Gator Stare

This is a true story, not a lie. I'm at this loading dock in Miami one night a few years ago and am standing beside my truck at the dock while the guys are doing the loading. There's a slight slope beside me for about ten feet down into a drainage waterway which is about twenty feet across, full of dark, dirty, greenish water. This strange feeling of danger comes over me, a feeling that something is wrong here, just totally absorbing my attention. I look down into the edge of the water and there is this alligator, about twelve feet away, just staring very steadily at me. All I can see at first are the eyes and the end of the nose, and then I can just make out the head and its front legs which look a little like fins slanting down into the water. I stare back at it, neither of us flinching or blinking or moving for what seems like about five to ten minutes, when finally it very slowly swims off to the right.

That story brings me to Thomas Frank's book, What's The Matter with Kansas?, of which I've thought often since it first came out in 2004.

The question of the book was, Why are low-wage, unemployed, underemployed, exploited, uninsured, ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed poor people out there demonstrating for, and voting for, politicians who demand even greater income disparity - lower wages and benefits for the poor, and more breaks favoring wealthy people?

These poorly-paid people take great offense when you tell them that they are voting against their own interests, and that rich people are not only better off than any time in history but that most are not even asking for these breaks.

I've heard many explanations of what the matter is with Kansas, and my best guess is that more than one of them are true – that it is "over-determined," in psychoanalytic language, rather than having just one reason. Some of the explanations I have heard are: low information, too much exclusive exposure to right-wing radio and Fox News, strong self-reliance and other personal virtues including love of freedom, hatred of the “librul” enemy, “Stockholm Syndrome,” distrust of government but trust of local politicians who are nonetheless 'owned,' fundamentalist/radical Protestantism, provincialism or lack of understanding of the complexity of the larger world which they are necessarily but not obviously a part. I do not doubt that there are further explanations being offered.

I have had a part-time big-truck driving job during the past year for which I get paid about $12 an hour with no benefits, which is the same dollar-amount pay I got when I first started driving in 1988, twenty-five years ago and with a health care benefit. The dollar-amount pay for this skilled, odd-hours, highly-dangerous work is the same as it was twenty-five years ago.

I calculate using the Consumer Price Index that in real value terms I now receive exactly one-half the real pay that I received twenty-five years ago, now with no benefits, an “at-will” clause, vastly more crowded highways, fewer parking places, more rules/inspections/tests, more contempt and more danger. This loss does not include the mortgage-banking and Libor swindles.

Recently, I have talked with some workers about this and what I get is silence. No visible, no detectable reaction. The sides of the face, the mouth, the cheeks, the eyes don't move, but I know something is going on in there. It's the “gator stare” and it has come often to me lately that this image is what I have been picking up increasingly since society went consciously, programmatically, selfish and predatory after the Viet-Nam war.

Strange but delightful to say, I'm also finding more and more people whose smiles, understanding, humor, and whose very existence, near or far away, are protective and redemptive. There seems to be some way in which hard times bring out something good; some way in which darkness makes the stars shine brighter.