Poverty Is Patriotic!

NOVEMBER 22, 2001/MAZAR-E-SHARIF, AFGHANISTAN ? The Taliban fighter, fluid leaking from every orifice, gripped my shirt, his eyes fiery, hateful effigies of themselves. Fueled by an extra helping of airdropped food, I wrenched away from him, grabbed his beard and whipped my pistol into his temple. His brains oozed, like a heavily sauced appetizer at Balthazar, and he fell, down, down, into history's dustbin of discarded lies.

About me, my Northern Alliance allies huzzahed.

"Great writer!" said one of them. "Once again, you have proved yourself on the field of battle!"

"I had to, Abdullah," I said, wiping myself clean with a moist towelette. "For eight of my fellow journalists have died in this just war, and only I, with my iron fists of steel, can exact the true revenge of the Fourth Estate."

We all cheered in unison, and joyfully hacked the ears off corpses.

Indeed, I meant my statements, pithy yet improvised as they were. During my decades as a correspondent, I have been privileged to witness many acts of courage and freedom among the fighting men of the world. But never have I seen such bravery as I did throughout the now-famous Taliban prison revolt. I am proud to say that I fought alongside the hardworking underpaid grunts of the Northern Alliance and their CIA advisers, systematically slaughtering hundreds of people and therefore bringing the world one step closer to freedom. To paraphrase the great British historian E.P. Thompson, we fucking smoked their ass.

Alas, before I could complete the job, fate made a phone call.

"Pollack," said a dear friend, "you got a whiny guy on the box."

"Thank you, Abdullah," I said, and picked up the receiver. "Greatest Living American Writer here," I said.

"It's Steve," said the voice.

Ah. The editor of one of the glossy magazines for which I toil.

"Kinda busy right now," I said.

"I know, I know, the Siege of Kunduz and all," he said. "But listen, we need you here at home. There's an important trend story breaking."

"But I gotta kill, Steve," I said. "I mean, gotta report on killing."

"We'll pay you three dollars a word."

I hung up and turned to face the battle.

"Gentlemen," I said. "It's been a pleasure."

?DECEMBER 4, 2001/NEW YORK CITY ? Since the terrible events of Sept. 11, the social landscape of New York has been completely transformed. Firefighters, it seems, are getting laid more often than concert promoters. Comedy is no longer funny, and music no longer seems to mean what it once did, either. The leaves fall off the trees, and soon the ground will be covered with thick snow, adding a wet chill to our already grieving hearts.

What a relief, then, to discover that it's suddenly cool to be poor. This societal change has been reported in a very reputable Sunday supplement, so it must therefore be true. Many excellent magazines have also picked up on the theme, covering such important topics as how to be a cheap date, how to cook at home and how to get the hell out of New York. All the articles I read in preparation for this article said that poor is the new rich, and I thoroughly agreed with their brilliant collective premise. But I saw few pieces with the courage to actually cover the story from the ground.

Fortunately, I live in Williamsburg.

First, I visited the airless, unheated squat of Adam Cohen, a leading advocate of the New Poverty. Only 15 months ago, Cohen, who is 24 and a graduate of Middlebury, was the CEO of Itsyourmonkey.com, an online delivery portal for services and consumer systems. He lost his job in a bloody, heartless coup, and now finds himself leading a new organization called Live Poor Or Die!

"Poor is the new rich," he said, as we sat on milk crates, sipping ramen from paper cups.

"Yeah, yeah," I said.

He pulled a tick from behind his ear and squashed it.

"No, seriously," he said. "We like being poor now. It's fun. It makes us feel patriotic."

"Who's we?"

"Unemployed New Yorkers."

I thought thoughtfully for a few moments.

"Let me play devil's advocate with you," I said.

"Okay."

"Haven't there always been unemployed New Yorkers?"

"I dunno," he said. "I guess. Maybe."

"So why is it suddenly now cool to be poor?"

