(Well, would you believe I’m a man of taste?)
My name is Lyle William Dunlap. My friends call me Bill. My very oldest friends call me Sparrow, but only three are left. I’m an adult child of the mentally ill, and I had no idea I had ADHD until I was 63 years old. Yet despite everything against me, I survived the 1990s.
I’m writing this memoir in response to historical revisionism. It’s gotten so bad that both parties are just making shit up. So let’s get something straight, Punk could be as racist as hell. Joe Biden was hostile to the poor. And Bill Clinton destroyed my community. It wasn’t much of a community. And if I had my druthers, I would have lived anywhere except the Blair House Apartments.
My neighbors were all poor. Those who weren’t on welfare worked seasonal construction or minimum wage retail. My wife was disabled and on welfare. I had drifted into telephone sales and made more money than most of my peers, but I was still the farthest thing from rich. Only my wife and stepson got Medicaid, and my youngest boy and I had to go without it. Even in the 1990s, medical care was out of reach for most people, and I had to treat my chronic illnesses with herbs and meditation.
Blair House was “Hillbilly Heaven.” It was a deteriorating garden complex built in the 1950s. The whole place was white, except for a few Mexican migrants who crashed in an apartment for the summer, and we had an apartment with an ever-changing group of new immigrants. Otherwise, it was depressingly WASP.
The maintenance man was a skinny little alcoholic, but he was a pretty decent guy when he wasn’t drunk. My wife and I would join him outside with our instruments, and we’d jam, calling ourselves The Usual Band of Suspects. His ex-wife was the property manager. She was also on welfare, but she went antiquing the first Saturday after every rent day. Nobody asked where she got the money. She preferred to rent to single mothers because they were the easiest to bully. My wife and I were desperate for a place to live, so we pulled an end-run around her. My wife and kids moved in first. Then I moved in by getting permission from the county section 8 office, and there was nothing the manager could do about it. I was in like Flynn. The manager tried to force us out, but I had recently quit working for the most notorious slumlord in Pennsylvania. I knew what she was going to do before she did it.
Blair House wasn’t the community I wanted, but it was my community. I lived beside crackers, outlaw bikers, ex-cons, a group home for the developmentally disabled, and an old couple in their 90s. We had kids, cats, dogs, friends, enemies, rivalries, misunderstandings, and outright viciousness. Unlike other communities I lived in, the police were the best part of living there. Belvidere, NJ, did not deserve the police force it had. Those guys treated the poor people of Blair House with professionalism I never saw in any other police force. They deserve to be remembered for that.
Life is always challenging for poor people. (I’ll explain how social workers, brainless regulations, and Reagan-era persecution made things harder than they had to be in future posts.) But we still had the myth of upward mobility. Every new job was a new hope and possibility that someday we could leave poverty and social workers behind. Then came Bill Clinton and his promise of national health. My neighbors were so excited and so hopeful. Then Clinton turned around and continued the same policies that made poor people hate Ronald Reagan.
Life went from challenging to frightening after Clinton’s social service reforms. Rather than improving medical care, Clinton privatized Medicaid. Beneifits were cut and it became harder to apply and even harder to stay on. Section 8 kicked clients into homelessness due to lack of funding. Welfare and foodstamps became short term, and people were looking at homelessness and starvation.
I watched the Trump movement begin at Blair House during the 1990s. My white neighbors couldn’t fathom the idea that the color of their skin didn’t give them immunity from economic persecution. Myths about social services unfairly favoring minorites returned with a vengeance. Social workers actually turned White people away by telling them Welfare was only for Black people. And nobody would believe me when I told them it was illegal. They were scared and angry, and not ready to listen to reason. Nor would they listen to me when I pointed out that my minority friends and coworkers were in just as bad shape as they were.
So if any member of the middle-class wonder why the Republican Party has Black, Latino, Gay, and Jewish voters, remember Clinton’s welfare reforms. Poor people may despise the Republican party, but we despise the Democrats more. And that’s why we ended up with President Trump. And this is why I’m harder on Democrats than I am Republicans. Nobody expects the Republicans to keep their word. But all through the dark years of Reagan and Bush we looked to the Democrats to make things better. They turned around and totally screwed their base instead. And it was all done in the name of bipartisanship.
Bipartisanship was the vocabulary word of the 1990s. Joe Biden is still using it. Thanks to bipartisanship, Bill Clinton destroyed the social safety net and sent hundreds of thousands into homelessness. I know people who have been homeless since the Clinton years, or who had been born homeless during that time. Democrats and Republicans became so close that it took the Lewinsky idiocy to create the illusion of a difference. But there is no real difference. We have a right-wing uniparty.
You would think that there was some resistance to all this bipartisanship. Well, yes, there was, but they were far from organized. There was no unity between them. We had political cults such as Democratic Socialists of America, the Revolutionary Communist Party and all their schisms and spin-offs. And they spent more time arguing with Christian Socialists and Earth First neopagans to actually accomplish anything. Besides, they were all as racist as all hell and economic elitists. Especially the religious crowd. They spent more time staring into crystals and various forms of prosperity idiocy to worry about poverty and racism. Their attitude was if you didn’t want to be poor, you should have decided to incarnate as a billionaire.
The Green Party came closest to standing against bipartisanship. They supported Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign. Too bad the insanity that invaded the Green Party drove Nader out and made the Greens a liability to poor people. I wasn’t as involved in these movements as I had been in the 1980s. But I’ll be sharing my first person observations about them. Espcially the trainwrecks which were Earth First and the Neopagans.
The 1990s were a giant dumpster fire, and I got out of them with the seat of my pants in flames. Those were the 1990s when millions of jobs were sent overseas. The health insurance industry grew so powerful it now dictates policy, and economic security is a vague dream. This is the story of the poor people who survived the 1990s and those who didn’t. It’s the story of people surviving a government falling into the end stages of fascism and the left that was too weak to stop it.
The Traumatic 90s 