Paul Joins the Scouts

    I don’t often see a graphic memoir about happy families. After reading the well-known selections -Maus, The Arab of the Future, Persepolis, and Stitches, to name a few – I came to the conclusion that lousy lives make for better storytelling. This is where Michel Rabagliati’s Canadian comics defy parameters: he writes and draws of a happy life, that’s both a pleasure and a tragedy to read. The story begins with a sneaker hanging from a wire, foreshadowing an abrupt and shocking end to a wonderful childhood.

    The story begins simple enough: Paul Riforiati is ten years old, like to eat Aero Bars, watches cartoons, draws comics, gets chased by a red-haired girl his age, and enjoys the child-friendly atmosphere of Montreal. He’s introduced to a Catholic scout troop (though it’s not clear if it’s part of the mainstream Boy Scout movement) and meets a whole new set of kids. And new adults. But is there something else going on here? Could the scout masters have a hidden motive for their involvement? The story is told against the backdrop of the FLQ and the October Crisis, and if you’re not familiar with Canadian history, you may need to do a quick web search.

    The character of Paul is a French-speaking Quebecois, though the family has absolutely no use for nationalism. They view the Front Liberte de Quebec as a nuisance, and the conservative Catholics probably see it as Communist. One of the scoutmasters is a beret-wearing leftist college student named Daniel Sabourin, who may or may not be involved with FLQ. It’s left to the reader to wonder, is the scout troop really a front for the nationalists? Is it some kind of recruiting effort? The scouts have to be Catholic, and despite one of the scoutmasters being a Priest, there doesn’t seem to be any religion involved. Is the requirement that they be Catholic really just a way of keeping Anglos or Jews out?

   The motives of the scoutmasters are another issue that’s left to the reader. While one of them is ordained, the scoutmaster named Ballou is revealed to be gay and living with a man. His lover boyfriend, disappointed in how much time Ballou spends on the scout troop, actually questions his motives, saying, “You must like seeing those boys in their little shorts!” Yet there’s no sign anywhere of inappropriate behavior among the adults in the equation. Then there’s Akela, working in a factory, and refusing to join the coworkers on their tours of the strip joints (hey, did I mention that Montreal was somehow the strip club capitol of North America?). Is Akela really gay and closeted? Ballou probably has a job where nobody will question is lifestyle, but Akela, if he is in fact gay, would probably have to keep it hidden. Is the scout troop a substitute for these men having no children of their own?

    In terms of family, Rabagliati portrays his mother as a sexy, vivacious woman, proud of her looks and enjoying her life as a stay-at-home parent. The only problem is her mother-in-law, who lives across the hall, and with whom she’s locked in a messy power struggle. Her obese bachelor brother-in-law lives with his mother and he’s another thorn in her side. The family are what we’d consider middle class: they have a spacious apartment, the kids have their own rooms, and they dress well. One of the recurring themes in the Paul Riforiati saga is how he always finds himself to be better-off than others. He wears Adidas sneakers (not exactly the priciest of shoes) but the other scout wears far cheaper ones.

   Rabagliati begins with that image of the shoe hanging on the wire, the result of a car crash that kills everyone. Except Paul. Staying home from the scout trip, thanks to a broken leg, saves him from the accident. Though the loss of his friends is never mentioned in later episodes of the book, I wonder if he develops survivor’s guilt? Could it explain his lack of motivation later on? Then there’s the stadium for the 1976 Olympics, which we see in the later episode Paul Up North. The ’76 Olympics will be another disappointment for the family.

   Perhaps this book is some kind of metaphor for disappointment? The kid goes from being a bit of a loner, to an avid Boy Scout, to losing his friends in the space of one day. The ending is shocking.

Stepping Stones by Lucy Knisley

 

Forgive me if I’ve written his before, but todays graphic memoirs all share a  character, namely the feeble mother. Let’s recap a little. In The Arab of the Future, the feeble mother allows herself to be dragged to the worst country in the world; in Be Prepared, the feeble mother is completely ignorant of her children’s feelings; in Cub, the idiot other thinks of her daughter as a puppet and an avatar. Now we have the memoir Stepping Stones, where the feeble mother allows her boyfriend to verbally abuse her daughter. Feeble moms make for a great story.

