Being Invisible in Death

Waking Up Poor in the United States of America
I worked my ass off for 35 years in the advertising game on Madison "By God" Avenue, to boot. I've worked for the biggies, from Time Inc., CBS, Viacom, a Big 8 accounting firm (they've all so merged during globalization these firms are now mostly "fallen flags," a railroad term meaning a railroad that once was a major road no longer in existence. It comes from an olden day when each railroad had its own flag that carried the road's emblem on it), and several pharmaceutical advertising firms. But during the globalization of the world in the 90s, advertising went merger nuts and so many of the smaller, single-owner agencies that were fun to work for were offered umbrella protection by larger agencies, like BBD&O (now so mergered finding the original company is like tracing a race horse's pedigree), Ogilvy & Mather, J. Walter Thompson. One umbrella that emerged out of all of this global merging was a monolithic monster called OmniCom, which is advertizo for Omnipotent Company, dig? That also stands for Omnipresent Company, too. Think of all the Omni- words; this company is all of them.

You see, what these mergers intended I think did happened. All of the companies I have worked for depended on market share for their existence. Mergers were simply creating larger market shares out of smaller market shares, until, well, hell, the US markets were pretty well saturated; the market shares so saturated they stayed pretty consistent and easily predictable. The type of advertising had to change effectively when the market share controllers--the Big Boys--decided the 21st century would be the global century and they saw a wide-open Wild West of potential markets and world market shares out there for the taking; screw the US markets. And when advertising went global, there was no need for old-fashioned US-market sharing experts like my ass, so after 35 years in big-time advertising, my poor butt was hustled out into a Madison Avenue gutter with my career in the toilet, and I was too f-ing old to even think about a lower-level reentry attack. Free-lancing was out, too. These big umbrella monopolies did away with free-lancers. Oh, yeah, you can still get free-lance work but you have to incorporate now and actually become a business to get the big money jobs, which means you ain't an individual anymore but a company, which further means you got estimated earnings taxes, regular Schedule C taxes, also state, county, and city taxes and FICA problems and 401K considerations. Just as the new advertising is called "disruptive," you've gotta disrupt your life in a way you're just too damned old and independently anti-slavery to go through such Mr. Charlie overregulated bullshit.

From Easy Street to the Back Alleys
I used to be welcomed with red carpet treatment in most office or apartment buildings in the country. "Yessir, Mister Charles, sir. Here, let my boy take that luggage. Here, let my boy park your Beamer. Yessir, yessir, yessir. And, sir, that will be on which of your many credit cards? Credit Suisse, oh, sir, highly recommended in the upper circles...blah, blah, blah." That was the kind of deep-crack asskissing treatment I once got the minute I got out of my ex-cop-driven or Russian immigrant-driven limo. Now, though things have changed. Now, that I lost my corporate identity, I don't have enough ID to get me to West Orange, New Jersey, just 30 miles straight west of me. "You need two photo IDs, sir, sorry, and one of those would be your company ID." "But I used to work in this building, come on, Jorge, you remember me, the big tipper?" "Sorry, sir, building rules, 2 photo IDs, one should be a company ID."

Rents are suddenly just going up astronomically every day. Apartments are selling for prices I never knew possible; to buy an apartment now outright averages 1 million dollars. I can't believe how many millions of dollars individuals are now making whereas only 20 years ago, $100,000 a year was like being a CEO. Now, if you don't entry-level at one hundred grand you're chicken feed in a huge chicken pen and are going to get eaten up alive. Prices of goods are going up every day. I have eaten in restaurants most of my adult life; I can't afford to eat at a McDonald's now restaurant prices have gotten so out-of-reach for me. Suddenly, I'm told to go back to the alley and maybe the scum back there can help me get a crust of bread or maybe a bone in my bowl of stone soup. I'm now poor. That's my dilemma. I was on top for 35 years and now, I'm slidin' toward the very flat bottom of the job market barrel. Oh the Now. How deceitful it is. How gloriously wonderful things look when you head to bed and then how extraordiarily things can change by the time you're scrounging for breakfast in the garbage cans the next morning. Jesus, it's getting manic, and your head starts pounding, and your heart is overbeating, and your lungs are hyperventilating, and the anger of frustration is beginning to boil up in you to an overflowing gush of F-ing explicatives against God, Mom, the Flag, and certainly the rest of humanity.

