Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America

    This is not the first book that I’ve read about middle class debt in the last five years, and something tells me it won’t be the last. First there was Broke USA, then there was End of Suburbia, then Assault on the Middle Class, Opting for Elsewhere, American Way of Poverty, and now this. Right now, I expect nothing new, and as I read this book my suspicions of getting another “oh poor me, I borrowed five figures to pay for college and can’t pay it back” are being confirmed. Fortunately, the author writes about a problem not seen in the other books – pregnancy discrimination – that does in fact seem to be a recurring problem in the USA. The author uses two examples, in law firms and airlines, where women are losing their jobs. Even if the boss can’t fire you for taking time off, he can still eliminate your position and stick you with lousy clients (or demote you to the mail room.)  Either way, these jobs involve high pressure, and you don’t have the protections that teachers or civil servants have. Perhaps that’s why civil service jobs are so popular?

    The next example of “educated but can’t afford it” is a college professor in Chicago. She teaches English composition, makes 24k per year, has a disabled eight year old son, and raises him on her own with no help from his father. The professor has no student loan debt, so far so good, but she’s an idiot. She lived the hipster life, got pregnant at 28 by a 20-year-old punk rocker, and now she’s trapped. The author goes into detail about her struggle, but I couldn’t really feel any sympathy for her. Why doesn’t she go for a higher-paying teaching job in the Chicago public schools? What about the Chicago PD or the Cook County Sheriff Department? I suspect that either she wants an easy job, or she’s just not tough enough for others.

    The next example of the author’s is a Baruch College professor in NYC with a 74k salary and her husband, a church organist, makes 50k. They spend most of their money on daycare and are too wealthy for affordable housing.  Now here’s the problem; in both instances, they were warned against an academic career, which is poorly paid and with few benefits or protections. If the professor complains that daycare is too much, I bet she’ll complain about the cost of private school. Will she make her kid tough enough for public school? I bet there are people in Yonkers who send their kids to less-expensive private schools, but then they’d lose the thrill of living in Manhattan. Furthermore, why haven’t these people tried to join (or start) a food co-op?

    Okay, that’s it, I’ve had it. Opt for a cheap college so you won’t have student loan debt. Do a 2-year paralegal degree at a cheap community college, go to work at a law firm or a bank, and work your way up to a 4-year degree. Or you could do a degree in nursing, which is a lot cheaper and pays a lot more (with benefits, I add) but whoops, I forgot, nursing isn’t hip or cool. Maybe you could enlist in the military and get the GI Bill for college? Let’s say you got silly and got into student loan debt, you could always go into law enforcement for the high pay, and work off the loan. Or maybe you could skip college, find an electrician who will take you on as an apprentice, and work your way up?

    I’m sorry, this book is about people who waste time and money. They chase after the dream of a cool job, while ignoring the facts of life – rent, food, childcare, health – that can make or break you. I see so many blue-collar professionals who make it work, with few debts and stable families. How do they do it? There must be some way. Why not write a book about them? We’ll call it Debt Free: How Uneducated People Lead Uncool Lives and Achieve the American Dream.

Into the Wild

    This book is one that I read many years ago, and I place it in a category that I can “read for posterity.” It’s one of those few books that reach the bestseller list in the New York Times, then continues to be read for years afterward. You can go through the bestseller list from 25 years ago and find few that are still read, save for this book, along with A Walk in the Woods and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Maybe they appeal to a unique sense of adventure? Maybe they appeal to the ideal of finding self-respect by conquering the frontier, like in Call of the Wild? All three are about men (or in the latter, a dog) who do the things that most of us aren’t strong enough to try?

    John Krakauer pieces together the life of Chris McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp), from an unsatisfied teenager to continent-crossing vagabond. I say vagabond and not vagrant, because McCandless did in fact work his way across the country, finding employment in fast food, farms, and when there was no place to work, he foraged for food. He starts by giving away his trust fund, then abandons his old car in the desert, then makes his way to Nevada, the Salton Sea, down the Colorado River into Mexico, and eventually to Alaska.

