Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

    There’s a scene in this book where the teenage Piri, with his lowlife friends, visit an apartment full of transvestites. They smoke pot, engage in oral and anal sex (described with uncompromising and vulgar frankness) and lay down some beatings. Now keep in mind three things about this book; first, it takes place in the 1940’s, secondly, the protagonist is just a kid, and third, it’s on the reading list for some high schools.  I bet that had this book been released at the time it takes place, it would not only have been banned in every library, but also consigned to fuel the building furnace. I wonder if it’s assigned to Black high schoolers today because some educators thing the boys can relate to it? Maybe so, I can imagine they’d relate to it more than The Glass Menagerie.

    Let’s go into the author’s family life. Born in NYC in 1928, he and his family were part of Harlem’s tiny Spanish-speaking community. Race forms a nasty undercurrent in the story, and not just in terms of segregation, but his family life as well. He’s a dark-skinned boy, and his darkness is something of an embarrassment to his family. Growing up, he fits in with the other Puerto Rican kids, but they can get things he can’t. Then his family moves to Long Island to work in the wartime industries, and things get worse. His father intends to leave their old life behind, but for dark-skinned Piri, racial hostility replaces the roughness of the streets. No more Puerto Rican for him, he’s now a Black kid, and treated like one by his classmates. He retreats back to his old neighborhood, settles in with the lowlifes as his new family, slides further down into vice and crime, and ends up doing time for shooting a cop.

    In contrast to the Langston Hughes Harlem, I consider this a book about the sleazy underbelly of the community. The young Piri Thomas lives in a world of drugs, pimps, hookers, trannies, loose women, poverty, crime, and all the things that Neil Jordan, Larry Clark, and Harmony Korine would put in their movies. Much of the book takes place on the fringes of society, a place where the people never see the best part of the city, and the people in the better parts never see this neighborhood. There’s no “discovery” scene like in Go Tell It On the Mountain, where the narrator visits a museum and sees that there’s more to the city than his own sphere. Both Piri Thomas and James Baldwin put their stories in Harlem, and they were born around the same time, but there is a difference between the two. Baldwin’s characters climb out of their consigned world by working their way out, while in Piri’s case, he stays there because it’s a comfort zone. There’s also a sense of nihilism, in that Piri actively looks for trouble, almost with a suicidal attitude. Lastly, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, the narrator is trying to break from under his parents’ hypocrisy, while Piri Thomas sees no hypocrisy at all; his father’s abusive behavior is obvious, and the boy has no illusions about it.

Throughout the book, I kept wondering if things were really that bad in 1940’s Harlem. Bill Cosby (before he was outed as a creep) once said “in the old days you couldn’t play hooky from school, because behind every drawn curtain, there was an eye.” While reading Down These Mean Streets, I got the feeling that either Piri’s neighborhood had no such eye, or his parents didn’t care. I wonder if the cult of “the good old days” doesn’t apply, because dysfunctional families had no support and no hope?

Detective: The Story of an Unfortunate Cop Who Let the System Wear Her Down

   I’m making a nasty joke here, folks. The actual title of this book is Detective: The Story of a Trail-Blazing Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit. But I have a whole lot of issues with this book, not the least of which is the incredible bias of the author, followed by her self-indulgence. While her story is an interesting one, and covers many important issues of the NYPD, I found that her incredible bitterness ruins it.

   Kathy Burke became a New York City cop in the late 1960’s. It was right at the time where the women officers were going from the job of matron, who booked and searched women suspects, to doing real police work. According to Burke, there were a sizeable number of women detectives in the department, and the main reason is that the women were needed as bait. She ends up masquerading as a college student, drug user, high school kid, and other characters in order to catch drug dealers. The problem is that the men who were supposed to be watching her goofed off, and she get stabbed. Several lessons were learned that day; first, the women were disregarded, and second, the worst thing you can do is let your colleagues get in trouble. But that incident had one advantage - it got her a detective’s shield!

    Ironically, Burke was facing far more dangerous work than any of the male detectives. She didn’t have any advantage of size, wasn’t a skilled fighter, and was in the type of undercover work that could get her killed. In her 20 years in the NYPD she dealt with dealers, bank robbers (including a six-foot-ten that she collared twice) and others. Unfortunately, she dealt with a lot of sexual harassment from her supervisor, and that led to her suing the NYPD over withheld promotions. She won the lawsuit, and soon afterwards the NYPD stopped using the terms patrolman and policewoman, opting instead to call them all police officers regardless of gender.

    My problem with her story is that she has annoying prejudices against the people she’s dealing with. In the earlier part of her career, she went undercover to bust a lot of teenage drug dealers, usually going into the schools, taking advantage of her youthful appearance. A lot of the teens she found dealing were from well-connected families; one of them was the daughter of a district attorney. But then she starts saying that she despised these teenage dealers, and it’s clear that she still does. I would like to know why she despises the kids, not the parents who let them do it? She also writes about how the patrolmen who arrested her would make lewd remarks about her in the car. Why doesn’t she despise those men more than the teenage pot dealer?

    The ending of this book takes the cake. She and her colleague get shot while doing surveillance of a Mafia gambling operation; he dies, she gets blames by everyone for her his death, and the mob gunmen who did it are acquitted. Everyone (including the prosecutor) makes her out to be a pushy woman getting above herself, and she leaves in a big huff. The problem with this is that there are too many unanswered questions. Firstly, a cop doesn’t normally get the blame for another’s death if she too gets shot, so why was everyone so quick to blame her? Secondly, she says that she was harassed by cops who wanted her to drop the charges against the men who shot her, and that doesn’t make sense. Lastly, when I looked up this story online (including the book’s reviews) I found so many cops who disputed her version of the story. They all say she fled in the car and left the other cop to die. If they are in fact wrong, what incentive do they have to say those things? One of them suggested that her husband, a high-ranking NYPD captain, helped cover things up. Someone here is not being truthful, but who?

    I don’t know how to categorize this book. Should I call it a woman’s memoir of the NYPD? The change in the NYPD’s attitude to women officers? A book about sexual harassment? I hope things have changed in the department, at least in comparison to what she went through. Other than that, there isn’t really much to learn from this book. There’s another autobiography by a former decoy detective named Mary Glatzle, AKA “Muggable Mary,” with similar stories of working undercover, yet the latter was a lot more enjoyable. Also, Detective Glatzle doesn’t have the huge prejudices that Burke has of her days in the department.

When Do the Good Things Start?

    I grew up with relatives who were just like Lucy in The Peanuts comic strip. They would insult people, shirk responsibility, chew people out, and in the end, they always found ways to justify their behavior. Eventually, I realized there was only way out, and that way was to avoid them. You can never win an argument with a narcissist, because they believe their own lies. In this book, Dr. Abraham Twersky uses Lucy, and other Peanuts characters, to illustrate the mentality of addiction.

Dr. Twersky (MD/PhD) is an interesting character; a Rabbi and Psychiatrist, specializing in addictions, he’s worked with every class of addiction you can think of, be it drugs, alcohol, sex, food, rage, or just plain procrastination. He mentioned in The Jews of America that he sees the traits of an addict in himself, describing it as “I’m a procrastinator, I crave instant relief.” One of the points of this book is that the need for relief is not a cause or symptom of addiction, but part of a spectrum of problems you see in addiction.

