Written on the Outhouse Wall
by Joe Woodard
I heard the mouse again, gnawing in the wall of my bedroom while I slept,
or tried to sleep. Crunch, crunch, grind, snap. Wee, cowerin', timorous
beastie, my foot! The mice are proliferating in the walls, outside,
downstairs. The tenant in number 4 is complaining about them frightening
his children. They've raided all the dog kibble the puppies leave uneaten
in their dishes. With that kind of nutrition, the mice are probably
learning how to bark and chase cars. They avoid traps I put out. They're
smart and they remember. I find myself wakened by grinding noises. I lay
in bed making siege plans. I figure where to lay traps, debate cheese
versus peanut butter bait, wonder if they're tunneling into boxes of
printer paper I keep under my desk near my feet.
Dorothy's surprisingly calm about co-existing with mice. "Rats bother
me," she shudders. "But mice can't hurt you. They're so cute and
helpless."
But I hate them. To my imagination, mice are vermin, encephalitis
carriers, symbols of defeat in a struggle to rise above poverty,
infestations in the house of a loser, the touch of untouchable problems,
invasions of headline news.
The mice draw all of the ire and helpless exasperation that
builds in me every day listening to the revelation of yet another, larger
financial fraud, and duping of the public mind. I burn listening to the
Middle East fly apart, Africa wither and scream, Latin America convulse,
Asia blister, and the seas bleach. All of those stories set me boiling
inexpressibly, stymied by the magnitude and incomprehensible waste of
people combusting in agony.
Shall I send $25 to Ralph Nader? Shall I demand that Senator
Feinstein vote no on that nuclear waste disposal bill? Shall I send
another $50 to Amnesty International or Doctors Without Borders? Shall I
answer phones in the Farm Workers' Union office in Delano? All those thing
are useful and useless at the same time. Shall I make a pilgrimage to
Montana and meditate? Shall I burn a candle and pray? What should I do
beside any number of ineffectual rituals designed to placate my own fear
and anger, but do nothing to stop the madness?
I think that the root causes of such publicly examined catastrophes
should be evident now, but the process of examination presumes the reasons
for failure in order to disguise the disorder. Currently the papers are
wringing their editorial hands about the size of CEO homes. Fabulously
expensive personal real estate can't be touched in bankruptcy proceedings
ironically designed to keep a bankrupt person from becoming dispossessed of
their living quarters. Ain't it a crime, the papers imply, that those
bastards crammed so much ill-gotten gain in their houses where it will be
safely separated from the clutching hands of workers unemployed and ruined
by the very same thieving CEOs?
Where were the hand-wringers when the CEOs were stealing our purse all
along? Where were the lynch mob leaders when the task of big business
wasn't to make anything at all but, instead, to rob us and use our money to
materialize more money out of thin air? Why didn't the voice of reason
trace the sucking sound to the door of the rich and powerful who pilot a
system that allows them to punch holes in everything around and suck out
the juices? The papers shout corruption, out-of-bounds activity, illegal
manipulations, but why is the world on fire and so many tens of millions
shoved in the hole if so-called legal activities only benefit a few at the
expense of a future, not fifty years hence, or twenty, or five, but
tomorrow morning? Tens of thousands of starving children in Xambia run
away from home to the capital city of Lusaka where they have some chance to
steal food. Meanwhile Kenneth Lay, the former chairman of Enron, is
relaxing in his seven million dollar apartment, smiling. His wife, Linda,
opened a thrift shop outside Houston named "Jes' Stuff" where they'll sell
several million dollars worth of goodies they have to dispose of in
bankruptcy. Four thousand workers, economically devastated when Enron
collapsed, live in the same municipality. A fifth of the children in
America will go to bed hungry tonight. But the newspapers never contend
with the concept of a system that allows the Lays and other, far more
wealthy people to amass wealth and power in the midst of despair.
"I don't think it's a crime to make money," said one of our Alameda
City Planning Board members Monday night. He said it so matter-of-factly,
in a tone that presented it as plain common sense, the business of
business. President Coolidge couldn't have said it better. But that
declaration dresses the worker and highway man in the same clothes. The
Planning Board was considering whether to rezone a part of the land along
the estuary that separates our island city from Oakland. The City could
change that zone from industrial to residential and thus make its owners
fabulously wealthy in residential building schemes. The profit will lay
principally in value created by community cry for land, not because the
land owners build housing. Put those same homes in the Bad Lands of South
Dakota and their worth is entirely different. When ground rent, a value
created by common demand for land, is awarded to a small class of people
rather than all of us who create it in the first place by our communal
demand, we have erected a system that requires most to pay tribute to a few
for permission to stand on the face of the earth. We will have to
surrender our teeth to eat.
Now you know what's pissing me off. You probably realize what these
conditions do to people. Concepts of justice fly out the window. Life
degenerates into a mapcap dash to a single barrel of beans, every one for
themselves. Everyone becomes a competitor and a threat. Everyone pulls
out the biggest weapon they can muster. They line up their cross hairs on
the first and most vulnerable target that crosses their path. Mice haven't
got a prayer. Or maybe they do. The tenant in number 4 asked if I could
please buy another mousetrap for him. He's barely got two coins to rub
together and I'm unemployed. Somebody else has scooped up our dough and
bought all the weapons. And those people ain't out shooting mice.
Return to top