Vol. 1, Number 3	Fall 1998 issue

 

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In the early sixties, Michael Harrington's The Other America inspired the War on Poverty. Since then, other sketches and studies of Americans who have been shut out of security and privilege, such as Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities and William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, have influenced public debate and sometimes even spurred changes in law. The latest work aspiring to this genre comes from William Finnegan, a journalist whose previous books have all been accounts of sub-Saharan warzones such as Mozambique and South Africa.

In Cold New World, Finnegan turns his attention to the United States and finds that, since the 1970s, we have come to live in a Cold New World marked by an end to American post-war, post-civil rights movement class mobility. This new "caste system," as he describes it, is particularly notable in its oppressive effects on disadvantaged teenagers. Cold New World follows the lives of four teens in New Haven, Washington State, Los Angeles, and East Texas as they suffer the deprivations of the unforgiving new class structure.

Unfortunately, the various young people Finnegan selected to profile in this book simply do not confirm his theory of a new caste system. Only one of Finnegan's subjects is at all trapped in her situation. For the other three, Finnegan's insistence that larger socio-economic forces alone were limiting their possibilities in life rings false.

Finnegan's least convincing victim, Juan, lives in the Yakima Valley of Washington State. His parents are Mexican migrant farm workers who have worked so hard for so long that they have been able to buy a home in Yakima and send their children to its public schools. They are also active, dedicated members of the United Farm Workers labor union. Juan lacks both his parents' work ethic and their ability to believe in a cause. He drops out of high school, then quickly loses his job working in the fields with his parents. He does not get another job, but stays at home and watches TV in the daytime. He is so alienated he doesn't even belong to one of the two rival Mexican gangs, although he does indulge in street fighting-he ends up fleeing Yakima in fear of retaliation against himself and his family by a humiliated gang member and twenty of his closest bat-wielding friends. Finnegan funds Juan's flight from Yakima and pays for him to travel around different Western cities with his best friend so they can choose a city that appeals to them.

For all Finnegan's concern for Juan, he is unable to write sensibly about the boy's motivations. He casts about for an explanation of Juan's lethargy, seeking answers in racism, assimilation, and class conflict. At one point Finnegan, by his own admission unsuccessfully, tries comparing Juan to Melville's enigmatic protagonist in Bartleby the Scrivener. Juan's final words to Finnegan in the story, explaining why he plans to kick his loving, intelligent girlfriend out of his apartment in Forth Worth so he and his friend can drink more, are "Fuck it. We do what we want."

Finnegan tries to argue that Juan's nihilist behavior is the teen's reaction to the hardening of class lines, a reflection of his sense that no opportunities are available to him. Juan, however, does not face anything like the socio-economic or personal obstacles that confront so many American young people, including others in this book. He attends a reasonably good high school. Police and school officials' racism exists in Yakima, but they are a diffuse presence. His parents are still alive, still married, and not on drugs.

To understand that what is eating Juan must come from inside himself, and not from a new misery-inducing American caste system, one need look no further than Juan's younger brother Ralph. Ralph grew up in exactly the same home Juan did and has the same parents. He lives in the same city, and attends the same schools. At the time of Finnegan's writing, he was a high school honor student already investigating scholarships to the University of Washington. Juan's story is interesting, but what is apparently his own individual pathology does not necessarily contribute to Finnegan's theory of a harsh new social order.

Finnegan's final subject, white sixteen year-old Mindy, plays nearly as unconvincingly as Juan as an example of a helpless young person caught in a pitiless caste system. Mindy lives in a distant suburb of Los Angeles called the Antelope Valley. It is a new development inhabited, as Finnegan learns, by blacks and Latinos who have moved out of the inner city and are eagerly working toward breaking into the middle class, and by whites who feel they are losing out economically and do not experience the privileges enjoyed by other whites. Most families have two working parents or only one parent who is a working mother. The commute to LA from the Valley is over two hours long, so adults are absent from the suburb from seven in the morning until at least seven at night. This combination of racial differences and lack of adult supervision has nurtured a bumper crop of young white racist skinheads. Mindy, a high school dropout who briefly joined with and continues to date her local skinheads is Finnegan's "native guide" through the bizarre suburban landscape of The Skinhead Bible, crystal meth tweakers, and ignorant adolescent debates on the roles of blacks, Jews, and Hitler in world history.

