Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol

    Vera, I feel your pain. I can relate to your experience at camp. It’s a time-tested American tradition, going to sleepaway camp for the summer and having a great time or a terrible time. You’re stuck out in the countryside with people you hardly know and you’re with them 24-7. You can’t go home at the end of the day, you can’t ask your parents for advice, and you have no privacy.

   Be Prepared is a graphic novel (though not really a novel because it’s not fiction) based on the author’s experience in a Russian camp in Connecticut. As an immigrant kid growing up in Albany, she doesn’t fit in with the rich kids, nor any other group for that matter. One of the saddest scenes in this book is her “failed sleepover” (also a time-tested American tradition) and the huge disappointment it brings. The scene sets the tone for the rest of the book, where the underprivileged kid becomes a social outcast. It’s a theme throughout the book; she always ends up being the kid who doesn’t get. As for the camp, I assumed it would be one of those young Pioneer camps they had in the USSR, but no, it’s no that kind of place. While it is Russian in terms of language, it’s run by the church, and not designed to foster economic and social equality.

    Brosgol captures the essence of childhood perfectly. Her eyes are almost as big as her face, enlarged by her oversized glasses, which seem to form a barrier against the world. Those huge eyes show all her hope, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness. In the sleepover scene, she goes from wide-eyed optimism to disappointment to being completely resigned. The artwork is perfect, with olive greens that give you the essence of nature. She also captures facial expressions and body language perfectly, making her mother look both resolute and feeble at the same time. When it comes to the portrayal of the kids, the author uses head size, posture, and facial expressions to show the age difference. Vera is only ten years old in the book, but she’s out in the bunk with fourteen-year-old girls, and as you guess, she feels outnumbered and invisible.

    Like I mentioned earlier, going to camp can be a source of happiness or pain. For Vera, she’s a kid from a less well-off family, whose mother is faced with two difficulties; first is her absent husband, and second are the children who want what they haven’t got. I can really relate to this, because I grew up around kids whose families were on a limited budget, and they felt guilty for asking for things that other kids had. At the same time, the parents had no idea that their kids were outcasts, and were trying desperately to fit in. You’re never sure if you should feel sympathy for the parents, or be annoyed because they’re feeble.

    I will recommend this book to kids over ten years old. It’s not hard to read, there are plenty of illustrations, and it has a story that kids can relate to.

Just Kids by Patti Smith

    "Just Kids" is predated by a 1995 biography of Maplethorpe and his relationship with Patti Smith. It takes you back to an era when bohemian life was possible, when there wasn't a great obsession with being a success, and people were satisfied with less. It was the 1960’s, a time when there were cheap apartments, abundant jobs, but also greater dangers. It wasn’t a safe time to be in Manhattan, but if you didn’t look like you had money, you might survive. If you did survive, life could be quite fun.

    Patti Smith came from a liberal family in a conservative town near Philadelphia. At the start of the memoir, she doesn't fit in with local mores and norms, so she takes a bus to Brooklyn and expects to stay with friends near the Pratt Institute. When she gets there, they've moved out, so she couch surfs and ends up with a dropout artist named Robert, who might be gay. For the next four years, they hop from one dirt-cheap pad to the next, eating one meal a day, and making art from cast-off junk.

    The title of "Just Kids" is perfect for the book. It's about young people doing what all young people dream of; living far from their parents, doing whatever they want, not having a care in the world, working just enough to support themselves. All those things were possible in 1968 New York. Rent was cheap, and as long as you didn't carry any valuables, you were relatively safe. Nowadays, however, I can't see any of this happening. If Patti and Robert had come to New York City (or even Brooklyn) in 2013, they'd never be able to live this way. The only cheap apartments are in the worst neighborhoods, and it would be a long commute from anything they’d want to do. The commute to work would be long, and you'd never be able to have an apartment on a bookstore clerk's salary. Would they mind living six to a tiny apartment in Williamsburg? Would they mind commuting from Brighton Beach all the way to Midtown? Would they be happy without an iPhone, a laptop, internet, gym membership, the latest footwear?

    Bohemian life doesn't flourish in this city the way it did in the 60's. Most of the so-called "hipsters" today live on money from their parents, but Patti and Robert lived in a bare-bones apartment with whatever furniture they could get, and when it came to clothes, they wore a weird mix of.....well I guess we could say they wore what they could get. Today's "hipsters" wear expensive clothing, eat in costly restaurants, and have high-priced technology.

    I give this book 4 stars instead of 5, only because it's repetitive. There's too much name-dropping about all her favorite poets, and that distracts from things. I would have like to have seen a greater description of the physical aspect of New York at the time.

