1967: The Year of Fire and Ice

    1967 was a dramatic and dynamic year in American life, music, art, and world affairs. However, the author of this book relies heavily on stereotyping. For instance, he devotes a chapter to Israel and the Six Day War, and he gets a lot of it wrong. Firstly, Israel’s planes were high-speed interceptors, not fighter-bombers, and the Egyptian pilots were eating breakfast when the Israelis attacked, not sitting in their cockpits. Next problem is that the author leaves out major details; Israeli officers had to work hard for their ranks, while the Egyptian and Syrian officers were all incompetent. Israel’s intelligence service had been hard at work for 20 years, spying on the Arab world, and it was the intelligence that gave Israel an advantage. At the time of the Six Day War, the US was bogged down in Vietnam. Were the South Vietnamese army officers as incompetent as the Arab officers? If so, was the USA just babysitting an army that was too damn lazy?

    The author begins with Abba Eban’s visit to Washington DC to ask for US help, and the dismissive response of LBJ. There’s no explanation of why. Was it because the USA was more concerned about Vietnam? Was Johnson looking to keep the Arab Oil Sheiks happy? There’s a lot more going on here than the author goes into.

    In terms of movies (kind of lame, ever since Hollywood had been killed by TV) American audiences were shocked by You Only Live Twice, with its portrayal of the Japanese as good-natured allies of the USA. Then there was the epic The Dirty Dozen, which tossed “civilized warfare” out the window. It may have been groundbreaking for the role of Jim Brown (how many Black action heroes were there at the time, besides Woody Strode?) and the amount of violence. However, it was not the only war film of the era; we had Von Ryan’s Express, Cast a Giant Shadow, The Manchurian Candidate, and others. Paint Your Wagon was garbage, and who needed a big-budget western when you could watch Gunsmoke and The Rifleman for free? Sergio Leone’s Italian westerns did well at the box office, probably because they had an edgier style that appealed to younger audiences (the Baby Boomers weren’t especially fond of John Wayne’s hypermasculinity.)

    The bottom line is that this book contains absolutely NOTHING that I haven’t already seen in every book, documentary, biography, or comic about the 60’s. Half the stuff in this book was portrayed on The Wonder Years, and that wasn’t even a primary source.

   

Empire, State, & Building

   Kiel Moe finds a sort of imperialist doctrine in Manhattan’s buildings. He thinks that every time something great gets built, some part of history is lost (though some might say that when a tree dies, a thousand flowers bloom) and the buildings are an encroachment. His first example is the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which started out as the Waldorf, then the owner bought out the nearby Astor hotel, and merged them. With the new tall buildings came the need for structural engineering, and the building trusses had to be specially designed.

The author then goes into the destruction aspect of the buildings. The new Waldorf-Astoria used doors and paneling from the old building it replaced, but that was as far as the salvage went. When the 34^th street hotel was demolished in 1929, it ended then and there. But that doesn’t mean that everything went to waste; the steel and copper were recycled, and the elevators were installed elsewhere. The industrial materials were more valuable at the time than the décor, and during the depression, I don’t know how many people had the money to buy antiques.

Moe’s research brings up old photos of Manhattan’s grid, which despite the size of the plots, did not favor large buildings. The original pots were meant to favor the small row houses (that cost a fortune nowadays). Large mansions were strictly for the rich who could afford them, and a lot of those mansions were eventually sold off and torn down, making way for the rich people who wanted small apartments. The other problem was the height of the buildings; before the elevators came along, you couldn’t have a ten-story building. The materials weren’t even local; the stone was from upstate New York, the fancy bricks were from Pennsylvania, and the fancy furniture and marble fireplaces were probably from Europe.

This book is stuffed full of silly nostalgia. Most of the buildings in this book, lamented by the author, were just playgrounds for the rich. Only rich men could build mansions, and their heirs didn’t want them. The Vanderbilt mansion on 5^th Avenue was torn down by the 1930’s, and the gates are now used in Central Park. The Rice Mansion is now a school (Yeshiva HaKetanah) and God knows where the original owner’s descendants are now. Do the mansions of magnates represent the city or the people? Are they important to us, even though they contribute nothing?

On a lighter note, the Astor hotel was built to spite the rich. There was a mansion owned by Mrs. Astor, of the Astor dynasty, who declared that she alone could be called “Mrs. Astor,” and when her nephew’s wife started using the title, she had him cut from the family. To piss her off, he bought the property next door, tore it down, and built the Astor Hotel on the site. What could be worse for an old-money sow than the have a hotel next door to her royal palace? The construction and traffic ruined her life and forced her to move.

The bottom line is, nobody is nostalgic for a rich man’s souvenirs.

