I have to insert one last digression from my attempt to capsulize essential marxism in a few short essays. I hope to complete this task in my next blog, which will cover historical materialism and primitive (primal) accumulation. If you are reading this, thanks for your patience. If not, thanks anyway....          

Tyrone

There had  been two phone messages from Fed Ex that they were holding four dining chairs I had ordered from Overstock.com. We had just driven 300 hot miles northeast from the coast. I was excited to see what the chairs would look like with the oak table we had found at a yard sale and I had sanded and stained. Tired as I was, I decided to go get the chairs before the local Fed Ex store closed.

For the past couple of years my wife and I have met my sister and brother-in-law at one of the beach towns on the coast half-way between Los Angeles (where they lived) and Sacramento. As usual, we talked mostly politics, a grim subject these days for those on the “left,” since the subject has come to revolve about the absence of any effective “left” political movement in the US--or rather, even a proper language with which to analyze the cause of the absence of any politics at all--except the politics of the hegemony of  monopoly financial capital, not only here, but throughout the world. 

My sister and her husband had devoted their lives to labor organizing and political activism. And there I was, sitting in a restaurant chair (though I had done my bit working for civil rights and protesting imperial wars)--repeating the obvious: the industrial working class of the United States lives in China, etc., and we Americans eat courtesy of guest workers mainly from Mexico. Centuries of slavery, racism, and the crumbs of imperial rent have emasculated the average, ethnically divided, American wage earner. Nothing but false consciousness is to be expected from most of them for now, not even the anti-imperialism that basically motivated our generation. We had grown old. My brother-in-law had just retired, and my sister was about to do so. I might as well have told them that they had wasted their lives. Yet I did not think so. I continue to admire them--I suppose, for the same reason that I don’t feel I had wasted more than three decades teaching mainly Afro-American children so that Condoleesa Rice (it would seem) could have an oil tanker named after her. One day that stinking tanker will sink under the sea that floated it. 

The Overstock.com chairs weren’t made in China, they were made in Vietnam. I was stunned, not surprised. It was my particular store of grief evoked by that particular criminal war. Then weakness dressed itself up as irony: should I give up bananas, coffee, underwear? To be honest, the moral miasma I created for myself was a blind that obfuscated good reasons for sending the chairs back, but not my desire to take them home to see what they looked like around the yard sale oak table, which was maybe 100 years old and real oak. These Vietnamese chairs, as I knew, were composed of laminated scraps of oak-finished, tropical wood, processed in high tech factories controlled by the very imperial forces that had murdered millions of the parents of the young people who now had to work for almost nothing in these satanic mills.  

But the price was right: four for $400 rather than about $3000 for real real oak chairs I wouldn’t have to bolt together myself and made in small batches. As far as the business of living and getting by in the United States goes, I’m in the same boat as the patriot across the street running up a flag on Veterans’ Day. Except that his political morality is blindly unproblematic. He looks where he is told to look and sees what he’s told to see. He powerlessly identifies with power. I view my daily existence as a political and moral dilemma.

The woman behind the Fed Ex counter was tiny and wiry, and alone, running around serving customers. She managed to drag my four large, heavy cartons out from somewhere in the back, but I was not going to ask her to load them into my car across the lot. So, respecting the uncertainty of my bulging disks and sciatic feet, I began awkwardly trundling the first carton toward the opened hatch of my “vice Versa”. Then Tyrone called out: Can I help you?

My wife later told me that he had been hanging about Peets for some time with a spray bottle and rags, washing car windows. But I knew Tyrone from a previous encounter a couple of weeks before. It was 6 a.m. and I’d been hobbling along to get us a couple of scones from the local cafe around the corner that had mysteriously started baking good pastries--no more Peets or Starbucks for me! ...Someone called out. --Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I was about to turn my head when Tyrone slowly rolled into view on a decent mountain bike. --Thank the Lord! I am blessed, brother.  And so are you! Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I looked at him carefully. His face was round and brown and smiling and wonderful to behold at at six in the morning. I did feel blessed. I told him so... as he rolled and I strolled toward the intersection. 