   A recurring theme or event of Into the Wild is that of living off the land. McCandless carries a book on edible plants, though it may be out of date, and there is a lingering suspicion that it contributed to his death from starvation. When his body is found on the famous old bus in the woods, he’s emaciated and has zero fat on him, and to this day the scientists suspect he ate a wild tuber that blocked the absorption of fat. The author also concludes, tacitly, that McCandless wasn’t really ready for living alone in Alaska. He did just fine in the desert, but the people who knew McCandless, and filled the author in, all say he was unprepared; he had the wrong clothes, the wrong supplies, and was going in there without a weapon. The driver who brought him to the starting point forced him to take a free pair of boots and a rifle, but even that wasn’t enough. The caliber wasn’t much good for killing large elk, only small animals, and the food that he brought was barely adequate. Even the Indians of Alaska would never have ventured into the territory he was heading for. There was no reason for anyone to venture into the middle of nowhere.

    The story of Chris McCandless was first brought to light in Outside Magazine, and it’s just the kind of story that the readers would love.  The part where he acquires an old canoe, lazily floats down the Colorado River, and lives off the fish he catches, would seriously wet the reader’s appetite. But setting aside the adventure in the wild, I’m seeing a connection to another book (also in my “bestseller that’s still read after 15 years” catalogue) titled Nickel and Dimes. The well-known expose by Barbara Ehrenreich, about her adventure through the USA, has some similarities to Into the Wild. She doesn’t live off the land, but she does travel the country without a safety net, without connections, without a useable trade, knowing absolutely nobody, and surviving on her ability to survive, that’s t nothing more. In both books, the authors do not take charity, yet I have to wonder if the middle-aged Ehrenreich would have survived alone as McCandless did? Women have to contend with the danger of being raped, McCandless did not.

    John Krakauer’s books all seem to be about people getting swallowed up by the nature of the continent. I read his book Under the Banner of Heaven, and though it was anti-Mormon, it does show how remoteness can influence anything, even religion. I’m going to say that Into the Wild will become a classis, along with A Walk in the Woods, Born to Run, Nickel and Dimes, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, all of which take the reader into dangerous or exotic worlds. Is there something about the traveler that charms the American reader? Do we envy those that can function without a safety net? Back when I read George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, I saw it as much as an adventure as an expose; the author was living on his wits, with no safety net, but he was also living without any responsibilities.

   A recent book by Chris McCandless’ sister reveals what might have been the protagonist’s motivation. They were the product of an adulterous affair by their father, who was married to someone else when they were born. She describes their father as an abusive alcoholic, and how their mother’s spinelessness enabled him, forming a nasty undercurrent in their upper-middle-class suburban life. In all the photos she provides, Chris is the only one not smiling; on the contrary, his expression comes across as very hostile. She says that she wrote this book to provide a reason why her brother chose to vanish into the wilderness, which Krakauer’s book doesn’t really say. She also says that she told all this to Krakauer when he was writing his story, but that he agreed to leave it out. She just wasn’t ready at the time for the world to know.

The People are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore

    I see a recurring theme here when I read the chapter titled Canary in the Coal Mine, just like the book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, with a chapter titled Canary in the Auto Plant. In both books, you see how the liberals became disillusioned with Obama and the Democrats, while the working-class Whites were fed up with everything. In Iowa, which Obama won in 2008, you now saw “Hillary’s Bitch” bumper stickers. It was the state that Hillary lost twice, first in ’08 and again in ’16; she came off as cold, power-hungry, too close to Wall Street, and out of touch with the invisible Americans who don’t wear suits. Then again, was there any way she could’ve saved the Democrat Party? Could Bernie Sanders have done a better job?

    Sexton mixes the journalist’s objectivity with his own surprise at the change in American attitudes towards liberalism. However, he doesn’t lose his impartiality; he has great respect for the working-class barflies, the cracker-barrel philosophers, the less ambitious people in small towns. However, he doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for cranky baby-boomers who bitch in the bar. It seems to him, during his beer-fueled writing binges, that the 2016 campaign was a beer hall rally. First came the angry white men, then the Archie Bunker and Fred Flintstone types, raising their tallboys and drinking to the health of a macho-patriot. With the election of a great American loudmouth, we’ve degenerated into open racism and it gets worse.