Even a safety net I was depending on ain't comin' together for another 2 years NOW. So, here's me situation, mateys: I have to somehow support myself for the next two years starting right now at a clip of about $30,000 a year, pretty much a bottom-line survival salary (it comes from the word "salt") in this big city, and I'm starting out on this quest with 49 bucks in the bank and not one pot to piss in; plus the forecast on my radar is for continuing heavy rain during the fullest of full moons with not one f-ing rainbow predicted for any of those moons as far ahead as my sentient nature can see. In other words, I'm gonna be living under a constant full moon for the next 730 days and the only outlet for my exacerbations is ululation--growling from a deep-throated growl up and out into a Yowling that can be heard across the jungle roof for miles upon desolate miles. [An interesting aside, to me: in the dictionary under "ululant" is an quoted use of the word: "dark wasteland...ululant with bitter wind." It's a usage attributed to Rudi Blesh. I'll a man or woman a small bottle of the best if they know who Rudi Blesh is. I remember him because I was into jazz since I was old enough to welcome music into my psyche--when's that? At birth? How wonderful it must be to have one's writing and name as an example of a word in the dictionary. Though how many people look up the word "ululant" in their lives. Sorry, Rudi, only a weird wolf-attituded man like me would get to see your name in such a privileged setting.]

In order to assuage my own feelings of being poor, I checked myself out against the rest of the human world poor. Just how poor am I and what are my chances of making it by hoofing for a living in the gutter of a main street in good ole Today's America?

Here's some facts I found at www.globalissues.org

These will thrill your soul:

Fact 1: 0.13% of the world's population (I'm using 6 billion) control 25% of the world's assets (from 2004 statistics)

Fact 2: 20% of the world's population consume 86% of the world's goods

Fact 3: 50% of the world's population (3 billion) live on less than $2 a day

Fact 4: The GDP of the poorest 48 countries (25% of all countries) is less than the wealth of the
world's 3 richest people combined

Fact 5: 1 billion people in the world cannot read or write

Fact 6: 1.7 million children a year die because they are too poor to live

According to a UNICEF report: Thirty thousand children die each day due to poverty. "[They] die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death."

Fact 7: Economic growth rates are declining worldwide in every economy

Fact 8: 12% of the world's population uses 85% of the world's drinkable water (none of this
12% is in a Third World country)

Fact 9: There are 15 million children in the world orphaned by HIV/AIDS--that's equal to
the children populations of Germany and England

Fact 10: The World Bank defines the poverty line at people making $1.00 a day. There are
1.3 billion people in the world living at that level at the moment, according to the
World Bank (remember, Paul Wolfowitz runs the World Bank)

Here Are Some Global Priorities (what we spend our wealth on)
--In the US, we spend 8 billion a year on cosmetics
--In Japan, they spend 35 billion a year on "business entertainment"
--In Europe, they spend 50 billion a year on cigarettes
--In the world, we spend 400 billion a year on drugs and narcotics
--In the world, we spend 780 billion a year on military spending (1998 figs. surely over 1 trillion
by now)

According to some figures I have here, for 13 billion dollars a year, we could give everyone on earth basic health and nutrition care.

Henry George
Henry George was a printer who lived in San Francisco at the time right after the Gold Rush when San Francisco was rising from a tent city to a metropolis. George observed a phenomenon he couldn't really understand: why in a city so full of wealth was there such abyssmal poverty. Why in a land like the United States was there any poverty at all? As a result, this self-taught philosopher/thinker wrote one of the great American books of all time, Progress and Poverty. The first trade edition of this book came out in 1880 published by D. Appleton and Co. From the publication of this book and the then popular "single tax" theory it proposed, Henry George rose from a state of poverty in San Francisco to become the third most popular person in the US, next to Mark Twain and Thomas A. Edison, at the peak of his popularity. He ran for mayor of New York City as a Single Taxer and almost got elected. His daughter, Anna, married a man named de Mille and had a daughter named Agnes. And Agnes de Mille writes a very well-done introduction to the 100th Anniversary edition of the publication of her grandfather's great book. In it, Miss de Mille writes, "These multinationals [corporations] are not American any more. Transcending nations, they serve not their country's interests, but their own. They manipulate our tax policies to help themselves. They determine our statecraft. They are autonomous. They do not need to coin money or raise armies. They use ours. ... In the meantime, the bureaucracy, both federal and local ... legislate themselves mounting power never originally intended for our government and exert a ubiquitous influence which can be and often is corrupt. ... George wrote this extraordinary treatise a hundred years ago [1879; Agnes wrote this introduction in 1979]. His ideas stand: he who makes should have; he who saves should enjoy; what the community produces belongs to the community for communal uses; and God's earth, all of it, is the right of the people who inhabit the earth." Agnes de Mille, Introduction to 100th anniversary publication of Henry George's Progress and Poverty, published by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, New York, 1979.

thegrowlingpo'boy
for The Daily Growler