THE GROUCH READS...

The Grouch Reads: Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor

I've commented before on this blog about the local confusion between bus driver and policeman. This is encouraged by the El Paso bus system's fare box--placed at the very front of the bus--symbolically much like the Border Police, aka, Border Patrol's control at border crossings with Mexico..... If I were in a poetic mood, I might say that the fact that we are on the border with Mexico, and the the minds of the citizens of the US are filled with fears of "Mexican" crime "spilling across" the border---as if crime were a flood, as if it were water...makes it natural for a manager or supervisor to choose such a system of control....

And here I recall Sartre:

Insofar as a man is immersed in the historical situation, he does not even succeed in conceiving of the failures and lacks in a political organization or determined economy; this is not, as is stupidly said, because he is 'accustomed to it', but because he apprehends it in its plenitude of being and because he cannot even imagine that he can exist in it otherwise." (P. 561 Barnes' transl. of Being and Nothingness)

Sartre goes on to speak of the necessity of acknowledging "the harshness of a situation or the suffering which it imposes." Once one acknowledge that harshness and suffering, one has a motive to imagine something different.

And thereby Sartre allows me to, once again, explain the edge of my blog writing. Once one forgets or denies the brutality of the world, one loses the ability to imagine anything else. ---A thought I've tried to formulate before...

To borrow from Wacquant, we can say that the control system chosen by the managers and supervisors of "Sun Metro" (so-called) expresses the desire for CONTROL of a marginal population

"Marginal"???--Is that not an insult to the idea of equality? Is it not an offense against the founding fathers' words: All of us are created equal.
??

Marginal? As one bus rider told me: "In El Paso, only poor people ride the buses."

But notice: Wacquant creates a portrait of a population simultaneously pressed (as it were from above) by a lack of good jobs and pressed (as it were from below) with various forms of social control and the constant threat of criminalization.... A brutal and inhumane situation....

On page 35 Wacquant describes how teachers are given police functions, how the most minor sort of problem is criminalized:

"... by treating jostling in the school corridors, rudeness in the classroom, or playground ruckus not as matters of discipline pertaining to pedagogical authority... but as infractions of the law that must be tallied and centrally compiled via a dedicated computer software...and systematically reported to the local police...the authorities have fabricated an epidemic of 'school violence,' even as surveys of students show that 90percent of them feel completely safe at school." (p. 35, Punishing the Poor)

The above is a description of what's going on in France--under the influence of American trends...

Wacquant has in fact detailed how those trends are ineffective--or, at any rate, there is precious little evidence that, e.g., the "broken windows" approach actually works.

What conclusions do I draw from my reading of Waquant?
The ugliness I witness in El Paso is real, and part of a broader phenomenon.