    Sexton admits that he did a lot of the research in bars. He went in there to see and explore the world of the beer-loving unemployed conservative, then uses it as a vantage point. While Shattered explored how Hillary Clinton lost, this book ponders how Trump won. There’s an undercurrent of delusion among Trump’s supporters, clearly seen in any small town that went downhill during the Obama years; why do they believe that the president can somehow reopen a shuttered factory, when it can’t compete with foreign labor? There is also a difference in the attitude towards the President’s responsibility when you look at the two camps. On one side, too many liberals are asking for money while on the other side, the conservative voters just want their jobs back.

Maybe it’s like the Bob Dylan song, Only a Pawn in The Game? 

Just a Journalist by Linda Greenhouse

    Linda Greenhouse questions why the media have thrown neutrality to the wind. In the first decade of the New Millennium, the newspapers were careful not to outwardly criticize George W. Bush, but now they are openly lashing out at Trump. She recounts the time that she came out and said exactly wat she was thinking – that Hugh Carey was the greatest public servant, and that Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay violated the rule of law – and ignored everyone who might accuse her of bias. I say to myself, how can it be biased to state the facts?

    When it comes to the reporters airing the views, she uses the New York Times as an example. First, the Times didn’t mince words when it came to labelling Trumps views as lies. First there was the claim that Obama was born in Kenya, then the one about the illegal alien voters, and finally the Times reported on Trump (grudgingly) retracting his claims. Greenhouse quotes Thomas E. Patterson, a Harvard, accusing the press of deferring to those in power. I won’t say I agree, but a politician can always refuse interviews with the New York Times if they give him bad press. Then there’s the law that required abortion doctors to have hospital privileges, struck down by SCOTUS in 2006. The media were clear that the law had absolutely no use, and that it was nothing more than a backdoor restriction of abortion. Whatever the Texas politicians claimed, the press were not buying it.

     Greenhouse recounts other scandals – like Senator Thomas Dodd and his misuse of campaign money – where every reporter made it clear that they weren’t interested in the Senator’s explanation. Sure, they’d print it, but the readers could tell that the writers weren’t buying it. I also recount a few from my own memory, such as the 2003 Jayson Blair debacle, where the New York Times thrashed him in the Sunday edition (no neutrality there.)  Go back a few more years, and the newspaper attacked Governor Eddy Edwards of Louisiana for taking bribes. The press were not forgiving.

    There is, however, an instance of bias that many consider unbecoming of journalism, and that is the Duke Lacrosse Case. It was back in 2007 – let’s not forget it anytime soon – and the New York Times jumped on the bandwagon, publishing studies of out-of-control athletes and coaches who enable them. They had me convinced, I admit it, I was fooled, until the case unraveled. There was clear bias in the reporting, and I have to wonder if maybe that was the beginning of the end of neutrality?

On the God of the Christians by Remi Brague

   Remi Brague  makes no graven image in his treatise about God; on the contrary, he’s pretty clear that little can be known about a creator whom you cannot see. The first question is whether the Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same deity. He goes into this with the origins of what we call “monotheism,” which he also questions, since the term wasn’t used until the time of the Renaissance. The Muslims have a mantra that there is only one God and that God is one, so we can see a closeness to Christianity’s single deity. He also discusses the Xenophanes of the Greek world (around 600 BC) who opposed Hellenic paganism.

    Next comes the chapter To Know God, the author discusses whether God is a person or thing. If we were to see God as a thing, then we would not be able to attribute much in the way of accomplishment. Then there’s the issue of knowledge, which is something of a touchy subject in the Bible. On one hand, perhaps knowledge can deepen our understanding of the sacred, but at the same time there was suspicion about scientific knowledge. The Catholic clergy were wary of Galileo’s telescope, along with other scientific discoveries, and many wondered if it would lead the people astray. Keep in mind that in the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve run their carefree existence by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, but then again, is it better to be ignorant in luxury than knowledgeable in a world of work?

