And Alabama In Between

One of the few pleasures of aging is the capacity to see things from the eagle's eye view, to see one's place in a landscape rather than seeing the world from the worm's eye view.

So, when the Phantom recently learned about the policy of the United States government which financed massive suburban home building following World War II, but forbade home builders from selling these new homes to people of color, or "Negroes" as they were then called, it was an "Aha!" moment. 

There is a mordant joke about Pennsylvania, but it has been applied to all states, that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with Alabama in between. Of course, the same can be said of Texas (Austin/Dallas/Houston) and even New Hampshire (Manchester/Portsmouth/Durham). 

It is, as the Joker famously said, in "Full Metal Jacket" the "Jungian thing" thing. When an officious colonel rebukes the Joker for wearing a peace button on his helmet next to a phrase "Born to Kill" the Joker says it's about being able to hold two opposite thoughts together in (or, in this case on) the same head.

And so it is with America, two different beliefs: tolerance and intolerance, welcoming even celebrating differences and hybridization existing next to rejection of the other tribe, horror at "bastardization."

When the Phantom moved from Virginia into the newly built Maryland housing development he discovered some odd, at that time unfathomable, facts. His neighborhood was built by two Jewish brothers, engineers, who came back from the war, went to college on the GI bill, and set out to replicate what was going on in Levittown and all over the country, building new suburban houses for returning veterans who could buy them with low interest GI bill loans. He discovered that about 1/3 of his neighbors were Jewish, which was pretty striking because in his Virginia garden apartment complex, there were only two Jewish families among the hundreds.

When the Phantom went to the public junior high school, he made friends with schoolmates who lived in neighborhoods with lovely, Ozzie and Harriet names like "Woodacres" and "Springfield" and "Kenwood," and he noted they were blond, wore gold crosses around their necks and had names which his parents told him were of English and Scandinavian origin. The public school, drawing from these neighborhoods had almost no Blacks and the only Jews came from his neighborhood and one other.

This was what "redlining" accomplished: neighborhoods in which the invisible hand of government segregated out different "tribes,"  by virtue of financing structures you could not see driving around. Certainly, no 9 year old kid could see that. And most of the parents who bought those homes probably were unaware. The whole process was opaque. You looked at a house. You could afford it. The government gave you the mortgage guarantee. The government gave the builder his money.  There were no "whites only" signs hung out, no signs which said, "Jews live here." So the federal government did that with its home loan racially discriminatory policies, and locally the discrimination got down to finer points among different types of whites. 

But there was the other force--public education, which mixed some of the tribes--Catholics, Prostestants, Jews--but not all the tribes. No Negroes. Well, almost no Negroes. In a class of 500, there were maybe 15 Negroes. 

In school it was tough to keep Jews and Protestants and Catholics apart, to the consternation of some, to the delight of others, and dating patterns turned into marriages among the tribes. 

But of course, none of this was publicly stated.

Alex Ross, writing in this week's New Yorker about Hitler and the Nazis and the inspiration Hitler drew from America, notes 
"The entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism." 
And speaking of the American rejection of a ship loaded with Jewish refugees, who were returned to Europe to die in concentration camps:
"The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it 'astounding' that other countries would decry Germany's treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them." 

The thrust of the whole long article is that America was every bit as racist as the Third Reich it fought, but it simply refused to publicly embrace its own racism, or its past which included genocide against Indians and Negro slavery. Jim Crow laws prevailed in the South, but people in the North remained mostly unaware of them. 

America achieved "the Jungian thing" living with two contradictory ideas in the same mind, freedom/inclusion/unity set against Jim Crow/segregation/tribalism.

There is a man who drives a pick up truck through Hampton some days. He probably lives in Hampton or possibly Exeter. Two large flags fly from poles affixed to the flat bed behind him: An American flag and a Confederate flag. The flag of Union. The flag of disunion.

Hitler was an artist and personally designed the Nazi flag, going through many designs before settling on a flag with immediate emotional impact. It's a brilliant flag, really. Only the French tricolor is more brilliant.

And what are flags? Symbols and expression of tribe.  
The Phantom loved flags. They are art. 