Lucy Knisley, the cartoonist who gave us the graphic memoirs Relish (brilliant), Age of License (self-obsessed story mediocre artwork), Displacement (better), Something New (don’t bother), and Kid Gloves (okay), is finally looking back on her life. Stepping Stones has good quality drawing, and she mines her life story to create a serious comic for young readers. It’s all about moving to the country, getting used to a new environment, dealing with new people, and having to share your new home with strangers. What I have trouble dealing with is the adult character’s behavior.

The protagonist is Jennifer McGinnis, born in NYC (though the neighborhood is not mentioned), who moves upstate with her mother. Now they live on a large property that her mother is turning into a farm, complete with chickens, a henhouse, and crops that they sell in the farmer’s market. However, the so-called farm sees more like a large hobby garden, because I don’t see how they could gain much in revenue from such a small farm. The chickens have an interesting role in the story: they’re cute pets, and they’re an unwanted chore, and they’re a source of conflict between Jen and her new stepsister.

Dealing with a new and unfamiliar adult in the house is one of the many unpleasant issues that Jen faces. Walter the stepfather is an obnoxious, high-handed loudmouth, legitimately annoying, and Jen believes (perhaps correctly) that he takes pleasure in putting her down. He repeatedly calls her Jenny, and not Jen, which she prefers. I have to wonder, what could an adult could gain by calling a child by her non-preferred name? Does it make him feel powerful? Is it a way to let off steam? He chews her out, browbeats her constantly, and all this goes on under her mother’s nose. When Jen runs off crying, her mother tries to comfort her by saying “well, he’s like that.”

In a story like this, I’m tempted to assume that Jen’s change of scenery will be a learning experience. I’d assume that the protagonist will conquer these nasty people, learn new skills, and go from being the victim to the victor. Nope, that doesn’t happen. In the first scene of the book, she explores the hayloft, finds barn kittens, brings them some food, and relaxes by lying in the hay and drawing the kittens. Everything is good…..until she hears her name called. It’s hard to enjoy learning, if hearing your name is a sign of trouble.

Peer relationships are explored well in Stepping Stones. While the stepfather is the primary antagonist, Jen’s stepsister Andrea is an antagonist and foil combined. When we think of the stepsister in children’s books, we tend to assume the villainous fairy tale character, or (thanks to Disney) the ugly jealous interloper. We get the opposite of that in Stepping Stones: the evil stepsister is neither ugly (she looks like a normal kid) nor jealous, and I say that because she considers everything Jen is or has to be inferior. She’s incredibly self-satisfied, and she looks at Jen as a poor and incompetent child who needs to be helped. Andrea is an obnoxious know-it-all, a myopic bulldozer, and her level of paternalism towards Jen is astounding. You know for sure that she isn’t jealous, because if she sees something she wants, she just goes ahead and takes it. On her first day at the farm, she immediately starts naming the chickens, despite Jen’s polite protest that she already gave them names. Andrea openly criticizes everything Jen does, and her father backs her up, always reminding Jen that she needs to let Andrea “teach” her. This is not a way to motivate a child. You really get the feeling of Jen’s powerlessness, and how everyone is ganging up on her.

A side plot to the story is the farmer’s market. Jen’s mother makes her work at their stall, despite the girl having a clear and present case of dyscalculia, and her inability to make change becomes a big conflict. All the while, I’m wondering about two things: first, why does she make her daughter run the till when she knows the kid can’t do the math, and second, why doesn’t this idiot give her daughter a calculator. When Jen goofs up at making the change, her mother says, “you told me your father was doing flash cards with you!” In this scene the feeble mother really rises to her level of incompetence.

I have to wonder if this book is suitable for young readers. There’s nothing wrong with the language, and the illustrations are great, plus we could always do with a book about kids dealing with divorce. But who wants a story about a kid being verbally abused? An English teacher could still use this book a s prompt on problem-solving, and the assignment could be on how Jen could respond to her stepfather’s remarks.

I give five stars for the artwork. They’re all done in earth tones, and you can almost smell the grass, the trees, and the mustiness of the ground. There aren’t any bright colors, and that’s perfect, because there’s nothing colorful about a helpless, powerless kid surrounded by people who gang up on her.

