The End of the Dive Bar on Skid Row

At the Los Angeles Times, "The last call for a skid row era at King Eddy Saloon":

Wire-thin and slumped like a question mark, James Maley nurses a watered-down whiskey at the battered bar inside the King Eddy Saloon. Around him a boisterous crowd presses in. Maley taps a cracked fingernail nervously on his glass and stares warily at the newcomers.

They've come to see novelist John Fante's son, Dan Fante, read at the bar that inspired his father's 1939 classic "Ask the Dust." They're also here to experience skid row's last dive bar before it shuts down for renovations on Sunday.

"If this happened every day, I would never show up," says Maley, who lives in transitional housing a few blocks away.

Other time-worn regulars, many with leathery skin, bad teeth and watchful eyes, nod in agreement. The bar provides home and family for those who have neither. They come for community and to spend what little money they have on plastic pitchers of beer and $2.50 gin and tonics.

When the Fante reading ends, the interlopers quickly disperse.

"There go the slummers," says John Tottenham, a poet who has been coming to the King Eddy since the 1980s.

Chances are the crowds will be back when the bar reopens under new management. The owners plan to use old photos to restore the bar's Midcentury look. They hope to renovate the abandoned speak-easy in the basement and open the bar's windows that are covered by stucco, letting natural light into the place for the first time in decades.

They haven't finalized their plans, but one thing is for sure. Drinks won't come cheap at the new King Eddy.

The bar is located on the corner of 5th and Los Angeles streets in the King Edward Hotel, which was built in 1906 and was a tony destination for visitors to what was once a thriving commercial district. The hotel now provides low-income housing for many of King Eddy's regulars.

The pre-Prohibition era King Eddy is painted black. With neon beer signs providing most of its light, the room is dim and gloomy. Its black-and-white checkered floor is grimy. Plastic beer flags hang from the ceiling and the place smells of stale smoke and disinfectant.

The bar itself, shaped in a square, commands the center of the room, with cracked vinyl banquettes lining the perimeter. A glassed-in smoking space is set off to the side. Behind the bar is a tiny fluorescent-lighted kitchen where prepackaged burgers, pizza and sandwiches are heated in a microwave. A beer and burrito would set a person back only $4.

Next week, Maley and the other dislodged drinkers will have to find another bar, but they face a new downtown landscape of high-end mixology bars, restaurants and Brazilian waxing salons...

Well, it's probably for the better, right? Skid row's the roughest of rough-and-tumble hardscrabble habitats, so cleaning up the place is good policy. But if you're down and out downtown, this kind of gentrification can force a relocation to even more dangerous haunts. It's hard out there on the streets. Hopefully folks can hang on to a little stability and continuity.

Continue reading at the link.

A Migration in Reverse

The most interesting thing about this story is the intense poverty seen in Mexico, where the American kids end up after their illegal immigrant family members get deported.

See, "Caught in the current of reverse migration."

The photos are here, "Teenager’s identity lies on both sides of the border."

Doctors Prescribe Attention Deficit Drugs to Treat Poor Academic Performance, Not A.D.H.D.

Some doctors, that is, according to the New York Times, "Attention Disorder or Not, Pills to Help in School":

CANTON, Ga. — When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall.

The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”

Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance.

It is not yet clear whether Dr. Anderson is representative of a widening trend. But some experts note that as wealthy students abuse stimulants to raise already-good grades in colleges and high schools, the medications are being used on low-income elementary school children with faltering grades and parents eager to see them succeed.

“We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families,” said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, a child mental-health services researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children. “We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.”

Call it the drug abuse spiral model. Affluent kids take drugs and pull ahead that much farther in academic performance, and then, already behind, poor kids, most likely minorities, get hopped up on prescription drugs to catch up. What could go wrong?

More at the link.

And really read it all. Medicaid is paying for it. State-subsidized drug abuse. Man, isn't that something else. It's supposed to be all about "social justice" as well. Progressivism has just f-ked people up by this point. Sad.

