Outrage, Inc: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood

    Let me be frank, there’s nothing in Derek Hunter’s book that I haven’t heard already, there are plenty of articles on frivolous libtards and snowflakes in every magazine, from Mother Jones to the National Review. What makes this book so good is the humor; according to the author, People Magazine and Time Magazine were for gossip and news, respectively, but in this day and age you can’t tell them apart. It’s kind of like when A&E started airing the shows Dog the Bounty Hunter and The Two Coreys; at that point I realized the American IQ had been damaged. Then you have the split in the American attitude, where the conservative only wants to feed the kids, while the liberal points to a huge house and says “that’s not fair.” I can tell this is not going to go well, but the author’s humor is a big help.

    In Chapter 1, he starts with The Crazy Factory, where Africa is saved by the peanut and American kids all have an allergy to peanuts (a first world problem, perhaps?) when it happens to have all the fat and minerals that the kids need. Then you have the scientist Tim Hunt, who lost his job in 2001 over a sexist remark, but 17 years later, a remark like that would cost you everything. Recently, we  had the Evergreen State College fiasco, where liberal professor Bob Weinstein was driven out by hostile students and spineless administrators. All he did was criticize a protest. All he did was criticize the idea of keeping White students off the campus for the day. All he did was say that keeping White students off the campus was racist segregation. Keep in mind. Dr. Weinstein was always a staunch liberal. It makes you think.

   Derek Hunter also discusses how the media is reporting false stories, and I don’t mean the Rape on Campus article in Rolling Stone, but reports of rape, racist attacks, and gay-bashing that aren’t true. Phony accusations make it harder to investigate real crimes, and ruins the relationship between the citizens, the police, the judges, and the press. The author blames faulty fact-checking, combined with show hosts – like John Oliver – who masquerade as serious journalists. Nobody fact-checks John Oliver, nor Beyonce, Kanye, the Kardashian sisters, or any other celebrity skank whom the media chases for political opinion. Most of these celebrities, if not in the performing arts, get famous thanks to outrageous antics.

    There are books about solutions to these problems, like America’s Way Back, Rebooting the American Dream, and The Vanishing American Adult, all of which advocate letting the kids lose. Discard the fairness. Discard the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality. Don’t point to the huge house and say “that’s unfair.” Teach your kids that everyone succeeds on their own merits. And then maybe the authorities, like the college administrators, will stop coddling liberal thugs who behave like Nazis. William F. Buckley used to call the right-wing militias “pot bellies lacking a casus belie,” and I think that applies to the “students” at Evergreen State now. They’re lazy kids, who’ve never had jobs, and want to feel powerful.

Somehow, when it comes to wanting to feel powerful, any American who served in the military or has a full-time job doesn’t want for that feeling.

The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History

   Written in 1966 and republished in 2005, Ellis’ book give you Manhattan as seen through the kooks and wackos that inhabit Gotham’s history. We get the basic story – Peter Minuit buys the island for a bag of junk, then the city grows, then it becomes a place where you can act stupid, Peter Stuyvesant shows up to whip everyone into shape, people still act stupid – and nothing’s changed. But what makes this book enjoyable is that the author goes for the really crazy parts that are left out of the history books.

Let’s start with a chapter on The Doctor’ Riots of 1788. Ellis frames the events in the context of a weak local government and a weak central government that lacked any authority. It pays to mention that in the pre-telegraph days, getting word to the central government took weeks, so don’t think of calling the president for help. The riots themselves started when some medical student, or maybe just stupid kids, hung dissection limbs in a window, and with grave robbery being a problem, the masses now knew where the goods ended up.

Now here’s where the author uses the events to illustrate the problem of the time. New York had a huge number of poor people, and tempers often flared. When the mob got into a frenzy, they were impossible to control, and the city’s tiny militia couldn’t handle them. The result was that the militia had to resort to firing into the crowds (and now that the militia have been replaced by the NYPD, I wonder if that’s changed?) As for the medical students’ disrespectful handling of the cadavers, it doesn’t surprise me, given the medical ethics of the day. As we saw in a recent history of Bellevue, and the infamous book about Henrietta Lacks, doctors often saw their patients, especially poor ones, as expendable guinea pigs.

This book originally came out at a time when there weren’t as many books about New York, and the few that existed are rarely read today. The year 1966 was a great time to be in New York, as long as you were tough and didn’t have to raise kids. If you wanted to be a musician or join the Warhol crowd, great, but if you were afraid of getting mugged, you looked elsewhere. The city wasn’t anywhere near as desirable a it is now, so maybe there was less interest in it?