Not by the Sword, by Kathryn Watterson

  Larry Trapp, Grand Dragon of the Nebraska Ku Klux Klan makes an announcement: he’s going to blow up the Synagogue in Lincoln, massacre the entire Jewish population, and then do the same to the blacks (and if he’s smart, he’ll spare the Jewish doctors, black orderlies, and Vietnamese nurses.) The police do nothing. The citizens are apathetic. So what can the Synagogue Cantor do? Knowing that Trapp is blind and legless, he picks up the phone and says “need a ride?” I mean come on, what does Cantor Weisser have to lose? He figures he’s doomed anyway, because the same group of racists destroyed a Vietnamese community center, and the police weren’t much help with that one. But when Weisser finally meets (what he thinks is) this powerful, menacing monster of a Klansman, he’s in for a surprise. He know that Trapp is disabled and can’t see, but even worse, Trapp is not a hard-driven man with any resolve.  He’s just a lonely guy, hiding behind a large bear, dying of diabetes, and never recovered from an abusive childhood. They invite the guy over for dinner on Shabbat, and by Sunday he’s thrown his white hood in the trash.

    Back in the 1990’s, I watched documentaries about white supremacists, and they were all the same: disaffected young people, alienated from their parents, hopelessly drifting through life, and without adult guidance.  Then along comes a manipulative adult, flatters these kids with attention (or alcohol) and they’re now in his clutches. Trapp was an adult when he joined the Klan, but just like those poor kids, he fell into the web that his “benefactors” had spun. It was after Weisser treated him as an equal, and not a pawn, that Trapp would see that he was wrong (and had been wronged). It would not only be a time where he’d ask for forgiveness, but also find the strength to forgive his own father, who’d pretty much destroyed the family.

    Now let’s look at these two main characters; Larry Trapp is a working class Midwesterner, and Mordecai Weisser is a Jew from New York. You might think they have nothing in common, but they do. Both had troubled childhoods, both had lousy parents, and both did time in jail. Weisser had a non-typical childhood for a Jewish-American: raised in a broken home, in and out of youth reformatories, looking for acceptance with the wrong crowd. The difference is that Weisser discovered his Jewish roots and found a strong community to be part of. Trapp didn’t. So while Weisser found a happy career, Trapp drifted through life, escaping into the bottle. Weisser obviously senses what Trapp’s troubles really are. Perhaps his own rough childhood has gave him a kind of telepathy?

    Trapp was dead within a few months. In the years after this story took place, Weisser and his wife divorced, he took a post in New Zealand, returned to the USA and became the Rabbi of an old congregation in Flushing, Queens. The neighborhood had few Jews left when he arrived, not because of anti-Semitism, but because they simply got old. The area is now 90% Chinese and Korean, so the Synagogue is like a lone holdout. Things are not what they were in 1994, with fewer hate groups to join and former skinheads have left their past behind. Weisser’s congregation in Flushing had no conflict with the Asian community in any manner whatsoever. Why would they? The social dynamic is far different.  They’re like two ships passing in lanes half a mile apart, neither one’s interests conflicting with the other.

   I read a similar book, Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead by Frank Meink. The author was just like Larry Trapp; abused kid, horrible neighborhood, then the racists show up and give him something to belong to. He had no real beef with the blacks, and there were none where he lived. His problem was that he was a lost boy. Essentially, that’s what Trapp was, and the Weissers didn’t have to try that hard to bring him in from the cold. But Meink had to go to jail to see the error in his ways. All Weisser had to do to change Larry Trapp was to offer to meet him face to face.

   When my mother read this book, she wasn’t especially impressed. With a look of annoyance, she said “No wonder it got the Saint Christopher medal, this is the kind of book that Christians just love!” Now you must understand, my parents are part of a strict sect of Judaism, so there’s a lot they’ll expect of a book that has anything to do with Judaism. My mother may have thought that Cantor Weisser’s interest in Judaism was shallow: she expects a Jewish clergyman to be a bit more scholarly. But over the years, I’ve realized that it plays into a desire that people have, and that is to seek peace through mutual understanding and cooperation. Look at the current movement for Restorative Justice as an example, where people try to reduce crime by encouraging dialogue.  

