O.O. McIntyre: 25 Selected Stories

 Oscar Odd McIntyre is forgotten, a New York City columnist in the days before the Jazz Age, he was sarcastic and dry-humored, writing weeklies about the small town man’s view of the city. Like Bat Masterson before him, this columnist was an outsider, though he wasn’t a gunfighter like Masterson. He came from Ohio and began his career began in Cincinnati papers, eventually having his column was syndicated. He describes the fresh New Yorker as a country boy who sees the high-hatted city man, with his urban airs and extra cash, and gets charmed by his ways. The rube then heads for the city, sees what it’s really like, and the fantasy dies. As McIntyre puts it, “bang, into the grave of youth goes another illusion!”

    Back in the 1910’s, rich men enjoyed rough pastimes. Vincent Astor liked the cheap restaurants around Grand Central Station, and Vanderbilt had his own cobbling studio in his 5^th avenue basement. He wrote a story called The Simple Rich, about wealthy men who raise their own chickens. Perhaps they like it because it’s not all they have? Like Americans today, they enjoyed these things, as hobbies, but wouldn’t like doing them for a living.

    As for the silk-hatted city man, he says don’t be fooled. The man who you think is rich and refined probably came from Kentucky and came into money later on. Like most New Yorkers, he wasn’t likely to have been born there. Unfortunately, McIntyre only writes about the wealthier classes, so you won’t read much about the police, teachers, chefs, or average people. Then again, only the rich and affluent would’ve bought the newspapers that published his column. It would be another few decades before Gale Sheehy would write stories about prostitutes and sleaze and be credited for promoting feminism. Perhaps there will always be a readership divide?

   These 25 stories were written for Cosmopolitan, one of the many publications that ran his work. My research tells me that he started his New York career in PR, handling publicity for Broadway stars. He turned down a chance to do radio because he didn’t want to lower the quality of his work. However, I think he just didn’t want his readers to know how he really sounded!

As Golems Go, by Benjamin Kuras

Kuras portrays The Maharal as the new sheriff in town, who came to Prague to whip the Jewish community into shape. The new Rabbi finds that the Jews have joined the gentiles in their frivolous habits, and proceeds to scare his people into a more divine state of mind. The Golem doesn’t appear in this non-fiction book; it is the Maharal himself who does the “rescuing.”

    According to Kuras, Rabbi Judah Lowe, aka The Maharal, was a conservative Ashkenazi Jew with a problem. He came at a time of double trouble, where you had the Protestants versus Catholics, the Poles versus Germans, and the Renaissance, which started years earlier, was making non-Jewish philosophy very attractive. If that wasn’t bad enough, Sephardic Jewish philosophers had the chutzpah to question the sages, mixing their religious learning with scientific theories. Aaria De Rossi wrote Meir Haeynayim, and in response, Rabbi Lowe wrote Be’er Hagolah.

    However, though he had no sympathy for heresy, Rabbi Lowe was not dead set against questioning. He believed that a question as half way to knowledge, and urged teachers to be patient, not the “Mister Garrison” type who thinks there are no stupid questions, only stupid people. Nonetheless, the Maharal did not appeal to those who wanted secular education.

    There is a funny scene where Rabbi Lowe sees a group of teenage boys stumbling out of a house drunk, and by their feathered caps, he can tell they’re not Jewish, so he takes no notice. But then he sees boys with skullcaps, and thinks “Jewish boys getting drunk with the goyim, no way!” This wouldn’t have raised eyebrows for a Prague Jew, since the Jews of that city were wealthy, worldly, and more in tune to free thought. Rabbi Lowe, however, was a “yekkeh,” a German Jew not trusted by the city people. They looked at him as a country bumpkin Rabbi, riding into their town and telling them off.

