"McFarland" again, or, The unrecognized virtue of poverty

There’s another point to make about the movie “McFarland USA”. It’s about poverty.

 

From time to time rich folks get sentimental about poverty. There’s plenty of literature that celebrates the poor man as nobler and more virtuous than the rich man. And like all deliberate sentimentality, it lies. There is no ipso facto virtue in being poor, and plenty of poor men through the years have been blackhearted scoundrels. One might almost think that some rich man invented this trope in hope of buying off the poor man with praise, to avoid being murdered in his bed or having to part with real cash.

 

But that’s not the whole story. While the trope of the virtuous poor is false, I think that at root it is not so much cynical as unskillful. There is something real that the trope is trying to say; it says the thing badly – it says the thing falsely – but the thing is real all the same. It’s just hard to put into words.

 

“McFarland USA” probably still oversimplifies, but it puts a part of this elusive fact into pictures. And what it shows is this.

 

On the one hand, poverty does nothing to inspire personal virtue. The school is right across from the jail, and we are told that plenty of the school’s graduates end up in jail before too long. One runner’s father is released from jail during the story. He comes home to find his unmarried teenaged daughter pregnant, and throws a violent tantrum. Another character admits he is a reformed gangbanger – his term, not mine. Some guys who are hinted to be his former gang members come looking for him, and there is a fight – offscreen – which leaves blood all over the street. And we see all manner of pettier vices across the community. There’s no more personal virtue in the town of McFarland than in any richer town.

 

What else do we see? Coach White’s wife is driving through town and her car overheats – or, well, something’s wrong with it that involves clouds billowing out from under the hood, we’re not told more than that. One of their neighbors runs a beauty parlor across the street from where the car stops; she brings Mrs. White into her shop, gives her a manicure, and gets her boyfriend to fix the car. Coach White had bought the team running shoes out of his own pocket – the cheapest shoes he could find because that’s all he could afford. The community families put on a tamale sale and car wash to raise money for better shoes and decent uniforms. Coach White forgets his daughter’s fifteenth birthday; but the community mothers band together to put on a quinceañera celebration for her.

 

None of this is about personal virtue. All of it is about helping each other – about social virtue. And this is what’s true about poverty. It doesn’t make anybody better. But it makes everybody need help. We have, deep inside us, a social instinct to help each other. Poverty calls it into action, gives us an occasion to use it. Poverty allows us the chance to help each other, and therefore – oh, so indirectly! – it nurtures an environment in which social virtue can grow. This is why Mrs. White – who hated the town at first (as did the whole family) – finally says that nowhere else has ever felt so much like home. McFarland, because it is so desperately poor, is a healthier community than any richer town could ever be.

 

Nothing is guaranteed. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison writes in “Women and Blacks and Bensonhurst” that in her childhood in Bensonhurst (nobody’s idea of a rich community) people made a virtue of minding their own business. If everyone in the building heard a gunshot from the apartment directly above yours, nobody would investigate and nobody would call the police because “We mind our own business.” A girl in her class had only one eye because her father had knocked out the other one while beating her with a broomstick, and nobody did anything. Poverty doesn’t guarantee that people will help each other. Poverty doesn’t guarantee a healthier community.

 

All it can do is to provide the environment in which a healthy community might grow, if not stunted by other forces. And there is deep inside us, somehow, a voice calling us to help each other. That’s the most we can guarantee in the real world. But even that little is good.

 

 

"McFarland USA" or Revisiting "Ancient politics vs modern"

Last year I wrote a post in which I argued that modern political entities are by nature stronger than ancient ones: "Set up a modern state and an ancient one side by side, and the first will conquer the second as soon as it wants to." But now I'm not so sure. Does the rich power always vanquish the poor one?

Last month Walt Disney Pictures released "McFarland USA" in which a school teacher with nowhere else to go starts a cross-country team at one of the poorest high schools in California, and they sweep the CIF championships. It's a good movie: if you haven't seen it, stop reading philosophy blogs and go rent it. But it calls into question the seemingly natural victory of rich over poor. Before one race (on a course with a lot of hills) the coach tells his runners,

Just remember: when you start to feel pain going up those hills, so does the guy next to you and the guy in front of you. This race is going to come down to who can handle more pain. My bet is on you guys. [The quote is inexact.]

The rest is history.

Does this attitude translate to the battlefield? James Fallows recently wrote about why the American military -- the richest and most powerful army in the world by a very large margin -- keeps losing. In particular, we lose to poorer forces that are willing to engage in non-stop non-traditional warfare, particularly guerilla warfare. The North Vietnamese were very good at this; more recently, so were the Afghans. Armies like that nibble away at us until we just don't care any more, and call it a day. As Ho Chi Minh famously said, "You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it."

This suggests that maybe there is a breathing space, after all, in which ancient political forms could flourish. The city would have to be one like Sparta, oriented entirely around making war. It would help if it were located somewhere remote and inaccessible: Afghanistan and northern Pakistan are actually perfect in that regard, but they are already taken. But it's not impossible.

Even so, the margins in which such a city could prosper are narrow. When I summarized McFarland's victories by saying "The rest is history," it is instructive to look at all the history. McFarland's winning streak came to an end when the California Interscholastic Federation reclassified the small school into Division I, so that they had to compete against the largest schools in the state. No matter how good they were, they couldn't dominate against that deep a field and they began losing. Likewise, an ancient city transplanted to the modern day could probably hold out for some time against a larger power if they dedicated themselves heart and soul to guerilla combat. (I leave for another time the question whether such dedication would be consistent with the spirit of ancient cities in other ways.) But ancient cities were small. The city in Plato's Laws had 5040 families. If the larger power is sufficiently determined, sooner or later it can kill every last family and extinguish the city. And in the meanwhile, the city would have lived every minute as an armed camp. It's hard to think of this as the Good Life.

It may not be impossible to achieve ancient political ideals today, but there is no question that the attempt would be difficult on many levels.