Piecework

The American slide into urban barbarism has yet to find its Gibbon. But someday a great historian must try to answer the most persistent question: What happened to us in the last third of the twentieth century? It’s too easy to say that the sixties happened, or Vietnam happened, or Watergate happened. But they are surely part of the story. The apparently endless Cold War — which was their context — insisted on the doctrine of massive retaliation; overwhelming force became essential to our politics and permeated our popular culture. On television news shows, gray-haired statesmen and men from think tanks spoke with icy seriousness about MIRVs and throw weights and the use of force. American governments spent many billions on weapons; our engineers designed amazing new ways for killing people while the Japanese devoted their energies to consumer goods. We killed uncountable Vietnamese. We bombed Cambodia until the Khmer Rouge rose from the ruins to widen the horror. We invaded the Dominican Republic and Grenada, landed troops in Lebanon, armed and paid counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, and killed at least 500 human beings in Panama while making the bloodiest drug arrest in history. The leadership of the country obviously believed in the use of violence. Why was anyone surprised that Americans in the worst parts of large cities shared their beliefs? The Crips and the Bloods are Americans. And for more than forty years, Americans were taught that pacifism was a dirty word.

The current violence in American cities has a number of obvious components: poverty, drugs, guns, and race. They can’t be easily separated. The poverty caused by the collapse of the urban manufacturing base has been compounded by racism and a failed welfare system. Thousands of young men and women in the ghettos used drugs to obliterate or enhance reality and then some decided to make big scores in the drug trade itself. Why not? Cocaine was fashionable among many people who were not from ghettos: musicians, movie stars, Wall Street brokers. Then some evil genius invented crack, and suddenly this drug of the elite was available to the poor. It was cheap; it could be snorted instead of injected, thus eliminating the fear of AIDS; it was almost instantly addictive. The market boomed.

The shift from heroin to cocaine in the 1970s coincided with the decline of the old American Mob, forged during Prohibition. The crude second-generation hoods couldn’t make contact with the Cubans and Colombians who were running the wholesale trade in Medellin, Cali, and Miami. Their own parochialism and racism kept them out of the black and Latino ghettos. The wholesalers built condominiums and office buildings in Miami; the retailers battled over street corners. Decentralization of the drug trade led to endless turf wars and these were made even bloodier by the easy availability of high-powered automatic weapons. This too was endorsed by higher authority; very few politicians would dare to oppose the Great American Gun Cult and its Holy See, the National Rifle Association. They all endorsed the notion, unique in the industrialized world, that every real American had the right to carry a gun and protect himself.

I’ve included here only a few of the many pieces I wrote on these subjects during this desperate period. There were too many accounts of the deaths of innocent bystanders, of young men shot down for nothing, and widows and mothers and children assembling for funerals. The repetition was numbing. The chosen pieces don’t pretend to tell the whole story of what happened to New York, Miami, and other cities; although the use of crack cocaine is declining, the story has not ended. These are situation reports, and though the situation has shifted, its details have altered, its players have been replaced, the basic situation remains. Today, more than a million men are jammed into American prisons (including John Gotti). Thousands of others are in graveyards. The drugs keep coming. So do the guns.

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

The slow and tedious processes of justice brought Bernhard Hugo Goetz last week to a fifth-floor courtroom at 111 Centre Street and there, at least, the poor man was safe. Out in the great scary city, the demons of his imagination roamed freely; across the street, many of them were locked away in the cages of The Tombs. But here at the defense table, flanked by his lawyers, protected by a half-dozen armed court officers, the room itself separated by metal detectors from the anarchy of the city, Goetz looked almost serene.