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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Creative Destruction of New York City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration

   Berman and Alder compare the US incarceration policies unfavorably to those of Asia and Europe. According to their sources (mostly from policy institutes) there are 3000 prisoners in Norway’s prisons and 50,000 detainees in the LA County Jail. There are obvious reasons; Norway has no teen pregnancies and they never had a crack epidemic. On the flip side, my research shows that there are a lot of Norwegians who should be in prison, but thanks to Norway’s liberal pacifism, they aren’t.

   The authors provide examples of programs that can keep people out of jail, while at the same time reducing the crime that sends them there. For starters, there’s Brownsville, Brooklyn, an area that deserves its terrible reputation, where the programs are seeking to change the local norms. Efforts are made to discourage the cult of easily avenged honor and violent revenge, which was the subject of the 1995 book All God’s Children. Do young people know that shooting someone over an insult is not allowed? Do they understand that they’re setting themselves up for 15 years in prison if they do it? Then there are nonprofit organizations like Harlem Children’s Zone, which tries to keep kids off the streets (at least until they’re 18) by providing activities. It has a program called The Baby College, which teaches parenting skills as a way to discourage neglect and child abuse.

    One of the problems with poor communities (not just Black areas of Brooklyn, but also White ones like Southie) is that the parents handle meagre annoyances with mean looks, yells, and smacks. Those that read the recent memoir Hillbilly Elegy will see how the idea of “parenting through intimidation” is a problem in Appalachia, and it teaches children to handle everything through aggression. While spanking kids may have been the norm in the old days, most experts now agree that it only teaches “might makes right” and leads to kids handling problems the same way. I’ve had Black kids ask me why the White parents work so hard to discipline their kids (talking to them, time-outs, withholding privileges) while Black parents just slap the kid. My response is always “What are you going to do when the kid is too big to slap? What are you going to do if he’s bigger than the parent and slaps back?” These are the problems that Harlem Children’s Zone (among others) tries to address. They form a “bottoms-up” effort that focuses on the children, because they are the most susceptible to influences.

    Money is another problem in reducing mass incarceration. If a stupid kid punches a store clerk and gets a $250 fine and probation, what happens if the parent has no money? What happens f the kid lives in a foster home and nobody supervises him? He’ll start a long cycle of jail, and learn none of the life skills he needs for independent living. Similar problems were discussed in another recent nonfiction book titled On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, where Philadelphia’s poor are constantly evading police, thanks to unpaid fines and open warrants.

    A recent documentary on Wyoming’s one and only men’s prison shows the connection between crime and local norms. Given the tiny population of Wyoming, it makes sense for them to have only one prison. Out of the prison’s entire population, there’s one Black American (how many Black Americans are there in Wyoming?) and a lot of Native Americans, and I wonder if, at an earlier time, their crimes might have been part of tribal warfare? One of the prisoners, a man with a distinct Native American accent, looks like he has FAS, which might explain his lack of self-control. If so, then the reservations might benefit from the type of social program mentioned in this book, at least if they want to discourage alcoholism. Then there’s the geography angle; as long as Wyoming remains way out west, I doubt things will get worse, because not a lot of people migrate there. However, the shale gas drilling business is increasing in the area, and if thousands of men migrate there for work, then there will be trouble. You’ll have all the problems of a town with a large ratio of men-to-women; drinking, prostitution, gambling, and crime. More arrests will follow, and that will mean another prison.

Inside Private Prisons by Lauren-Brooke Eisen

    I, personally, don’t like the idea of private prisons. I think they’re an excuse to pawn off government responsibility to people who aren’t qualified. They of the Brady Bunch episode where Bobby gets appointed (not elected) to be the school hall monitor and proceeds to play policeman. We had the same thing when I was in grade school, and it annoyed me silly for a whole bunch of reasons. First, I wasn’t going to take orders from a little kid, and second, why would the principal appoint a little kid to rat out other kids? Isn’t it the principal’s job to take care of discipline? I see a similar thing happen in a lot of wealthy families; the parents hire someone else to make their children behave, usually a nanny from Latin American or the West Indies. All over the USA, parents are subcontracting their duties to other people, and now the same thing is happening with government service. What happens if the government subcontracts law enforcement and prisons? Will it be effective, or will the lunatics run the asylum? Private prisons (henceforth referred to as PP) are increasing in the USA, and this book explores their use, importance, and their prospects for the future.