The Arab of the Future, Part 3: A Childhood in the Middle East 1985-1987

   At this point in Satouff’s Arab of the Future saga, I’ve reached the conclusion that his mother has joined a cult. She allows her seven-year-old son to be circumcised, without anesthetic, by a man with no medical knowledge, and with a dirty razor to boot. Worse, she allows this travesty at the father’s insistence, despite his dislike of the practice (?!?) and the fact that he cries in the other room during the operation. Keep in mind that this is the husband who drags her to a desolate dump of a country, lets her go hungry, and provides nothing. She spends the whole book yelling at him for giving her a cold house, bad food, intermittent electricity, and a relative who’s a murderer. But she won’t insist on going back to her native France.

    Now, a little about the preceding events. In the first book, Abdel-Rask Satouff is a delusional Pan-Arabist and Ba’athist, with a degree in political study from the Sorbonne, and the family travels with him to Libya and Syria (his home) and occasionally to his wife’s hometown in Brittany. He insists on taking a job in Syria because the French and British don’t respect the Arabs (he’s partially right about that one) but finds nothing better in Syria. You’d think a PhD from the Sorbonne would make him top dog in Syria? On the contrary, everything in Syria is gained through nepotism, and Satouff comes from a poor family, so all he gets to be is an assistant professor. Even the army officers get their jobs through nepotism, which is why they lost every war with Israel (and with ISIS, btw.) He holds onto the delusion that he’ll somehow save the country, even though his beloved Assad couldn’t care any less.

    With the third installment of his saga, Satouff once again proves himself to be Europe’s greatest cartoonist since Herge. More than an autobiography, it’s a tragic thesis on the bleak outlook of the Middle East. His artwork represents the bleakness perfectly, with his limited palette of colors and simple line drawings; hot, dusty Libya is yellow; bad-tempered Syria is red; and cool, somber France is blue. The colors represent the extremes of the moods in these countries, as the behavior varies wherever they go. In Syria, the teachers hit the kids and the kids hit each other, but in France the teacher uses her voice. The Syrians neglect their huge broods of children, but the French, with their small families, care for an cherish their children. Riad Satouff captures the surprise at the French classroom; it’s old and musty, but it’s well-kept and there’s no whipping. The teacher’s authoritative voice suffices.

    The events of the book change little from the last one. Dr. Abdel-Rasuk Satouff is still incompetent and spineless, and their hometown is still filthy. His nephews destroy his fruit trees, and with that, his hope of any extra money. He starts getting promoted socially, thanks to an army officer in his classroom, who appreciates the professor’s help (marking him present when he never actually attends class.) As for Riad, he watches imported VHS movies (mostly Italian apocalyptic action films) and in the funniest chapter, he and his friends watch Conan the Barbarian (definitely NOT for the kids) and declare themselves “Cimmerians.” They prance through the filthy streets and fields with mean faces, waving sticks, and chasing any kid who looks meek enough. As for the movie, the father is assured that there are no women, just lots of killing and war. Well it turns out there are naked women in the film, and the film is off-limits to them from then on. I had to laugh at this one, because when I was that age, violent movies were a definite no-no. The Syrians are more afraid of seeing scantily-clad babes than they are about their kids emulating violence.

    As far as politics are concerned, his father reveals his dislike of the Saudis. They encounter a limousine belonging to the Saudi ambassador, his Filipino chauffeur fetching his (expensive) whiskey from a liquor store, and the disparity of life in the cities. He says, “the car belongs to the ambassador, but that man was his Filipino, because he’s too big a hypocrite to buy alcohol himself.” The infamous 1981 siege of Mecca is his father’s biggest example of the dangers of Islam, a practice he despises as backward. He warns against radical Islam, as a nuisance that holds back Arab progress, and as a platform for insincere piety (symbolized by the rich Saudi who does his drinking where his countrymen won’t see.) The liquor store, by the way, is owned by a Christian, and the bright, beautiful interior is shocking to seven-year-old Riad. It appears the second-class Christian minority is better off economically than the Muslim majority.

    You might wonder why I like this series so much when I can’t stand the characters. It’s true, I find the characters loathsome, but the storytelling is hilarious. Satouff recounts his observation like a slapstick comedy, both in the text and the illustration. Like Marjane Satrapi, he uses very simple ink line drawing, but gives each character a more distinctive face. I regard Satouff’s story as a tragedy, with elements of black comedy, the way I’d view a story about someone in a crazy, hopeless situation. Lastly, the biggest tragedy here may be Ba’athism. My research shows that it was no delusion, but a worthy effort to modernize Arab life. In the hands of dictators, however, it always failed, and dictatorship seems to be the only possible stability in the Middle East.

