I listen to This American Life every weekend and if I miss it I download the podcast. It's always a great show. I laugh, I cry, it's better than Cats. I was listening this weekend to their show about True Urban Legends and was riveted when I heard the host, Ira Glass, interviewing a Republican hopeful in the California gubernatorial race, Steve Poizner. Poizner is a multimillionaire. He made his fortune in Silicon Valley. He recently wrote a book about his experience as a teacher in a San Jose High School titled Mount Pleasant. In the book Poizner characterizes the school, neighborhood, students as "inner city." Here is a transcript from the beginning of the story, on This American Life:
Steve Poizner: [reading] I passed nearby my neighborhood French bakery and the local Ferrari
dealership.
Ira Glass: This is Steve Poizner, reading from the book he wrote about this.
Steve Poizner: [reading] Several miles and a couple of highways later I took the Capital
Expressway exit and drove into what felt like another planet. Signs advertising janitorial supply
stores and taquerÃas. Exhaust hung over 10 lanes of inner city traffic; yellowing, weedy gardens
fronted many of the homes, as did driveways marred by large oil spots or broken down cars.
Ira Glass: When he sees the sound walls that separate California homes from the highway he asks, "were
they keeping out the city's grit and noise, or hiding profoundly sad lives?"
He's allowed to teach one U.S. government class for one semester, under another teacher's supervision.
What he finds in the school are leaky roofs, hardened, unresponsive students, gangs and violence, a dropout
rate twice the national average. He worries that one student is going to punch him and later that this student
and his thug friends are going to push him up against a wall. He wonders if the kids are "too busy ducking
bullets to consider their careers?" At the end of his first visit to school, he's relieved to find his Lexus still
in the parking lot where he left it.
sounds pretty grim but the people who live in the neighborhood, the teachers, and Ira Glass (who reported on the Education Beat for NPR) all think Mount Pleasant is a typical middle class school in a typical middle class neighborhood... And they are pissed at how Poizner characterized them. After hearing the story I remember two incidences from my childhood. They are not really related to the TAL story about True Urban Legends but they are about class distinction, growing up on the other side of the tracks, and how the rich see the poor.
I grew up in a town of about 5000 people, surround by cornfields, in the middle of Indiana. We had one junior high, a middle school, on the other side of town. It was about a two mile walk so I rode the bus. I lived in a typical middle class neighborhood and the bus that served my side of town picked up kids from two other neighborhoods in the area. About halfway through my 6th grade year the bus driver, Mr. Smiley, told us that we were going to start picking up kids from Brendan Wood too. Brendan Wood was an upper middle class neighborhood were doctors and lawyers lived. It was nice but not as nice as the Ulen Country Club on the other side of the golf course. My hometown was very segregated according to class and the fact that the country club, which was surround by the town, was an independent town unto itself made matters worse.
Mr. Smiley told us that because he would be picking up the Brendan Wood kids after us we had to reserve the first three rows of seats for them. We all had to crowd in the back of the bus while he made his way to the upper middle class neighborhood on the other side of town. On the way home from school we stopped in Brendan Wood first and every student was dropped off right in front of their door. There were only 9-12 kids from Brendan Wood and they sat comfortably in the first three rows and we could not move up until the last Brendan Wood kid left. After dropping off the snobs we circled through Northfield, a working class neighborhood, making several stops. I got off at the elementary school and walked the six blocks home.
Surprisingly, I didn't tell my parents about having to sit in the back of the bus that is until the school board consolidated all of the stops in three working class neighborhoods into one stop. All of the kids from Northfield, Hoosier Acres, and West Maplewood had to gather in front of the elementary school while Brendan Wood kids practically had door to door service. I told my parents and they talked to other parents but nothing happened. I was sure that the kids from Brendan Wood told their parents stories about how awful the other kids were and how frightened they were about riding the bus with us. Riding in the back of the bus continued until I moved on to High School. The High School was walking distance to my house so problem solved...
The second story deals with picking up my brother from a birthday party. I'm 10 years older than my youngest brother. When I got my license my parents pressured me into picking up my brother from time to time... I had a 1972 Dodge Dart and even in the 80's it was a pretty lame car. My brother had befriended one of the kids in the Country Club and when I arrived to pick him up the kid's dad was outside at the drive waving riff raff away. He told me that I had to drive around to the service entrance to pick up my brother. He wouldn't even let me stop my car in front of his house. I had to exit the country club and drive the county road around the back side to the service drive to pick up my own brother...
I know many people had it much worse. In the context of the racial segregation and hate crimes perpetrated in the country my experiences are laughable. I just wanted to point out that rich folk don't always have both feet in reality. I think Steve Poizner is a good example. What could he possible learn from teaching one semester at a public high school and how could he mis-characterize the situation so badly? When McCain, during the 2008 Presidential Election, couldn't remember the number of houses he had that, to me, was typical of people who are out of touch with reality. President Bush, in the late 80's, marveled at the bar code scan reader in a grocery store. He had never experienced the joys of shopping for his own food. To even imagine that people like Bush Sr., John McCain, or Steve Poizner have even the slightest inkling of what everyday Americans face is strangely unimaginable. Maybe that is the source of populist anger... Maybe we have been electing people who have no idea how we live.
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