subjectivist line II

"what rendered the gap-toothed crack whores and meth dealers mostly invisible to them was the convenient social subdivision variously called the jewish ghetto, the red light district,...the combat zone, the zona de tolerancia, the bad side of town,...or the wrong side of the tracks. willed blindness was accordingly not needed for the walled-off seekers of tranquility. the poor kept themselves physically out of sight! if one had no business on the wrong side of the tracks why go there, especially when going there increased one's risk of being robbed, assaulted, or annoyed?"

"it works both ways. how often have you seen a panhandler inside a gated community? anyone unbalanced enough to play such a visible part would imedeately get rapidly neutralized by uniformed antibodied, flushed out of the social body."
from "poor people" by william t vollmann

i touched on the the legal and social mechanisms that keep the poor out of the line-of-sight of "nice people"in an earlier blog... not as well as vollmann...but it's true none the less...the photos are from different parts of gary...26th avenue just a couple of blocks off martin luther king drive...or 15th avenue west of broadway..or in glen park not all that far form iu northwest...i can think of a number of local readers who may have had reason to go down these streets in recent times, but how many people from hobart or portage or say munster have ventured down there recently? the ruins of mid-level and small time economic failure abound...from boarded up storefronts to the wreckage of the dairy that delivered our milk when i was an adolescent...ghettoized by obsolescence or failure...removed from the mainstream and left to get by as best they can...far removed enough that you only read about them in the newspaper...don't even make the big-time of electronic media...just a passing glance...forgotten...blighted because they no longer contribute significantly to "the social body"...perception is everything...i'd like to blame post-modernism for this but perception pre-dates it....stalin ( who found that power obviated the need for wealth..or, rather, achieved power on the basis of something other than wealth which is what the west really hated) was wont to say that some people dressed elegantly to show their wealth while others did so to conceal their poverty...in this era of massive economic decline ( despite the smoke and mirrors propaganda emanating from the centers of hopeful, wealth based, power) you have to wonder how many people living in those gated communities have clothed themselves in debt to conceal their decline...ghettoized by a pretense of social and economic success into crippling economic fantasy...be careful what you pretend to be.