A Hard Rain: America in the 1960’s, Our Decade of Hope, Possibility, and Innocence Lost

    I have a love-hate relationship with history’s retelling of the 1960’s. I can’t decide if the decade was one of hope and success, or another dead body in the grave of youthful idealism. What is it that made the 1960’s so great? Was it The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Motown? Was it the protests? Was it the crazy fashion? Was it the attitude of sticking it to the authority and defying the pecking order? The photographs of the colorful hippies in their gypsy dresses and beads make the decade look wonderful, but how many of them ended up on drugs? Then there’s the huge 1969 concert at Woodstock, New York; it may live on in our hearts forever as the ultimate “peace and love” of the decade, but a few months later that image would be countered at Altamont. So how shall we remember the 60’s? This is where Gaillard’s book begins.

    The author, in the book’s preface, describes his personal connection to the 1960’s. He met William F. Buckley during a debate with Julian Bond, graduated in 1968, and describes it as a bad year (two assassinations didn’t make things optimistic.) But eight years earlier, five college students defied the norm (and ended up int eh history books) by sitting at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Does Woolworth’s still exist? If it does, do the stores still have a dining area? Back then the store was inconsequential, but it was segregated, and to those students it was a symbol of legalized discrimination. They knew that they’d be making history, because all other attempts met with national attention. They knew what they were getting into, they would be harassed like the Little Rock Nine, or worse, have their houses bombed. They were afraid, but then their fear turned to anger, and anger can be a lot stronger than fear.

    Cesar Chavez was another well-known figure of the time, but unlike other leaders, he was not well-educated, nor the product of the East Coast liberal establishment. A dirt-poor Mexican American farmer from Arizona, he’d been seen as an invader all his life. Here’s where the author makes a comparison; California is the setting for The Grapes of Wrath, about a migrant family struggling on the farms, and unlike the Depression-era migrants, Chavez was dealing with racism as well as poverty. Like Dr. King, he understood how to use the media to his advantage, and unlike the Depression-era migrants, he led California’s migrant farmers to unionize. I also have to wonder how much the post-WWII economy had to do with it; fresh grapes have almost no shelf-life, and they weren’t commonly eaten until the invention of the refrigerator, which almost every post-war family had in their home. When millions of Americans agreed to boycott grapes, did they replace them with another luxury on the table? Maybe they opted for oranges, harvested with badly paid Black American workers.

    Next, we have San Francisco and the Summer of Love. The author retells the story of the city’s folk music scene, the funny clothes that the hippies wore, and the long-time Beatnik residents, and Ken Kesey, and all the other colorful characters from the city’s hippy scene. However, the author doesn’t go into much exploration as to why the city became a hotbed of the counterculture. What did it have that Miami and New York didn’t? California was NOT especially liberal, it always had a very conservative government, and was not as tolerant as it was stereotyped to be. The author implies that the JFk assassination may have had something to do with it, but that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t explain why San Francisco, a run-down port city, would attract eccentrics.

    The final chapter confirms what I always suspected – that the 60’s weren’t that great. The decade didn’t “die” at Altamont, but was already a gangrenous limb and needed to be cut loose. The cities burned in race riots, drug use increased, women got a raw deal (even in hippie communes, they had to do the laundry and cooking) and the Vietnam war left thousands disabled and on drugs. 400,000 young people went to Woodstock, but just as many were shipped off to Vietnam. The JFK assassination, the RFK assassination, Dr. King’s assassination, the Manson Family murders, the killing by Hell’s Angels at Altamont – among other acts of violence in the decade – didn’t kill the decade of “peace and love” because the violence was already there. People just didn’t expect to see it at a Rolling Stones concert or the home of a Hollywood actress.

    My father, 20 years old in 1969, wasn’t a hippy, didn’t smoke pot, didn’t drop out, and wasn’t at Woodstock. Over the years I asked him why, and his reasons were either work, inconvenience, non-interest, or all three. But years later, he said to me “I had to work so I could go to college, and I needed a well-paid summer job, and my boss wouldn’t give me the weekend off.” It all makes sense, not every Baby-Boomer could get to Woodstock, but keep something else in mind. 400,000 people attended that concert, but ten times that many were serving in the military at the time. Then you have all the people who had to work, like my Dad, and couldn’t get the time off to go. Finally, Woodstock is in New York State, and all those young people in Florida, California, and the Midwest couldn’t possibly get there. How many young people had the money for an airline ticket?

