Unbearable Dreariness of Being Nick Coleman

Elder from Fraters said it well yesterday:

After my latest lengthy lambasting of Nick Coleman yesterday, I was left in a bit of a funk. What was the point anyway? How many times have I pounded on this worthless bastard in the last few months (please don't remind me)? How many hours have I spent dissecting his pompous pontificating? As Saint Paul likes to say, that's time we're not getting back.

Shouldn't I be doing something more productive? Something worthwhile? Something that would mark my all too short time here on earth for the good? Is this really all there is?

Truly a great question. One needs to wonder.

Nick Coleman is a constant irritant, of course; back in grade school, he must have been one of the kids that tattled on those of us who were playing tackle football in the far corner of the playground; today, he's a joyless scold, so seemingly distraught by the injustices of life that he's incapable of enjoying his incredibly posh-yet-well-paid job, his new family, his too-bootylicious-for-him second wife...

No, in Nick's world, it's all about one thing: the eternal poor against the eternal rich.

The problem, in Coleman's world, is that they are precisely that; eternal.

That may be one of the reasons Coleman has always rubbed me the wrong way - in his world, the poor and working class are a big fraternity, united in their eternal struggle against the "big cheeses" that swarm just outside the city limits, patrolling gated streets in Lexi with assault rifles, upending public buses and slashing wages to the plucky poor.

What garbage.

I say this because I was poor. Incredibly poor. How poor?

Not just "I was a poor college kid" poor, although I certainly had no spare change when I was in school. Not "I was a starving artist"-poor, either, although when I was single and in my early and mid twenties I never made much (but never spent much either).

No, I'm talking about the first three years of my married life, way back when. When I and my ex-wife were married, I was working part-time at a radio station and part-time spinning records in bars. She was a waitress. On our 1991 income tax forms - the year my daughter was born - we made $18,000. Together. I was working hard trying to find my next real radio job, in the midst of a recession and the Limbaugh revolution, when a lot of talk stations that used to hire 27-year-old kids to work mid-days for $24,000 decided to carry Limbaugh for free instead.

The pregnancy, and the birth, and then another. More job churn - all of our jobs tanked, and I was working for $6.50 per hour as a legal document coder, and my wife-at-the-time was pregnant again. On the day my son was born, we got eviction and power shutoff notices simultaneously.

I can remember more horrifyingly stressful days in my life - actually only one. At one point, we were less than 24 hours away from having to find a homeless shelter for two adults, a 12 year old, a toddler and an infant.

We got some help - the Salvation Army helped with the power, and we worked out an 11th hour deal with my landlord. Six weeks later, I got my first technical writing job, which started us toward the middle class, where by the grace of God I've managed to stay.

I was nervous last year, of course; four months of complete unemployment followed by five more of hand-to-mouth contracting brought back a few bits of deja vu as some of the sights, sounds, smells and nervous tics of poverty came back to me; the taste of government cheese; the monotone of the unemployment worker; the smell of just-about-to-turn produce at the budget grocery; the heft of the letters and the background noises on the phone calls from bill collectors.

And I remembered - not that I'd ever forgotten - what it was that I loved most, back on my first climb out of poverty in 1993-94; not having that existential panic; not wondering if my kids would grow up thinking that this was normal, the way life was supposed to be for them; not having to endure the condescending nods of the government workers, the unemployment and medical assistance and food shelf workers and bus drivers who treat you, endlessly, like human product warehoused within the city limits. Not having to climb up the steps onto that farging bus, listen to the driver's curt grunt, to endure the slow, cold in winter, hot in summer, teeth-rattling, diesel-stench ride, sitting next to people who at best were just like you, desperate to get out, to move up, to have one less worry tomorrow than they did today. Or people who at worst were the sort of people you looked at and felt the gnawing at the back of your skull - "Am I turning into that? The poverty-pudgy guy with the porkpie hat and the vacant, glazed stare at the passing storefronts? The supernaturally-alert bipolar, walking like she was pursued, eyes never blinking, darting back and forth like a hawk on espresso? And then, to add insult to injury, having to read the paternalistic, eternal condescenscion of the likes of Nick Coleman, who drive in and stand around the food shelves and cry their crocodile tears and drive back to their homes in North Oaks and Edina

People like Nick Coleman and Steve Perry think that a mass transit system is the hallmark of a significant metro area; that it forces all strata of a city to rub shoulders a couple times a day, bringing some sort of magical cross-pollination, as if prosperous suburbanites need to be exposed to some fictional nobility inherent in poverty, to be yelled at by schizophrenics and walk through puddles of urine to be truly well-rounded people (or well-rounded "big cheeses", in Coleman's curiously pre-1950 parlance).

Sorry, Nick. Try again, Steve. I got plenty well-rounded - in ways you can not imagine. Most of the people on those buses, the ones with whom you imbue so much fictional, specious nobility, would cut your throats to drive to work at their own speed, to not be dependent on the wills and agendas and schedules of others, to not have to endure the humiliation of being represented in the public forum by your impotent bloviation.

That, I can remember like it was yesterday.

Posted by Mitch at April 22, 2004 05:05 AM