After the "Movement" in the 1960s, some of us who had gotten caught up in it during our student days moved on to jobs where we felt fortunate that we were able to work in a salaried position with a major corporation and attempt to develop economic opportunities for the less fortunate, particularly minority group members, through job training and skills development, as well as working with minority entrepreneurs. Truly, we thought, this is "capitalism" responding.
The training we designed in the programs we developed included what the "War on Poverty" establishment perceived as "social" skills, as well as strictly technical skills. Our vision, we thought, at least when we began, was to integrate those left behind into American society.
It seemed a benign extension of the best of American enterprise.
In my own case I worked for a subsidiary established for this purpose by a Fortune 500 company. We thought that these efforts combining government programs and private sector initiative demonstrated a unique conscience and good will. With the help of various funding mechanisms, contracts and grants designed to "incentivize" the private sector into applying business methods to solve "social" problems, we set out to integrate those left behind into the larger "Great Society." Or at least we thought that was the idea as it had been envisioned and articulated by the president and his planners and policy-makers: We were to bring the less fortunate into the economic and social mainstream.
The contracts for profit were from such agencies as the Department of Labor, the old Office of Equal Opportunity, and other related socially oriented agencies. We ran Job Corps Centers (Labor), MA-5 job training programs (Labor) and a variety of special programs for OEO.
We were, we thought, not only applying business methods to solve social problems, we were in the front lines. We had enlisted in a "war" on being poor in America. Americans ought to be economically successful; this was the newly conceived right.
Hindsight was to show that this war, on the whole, was more successful in ending poverty for those who were fortunate enough to be employed in the programs than for the intended recipients. As the war waged, the results achieved were not quite what Congress and the politicians stated that they wished to happen and what they thought would result. But there were, one has to admit, some wonderful individual success stories among the actual trainees and objects of the efforts.
Anyone who doesn't believe that there were some successes should note that the indomitable George Foreman is a graduate of the Job Corps, and he has been a one-man entrepreneurial wave. America has taken him to her heart. Family man, preacher, founder and administrator of local faith-based community programs, inspiration and seemingly eternal formidable champion athlete -- his smiling good and personable nature have allowed him to promote and to partner in commercial ventures while increasing our admiration for him as a role model. Truly he is an American success story.
By contrast, another man who emerged from the "Movement" was a man who, having seized an opportunity to become a civil rights "leader," then prospered greatly as an administrator of war on poverty programs himself.
These are programs that he and others still laud, but whose measurable results are in most instances hard to determine, even on a subjective basis. Moreover, where these programs -- which he is in charge of and for which he takes grants and donations -- are measurable, they show few commendable results and seem riddled with questions and suggestions of graft and inefficiency.
He has been, unlike George Foreman, a major recipient of funds for the war on poverty, grants which have been demonstrably wasted in substantial part and which have never fully been accounted for. When he has been audited, he has evaded any real examination. When his irresponsibility and apparent graft has been threatened with prosecution or has been prosecuted, he has been able to "settle" on terms which cause the ordinary citizen envy, so rank are they with special treatment.
When questioned as to his personal character and life, he has attacked the questioners with remarkable success and, up until recently, at least, been able to make it seem like they were out of line for daring to question. Indeed, until recently it seemed as if he were going to get a free ride forever, with his status as a moral and minority leader intact and never debated.
It has seemed, according to the incessant gospel of the mainstream media these past 30-some years, as if the "Reverend" Jesse Jackson has become one of the great commanders of the war on poverty as it has developed and been waged over that time.
Nothing could be further from the truth, whether spelled with a capital "T" (Prov. 11) or a small "t." The George Foremans of our nation have put a real dent in poverty these past 30 years. The Jesse Jacksons have, by contrast commanded little more than the attention of the media while siphoning off wealth for their buddies, partying pals and girlfriends. Moreover, for every Jesse Jackson with whom the media have been obsessed, there have been a number of minority entrepreneurs, unsung but with actual new ideas and entrepreneurial ability, who have actually increased the wealth of this nation as envisioned in the rhetoric when the war on poverty was conceived. They are as likely to have succeeded despite the obstacles placed in their way by the Jesse Jacksons of the world and by the misguided lavishments of the Leviathan State as they are to have done so because of these factors.
For every taxpayer's dollar which Jesse Jackson conned and wasted, for every dollar which he extorted from a "mature" corporation long since gone to government and clout rather than entrepreneurship and breaking through with new products, somewhere there was an heir of Benjamin Banneker and George Washington Carver actually creating wealth for this nation. But they were paid no mind by the mavens of the mainstream media and on the whole, found their struggles as difficult and onerous as did their non-minority counterparts.
In this entrepreneurial vacuum, we have witnessed the elevation of the celebrity race hustler to the lofty status of the goal of the war on poverty, instead of those actually beating poverty.
Where we set out to integrate those thought left behind into the mainstream, we have witnessed the centralized command media of New York, Los Angeles and Washington reduce the desirable goal of the war on poverty to a new kind of sophisticated Superfly --and white America, in the form of our recent president, follows right along. Where we set out to bring the broken families and dreams of the ghetto and the rural South, Appalachia and the Ozarks into the mainstream, we have broken the families and idealized the irresponsible, deceiving black buck. Where we set out to suburbanize the urban, we have instead created suburbs of Superflies. This is truly, in that wonderful phrase of John Henry, a "triumph of seeming."
We have moved the goal to be the attainment of irresponsible celebrity, not the elimination of irresponsibility by integration into a family-based meritocracy. But celebrity, as someone once said, "turns out to be rather thin gruel." And now the illusions are crumbling.
We are beginning to see that Jesse Jackson, considered over all, in the harsh light of reality, has not achieved much by way of leadership or entrepreneurial success for his "people," but solely for himself, his son and his entourage -- a kind of nationalization of the path taken by Honey Fitz and so many others in the cities of the era of fabled corruption. The wonderful thing about this nationalization of such an ideal is that it entails no real responsibility. Mayor Daley, after all, had to run Chicago and make it work. As the late Coleman Young, mayor of Detroit observed pithily, "The only thing Jesse has run is his mouth."
Yet, for all these years the mainstream media have hung on Jesse's every word and chiming rhyme, even as they have grown less pertinent and coherent, culminating in the dreadfully childish and startlingly unintelligent, "stay out da Bushes." This passes for leadership?
Were it not for the surprising combination (which could not have existed a few years ago) of the Chicago Tribune's returning to the fabled days of "Front Page" in reporting on a regional celebrity, the emergence of huge hard news websites such as WND and a pugnacious Irishman on a new cable network rising to dominance in a brief span, the Rev. Jackson's free ride would have clearly gone on indefinitely and he could have continued his pretense of being a "spiritual adviser."
But, I'm going to have to continue these thoughts another day, because I see that dinner is almost cooked on our "lean mean grilling machine" and the "O'Reilly Factor" is about to come on.
Larry Elgin is chairman and counsel for U.S. Defense -- American Victory in Washington, D.C..