   Of those college students, who (according to the author) kicked off the decade with a sit-in at a dirty lunch counter, one became a General in the US Army. In the end, it doesn’t surprise me; he was tough enough to stand up to racists in the south, and tough enough for the military. Another member of the Greensboro sit-in became a special education teacher, devoting his life to helping kids get through school. The anti-establishment protestors, with their tie-dyed shirts and long hair, were sitting on the shoulders of those brave men. Yet in typical American fashion, we ignore the ones who work the hardest, and lionize the ones who complain the loudest.

The Creative Destruction of New York City

    From the outset, Dr. Alessandro Busa derides long commutes to work, and shows obvious disgust for tiny rooms. One thing that makes up for it in New York City is the people. To him, tiny rooms are fine as long as he can sit on the fire escape or stoop and watch all the people walking by. His reason for leaving Germany and coming to NYC is to do a degree at Columbia, so I can see how his commute – from Chinatown to Morningside Heights – is either an adventure or a chore. I don’t know how our city’s subway compares to that of Berlin (I’ve never visited) but I know it’s worse than Chicago.

   In the first chapter, Dr. Busa researches how Harlem transformed overnight into a place for the rich (or at least the ones who were not rich enough for the West Village) and how the new stores – Gap, Old Navy, Starbucks, Wholefoods – were of little benefit to those who were already there. Marcus Samuelson’s Red Rooster – discussed heavily in his autobiography Yes Chef – doesn’t really do much for Harlem and probably never will. I find it unlikely that Samuelson would’ve enjoyed Harlem in the 1990’s when he first came over; the kind of people with the money to eat at the Red Rooster did not live there at the time.

    For research, Dr. Busa interviews random Harem residents and he finds some very disturbing experiences. Long- time residents – who lived there during the rough times – are forced out of their apartments and end up in the Bronx. The new arrivals ignore the Mom & Pop restaurants, which end up closing. I personally experienced this on the Upper West Side; the cheaper supermarket had to close because the new residents, with more money to spend, wanted “organic” foods. Back in 2005, I had one meal – and not a good one – at a Harlem diner when I was working up there, and all the customers were middle aged Black men. The food was typical diner grub, and I doubt that someone with more money – even if they wanted a fry-up for breakfast – would want to eat there. McDonald’s has been displacing these diners for years. As for the diner’s atmosphere, it was a very gritty one, and wouldn’t have much appeal for a Columbia Professor. Maybe the problems that Dr. Busa discusses are the same problems seen in all US cities?

    I don’t know if the author read the book Home Girl by Judith Maitloff, who, ironically, was an adjunct at Columbia, where he studied. She bought a Harlem townhouse in 1999, back when it was undesirable except for the price, and she did in fact eat at local places, mainly from the lack of choice. The older Black residents, who refused to flee during the rough ages, welcomed her in. But these weren’t the people in rent-controlled apartments; they were owners of the buildings, and very gentile. They had no interest in the people who were “struggling,” and they were proud of themselves for succeeding on their own merits. They were happy to see a White family moving in. After all, wasn’t theirs a great neighborhood?

    Here’s where Busa puts the blame. First, you had racism, because banks wouldn’t lend to Black home buyers or builders. Then you had Redlining, a practice where the banks – on the advice of Federal research studies – declared Black neighborhoods to be too poor and criminal for mortgages. Then came heroin, crack, and more crime. He points out an interesting fact with regard to credit, using the Apollo Theater as an example. The building was shuttered in 1983, when it was bought by a company owned by Percy Sutton, the Manhattan Borough President. Sutton was an established Black businessman, with lots of connections in banking and in the city government, so credit wasn’t a problem for him. The author cites this as an example of how it takes an established corporation to make positive change, but this is not unique to Harlem. 1983 was a difficult time to get a bank loan, and few banks would loan money to refurbish a building. The book Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street, is all about how another run-down neighborhood, in this case Soho, needed bank loans. The borrowers who fixed up the Soho lofts were all White, and many of them had good credit, but the banks still wanted huge guarantees. Refurbishing a building, whether commercial or residential, is loan-dependent, and the white-collar bankers are more likely to deal with their own kind. Grass-roots projects don’t do well with bankers.