Most people live near freeways, Taco Bells, and Rite Aids in Sacramento. There are homeless of every description in our neighborhood, and you cannot expect to go walking about scot-free. So that morning I was wondering if I had some loose dollars in my wallet for Tyrone, as we approached the corner, still sincerely exchanging glad tidings. To me it was clear that Tyrone would have said what he said the way he said it whatever his situation. Nevertheless, his timing was as exquisite as an expert con-artist. The light obediently turned red, and Tyrone said quietly --I’m blessed to wake up and be alive and meet good people like you. ...I could use some money for breakfast. I figured five dollars would be o.k., and he took it graciously.

I don’t think Tyrone remembered me. I insisted on helping him load the cartons, which must have weighed 30 pounds each, but he wouldn’t allow it. He was just happy to help and he didn’t ask for any money, but I handed him two dollars and asked him where his bike was. Stolen he said. (I had three mountain bikes in the garage.) --That’s too bad, I said and mentioned the Bike Kitchen. He said he knew about the place and might try them again. It took a minute to get the cartons on the folded down back seat, and I was impatient to get home. But Tyrone wanted to talk more. Obviously the two dollars were not enough. He asked to wash my windows for a couple of extra dollars. I told him no. I had to go. Actually, I was too tired to stand around while he washed the windows of my car. Tyrone didn’t press the issue, but he wanted to tell me more: about how ill he was, about knees and kidneys. I mentioned a free clinic I knew about. Tyrone knew all about free clinics.  No, he was going to the emergency ward. They’d take care of him. ...Then one last quiet, friendly try: didn’t I have something he could do so he could have some supper?  

I put my hand in my wallet pocket when Tyrone, in way of giving up and saying goodbye, came closer and began to sing--beautifully--a few bars of a spiritual--there, between Fed Ex and Peets, about 3 inches from my face. I was lifted so high out of my nonsense and weariness that I forgot the wallet in my pocket. We shook hands, Tyrone walked back to Peets with, hopefully, more than my two dollars for supper, and I drove home, my spirit lifted, but with a back seat full of grief and stolen labor.

Postscript: Home at last, I ripped one carton apart and blindly convinced myself that the chairs’ color was o.k.  The next morning I tried to bolt the parts together. The directions were quite simple, so I didn’t bother to check the hardware against the illustrated number of parts in the directions. There seemed to be enough of everything, but alignment took some wrestling and the last bolt wouldn’t cinch down, seemingly stripped. I took the chair apart, and checked the hardware against the instruction sheet. There were supposed to be four long bolts and eight short bolts. Somebody had packaged eight long bolts and three short ones. The short bolts were way too short to grab anything but air (and I could find no use for any of them). The long bolts (of which there were many) seemed to work, except in the last hole. 

Could it have been that some eighteen year old worker was sending me a message of human resilience? sort of what Tyrone represented for me? But Tyrone and I had seen each other up close. He could see that (despite my decent pension and nice house that he could certainly have guessed at ) I was far from being the enemy. Quite the contrary. Nor would anything he didn’t know have made any difference to him: we were, in good faith, playing the fool together at this point in time, in this social situation. 

I hope some eighteen year old worker sabotaged my chairs. If she did, it would have been an act of audacity and defiance and proof of the resilience of the Vietnamese people. If so, I hope the defiance (if that’s what the screwed up bolts represented) was not directed at privileged victims (or our common enemy) like me. Rather, I hope and believe, that as a daughter of a revolutionary people now brought to their knees, she--and a host of others like her--intended to create disruptions along the chain of profit growing from the theft and misuse of their labor. They have nothing to lose by such audacity, nor did I. I sent the chairs back.

I hope Overstock.com lives up to its name, when all the factories and land in Vietnam are re-occupied by its workers. That might wake workers in the US to the real price of our illusions, and inspire them to come out on the streets and occupy all our public spaces, especially our bailed-out banks.  That will take the courage and audacity of the Vietnamese. And also, the love and wile of spiritual troubadours like Tyrone.

Amen.