   “Is God the father?” wonders the author. On one hand, unlike Zeus, he doesn’t have a wife, yet he does have human attributes (as in the Book of Jeremiah, the sky is my seat and the earth is my footrest.) We say “the hand of God” or “wrong in the eyes of God,” so we can assume that God can have a body.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire

    New York City in the 70’s is always great to write about, but for years nobody cared to remember the era. Back in 1993 (20 years before this book came out) nobody really cared about the city’s rough decade, but that’s all changed since 2000. The 1970’s NYC has been the subject of books, documentaries, movies, fashion trends, and just about everything you can license for profit. So why do we have such a fascination with that decade? Perhaps it was because all the peace & love stuff of the 1960’s were over, and the nation’s confidence was scarred by Vietnam? Or was it the riots here at home? America in the 1970’s seemed to be in a kind of limbo, now that the Flower Power was finished. Jimi and Janice were dead, the Beatles had broken up, and whatever feeling we all got from Woodstock was ruined at Altamont. The feeling of the 70’s was rough, and who could illustrate it better than Bruce Springsteen, the great working-class balladeer! The author Will Hermes describes Springsteen’s first gig at Max’s Kansas City as a fish out of water; the torn jeans and stubble of the singer, versus a club full of Warhol superstars.  But then we get the surprise; the audience – transvestites included – loved Bruce Springsteen! They weren’t any flower children in that audience, but lots of flagrantly gay scenesters who were turned on by Springsteen’s proletarian roughness. The kind of bands that the Warhol crowd went to see weren’t the Crosby-Stills-Nash-Young types, with fringe jackets and love beads. They wanted edgy, transgressive artists like the cross-dressing New York Dolls, weird-sounding Lou Reed, and in this case, a messy-looking guy from New Jersey. It was a sleazefest they wanted, not protest songs. Springsteen’s rough look and rough subjects were perfect for the occasion.

   Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (long title, very punk rock of the author) doesn’t gloss anything, and why would it? Given that in the 1970’s, gloss couldn’t even stick, and if it did, then it would’ve been spray painted over and ended up looking like a subway car. One of the best parts is the chapter Invent Yourself, where Abe Beam (the mayor) says “I want to be the matchmaker that brings us together.” The author says “well mazel tov, sort of, the city was bankrupt and everybody knew it.” In strides Patti Smith, with her thrift store duds and unfeminine stick figure, who fit in perfectly. She certainly wasn’t a babe, and come to think of it, she looked like a vampire. Her boyfriend (if they were intimate, which I doubt) was an equally skinny artist named Robert Maplethorpe, who everyone must’ve known was gay. This was no hippy chick in a floor-length embroidered gypsy dress with a flower in her hair; nope, that was San Francisco shit, and this was 1973 New York City. Mayor Beam wanted to be a peacemaker, and it obviously didn’t work, because there was no way to bring peace. Everyone saw him as he was; a silly little accountant in a silly little suit, out of his depth, over his head, and with the rough look of the time, way more “out of his element” than Bruce Springsteen was in a club full of cross-dressers!

    There is one issue that the author doesn’t discuss, and one that I think had an effect on the development of the NYC art scene, and that issue is labor. The NYC mayors of the time – Lindsay, Beam, and Kotch – had a terrible relationship with the transit workers, police, firemen, sanitation workers, and just about all the other city employees. It really made the city’s progress slower, and that made the city less enticing for developers. If it hadn’t been for all the strikes going on, the city’s progress would’ve been stunted, and developers would’ve gone after all those run-down neighborhoods. I also suspect that the city’s bohemian life had to do with the civil service as well; with all the hiring freezes, there were fewer full-time jobs, so that left plenty of time for everyone to be silly. The jobs that the artists and musicians took – restaurants, bookstores, record stores – didn’t mind the employees having long hair and drug addiction. If the Ramones all found full-time well-paid jobs in a unionized outfit, they probably would’ve given up their music.