Alice O’Connor’s Poverty Knowledge: Intellectual History in Action

I am persistently interested in examples of intellectual history that relate to political history, or more specifically, that demonstrate explicit influence over policy. This is not to say that intellectual history needs such a rationale: intellectual life helps us explain a given historical context, with or without explicit reference to its political influence. But my interests tend to gravitate towards intellectual history’s relation to politics, or what might be called “intellectual history in action” (with a nod towards Kevin Mattson, author of Intellectuals in Action, about early New Left intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams.)

Alice O’Connor’s 2001 book, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, is an excellent model of intellectual history in action. She painstakingly traces how social scientific thinking on poverty—what she terms “poverty knowledge”—was shaped by policy struggles, and how it helped shape those struggles, often in ways not anticipated by poverty scholars.

O’Connor researched and wrote this book in the dark shadow of welfare reform—the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed into law in 1996 by Bill Clinton, who made good on his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” The role intellectuals played in paving the way for Clinton’s welfare legislation acts as a microcosm of O’Connor’s larger argument: however much social scientists objected to how their knowledge was put into practice, they were complicit in policies that hurt the poor. In other words, their knowledge, intentionally or not, provided a rationale for polices that sought to remold the behavior of the poor, rather than attend to the structural inequalities of the US economy—“blame the victim” policymaking. O’Connor states it best:

“Following a well-established pattern in post-Great Society policy analysis, the Clinton administration’s poverty experts had already embraced and defined the parameters of a sweeping welfare reform featuring proposals that promised to change the behavior of poor people while paying little more than rhetorical attention to the problems of low-wage work, rising income inequality, or structural economic change, and none at all to the steadily mounting political disenfranchisement of the postindustrial working class" (3-4).

Social scientists have long debated whether culture or economy is more important in determining poverty. O’Connor traces this intellectual history, recognizing that these two modes of thinking—behavioral and structural—are not mutually exclusive. In the early twentieth century, poverty thinkers, taking their cues from the Chicago School of Sociology, fretted over growing “social disorganization” in northern cities, which they attributed to the gap between rural patterns of living, brought north by black migrants, and the grim realities of living in the industrial city. But many of these theorists saw economic policies as the solution to the supposedly degenerate culture of the ghetto dweller. In other words, job creation and higher wages would curtail bad behavior, such as alcoholism, prostitution, illegitimacy, and other vices. (Touré Reed, in his book Not Alms But Opportunity, recently reviewed here, demonstrates how such a framework shaped the Urban League.)

More recent thinkers have combined similar cultural description of the ghetto with calls for structural change, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his infamous Moynihan Report (1965), and William Julius Wilson, in his widely read and controversial book, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987). The two chapters of O’Connor’s book most interesting to me (Chapter 8: “Poverty’s Culture Wars”; and Chapter 10: “Dependency, the ‘Underclass,’ and a New Welfare ‘Consensus’”) deal with the wide-ranging debates that followed the publication of Moynihan and Wilson’s defining works, and how the policy world responded.

It turns out that, put into practice, Moynihan and Wilson’s calls for economic policy changes went unheeded, not surprisingly, while their descriptions of ghetto life were accentuated in the national discussion. Rather than Moynihan’s “case for national action”—the subtitle of his report—people keyed in on his description of a “tangle of pathology,” a phrase he used to describe the culture of poor black urbanites, a culture he rooted in the black, matriarchal family structure. And rather than Wilson’s calls to create jobs, raise wages, and otherwise stem the negative effects of deindustrialization, an increasingly conservative political climate led people to focus on the culture of “underclass,” the 1980s metaphor for poor black urbanites.

As O’Connor sees it, the biggest problem with the type of poverty theorizing done by the likes of Moynihan and Wilson—with a focus on the bad behavior of poor, often black, people—is that there are no left or liberal policy solutions to bad culture. Thus, the logical policy conclusion to a scholarly emphasis on ghetto behavior is that government cannot solve the problems of poverty, unless by way of authoritarian behavior modification. In fact, this is the argument made by Charles Murray, in his celebrated Losing Ground (1984). It is also the logic of Clinton (and Gingrich’s) welfare reform. There we have some of the consequences of liberal poverty knowledge.

