[SqueakyRat]

Once upon a time, I was well launched toward a high-flying academic career. Then suddenly I wasn’t. After some years of scuffling as a teaching peon, there came a period of real poverty, something I had never actually experienced before. During that time, I came to realize that being poor in America is what I call an ontological wound: I actually had a sense of not existing as I had before, simply because there were so many things in the culture I could no longer participate in. America’s culture, such as it is, is so thoroughly commercialized that without money you are, as someone said in this thread, excommunicated. There’s a recent film in which the hero, living in a society in which access to everything is mediated by an electronic identity swipe card, gets cut off by the system. He can’t get into his apartment building, he can’t make a phone call, he can’t access his bank account, he can’t take a train, he can’t do much of anything. So he falls into a kind of subterranean underworld of similarly identity-less people. It was a little like that for me. It’s a very eerie sensation.

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