    In the book’s introduction, Reik Raemusch becomes head of corrections for the state of Colorado and tries out the solitary confinement cell. It’s horrible, he goes crazy after 23 hours, and he wants to end the practice. Next, the author cites experienced correction officers who dislike private prison, for reasons that include mass incarceration or the possibility of mass layoffs. Eastern State Penitentiary is also discussed here, because for many years the prison used solitude and prohibited speech. The program made the prisoners worse, with no chance of living a crime-free life on the outside. Then the War on Drugs tripled the number of prisoners, and the prison systems were on the lookout for a cheap solution (just like the parents looking for a quick fix.)

   Eisen points out some benefits to privatization, like the homeowner associations who take responsibility for their block, and that has benefits. Privatization happens in the legal profession too, where lawyers can hire a judge to settle the case quickly and split the fee. I’ve also seen Air National Guard bases that hire private security because there aren’t enough full-time personnel. In the business of logistics, you can use the USPS or pay for fast shipping with UPS, FedEx, or DHL. But what happens when the government hires a private company to manage a prison? It’s one thing to hire contractors to maintain police cars and handle the repairs, but here we’re talking about privatizing public safety.

    Several chapters of this book are devoted to the profit motive (known as the Prison Industrial Complex), where an entire town may depend on prison jobs. We have “prison products” like special pens that can’t be used to stab, or the toilets that don’t have seats, or showers that run on timers. One of the reasons for the huge profits in the PP is that they can hire the unqualified and pay them less (even felons). Phone companies can charge prisoners four times the usual rate, and PP can even charge visitors for the security checks, parking, and package screening. The prison commissary can charge huge markups for the junk food and toiletries, and since the prisoners can be paid less than minimum wage, local businesses can profit too. All the while, the correction officers in the private prisons make a crap wage. They can be recruited from all the applicants who were rejected by the state’s corrections department. More common in the Midwest, thanks to industry loss – also covered in this book – having a prison in the town means money;  jobs in corrections, more business for local food suppliers, visiting relatives staying at local motels, and you can charge them for parking. The future is bright for the operators; private prisons are now being used as immigrant detention centers.

    I expect private prisons to increase, unless state legislatures vote against them. Ever since the early 80’s, you’ve had industries shutting down and whole towns out of work. It’s hard to attract technology to your town when you lack skilled people, and prisons don’t require much in the way of skill. Training a correction officer is easier than training a police officer, and far easier than training a technician. As for the issues like fair wages, unionization, and civil rights, there are plenty of job-desperate red states whose politicians couldn’t care less.

Street Warrior: The True Story of the NYPD's Most Decorated Detective

   

Ralph Friedman holds the record number of combat awards for a NYC cop for two reasons; the South Bronx of the 1970’s was a war zone, and Friedman was nuts. During his wild career as an undercover drug cop he jumps across rooftops, jumps out windows, gets dragged by cars, and has daily gun battles with armed suspects. Starting his post-high-school life as a trucker and finding it boring (no argument there) he opts for the NYPD. Now before we go further, let me warn you (as all other cop memoirs will) that in the early 1970’s, nobody, absolutely nobody, wanted to be a NYC cop! The issue wasn’t the pay (schoolteachers didn’t make much either) or the hours (lots of jobs require night shifts) but the hazards. Cops were getting shot all the time, and the Black Liberation Army was using cops for target practice. Cars full of off-duty cops were following the radio cars, armed with semi-automatic rifles. For Friedman, the attraction was the fighting.

    Street Warrior gives an account of not only the violence of the NYPD in the Bronx, but also the way collars and booking were done. Cops who wanted to get into the detectives or get promoted needed lots of collars, and that could only be done according to convenience. Friedman had an advantage of working in the Bronx over Manhattan; there was less auto traffic and the courts were faster. You could grab a perp on the street, drive him back to the station in ten minutes, book him, be back out on the street in half an hour, and make more arrests. The next morning you drive to court, testify, and be back on the street by lunchtime and make more arrests. On the one occasion that he has to go to Manhattan’s courts, he gets stuck in traffic all day. He’s like “how the hell did the Manhattan cops make more than one collar a week, when the traffic took all day and the courts took all week?” He has a greater dislike for Manhattan traffic than he does for the injuries he gets.

    Unlike a lot of the self-serving cop memoirs, Friedman admits to failed cases, particularly one with the Fraunce’s Tavern bombing.  He gets a tip from a drug dealing informer about the bombers, but just as they’re about to go into a wedding venue to identify the suspect, the dealer brags that he has a gun. Goodbye to the whole operation, it now has to be called off! Friedman regrets it all to this day, it would’ve been the one chance that anyone had of catching the bombers.  

