N.B: The months of blog hiatus brought with them many pent-up thoughts about a range of topics. Rather than trying to force some context onto the site so that I can work off a foundation of ideas, I am just going in, particularly because I need to get back into a rhythm as a writer. So be warned.
The wasteful debt-ceiling wrangling wears on, and both media and politicians perpetuate the canard that this fight is worthy of the resources it has consumed. No one believes that as a long-term strategy, outpacing revenue with spending is a good idea. However, sustained stimulus spending in its many forms might be a necessary step backward in the short term to facilitate two steps forward later on. That is debatable, but it's a credible discussion. The notion that the debt-ceiling can only be raised if it is accompanied by deep spending cuts so that jobs can be created again is just nonsense.
The real fight should be, and should have been, over job creation. Politicians are generally cynical and motivated by the self-interest tied to reelection, so while I am frustrated that the primary problem has been relegated to the heath, I understand why. Similarly, national television media fight for advertising dollars; informing the public is no longer a true priority. "Breaking news" has become synonymous with perpetuating hysteria, all with the intention of getting people to watch a few more ads. So again, I understand why the media coverage of this fight has been so far off from what actually matters.
Acknowledging the sorry state of affairs in this country does not excuse neglecting true ailments, though, and that is why the deficit-reduction farce is consuming and dispiriting. With a stagnant economy characterized by growing inequities between the top wage earners and everyone else, by a mythical "rebound" that has carried corporations and oligarchs to profit but left everyone else behind, by unemployment that is demoralizing, the real fight should be over how America manufactures new jobs. Apple now sits on $72b in cash after another record quarter, and across the board, large corporations are again making money. However, they are not spending it in meaningful quantities on new jobs and new industries. And after winning a presidential election by promising that he would lead steps toward expanding a green economy that would transform the national energy portfolio, Barack Obama has perpetuated the status quo.
So the real source of all the recriminations and doomsday news coverage should be this simple question: why isn't the corporate sector spending its money on job growth? And people who care about America even pretending to fight off its steady decline should be wondering why no one is hammering home this point. Rather than invoking misleading sham economics to argue about an all but compulsory budgeting measure, politicians should be engaged in an effort to create new jobs. Reform the tax code to provide incentives for spending in growth industries. Manipulate Fed policy to push money through banks to businesses that might actually use credit. And apply some pressure in every way to the large companies that find it more profitable and prudent to buy back stock, deposit cash, and make internal improvements that do not yield new jobs, new products, or new ideas.
Taxes, forever the boogieman cited as the reason businesses can't lead growth, are as low as they have been in 61 years. However, the economy is also as bad as it has been in about as long. Raising the debt ceiling while cutting the social safety net that helped make the United States a superpower is not going to foster new industries or restore lost jobs.
The first meal that I ever ate in St. Louis was a parking-lot-pimpin' special at a Sonic on Kingshighway. I gleefully pulled up at this Sonic. After years of seeing tantalizing ads on New York television, I finally was in a market where I could do something about it. All that time quietly longing for the decked-out hotdogs, the alluring neon beverages, and the kinds of indulgent, fattening foods that were impressive even by fast-food standards was going to come to a close. Anyone who has eaten at Sonic likely knows that this story ends in disappointment and self-loathing.
I nestled my car next to one of those drive-thru order stations, I spoke to a pleasant-enough-sounding woman through the metal grate, I chose a meal saturated with bright colors and cheese sauce, and then I waited in my car. It was August, the humidity was out of control, and the sun made everything seem washed out. I hardly noticed, though, because I had picked up my lease at the dealer that day, and with the air conditioner cranked up, I sat in a fast-food parking lot and excitedly picked my way through my new owner's manual. Delirious from the excitement of having my own car and getting to eat at Sonic on the same day, it barely registered when the Sonic attendant rapped on my window while carrying a bag with grease stains on the bottom.