His wife hates flags. Refuses to allow a flag to be displayed. 
The Phantom hangs his flags in his garage, which his wife considers his man cave. If he wants to hang Playboy pin ups, maps, Batman posters in his garage, even flags, that's his business. 
But no flags on the porch or the tree.
A neighbor hangs an American flag outside. 
"An American Nazi," she says. "Different flag, same idea."

Qualificatioins

What are the qualifications for a job running a government agency with a billion dollar budget and 350,000 employees?

If you ran a company with half a billion dollar budget and 20,000 employees would that give you the "management skills" to run the bigger agency?

What exactly are management skills?

Is this actually America?

People working on the line making airplane engines or in hospital emergency rooms often say to each other, "Who are the morons running this shop?" They can often see mismanagement and know how to fix it but they aren't "qualified."

My brother-in-law worked making airplane engines for 30 years, and along the way people along the line kept coming to him for advice about how to get things done more efficiently. Ultimately, the higher ups called him in and talked to him about becoming part of management. 

But there was one problem. He never finished college. Left without a degree. Can't be management at GE without a BA. Go back to school, night school, correspondence school, anything, just finesse the degree in anything, basket weaving, so we can bring you  up to management.

Looks qualified to me. Look at that great uniform!

He was very properly insulted. 

"Hey, if I'm not good enough to be a manager without that parchment, then I won't be any better with it.  I'm okay with where I am. You can keep your management job."

Eventually, they gave in and just installed him in management, where he made his factory one of the most productive in the country.

When Trump acolytes disparage the "elites" they are thinking of stories like that. In the eyes of the line workers, the managers who have the college degrees, the "qualifications" are illegitimate, just bastards intent on keeping the big jobs and high salaries for the guys in their club.

So when the White House guy defended Dr. Jackson, the White House Physician, who Trump appointed head of the VA because Jackson was effusive at the press conference where he said Mr. Trump was so healthy he'd live to be 200 if he ate right, it made sense to the Trump crowd. 
Oh, but he has no CEO experience. 

"So what?" The VA's been a mess for decades and it's been run by "qualified" men with lots of experience and degrees. Who is ever qualified to run an operation that big?  Fact is, CEO jobs are easier than the jobs in the trenches.

Reminds me of the conversation I had with a high end Washington lawyer after Larry Summers got fired as president of Harvard. "Too bad," this lawyer said, "He had such a confluence of talents and skill sets."
"Rubbish," I told him. "Being President of Harvard is the easiest job I can think of. Just keep your mouth shut and let the money flow in. His problem was he couldn't keep his mouth shut. He didn't want the job enough."
The lawyer looked like I'd slapped him in the face. Then he smiled weakly and said, "You know, you might have something there."

A Reason to Watch Twitter

Here is something I would not have believed had I not seen it.
And it was on Twitter.
I'm still not sure I believe it.

This, I am told, is an actual bat. 
Those are two bananas in his mouth.

Planet Earth. 

American Vandal: American Classic

The first season of "American Vandal" was so exquisite and so complete, I was disappointed to learn there would be a second.

The eight episodes were just right.

It is difficult to describe what makes this show so rich, but the essential point, whatever you think it is as you begin watching it and as you continue to watch it, it is not; it is more; it is less; it is something else.

At first, it looks and feels like a very canny satire of that new genre of documentaries which seek to investigate the official investigation of a crime: "The Making of a Murderer" or the "Serial" in which the obvious suspect is apparently railroaded into conviction, although it is not certain he was in fact NOT the actual perpetrator. 

There are details of technique which mark the show as this genre--portraits of an empty room after the main actors have left, hand held cameras and most of all the faces and bodies of the people on screen look so ordinary, not at all Hollywood hair or skin or teeth.

But as the story develops, you are drawn into an American high school, which makes the school in "Rita" look benign.  Shades of that old series, "OC" emerge. These high school kids live in some coast community which is clearly affluent, and soaring palm trees dot the background, along with occasional far off vistas of mountain ranges. And yet, they are impoverished emotionally and intellectually. 

The party scenes look like  they are drawn from a Terry Rodgers tableau: wealthy, hollow people making a show of enjoying themselves in a circle of Hell.

Then there is the offhand sexuality of these teenagers. One of the girls, hearing that the popular phys ed teacher had had an affair with the mother of one of her classmates, casually remarks, "Oh, I'd do him." Amidst the tabloid headlines which explode every time an adult teacher is revealed to have engaged in sex with some innocent student, you realize these kids are not so innocent. The girls, who are typically more developed and more sophisticated than the boys their own age, are having sex with twenty and thirty year old men whenever they fancy it.

