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by Christopher Ketcham

My father, who just turned 70, called from the mountains the other day. He’d been watching television again, always a bad sign.

My father is an engineer and city planner and tends toward the macro view of things, the big structural view over time, looking at the life of cities, how civilizations organize in cities, much the way geologists look at rock. In retirement, he’s been reading about the coming collapse of the United States due to debt and waste and war and greed – the books pile up on his shelves – and is increasingly radicalized by the macro conclusion that the country is screwed. “Why aren’t the young people out protesting? Why aren’t they going nuts over what’s happening? Why aren’t they taking a gun to the heads of these fucking CEOs?”

“Busy thinking about Max Jackoff,” I offered. “You know that in the late 20th century he was probably one of the world’s most influential pop singers” – this last phrase I imagine ringing in my father’s ears about as eloquently as cud in a cow’s mouth.

I’ve been lucky enough to have old people around me, mostly my parents and their friends, who are growing more cogently contrarian in mind every year their bodies grow more infirm. If Michael Jackson was beloved and is now mourned by tens of millions of Americans, then my father is sure to disagree. I might venture to craft a probability equation of his thinking: the more people gathered around any one totem in the zeitgeist, the more likely my father is to consider it a waste of time. This thought process is not out of spite or fury or disgust, but born, I’d guess, of the simple reckoning that most popular culture these days, being popular, isn’t worth a shit on a stick.

I’ve gotten to thinking recently of another old man, a friend of the family named A.J. Centola, who went homeless a few years back – the garret he lived in was the top floor of a brownstone converted to condos during the real estate bubble – and ended up sleeping in my dad’s Brooklyn basement for six months. A.J. and I used to sit around gabbing on afternoons, walking around the old neighborhood, Carroll Gardens, where he grew up during the last Great War, when it was an insular little place of Irish and Italians who hated each other, and merchant marines in boarding houses, and dockworkers, ironworkers, grocers, and freelance laborers like him.

Losing his garret, losing the context of the place where he’d worked as an electrician and carpenter for 60 years – he’d never left Carroll Gardens – was agony for the guy, and it was made worse because he was a smart man, he’d read his history, he knew what was happening was part of a transformation of class throughout the neighborhood, the wiping away of the class without money. At that time, in the spring of 2002, all sorts of new and expensive bars and restaurants were going up, places that sold pain au raisin in the morning. And in the summer evenings the restaurants filled with well-dressed crowds of the young. A.J. lived on cigarettes and vitamins, ate maybe once a day, a pizza or a chicken roll or a cheese roll at Sal’s Pizzeria, which had been at the same spot since the War. He walked with a pained-looking half-hunch and he suffered tremors – he said he was like a Jack Russell terrier, too much unused energy, it shot through his limbs and made him shake, but I thought it was coming Parkinson’s.

 

“Now we got the Television Watchers, the Cell Phone Talkers. Whole class of men and women who watch TV or some version of it, like this Internet thing – stay attached to little machines all day long. A lifetime. Sad: free-thinking goes in the toilet. The Television Watchers start thinking alike, looking alike, buying alike, and they don’t know why. I’m harsh. I don’t forgive the TV for lying so much. Some people do. Ever thought of the rise of the television and that funny little coincidence of the Cold War and the National Security State? National Security Act is signed in 1947. OSS becomes CIA. Five years later – less – first televisions go into mass production, mass distributed. The Television Watcher is born while the state expands. Enormous increases in defense funding, war funding. A standing army is built unlike any you ever seen in the history of the country. Expansion of the secrecy of affairs: the things that can be held from people now include billions of dollars, all that black spending. State grows and grows and grows, and so do the Television Watchers. Cold War was the worst thing to ever happen to this country.”

When A.J. was thrown out of his little garret in July of 2001, he did not exist on paper, he was an unknown quantity to the earmarkers of the state, and he liked this fact. But it posed a question: the owner of the building, an old man who happened to realize in the bubble economy that he had a pile of money in the four floors of his brownstone, offered A.J. a cut of the proceeds from the sale. The owner had known A.J. most of his life and felt bad about evicting him. Total cut was $50,000 – for A.J., an enormous sum. But to receive the gift meant A.J. would have to acquiesce to an existence on paper; the money couldn’t just be handed over in cash, it would wait for him in a bank account, and to claim the account, he needed identification. So how to get the money? A.J. had never paid taxes, never voted, never been fingerprinted or had a credit card or a driver’s license or a social security card or any official identification. “I lived under the radar, and it’s going to stay that way,” he said. “I’ve seen enough of what the government can do when it gets its hands on your identity. You give that up, you might as well march down to the police station and tell ‘em to get it over with and arrest you now, and they’ll say ‘Well, why?’ and you’ll say, ‘You got my identity, you’ll find a reason to arrest me soon enough.’”

“You need I.D. to live in this world,” I told him. I had the odd feeling saying it that I was actually a tape-recorded message, and I immediately apologized.

“This world,” he said. “Which world? I’ve known people my whole life and we never knew each other’s last names, and we were good friends and kept it that way. The people who weren’t your closest and most intimate didn’t want to know those things and I knew there was something as knowing too much about a person, and that could get you killed. There were people whose faces I knew, and that was it. And they knew my face and that was it – it was the trust between us.”

C.J. spat on the sidewalk and said, “Now it’s all about getting your identity down to a science. Devices to track you down and track you out. Everywhere now. The cellphone? Tracking device. This Internet thing? Tracking device. Credit cards, Metrocards, EZ-Passes, bank accounts, saving accounts, mortgages – all keeping a record.” I laughed at him as paranoid, but this was three years before the country learned about the government’s data-mining of exactly these records.

A.J. never took the $50,000. The price of going on the radar was too much. When he finally parted from my father’s basement, he ended up finding another basement, in the Brooklyn brownstone of an old lady, a happy cursing drunkard who puts him to work keeping the house from falling down.

Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, is working on a book about the break-up of the United States. He can be reached at cketcham99@mindspring.com

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