. Mostly they settled down and got married right out of high school, and will spent the rest of their lives working at occupations close to the jobs they had as teenagers.
So anyways, I bought this house. It needed everything, having been repossessed, abandoned, and then vandalized. My father, grandfather, and uncle pitched in and we tore up flooring and carpet, patched plaster, fixed leaky pipes, laid tile, installed windows, patched a chimney, ran wiring, duct work, and did lots of other shit. I relined the box gutters, refinished the floors, painted the place, and built a new staircase to the attic. Needless to say as a college student hellbent on making Dean's List and working 30 hours a week this was pretty much a stress-ridden nightmare. Not to mention paying the mortgage, which after taxes ended up being significantly more than my mortgage broker had originally quoted me. (Thanks Cincinnati!) Then last winter the City of Cincinnati Building Department sent me a letter stating that I was in violation of building code and that I needed to rebuild the sagging wraparound porch on the front of my home. I was threatened with court and fines. That project took months and required calling in lots of favors from friends and family. Fortunately a buddy moved in for a while who knew carpentry and he did most of it. But I ended up dropping at least $2000 on pressure-treated lumber and I had to take time out to meet with building inspectors during the process. Fuck that.
I always thought that owning my own home would mean independence and peace of mind. But I have come to believe that the opposite is true. A mortgage is not much different from rent - at least for much of the tenure of a 30-year mortgage. The bank pretty much owns it until about 20 years in. Owning a home is a lot of work, and moreover is implicated in a lot of social psychology that I am coming to question for the first time.
A few weeks ago the University of Cincinnati hosted an event called Worldfest - basically a week of events centered around multiculturalism. The theme this year was Social and Economic Justice. So I went to check it out. They showed Slumdog Millionaire - which I think is wildly over-rated, actvisit Judy Shepherd spoke about her gay son Matt's brutal murder at the hands of Wyoming homophobes, and the foreign students' associations offered up various ethnic cuisines from booths on the lawn. But what really got my attention was hearing Rosa Clemente speak - nay preach - from a podium in the theater inside Tangeman University Center. Rosa grew up in the South Bronx - the poorest Congressional District in America. Her neighborhood was an impoverished Black and Puerto Rican ghetto; she came of age watching Reaganomics and crack wipe out human lives. As a teen her family moved out to Westchester County - an enclave of exurban NYC wealth. She later attended SUNY Albany - where she led lots of campus activism and found her life's work as a community organizer. She describes herself as a Hip Hop Activist, and in 2003 organized the first National Hip Hop Political Convention. Clemente spoke passionately about hip hop's importance in giving a voice to the voiceless, a means of spiritual survival for America's most dispossessed youth - who have no art programs to enrich their lives.
I am ashamed now that I did not know about Rosa during the 2008 election; she was the vice presidential candidate for the Green Party ticket. I don't know a lot about the Greens (which only exist on paper at my campus), but everything that woman said resonated with me on a really deep level. I would have paid to vote for her. Much of her speech espoused ideas and views I had never really heard articulated before. She preached about how Obama is soft-pedaling on ending the wars we are losing, how the Democrats knew what was up with the US military torturing detainees, how we are blowing the budget on wars while closing schools and hospitals, how we are "making new enemies faster than we can kill them." Rosa talked about losing 7 cousins in 3 years to the crack epidemic, the 2001 uprising against the racist cops here in Cincinnati, the time she spent in Ithaca as a grad student at Cornell - where local kids live on food stamps and college students have trust funds, and her experience on the ground after Katrina - where she watched private armed guards standing in formation to protect corporate property while hurricane survivors wandered the streets looking for food, water, and shelter. She said America cares more about property than people, quipping "We live in an Ownership Society..."