One of his examples is the dynamic between Lucy and Schroeder. We’ve all read the strips, where Lucy leans on the piano, crooning to the boy while he ignores her. Nothing he says or does, no matter how dismissive or just downright hostile, can make her go away. He looks right through her, and she can’t see that he’s ignoring her. Then there are Lucy’s victims, the people that good-naturedly listen to her while she raves, rants, vents, and lies. She’ll miss a fly ball because she’s drawing in the dirt, and when Charlie Brown gets mad, she’ll say, calmly, “A good coach doesn’t yell at the players.” She goads people into getting angry so she can criticize them, and it’s a way for her to feel superior. We wonder when Charlie Brown will get it into his head that Lucy can never be trusted, wishing he’d give Lucy her comeuppance.

The book begins with the mantras for Alcoholics Anonymous and 12-Step, and one of the most well-known is that you have to admit you’ve lost control. You have to come out and say “I’m an alcoholic, and I have no control over myself anymore.” From there, you build back up, and you look into how your addiction started and how it altered your life. In the Peanuts comic, Charlie lets people drive him crazy, but won’t face the fact that he needs to avoid them.

On the subject of addiction, I recall the movie The Lost Weekend, where the alcoholic writer drags everyone down with him. I asked an addiction counselor how much of it was realistic, and he said “everything,” and how he could relate to the guy being desperate for another drink, waiting desperately for the pawn shops to open, lying constantly to his loved ones. But there was one highly unrealistic part, and that was the end. There are no epiphanies in addiction; the only way an addict gets clean is when he hits rock bottom, and rock bottom is when your friends and family cut you off.

Unlike another Rabbi/therapist name Shmuley Boteach, Dr. Twersky doesn’t get as much attention. He’s not a media hound, but he is well-known to people who really want to recover. If you watch him on youtube, you’ll see that he doesn’t go for instant relief, and you’ll have to have patience to watch and listen to him. If you want instant relief (whether it works or not) then you can watch Dr. Phil. One of the aspects of the Peanuts comic that kind of mirrors Dr. Phil is the way Snoopy decides to eat to forget. Instead of facing his problem, he decides to eat until he no longer thinks about horrible things, and ends up obese. Saying “hooray, I’ve forgotten her,” does not mean anything. There’s no magic pill.

I recall a Mad Magazine parody of Peanuts, where Charlie Brown finally deals with his frustration. In that parody, Lucy says she’ll hold the football down, while Charlie runs up to kick it, and we all know how this always ends, right? Well in the next panel, Lucy is on the ground, nursing a big bruise, and says “I know I deserve something for always pulling the ball away, but why did you have to kick me in the head?” Charlie responds “because the way you were facing, I couldn’t reach your butt!” Though the reader wishes this would happen, it wouldn’t work. Lucy would never learn from something like this. She’d go around telling everyone that Charlie was the aggressor. Unless, that it, Charlie cut all ties with his social circle, because then it would make no difference what they thought of him.

Perhaps one of the first things about recovery is leaving the people with whom you are addicted.

The Truth About New York

    Amir Said starts with basic info about the five boroughs; how Manhattan is an island with a grid, how Robert Moses plowed through the Bronx, how Staten Island is a mob residence, how Brooklyn is getting more love than ever before, etc. Some things in here I don’t believe, like the part about NYC being the place for jobs. Illegal immigrants take a lot of the jobs in restaurants and construction, and most of the tech jobs are done by unpaid interns. Obesity is not a major problem here, because everyone has to be on their feet.

    

    He does give some humorous pages to renting an apartment in the city, with all the down-and-dirty about rent control and how the landlords try to scare away tenants. He advises the renter to discard the dream of a spacious apartment, and avoid any place with a commute of more than 45 minutes into Manhattan. Stay close to a good public library (decent people in the area) and avoid police stations (they’re placed in high-crime areas.) The subways are how people get around, but they are unreliable, filthy, overcrowded, and prone to delays.

    The book goes on to cover dating, food and dining, nightlife, culture, education, and religion. Sometimes the writing goes too far, some parts are too long, each chapter could be its own book. Some parts, like the one on schools, would be better if they included interviews with parents, maybe have a part about schools where the White kids are a minority. 

The Spanish Fantastic: Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy, and Sci-Fi

   Film critic Rowan-Legg begins with the same question that I asked when I saw Devil’s Backbone; why have Spain’s horror-thrillers only gotten attention in the last 15 years? What was their standing before that? Why were Armando D’Ossorio’s horror films ignored? His Tombs of the Blind Dead and subsequent works are so obscure, not to mention his other films. If Spain was renowned for Pedro Almadovar’s neurotic-woman comedies, why not horror?

   

  It seems that D’Ossorio’s movies were meant for the kind of people that liked Dario Argento’s Italian gore fests. When it comes to Spain’s late development in the horror film genre, the author blames it on the country’s instability. First there was the civil war of the 1930’s, when few theaters were functioning, then the country’s strict censorship, then the strong influence of the Catholic church, and finally the Franco regime’s dislike of foreign influence. As time went on, the country’s filmmakers created celebrations of the country’s music and dancing, which were more acceptable to the country’s conservative leaders. Franco’s death in 1975 flooded Spain with American movies, so what use was there for poor-quality native cinema?

    When the Spanish horror films began in earnest, the directors like Franco, Martin, and Naschy took their cues from Britain’s Hammer horror films, hiring actors like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The use of American and/or British actors did help get them some exposure outside the country, but even that was limited. Franco’s movies never went much further than the cult circuit, and they bear a strong resemblance to Argento’s works. Should they be classed as Eurotrash films? If the USA already had enough horror movies to fill a video rental store, what use was there for Franco’s horror films?

Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict

    For her book on contemporary Arabic poetry, Professor Athamneh doesn’t go into all the ancient Arabic works that got catalogued with eastern philosophy. She begins with a chapter on how it changed in the last century, a time that saw extreme change and upheaval in the Arab world. Ba’athism was an inspiration for a lot of these poets, and Nasser’s 1967 defeat made them question their role in society. Now that Ba’athism is dead and gone, they’re questioning their role even further.

    An example of the modern Arabic poet is Iraqi born Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1926-1999). He lived in other Arab countries after leaving Iraq, and more often than not he was at odds with the Iraqi government. His works underwent a dramatic change after the 1967 defeat, and he compared poetry to a forgotten man dying in a hospital.

    The poets of Arabia had high standards in the old days. Tribes would compete with their bards, who composed verses on life, war, and the pleasures of sitting among the olive trees (quite a luxury in Arabia, which is mostly desert.) I wonder sometimes if a lot of it had to do with widespread illiteracy in the Middle East. When your audience can’t read, the poems had better be the kind that you can easily remember.

    Another poet whose work is discussed is Ahman Hijazi, born in 1935, also a fixture in the Ba’athist era. While he was in friendly relations with Nasser, he fell out of favor with Sadat. His poem Elegy for a Circus Performer compares the Arab leader (in this case, Nasser) to a circus acrobat on a tightrope. He doesn’t have the option of “stepping down” and certainly can’t fall, because not only would that mean certain death, but it would also disappoint the people who look up to him. 

    Unfortunately for the poets, the Arab world has lost a lot of great leaders. Like Hijazi’s tightrope walker, they walk a fine line between success and being lynched. A leader who was once admired can end up fleeing in a car pelted with stones.

Jan Ken Po: The World of Hawaii’s Japanese Americans

    Japanese Hawaiians are strangers everywhere, says the author; in Japan they’re typical American tourists with foreign airs and big appetites; in continental USA, they’re bumpkins with funny grammar. It was during World War II that the Hawaiian and Californian Nisei encountered each other in the 44^th Combat Team, and the two sides got into fights. The Hawaiians thought the mainland Nisei, or “Katonks,” were snobs with fancy accents like the Haolis (Caucasians) back home. The mainland Nisei couldn’t understand (then or now) why Hawaiians like to eat Spam and canned Vienna sausages. In California, then as now, canned meat is not a delicacy, but synonymous with poverty.

