Follow the Shoes

On doctor’s orders I’ve taken to walking. The prescription: a half an hour a day at least three days a week. I’m doing five days a week and feeling quite good about it, thank you very much.

This regime encouraged me to purchase a new pair of walking shoes. Knowing of Thoreau’s injunction to beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, I did not act immediately to purchase the new shoes, but walked for a couple of weeks in my clunky, though not too uncomfortable work shoes. Eventually, however, I gave in to the urge to outfit myself properly, an urge I could justify to Mr. Thoreau, if necessary, under the heading of cardiovascular health.

The shoes, by Born, are a now retro version of jogging shoes that I wore -- that joggers all over the world wore -- in the 1970s: narrow, with slender diagonal racing stripes on the side, cut low around the ankles, long tongue and laces. The shoe form of the skimpy basketball shorts of the 70s.

Back in the 70s I jogged for about half a summer. I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina, driven there by the promise of a summer job. There were no jobs in upstate New York at the time. Not for young men who were going to college at any rate. Scarce and soon to be much scarcer, jobs at the local lumber and paper mills were reserved for the sons and daughters of senior mill workers.

Within a few years though, those jobs would be sent to the Pacific Northwest, and then Canada, then overseas, leaving in their wake unpaid mortgages, unrepaired snowmobiles, abandoned trailers and shotgun shacks, their abject yards clotted with broken washers and refrigerators. But the job diaspora hadn’t come to that yet, although the seams were beginning to show.

Through my brother I got a job as an electrician’s helper. Paid minimum wage, barely able to afford one meal a day, I spent every evening in the air conditioning of the college library to get out of the stifling swampy North Carolina air.

At closing time, I’d trudge slowly back to the small second floor attic room I shared with my brother and two other struggling beneficiaries of the State of North Carolina’s right-to-work policy. The tiny air conditioner we shared could only about half wring the water from the sludgy, musty attic air. It could not actually cool off the room, but it did at least dry the sweat off of our skin.

Waking up in this musty airless den, I’d pull on my Converse sneakers and jog out to the college track and do laps for about half an hour. It was relatively pleasant in the early morning, about eighty degrees, dewy, which somehow held the mugginess in check.

Eventually, I got the point where I thought I deserved some real running shoes, and so putting aside money for a couple of weeks toward their purchase, I went to the local mall on a Friday night and bought a pair of no-name brand running shoes, bright blue with three yellow diagonal stripes on either side. I could not afford Nike’s or Adida's, which cost about twice as much as the knock-offs I bought.

The next morning, elated with my purchase, I ran an extra fifteen or so minutes to break them in, enjoying the sense of mastery my new shoes promised and seemed to deliver. Spongy, springy, they were clearly a departure from the thin-soled basketball shoes we had all grown up with.

But it was me that was broken in, not the shoes. The next morning I could barely walk. I couldn’t climb the ladder at work and could barely climb stairs. Back at home later that summer I described my symptoms to a friend who had become an expert jogger who told me I had given myself shin splints. I never wore those shoes again, but nevertheless kept them for years as literal object lesson of Thoreau’s teaching.

My boss, deservedly nicknamed Lard, couldn’t understand why anyone would run anywhere at anytime, much less run and injure one’s legs to the extent that they could barely work and cost him money. Although he was irritated to have less than half a worker for the week or so it took me to recover, he got a lot of mileage telling other bosses on the worksite about the northern college boy who hurt his legs “jogging.”

Jogging was new concept back then and Lard was able to put an extraordinary spin on it, a spin that spoke volumes about idiocy of Yankee college boys, and Yankees in general. To run in the heat, even of an early summer morning, was to him and his cohorts just plain crazy. Sauntering with grave rotundity, drinking Co’ Cola for breakfast, that was the sane and accepted practice.

So with this retro purchase, I find myself thrown back in time to the mid 70s just at the moment when the Counterrevolution of the Bosses was beginning to kick in. Not the bosses like Lard, of course, but the big bosses. The thousand or so guys who tell Wall Street what to do. You know, the plutocracy whom if you mention people call you crazy. Because in America the plutocracy has managed to convince people they don't exist. Good ol' boys like George W. and his Daddy ain't no plutocracy. They's good folks, and don't you forget it, you damn liberals.

The post war consensus of business, labor and government was just beginning to crack apart in the mid 70s. Northern jobs were being exported to the South and East, US banks were recycling petrodollars and colonizing the third world with indebtedness, and Paul Volcker, friend of Wall Street, was squeezing the money supply until he was able to establish the rentier economy so devoutly wished by the captains of the economy, and their neo-liberal apologists at the University of Chicago.

The Counterrevolution is now so complete that the wealthiest families in America have managed to get back most of the money and power they ceded during the short-lived liberal era that lasted roughly from Roosevelt through Nixon. They have managed to assert their will in every sector of the economy, demanding from workers longer hours on smaller paychecks, from the government more tax breaks and fewer regulations, from Wall Street greater returns on their investments. Further, they now support an apologist class so large and so vociferous that to propose an alternative to the plutocracy is to be attacked as mad, or even worse, a liberal.

And so what that means is I’m buying shoes made in China from a corporation whose headquarters is possibly in Europe, but like Haagen Dazs could be in located in New Jersey, buying them from a discount store located on the site once offered by the Borough of Brooklyn to the O’Malley’s for a new Ebbets Field, but which, in fact, was never really seriously considered by same as secret talks were nearing completion with Los Angeles.

And right next door to that shopping center there probably is soon to be a Trojan horse of a basketball arena erected by a canny real estate speculator named in fine Dickensian fashion, Ratner, a project which is being sold to us as a means to bring Brooklyn back into the world of major league sport where we are told that we the people of Brooklyn belong and which some of the more gullible believe.

It is possible to buy clones of the Converse and Keds basketball sneakers that I wore before buying those crippling jogging shoes back in the 70s. I see people wearing them all the time these days. Not for playing basketball, but rather as a campy emblem of 50s Americana, a time when juvenile delinquency, Communists, the Warren Court and atomic destruction reigned as the four horsemen of the American Apocalypse: you know, that pre-lapsarian American favored by conservative mythologizers, that kinder, gentler America that was actually pretty much like America now, at least in it's right-wing fear mongering. I may be wrong about why people wear them; that’s why I would wear them, that’s what Converses say to me.

Back in the Watergate 70s, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.

Me -- I’m following the shoes. Until I get tired. Which is right about now.

Plutocracy, Bush, The 70s, Paul Volcker, Stagflation ,Wall Street