    Back in 1999, a man named Buford Furrow shot and killed a bunch of people over their skin color. He was a failed engineer, and despite having no experience in military or law enforcement, was made a Lieutenant of security for the Aryan Nations. He was known to be proud of his rank, which outside of the racist gang meant nothing to anyone.  Fourteen years after shooting an immigrant mailman and several children, he admitted that he was wrong. It’s not unusual for young killers to say “we were bored” or for a terrorist to have been a beta male in life. That’s the essence here; bored, angry, hopeless, and wanting to feel stronger. It’s a bad combination. But thanks to some strong minded people, there is hope. Cantor Weisser believed in the Jewish ethic of forgiveness: first you learn why your actions were wrong, then you admit your wrongs, and finally, you consciously cease to transgress. By being the first to treat this Klansman as an equal, Weisser brought him to see the error in his ways and make amends for all his wrongs.

I wonder if lives would’ve been spared if Weisser had gotten to Buford Furrow.

Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing

    The big debate about today’s public housing is whether it’s a commodity or an entitlement, depending on whether the opinion is from the right or left wing of the debate. Th next issue, though not really a debate, is who’s responsible for the terrible condition of public housing. Municipal Dreams is all about Britain’s public housing (known as Council Flats or Council Estates) and whether it’s a model of progress or a model of what to avoid.

    John Boughton begins with the origins of British public housing and how it replaced the Dickens-era slums. Parliament passed a law in 1866 that allowed town councils to buy land and tear ir down for new housing (an early form of eminent domain) though there was no quality control. The author brings up a builder’s journal from 1869, which criticizes Liverpool’s St. Martin’s cottages for their terrible appearance. Though he doesn’t expressly mention it, finding any kind of financing for a building project would have been difficult in Victorian England; it seems unlikely that British banks were eager to lend money to builders, unlike the USA, where J.P. Morgan loved giving loans to big business. The next problem is that nobody wanted to go into property management. While the author cites some Victorian-era public housing that still stands, and built with good quality, they are few and far between. Where would a town council have gotten financing for a building project in the 1800’s? Did the council members want to get stuck being a landlord? Who would oversee collecting the rents and keeping track of repairs? It’s a problem that began the minute public housing began.

    Dullness and banality are another issue in the book, not as pressing as quality, but still a factor in the housing and its effect on the community. The author’s example is the Becontree Estate, where all the houses are identical, and that was a shock to the townspeople when it was constructed. They were used to the traditional asymmetrical British architecture, where each house was built according to the builder’s own plan. Then there’s the Honor Oak Estate, slightly less banal, and recently refurbished. I suspect that one of the issues here is the fact that the public housing was designed for multitudes, as opposed the one family. In earlier times, a wealthy man would hire a builder to design and build his house according to three things; the condition of his land, the needs of the homeowner, and how much money they could afford to spend. Any builder in this day and age will have to factor in the same three things, or it won’t work. But in the origins of public housing, the builders were constructing a whole block of houses at once, so there was no individuality to them. Then in contrast to what I mentioned before, the land wasn’t always the best available, so you had mold and damp. The residents had no say in the building process, and there wasn’t much oversight to the materials used.

    The next topic the author writes is how the public housing was badly needed in the first place. The old housing stock from earlier times was crumbling, and had terrible sanitation (and probably a firetrap too) so it made sense to get rid of it. Replacing the filthy housing could also prevent outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, dysentery, and others. After WWII, not only were the old houses crumbling, but a lot of them were bombed and burned. The city of Birmingham built the Castle Vale Estate, with low-rise blocks and a few tower blocks, and everything was great…until the shoddy construction began to fight back! First the pipes leaked, then the leaking pipes were not replaced, then the leaking pipes eroded the plaster, then the elevators broke down, windows got stuck, doors got stuck (or wouldn’t close at all) and doorknobs came loose. Then the stuck windows let cold air in, and the non-locking doors invited crime. It was the same problem that the Pruit-Igoe houses in St. Louis had. Public housing is clearly a problem for the same reasons, no matter where in the world you build it.

    Recently, I visited Liberty Plaza in Manhattan, and saw how it looked like a British council house. The building is a tower block, with a plaza in the center, some townhouse-style units, and a stairway entrance. There was no physical barrier to keep trespassers out of the plaza, but the stairway prevented impulsive entry. This is an example of designing a building for security, so that the residents will be safe without the building becoming a fortress. It was built with quality materials that lasted for years, and the property was maintained daily, with littler swept up and graffiti painted over. There was retail space on the ground level, generating revenue for upkeep.

   The author does the best research for this book. He covers housing estates all over Britain, and explores their political and economic origins, plus the type of construction used. After reading this book, the reader is left to question whether the problem was the land, and architecture, the lack of maintenance, the lack of funding for maintenance, or general neglect of the poor. He does not say whether the public housing estates effectively Gerrymandered the votes, nor does he say whether this was the design or a side effect. Maybe the reason includes all of the above?

