To the Rails!

Spent the evening watching Riding the Rails, a 2005 documentary about the quarter-million teenagers who took to freight trains in the Great Depression, the film's themes of hard times, hard work and hard traveling now reverberating into the night. There was a time in my teens--and beyond then, even--when what I longed for more than just about anything else was for another Great Depression to come along. Whether it was a book of Walker Evans photographs or the exuberant lilt in Jimmie Rogers' voice that did it, I developed almost a fetish for the Depression era. The people in the pictures had honest faces, even the poorest were so smartly dressed, and there always seemed to be at least a pot of beef stew boiling in the background. I found this peasant life infinitely more attractive than the hypercolor cyberdream which modern life had become.

My ignorance, in retrospect, seems striking. Not only my misreading of Depression-era struggle--the kids in Riding the Rails were perhaps, as they later recalled, hopping freights partly for the adventure of it, but quickly came to know real hunger, loneliness and suffering--but also my misconception of the modern age; times had changed, and economic hardship would not bestow noble virtue upon the nation any more than it would change out our ugly made-in-Taiwan sweatshirts for a rugged American tweed. This lesson did not really sink in until the fall of 2008, when the Economic Crisis came barreling along. Now that I have my very own modern-age Depression to observe--to say nothing of struggling through--I can begin to sense how profoundly different our world now is, and any pretensions as to the romanticism of economic collapse have been pretty well stripped away.

Suffice it to say, first of all, that teenagers are not flocking to the railyards en masse. I do have some friends who have worked as itinerant harvesters, working the beet harvest in Minnesota or the weed harvest in California, but these jobs were applied for months in advance, acquired through networking or good references. No, I think the modern work-for-food set has a different MO entirely, the down-on-their-luckers more likely to be found trolling the dregs of craigslist, working bizarre one-day gigs much more perplexing than picking peaches. I know because I'm one of them. To keep a roof above my head and food on the table, I sign up for "street teams," promoting shadow lobbyists or going to suburban shopping malls to pass out gift cards in the cold for $80 a day; I join market-research panels, evaluating products I'd never use; I hop aboard fly-by-night telemarketing operations, scamming money from clueless old people.

It's here that I've most recently landed, working a telephone bank deep in the bowels of the Harris Theater. On paper, I'm soliciting donations for a nonprofit arts organization, but in reality it's a shameless con game. To milk donations from the tightfisted theatergoers, we've concocted an utterly fantastical narrative, wherein the donations are spent bringing "disadvantaged children"--I can see them now, starving and sniveling in some cold back alley with nary a penny to their their names or a crumb to nibble on--to the theater for their very first encounter with High Art, that great ennobling feat of civilized man. "Aw shucks, mister, thanks for takin' me to that concert of baroque music," they squeak, a single tear of gratitude crawling down their grimy little cheeks. "I'm gonna get me a newspaper route, and work real hard, and save up some money to buy me a violin!" Our boss even referred to a theoretical patient at Children's Memorial Hospital--he's been in the cancer ward for almost a year, that brave li'l guy, and all he wants is to see a program of Steven Sondheim songs--as "Timmy"; I couldn't refrain from asking if this was the same Timmy who fell down the well last summer.

Qualitatively, if not quantitatively, my work feels on a par with the Great Depression farmers who, in an effort to keep prices stable, destroyed their crops while people starved. It's keeping the economy moving along, in a very superficial sense--money, at least, is changing hands--but more fundamentally it's futile, counterproductive; we lowly telemarketers are not providing any real service, we're certainly not bettering humankind, we're merely low cogs in the money-exchanging apparatus. There's one kid I work with that cracks me up endlessly. He's supposedly a guitar-playing college graduate from Kansas, but in his appearance and behavior he reminds me of nothing so much as the rail-riding wastrels of the 1930s. He stumbles in late, in dingy and wrinkled business-casual attire and proceeds to stare dumbly at the wall for the duration of our 4-hour shift, as if he were teleported here from a dust-bowl cotton patch and doesn't know the first thing to do with all these button-telephones and fancy papers. He goes out for a zillion cigarette breaks, sometimes disappearing for hours on end. The funniest thing is that no one seems to notice his long absences or comatose behavior, not even the boss whose desk is mere feet from his. The boss is struggling with serious medical problems, without the benefit of health insurance, and is busy being grateful that she has a job; she can hardly be bothered by the comings and goings of her ragtag minimum-wage-earners.

This is the Great Depression of 2009, not nearly as picturesque or maudlin as the dust bowl but just as poignant and pathetic, in its own way. The apparatus has changed greatly, but the spirit has perhaps not; at the end of the day, we're all just trying to keep food on the table. In the midst of a craigslist-fueled day-labor binge circa 2008, I noted in my journal that "the difference between moderism and postmodernism is the difference between working in an auto-parts factory and passing out samples for a yogurt company". As has become increasingly clear, the days of auto-parts factories are very much numbered; one can't help but wonder whether the world of yogurt promotions faces eventual extinction as well--discontinued, as the population explodes and real human issues bubble to the surface, in favor of more vital and pressing business. Should the apparatus fail completely, as it often seems liable to, I'm more than ready to grab a shovel and start digging in the dirt, performing actual labor in an unfabricated landscape. If this is what economic collapse ultimately leads to, then I still, as I did a decade ago, embrace it.

One last thought on the subject. Watching the film I was struck by one thing that hasn't changed considerably, and that's the trains themselves. Crisscrossing the country in greater numbers than ever, freight trains offer the same thrills, perils and outlaw adventures as in our grandparents' days; the same cold nights, the same majestic vistas, the same hunger and thirst and sense of grandeur. If teenagers haven't flocked to the railyards en masse, it's to their own detriment. I'd hate to see a whole generation of good young people go to waste, chained in dark rooms to their telemarketing jobs, or browsing craigslist for a buck. There's still a whole world out there, begging for fresh eyes and a sense of adventure. To the rails, young people!

