Homeless Man and Dog

The other day I saw a homeless man and his homeless dog asleep on the sidewalk just outside the subway station at Astor Place. It was 5:30 p.m., quite crowded, and everyone had to step carefully around them, but no one looked directly at them. I'm from out of town, but I visit New York regularly enough that I probably wouldn't have paid any attention either except for the dog. How can a dog sleep like that on a busy sidewalk? What's the attachment between the man and the dog? How long have they been together?

David Brooks' Bobos in Paradise is a marvelous book. It's an uncomfortable but hilarious skewer of contemporary Yuppie culture, of the people who make a fetish of latte and natural fibers, who view shopping as a means of self expression. One of his themes is the cooptation of oppressed cultures. We want to believe we can save the world by shopping, that we support indigenous people by venerating their handicrafts, artifacts, and foods. "We want our material things to be bridges that will allow us to effect positive social change." (p. 101) It's a way of rationalizing away our guilt about all the money the new economy seems bent on handing us.

The problem with Brooks is that irony is wasted on the shameless. Last night I saw a new commercial for Land Rover. It shows a young-middle-aged couple using their $65,000 SUV to rescue a dog lost on a busy highway on a rainy night. The screen fades to black with the single word "Courage" illuminated. See what buying the right car means?

The shops around the homeless man and dog on Astor Place are full of third world artifacts, places to buy things that make you feel like a good global citizen. So if we're so concerned about the oppressed, how come we all walk around the man and his dog?

Because we don't want to think difficult thoughts. It's a lot easier to assume that poverty in the third world is a result of oppression than to entertain the idea that there's oppression in America. We live in a meritocracy where it's still a sin to be poor. If you are poor in this economy, it must be your fault. Either that OR it's mental illness, and there's nothing we can do about that until the right pill comes along. So, since there's nothing we can do for the homeless man and his dog, we pretend they don't exist. Of course, if the dog would only run away from him, then we could use our Land Rover to rescue the pooch. Wouldn't we be proud of ourselves then!