    Mainland versus Continental conflict aside, Dr. Dennis Ogawa devotes a chapter, and a humorous one at that, to the intergenerational conflict. On one hand you have the reputation-obsessed parents, while on the other, you have the American-raised kids. Everything is about honor or shame to the older generation, while the kids born after 1950 have an “anything goes” attitude. The Sesei (third generation) daughter who dates a long-haired boy that her parents don’t like, or the college educated daughter who moves out before she gets married, these things will shame the parents. Dr. Ogawa attributes the low crime and divorce rates among Japanese Hawaiians to this. If you get divorced, the neighbors will think you can’t handle life.

    Geography also comes into play in this book, since Hawaii is a group of islands, and you can’t move away easily to escape shame. Close proximity means everyone has to get along. Though the author doesn’t mention it, parts of Hawaii are separated by mountains, so the towns may be isolated from each other unless you travel by water. I don’t know if rail travel came to any of the islands, and there were no little puddle-jumping planes until the 1930’s. The Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese,

    Occasionally, I find a forgotten book, and sometimes, the story isn’t outdated. Jan Ken Po is 40 years old, and it’s the kind of book that probably wasn’t read much when it came out. The author is (or more likely was) a professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii, and according to his writing, he probably wasn’t well known off-island. He drops hints here and there that Hawaii’s college graduates usually stay in the islands, so I doubt his work reached far and wide. Regardless, Dr. Ogawa’s book on Hawaii’s Japanese Americans is enlightening. I would read this in conjunction with two recent books about Hawaii; Captive Paradise, about the colonization of the islands, and Charlie Chan & Chang Apana, about Hawaiian history told through the stories of two popular characters.

    My only suggestion to the author would be an update, because Hawaiian life has definitely changed since the book was written. The media image of Hawaii is different now too, and there have been a few decent movies (like The Picture Bride) that portray the state’s history. Unfortunately, too many of us only know Hawaii from the Dog The Bounty Hunter tv series, and the image isn’t good. I’d also like to know if there’s any class conflict between the Japanese Hawaiians and the natives, Tongans, and Samoans who now live on the islands.

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine

    Here I go again, fascinated with forgotten books. Written in 1958, read in 1988 (when I was in 4^th grade) and no longer read by kids of any age, this book sits on the ash heap of literature. Maybe it’s been replaced by more “relevant” books (like the Hunger Games) or maybe this Eisenhower-era science fiction book is of little interest to the sex-obsessed youngsters of our time? Or maybe the book’s fantasy plot – kids using a machine to do their homework – is dated now, since all kids are downloading their homework. But there is something in the story that’s relevant now even to today’s audiences; all kids hate homework!

   In the first scene, Danny and Joe (aged about 12) are looking for ways to do both of their math homework assignments at the same time, and then they’re finding ways to make the two handwritings look less similar. As the book progresses, they come across a machine that can do the homework for them, then they get caught, and then the teacher looks for ways to outsmart them. Back in the 1950’s, I’m sure the lesson for kids was that you should always shut up, do your work, and listen to the grownups. But in this day and age, I’m not sure if that’s right.

   Look at today’s kids; they spend all day learning to take exams, and they have no outdoor recess, which is why they can’t sit still or pay attention. When you ask the principal why there’s no outdoor recess, she’ll say “it cuts into the time we need to spend learning for the exams.” I’ve seen 4^th graders who can’t even do current events or book reports, and when I ask the stressed-out teacher why, she’ll say “we have to prepare for the state exams.” Then there’s the homework that loads the kids down, and keep in mind that this is after a long school day with boring work, bad food, and no recess.

    I find Danny’s homework machine hijinks relevant today because the boys in the story are not lazy. They’re not looking to shirk their schoolwork so they can watch TV (there wasn’t much to watch at the time) or surf the web (didn’t exist.) They want to do healthy things, like play ball, ride bikes, fly kites, read their books, do their own science experiments. They want to do the kind of things that boys their age should do, and homework gets in the way. Think of it in terms of your job; if you spend all day in an office doing paperwork, do you want to spend the evenings at home practicing how to do the paperwork?

   I wonder sometimes, are we demanding that our children do things that we don’t have to do? That we don’t want to do? That we hated doing when we were young?

Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family

   In a 2010 article, Dr. Haynes recalls finding the portrait of a long-dead ancestor in his parents’ attic. He was a respected Black leader, and the portrait was part of a series for the White House, somehow lost from the others and consigned to storage. Why was the portrait forgotten, he wondered, and why did his parents leave it in the attic for so long? Throughout the book, the author studies the same issue regarding his parents; why did this respectable family fall into reclusivness, and why did they stay in Harlem?

    Haynes (born 1960) comes from an unusual social class, the Black Harlem gentry. He, his parents, and his two older brothers lived in a stately Harlem townhouse that alternated from being subdivided into apartments and returning to its one-family state. Though his parents considered themselves the cream-of-the-crop, they let their home fall into ruin. He describes the house, with beautiful woodwork and period décor, as being a dump that rivals the Collier Brothers. Garbage piled up, they never threw anything away, the roof leaked, and eventually his parents physically separate while living under the same roof. From childhood to age 18, he doesn’t seem to have enjoyed being home. Neither did his two brothers.

    In some ways it’s a story about people who straddle two worlds. Haynes mother was a social worker with an office in the World Trade Center, fashionably dressed, held court at downtown restaurants, but she didn’t have these friends over to her home. It’s not clear if it’s because their house was in a state, or if they let the house become a hovel because they couldn’t have visitors. Harlem, by the time Haynes was ten years old, had become unsafe, and he says that when he was growing up no white kid could walk in those streets. His older brothers, born 1950 and 1953, also suffered from street crime. I doubt that any White person visited their Black friends in Harlem by the late 1960’s.

    Haynes’ pretty much loses his brother over the years. One of them gets killed at work, and the police make little effort to find the killer. His oldest brother joins the Nation of Islam, suffers when the break up after Elijah Muhammed’s death, and gets into drugs and several mental breakdowns. The saddest thing is that he learns about his brother’s murder while sleeping over at a friend’s house, and says he’d rather stay there than head home. He clearly felt more comfortable with the White kids at the private schools he attended than in his own home and neighborhood.

    This book paints a really weird portrait of the Harlem that the author knew as a boy. There is a funny part to this story, in the way that gay men were accepted there. He recounts a transvestite who ran a newsstand, and the hair salons were run by men with effeminate mannerisms. He theorizes that with so few decent men in the community, nobody cared if a guy was a sissy, so long as he pulled his weight. In the 1980’s these men started dying off thanks to a little-understood disease.

    I wonder if Down the Up Staircase is a study on downward mobility? This was a family with well-educated parents, refined and elegant, whose world always seems to crumble around them. The author says that his father, a parole officer, could have done a lot more with his career, and hints that the man was a bit of an underachiever. His oldest brother slides further and further down into an abyss of drugs and the wrong crowd, further and further away from his parents’ values, never climbing back up. Then his next oldest brother graduates high school, marries his teacher (?!?) and goes to work in a bicycle store, where he gets killed. By the mid 1990’s, the elegant townhouse is in a terrible state of repair, and it’s a wonder it didn’t get condemned. Thankfully, he took his teachers’ advice, to find a rural college that would give him a full scholarship, and leave the city.

   The house was sold in the 1990’s, and at this time it’s probably occupied by a White family and would sell for a million dollars. The old Harlem elite is gone, and Dr. Haynes admits that today there is no way he could afford to live in Harlem.

