Second Acts In American Lives: Past is Prologue Dept.

There are no second acts in American lives.

                 --F. Scott Fitzgerald


F. Scott said a lot of silly things, but some of them have had more traction than others, if only because they seem so outlandish;  they provoke discussion--people start citing examples from Mark Sanford to Teddy Roosevelt to Muhammad Ali. 

Part of the allure of this idea, apart from its apparent obvious fallacy, is the idea Fitzgerald may have, in some psychological way, been on to something.  The last line of his most famous book is about the inescapable hold the past has over the self--the image of boats born back ceaselessly against the current, into the past, the gravitation pull of the past which sucks even Gatsby, who has been so wildly successful in American terms of money and fame and power, but who cannot escape his own sense of inferiority and defeat,  because he once was poor and because he was poor he was unworthy and not able to win the love of his life.

Of course, this problem was one which afflicted Fitzgerald, the arrested development thing. He could not get past his own past, and it tied him to Zelda and doomed him to defeat and disappointment. He was not one who could escape the surly bonds of Freudian gravity and soar above, to new and better places.

The Phantom considers the trajectories of two men he knew when they were children. Their stories are still unfolding, but they appear to offer examples of individuals who got past their childhood deprivations and on to better places.

Jamel Mims, who grew up in the dangerous Anacostia section of Washington, DC, who was selected for a place in the private Sidwell Friends School, graduated and went on to another school which one would think would make him a brother from another planet, Boston College, and from there to New York City.  He came to public attention when he was arrested protesting Stop and Frisk, the practice of New York City police to harass, stop and search anyone they damn well please. In New York, police can just throw people up against a wall for walking while Black or walking while Hispanic and claim this blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment and of all that America should hold sacred is the vehicle which has accounted for the decline of crime in New York City.

Of course, crime has declined in other cities where police have not created a police state of random and arbitrary terror--well, not really random since there is a pattern of racial profiling. Steve Levitt, author of Freakonomics, has suggested the real reason for the decline in ghetto violence since the 1990's is there are fewer young men who were born to teen aged mothers on welfare, unwanted babies, because of the Supreme Court ruling, Roe v Wade in 1973.  The argument, not entirely convincing, is  young men are responsible for most the the rape and robbery and murder,  and eliminating the most uncontrolled young men, the motherless sons, has had an unanticipated social benefit. Who knows? Hard to prove. But at least it raises the possibility lower crime rates may be multi-factorial and not attributable to one practice, as the police have claimed.

While at Sidwell, Mims was on the wrestling team. Another Sidwell wrestler was Zac Bookman, whose homelife was something of a cross between Dickens Oliver Twist, and The Children of Sylvia Plath. Had Zac grown up to be a shooter who mowed down children on a playground, the adults in his village of  Cabin John, Maryland, would have shaken their heads and said, "Well, you could see that coming."  

But Bookman went in exactly the opposite direction, graduated first in his class from the University of Maryland (where there were thousands behind him) went on to Yale Law and Harvard Kennedy school of government and then on to a law practice in Silicon Valley, where he is not only rich, but respected, and may be one of those forces in a culture which cares nothing for the general welfare,who pushes that culture away from self absorption,  a man who pushes the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to think about the welfare of the country which spawned them.

Psychological biography is fraught with speculation and little data, but it is intriguing both of these men were attracted to, and successful in a sport which throws boys into the most intensive confrontation, where there are no team mates to save them, and where conflict is face to face, intimate, unavoidable and ruthless.  Anger is as pervasive in wrestling as it is in the Iliad, and it is important for boys to learn to channel that anger into meaningful and efficient action, or they are lost.

Whatever it was which saved these two boys and sent them on the path to manhood-- and it was likely multi-factorial-- they both managed to arrive at a place which would surely astonish the adults who knew them when.

As far as the Phantom can tell, there is no systematic review by institutions like Sidwel Friends School, not to mention Yale Law or Boston College, to look back into the past, to follow those boats.  

Too bad:  we might all learn something.