Parliament of Whores by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1991-03-16T05:00:00+00:00

POVERTY POLICY

How to Endow Privation

OK, the federal government can’t do anything about drugs. But it really should do something about poverty. Or has it already?

I went to a federal low-income housing project in Newark, New Jersey, and just going inside and climbing the stairs was more exposure to questions of poverty policy than most people can stand and not pass out. The stairwell was a cascade of filth, a spillway of human urine and unidentifiable putrifying matter. There was nothing on these steps wholesome enough to call trash. It would have cheered me up to see anything as vibrant as a rat.

The housing project was one of those War on Poverty, a-Hand-Not-a-Handout, Great Society Give-a-Damn edifices that they tore down a perfectly good slum to build in the 1960s. The stairwell was lighted by dim, bagel-shaped, twenty-two-watt fluorescent tubes—“landlord halos”—each protected by a steel cage lag-bolted to the reinforced-concrete ceiling. Only the strongest and most purposeful vandals could destroy light fixtures like these, but that’s the kind of vandals this housing project has, and dangling electric wires and foot-wide craters in the cement marked the former location of each lamp. There was some illumination, however, from a large puddle of lighter fluid blazing away on the third-story landing, and phlegm-colored sun shone through a befouled skylight seven stories above.

I don’t know what, or if, the stairwell walls had once been painted. I couldn’t even tell what they were made of. Smoke, dirt, spray paint and marker-pen scribbling were caked on every surface in a cover-all hue of defeat and exasperation, the same shade small children achieve with their first set of watercolors. Graffitied names and signs overlapped, layered in a density of senselessness to do a Yale semiotics professor proud. The only scrap of writing I could make out was in the lobby by the front door: “THE FUCK-UP POSSIE,” spelled thus, with one more fuck-up.

It should have been thought provoking to climb those stairs, but it wasn’t. People often say a place is “too noisy to think.” This place was too smelly. What I thought later, however, was that I have been to some dirty, hapless, hungry, out-of-luck spots in twenty years of journalism. I’ve been to Beirut, where people were living in holes scooped out of rubble. I’ve been to the Manila city dump, where people were living in holes scooped out of garbage. And I’ve been to villages in El Salvador where people weren’t living at all anymore because they’d been shot. I’ve been to rioting Soweto shantytowns and besieged Gaza Strip refugee camps and half-starved contra outposts in the jungles of Honduras, and I’ve never been to a place I would less rather live than this housing project in New Jersey.

I had other, more airy, thoughts, too—about the symbolism of climbing stairs, about “Up on the Roof” by the Drifters and Fiddler on the Roof with Tevye singing about his dream house in “If I Were a Rich Man”:

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