    This scenario would play over again and again, from the time of Jesus all the way to the modern era. The same way Jesus, a country bumpkin Rabbi, marched into town and chased the moneychangers out of the temple, your new Rabbi will do the same now. Every time a Synagogue gets the new Rabbi, he’ll make demands. Maybe it’ll be that long sleeves have to be worn? No short skirts? Cover up the tattoos? Ban alcohol from Bar Mitzvahs? I always wait with baited breath to see what the next rule will be.

Human Rights in the World Community

This text on human rights consists of essays by more than thirty scholars, each one arguing a different aspect of human rights. One thing they all have in common is that they discuss how a nation’s economy effects how the rights are enjoyed.

In the seventeenth essay, Judy Fudge (University of Kent) discusses how labor rights have changed as countries move from heavy industry to digital business. She begins with a quote by Bob Hepple, about rights being little more than “paper tigers,” which is an essential problem discussed in this book. She writes about “social rights” as a way to address the deficits of citizenship, and by deficits, I mean the economic inequalities. Just because the law says “everyone is equal” doesn’t mean it’s going to happen that way. Businesses can still promote sexism, and though not discussed in her essay, disabled people can be kept out of a lot of jobs for image reasons. Fudge also discusses how the courts are uneasy at dealing with social rights, owing to their debatable nature as opposed to being codified.

Michael Ignatieff (former politician from Canada) writes about the USA’s focus on civil rights at home while at the same time sponsoring dictatorship in Latin America. The USA, despite the famous Bill of Rights, opted out of the UN declaration of children’s rights, and dragged its heels on the UN convention on genocide. It wasn’t that the USA had no desire for involvement, but that the USA could not use foreign rules in its own courts. I admit that children’s rights go begging in the USA, as seen with the “kids-for-cash” scandal in Pennsylvania. Perhaps US lawmakers, aware of the problem at home, don’t want to look hypocritical. Thanks to the US doctrine of states’ rights, it is difficult for our central government to make laws for the entire nation. Rights an autonomy can be a fickle thing, no?

Human rights are difficult to guarantee anywhere, as opposed to rule of law. It was an issue back in the feudal England, when the Barons could do as they pleased to the serfs. It was a problem in Russia, when the serfs were literally commodities, and the only reason the Czars ended serfdom was that it impeded industrialization. Even in the United States, it’s a problem on the micro level, especially with regard to families. Take for instance the right to keep the money you earn; if a teenage girl in The Bronx has an afterschool job, what’s to stop the girl’s irresponsible mother from bullying her into handing over her paycheck?  

The recent book by Janette Sadik-Khan, titled Street Fight, discusses the city of Medellin and what I call “commuter’s inequality.” If you have all the poor people living in the hills above the city, and the commute to town is a two-hour bus ride, then how will the people get to work? If all the public-funded schools are in town, how will the kids get to school? As is the case with many of the arguments in Human Rights in the World Community, many of the deficits of rights are actually deficits of the economy. Poor people are more likely to pull kids out of school and send them to work, so there’s less guarantee that a right to education will be enforced.

Stiffs Skulls, and Skeletons: Medical Photography and Symbolism

After looking at these photos from the collection of Dr. Burns, I wonder if the physicians of the 19^th century really had any respect for the patients. This book is interesting, without a doubt, because you get to see the medical schools of old, along with the type of instruction that was commonplace. According to the preface, medicine in the UK had changed in the nineteenth century; gone were the quack barber surgeons, now replaced by years of study at universities. Dissection was no longer done in secret with payments to grave robbers, but in teaching wards, where the students received a lot of training. However, according to these photos, the bodies themselves were often reduced to a freak show.

One of the photos in this book shows a dissected head, with part of the cranium removed, sitting on a plate. The eyes are open and so is the stubbly mouth, as if the deceased is in a stupor. It probably looks less ghastly in an old black and white photo than it would as a clear color digital one, because black and white photos can’t show the blood. Nowadays this is the kind of thing you’d see on a website devoted to “rotten.” Half the photos in this book show the medical students clowning around with the corpses, though how they got the expensive (and large and cumbersome) cameras into the wards I do not know. It would be easier nowadays thanks to iPhone cameras and their capacity to hold a million photos, but the student who takes the photo would probably be expelled.

