Adam’s Curse

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We’re just back from a long weekend in Chicago that we mostly spent going to museums. But we had a few interesting and pleasant encounters with fellow travelers as well. Here’s one.

We stay at the Essex on Michigan Avenue since we discovered it a few years ago when we had waited too long to get into the Hilton across the street for the annual meeting of the National Communication Association. It’s a nice simple hotel, friendly to commercial travelers and vacationers alike. One pays a bit of a premium for its location on the south loop, but not as much as one pays for grander digs at the Hilton or the Blackstone.

On the afternoon of our arrival we took a walk along the edge of Grant Park and as we returned to the hotel fell in with an extended family group who seemed to be waiting for the hotel shuttle. At their center was a cluster of children of various ages, including a small boy who had attracted the attention of one of the women in the group. They seemed to be talking about the fact that the boy played the fiddle.

I would have guessed his age at about nine, old enough to speak up for himself but young enough still that he hadn’t yet passed that age when little boys sometimes turn into hellions. His aunt, as I guessed her to be, was saying to him that he could play his fiddle on the street in front of the hotel and make himself some money whilst they were there. His reply to her was that he might do it and then spend all the money he made buying video games.

We chuckled at the exchange, nodded to the grownups in the group as we walked by, and didn’t think about it again until the next morning. We had eaten breakfast in the little Brasserie that opens off the hotel lobby and were settling down to wait for another shuttle to take us to the Art Institute when we spied the small boy sitting in a chair just outside the hotel entrance playing a three quarter size cello with his instrument case open in front of him.

I walked outside to listen, and instead of the squawing I expected heard the surpassingly beautiful strains of a portion of of one of the Bach unaccompanied cello suites. I stood close by and listened to the boy’s playing for a bit then took some bills out of my pocket and put them in his instrument case, noticing as I did that he had already collected quite a reasonable fee. He thanked me politely without breaking his stride, and then I noticed two adults sitting on a concrete tree surround not far away and walked over to them.

“Is he your son?” I asked. The mother beamed and said he was. She then told me that he was eight years old and had been studying the cello since he was four. I speculated that with that beginning he might very well become a professional musician. The mother demurred a bit, saying that careers in classical music are hard. I mentioned young friends of mine who play in symphony orchestras by way of saying that such careers are still possible. Both parents smiled in a way that said to me how proud they were of this little boy, bravely playing his “fiddle” on the street and planning to spend all the money he made on video games.

As we talked on, they allowed as how the adventure had been his idea and that they had been against it at first but had given in because he had seemed very enthusiastic. What struck me, aside from his impeccable and beautiful playing, was the little boy’s confidence. And watching them all together I thought what a fine thing it was that there are still such little boys and such parents in the world, parents willing to nourish a child’s talent without regard for whether it might ever make him any money, parents who understood the preciousness of his gift.

For he had already learned a very important thing about who he was and what he was for. His music was already imbedded in his being; he tossed it off as though it were a slight thing, though of course his abillity to do so bespoke hours of toil and practice. I thought of Yeats’s wonderful poem:

. . . . . . . . ‘To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful.’

I did not ask his name. It was blessing enough to have encountered him and his parents anonymously. The memory of his playing now resides in my mind among other archtypes that speak of the love of life and find me still rejoicing in the worth of the world.

one more thing

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In an introduction at Facebook for my last blog post I wrote as follows:

A few years ago at a public forum I listened apprehensively as the owner of a large St. Louis business defended the attacks on pensions that are going on presently in the public and private sectors. “Why should today’s managers have to abide by contracts with workers that were made over twenty-five years ago?” he asked. I might put the question differently, at least with respect to public workers: “Why should todays managers, having systematically and illegally underfunded public pension obligations for years (and perhaps lost workers’ contributions by bad management and high-risk investment strategies) be allowed an escape hatch?” But my argument and others like it have largely fallen on deaf ears for the past thirty-plus years. Now we’re seeing the consequence of this unconscionable public irresponsibility in Detroit, complete with the connivance of the Obama administration.

But I spoke too soon, at least in one respect. Underfunding pensions for public workers has not been illegal since 1974. In a piece that appeared in Rolling Stone a few weeks back, Matt Taibbi has presented a substantial and well-documented analysis of the financial crisis we seem to be in as a nation, that honors the perspective of those of us who worry that benefits we worked for years to obtain may disappear because of the machinations of “huckster financiers.”

another loss for democracy

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As the hostage crisis drags on in Washington, and we get closer and closer to default on the national debt, there’s a new story today that’s perhaps more disturbing. The Obama administration has intervened in the Detroit bankruptcy proceeding, and not on behalf of workers or middle-class Detroit citizens, who overwhelmingly oppose the bankruptcy and the dictatorship of sometime Obama apparatchik, Kevyn Orr, who is reprising his role in the sack of the US Auto Industry as he directs the use of the courts “to gut the benefits of public employees and sell off public assets.” No, the Obama administration has intervened on behalf of capital. Jerry White puts it this way at the World Socialist Web Site.

The Obama administration, speaking on behalf of Wall Street, sees the measures being taken in Detroit as a model. Just as the government-backed restructuring of the auto industry in 2009—in which Orr played a significant role—was the opening shot in an attack on wages and benefits throughout the country, the bankruptcy of Detroit will set the precedent for destroying city workers’ pensions and health care.

Banks and other investment firms who “swindled the city out of hundreds of millions in credit default swaps” will of course be paid first as the bankruptcy proceeds. Workers and retirees, who have been abandoned by their unions, will lose most. The Bankruptcy will rob “the city’s 19,000 retirees and their dependents of as much as 90 percent of their pension benefits” and dump them willy-nilly into the new health insurance exchanges. Some workers have already lost jobs as the public services of which they were part have been privatized (and these include public schools). A once proud city will lose the last vestige of its integrity and much of its cultural capital as Orr sells off the contents of its “world famous Detroit Institute of Arts,” having already lost its ability to govern itself. It may be the most profoundly un-American thing I have witnessed in my seventy-six years.

The back story is well known. The state of Michigan overturned the law enabling the unelected emergency manager, but the will of the people was thwarted by a last minute deal to reinstate the law by a venal state government, backed by Detroit’s mayor. Now Detroit is ruled by a dictator, who when he took the job announced that he was “prepared to be the most hated man for a period of time.” And the situation in Detroit presages something still more ominous. We are hearing from Washington of the possible willingness of the Obama administration to begin the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. And the news today that COLAs next January will amount to only 1.5 percent does nothing to allay the dismay of retirees like me. Public workers, retirees, and public life are under attack everywhere. If the Obama administration sells us out again, and this brief in the Detroit bankruptcy case looks very much like a sellout, I and a good many other progressives may have to look for a political home outside the Democratic Party.

But this action in the Detroit case is less a betrayal of me and my generation than it is of Generation X and the Millennials, those younger Americans who have supported the Obama presidency in numbers, perhaps even while they participated in the occupy movement. It isn’t just Detroit’s public workers and retirees who are being sold out; it is the hopes and dreams of millions of young Americans who didn’t exactly think Social Security would be there for them, but hoped it might—and who, as they chanted “Yes, we can!” with the rest of us, almost came to believe they could.