The two students pursuing the truth are revealed to have their own reasons for their tenacity, and they have to face their own ethical lapses as they gain celebrity from their project and they have to ask themselves who they would be willing to hurt to pursue the truth: Who painted phallic images on the cars in the teachers' parking lot?

Of course, this goes to the very issue Joan Didion raised 50 years ago, "As a writer, you are always selling someone out."  The moral superiority of the "investigative reporter" is, of course, a lie. The reporter is getting rewarded for the story. As Jimmy McNulty remarks when a Baltimore Sun reporters says he wonders what effect the news of a serial murderer praying on homeless people in the city has had on the homeless who live, defenseless, on the street. "How bad must they feel? I feel bad for them," the reporter says. "Oh, I don't know," McNulty says, "It's worked out pretty well for you."

The reporter is offended, but the editor smiles, knowing McNulty has seen the real truth. "If it bleeds, it leads."
All of this is playing against a background of the #MeToo movement which is, at its heart, a movement centered on the power of accusation. Of course, for #MeToo, accusation is a good thing; it has the salutary effect of exposing predators who would otherwise escape control by the normal mechanism of social control--the law, corporate rules. In "American Vandal" we are confronted with the profound destructive power of accusation.  Because of his past behavior, the accused is assumed to have committed the crime. It is "fast thinking" rather than "slow thinking" and it should stop all of us in our tracks and make us ask how important is truth?

And then there is the character of the central protagonist, a neer-do-well, who other students describe as the most stupid kid they have ever met, the dumbest kid in the school, who has hopes of being admitted to the University of Colorado at Boulder engineering program. He entertains himself by drawing penises and testicles on the white boards when the teachers have their backs turned.  He is every bit as much a bottom dweller as the Wisconsin junk yard man who was accused in "The Making of a Murderer." 

But as each episode unfolds, he becomes more sympathetic, more  human, more multi dimensional, and the pursuit of the truth unravels his world as much as it unravels the worlds of his teachers, sundry parents, and many of his classmates. 
The truth will cost him the one person he really relies upon and trusts, as he finds she has in fact, been unfaithful to him. It is revelatory and unexpected how much this hurts him. This is the devil-may-care, everything-is-a joke kid who discovers it matters to him his girlfriend is unfaithful.

Along the way we meet teenagers who have already dropped out, who no longer hope or try for achievement, success, but simply hang out in someone's basement and smoke weed and play cruel jokes on some neighbor. 

By the time exculpation occurs, in the last episode, the accused has lost so much it almost doesn't matter. He swallows the contempt with which he is held by his classmates as a sort of social poison, which in fact poisons his own self respect. 
Thoreau said, "It is a man's opinion of himself which determines his own fate," and that coming crashing home in "American Vandal."

Woh, Mexico

Woh, Mexico, never really been, so I don't really know.
--James Taylor "Mexico"

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

--Ann Coulter

Professor Coulter

“Okay, yes — Trump shouldn’t call them “shithole countries.” A little respect is in order. They are shithole nations.”

--Ann Coulter

Can I say something to get a rise out of you?

                                                 
I spoke with a man yesterday who works for a company which makes medical devices. He travels to Mexico on business frequently, mostly Guadalajara, but elsewhere as well. 

J.T.

He told me his company had a million square feet of manufacturing space in Mexico, that there were plenty of well educated workers down there, many of whom spoke English. He described shopping malls and suburbs and wealthy communities untouched by the drug cartels and vast landscapes of automobile manufacturing plants. He said the automobile plants and the medical device plants were pristine and their products world class quality. Guadalajara is in the center of Mexico so it can truck its products to the East Coast and ship them to the United States or it can send them to the West Coast and off to China. It's a great place for any manufacturer, American, German or Chinese.

And the landscape of factories is vast, seems to go on to the horizon. 

It sounded as if he were describing China.

Mexican industry

I expressed amazement. I thought Mexico was over run by drug cartels, the people most illiterate, but certainly uneducated. Not that I assumed Mexicans are rapists, narco terrorists, but still, pretty close to a desperate, failed state.