Finnegan places Mindy's story last because he says he found her "apocalyptic" environment more disturbing than the others. He believes Mindy and her peers are reacting to their perceived lack of opportunity by indulging in white supremacism and other nihilist teen pursuits. However, as any recent graduate of a suburban public high school can confirm, the raves, skinheads, tattoos, and straight-edgedness that shock Finnegan are all banal features of white suburban teenage life. Mindy's story must have seemed most upsetting to Finnegan not because teenage boys' desire to wear steel-toed boots and beat people up is visceral evidence of a Cold New World, but because Mindy herself is the most fragile and hurt of all Finnegan's subjects. Her problems seem to have begun years earlier, when her father died suddenly in a tragic accident. Mindy does not seem to have recovered, and her strange, irresponsible behavior-offering herself as "property of the Nazi Low Riders," experimenting with various religions, drinking heavily, and using methamphetamines-is most easily explicable as acting-out of grief.

In Mindy's epic, misguided search for a surrogate father figure, she at one point skips a full week of work in order to stay home and watch the televised trial of a twenty-one year-old skinhead. She begins a jailhouse correspondence, expressing admiration for his "commitment to his [neo-Nazi] beliefs," which he expressed by murdering an interracial couple. Mindy loses her job, but in exchange she has gained the attention of a paternal figure.

Mindy reveals more intimate and embarrassing details of her life to Finnegan, including her drug use and an abortion, than his other subjects. It is very sad that Finnegan published all this information using Mindy's real first and last names, apparently without thinking that she revealed more to him than an emotionally healthy, undamaged girl would have. The journalist who suddenly came into her life wanting to learn all about her probably struck Mindy as someone very much like the father she had been searching for, in whom she could confide. To Finnegan, Mindy seemed so unhappy that she simply had to confirm his idea that today's deprived young people are caged in their unfortunate lots in life by a cruel, newly hardened society. That her grim prospects might have resulted from her destructive way of dealing with her grief, rather than of larger social forces, seems not to have occurred to him.

A third teen subject contradicts Finnegan's thesis in the opposite fashion, by succeeding against those odds Finnegan insists have become newly insurmountable. Terry, a young black man living in New Haven, works hard at a job folding boxes for a local restaurant. Soon however, he is introduced by a friend to the $1000-a-week business of drug dealing. Terry and his business associates work six days a week, sometimes pulling all-nighters preparing their product. Terry explains his conversion from box-folding to cocaine-selling saying he felt peer pressure to be able to give expensive gifts to girls and toss money around.

Terry feels other, more serious pressures as well. His high school is chaotic and sometimes dangerous. A bloody drive-by shooting occurs while Finnegan visits Terry's school. As a young black man, Terry is the object of police persecution. At one point, Finnegan follows him on a ridiculous journey through the criminal justice system for a crime he did not commit.

Terry's worst pressure comes from his mother's drug addiction. The home she provides is unheated and dangerous. She occasionally kicks Terry out of the house. After Terry is forced to stop dealing, Finnegan sees him through more tangles with the courts and a few false starts in programs such as the Job Corps, but Terry's unstable home life confines him only to menial jobs. Finally, Finnegan goes home to New York to write the story, certain he's come away with evidence that poor young blacks like Terry are trapped in inner-city poverty.

However, there's a coda to Terry's story. On the last page of his narrative, Finnegan recounts a phone call from Terry, who left New Haven to start over again in Detroit, where he was free of associations with the drug trade and his old reputation with neighborhood gangs. Terry tells Finnegan that he has been working in a nursing home complex's kitchens and has already been promoted to general manager. He adds that he plans to open a restaurant of his own. Finnegan, unable to find evidence of a Cold New World in Terry's Horatio Alger story, can only shake his head in wonder. He does not offer an an explanation for the young man's defeat of what the book alleges are impossible odds.

Lanee, a young black woman who is Finnegan's second and most convincingly oppressed subject, lives in the isolated piney woods of East Texas' San Augustin County. Lanee works long, grueling days in a local chicken-slaughtering factory, a job gruesome enough to make her remember her childhood sharecropping work with fondness. There is no other major employer in the county because it is too sparsely populated and poor to attract even a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, let alone a big employer like a Wal-mart or a prison. Existing county government jobs go to whites, as do any bank loans sufficient to start a business of one's own.

