Right Questions, Wrong Answers
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Right Questions, Wrong Answers Visible Man By George Gilder Basic Books. 249pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman George Gilder is white, Republican, an alumnus of Harvard and a member of New...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman George Gilder is white, Republican, an alumnus of Harvard and a member of New York's staid Century Association for gentlemen only...
...One need not doubt that astute manipulators of food stamps, Medicaid, public housing, and cash welfare grants totted up total benefits in excess of the wages of some hard-working, fully employed members of the labor force...
...The scale of documentation needed to get food stamps is by itself an impressive barrier...
...One hates to ruin a good theory with a few facts...
...Possibly as an ex-Marine, Gilder was better prepared than most white males of his particular totem for the world of coercion in which Sam manages to survive if not precisely thrive...
...They scratch along, in and out of jail, in and out of public hospitals, often on the proceeds of the welfare checks received by the women on whom they live...
...On Gilder's telling and the jury's acquittal, Sam had reason to anticipate the successful completion of an ordinary commercial transaction rather than a charge of rape...
...Although neither solution is ideal, Northern practices do seem a bit easier on the women and no worse for the men...
...Men cannot live on the welfare checks of women south of the Mason-Dixon line as they can in New York and other snowy jurisdictions...
...Adolescent males are as shy of work and school as in Albany, New York...
...Other societies, present and past, have exhibited the same social problems as ours...
...A word of caution ought to be uttered, too, on the theme of the scale of benefits available in the more generous states...
...She turns out to be lesbian by preference and rented out by her huge and domineering female sexual partner to men for cash...
...Their short lives will predictably terminate in violence, alcoholism, or related ailments...
...In our own South, where benefits are meager and, until the Supreme Court intervened, female clients were harried with such techniques as midnight searches for male companions, the same disheartening phenomena are evident as in the North...
...A recent Urban Institute survey of welfare practices ranked the state 50th, yes 50th, among the states in ease of access to the welfare system...
...Why, he asks, does this intelligent, talented, ingratiating young man deliberately choose a self-destructive way of life...
...Much too frequently their presence means trouble from the local or Federal fuzz, narcs, debt collectors, and other types with no good on their minds...
...Skip him as a social theorist...
...It is not all that easy to scoop up these bounties in presumptively liberal New York, however...
...The villain is our foolishly lavish welfare system...
...It is unlikely to have much impact, for good or evil, on the behavior of violent young, and less young, men...
...Somehow Gilder establishes rapport with his unlikely subject, albeit not without contretemps that start with the sheer black comedy of locating Sam's physical whereabouts...
...Sam and his peers associate more frequently with the police than with more benign public agencies...
...Few of them spoiled their citizens with very much in the way of welfare...
...In the North, women can stay at home and collect welfare checks that their male exploiters then grab...
...Male role models are absent...
...It is also valuable for its insights into the minds and psyches of violent young males, many of them black, whose connection with work and respectable society is occasional at best...
...Gradually, as Gilder wins his confidence, Sam comes to take pride in the notion of a respected journalist writing about him...
...In sum, by all means read George Gilder as a reporter...
...Yet regrettably for Gilder's argument, male exploitation of women and associated pathologies of violence, drunkenness and crime occur as well in places like South Africa, whose authorities are innocent of excessive welfare spending upon blacks...
...Gilder's and Brewer's association has its moments of physical apprehension, candidly recalled in this volume...
...Young men like Sam are much too "cool" to undergo the tedium of school and the oppresive routine of the workplace when all they need do is latch onto some welfare mother and live the good life...
...He allows Gilder to pay for a trip home to Greenville, North Carolina, and otherwise to subsidize him...
...In the South, more frequently the women perforce go out to work and the young men seize their earnings...
...Welfare may have the effect of diminishing the work incentives of mothers with young children...
...His hero, Sam Brewer, is black, product of a broken home, a dropout from high school, sponger upon women, and man of violence almost as often received as inflicted...
...It is not an attractive social milieu and, although Sam evokes occasional sympathy from the reader, he is on the whole no more appealing than other denizens of this urban nether world...
...As I hope I have indicated, Visible Man is worth attention simply as a grim tale of our time...
...Things are better in Greenville than in Albany because benefits are much smaller down South than up North...
...The pity is that Gilder is convinced he knows the answer...
...Sam in his brief employment as a government servant impressed his supervisors as intelligent, charming and moderately gifted as an artist...
...At the beginning of Gilder's chronicle he is also on trial in the state capital, Albany, for the rape of a white woman, blonde of course...
...Men have lived off the earnings of women, moral or otherwise, through the centuries...
...Possibly improperly, the judge, ironically a man with a racist reputation, allows Sam's lawyer to present evidence of his white "victim's" sexual history...
...In his record of an implausible friendship, the dramatic highlight is Gilder's vivid report of Sam's rape trial...
...I wish that Gilder had stopped while he was ahead, though...
...For unfortunately he is even more a moralist than an amateur sociologist of sensitivity and a journalist of exceptional skill...
...Too much low quality alcohol, too many episodes of sexual coercion, too many knifings and stompings, and too little confidence in education and steady work at legal jobs: these are the characteristics of Sam's environment...
...White faces are not necessarily welcome in urban black slums...
Vol. 61 • September 1978 • No. 18