Plate 1.29, however, has a more scholarly angle to the anatomy photo. It shows three men sitting around a skull, perched on an open book, as they study it. The skull and book bring to mind the old “memento mori” theme in classical painting, where the skull symbolizes the passage of time. As for the photos of the operating theaters, everything is very orderly and respectful, with none of the shenanigans from where the professors weren’t around.

Further chapters have photos from case studies, and before-and-after photos of patients after operations. There are photos of skulls eaten away by syphilis, WWI veterans recovering from jaw surgery, and bullets lodged in bones. The surgeons probably had plenty of opportunity to experiment with all the gruesome injuries that the veterans had, the kind that you can’t do on a cadaver whose bones don’t grow.

Medicine has always been politically controversial, not just because of quality and cost, but the ethics towards the patient. A recent book, Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, portrays how a lack of trust grew among African Americans towards physicians, given how they were often used for unethical experimentation. Then you have last year’s book A Finger In Lincolns Brain, which shows how low the quality of American medicine was. But after reading this book, it’s clear that even in the more primitive days, the patients’ survival rate hinged on how seriously the physician took his job.

Street Fight: Handbook of an Urban Revolution

    This book brings to mind an earlier tome called The Pedestrian Revolution, where the argument for car-free zones is shown to be feasible and profitable. However, The Pedestrian Revolution was written 40 years ago, a time when living in the city wasn’t the vogue. Much of Janette Sadik-Khan’s Street Fight has to do with modern issues of overcrowding and high fuel costs. Not all of her examples are from NYC; she includes Medellin, Colombia, as an example of non-automobile services. That unfortunate city, better known for cocaine, now has cable cars and escalators to get people up the hills. Instead of a two hour bus trip down the winding mountain roads, it’s a ten minute walk to the cable station, twenty minutes down to the city, and a ten minute bus ride to work. Medellin sits at the bottom of a valley, so more cars would equal more smog (like LA, Santiago De Chile, Beirut, Mexico City, etc) and even if the cars go electric, who can afford one anyway? The cable cars and escalators are an alternative to moving everyone to “affordable housing” in an unfamiliar neighborhood.

   Sadik-Khan explores the no-car solutions worldwide, and outlines the benefits; you get less smog, shorter commutes, lower fuel costs, decreased traffic, and if you increase the landmarks, navigation becomes easier. She also discusses the many sacrifices to me made, such as when 1^st Avenue in Manhattan got a bike lane. The Avenue, once a five-lane road, is reduced to only three car lanes; one for bikes, one for buses, and three for cars. While cars end up with fewer lanes and parking, she’s not terribly sympathetic; most of the cars on 1^st Avenue are commercial, and few New Yorkers can afford a car anyway.

    The author devotes a chapter to the anti-bike lane people, such a Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford (given his girth, he could use a bike) and doesn’t turn them into villains. Not everybody wants to ride, like the grocery magnate John Castimatides, who has the money to get driven to work daily, and like Rob Ford, would benefit from a few rides. Sadik-Khan does, however, criticize the anti-bike people with regard to their attitude to casualties. When a cyclist gets run over, they’re likely to say “he deserved it,” but when a cyclist hits a pedestrian, they’re up in arms.

    The earlier book by Jane Jacobs is mentioned in Street Fight, along with the changes that did not happen as a result. Robert Moses becomes the villain in this book, because it was Moses that pushed for car accommodations and not pedestrians. Maybe this book is really about the change from the city-to-suburb-to-city change in today’s world? Perhaps the number of young people putting off marriage influences the desire to live in cities? This book is one of several pro-urban arguments that have hot the bookshelves in recent years, the most recent one of which was Never Built Los Angeles. It turns out that LA had many planned neighborhoods proposed in the 1950’s, all of which had a rail link, and none of which were taken seriously. But given 30 years of “the freeway is a parking lot,” maybe it’s time?