Badge #1843 NYPD by John Peller

    Most of the book comes from the elder Peller’s autobiography, written because his sons wanted to know about his life, and just in case someone else might be interested in his story (and more would’ve been if he hadn’t held back.) Like my ancestors who grew up in pre-glamor New York, he doesn’t seem keen to talk about the past, yet he does go into detail about the good parts. The Settlement House, for instance, and all the activities it had for kids, gives him fond memories. There were weekend getaways to upstate farms – not a luxury today – but an extreme change of pace for a boy in his day. The city was smoggy and sooty in the 1930’s, and train fare was expensive (besides, people made less money anyway) so getting to run barefoot on the grass, having air you can breathe, and having no sounds at night must’ve been quite a treat.

This book has an interesting angle on the issue of education in the days before the GI Bill. Peller was perfectly competent in the classroom, and could’ve gone to college, but didn’t. It seems that boys in those days were not encouraged to go to college the way they are now. He joined the NYPD during the Great Depression, when there were few jobs available, even to a skilled mechanic like him. He also describes how a lot of college-educated men joined at the time (including future chief detective Albert Seedman) thanks to lack of alternatives, and how it was these college-educated cops who brought about changes to policing.

There are funny anecdotes, like the crazy women who’d call the police so they could get a man. Then there were the bars on the East 100’s that catered to sailors of different nationalities. He mentions one that was frequented by Scandinavian sailors; they’d get drunk, get in fights, spill out onto the sidewalk, and a loud bark from the police would send them all shuffling back in. A frequent emergency in the days before WWII involved exploding refrigerators (they used volatile chemicals at the time) which were the cause of building fires.

Officer Peller’s post-NYPD career takes an unusual turn. He retires and gets a measly pension, but then finds that there aren’t a lot of jobs for guys in their late 40’s. He gets a bottom level job in finance and works his way up, taking whatever training he can get, and eventually building up a very nice career (though he was probably the only male employee.) It resonates with me, because even today it’s difficult to start a new career in middle age. However, I’m surprised he didn’t look for a job as an armed security guard or private investigator.

One of the problems with this book is the writing. It needs a huge amount of editing, and could do with more information about the other police officers. Peller doesn’t mention anything about corruption, racism, the roles of women in the police department. I can understand why he left these things out, but I would still like to know more about the other officers. Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable book about the city in a time when there was grit but no glamour.

The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

   I don’t need this book to know that the US adult has stagnated. Every day I see 20-something men and women who refuse to work, or simply don’t know how. Then I see grown men at the airport doing coloring books with adult themes. Next come the college students getting special refuge rooms and counseling, all because Donald Trump is now the president. Keep in mind that combat veterans with PTSD can’t get free psychotherapy, but a 19-year-old, with no financial obligation is given a shoulder to cry on. Speakers are barred from college campuses because they’ll traumatize the students with conservative rhetoric. Last of all, in my neighborhood, I see 40-year-old men and women with their kids, and I can’t distinguish the parents from their children.

    Senator Ben Sasse, graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, PhD in History, gives many examples of the softening of the adult American. It all starts in childhood, he says, with the “Baby Einstein” syndrome. More school, less outdoor activity, less manual training, and fewer part-time jobs. Look at The Economist July 6, 2017 article on the disappearing summer job; it uses Ronald Reagan as an example of how a teenager’s job used to mold the mind. It also discusses how rising minimum wage has made it harder to hire teens.

   Sasses give a funny (and at the same time disturbing) example in Talia Jane, whose meager salary at Yelp headquarters kept her hungry and poor. Kind of unfair, no? After all, Yelp’s corporate officers were raking in the cash, and they knew that rents in the Bay area are sky-high. But just when Ms. Jane was about to become the poster girl for the underpaid, another twenty-something named Stefanie Williams tore the poor serf’s platform to shreds. Out came the photos - lifted from Talia Jane’s own social media page – of Jane’s high-maintenance e partying. Yelp’s salaries are not enough? You bet they’re not, if you’re throwing away money on alcohol, expensive cakes, eating out a lot, and living without roommates!

    Most of Sasse’s book blames the problem on helicopter parenting, safety paranoia, pressure to get into a top college, and parents who won’t teach the kid to get himself up in the morning. He refers to his own childhood, where he was expected to work, and how it taught him life skills. He blames helicopter parenting for the lack of financial savvy in today’s young men and women, and I’m inclined to agree. He advises giving the kids more responsibility, giving them tasks that let them prove their worth, and advises against grouping them by age.

    This book should be read with other tomes on this topic. Glow Kids, by Nicholas Kardaras, tells you how too much screen time damaging the children. Rebooting the American Dream is another excellent book on this topic.

Spanish Civil War 1936-1039 Republican Forces

    I have to hand it to author Alejandro De Quesada, he does his best to stay positive about a lost cause. But no matter how hard you look at it, or how nicely the author puts it, the Spanish Loyalists were doomed from day #1. The commanders were incompetent, the militia members disliked military-style discipline, and the Soviet suppliers ripped them off. There was a small professional army among them, and there were some qualified people among the volunteers, but none of them got along. The trained soldiers didn’t like the undisciplined militias, and there was no communication between the groups. With few officers trained in strategy, there would be no logistics.

    De Quesada writes about how Franco’s Nationalist Falange used battle-hardened troops, fresh from the Rif war in Morocco, and the Loyalist militias often ran away from them. Then the extremists in the militias would go on purges against suspected enemies (whoops, didn’t know the town’s only doctor was among the 30 that we shot for being too bourgoise) and loot every church they found. Seeing as the European industrialists and bankers were all Catholic, I doubt the anti-church activities were good for public relations.

    The armor and equipment are shown to have been a problem too. It’s well-known that the Soviets sold the Loyalists outdated Remington rifles for whatever gold there was, and that left the legitimate government cash-strapped. The Soviets did send in a fleet of T-26 tanks, which were better than the ones that the Nationalist and Italian armies used, along with instructors. However, the T-26 was prone to engine malfunction, and the Nationalists had anti-tank artillery. Bungling by the unqualified and incompetent Loyalist commanders made things worse, and loads of T-26 tanks were captured and used by Franco.

    Undisciplined rabble, a hodgepodge of different firearms and ammo, lack of communication, zero coordination, abuse of the Catholic clergy, blatant robbery of church property, and incompetence on the part of the brass, it all contributed to the Republican failure and 40 years of fascist dictatorship. Soviet sympathies among the Republicans didn’t do much to gain the support of France, USA, and Britain, all of whom were wary about the Soviet’s presence in the region. Once the German Luttwaffe came to the aid of Frando’s forces, the Republicans were dead in the water.

This Fight is Our Fight

    The opening for Senator Warren’s pro minimum wage argument sounds a lot like misplaced blame. She writes about her stressful teenage years in Oklahoma, her sickly out-of-work father, and her mother’s minimum wage job. It barely kept them in their house, because even in the late 60’s, minimum wage didn’t leave you with any extra money. Her mother lashed out at her for wanting to go to college, and now, in her book, Warren lashes out at Republicans who won’t raise the minimum wage. I wonder why Senator Warren doesn’t lash out at people who waste money? Her father could’ve given up smoking (which is probably how he got sick in the first place) and spent the money on her college application fees.

    Every single problem mentioned in this book seems to have foolishness at the root. She writes about the Black Chicago homeowners, who were scammed into risky mortgages, but at the same time she made no effort to regulate them. Next comes the evil CEO, paying low tax on his huge salary, while his workers make minimum wage. Again, Warren could place a cap on salaries for corporate officers, but she didn’t event try. Healthcare costs? Warren made no effort to put a cap on malpractice lawsuits that drive up insurance rates. We get more horror stories here, like the one about the girl who took out the crazy student loans, went to a shady for-profit college, and ended up with debt and a useless degree. Again, lack of regulation, and whose fault is that?

