Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Archive for the ‘Poor People’ Category

It’s depressing what passes for news these days, especially in the LA Times. I’ll explain.

Like most major world-class cities, Los Angeles is a decent place to live–with its own unique set of urban irritations.

One of them here is the constant influx of transplants from the Midwest—or other remote regions of the country–that are here to “make it” in “the industry.” That shit gets old. And like with other cities, a majority of the well-known negative stereotypes about how LA people look and act, seem to originate from these characters, instead of actual LA natives. Certain districts of the city, like the hipster enclave known as Silverlake, are jam packed with them.

You can usually pick them out pretty easily, since they furiously reject their wholesome, Midwestern look and ways—which would actually be a refreshing addition to the city’s culture—in favor of walking around in the most over-the-top hipster regalia imaginable, acting the fool.

Probably-not-LA-natives in Los Angeles.

One such Midwestern LA transplant, a Straight-Up White Girl named Jacquelyn Carr, is the subject of a ridiculous Los Angeles Times story. Apparently, after driving around in her Volkswagen Jetta for a while, she was “forced” to ride the bus when her parents finally cut her lazy-ass off.

A year ago, Carr would not have been caught dead on a bus.

She pulled into town from Indiana University in 2006 and quickly got a job at a talent agency. She drove a 2005 Volkswagen Jetta with tinted windows and thought of one day becoming a publicist…

But her job working in Hollywood publicity went away. Then the lease on the Jetta was up. Her parents, who had been helping cover the $250 monthly payments, told her she would have to foot the bill on her own.

A bit of background on Los Angeles public transportation is in order, in case you’re not familiar.

LA isn’t like other cities. It’s not just a city, it’s a region. Areas that aren’t technically part of the city are de facto parts of the city. Take Beverly Hills. It’s surrounded on all sides by Los Angeles, but it’s its own city, with its own mayor. There are several areas like this. So, in other words: Los Angeles is huge, bigger than it is “on paper.”

Separately, there’s this myth that Los Angeles has a terrible public transportation system. That’s sort of true, sort of bullshit. On the one hand, it takes forever to take a bus somewhere. There’s a subway that only goes to very specific parts of the city, to the exclusion of most of the rest of it. On the other hand, ours is one of the most robust bus transit systems in the country. If you took it and put it nearly anywhere else, you’d cover every square inch of space. The problem is, in the simplest terms, that LA is really spread out and enormous. But, you can still get places. It takes a long time, mostly, because it’s a long distance away.

So, in a city where everyone has cars, taking public transportation is a mark of your social status, and also—most of the time—your race. The buses and subway is Los Angeles are packed. But they’re packed with minorities and poor people.

So that puts Jacki’s “attitude” toward riding the bus in a little better context.

“I felt like I was too good for the bus,” said Carr, recalling her virgin voyage last October with a mixture of embarrassment and marvel. “I think there’s a social understanding and a construction around that if you take the bus, you take it because you don’t have money. There’s a social standard. Obviously I had bought into that.”

So I guess, when you think about it, it is news that: a rich, White-Girl transplant from the Midwest “struggled” to bite the bullet—because she had no choice—and temporarily ride the bus from her apartment in Brentwood to her “industry” job in Beverly Hills. Bravo LA Times.

The other day I was stimulating the economy (watching television), when I realized that I haven’t seen a (new) show about broke-ass people in a long time.

If you study any of the retro cable stations, you’ll notice that there was a period of time (roughly corresponding to the mid-to-late 70s and very early 80s) where nearly every show was about poor people, or poor people that—through a stroke of implausibly good luck–were suddenly not poor anymore. The characters had “real” problems, and their socio-economic status was accurately reflected in their living situations.

Some examples off the top of my head:

Then, all of sudden, everyone on TV was automatically rich. I don’t mean start-off-poor-and-then-get-rich, I mean just unrealistically comfortable from the start. People that worked regular jobs had ridiculously nice homes, and stuff that they never would have been able to afford in real life. Take Family Ties. Even though the guy worked at a non-profit radio station, and the wife (if I remember correctly) didn’t even work, they lived in a beautiful, wood-paneled house with (eventually) four kids.

I know what you’re going to say: “That was Columbus, Ohio. You can probably buy a nice house there with a handful of paperclips.”

Even if that’s true, there are tons of examples throughout the 80s and 90s. Take Married with Children—set in Chicago. Al Bundy worked a fucking retail job (shoe store), but still had a decent two-story house–in a nice neighborhood–with three kids, a dog, and a lazy, spendy wife. Impossible. In real life, these assholes would have been foreclosed on by the second episode.

But even more common than the unrealistic income-to-status gap was the unexplainably-upper-middle-class lifestyle. Kramer from Seinfeld. Most of the characters on Friends. The list goes on.

I’m all for suspending disbelief. But I want some truth-in-entertainment. Give us a stack of credit card bills on the kitchen table, a rejected ATM transaction, or the occasional collection agency phone call.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t like poor people either. In fact, fuck ‘em. But they (and their plight) do tend to be hilarious.