"Not the Mexico I know," he said. "That sounds more like Alabama. We got a plant in Alabama, too. But it's in the part of Alabama where all the space program people live. There's parts of Alabama where the defense plants are, and people are well educated and affluent.  But my kid went to Georgia Tech, and I gotta tell you, there are parts of Georgia...well, let me put it this way, if they deported a lot of those White, Christian Georgia folks to Mexico, those folks would be taking a step up in life."

American business people are apt to travel nowadays. The rapists on the other side of the wall on our Southern border are not just an applause line to them. They know something about the world Donald Trump and Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Louie Gohmert do not know.

Mexican rapists at work

I am so parochial I cannot know about the rest of the world. But at least I know I'm ignorant. 

But I can see from what I've seen in America, wealth and poverty have an osmotic relationship.  When you have poor people living in squalid and unsafe conditions, they tend to want to leave those places and they move toward places where there is more wealth, where the streets are cleaner and safer, just as if you put a highly concentrated space in any organism next to a more dilute space, water travels from more concentrated to less concentrated; it moves along what is called an "osmotic gradient" ineluctably. Eventually both spaces have equal concentration of solute and you have what's called "osmotic equilibrium."

Factory in Ann's shithole country: Mexico 

Likely the same happens with respect to wealth. There's always movement.

Of course, you have membranes along the border, separating the inside from the outside, but all membranes have to be porous to some extent, or what lives inside would eventually perish. Things have to move back and forth across that membranous border, or the cell dies.

Readin Aloud

Last Sunday was Easter, which got me thinking about Mr. Mayo and reading aloud.


Mr. Charles Mayo, my 6th grade teacher--the first male teacher I had ever had--discovered he could gain control over his class of 40 obstreperous 11 year olds by a simple expedient. When we got too rowdy he simply said, "Well, then I don't have to read 'Green Pastures', today. I can simply not read it," and instantly disorder transformed into obedience.

The best part of every day was when Mr. Mayo read "Green Pastures," doing all the Negro dialects (it was "Negro" then) and we were enthralled.


Twenty years later, when I read to my own kids, in their bedroom, just two miles from that classroom at Bannockburn Elementary, they also calmed down, and sat in their bunkbeds, with me in the chair across from them, reading their bedtime stories. Sometimes the 5 year old sat in my lap, so he could see the pictures, if there were good ones.


The boys really liked their bedtime stories, just as I relished Mr. Mayo's readings.

We went through Greek mythology, Norse mythology, which had giants and monsters and swords, Aesop's fables, and then we started the five book series by C.S. Lewis, which my wife had bought at Barnes and Noble, the Narnia series, with "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe."
 

I think we had got to book five when, one night, I had to stop reading out loud and read silently a page ahead and the boys became indignant.

"Why'd you stop reading?"  they asked. "Read!"
But I was now two pages ahead.
"Read! What's wrong?!?"
The five year old, always the more emotional, was red faced standing up in his lower bunk and the seven year old, who could read himself, was in a funk, too.
They caused such a ruckus, my wife appeared in the door: "What's wrong?" she asked.
"He won't read to us! He's reading to himself!"
She looked to me for an explanation.
"Well," I told her, "They killed Aslan, the Lion, the king of Narnia."
"So?"
"Well, he's all laid out on the stone alter like thing, and we all really liked Aslan," I explained, "And we didn't see that coming, but that's all right. But then we get to the lion resurrection."
"The what?" the kids demanded.
Resurrection meant nothing to them, thank God.
"And so?" my wife now had her arms folded and steam was coming out her ears.
"So, we are mixing government with religion here," I said.
"He wont' read!" the five year old expostulated.
"I mean, we had the lion put to death in 'West With the Night,'" I said, "But that lion had moderately eaten Beryl Markham, and he stayed dead. This lion is about to rise again."
"In this room, the First Amendment does not apply," my wife said slowly, as if talking to a very slow child. "Look at these kids. Read the goddamned book!" She then turned on her heels and slammed the door behind her.
By this time the five year old was in tears. The Seven year old, always the mordant one, expected injustice and simply lay down and turned his back to me.
So, I read about the resurrection of Aslan and all that.

