Visible Man

George Gilder has had an interesting and controversial career, including a famous book on economics (`Wealth and Poverty', highly praised by Ronald Reagan among others), several books on the high tech industry (a field in which he has long served as an investment advisor), a book entitled `Sexual Suicide' (later renamed `Men and Marriage', that challenged many of the tenets of the feminist movement - N.O.W. once named him `Pig of the Year'), and his recent defense of the Intelligent Design belief that life might be something more than just an accident wrought by the fluke movements of dead bits of matter. There is also this lesser known work, `Visible Man', published in 1978, and re-released with a new Introduction in 1995. The title, Gilder tells us, is both "a tribute to Ralph Ellison's classic ['Invisible Man'] and an assertion that whatever the problems of young black men, invisibility was no longer among them." The book reads like a good novel, as Gilder tells the story - based on hundreds of interviews over two years -- of a young black man from Albany, NY, raised by a welfare mother and her female relatives, who fought in Vietnam, spends his time chasing women who frequent the bars of his neighborhood, fathers several children, works briefly for a government agency, and gets into various scrapes with the law - including a charge of rape, for which he is eventually acquitted. It was during these years spent with `Sam', his family, and his friends, that the author's unconventional views on the causes of poverty in America were forged and confirmed: specifically, his convictions regarding the civilizing and maturing power of marriage, family, and work, and the cruelty and degradation that is concealed within the welfare system. When someone speaks out against welfare, it is easy to become indignant and to charge such a person with an appalling lack of decency, a lack of caring, a lack of charity and humanity. But shallow sentimentality has to give way to a deeper and more intelligent form of `loving one's neighbor', and I find Gilder's earnest assertions to be exceedingly compassionate and wise. In 1978, he warned us against treating blacks as if they were children -- unable to be told the truth, unable to understand the basic facts of a market economy, unable to rise above a system of fantastic expectations, indulgences, and entitlements. "This is the worst kind of racism in America," he said, "the respectable kind." The kind that unmans black men, that belittles them with pity and charity. Problems inevitably arise "whenever and wherever the worth of welfare payments and related benefits - crucially including leisure time and related medical care - rises above the value of earnings. Under these conditions, regardless of reforms and regulations, welfare will be a government machine that fosters illegitimacy and turns dads into deadbeats." Unwed mothers are particularly eligible for these generous benefits, which means that the need for

Though the book is non-fiction, it at time reads like a quirky novel, with memorable charactors like Buddy the overweight lesbian. Now that the nation's welfare system is in its final years, its interesting to see the effects of New York State's extreamly generous welfare benefits had on a low-income neighborhood and its residents in the first few years, which is the background of the story, which concerns a black man falsly accused of raping a white woman.The books is very well-written and engrossing. I read it in only two sittings.