    In the chapter titled The Disappearing Middle Class the author disproves her own argument. She says that she did her undergrad – in the practical major of teaching – at a cheap local college. If that had been the goal of all these other sorry people, then none of these problems would ever have happened. Nobody’s forcing people to take out student loans, nor is anyone forcing students to major in graphic arts, film studies, or any of the arts majors where the jobs are highly competitive. Schools like NYU, Columbia, and UC Berkeley are full of students doing frivolous majors. But in public colleges, like Baruch, Hunter, and John Jay, the students go for practical things – business, education, science, and law enforcement – that will get them a job after they graduate. They’ll make good money and have few debts.

    Warren writes about her family’s struggles in the Great Depression, and they survived on their abilities, just like my ancestors did. But she blames it all on big business, ignoring the reason it lasted so long, and that was the Smoot-Hawley tariff. Throughout the book she blames the rich and the big businesses for everything, but she never has any problem with the lack of self-accountability in the country. What about all the crumbling cities like Detroit, Flint, Philadelphia, Camden, Newark, and New Orleans? Those cities all had liberal Democrat mayors, and look where they ended up. The corrupt mayors – Sharpe James, Ray Nagin, Kwame Kilpatrick, Frank Melton, Marion Barry – were all Democrats, same party as her.

   Elizabeth is right about one thing in her book; it’s the unions that negotiate the higher wages. If a charter school pays a higher rate than the public schools, then they’re benefiting from the union that negotiated the lower wage. If the public schools busted the union, then the wage would be lower, and the charter schools could lower their wages too. She hates what President Reagan did to the air traffic controller union, but what ever happened to tough love? Reagan was trying to avoid the crippling strikes that NYC had in the 70’s, and if he’d given in, then all the other unions would’ve called a strike. She calls President Trump “Ronald Reagan without the charm,” but I wonder how much of it is the fault of Hillary Clinton and her incredibly bad campaign?

    I think the main problem is that Warren practices but doesn’t preach. She mollycoddles the lazy and incompetent people, all the while forgetting where she came from, and that is why she is so out of touch. This is a woman who pulled herself up by the bootstraps; she earned her own money to pay for college applications, then she sought out a college that would give her a full scholarship, then after she left to get married, she still finished at a public college at her own expense. Nobody ever did anything for her, no student loans, no trust fund, no silver platter. This is a self-made woman who wants to make excuses for people who can’t (or won’t) take care of themselves.

    Warren wrote this book to promote (what basically amounts to) socialism, but after reading it, I’m convinced that we should neither raise the minimum wage nor make anything free.

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

    Dr. Dyson starts his usual complaining about American life by recounting a bad memory. He was doing a stint at Connecticut’s Hartford Seminary, when he got pulled over by a rude (and probably racist) cop. The reason – someone saw him spanking his kid and thought it was child abuse - so she called cops. They order him out of the car, they’re domineering, they’re hostile, they shove him as they walk away. As for the ten-year-old son, he ends up crying. This is what always bothers me about Dyson, he just can’t seem to take responsibility when he does something wrong. He’s tough enough to give his son “a few licks on the hand” but is he tough enough to take a few licks of his own? He uses physical punishment on his (probably smaller) son for some perceived misbehavior, but what about when the cops punish HIM for a perceived misbehavior?

    There are some anecdotes that get you thinking, like the one where his kids are called “nigger” at a Chicago skating rink, same thing at a swimming pool in Kissimmee, Florida. A cute, blonde blue-eyed kid, no older than his children, calls them racist names, casually, and dismissively. I would love to know what motivated the White kids to say those things. Did their parents use that kind of language at home? What about their teachers at school? Would they dismissively address a Black hospital employee as a nigger if they needed medical help?

    Dyson recounts how he left Carson-Newman college before his senior year, over a financial and personal dispute. He makes it look like a protest, but I can see right through it – he left because he couldn’t have his way. He got into a personality conflict with the college’s White president, a man who had no PhD and was therefore not qualified. But what about all the Black high school principals who are not qualified? They’re out there right now, screwing over Black kids, nothing but puppets for the White establishment, or kicking up to the White elites in order to stay in power. There are more corrupt, dishonest, unqualified, and incompetent high school principals ruining Black children’s lives than there are unqualified college presidents. Where’s Dyson’s rant against it?

    It was interesting to read the chapter Inventing Whiteness, where he discusses how the Poles, Jews, Irish, and Italians, all became “white” partly out of their own initiative, and partly out of the way they were perceived (also discussed in an earlier book titled How the Irish Became White.) It’s his belief that all of these ethnic groups took advantage of the “white” label in order to get ahead, both at the expense of Black Americans, and at the expense of losing their own ethnic identity. In one example he uses O.J. Simpson (a man he thoroughly dislikes) as having bought into the White world, then switched back to being Black just for the convenience. Dyson says that prior to murdering his ex-wife, nothing was Black about O.J. except for the bottom of his shoe. No secret is made about how many Black Americans did in fact think he was guilty, but it was the anger of the people that drove them to support him. Despite his dislike for O.J, he credits the trial with giving Whites a taste of the absurdities that Black Americans face.

   Other Black-White issues are discussed, like White rappers who hijack (or mimic) Black American culture. Dyson credits Justin Timberlake for his use of hip-hop rhythms, while being wary of the singer using it to his convenience. But he seriously dislike’s Iggy Azalia’s appropriation of hip-hop, treating her like she hijacked it. He doesn’t have anything bad to say about Eminem. Dyson has respect for Eminem’s ability, but I also suspect that it’s because Eminem kind of “paid his dues,” growing up a poor kid in Detroit, no White privilege there. On the other hand, I always saw Eminem as an incredible opportunist, because you can’t claim “street cred” when you’re living in an upscale neighborhood. Then again, most hip-hop artists exploit violence in the Black community, while at the same time living in exclusive White suburban mansions (there’s the O.J. Simpson experience again.) Maybe it’s time for Dr. Dyson to write about that too?

Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth Century Mexico

    Professor Garcia introduces the Mexican vendor’s struggle with two facts mostly unknown outside of the country; the vendor’s union is one of the biggest in Mexico, and unlike other unions, it is independent of the ruling party. If Mexico’s labor unions are mostly under government control without autonomy, then this doesn’t look good. The book focuses on the city of Puebla (in the middle of the country) where open-air markets are the primary source of purchase and the vendors are mostly women. Communist sympathies abounded in the 70’s and 80’s, along with theater productions about the vendors’ plight.

    

It seems like many of the women vendors are in it because they can’t find other jobs. Some of the characters in this study are illiterate, or failed to get jobs in the industries that existed in Puebla 30 years ago. Race and class play a huge part, because the wealthy city people didn’t want the shouts of the vendors or the mess of their wares. The Spanish and Lebanese industrialists, with their palatial homes, did not want to open their windows and smell cooking oil or hear crying babies. While the elite were consuming goods from enclosed stores in the shopping centers, the less affluent bought food, clothes, and other things from open-air vendors.

Throughout the book, classism, sexism, and racism come into play. I was shocked at how sexist Mexicans were towards women who worked in factories; they were thought to be diseased. Even the leftist unions disliked seeing women in factories because it didn’t jive with (what was in their eyes) the sanctity of motherhood and domesticity (never mind that these women would probably have rather stayed home like the rich Lebanese wives.) The classism is abundant in every part of the vendors’ struggle, starting with the way the poor often buy from street sellers because of the lower prices. It seems that the attitude towards street business changed when cars became commonplace and walking in the road was no longer safe. It also seems like the upper classes (keep in mind there was little upward mobility) didn’t like seeing lower-class people (often rural migrants) so close to their mansions.

