Where's the labor section?

[alice wellintown]

I have seen
The old gods go
And the new gods come.

Day by day
And year by year
The idols fall
And the idols rise.

Today
I worship the hammer.

         --Carl Sandburg

In chapter V of V. we meet Zeitsuss. He has a dream: one day he will
be Walter Reuther. After the Great Sewer Scandal of 1955, the
department, made up of mostly bums, develops a passion for honesty.
One old guy has been in the department hunting rats since at least
1922. Under the summer streets of Brownsville he killed 47 rats with a
brushhook, 13 August 1922. A brushhook is commonly used by surveying
crews to clear out heavy undergrowth from trails. These bum stories,
the biographies of the bums, read like the tales a young man might
listen to with incredulous curiosity as he does his stint on the road
crew. A kid from out on the guyland, riding the long island railroad
into the city would avoid Brownsville, but he might read about its
violent eruptions, then look into its history, the communists, the
socialists, their volatile conflicts, with the police, with each
other, the Jewish mafia, the Jewish and white flight, the emerging
Black underclass and so on.

The rats killed, like the rats the priest preaches too, who argue
about Marx and then fight, tearing eyes from sockets (one of the bums
lost his wife to Oswiecim and an eye to a hoist cable on the freighter
Mikolaj Rej), are allegorical figures. The conflicts, ideological,
sometimes bloody and blinding, as in Yeats's "blindmen battering
blindmen" send these workers into the ditch of history. Well, when the
new gods come, the ditch may be made a shrine erected in remembrance
of those who gave their eyes. And the songs of solidarity, songs of
rembrance,  may be tendered and rendered profane, the heroic men and
women, once made saints, made idols of the market place.

Brownsville, Brooklyn
 http://www.forgotten-ny.com/NEIGHBORHOODS/brownsville/brownsville.html