    It seems like it’s not that hard to become a detective when you work in narcotics. Most of Friedman’s work involves stalking around the neighborhood in scruffy clothes, with plenty of shooting and punching.  I imagine that being a homicide detective would involve a lot more patience; knocking on every door, checking dozens of numbers, spending cold nights in a car and watching for a suspect who might, just might, come out of a building. Those who read The French Connection know that the famous drug bust involved spending nights in hotel lobbies, fueled by coffee and dirty water hot dogs, waiting for the suspect to exit the hotel. One word – boring! But Friedman’s career is a lot more exciting and has a lot less of the waiting. In 1970’s South Bronx, you could find an armed thief every ten paces.

    Would I have wanted to be a cop in NYC in the 1970’s? The answer is yes! What other jobs were there anyway? My mother hated being a teacher in private Jewish schools (those people didn’t need any help) and wouldn’t dare teach in the public schools (might as well be a cop, no?) . Then there was my father’s career in Chase Manhattan Plaza, and I doubt he liked the long commute or the expensive suits he had to pay for (this was back in the day when the subway had no air conditioning.) If you’re a cop, you can wear what you like to work, get free parking space, change into your uniform when you get to work, and best of all, get an instant gun-carry license. The gun license was no small asset in 1970’s NYC.

    Friedman’s co-writer is Patrick Picarelli, the same writer who did Jimmy the Wags, another NYC cop memoir that I thoroughly enjoyed. The storytelling is straightforward, nobody tries to wax poetic or put on airs. But I won’t say that I like Ralph Friedman, and I won’t call him brave or tough. Anybody can shoot, kick, and punch, especially if they’re empowered to do it legally. Given, not everyone wants to risk getting shot but this guy wasn’t married and he had no kids, so it wasn’t like he had anything to worry about. I also doubt that anything the police did at the time made much of a difference, if the South Bronx was as hopeless as he portrays it. Still, it’s a fun read, and gives an uncompromising story of policing in the 1970’s.

Un-Standardizing Curriculum

    Un-Standardizing Curriculum was originally published 20 years ago, a time when some districts began a conflicting series of order to teach arts to the kids, while at the same time enforcing a fixed curriculum of math and English. Social studies, gym, and others would have to be worked in somehow. Both authors were classroom teachers, and both saw the results of saddling the teachers with an impossible curriculum; the students lose all motivation and classroom management becomes impossible.

    In the first chapter the authors discuss the benefits of a standardized curriculum and the need to include the students’ identities. Judith  Carmona says she was held back a grade when she immigrated to the USA (a standard practice for non-English-speaking students) and that none of the teachers spoke or understood Spanish. However, thanks to her own efforts, she eventually got into a humanities program for gifted students, where much of the learning was self-reflective. Christine Sleeter, however, had it a little better growing up; her father was a doctor, and her teachers encouraged the students to engage in greater discussions of what they read. Now here was have the gap in learning; for some students, what they learn at school means nothing at home, and it can be even harder to teach low-income students and/or minorities. I also have to wonder if the self-reflective seminar type of learning is any good students in Japan or China, where learning is often done by rote.

    In the second chapter, the authors discuss the teacher’s belief about knowledge and how that can either advance or hold back the learning. They give an example of a 4^th graders studying Native American mythology and customs (kind of like what I did in 4^th grade) which the teacher hopes will encourage balanced understanding. She will assume that the students will gain respect for Native American culture (and by culture, I mean the combination of religion, lore, language, and economy) and help end racist views. But is she glossing things? The students learn about the people, but what about the abuse they suffered? Do they learn how the Anglos slaughtered the buffalo as a means to control the Sioux and Blackfoot? Do they learn how the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Seminole were forcibly relocated? Do they learn why the towns of Nassau and Suffolk counties have Native American names, but the tribes are mysteriously no longer there? Do they learn how the tribes of the Northeast were all murdered? In the end, the teacher’s effort at cultural inclusion is more like “we’re so bloody nice because we learn about it,” yet the students don’t know how bad the tribes have it today.

    After reading this book, I have to wonder if the cultural biases can effect all subjects, not just English and social studies. Mathematics is all about numbers, not people, but what about the illustrations? If the math book for 3^rd graders uses photos of White children only, what does that tell the kids who are not? Will they get the message that they don’t count? If it uses the example of mom and dad + three children = five people in the family, what does that mean to a kid with only one parents? Even if you are racially inclusive, watch out for photos in the illustration. How many kids in the photos are overweight, have braces, crooked teeth, Down’s Syndrome, etc.