    

The author manages to find a trove of resources for this book, going back to the 1940’s. Things don’t end well in this book. Puebla’s vendor district was turned into a shopping mall that nobody liked, with a food court that nobody wanted (selling the same disgusting food that American food courts assault us with) and the city had lots of urban renewal projects that failed. Activists for vendor causes were continually harassed by the government. Nothing changed.

Mapping Manhattan

    Becky Cooper travels the city with a blank image of Manhattan, asking unknown people to fill in the areas that are important to them. One author writes in the places where she lost her gloves, umbrellas, earrings, books, etc. A recurring theme in the book is how Manhattanites stick to certain areas and don’t venture beyond. This is something I can relate to, as I never ventured into Harlem until I started working as a substitute teacher back in 2002. By that time I had been living here for six years. I only went into Harlem to teach, never for a construction job or takeout delivery. I worked a Rice High School, right on the corner of 123^rd and Lennox (or Malcolm X. Boulevard, if you prefer) and every time I went to the Staples store, everybody thought I worked there (big white guy, shirt and tie.) Whenever I’m in that area, I always remember those days, even though the school is now gone.

    One lovestruck New Yorker colors “her” city in pink (after all, she’s a kid) and marks the tops half – titled “I’ve never been there” – in yellow. A grown woman draws in the sites of her first NYC trip (at age 7 in 1967) where her grandparents showed her the city in the era of Eloise. She saw a little man with a funny moustache and pet ocelot (later ID’d as Salvador Dali) and the MOMA sculpture garden (she thought it was someone’s backyard). Then she had lunch at a Times Square automat.

    Every New Yorker has fond memories of their time here. I could draw a map of every art store where I bought materials, some of them closed, some have simply come under new management.

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

    Joan C. Williams describes the White American working class as shifting from being honored (like the famous WPA murals) to being ignored by the elites. The author cites the old stereotype of Terry Molloy (from Kazan’s On the Waterfront) as the sort of thing that liberal Americans were trying to understand. Then came Archie Bunker, then Al Bundy, then Homer Simpson – all of them crude, silly, or both – as the new stereotype working man. This book explores two things; the reason the elites look down on the blue collar (or study it like a specimen) and the reason the blue-collar sneer at (what they consider the phony) accomplishments of the elites.

    Williams begins by showing how the poor-middle-rich divide isn’t that clear anymore, especially since a 45k-earning mechanic and a 100k-earning lawyer both think they’re middle class. She also refers to the recent J.D. Vance memoir Hillbilly Elegy (okay, who wouldn’t refer to it?) where the hardworking poor (full time work, low pay) feel as though they’re “paying for the party” of the non-working poor (no job, no discipline, lots of drug use) and become resentful. There’s also the problem of how the better jobs (like construction) go to men while there are few good jobs for an uneducated woman.

    I disagree with the author on a few things. For one, I see many women from low-income families who go to junior college, get a two-year degree in health or paralegal studies, and start earning 45k per year right away. Then again, 45k per year is great when you’re single, but gets stretched thin when you have children. Some nursing jobs pay high five-figure salaries, but even that can wear thin. High salaries are taxed higher, and make your kids ineligible for public-funded daycare (or kindergarten in some states.) This was one of the things discussed in the New York Times article Angela Whittaker’s Climb (way back in 2005, featured in the collection Class Matters.) Even at a salary of 85k, you end up spending most of your salary on taxes, healthcare, and a home in a low-crime neighborhood.

    The author also discusses a question rolling off the tongues of Americans; why don’t the working classes of the Rust Belt just abandon ship and move away? The answer is twofold – there’s safety and familiarity. First off, moving away from everything you know is hard, no matter what your social class. I recently met an army veteran in Delaware who works in construction in his hometown – not always steady – but it’s easier to live in Delaware than New York. If he took a job in NYC at the same salary, he could afford to live in the South Bronx (not good) or somewhere an hour and a half away by train. Let me add something else here, the transit in NYC is no longer reliable. If you’ve ever been to Delaware, you’ll see it’s easier to get around by car. That might be why in a lot of these states, law enforcement jobs are very popular. You get good pay, benefits, and the training can get you a higher-paid job in a suburban police department, so you could end up with good pay AND live in a good neighborhood, not far from your job.

    Another topic discussed here is college. The private versus state college choice has a lot to do with social life and networking versus practicality. Are you looking to get the education and graduate as soon as you can, or do you want to have the luxury of partying and playing sports for the next four years? This was another thing that I noticed in Delaware; the college grads all majored in lucrative skills, like business and science, while students at NYU and Columbia often pick arts majors that get them nowhere.

   I disagree with the chapter on pushing (or not pushing) their kids to succeed. A lot of them do, but their priorities are different. They just want their kids to grow up to be self-supporting, everything else is unnecessary. Take for instance the book Almost a Woman by Esmeralda Santiago; her mother tells her “none of this starving actor business for you, when you graduate you’re getting a job.” Williams finds, correctly, that elite kids being overscheduled with too many activities, and pressured to read at the age of five. I agree that a lot of it is unnecessary; I was a lousy reader even at age eight, but I could make my own breakfast, tie my own shoes, and do a lot of things for myself. She’s right in that the working class don’t need for their children to read at age six, they just need their children to pull their own weight. But I disagree with the way she makes it look like it’s wrong. Both classes have priorities, and for the elite the priority is to get their children into the best schools.

    Another thing I disagree with is her take on the issue of racism among the White working classes. The real problem is that priorities are different in Black and White families. Here in New York City (and I bet in others too) there’s a huge amount of nepotism in the construction business, and the Italian-Americans hire their own. Same thing with Albanian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Indian-Americans, and just about every other ethnic group. If you’re Italian-American from Staten Island, and you hate school no problem – someone in your family, or a friend of you parents, can give you a job. It’ll be in their roofing business, garage, restaurant, take your pick. If you’re a Hasidic Jew and you get kicked out of Yeshiva for punching out the Rabbi – no problem, you’ll have a job at BH photo the next day!

    I agree with her take on how the elites fail to connect with the blue-collar classes. The Republicans do a better job at winning over the factory workers, builders, and farmers, but the Democrats don’t seem interested. Obama and Clinton only seemed interested in college professors and Wall Street, while failing to get the support of police unions and army veterans. I would welcome a second installment to this book, particularly one about the successes of the White working class. If their ways work for them, there’s got to be a reason.

   I’m going to sign off with a personal experience with this topic. Years ago, in the summer of 1998, I worked in a county printing shop, where all the county’s parking tickets and public service flyers were printed. The men in the shop, all White, and all unionized, were guaranteed Republican voters. When election time came around, you could guarantee they’d vote for Bush, McCain, Romney, and Trump. Same thing with state & local. But when the Republicans took office, what was the first thing they always did? Bust their union!

The New Urban Crisis

   Richard Florida went from Newark-born son of a factory foreman to Rutgers student to long-term professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg. He saw how Pittsburg kept hemorrhaging its population, no matter how many tax breaks it offered. He asks why all the tech companies were going to Boston, New York City, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley, when the cost of living in those places was so high? What was unattractive about Pittsburg if the living cost was so law and there were so many financial incentives to be there?  The answer is that the talent was in Boston, NYC, and the West Coast, but nobody with the talent wanted to live in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

    Professor Florida’s research shows cities, not the suburbs, to be the most government-dependent. Factory closings make the city ground zero for unemployment, along with a loss of income tax revenue, and if the houses are deserted, they lose property tax income and the schools suffer. Worse still, poverty has been reaching the suburbs in the last few years (and this is not the first book about it) so there’s less refuge for those fleeing the city. He blames a lot of it on poor infrastructure in cities and suburbs, especially in car-dependent communities (forget about biking to work in the snow) where no car means no getting to work. I remember being a teenager in Nassau County, and my summer job options were limited to camp counselor (lucky to make minimum wage there) unless I found one in the city ($8 to use the LIRR) or found a job nearby (forget about biking to work on the highway) in the county.