How to Fight Anti-Semitism

   The author was inspired to write this book partly in response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting. It stung her for two reasons; it was the same place where she’d had her Bat Mitzva ceremony, and her previous congregation in Squirrel Hill burned down the previous year. She compares it to the attacks on Jews in France and blames that on the French government’s reaction. Either the French will deny that the Jews were the target, or they’ll claim that the Jewish community were partly responsible.

    Weiss goes into the history of antisemitism in the USA (or lack of it) which she attributes to the founding fathers’ dislike of old-world grievances. There wasn’t much in the way of Christian antisemitism in the USA in the early days, mainly because George Washington (and Ben Franklin, and John Hancock, and all the others present at the Declaration of Independence) rarely went to church, and they certainly weren’t going to take orders from the clergy. Though she doesn’t expressly say it, the businessmen who founded the USA were less interested in God and more interested in people who could pull their weight.

   Looking back on the documentary Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, I can see how the anti-Jewish sentiment lingers everywhere. Take the stereotypes as the prime clue to the puzzle; the Jew as the money-loving businessman, or the Jew as the money-hating communist. The image of the Jew is protean; it can be whatever evil you don’t like. Weiss also goes into how this is about religion more than ethnicity or color. She points out that the Hasids in Crown Heights were targeted for their distinctive clothing and beards, while at the same time a Jewish college student got an “eviction notice” from an anti-Zionist student group. The Jewish students had nothing to do with Zionism on campus, so why should they have to answer for what Israel does? The Black youth who targeted Hasids in Crown Heights didn’t target the Jews who didn’t have beards or black hats because they were harder to spot. Then there’s the Israeli family who dealt with rocket attacks in Sderot, a swastika on their garage door in California, and the Poway Chabad shooting. Each time they were attacked, it was because of their religion.

   I’ve had personal experience with inappropriate remarks over me being a Jew, but most pf them were based on idiocy rather than ideology. First there was the idiot coworker (behind on his child support, averse to having to work, and often in trouble with the law) who said “you’re the biggest Jew I ever saw” despite the fact that he probably knew none. Then there was moron coworker #2, who said all Jews were 90lb wimps with no dicks (lucky for him he never had to fight me). Finally there was the 16 year old high schooler; a Chinese-American kid, on probation for a crime committed at Brooklyn Tech, who drew a swastika to see how I would react. I declined to tell his probation officer about the incident, because I knew we’d get no results. The judge would’ve been angry at the boy, but who takes a moron seriously? All of the people who insulted me because of my religion were morons; lazy, unmotivated, stupid, and likely to screw up no matter wherever they went.

   Ban the Zionists, and that would include 80% of all Jews. If you ban Cubans for being anti-Castro, then you would have no Cubans in Miami. As for anti-Jewish attacks, are they really about a beef with Jewish people, or just plain old crime? The author devotes a chapter to anti-Jewish sentiment in Muslim countries, going back to the days of the Jizya. The author finds it surprising that there can be Jew-haters in the Middle East, when there are few Jews left in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria. So what was the Muslim world’s beef with their Jewish neighbors? First there was the notion that refusal to convert to Islam was a slight to the prophet, then there was the Jealousy over western aid, then it was about Israel. Nowadays the Jews are being spat on by Muslims in Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan, and Malmo, despite the fact that no European Muslim is suffering at the hands of Jew. When President Trump announced his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the city of Malmo was full of protest by Muslims. The famously rough Swedish city, home to scores of Muslim immigrants, is no stranger to trouble. But the protestors weren’t rallying against Trump, or the USA, or Israel; they were chanting “shoot the Jews” The mayor of Malmo didn’t help things by saying “we don’t accept Anti-Semitism and we don’t accept Zionism.” What does one have to do with the other? The tiny Jewish community in Sweden isn’t pushing Zionism, in fact there are probably fewer Swedish Jews pushing Zionism than Swedish gentiles pushing drugs.