Standing With Standing Rock: Voices From the #NoDAPL Movement

    Native Americans protests are nothing new, at least not since the 1970’s, but the mass protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline involves more than we’ve dealt with previously. Starting with the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz, the protests involved Wounded Knee,  The Trail of Broken Treaties (1972) and the “Protect Our Peaks” movement (2004). These protests were about broken treaties, bad memories, and modern problems, issues like pollution, sovereignty, water rights, and funding, but the anti-DAPL movement is different; it involves every single issue, and not just one specific complaint.

    In Standing With Standing Rock, we have a collection of writings (essays, narratives, and poems) about the anti-DAPL effort and its significance. One entry to start with is The Great Sioux Nation and the Resistance to Colonial Land-Grabbing. The land-grabbing phenomena is nothing new in the USA, and it’s been a problem for all Americans, not just Native American people, thanks to eminent domain.  However, tribal reservation lands seem to get grabbed the most, and it’s not just for farming and ranching (the historical reason) or mining and drilling (the modern reason) but for things like golf courses. It isn’t just a problem in the USA, but in Canada as well, as we saw with the Oka protests in Quebec in the 1990’s. News stories of greedy stock and oil men, drooling over a tribe’s land, won’t shock anybody.

    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States) uses her essay on land-grabbing to show how the treaties between the tribes and the US government changed over time (usually with dismal results.) First there was the treaty with the plains tribes (1805) which was of no consequence, because there were few settlers west of the Mississippi. However, the fur trade soon began, and the US had more incentive to put forts in the area. She says that when the tribes found that they could trade furs for European guns, horses, and other goods, they became more dependent on them (though she doesn’t expressly mention it, I bet alcohol may have played a part.) Then you had farmers moving in, then gold was found, then oil, and because the country’s industries were resource-dependent, there was more incentive to break the treaties.

    Another point made by Dunbar-Ortiz is that the government kept the reservations scattered to keep them from unifying. There were six Sioux reservations, miles apart from each other, so it was difficult for them to work together. She also shows how giving the tribes the reservations was, is, and will be, akin to snatching a man’s property and giving him a cheap gift. Essentially it was “here’s a piece of land where you can hunt all you like, now we’ll take the rest of the land, and we’re sure you’ll be satisfied with what we’ve given you.” After looking at Google Earth/Map, and seeing the reservations, I really have to wonder why the Sioux (and other tribes) can’t have more space. The area surrounding the Pine Ridge reservation is unfarmed, unsettled, unbuilt, devoid of roads, and you can drive for miles without seeing anyone or anything. It’s not like anybody wants the land, seeing as it’s far away from anything. One would think the state of Nebraska would love to be rid of responsibility for it, and if it were given to the reservation, it would become the Fed’s problem. The answer may be in the origin of the treaty; Congress wouldn’t give away land they might need, and today they won’t risk losing the right to the minerals.

    Tribal sovereignty is another issue covered in this book, and a major bone of contention with regards to the DAPL. Maybe it seems trite to say it, because running a pipeline over anyone’s territory is bound to cause trouble (look at Ukraine for an example.) Andrew Curley’s essay Beyond Environmentalism is all about the way that the DAPL protests gained broad support, thanks to the mutual concern over ecology. He also writes on how the indigenous  people, once portrayed as backward and lazy, became the “noble ecologists” who lived with nature. He does, however, note that the image is still racist (remember the Crying Indian commercial?) and pigeonholes the people as one-dimensional. Still, he argues that the need to protect the land from pollution was the reason that the outsiders came in to help, and the outside help is usually attracted by a mutual benefit.

Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI and the New York Intellectuals

    This book isn’t as much about the New York intellectuals of the 50’s as it is about the politics of surveillance. According to the author, there was little protection against wiretapping until the 1990’s, so the FBI bugged homes and cars at will. The courts would not allow wiretaps to be used as evidence, but the FBI still listened in on Charles Chaplin, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Dr. King, and countless others. There’s irony in that too, because none of those men posed any real danger to the American people. I’m not surprised by the author’s revelations on FBI bugging, given that that Hoover and his henchmen were never warm to the intellectuals or activists. Nonetheless, this book raises questions on two issues; firstly, the threat that the targets actually posed, and secondly, the goals that the FBI had in mind.

    Lionel Trilling is prominent in this book, and in the greatest irony, he was suspected of being a Trotskyite. I say irony, because Trotsky was anti-Stalin, which the FBI plants (spies if you prefer) never realized. As for his years of teaching philosophy at NYU, he doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact. Dwight MacDonald, another forgotten intellectual, was another weird obsession for J. Edgar Hoover. Again, nothing gained by either side.