    Mayor Kotch tried to auction off the city-foreclosed buildings in Harlem, but that failed, because banks wouldn’t risk financing a project in blighted 80’s Harlem. The author doesn’t mention the Homesteader program of the 1980’s, which did in fact work, primarily because very little financing was needed. The homesteaders fixed up the buildings with their own bare hands, often waiting months before having hot (or even running) water. I also disagree with Busa’s attitude towards the media’s portrayal of Harlem. It’s true that the 1970’s were all about Blaxploitation movies and crime, but the more positive 1980’s portrayal of Harlem is just a myth. If Harlem was a good place to be, why did not only the Whites, but also middle-class Blacks, avoid it? The Studio Museum, Sylvia’s, The Schomberg Center, The Apollo Theater, and all the other tourist attractions were just a façade in a neighborhood that was unsafe at night. The John Sayles movie Brother From Another Planet didn’t show all of the extreme misery in the community.

   In each chapter, the author shows how it’s the capital investment that makes all the difference. Whoever can get the bank to lend hi money is the one who will get his way. We see in the first chapter how banks wouldn’t lend money to Black landlords, which led to blight, and (though not mentioned in this book) the artist-owned Soho lofts were all the result of banks that did loan money. The old Rivington House on the Lower East Side, once a nursing home, was changed to condos for the same reason; the owner got his hands on the $16million fee to change the deed. The elderly residents ended up scattered to other hospices.

    I disagree with the author’s attitude that everyone is losing. Rent-controlled tenants are very hard to kick out, as seen in the Stuyvesant Town debacle, and the big businesses with their big money ended up bankrupt, while the Stuyvesant Town residents were left warm and comfortable. Rent control tenants who lose in the end are the ones who (a) don’t pay the rent on time, (b) illegally sublet their apartments, and (c) have kids living with them who are a nuisance to the other tenants. The city had the chance to make adjustments to rent control, but every attempt caused an uproar. Few rent-controlled apartments were lost to eviction.

    The next disagreement that I have with the author is the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the so-called historic districts. A lot of the old buildings are crumbling and unsustainable, like the old Tammany Hall building. Never mind that it was old, it was built with stolen money by the thieving Boss Tweed, and the only good thing about it is the pretty stonework. It couldn’t be demolished, so it had to have commercial tenants who could pay the huge rent. It was too small to have lots of low-rent tenants, an wasn’t zoned as a residence, so in the end, the building was pretty much useless. Dr. Busa is so irritated by the lack of affordable housing, but it would break his heart for Tammany Hall to be replaced by an eight-story apartment house. His chapter on “The Rezoning that Killed Coney Island” is all wrong, because Coney Island was a dump for years. All seaside resorts in the USA suffered after the 1950’s, not just Coney Island but also Atlantic City (NJ) and Venice Beach (CA) which lost revenue too. The amusement venues, only profitable in the summer, weren’t enough to keep things going. What does the author expect the owners to do? Hold on to an unprofitable building just for the nostalgia? Brighton Beach was nothing until the Ukrainians moved in, and they’re probably more interested in good housing than an old façade. He waxes nostalgia on the Coney Island Ballroom and the old arcade, but who cares? I visited in 2008, and it was a decaying old wreck. The old Playland, destroyed by fire years earlier, was no a weeded lot. Across the Hudson River, Long Branch had burned in the 80’s, and was derelict until housing was built in 2005. Today it’s completely revamped, survived Hurricane Sandy, and nobody feels nostalgic because nobody remembers!

   The author could benefit from a little more research. Soho is a great example of activism preserving a neighborhood, and there are many in Harlem who have found ways to avoid displacement. He could also benefit from reading Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal; I know it’s an arrogant tome, but it does have valid points about the problem with rent-control and how Mayor Koch’s well-meaning plans didn’t work. As for the old 42^nd Street, gone and replaced by glass office blocks, I have few good memories. The old “Deuce” which entertains with the nostalgic TV drama was of no benefit to the city. Little tax revenue was ever gained, and it was a great place for the mob to launder money.

    He places a lot of the blame on Mayor Bloomberg and his re-zoning laws, but he ignores the fact that a lot of old buildings were barely habitable. While he laments the loss of the “creative types” he ignores (or doesn’t know about) how 30 years ago, the “creative” people were mostly single with no kids, and they left the city when they did have kids. Dr. Busa wasn’t here in 1988, when it wasn’t so good. At the time, few educated Europeans wanted to live in New York. John Lennon’s move to Manhattan was very unusual at the time. The area where he moved to (the Upper West Side) was NOT safe at all, and I know because my parents lived there at the same time he did. You couldn’t go out at night, and even in the daytime you had to be on your guard. Indeed, our city has lost many of the things that made it whole, but at the same time, some buildings are just not meant to last.

     You can’t survive on ideals, nor on nostalgia. It’s true that the old-time residents get screwed by gentrification, and that it wrong. But in every chapter of this book, I see what I’ve long believed; you have to be prepared for the future, and no neighborhood lasts forever. Time waits for no man.