   In the recent book Terror in France, written by French professor name Gilles Kepel, the problem of Muslim terrorism is blamed on the politicians; the right-wing use it to push tougher immigration standards, while the left-wing use it to accuse the authorities of racism. Weiss brings up the same argument in her book, and shows how the right and left groups in Europe’s legislatures use it to their own gains. In the end, however, it’s not the Jews who suffer, but the whole of Europe. The Jews will simply pack up and leave, taking their money, business, talents, and whatever contributions they make, leaving the rest of Europe to fend for itself. Meanwhile, racist politicians like Marine LePen have a bigger platform to bash immigration.

    Unfortunately, Weiss doesn’t give much of an idea of how to fight the problem of Anti-Semitism. From what I gather in her book, the problem is lax border control and weak law enforcement. I suspect that Britain and Europe have a separate code of conduct for different people, and it makes the authorities tolerate criminal behavior in the name of Islam. Donald Trump is also part of the problem, because his Anti-Muslim rhetoric puts the Jewish community in a tight spot. However, as long as the USA has only one set of laws, and the police enforce it, then you won’t have an entire neighborhood spitting on Jews in the street. In all of the recent attacks on Jews – the Poway shooting, Pittsburgh shooting, Monsey machete attack – the perpetrator was either a habitual offender, or a disaffected loner. The politics behind the attack? Chances are he uses the politics as an excuse, nothing more. In the Holocaust Museum shooting in 2000 (does anyone remember that one?) the killer was an elderly White supremacist, who according to his son, had pretty much ruined the family with his activities.

    Look at how Zionism exists in the USA versus Europe. We’ve had Rabbis attacked in Crown Heights, but the attackers are always criminals and they’re usually brought to justice. Then you have the Israel Parade in NYC, every year, and there’s rarely any trouble. Lots of non-Jews march in the parade, and no Muslim group ever attacked the marchers. Now compare it to the UK and France, where Muslim fanatics are known to attack people. The attacks in UK and France are often ideological, and the police are sometimes unsure of what to do. They seem to wonder if the attack is excusable based on the motivation, rather than relying on codified law. In New York City’s Israel Parade, you can wave the Israeli flag without fear, and we rarely see Palestinian rights groups protesting at the event. In fact the only time I ever saw violence at the Israel parade was a Jewish militant group harassing the Neturei Karta sect of Hasidism. Jewish kids run around the city’s parks every weekend without getting rocks thrown at their heads, and Muslim girls are not told to take off their headscarves at school.

Maybe the problem is not Anti-Semitism, but the condition of Europe?

The Bruce Lee Way

   I want to make it clear to you that I am not a Bruce Lee fan. I never liked his movies (or any other Hong Kong action movie for that matter) with their elaborately choreographed fight scenes, silly sound effects, wooden sets, and predictable plots. What impresses me is the amazing physical talent that he had, which other martial artists have rarely been able to duplicate. Aside from his talents, he has an important place in history; he was probably the first Chinese instructor to make Kung Fu available to Americans.

This book draws from Lee’s own writings, along with secondhand accounts and expert theories. First comes his weight training regimen, for which he kept a detailed journal. He carefully charted his weight training exercises, which may have been a sign of obsessive behavior. The author believes that Lee’s entry into California sparked his interest in weight training, because California (especially LA) has a culture of fitness and health food going back to the 1920’s. This weight training regimen was alternated, with cardio on one day and weights on the next day. Lee wrote that he found it monotonous, but it was the routine that guaranteed results. We see in this book some photos of his journals, written in perfect cursive; no small asset in terms of mindfulness.

Bruce Lee was a philosopher as well as a martial artist. He incorporated a huge amount of scholarship into his work, and not just the Confucius or Sun Tzu volumes that were available at the local public library. In the chapter titled Making Your Own Path, he incorporated multiple fighting styles, comparing US and European boxing, along with Indian Yoga. The use of only one fighting discipline was, in his eyes, to constricting, and he regarded the style fusion the way he did with philosophy, always learning new things. There’s a humorous letter where Lee writes “if you think you’re beaten, you are.” I can see that this Kung Fu master had been reading the works of Kipling!

Despite his fame, Lee wasn’t into self-aggrandizement, basing his approach on Confucian ethics of personal humility. He gave lessons to anyone who was interested, and he put a huge amount of comedy into his movies. Take for example The Way of the Dragon, where his character keeps goofing up thanks to his ignorance of Italian and even worse ignorance of Italian social norms. Every joke is on him, and he put pauses in between the dialogue to give the audience time to laugh.