    This entire book has zilch to do with New York City or its intellectuals, so don’t bother. It’s an ineffectual book about ineffectual people.

Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by In America

    Let it be known, that Barabara Ehrenreich’s book is about three problems in American life; first, that minimum wage jobs are full of worker abuse, secondly, that they’re not enough to live on, and third, this is even more likely if you’re a woman. I’ve seen few women in the well-paid,  blue-collar jobs, like trucking, construction, cab driving, and restaurant kitchens. Here in New York City, some of the best-paid jobs for those with no college degrees are the building staff – doormen, concierges, and porters – with few women on staff. Let it also be known that the author does not survive off charity, and when she does get free food from a food bank, it’s crappy canned food and Hamburger Helper, full of salt.

Ehrenreich wrote this book in the early 2000’s, in order to see if the 1996 Welfare Reform had made things better or worse for the poor. She finds that the average minimum wage job is barely enough to support a single woman, and certainly wouldn’t be enough to feed the kids, rent more than one room, pay the medical bills, and eat well. Worse, there are towns where the only unskilled job is in Walmart, and she finds that Walmart abuses the employees and often tries to cheat them. In Florida, she takes a job waitressing at a restaurant where tourists go, and under the state laws she gets less than minimum wage; a common problem for tipped employees. While the customers are supposed to leave tips, many do not, and the employers rarely bother to obey the law and make up the difference. She tries working at a cleaning service, and here’s where she encounters another troubling factor. There’s a protocol for cleaning the bathrooms, and it requires a huge mental effort to learn the routine. Thanks to the high turnover rate, the boss can change your schedule at will and without notice. You can be at the end of your shift and be told to stay late and work at night. You have to pick your kid up from the babysitter? Too bad. You can’t get childcare with no notice? Too bad.

One of the more surprising things in this book is the drug testing of employees. I’ve only been drug tested twice in my life, once at Chase Manhattan Bank, and once by the Department of Education. None of the brokerage houses where I worked ever drug-tested me, and neither did the construction jobs or tutoring services. I find it surprising, because a construction company, with safety issues to consider, can least afford a worker with a drug problem. But Walmart? Would it make much difference? Another problem that a lot of poor neighborhoods are facing is what we call the criminalization of the poor. Parents can be fined if their children are absent from school, and face jail time if they haven’t got the money to pay. When you’re on the move from one homeless shelter to another, and have no transportation, getting your kid to school is a problem. If you need any kind of government aid, you can expect to be drug-tested.

Ehrenreich starts out her journey with only $1,000 and tells everyone she has a high school diploma. The question is whether the money she has with her will be enough to start off, and she finds that it isn’t. Her savings are barely enough to pay the deposit on an apartment, and local cheap hotels aren’t that cheap in the end. Renting a car costs more in the long run, but without the startup money to purchase one, she has no choice. The poor neighborhoods are food deserts, and the only food available is salt and fat.

There is a cure for the problem, and that is solidarity. People who live in a food desert can club together with someone who has a car, chip in for gas, and drive to a place with a cheap supermarket. Some people form food co-ops, so they can buy good quality food at wholesale prices. If several families live together in one home, they can gain two benefits; first is a lower living cost, and second is available childcare.  In the book Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street, the artists in Soho formed food co-ops, daycare co-ops, and others that provided home repair, homework help, art supplies, and more. The problem with charity is that it’s a “top-down” program, where the money on top can dictate, but solidarity is a “bottom-up” effort that allows the people to decide for themselves. It is my belief that this is why Jewish immigrants in the USA (and later Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants) did better than others. The Jews relied on each other for housing, food, education, and health, with benevolent lodges that provided emergency funds for medical bills and burial costs. You had three generations of a family living in one apartment, so the grandparents watched the kids while the parents worked 12 hour days.

In another book about poverty, Joanna Lipper’s Growing Up Fast, we see how a hotel employs women housekeepers while the cooks are all men, and while the women are paid a pittance, the male cooks eat well from the leftovers. Another difference is that the male cooks have a greater opportunity to work their way up the ladder, while a female cleaner can only be promoted to head housekeeper, with few levels in between. The cooks and the maids are on their feet all day, but the maids have to kneel and stoop. It’s a similar thing with construction; laborers don’t have to dress up, don’t have to buy expensive uniforms, and aren’t at the mercy of decent tips.

The end result is that the 1996 Welfare Reform law didn’t make things better. This book was published back in 2001 and is still read frequently, so it remains to be seen how the issues in this book will pan out in later generations. With the decriminalization of marijuana, there will be fewer people in prison, and thanks to bail reform, we’ll have fewer people missing work while they sit in the lockup.