Fidel & Leo

There was no war, no depression, no event of any kind that could explain what was happening to the American economy.  Indeed, to many people, nothing was happening at all, for it all seemed to be happening invisibly.  The stock markets and the GNP continued to rise, unemployment was low, and stable, inflation negligible.  But the country was being pulled apart, as if by the claws of a monster.  People felt as if their future was being determined by a lottery over which they had no control: hundreds of thousands of people, through no effort of their own, enjoyed an ever higher standard of living.  Millions more, through no fault of their own, were being pushed into a life of permanent poverty and degradation.  

Although Florestan and his children were protected from the storm, he could see new ravages every day.  While many people continued to do well, whole segments of the economy seemed to wither, fester, putrefy.  Companies disappeared, industries fled; one city thrived while thirty miles away another went bankrupt.  Stable, middle-class people suddenly found themselves penniless.  It seemed completely arbitrary, a gigantic shifting of tectonic plates under the economic and social landscape.  Financial earthquakes decimated areas where no one ever suspected a fault; social lava spewed corrosive ash over a society treasured for its tranquility.

Many people sought new avenues of spiritual enlightenment; even as mainstream religions lost members year by year, a wide variety of sects grew up to replace them.  Although many of these sects were nominally Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist, their similarities were far greater than their differences.  All were headed by charismatic leaders to whom blind obedience was due; all tithed their members (some as much as 100%); all supplanted (and sometimes replaced) traditional institutions; all wielded enormous political power, especially at the local level.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, a literacy program run by one sect turned out to be a recruiting organization for the sect’s owners, a Chicago gang that controlled 12% of the crack cocaine trade in the Eastern U.S.

In Omaha, Nebraska, when a mom-and-pop convenience store was being robbed, the wife crept up behind the gunman and disarmed him by, among other things, squeezing his testicles until the robber begged for mercy.  But the storeowners were members of an ultra-fundamentalist sect, which decreed that by seizing the robber’s genitals, the wife had violated the prohibitions of Deuteronomy 25:11-12 and, therefore, her hand must be cut off.  Both husband and wife concurred in the punishment, which was carried out forthwith.  

"One Nation, under God, Indivisible" was turning into a fragmented agglomeration of special interests, beholden neither to any political authority nor to each other.

As the chasm opened wider, more and more people worked for barter.  The going wage for an illegal alien was no wage at all: table scraps, castoff clothing, a mattress in the basement.  It was fortunate that so few people needed to read (fewer still wanted to), because illiteracy had climbed to its highest rate in seventy years.

Florestan remembered the nausea he had felt ten years earlier when he had first seen families living on the street, lining up to eat in church basement soup kitchens.  Now people were dying on the street in great numbers and no one took notice.

Disease was rampant.  Women seemed particularly susceptible; many were so frail that they could no longer support themselves by prostitution.  The price of a blow job fell from $10 to $2 to a few cigarettes.

The most politically explosive manifestation of the new economy was crime -- not only because it kept rising, year after year, despite ever-tougher sentences, thousands of new prisons and hundreds of thousands of new police -- but because of its brutality and apparent randomness.  Nostalgia was a common emotion among tourists to Alcatraz in San Francisco bay, not nostalgia for the squalid and inhumane concrete bunker that the government shut down in 1963, but for the old-fashioned, almost courtly kind of criminal that used to be housed there -- bank robbers, bootleggers, forgers, for God’s sake.

Now, six year-olds played in streets awash with crack vials; in some blocks, drug detritus was so thick that it blanketed the pavement.  "Mushrooms" -- victims who happened to be in the line of fire during a gang shooting -- proliferated like, well, mushrooms.  

An epidemic of "double nines" -- nine year-old boys shooting each other with 9mm semiautomatic pistols -- spread out from the inner cities into suburbs and small towns all across the country.  The newspapers, had they so wished, could have filled pages with lists of unnamed corpses found in dumpsters and landfills.  At least a third of the corpses -- the daily toll was in the hundreds -- were infants.

The "double nines" had another dimension as well: they were the most expensive part of a crime wave that was bankrupting cities and states all across the nation.  When Tyrone Nostrand, age fifteen, was convicted of raping and killing a fourteen year-old neighbor at the Vanderveer Estates on Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn on his first day out of juvenile detention, the judge sentenced him to life without parole in Sing-Sing, which has a special program for violent and incorrigible juvenile offenders.  By a margin of 86%, the public approved of the sentence, and the judge who imposed it was elected District Attorney shortly thereafter.  Unfortunately, while wildly popular, the sentence was also wildly expensive, costing the taxpayers a record $80,000 a year.  Since Tyrone Nostrand had a life expectancy of fifty-six more years, protecting the public from this single teenage felon would cost the State of New York $4,480,000.  Tyrone and his peers were the most expensive prisoners in American history, and by the mid-1990’s the arrest rate for juvenile murderers was increasing at a compound rate of over 150% per year.

Politicians talked ad nauseam about crime and violence, but none had the slightest ability to do anything about it.  Conservatives loosened gun laws, toughened sentences, cut social programs -- and built more prisons.  Liberals tightened gun laws, lightened sentences, increased social programs -- and built more prisons.  The spiral kept deepening, the centrifuge continued to spin faster and faster, hurling out families, children, jobs, safety, tranquility, morality itself.

Times indeed were bad -- and Florestan feared that for many people they would get worse.

His intuition was correct: times would become so bad, for so long, in so many places, and for so many people, that they would make Florestan Aramberri de Andrés and his partners rich beyond their wildest imaginings.