Minhaj dots his routines with one-liners playing to the upper-middle-brow crowd, slipping once again into self-awareness with an off-the-cuff comment about "hitting all the pockets" with an "arthouse joke" about Call Me By Your Name and an "AP Gov joke" name-checking
Hoovervilles. While his colleagues grapple for pageviews, Minhaj employs a refreshingly un-viral technique.
Shantytowns of the dispossessed were called
Hoovervilles.
Nine thousand failed banks and unemployment at a fourth of the workforce; bread lines, soup kitchens, desperate human beings living in
Hoovervilles in worn-out clothes: Those who lived through the Great Depression may not have known the exact figures that confirm the human misery of those bleak years, but they did know about their own experiences, and no one disputes that it was a desperate time.
Meanwhile, millions of Americans were homeless, while others lived at the edges of cities in makeshift shantytowns disdainfully named "
Hoovervilles." See Taylor, supra note 35.
Homeless people called them '
Hoovervilles' back then.
1920s Chicago is bleak and dominated by
Hoovervilles and poverty.
Its tents and makeshift shelters, eerily reminiscent of the
Hoovervilles of the 1930s, (187) stood in solidarity with those victims of spiking home foreclosures.
The NYABC's Bloombergville, named after New York mayor Mike Bloomberg and modeled on Depression-era
Hoovervilles, occupied Zuccotti Park four months before Occupy.
Set among the
Hoovervilles of the Depression in 1933, "Annie" has sudden relevance in a metropolis recovering from a disastrously devastating storm, with present-day residents roaming the streets looking for food, fuel and shelter.
A tent city went up in Madison, modeled after the
Hoovervilles of the 1930s.
Annie finally, albeit briefly, makes good her getaway and finds herself in the bowels of New York, encountering thieves and the homeless denizens of one of the city's
Hoovervilles. These inhabitants look suspiciously like ancestors of today's Occupy Wall Street movement.
As protesters fed up with the increasing injustices of the global economic system get chucked out of their latter-day
Hoovervilles, Euro-American elites might consider when their turn will come.