They win again

I've done, in my time, some pretty embarrassing and morally-questionable things for a fistful of dollars, from donating plasma to selling stolen books, from being a chewing gum tester for the Wrigley company to posing as a fortune teller. Many of the stranger or more unsavory rackets I've pulled have come from craigslist, that rowdy town square of the online world, and it was here that I came across a posting offering an enticing $150 to participate in a one-day marketing campaign. The marketers, a New York agency called GoGorilla, were recruiting a fun and outgoing street-team--not exactly my usual self-referents, but I could pretend for a day--to fan out across downtown Chicago, costumed as "homeless" Uncle Sams, and "beg" for 12 trillion dollars to pay off the national debt. GoGorilla's client, a website called DefeattheDebt.com, was launching this promotion in several cities to spread its message and gain publicity.

The whole thing reeked, right off the bat, of Teaparty Patriot-style right-wing propaganda, but it didn't seem any more offensive than dressing up as a chicken, say, and passing out menus. And I very much needed the money; your blogger's finances are paltry at best. So I sent along a photograph and a little biographical resume, and promptly received a call back from the marketing agency; as a sentient being capable of holding a cardboard sign for several hours straight, I apparently met their qualifications--though I suspect they could have found far more experienced panhandlers without great effort. There are a lot of guys hanging out near the public library that could really use the $150.

The job entailed arriving at a Gold Coast hotel at the profane hour of 5:30 am to dress up and get some coaching. There was already a group of guys huddled outside the hotel when I arrived, drinking coffee and smoking. They more-or-less resembled any pre-dawn crew of day laborers, though better-dressed and more Caucasian; this was day labor for the nouveau-poor, guys that went to college but still can't pay the rent.

We made our way up to a 4th floor conference room, the sort of bleakly-lit room where one hopes in vain to find at least a box of donuts awaiting. Here we met our "team leaders" from DefeattheDebt.com. Unreasonably chipper, they glowed with the grotesque health and optimism of Young Republicans. The Defeat the Debt campaign, one of these twats proceeded to explain, was actually a non-partisan and fairly uncontroversial one, a public awareness project run by a group called the Employment Policies Institute, which he memorably described as a "sleepy little thinktank in Washington"--y'know, your old fashioned, mom-n-pop type thinktank, where everybody knows your name.

Having done a bit of research the evening prior, I knew this to be fallacy. According to the Center for Media and Democracy, the EPI is a front group for Washington, DC public affairs firm Berman & Company, which is largely funded by the fast-food and tobacco industries and which lobbies against the minimum wage and organized labor. In short, enemies of humankind. While the political logic behind their Defeat the Debt campaign was beyond the scope of my layman's understanding, I knew that coming from these scumbags it couldn't be good. Still, we were assured, we didn't need to actually know anything about the national debt--"Just tell people to go to defeatthedebt.com," our leader advised. "Oh, and don't talk to reporters."

That said, we were ready to get suited up. As Uncle Sam costumes go, these were good-quality--our blue coats had actual tails, and we were outfitted with both beards and sideburns--but the costumes had been meticulously distressed according to some intern's idea of homelessness: painted-on grease marks, fingerless gloves. The money expended on our homeless costumes would have gone a long way, needless to say, toward clothing some actual homeless people. No matter, we were on our way.

Any location would have been mortifying in its own way, but my post was an especially gnarly one--I'd be spending the next four hours standing, with my cardboard sign reading Spent it All--Can You Spare $12 Trillion?, outside of the Chicago Board of Trade, the financial district's heart of darkness. Though it was only 7:00, the parade of commuters was already in full swing. Cranky and bleary-eyed, the throngs of day-traders paid me little notice beyond the occasional smirk or sneer--although, a few clueless passers-by offered me their spare change, and several people told me, mistakenly, that they'd seen my picture in this morning's Red Eye (Defeat the Debt had taken out a full-page ad). I'd done some seedy gigs in the past, but I'd certainly never been mistaken for someone in the Red Eye--surely this was a new low.

But as the morning wore on, and the day-traders wandered out for their cigarette breaks, several of them insisted on engaging me in conversations on economic policy. The mood in the financial district was decidedly bitter on this grey and windy morning, and the sight of a panhandling Uncle Sam can't have helped. "You know what you should do?," one particularly feisty trader suggested, pointing to the grand edifice across the street. "Burn down the Federal Reserve Bank." I laughed nervously.

The guys panhandling outside of McDonald's weren't very amused, though. I was obviously infringing on their turf--and mocking their predicament, no less! There was a certain bitter irony in the fact that I was being paid $150 to fake-panhandle, while the real panhandlers just down the block were struggling to get enough for a cheeseburger, or a bottle of Night Train. They were gracious enough, to their credit, to not whoop my ass.

But most pathetic of all is that the whole campaign seemed not only stupid and wrongheaded, it also seemed to be a dismal failure. The organizers made it seem as if we'd be mobbed by reporters and television cameras, as if this troupe of fake Uncle Sams would make some sort of tremendous splash downtown, but in fact people were downright apathetic. There was a basic miscalculation at work in the offices of the Employment Policies Institute. Hiring a large, New York marketing firm to subcontract out a shitty, sad-looking street-team for four hours on a Tuesday morning is not novel or newsworthy. People, in fact, have grown quite bored with marketing agencies and their shitty spectacles. For all it will affect economic policy, we may have been passing out sample-packs of breath mints.

On the other hand, the $150 is very significant, on a micro-economic scale. I'll pump that money straight back into the economy, even throwing a few bones to the very tobacco companies which are bankrolling this whole project in the first place. They win again!