Years later, the power of reading aloud rose again. I had published a book which was deservedly ignored and died a quick death, but then, for reasons known only to God and the publisher, got sold to a books-on-tape company and I heard, for the first time, something I had written read aloud. It was then I could understand why my books never sold. They were pretty awful. The Broadway actor thought he was reading for some soap opera, and they had piano music in the background, just so you'd know when the sad parts were coming.  I was driving down the road and nearly puked.


But then someone told me the same book had been recorded by Books for the Blind and was available at the library. I hustled right over and got the tape.
The guy reading had a voice like gravel rumbling around in a tank, and he read the book like it was some hard boiled crime novel by Raymond Chandler.  The way this guy read the book, it was ten times better than what I had written.


It was really astonishing, what a guy could do to a mediocre book by simply reading with something called talent.


I started listening to books on tape wherever I drove and it was wonderful. "West with the Night," which I had read to the kids artlessly was even more fantastic, read by a woman with a British accent.


But the best reader of all was John LeCarre, reading his own stuff, doing all the voices and he didn't even have to tell you who was talking because you knew the voice for that character. He had no peer in reading aloud.


I don't know if people read aloud any more.
Maybe it's a lost art, but it is an art, most def.

What's College Good For?

Front page article in the Boston Globe today tells the sad tale of "private colleges" struggling to attract enough students to keep their doors open, places like Stonehill College, Newbury College, Franklin Pierce University, Mount St. Ida, Marlboro College, Rivier University, Godard College, Northpoint Bible College, Boston Baptist College and Dean College.

The theme of the article is that two big forces are driving these colleges out of existence for want of customers:  Demographic shifts with falling birth rates and fewer children and expense, where the cost of college now consumes too much of a family's budget.

No college

As I was reading this I thought of Cambridge and Oxford, where an undergraduate degree is achieved in 3, not four years. For the sciences, engineering, computer, the degree is 4 years, but you get a Master's for that, not just the BA. 

The medical school degree is an undergraduate degree--bachelor's in medicine--attained at age 20-21, unlike the American system which requires 4 years of college and 4 years of medical school, then 2-5 years of residency training. Are American doctors better than British doctors?  Well, it depends when you look at them, at what age. 
Makes one wonder: Why do our colleges have to be 4 years? If the English can educate undergraduates in 3 years, why must we take 4?
Of course, one possible answer may be that students entering Oxford and Cambridge can all read, write and calculate at grade level and so the high school students in England have been so much better educated, they don't need 4 years in college.

No College

My father, who was born to non English speaking parents, not to mention parents with little formal education had to figure out how America worked, growing up in the New York City public schools, and he went to "City College" the nearly free college, "the Harvard of the proletariat" they called it. He worked and went to school during the Great Depression, sharing jobs with friends and he drifted into work at an employment agency, which, during the Great Depression, must have seemed relevant.

No College

One thing he noticed was when young men who had gone to Yale came in, you could send them right down to Chase Bank or any of the big banks and they never came back--they were hired right away, but guys from City College or Brooklyn College--don't even bother. They were back in a New York City minute. The banks, the brokerage houses, the real estate companies, the advertising agencies weren't interested.

"Fair haired boys" from Princeton and Yale were what the WASPy places were looking for.

For those guys, a college degree was their ticket through the door. 
"Once they got through the door, it might not have helped them. They had to make their own way, but if you couldn't even take that first step..."

College: But did it matter?

Now I'm looking at people from Methuen, Lawrence and they have only the dimmest idea what "college" really is. They ask if Oxford is "Ivy League."  They know Harvard and MIT mean success, but they couldn't say whether a degree from Brown or Dartmouth would give you any advantage over a person with a degree from Stonehill or Mt. St. Ida. It's all just "college" to them.

And who really knows? Does anyone actually track the job prospects of kids from University of Pennsylvania or Cornell and compare them to those of kids from Rivier or Northpoint Bible College?

We all hear about the "data" which says people with a BA earn significantly more over the course of their lives but can we believe it? Can we believe if there is a difference, it had anything to do with the school more than say, the family from which they came?

Electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, carpenters, HVAC repairmen--what kind of earnings to debt do they have compared to a graduate of Boston Bible College or Franklin Pierce? 

Is it possible that "college" is, for many people, for most colleges, just a big scam, sham colleges just riding on the wake of the big ships, Harvard, Stanford, MIT?