Whoa! That threw me, sat on my brain for weeks. Old axioms and expressions drifted through my mind: "Property is nine-tenths of the law." I thought about how voting used to be tied to property-ownership in the U.S., how Black America was dehumanized by being relegated to chattel, how the American Dream of limitless economic expansion is built on continuously gobbling up more land, to build more houses, to sell to more new homeowners. I thought about how much we privilege those who own things over those that do not. The price tag of a new McMansion is a ticket to the Good Life: decent public schools, geographic removal from poverty, crime, and blight, and getting into the leafy suburban side of America's spatial apartheid. Conversely renting an apartment, living without a car, not buying and accumulating lots of crap are not only not mainstream American values - they are widely perceived as antithetical to everything we are about. They signify failure - or insanity.Why would someone want to live without a car in America? The prospect is not only limiting, it is infantilizing. Carless-ness reduces one to the status of a child pedestrian, or worse yet - an impoverished patron of our notoriously woeful bus systems. Apartment-dwellers and renters really lose out financially. Massive governmental subsidies reward suburban home buyers and neglect the medium-density older urban neighborhoods built around apartment life. Renters cannot claim their mortgage interest as a tax deduction, get the VA or HUD to help them pay for their home, and do not accrue equity that they can later cash in when they need money in old age. Mortgage equity is most Americans' retirement savings.
Because most Americans have their life savings invested in their homes, they are compelled to buy into conventional ideas about what makes a home attractive, marketable, and valuable. For example, if minorities begin to trickle into a formerly all-white neighborhood homeowners are likely to begin to worry. Not necessarily out of their own individual xenophobia, but because most white Americans refuse to live in minority neighborhoods, or even meaningfully integrated neighborhoods, and thus would not buy a home there. This really does lower property values. Not because it makes any goddamn sense, but because white majority America is scared of Black/minority neighborhoods, won't consider living in one, and thus the demand for housing in such areas slumps, resulting in falling prices.
And buying a home is a big investment. Investing all that time and money into a project means that you feel compelled to take care of it. It means you start eyeing home and garden magazines, critiquing slovenly neighbors who seem to lack sufficient pride in their houses, and generally buy into a lot of pretty mainstream American values.
And when you buy a home you suddenly find yourself needing lots of things to groom, clean, maintain, and deal with it: a lawnmower, hedge trimmers, paintbrushes, furniture, drapes, rugs, pictures, shower racks, lots of appliances, you name it. And the more stuff you accumulate the more invested in all of it you become. This assemblage of property and possessions becomes your world. I compare this to the lives of my friends who live near campus in modest apartments. They spend much more time out in the community, strolling around, meeting neighbors, and participating in society. Is it a mere coincidence that the decline of community in America runs in direct historical correlation to the rise of suburbia and ubiquitous home ownership? I think not. My Civil Rights history professor complains about how the Movement wouldn't work today because we are all too individualistic. Perhaps our heightened obsession with owning things is the reason. I recall a quip from one of my urban history texts, perhaps it was Crabgrass Nation, in which industrial magnates were contemplating the potential for radical union activism among their workforce. At the time the local proletariat was eagerly snapping up attractive little suburban homes, proudly believing they were moving up in the world. Said one wealthy industrialist to another, "No, I don't expect we'll have much trouble. They won't have time for it now [that they have houses to take care of]." I am paraphrasing here, but that was the general drift.
So America is fighting "wars on terror" that are probably creating more terrorism than stopping any, suffering under a subprime mortgage crisis that has tipped off a global recession, and we are all facing a looming environmental apocalypse. Personally, this whole world order is looking more and more fucked. And I regret buying into the whole plan.
Right now I am in the process of divesting - and I use that word very intentionally - myself of everything I possibly can. I am selling off, carting away, throwing out, and recycling damn near all of the bullshit that has taken over my life. I refuse to be possessed by my possessions any longer. And I sure as hell don't plan on spendin' my life slavin' away so I can hand the bulk of my check to Countrywide and pretend like I'm livin' the good life in a big-ass house I can't fuckin' afford.
I dream of moving out of Cincinnati, renting a small apartment in a new city, having just the basics in the way of furniture and whatnot, and spending a lot of time walking my dog, hanging out in my neighborhood, attending events and meetings on campus, meeting lots of people, and generally living life.
The Buddhists beleive that to live life without mindfulness constitutes a walking death. And in an America wracked by frivolous compulsive spending, instant gratification, conspicuous consumption, debt overload, and the hardcore anxiety produced by all of the above, I think that this has sadly become the norm. But what in the hell does 'normal' even mean in a society as fucked as ours?
And so I am renouncing my claim in the Ownership Society. I want freedom from things, personal mobility, and mental - as well as physical - unclutteredness. Quality of Life is, after all, a very different thing than Standard of Living.
War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, and Freedom is Slavery.
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