    Gentrification (now a dirtier word than NIMBY) is a problem too. He recounts taking flak for suggesting that small, quiet jets be allowed to land in Toronto. The response was an extreme “absolutely no” even though the city needed the revenue. It was the elites who were against the jets at the airports (turboprop only) even though there wouldn’t really be much noise from them (we’re talking about small jets, not 747’s.) All the “no noise” and “no building” demands were going on at the same time as a financial deficit, and into the strife waded Rob Ford, the big unhealthy drug-using mayor, who tore up the bike lanes and plowed up the nostalgia. The people who voted for him were the less-educated, fed up with stagnation and with little use for creative arts districts. They welcomed the malls because they provided jobs.

    At the same time, Florida is not entirely sympathetic to the anti-gentrification lobby. He criticizes Spike Lee, and his analogy of “white mothers pushing strollers down 125^th street at 3am” which he equates with neocolonialism. However, the author cites how 40 years ago the Black leadership criticized “White flight,” while at the same time attacked the few Whites who moved in as interlopers. If you read Judith Maitloff’s memoir Home Girl then you’ll see an unusual shift; in the early 2000’s, it was the educated Black residents who were happy to see Whites moving into Harlem. Elderly Black men and women, part of Harlem’s creative class (a lot of them were educators) were fed up with the crime and filth. They were fed up with the Dominican drug dealers, and fed up with the out-of-state plated cars pulling up to buy drugs. They were happy to see White people moving in. It makes you think.

    I don’t agree with a lot of his descriptions of gentrification, however. Soho wasn’t really gentrified (nobody got evicted), it simply went from an industrial zone to a residential one. The artist’s lofts were all owned by the artists, sold to them as co-op apartments. Take for instance 80 Wooster Street, one of the early artist spaces in the area. The artists bought the lofts for $10,000 each in the 1970’s, and so what if they sold them 20 years later for 50 times that? These artists paid their dues, and they’re entitled to profit. As for it becoming a place of overpriced stores, that’s life, it’s going to happen one way or the other. Furthermore, thanks to rent-control and tenant protections, few people were evicted from their homes in NYC. The real problem is that when the rent-controlled tenant’s daughter turns 22 and wants her own place, she won’t find an affordable one nearby. Will she opt for an apartment in a disreputable area, or a safe and cheap neighborhood that’s an hour and a half from her job?

    As for the “creative class” that the author doesn’t seem to like, they’re hardly powerful by any means. The average creative types in Manhattan and Brooklyn are making less than $45k and are crammed five to an apartment. As far as the poor go, the author quotes Patrick Sharkey’s book Stuck in Place, about multi-generational poverty. Newcomers can’t be responsible for a problem that existed long before they arrived.

    I’ll sum up by saying that no building in this country has lasted since the dawn of time. The author mentions childhood trips to the Woodbridge Mall in New Jersey, a wonderful suburban experience. What the author forgets is that the mall was built on the site of the old Woodbridge clay pits, and the backwoods people who lived there must have been evicted. Did anybody hear their complaints?

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

    When it came to dealing with the working classes, Hillary focused on the Flint water crisis, which meant she was doing two things wrong; focusing on only one community, and reminding everyone of how bad things were. Then, in a desperate bid to kick Sanders, she falsely accused him of voting no to the auto industry bailout. If her elbowing and grandstanding weren’t enough, she was now resorting to outright lying. Fact checkers went haywire on her, as Sanders had voted yes to the bailout. Nobody was happy with her now. Especially not the people who supported her.

    The authors argue that Hillary’s incredible myopia cost her the vote in the Rust Belt states, and that is where it mattered most. Winning over the White American working class voters would mean success or defeat, and she failed. It’s all in the chapter titled The Canary In the Auto Plant, which is perfectly apt, considering that old factory cities are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. The state of Michigan is full of working-class White voters, and whatever she’d do – or not do – would resonate all over the USA. Her failure to win the Rust Belt is what resonated. The working classes felt like she was demonizing them.

    This book stresses Hillary’s complete and utter failure to connect with the White voters who had no college education. Be it Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, or Missouri, she ended up alienating everyone. The authors Allen and Parnes suggest that her six-figure speaking fees may have been part of the problem along with her chummy relationship with Wall Street tycoons. It made her look like a pawn of big business, and though Wall Street tycoons are powerful, they are few in number. Though Irish and Polish-American auto workers are probably not going to be seen at an a “ban Wall Street” rally, they’re not going to have much use for a dinner party full of CEO’s. The laid-off workers would probably have liked for her to meet with them and show some concern for THEIR needs, not just those of the 1%. All she needed was to win over one UAW chapter, and she’d have won over all of them. Though not expressly mentioned in the book, a lot of Hillary’s campaign cash was raised by her husband Bill, who shamelessly profits off his status as an ex-president.

    The authors don’t talk about Trump much, after all he’s not the subject of the book. But they do stress that he concentrated on the electoral vote by winning over entire states, particularly in the Rust Belt. After that, he went for that states where Obama had won in 2008. His tough-talking bravado impressed a lot of people there, and it swung the vote in his favor. There’s also a possibility that older Black voters may have voted for Trump; those that are fed up with crime and disorder may have been looking for a president who’d get tough.

    I always had the vibe that Hillary Clinton was elbowing her way into the spotlight, and this book confirms it. She comes across here as I always saw her; a ranting, domineering tyrant, and according to this book, nobody was fooled. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, had a strong following among working class whites, which Hillary did not. In fact, it seems like she was deliberately avoiding them. Not smart.

Terror In France: The Rise of Jihad in the West

    Kepel blames France’s home-grown terrorism on left-wing politicians who exploit the country’s disaffected Muslim youth. He compares Sarkozy and Hollande (right and left) who both came to power after the 2005 Paris Riots, and the way they both used the troubles as a platform. Sarkozy stood on a platform of dealing harshly with the rabble, while the leftist Francois Hollande sought to attract the angry youth. Kepel then refers to the 1983 protest marches by Muslim youth, which were somewhat more peaceful than recent events, and which President Mitterand, an old socialist, exploited. Rather than look into the complaints by disaffected minorities, Mitterand used the unrest as a platform to attack the conservative parties as being racist.

   Gilles Kepel, a political science professor, doesn’t take sides; on the contrary he blames the right and left equally and doesn’t spare the media. He criticizes French papers that headlined the riots, as well as the US and UK papers that headlined “Paris is Burning” which really wasn’t the case. The destruction was almost entirely in the areas where the Muslim youth lived. The roving hoodlums burned the stores where they shopped, trashed the schools they attended, and vandalized the transportation that they commuted on. It all bears resemblance to the LA Riots in 1992; they burned the stores in their own neighborhoods while the tourist areas were left intact. In Paris and LA, the rioting did not damage any monuments.

    Another issue explored by the author is how the combative and belligerent people have no war. Mohammed Merah’s 2012 murder spree in Toulouse (three kids and a teacher died, filmed with his go-pro) was the work of a Franco-Algerian, too young to have fought in the Algerian war of independence. He started his spree by killing four French soldiers, and the irony is that three were from North Africa and one from the West Indies. Merah was a juvenile delinquent, served time in prison, and it was in prison that he came into contact with radical Muslims. This is a case of an angry criminal youth, lacking a casus belli, looking for ways to feel powerful. He ended up killing his own people.