At that moment, a montage of Sonic ads played in my mind. There was some writing in red and yellow, lots of beautiful, unhealthy food exploding out of itself--tater tots in the chili in the burritos!--and a camera panning across all of it, conferring a sense of glamor. My dream came crashing down when I opened the bag and found a lukewarm hamburger in metal foil and french fries covered in a yellow glaze with a consistency that resembled melted plastic. The burger bun was mildly stale and had a sweet aftertaste that was disorienting. Then it hit me: I was sitting in a random parking lot, eating disgusting food, and seeking refuge from the heat inside a new car. I had really arrived in America. Can't say I wasn't excited.
Most of my early days in St. Louis resembled my first. I approached everything with enthusiasm that was not always earnest. For as much as I truly wanted to learn my way around and become familiar with the rhythms of my new home, I also was quick to draw comparisons to life in New York, juxtapositions which I knew I could exploit for the condescension value. I said "Missouruh" a lot. I kept eating fast food because I was lazy, I couldn't believe how abundant it was, and I thought I was doing something funny and novel. (This was never so. Joke on me.) I bemoaned that most buildings seemed compelled to post warnings that you couldn't tote your concealed weapon on the premises.
To be fair, I had little context for anything during my initial weeks. I moved to St. Louis for law school, and I arrived a few weeks before I would meet my classmates. For ten days of sustained 100-degree weather, I would venture out into the sprawl of my new, mid-sized city, return home with self-assemble furniture, and periodically call my family to tell them about oddities at a strip mall or the scale of the Target on Hampton. I was alone, and I had not yet arrived at an access point from which I could enter St. Louis life in a defined way. Left to fashion my own experience, it contained the usual mixture of sarcasm and honest inquiry. (I have built entire vacations using this epoxy to hold it all together.)
St. Louis left me wanting for a while. Nothing was open past 10, there was so much church that people parked at 45-degree angles on Sundays, and there was no street life. A select few stretches of two and three blocks scattered throughout the city will boast pedestrian traffic at times, but St. Louis is overwhelmingly a driving city with sad, lonely sidewalks. A driving enthusiast, I loved the time in my car. Don't get it twisted. But driving out of necessity begins to feel like any other life chore after a while, and in a place that has overlooked pockets of culture, walking around should not feel as alien as it does.
St. Louis also has a douchey streak: many men in striped shirts with dragons embroidered over them; hordes of women with fake hair, breasts, nails, and tans; aspirational nightclubs that charge token covers of two and three dollars just to say that there is one. In Clayton, the first town over, there are entire stretches where fifty-thousand-dollar millionaires congregate on weekend nights in class rings or dresses that they probably can't pull off anymore to talk about their duck-hunting clubs and their Cardinals. (I see you, Napoli. We all do.) To an outsider, particularly one from a city like New York, St. Louis can seem small, and even tacky.
The presumptions that rendered me an ugly, judgmental alien for most of my first year in law school were gradually challenged, and sometimes vitiated, as time wore on. Less intent on finding what made St. Louis different, I started seeking out what made St. Louis better.
Sitting almost 300 miles south of Chicago but not close enough to Arkansas to be southern, and lying far enough west for the East Coast to feel distant but not close enough to mountains for the city to take on any kind of rugged frontier character, St. Louis is an unassuming gem that defies easy categorization. It has a public park that rivals Central Park in scope, resources, and amenities. It has one of the most pleasant art museums you will find. The old Italian neighborhood can be as timeless and quaint as any Little Italy. The barbecue sauce doesn't rival Kansas City's, and the dry-rub ribs can't top those is Memphis, but the St. Louis barbecue culture is dedicated, serious, and tasty. Between Washington University and St. Louis University, the city churns out an intellectual class that has become a provincial but engaging local community. Rent is cheap, beer is cheap (and local), the movie theaters are clean and huge, and parking is generally easy.
When I started to learn about the city on these terms--its own terms--St. Louis was transformed into a wonderful place to live. More importantly, attending law school in St. Louis was converted from a New Yorker's cultural tourism into an American's assimilation.