Adam Cohen fingered the bill of his cap, which bore the LPOD! logo. He took a slug of Mad Dog.

"Um," he said, "because someday the masses will rise up and break the chains of their oppressors?"

I must have looked unimpressed, because he offered to give me a blowjob.

When we were done, Adam looked at me, dreamily, and said, "Do you think you could help me land an opinion piece in The New Republic?"

ºElizabeth Pinckney-Benedict is the daughter of an Upper East Side mortgage broker and a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Opera. She attended Vassar and Yale, received a degree in English literature, worked for a time as a schoolteacher in the Bronx and eventually married a man who looks just like her father. Now she is the organizer of the Poverty Balls, a series of parties that will be held in the next year around Manhattan and a couple of neighborhoods in Brooklyn to call attention to the fact that it's cool to be poor.

We met at Penury, a new poverty-themed club on the Bowery.

"Darling!" she exclaimed, smearing coal dust on both my cheeks as she kissed me.

"Didn't this used to be a flophouse?" I asked.

"You silly!" she exclaimed.

"No, seriously, I used to play poker down here, back when I walked the beat for the Daily News, and?"

She yanked me inside.

"You have just got to see what we've done with the place!" she said.

The spectacle astounded. All about the room, badly dressed, dirty, stunningly attractive young men and women huddled around trashcan fires, holding fingerless-gloved hands close to the flames. Somewhere, a hidden DJ played a trance version of "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" Enormous African-American women roamed the room with trays of tuna salad and Pabst Blue Ribbon. At uneven intervals, they shouted, "Mah baby! Someone done gone and stole mah baby!"

"Elizabeth," I said, "this is simply astounding. You've outdone yourself. Why, it's a scene straight out of George Orwell!"

"Who's George Orwell?" she asked.

A servant dressed as a poor person brought Elizabeth a bowl of tomato soup. I resisted the urge to spit. She turned to greet someone else.

Out came the loogie.

Across the room, I saw Iggy Pop, my ex-boyfriend. I called him over.

"What're you, the entertainment?" I said.

"Nah, man," he said. "I'm just poor."

Elizabeth took me into a special room, done up to look like a typical Depression-era street corner. We found six shabby, hot women, smoking government-issue cigarettes and shooting dice.

"Hiya, sailor," said one of them. "My name's Nancy. Wanna jitterbug?"

As soon as I identified myself, they cut the patois.

"Poor is the new rich," Nancy said. "I read about it in a magazine next to an article about the New Sincerity."

"Are you ladies poor?" I asked.

"Totally!" they exclaimed in unison.

"Even the women on Sex and the City are poor now," Nancy said.

"Do you like it here?"

"Oh, yes," Nancy said. "It's very poor. There's not even a washroom attendant!"

Often, when I'm around a group of beautiful but confused young women, I feel compelled to lecture. This moment proved no different. I told them the sad but interesting story about how my grandfather made millions of dollars in the diamond mines of Peru, and then about how my father invested in a German munitions factory, thereby sealing the family fortune. So, indeed, I said, I've never known the shocks of poverty, and I feel for those Americans who have to suffer its cruel buttresses for the first time.

"If ever any of you ladies needs a place to sleep," I said, "my three-story Williamsburg loft is available."

Six pairs of eyes batted in unison. Three hands touched my arm at once. The air smelt, instantly, of sex. From the main hall, I could hear a servant shout, "Mah baby! Mah baby!"

"You are so good-looking," Nancy said.

Poverty, apparently, didn't cloud her judgment. I spent a delightful week with Nancy and her five friends, bought them all the drugs they could toot and felt like a man of 35 again. And when the dawn came on Monday and the CNN helicopter appeared to return me to Afghanistan, they all cried unemployed tears as my bodyguards forcibly removed them from the guest suite. The end of privilege is bittersweet, yes, but war is bittersweeter. Despite the New Poverty, and the $7500 check I received for its chronicling, history calls me with her siren song of blood, and I must fight on.