   I’d better remind everyone here, 90% of the characters in this story weren’t even from New York City. Patti Smith was from New Jersey, Iggy Pop was from Detroit, Lou Reed was from Nassau County, the Ramones were from Queens, Warhol was from Pittsburg, etc. Manhattan always attracts outsiders from all over the USA (E.B. White said the same thing in his essay Here Is New York.) Perhaps that’s why the “noo-yawk” accent has vanished, except in Staten Island. But after their careers were established, a lot of these people left the city. Patti Smith moved to Michigan, several Warhol superstars went to other cities (Billy Name went upstate, Viva got kicked out of the Chelsea Hotel and moved to LA), and countless artists and musicians moved elsewhere. Manhattan, bankrupt and derelict, was perfect for men and women who didn’t mind it rough, but it wasn’t a place to raise kids. The schools were crap, the food was lousy, and when you want to have a family, safety becomes paramount.

   

    Those of you who watched the documentary NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell know that NYC in the 70’s wasn’t a place to raise kids or find happiness, but you could move here to drop out and enjoy free love. It was for people who liked it rough and messy, and if it weren’t crime-ridden, it would’ve taken New Orleans’ place as “the city that care forgot.” Punk rock, hip-hop, Latin pop, it could only happen in the most non-judgmental city in America, where high fashion meant dirty clothes, and torn jeans couldn’t keep you down. If transvestites could be accepted, then who wouldn’t be?

No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court

California’s juvenile justice system was a mess in 1996, and I don’t know exactly how much has changed in the last 22 years. I know that teenagers, at least for the type of crimes committed in this book, are tried as adults nowadays. Regardless of whether they end up in the Juvenile Courts or regular courts, there’s no guarantee of a competent lawyer, and there’s always the question of whether to keep them confined or release them to their families pending trial. Then there are the kids whom you just can’t reach.

One of the cases involves two boys robbing a man at gunpoint, they goof up, they drop the wallet they tried to steal, nobody gets hurt. Now let us look at the back story; the kid is Korean-American, with upper middle-class parents, and he wants for nothing so far so good. The problem is that two local high schools merged, and he ended up in a school with stupid kids, and he’s a bit of a follower. You’re probably thinking what I’m thinking, the parents should’ve been more alert to what was going on, but we can see that they weren’t. The parents worked long hours, so they were probably too tired to ask their kids what was going on at school, and then there was the language barrier, and then there was the culture gap. In some countries, there aren’t any minorities or a criminal underclass, so the parents are completely alien to the issue of “bad influences.”

There are some kids profiled in this book who really are criminals and really do deserve jail time. Take for instance, the boy who repeatedly punches women in the street and snatches their purses. Every time he offends, the juvenile courts let him right back out again. Is he learning that he can get away with these crimes? Is the constant leniency setting the wrong precedent? The biggest problem is that once he gets to the age where he’ll be tried as an adult, he’ll have ten strikes on his record. If he beats someone up at age 18, the judge will say “you’ve been doing this for years, so I’m throwing the book.” The juvenile courts are doing kids no favors be letting them out again and again.

I appreciate the author’s impartiality toward race. There are stories about Black, White, Asian, and Hispanic kids, one of them is an adolescent surfer who refuses to listen to his father. I could relate to the part where the surfer kid calmly says to his father “for the last time, shut up.” I’ve seen that a million times, the parents are mad at the kid, and the kid stands there looking annoyed. Parental neglect (or parental spinelessness) is a running theme in this book, and I wish the author had included what the judges have to say about it. The book centers around California’s juvenile court system, but the same in this book were happening in New York back in 1996. I read Judge Judy’s 1995 book Don’t Pee On My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining, where she details her years on the family court. It was the same thing in New York City; the kid commits a crime and gets a break, then he reoffends and gets the maximum.

Remember the scene from the documentary Scared Straight, where the convict compares the juvenile offenders to a dog pissing on the carpet? He says, “every time you go before that judge, you’re pissing on his carpet, and after a while he doesn’t know what to do with you anymore.” That’s exactly what happens to these young offenders when they’re old enough for prison. Even if the judge lets it slide, the offense is still on the record, and it’s going to add up when they offend as adult. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to give a kid a break.