St. Louis is much more like most of the United States than New York is. No surprise there. However, the ways in which St. Louis resembles elsewhere were important lessons for me to learn. When you spend too much time in New York without sustained, countervailing experiences, you begin to view Manhattan's wealth, Brooklyn's cool, and everything else as living ideals that are both precious and misunderstood. A New Yorker can easily buy into the notion that it's normal, and even desirable, to pay $2,300 a month for a studio apartment. Perversely, doing so just to claim that you live in the West Village becomes a badge of honor. Look what I can do. Similarly, a New Yorker can forget that a diner isn't always around the corner and open, that fashion need not be a statement made every time you step out on the street.
Cities like St. Louis can feel silly and second-rate; the people in St. Louis, and the rest of the country, can seem distant and different. As I demonstrated when I moved to St. Louis, this remove can metastasize into a cancerous worldview, one that treats most different things as inferior, and one that regards most other people with latent pity because they just don't get it. Beyond its kind people, cultural attractions, and good food, then, St. Louis gave a rich education that had nothing to do with law school. I felt worldly in a new way for having lived there, and it was the sort of reforming experience that deserves a place alongside the discussions of Paris and London which many people in Manhattan consider the only worthwhile forays into "foreign" culture.
It's not all lollipops and learning out in Missouri, of course. If you are white and middle class or richer, you play by a few rules which are forever controlling, even when not clearly articulated. And this, of course, assumes there are times when the rules aren't expressly stated. That's not often. It's likely that the first thing you will learn is that you should never go north of Delmar. People practically fell over themselves to warn me. What's north of Delmar? Well, duh--black people. And not just black people, but poor black people, the worst kind. You also learn that you shouldn't shop at the black Schnuck's. Why? Well, duh--you know.
However, St. Louis is not afflicted by modern day Jim Crow racism. Instead, the city's prevailing culture merely accepts the deep link between poverty and race, and it allows for a conversational shorthand that accommodates unspoken meaning. The stock answer for why you don't shop at the Schnuck's at Lindell Crossing is that it's "ghetto" or "shady." That's why you don't go to the Walgreen's across the street, either. And as everyone knows, those poor black people drive recklessly, break the law, and act all nuts, so seriously, never go north of Delmar. To be safe, don't even look in that direction.
I, of course, enjoy toeing the line. In this case literally, and so it was that my love affair with St. Louis dovetailed with my patronage of the gas-station convenience stores along Delmar. I was particularly fond of the Mobil station at Kingshighway and Delmar. I went in there the first time for a simple reason: my dangerous addiction to Lipton PureLeaf Iced Tea. Hard to find but always available at the Mobil, that tea drew me in. I went back weeks on end because it turned out to be so much more.
Not merely a collection of well-stocked freezer cases and endless rows of junk food, the Mobil station was a place of sumptuous dining (catfish nuggets, steak dinners, loaded baked potatoes), computer repair, internet connectivity (Wi-Fi hotspot!), cheap cigarettes, phone unlocking, retail fashions, cell phones, sexual stimulants, and wigs. It was a place where businesspeople in a rush waited on line behind drug addicts in a deep lean and no rush. It was a place that had a new concession nearly every week, a steady stream of disgruntled people in and around it, and ever thicker glass separating the sales floor from the staff. Naturally, I referred to it as Hamsterdam, especially when I was stopped and interrogated after the owner saw me taking pictures.
The Kingshighway Mobil also illustrated just how deep the social divisions run in St. Louis. Perched across the street from the northern boundary of what's considered safe, the Mobil was either a destination on the other side of the sociocultural Maginot Line which defiant types could cross to make symbolic gestures, or it was a weigh station at the border where under-served people could stop on their way into the part of town that reflects someone actually giving a shit. In this regard, it was very St. Louis, and I think it remains a fixture in my memory precisely because it easily allows me to veer off in any number of directions. That, in itself, is an odd but fitting tribute to St. Louis, a city that offers much more than your average New Yorker expects.
Feels good to be home. But also feels bad.
