A Voice for the Left-Behind
If America is truly better for having won a war, a large part of the gain may turn out to be a new candor in public discourse. Early in his presidency, George Bush proclaimed this a nation with more will than wallet. Bush had it backwards, and now there’s no pretending that he didn’t.
“Personal gestures. Profound actions,” said the president, “sometimes life-changing in their effect. These are the works of men and women who know that prosperity without purpose means nothing.”
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The president knows noblesse oblige when he sees it. What he didn’t see was his own duty. Lafeyette Walton–victim of circumstances that a president of the United States might actually be able to do something about–lived in terror of his life, in housing so misbegotten that when it was brand-new in the 50s, a visiting Russian housing official stared in astonishment at the cinder-block walls and said, “We would be thrown off our jobs in Moscow if we left unfinished walls like this.”
Having taken Lafeyette and his younger brother Pharoah fishing in northern Michigan the past three summers, Kotlowitz knows the limits to such good deeds. “As we got closer to Chicago, you could hear Pharoah’s stutter come back,” he told us, recalling the first of those trips. “They had dreams the night before they came back about being in a shoot-out.”
Yet all the attention came to nothing. “Politically,” Kotlowitz said of his article, “it fell on deaf ears. Things certainly haven’t gotten better since 1987. . . . You look at this incredible ability to mobilize in the Persian Gulf and the inspired leadership that President Bush gives the country to free Kuwait–you can’t even argue that it’s a democracy. But when it comes to domestic programs about the poor in our central cities–absolutely nothing.”
Every generation Kotlowitz describes at the Henry Horner Homes is worse off than the preceding. Lafeyette’s grandparents were working people from the south who moved in when the project was spanking new, and they thanked God for sturdy walls and reliable heat. Lafeyette’s mother LaJoe is beaten down, but she still has hopes of moving her family out (an ambition Kotlowitz wants to make possible with revenues from There Are No Children Here). But Lafeyette does not even count on growing up.
The folks back home are traditionally spared such spectacles. And it’s been the rare photograph from the Persian Gulf that shows even a single corpse–an unreality we owe to military censorship as well as to the media’s concern for our stomachs. “We got calls from newspapers all during the war asking us where the war photographs were,” said an Associated Press photo editor. His people weren’t sending him any.
