Beggars and billionaires

 

The beggar and the billionaire bookend neoliberal culture. During the era of the social democratic exception, from the mid forties to roughly the eighties, homelessness – and vagabondage – fell considerably. Not that this was an unmitigated good – from the mental asylum to the housing project, coercion, violence, despair and underfunding were endemic. But the effect of state cuts to welfare and to the general withdrawal of the state from housing, mental health care, and retirement funding had effects that were seen throughout the developed economies.  In Les gens de rien: l’histoire de la grande pauvreté dans le France du XXe siecle, Andre Guesclen traces the decline of vagabondage and homelessness during the thirty glorious years and their return at the end of the century. The same story was told, in 1991, by Joel Blau in The Visible Poor.

The visible poor, an excellent title.

I have a media knowledge of billionaires. How could I not. They populate telenovelas, like Succession, are featured extensively in the business and political press, have groupies and fans, and in general are all around us as parts of the celebrity phantom tribe we think we have a relationship with.

I have an experiential knowledge of beggars. Beggars are not the stars of popular telenovelas, are not extensively interviewed or featured in the business and political press, are not influencers on Instagram or in any way part of the celebrity phantom tribe. But for any urban dweller, they are ghosts of another sort, flesh and blood ghosts. They sleep on doorsteps or in tents or in sleeping bags or in improvised nests of trash. They prostrate themselves in pedestrian heavy areas, with plastic or paper cups by their sides for the stray coin. They choose their spots – outside grocery stores or by ATMs – where, by some perhaps shared convention, they know that people have loose change  on them. They get drunk, or they get stoned. They preach, or they scrawl signs, they favor parks, they tell stories of hunger on subway trains and trams.

On the whole, my experience with beggars is much like anyone else’s. That is, if they anyone else has some money somewhere. Sometimes I give, more often I don’t. I have a sort of tally in my head, and if I haven’t given for a while, I give more. Never a lot. Mostly I say no, no thanks, sorry, etc. No, no thanks, sorry, etc. constitutes, for the most part, the conversation between the beggar and the non-beggar population.

A couple days ago I tossed out my “non” to a man accosting me on Rue Charlot. However, he aimed a few words at my back that made me turn around. I don’t remember what they were. I approached him. He was a short black man of beggar’s age – that is, anywhere from 30 on up. Living rough has a way of erasing the middle class marks of age and registering new ones. This man had a hat. He held in his hand a booklet of some sort. As I came closer, he showed me what it was: song sheets. And he explained that he was a singer, that he sang for his money, but that he was too tired to sing today.

I gave him some Euros, and went on. A singer.

Where the media culture does feature the beggar, and there in abundance, is in poetry. In song, Gypsy Davy still steals the wife of the landowner. The hobo rides the rails, and Beau Jangles will dance for you in worn out shoes.

Why song and poetry has the beggar in its heart, and not the billionaire, is of some interest. Song and poetry is as servile as other media – it has long celebrated kings and warriors. But it has never celebrated the bourgeoisie. Other supposedly non-poetic objects – a note about plums on a table, a bright particular chameleon – have roused the poetic consciousness, but the bourgeoisie have been turned over and over by novelists, who found them dramatic in exact proportion to the scandals that de-bourgeois-fy them, and been ignored, mostly, by the poets. True, the sitcom is the glory of the bourgeoisie, and that is no mean thing in the history of art. However, I don’t quite know how to measure this.

Beggars have attracted some  attention on tv, but mainly in shows that are framed around the police. The Wire, even, is framed around the police – although I remember seeing the first shows of the first season of the Wire and crying, because finally, finally people in a housing project were being seen. The visible poor were being made visible. Of course, they were visible as part of a larger plot, but still.

That singing beggar rang a lot of bells for me. We live near a park named for a singer and songwriter, Beranger, whose songs were sung by beggars on the street in 19^th century Paris. Baudelaire, who lived around here  (it is hard to find a spot in Paris that is not near where Baudelaire, a most homeless man, lived for a while), wrote a poem that is still unloved and very analysed, La Mendiante rousse, about a redhaired beggar clothed in rags that barely covered her – much as, today, beggars in real desperation sometimes clothe themselves in such plastic sheeting as you find at construction sites, a costume that parodies the gaudiest bride’s gown.

Blanche fille aux cheveux roux,
Dont la robe par ses trous
Laisse voir la pauvreté
Et la beauté.

The poverty and the beauty. A combination we have lost. Bo Jangles is deader than a doornail.