There is another aspect of Lee’s work that the author doesn’t expressly say, and that is the equality between races. In the early 1960’s, there were a sizable number of Chinese instructors who would not take non-Chinese students, especially Black American, but Lee set no bar for race or color. His was a strict meritocracy, and if you could prove yourself, you went straight to the top. One possibility is that he learned lessons from being a minority, or maybe his attitude of inclusion was a rejection of constraint? As a rebellious youth in Hong Kong, he would have been eager to break out of constraint, and the West Coast, where he migrated, has always been a hotbed of holistic living. Away from the strict patriarchal ways of his homeland, he would’ve had fewer examples to follow.

Bruce Lee’s life has many elements worth studying. He was born on an Island that was 99% Chinese, owned by Britain, and flooded with craftsmen and businessmen after 1948. He was a skilled dancer, which may have aided his martial arts ability, and he had a great sense for business when it came to using his skills. It’s said that on his way to California, he made money giving Cha-Cha lessons to wealthy passengers in first-class, so he would have something to fall back on when he arrived. He would’ve taken flak from Kung Fu traditionalists, who weren’t keen on teaching outsiders, but at the same time, what were the traditionalists doing for him? He was on his own in California, with no family for support. It is unfortunate that his life ended at age 33, just as he was making his biggest appeal to American audiences. He broke stereotypes with his role of Kato in the Green Hornet, pushing his way out of the submissive Asian servant boy and forcing audiences to put up with his ass-kicking chauffeur.

If only Bruce Lee had lived long enough to write a Bill Bryson style comparison of Chinese and American habits.

All Souls: A family Story From Southie

   In 2000, when this book was getting rave reviews in the papers, I couldn’t believe any of it. First off, I’d never heard of Irish-Americans living in urban housing projects, so that was a bit of a shock. Secondly, I had a hard time believing that anybody could feel any affection for a horrible neighborhood. I wondered why the author’s community was full of single welfare mothers, when birth control was available. Why were they all on welfare, when Boston had jobs? Why would they choose to stay in a high-crime area? Had they never heard of white privilege? The reason I couldn’t believe the story is that I had only been to Boston once, and I’d never seen the Old Colony housing projects. When I asked my friends from Boston about it, they said they’d never seen it, but they knew it was there. This is precisely the issue explored in the book; South Boston’s public housing was not a secret, but if you didn’t live there, you didn’t go there. As for the residents, they distrusted everyone.

   The story begins in the early 1970’s, when the author was six years old and the youngest of eight children (more would follow later.) The family, headed by their matriarch Helen MacDonald, faced two major catastrophes at the time; inside the apartment, the oldest son had a mental breakdown, and out in the street, there were the anti-busing riots. The author attributes his brother’s mental deterioration to a horrible childhood; taking most of the father’s beatings, finding his baby brother dead in the crib, and though the author doesn’t say it, the mother’s behavior may have been part of the problem. Couple that with living in a hopeless neighborhood, where fighting is the norm, and it all adds up.

   As I mentioned in the beginning, I couldn’t believe any of it at first, which I attribute to my own ignorance. Though I’d been studying US history for years by the time I read this book, I knew nothing of the Boston Busing riots (it wasn’t covered in most college history books.) The problem with Boston is that the busing riots were a major issue in the history of civil rights, but they came at a time when the movement was splintering. The actual idea of exchanging poor black and white Boston students wasn’t even the work of Dr. King or Jesse Jackson, but white ivory-tower liberals like Ted Kennedy. It wasn’t fair on any level, especially since Ted Kennedy’s kids went to private school. All over South Boston you had the graffiti “bus Ted’s kids” while nothing good came out of desegregational school busing. The black schools in Roxbury and the white schools in Dorchester were still lousy. Did any of the liberals think that maybe the parents, regardless of their color, didn’t want this? Did they ask if the kids wanted this? It doesn’t seem as though the liberal establishment cared about the freedom of choice.

    MacDonald recounts his view of the busing riots, and his siblings’ own violent role. The protests had taken on an extreme racist tone, the likes of which you weren’t even seeing in the Deep South anymore. There is an earlier book of photos by Eugene Richards, titled Dorchester Days, with good clear photos of these events. White youth march with racist banners, smiling red-haired teens wear KKK placards, and who could forget the infamous photo “The Soiling of Old Glory” among the images of the events. One thing that the author of All Souls doesn’t mention, though he implies, is the neglect of education in the South Boston area. Reading this book, and seeing the photos by Eugene Richards, I have to wonder if any of these kids cared enough about their schooling to want to protest. How many of them would simply drop out regardless? How many of them ever put in a full day at school?