Lanee's best hope is probably to move out of San Augustin, but this option would be an extremely difficult one for her to pursue. She has received a shoddy education and, as Finnegan notes early in the chapter, she and everyone else in her family speaks in dialect. One of Lanee's relatives self-consciously asks and Finnegan translates, "What we're speaking down here, Bill, it's not really English, is it?" Lanee's story is by far the most heart-rending, her situation the most imprisoning and the most genuinely the result solely of outside forces larger than Lanee herself. However, while Finnegan effectively shows that Lanee's world is cold, he can hardly suggest that it is new. Her family has been trapped by vicious racism and slavery for hundreds of years.

Finnegan devotes an unusual amount of space in Lanee's story to her peppery mother, Laverne, whose sharp comments about his fascination with poor black people seem to have kept him awake at night. Finnegan's sensitivity to Laverne's remarks reveals why he explains Juan and Mindy's mostly personal problems in terms of large-scale social and economic factors, and why he does not try to resolve the matter of Terry's successful bootstrap-pulling. Finnegan is worried that he does not have enough in common with his subjects. He does not want to appear to be a wealthy white journalist who penetrates deep into the jungles of darkest Mozambique or darkest Dixwell to author Orientalist studies of people with whom he has nothing in common. He recoils from criticizing his subjects as individuals, because such criticism might make him seem to be an unsympathetic and judgmental outsider. Instead, he lays blame solely on broad socio-economic forces.

With the possible exception of Lanee, however, finding fault with the system at large is too facile to do justice to the young people Finnegan writes about. His evasion of discussing the role each one plays in determining his or her own future only makes him seem unable both to face reality about his subjects' personal failings and to acknowledge their accomplishments. Readers are left to crash through Finnegan's superficial fault-of-the-system explanations and come up with viable explanations on their own. Disturbingly, the stories are most simply understood as parables straight out of a freshman Republican's campaign speech: Terry is good because he works hard, Mindy and Juan are bad because they don't; opportunity and life chances are purely dependent on what the individual makes of them.

But Finnegan could have made subtler, more sympathetic interpretations of his subjects. Previous writers in Finnegan's genre have argued that very poor people who live most of their lives isolated from the mainstream workforce and from people of more privileged backgrounds live in a separate culture of poverty. Living solely in this culture leaves them unable to learn the behaviors that would gain them access to higher education or permanent well paid jobs. This argument is sometimes used by conservative thinkers in a way that can seem like encrypted racism. However, many liberal writers, notably Wilson, have embraced the culture-of-poverty argument as a sympathetic explanation for what can otherwise be mystifyingly irresponsible behavior.

Finnegan, however, resists the culture-of-poverty line of thinking. He makes several direct references to the theory in the course of Cold New World. Each time he rejects it as making poor people seem "exotic" and ignorant. Very likely Finnegan rejects the culture of poverty for the same reason he rejects examining his subjects' personal accountability: he fears seeming arrogant or racist.

Finnegan was reckless to write something as confused as Cold New World about such a sensitive topic as the characters of poor people. Three-quarters of the way through the book, I began seriously to entertain the notion that Bill Bennett or some conservative think tank might secretly be paying Finnegan to sow seeds of doubt among his white liberal readership about maintaining sympathy for less fortunate people. I honestly believe Finnegan could have found young people out there would would have proved his point. For instance, he could probably have shown any of the young women Terry leaves behind with his babies in New Haven to be stuck fast in poverty due to larger forces such as punitive welfare changes or racism.

Despite the massive flaws in Finnegan's thinking about his subjects, Cold New World is very readable and does provide interesting individual insights into the lives of different groups of poor young people. The descriptions of Lanee's Faulknerian environment and of Terry's hardworking career in cocaine dealing were all surprising and fascinating. The book may have a useful consciousness-raising effect for readers who can suspend their disbelief along with Finnegan. It is not hard to feel sympathy for all these kids - none of them has an easy or pleasant life. The book's failing is simply that their lives cannot prove Finnegan's overly simplistic thesis.