Imagining Urban Futures by Carl Abbott

    I had a lousy experience in a futuristic city – Milton Keynes to be exact – though legally it’s an “area” and not a city. The houses were built on high embankments, so you couldn’t see the homes from your car, and because they were all identical, we soon got lost. Luckily, we found a public kiosk with a large map of the community, but still we couldn’t locate Woughton Town Hall, which was to be our destination. As for the kiosk, it was in a massive plaza, devoid of any use, and the kind of plaza that symbolizes British modernism. Just when we were about to give up, a voice behind us said “it’s pronounced woof-ton.” It was hilarious to me, because one minute this huge expanse of gray concrete paving was lifeless, and all of a sudden there’s a typical English kid on an old BMX. It was almost like a Dr. Who episode, where you find yourself on a strange planet, and out of nowhere you see a stereotypical Englishman whose presence isn’t quite explained. All the better in the end, because Milton Keynes belongs in a science fiction movie.

“Milton Keynes is a planned community,” my father explained, “a big thing for left-wing governments.” But this was the UK, and back home in the USA, our planned communities – Levittown, Foster City, and Florida’s gated communities – were the brainchild of right-wing tycoons. New York’s planned communities – NYCHA and the Mitchell-Lama program – were either well meaning socialism or a devious way to Gerrymander the votes of the poor. Regardless, most planned communities are, in my biased opinion, likely to generate bored kids, reminiscent of the Mouse Utopia experiment.

We’ve seen futuristic cities in The Jetsons, Star Trek, and Futurama, and they all have mile-high apartment buildings and flying cars. The author Carl Abbott finds them in all of the old Popular Mechanics magazines, and I wonder what keeps the flying cars from crashing into windows. He points out that in old sci-fi films, new modern buildings are often used to portray the futuristic city. Alphaville used La Defense in Paris as the set for the future, and Total Recall used  Mexico City (he doesn’t mention that Century City in LA was used for Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, or that Thamesmead in London was used for A Clockwork Orange.) They all look boxy, geometric, and a bit lonely. He also points out how the old parts of London, Paris, and New York look great with a few additions. He credits the skyline as a distinctly American invention, yet he leaves out the reason why; the USA had lots of tycoons – Ford, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Chryster, Morgan, and Astor – with plenty of money to finance the building of skyscrapers. Britain and Europe did not.

Abbott devotes a chapter to the cities in space, like Babylon Five, Deep Space Nine, and Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet, and points out that few of them take work, living, air, and pressure into account. I recall an old science fiction story called Goodbye to the Moon, where a boy from the Moon Colony says “look how much water there is on Earth, and they charge us for every drop!” I don’t mean to spoil a fan’s experience, but I’m sure some people have said that if Deep Space Nine developed a bean-size hole, everyone would die from the pressure drop. Then you wonder what would happen if there were a carbon monoxide leak. As for a fire from an oxygen generator, well we all know what happened on Space Station Mir!

Abbott pretty much covers every possible fantasy city every invented by a science fiction writer. We have the model city, the city in space, the mobile city, the walled utopia (he calls it the Carceral City) and the decaying suburb that’s a no-go zone (B13, Escape From New York, and 1990: The Bronx Warriors.) They provide gritty material to countless filmmakers, and plenty of settings for Italian schlockmeisters to make cheeseball epics. I can recall a whole genre of apocalyptic movies, set in the Bronx, by Italian directors who used no-talent actors. While few American cared to watch (we already had Escape From New York) there were plenty of Arabs, Europeans, and South Americans who would gladly watch a low-budget (what I like to call) ‘spaghetti apocalypse.’  The third-world’s middle class – if they had the money for a VCR – must’ve enjoyed watching an Italian beefcake try to outrun a colorful, chain-waving gang, on his noisy motorbike.

Carl Abbott doesn’t completely trash the futuristic city, as we can see with his praise of Montreal’s Place Ville Marie. He seems to enjoy the idea of Montreal’s underground shopping malls, which are great in the nasty Canadian winters. One of the main issues of his book is that if the futuristic cities are inhabited by choice, then there’s a chance they could be settled by force. In the chapter “Spunky Kids,” he collects all the “carceral city” stories, where headstrong teens try to escape and see what’s out there. Most of these tales are teen-oriented, like The Hunger Games, The Giver, and Homecoming. But in some ways, I find New York City to be a bit of a carceral community with absolutely no spunky kids; here in New York, the kids rarely feel any incentive to venture out of the city, and they don’t even seem interested in exploring outside of their own neighborhood.

Carl Abbott has written a book about planned cities, and how they relate to the fantasies of science fiction. He discusses the question of whether the modern city could be the norm in the future, both in the benefits and the fallacies. Will New York City be made of glass? Will the whole world be a tower block? Will neighborhoods be underground? It’s al discussed in this book, and there’s always an architect with a dream, be it glorious to him or a nightmare to potential residents.

Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock

    Elizabeth and Hazel is a depressing book, in my opinion, and not because of what happened on that day in 1957. It's depressing because Elizabeth Eckford had a life that stunk. She was a depressed Black American kid who grew up to be a depressed adult, made bad choices, and ended up with a sorry life. As for Hazel, the most hated teenage girl in American history, I don’t think she deserves any derision, and what I dislike is the way she’s been treated by history. She bullied Elizabeth Eckford for ten minutes, and it was 60 years ago, when she was a sixteen-year-old kid. Why should the world be angry at her now? Why should she be known as the nasty White girl from Little Rock? She was under no moral obligation to apologize to Elizabeth, and Oprah Winfrey's behavior towards Hazel was just plain mean. The other members of the Little Rock Nine were equally nasty.

   A little background to the story; Elizabeth Eckford was one of the Little Rock Nine (I’m not going to explain who/what they were, it’s your job to learn your history!) and she’s in the famous photo, wearing the sunglasses. The teenage brunette in the light dress, snarling like a dog, is Hazel Bryant. The ordeal of being followed and surrounded by hostile hoodlums on the way to the bus stop lasted over an hour. To Elizabeth, I am sure it seemed like an eternity. But Hazel’s rudeness lasted a few minutes, at the most. Does she deserve to be vivified by all who study US history?

   

   This book surprised me in a lot of ways, not the least of which is David Margolick’s unbiased writing. He doesn’t make Elizabeth Eckford into a hero, and he doesn’t make Hazel into a model of hate, nor a model of repentance. From what the story shows, Elizabeth was depressed to begin with, and probably had severe anxiety. She went to college, dropped out to join the army, served two years, finished college, and immediately afterward she fell into a 20-year depression.  She was on welfare, living in a small house she bought from her mother, and she had two sons by different men. She chose to have children when she was in her late 30’s, even though she was unemployed and friendless, and she chose men who were in and out of jail, because she didn’t want a man interfering in their lives. What she ended up doing was making two fatherless boys, one of whom ended up dead. Elizabeth would finally rise up from her slump in the 1990’s, become a probation officer, and attended the 40^th anniversary celebration of the Little Rock Nine. Bill Clinton was there, and so was Hazel Bryan Massery, looking to make amends.

    When this book came out seven years ago, I read it eagerly, partly because I always wondered if Hazel was still horrible. What I’m reading here is that she was anything but horrible; she a typical 1950’s teenager, had a happy marriage, raised successful kids, and her life was mostly average. As for her terrible deed, it consisted of yelling at someone for a few minutes. Does she have to spend eternity apologizing for it? Over the years she would get in touch with Elizabeth, and there was even the 1997 reunion on Oprah Winfrey’s show. Oprah was a bit hostile to Hazel, and so were the rest of the Little Rock Nine. But the way I see it, Hazel had nothing to apologize for.

   What the history buffs don't get is that the Little Rock Nine didn't become "great" people; they became average citizens who have jobs, pay taxes, and hopefully enjoy their lives. History books treat them like big heroes and lionize them for their bravery, and perhaps they deserve the praise. But there were kids who were putting up with far worse than they, and never got any recognition. It isn't much different from the transgender rights movement, which has made stars of people like Kaitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings, both of whom look great on TV. Yet are they truly the “heroes” that the media has created? Both have the support of their families, and the support of the media, and the money for the sex change operation, and they look sexy. Now what about the kid in the Deep South, who comes out of the closet at the risk of being rejected by her friends?  She could be thrown out of the house, kicked out of her church, beaten up on the way to school. Where is the media support for that girl? Jazz Jennings, Nicole Mains, Corey Mason, Kim Petras, they’re all famous transgender teens, lionized by the press, and even in children’s books. But what risks have they taken? Shouldn’t the hero status go to the kid who really does have to struggle and overcome? In similar fashion, the national press gave plenty of support to the Little Rock Nine, although they were not the only Black children in the USA who faced racism head-on. Those nine kids in Little Rock all had the support of their families, and despite the attitudes in Little Rock, the national press were on their side too.

    Another comparison I want to make is what I call today’s “youtube disgrace.” I do not believe that Hazel would have survived had the incident occurred today. Everyone in the crowd would have a smart phone, and videos of her would be all over the internet. She’d be dubbed “Hater Hazel” by the media, then she’d be expelled from school, rejected from every college she applied to, rejected from every job she applied to, and she’d get death threats. But look at all the people today who are disgraced on youtube because of their behavior and lack of foresight; Apartment Patty, Pool Patrol Paula, Cornerstore Caroline, Permit Patty, Barbecue Becky; they’ve lost their jobs, been demonized by the media, even thrown under the bus by relatives. I have to wonder if they will be forgiven? Was it right to fire them from their jobs? I’m sure millions of others have done worse, only they never got caught on camera.

    In a way I think Elizabeth was accountable for her own failures. Having children was a very stupid thing for her to do, given that she was depressed and jobless. I can't honestly believe she was unaware of the hardship faced by fatherless boys with a depressed, unemployed, friendless mother, who has had no success or happiness in life. Did she think that having children would be like getting a new dog?

    I give this unpleasant story 5 stars because of the author's great writing. But the story itself is not a happy one.