    Kepel insists that the Muslim extremists in France are far different from the Salafists in the Middle East (who were militant from the start.) The French Muslim radicals began politically, according to the author, because the French government had a “dump them there and forget about them” attitude with regard to immigration. All the problems of the France’s immigrant housing project neighborhoods – AKA the Banlieus – built up over time and exploded in 2005. The financial crisis then made things worse, and Hollande took advantage of the Muslim vote, promising radical changes. Whatever these changes were, they never happened, and the government covered up all the problems in the immigrant communities. To make a long story short, Hollande sought out the votes of the Muslim bloc, then dumped them. They got played for suckers.

    There is one problem that is not discussed enough, and that is the policy of Laicite, or the banning of religious symbols in the public schools. The big challenge was in 2004 when a Kindergarten teacher - fired for refusing to remove her headscarf - sued and lost in the High Court. Obviously, this wasn’t good PR for the government, at least not if they wanted the support of the Muslims. The author doesn’t say if Jewish teachers were forced to remove skullcaps, shave off their beards, and cut off their payot. How are the Jews of France treated under this policy? Furthermore, do they send their children to their own religious schools? I also wonder what the Jews and Muslims do about the school lunches in public schools. If pork is served, do the children return home for lunch? I know they’re not allowed to bring pack lunches like the Americans and the Brits.

    One thing here is for certain, France has an internal problem that’s going to get a lot worse. But I wouldn’t be quick to blame the Muslims, for two reasons; first the government knew this was going to happen, and second, the discriminatory policies threw the proverbial gasoline on the fire.

On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value

   Allessandra Raengo begins with a lynching photo from the 1930’s, where the shadow of a hanging corpse falls over a White crowd. She writes of how this Black man, reduced to a shadow, has become a non-person whose life the crowd can disregard. Then she moves on to Richard Avedon’s 1963 portrait of a former slave. Is the man’s tight-lipped expression one of anger and defiance? Or is it tough resolve and perseverance? Are we mistaking the face of age for one of pain? Or vice versa?

    Another chapter discusses appearance versus reality, using the movie Precious as an example. The movie itself tries to get the audience to see beyond the overweight teenager and her troll of a mother, perhaps to show how and why they are so beaten down by life. The actress Gabourey Sidibe made it onto the cover of Ebony, but not Vanity Fair, and Raengo points out the same thing with the actor in The Blind Side, so maybe Hollywood has a prejudice against overweight people? On the flip side, size does make a positive difference in The Blind Side, because the character’s size makes him an asset on the football field. But in Precious, the character’s immense size has no redeeming value. Does this tell us something about society’s view on gender body image?

    In the chapter The Money of the Real, Raengo displays a picture postcard from the 1860’s of emancipated slaves. In the front row, the children stand in Napoleonic poses with their hands in their jackets (or maybe just to keep themselves steady during the long exposures.)  Three of the children are light enough to pass for White, but the men and women in the back row are dark-skinned. Was the photo part of a ploy for donations to the school they attended? Was the children’s light skin supposed to be the abolitionists’ idea of progress?

   Kara Walker’s violent silhouettes, Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, and the lynching photos of the early 20^th century, all convey the changing attitudes towards race, particularly in how it’s portrayed in art. Allessandra Raengo’s book explored race in the visual arts of the USA, with well-researched sources and scholarly discussions.  

The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch

   I never could understand why Punch and Judy are so popular with British kids. Not only are they hideous to look at, but the plot of the show should be R-rated. First off, Punch spends the show beating his wife, throwing the baby down the stairs, and tormenting everyone he can. Secondly, he talks in a creepy voice that sounds like the squawk of a panicked chicken. Lastly, when he’s not beating his wife or killing their child, he’s trying to deceive his wife any way he can. I used to see Punch and Judy shows in England, and I sat through them out of stubbornness. The urge to run away was overwhelming.

The story here is equally creepy; a little boy spends the summer with his grandfather, at the old man’s creepy seaside amusement park, and then an old “professor” with an old-school Punch-and-Judy act shows up. The contrast, however, is that the “professor” has a teenage assistant (his last one is now doing time) who isn’t creeped out at all. On the contrary, he sees the old showman as a pathetic old fossil. It’s hinted that the assistant (or Bottler, as they’re known) is a juvenile delinquent who might get into crime, but I have to wonder if it’s the boy’s own lack of morals that makes him unafraid? While the protagonist is both fascinated and frightened by these creepy old men, the teenage Bottler sees right through them.

Enough about the story (everything Neil Gaiman writes is brilliant) so I can say how much I loved the pictured. Only Dave McKean could illustrate something as frightening and wonderful as this. By combining photos with hand-drawn illustration, he creates a haunting, lurid backdrop reminiscent of Jan Svankmajer’s animation. For those of you unfamiliar with Dave McKean, he’s the guy that did the Sandman covers in the 1990’s, and those things used to give me nightmares. Sandman was DC’s foray into mature-themed material, and Mister Punch would fit right at home in there.

A little research tells me that Punch comes from Pulcinello, a character from Italian puppet shows, and his name means “chicken” thanks to his massive nose and a voice like a rooster’s squawk. He’s violent, deceptive, and when confronted with something he’s done, he’ll feign ignorance and/or stupidity. He’s usually paired with Arleccino (or Harlequin in English), his agile trickster alter-ego, who I might add is descended from a more demonic character of legend (hence the multicolored costume.)

All Day

    Liza Jessie Peterson is a broke unsuccessful model turned poet, who in the spirit of most unsuccessful artists in New York, turns to education for a living. Her assignment – The Island School, where the youth of Riker’s Island are educated. Wait, scrap that, it’s where they are dumped during the daytime. She’s with them all day long, no switching from math to science to social studies classes, and as a former suspension site teacher, I can tell this is going to be the teaching job from hell. While some of the boys are hard-core offenders, almost all of them behave like rude children (well what  do you expect, they don’t want to be there anyway) and they will test her, mess up the room, and do silly things.

    Peterson faces a problem of many “teaching artists” who go from afterschool programs into full time education. While the afterschool programs are easier because the kids want to be there, full-time teaching is always difficult because of the kids who DON’T want to be there. If you think that’s a problem in a regular high school, imagine what it’s like in Riker’s Island, arguably the worst jail in the USA. It’s not like you can call the kid’s mother (there’s nothing she can do) or send him to the principal (there isn’t one) or expel him (there nowhere to go, this is the end of the line.)

   Here’s a horrible irony about teaching at The Island School, which I figured out on my own. You know how the worst kids will probably come to school late and miss your class? Well not at this school, because they’re physically forced to go at gunpoint! Do you remember the kids in public school who never disturb your class because they spend all their time in the bathroom? Well not at this school, because bathroom breaks are restricted! You’re stuck all day long with the kind of kids who you’d rather play hookey all day.

    Peterson does get some info about how the boys got there, but I doubt they’re all truthful. Some of them are definitely guilty of the crimes they’re accused of, while others were in the wrong place at the wrong time (like riding in the back of a car when the driver was carrying a gun and had just shot someone.) Some are in there because their parents can’t afford a non-refundable $2000 bail bondsman’s fee, others are foster kids whose legal guardians probably don’t care.

    An advantage that the boys have in going to school is that they can hang out with their friends instead of getting stuck all day with the nasty correction officers. They don’t fight much in the classroom, mostly just tossing ball of paper at each other. Maybe the school is the only place where they can still be kids.