    Shortly after this book came out, I went to hear the author speak. He explained that in his opinion, South Boston could’ve been a very functional working-class community, if not for all the things that worked against it. The first problem was that the people in Southie didn’t trust the police, nor the media. Secondly, the politicians were a problem; the leftists used them as a racist scapegoat, and the right wing exploited their clannish anti-liberal mentality. The irony is that the conservatives, whom the residents usually voted for, were anti-welfare, but almost all the people in the projects were on welfare.  The next irony is that the right wing was tough on drug crime, but Southie had a huge drug problem. The mothers would say they were against free sex, but not one of the households had the father present, and despite the mothers being fervently Catholic, most of their kids were born out of wedlock. The clannish, anti-outsider mentality allowed criminals like Whitey Bulger to exploit the people; he extorted local businesses, scared outsiders from doing business in the neighborhood, and sold the drugs that were killing the kids.

    Over the years, Amazon reviews have been mixed. Some say the author’s neighborhood was the problem, other say that the family had problems long before they showed up. The mother, perpetually hooking up with bad men, comes off as incompetent, despite the author claiming otherwise. She marries an abusive man, has one child after another, fails to protect the children from him, then he leaves, and she shacks up with another irresponsible man, has two kids with him (one of whom dies in infancy) and then ten years later she does it again. MacDonald recounts an incident where they go to his grandmother’s funeral, and his grandfather yells at them to leave, not wanting bastard children in his home. Is the grandfather being horrible, or is he just fed up with his irresponsible daughter? The grandparents lived in a better part of the town, so I have to wonder if this story is an example of downward mobility?

    Several of the MacDonald kids ended up dead, from illness, crime, or suicide. The oldest spends his teen years in mental hospitals, then jumps off the roof, and one of his sisters does the same thing while high on drugs and ends up brain damaged. Some of them do, however, get out of Southie and have normal lives; one becomes a nurse, one goes to Tuft’s University and joins the navy, and the author eventually gets a job, yet he stays in the neighborhood. His mother moves to Colorado in the early 1990’s and tries to have a normal life, but I can’t get over the way she neglects her kids. Why did she need to keep shacking up with irresponsible men? She goes to college, but she never tries to use her education to get anything better in life. In the part of the book that looked like a real window of hope, she’s befriended by an African-American librarian, who says to her “I got my high school diploma and got off welfare.” The author, a small child at this point, says that he was always trying to impress this woman, and I can see how that makes sense; the women in his neighborhood were all nasty and disgusting, some of them would walk around without wearing menstrual pads, others were always yelling expletives at their kids. This librarian was probably the only woman he knew who wasn’t a filthy skank.

    In some ways, this book shows us how the Civil Rights Movement went off the rails after Dr. King’s murder. It was Dr. King’s intention for children of both colors to attend the same schools, not for them to exchange schools! Somehow, I bet the people in Boston were crying out “why is it only Boston that has to do this, and not New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles?!?” The busing didn’t benefit anyone economically either, because it was basically two poor districts exchanging kids. The poor Blacks of Roxbury and the poor Whites in Dorchester could’ve united to effect change, but that wouldn’t happen, thanks to their attitudes, and the politicians too. At his book talk back in 2000, the author said that a better solution would’ve been to bus both colors to a school on neutral territory.

    Most of the antiquated and crumbling South Boston housing projects are gone now, replaced by mixed-income housing, more in line with Boston’s traditional architecture. The remaining projects are racially integrated, because the authorities got smart and stopped letting applicants be choosy about race. The author’s siblings are now scattered across the country, and the area he grew up in is heavily gentrified.

    The book could use a few additions, however. Some maps would be in order because the location of the Old Colony projects played a major part in how they ended up, along with some better photos of the area, and a timeline. It is one of the many books on poverty, but one of the few that are still in print and being widely read, along with Nickel and Dimed , and the recent Hillbilly Elegy. The difference between All Souls and Hillbilly Elegy is that MacDonald’s family were second or third generation Americans, while J.D. Vance’s family had been living in Kentucky for over a century. While the MacDonald family was downwardly mobile, Vance’s family had always been that way; the poverty was generational.