Everyday Erinyes #128

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”

Cairo, Illinois is the southernmost town in Illinois. It sits in a little pocket formed by the Missouri and Ohio Rivers as they flow into each other to become the Mississippi River. On the other side of the Missouri River is Missouri; on the other side of the Ohio River is Kentucky.

Cairo has a history, starting in the first half of the nineteenth century when multiple attempts were made to establish it (chartered 1818, settled 1836-37, collapsed 1840, re-chartered 1857, and this time it took off.) Not all of the history is pretty. In 1842, after the first collapse, Charles Dickens visited it. He used it as the prototype for the City of Eden in Martin Chuzzlewit. I haven’t read all of Dickens, and Martin Chuzzlewit is one I have missed, but apparently, for City of Eden, read Republic of Gilead.

After the re-chartering in 1857, Cairo enjoyed a period of prosperity through trade. In 1862, General Grant made it a headquarters, and had Fort Defiance built there, but this diverted much of its trade commerce to Chicago (where the railroads went), and it never really recovered. Instead, its economy devolved into agriculture, lumber, and sawmills.

Being, as it was, at an important confluence of important rivers, and with steamboat transportation increasing, it couldn’t be kept totally down, and the railroads returned, and the ferry industry took off, since there were no bridges. By the early 1900s, it had seen a number of mansions and public buildings erected, many of which still exist and are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Race relations were abysmal, and lynchings were sufficiently prevalent that even some whites were lynched (by other whites). Bridges constructed in 1929 and 1937 ended the ferry industry, and we all know what the airlines did to the railroads everywhere, so the 20th century was one of economic decline for Cairo. Not that they would have anyway, but with many jobs lost by the 1960s, the white population of Cairo did not take kindly to the Civil Rights Act, nor to any persons of color attempting to exercise their civil rights.

The Interstate being built in 1978 to bypass Cairo was its economic death knell. From its highest population of 15,203 in 1920, it had fallen to 2,831. Why am I going through all of this? Because, already a ghost town, it has become a target for Ben Carson’s HUD.

In April 2017, Demarion Duncan learned he’d have to move. That in itself would not be the end of the world; the McBride public housing project in Cairo, Illinois, where the 12-year-old Duncan lived with his mom, dad, and two younger siblings, was falling apart…. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development had been debating what to do with public housing in Cairo for seven years and two presidential administrations, since federal inspections first uncovered grift, decay, and racial discrimination at the Alexander County Housing Authority. The mostly black residents of McBride and Elmwood, a sister project nearly two dozen blocks north that housed about 80 families, lived in squalor, while the white housing authority brass, under Executive Director James Wilson, blew public funds on boozy Vegas getaways and prioritized maintenance of the predominantly white high-rise across town. In the final year of the Obama administration, HUD placed the housing authority under receivership, but it left the future of Cairo’s public housing unresolved.

Ben Carson resolved public housing in Cairo by destroying it. Well, except the white part. He condemned McBride and Elmwood and gave residents a year to move out, on the grounds that Cairo was a dying town. (One suggestion was that a few tenants of McBride – there would not be room for all – could move into the white project. In a town with a history like Cairo’s, if I were a person of color, I would not be happy about that prospect, even though it might be the only way not to have to leave town.) Demarion Duncan and his classmates were facing the prospect of being scattered all over the midwest. Now in sixth grade, they had mostly been classmates forever. With the help of their teacher, Mary Beth Goff, they wrote letters to Ben Carson.

I won’t go into detail on the letters’ content. Some are cited and quoted in Mother Jones. They were mailed in April 2017.

Carson found himself on the defensive. The students made CNN. The president watches CNN. Carson wrote back promptly. In a warm but brief letter, he thanked the students for their messages. “You are living proof of the old saying, ‘Home is where the heart is,’” he wrote. In a separate letter to the superintendent, he got to the point. “I’ve had teams of experts searching for any viable solution to preserve affordable housing opportunities in Cairo, from rebuilding to utilizing manufactured housing,” he wrote. “Sadly there are very limited viable financial options for a nearly bankrupt housing authority.”…

“The kids said, ‘We don’t even think he read our letters,’” Goff told me. “There’s no way he could have read what we wrote” and written what he did.”

A lot has been said about Ben Carson not knowing what he is doing. Well, “Carson may not know what he’s doing, but he knows what he wants. He once told an interviewer that poverty is ‘more of a choice than anything else’; by proposing to raise rents in subsidized buildings, slash budgets, and tear down homes, Carson and the Trump administration are forcing the working poor to choose something else.”

I worry about everyone living in subsidized housing. The minimum rent has been $50 per month for some time. Carson has proposed tripling that. I am not in subsidized housing, I have a mortgage, but I can certainly tell you I could not afford to triple my mortgage payment. I could not afford to triple just the principal payment, leaving the interest and escrow constant. Heck, I could not afford to increase it by the $100 that tripling the minimum would impose on the poorest of the poor. Of course, states have some say in how these things are administered. The Mother Jones article will tell you plainly, if not using my words, that Illinois is not there for these people of Cairo.

Dear Furies, this story, which I have really just skimmed over, is as convoluted as – well, as a federal witch hunt would be if there were such a thing. You will have to call up every unnamed Fury to begin to deal with it (I hope some are trained as accountants.) We have to try.

The Furies and I will be back.

Cross posted to Care2 HERE.