AH

Alice O’Connor’s Poverty Knowledge: Intellectual History in Action

I am persistently interested in examples of intellectual history that relate to political history, or more specifically, that demonstrate explicit influence over policy. This is not to say that intellectual history needs such a rationale: intellectual life helps us explain a given historical context, with or without explicit reference to its political influence. But my interests tend to gravitate towards intellectual history’s relation to politics, or what might be called “intellectual history in action” (with a nod towards Kevin Mattson, author of Intellectuals in Action, about early New Left intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills and William Appleman Williams.)

Alice O’Connor’s 2001 book, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History, is an excellent model of intellectual history in action. She painstakingly traces how social scientific thinking on poverty—what she terms “poverty knowledge”—was shaped by policy struggles, and how it helped shape those struggles, often in ways not anticipated by poverty scholars.

O’Connor researched and wrote this book in the dark shadow of welfare reform—the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, signed into law in 1996 by Bill Clinton, who made good on his promise to “end welfare as we know it.” The role intellectuals played in paving the way for Clinton’s welfare legislation acts as a microcosm of O’Connor’s larger argument: however much social scientists objected to how their knowledge was put into practice, they were complicit in policies that hurt the poor. In other words, their knowledge, intentionally or not, provided a rationale for polices that sought to remold the behavior of the poor, rather than attend to the structural inequalities of the US economy—“blame the victim” policymaking. O’Connor states it best:

“Following a well-established pattern in post-Great Society policy analysis, the Clinton administration’s poverty experts had already embraced and defined the parameters of a sweeping welfare reform featuring proposals that promised to change the behavior of poor people while paying little more than rhetorical attention to the problems of low-wage work, rising income inequality, or structural economic change, and none at all to the steadily mounting political disenfranchisement of the postindustrial working class" (3-4).

Social scientists have long debated whether culture or economy is more important in determining poverty. O’Connor traces this intellectual history, recognizing that these two modes of thinking—behavioral and structural—are not mutually exclusive. In the early twentieth century, poverty thinkers, taking their cues from the Chicago School of Sociology, fretted over growing “social disorganization” in northern cities, which they attributed to the gap between rural patterns of living, brought north by black migrants, and the grim realities of living in the industrial city. But many of these theorists saw economic policies as the solution to the supposedly degenerate culture of the ghetto dweller. In other words, job creation and higher wages would curtail bad behavior, such as alcoholism, prostitution, illegitimacy, and other vices. (Touré Reed, in his book Not Alms But Opportunity, recently reviewed here, demonstrates how such a framework shaped the Urban League.)

More recent thinkers have combined similar cultural description of the ghetto with calls for structural change, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his infamous Moynihan Report (1965), and William Julius Wilson, in his widely read and controversial book, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987). The two chapters of O’Connor’s book most interesting to me (Chapter 8: “Poverty’s Culture Wars”; and Chapter 10: “Dependency, the ‘Underclass,’ and a New Welfare ‘Consensus’”) deal with the wide-ranging debates that followed the publication of Moynihan and Wilson’s defining works, and how the policy world responded.

It turns out that, put into practice, Moynihan and Wilson’s calls for economic policy changes went unheeded, not surprisingly, while their descriptions of ghetto life were accentuated in the national discussion. Rather than Moynihan’s “case for national action”—the subtitle of his report—people keyed in on his description of a “tangle of pathology,” a phrase he used to describe the culture of poor black urbanites, a culture he rooted in the black, matriarchal family structure. And rather than Wilson’s calls to create jobs, raise wages, and otherwise stem the negative effects of deindustrialization, an increasingly conservative political climate led people to focus on the culture of “underclass,” the 1980s metaphor for poor black urbanites.

As O’Connor sees it, the biggest problem with the type of poverty theorizing done by the likes of Moynihan and Wilson—with a focus on the bad behavior of poor, often black, people—is that there are no left or liberal policy solutions to bad culture. Thus, the logical policy conclusion to a scholarly emphasis on ghetto behavior is that government cannot solve the problems of poverty, unless by way of authoritarian behavior modification. In fact, this is the argument made by Charles Murray, in his celebrated Losing Ground (1984). It is also the logic of Clinton (and Gingrich’s) welfare reform. There we have some of the consequences of liberal poverty knowledge.

AH