The Vision-Impaired Rich

"Where have the poor disappeared to?" the occasional journalist of conscience wonders. Officially, they amount to 13 percent of the population, although -- since this number derives from an almost-forty-year-old definition of poverty (before rents went through the roof) -- it may be a serious undercount. Yet we seldom see the poor in the media -- unless they've managed to commit a particularly flamboyant crime -- or hear them mentioned in the political rhetoric of either party. If any other comparably sized chunk of the population -- college students, for example -- were to vanish from public view, their faces would be appearing on milk cartons.

The disappearance of the poor from the media is easy to explain: The advertisers who support most corporate media outlets are interested only in reaching the affluent, and media decisionmakers oblige them. I learned this several years ago when I attempted to pitch a story on women in poverty to the editor of a glossy national magazine (which, in the interests of my future career, will remain unnamed). We were at lunch, always a high point in the life of an impecunious freelancer, and I made my case through the mesclun with parmesan shavings and polenta-crusted salmon while the editor yawned between bites. Finally, over the espresso and death-by-chocolate dessert, he rolled his eyes and said, "OK, do your thing on poverty. Only make it upscale."

I never could figure out how to do that, but now a cleverer journalist has. The title of James Fallows's article in the March 19 New York Times Magazine is "The Invisible Poor" -- surprising fare, I thought, for a magazine that routinely brings us four-figure fashions and great recipes for artichokes and fennel. But the only humans we meet in this piece are members of the all-too-visible cyber-elite, a set which has little or no acquaintance with those unfortunates for whom, as Fallows puts it, "a million dollars would be a fortune." He finds his interview subjects wrapped snugly in their stock options, incapable of imagining anyone who might pause before breaking a twenty, or even several thousand times that much. Well, actually, he does encounter one representative of the poor -- an elderly office-cleaner in the software firm where Fallows does his interviewing, a woman with broken English and a painful-looking limp. But this solitary representative of the poor discomfits him so much, with her evident suffering, that he takes to leaving the building for the night as soon as he hears her shuffling down the corridor.

Even as I wince for the journalistic profession -- which, in its finer moments, seeks out the poor and is not afraid to approach them -- there's something to be said for Fallows's approach. To a notable extent, the problem isn't the "invisible poor"; it's the vision-impaired rich, including the sizable upper middle class. As many before Fallows have noted, these fortunates inhabit an increasingly insular world of their own, far from the customary venues of the poor or even the working class. They live in fortress-like apartment buildings, gated communities, or inaccessible exurbs. They do not use public transportation and are unlikely to send their children to public schools. And when they are forced to be in the presence of a sub-millionaire -- a haircutter, a driver, or a masseur -- their cell phones keep them safely sheltered from all but the most minimal verbal contact.

I once endured a few minutes of chit-chat with the CEO of a major multinational corporation. Where do I get my ideas? he wanted to know. I muttered something lame about everyday life -- raising kids, paying bills, going to the supermarket. At this last, his eyes lit up. "I've been to a supermarket," he confided, beaming with populist pride.