Shut Your Mouth!

Title: Shaft

Rating: 4 Stars

For some time now, I’ve been on a run of 1960s / 1970s New York City films. Over the last couple of years I’ve watched Taxi Driver, The French Connection, Klute, Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, The Warriors, Dog Day Afternoon, and many others. Starting back in the 1960s, New York City made the strategic choice of openly cooperating with film makers, working with them to accomplish such things as closing off streets and providing police officers for crowd control. Many filmmakers jumped at the opportunity and so, decades later, we get to see New York City in all of its glorious, gnarly, and gritty finery.

In most of these films, the city background is almost a character of its own. You see the beat up walls of tenement hallways. You see garish neon displays pulsing along the streets. You see hyperlocal businesses barely surviving. You see taxis shooting in and out of traffic. You see garbage on the street. The grittiness of the streets provide a reality to the characters that a backlot stage simply can’t provide.

You see all of that in Shaft. It really is a great, action packed film. Usually, when a film starts and I’m watching at home, I’ll quickly fast forward my way through the opening credits. After all, I really don’t care who did the casting. However, the theme to Shaft immediately began playing over the credits. With its pulsing beat and bold lyrics, the song grabs you by the throat and does not let go. The theme song does a wonderful job of projecting the experience that you’re about to have.

John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is a Black private detective. A white police lieutenant named Vic Androzzi tracks Shaft down. There’s something going down between white gangsters and black gangsters and he doesn’t know what it is. In the meantime, the main black gangster Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) wants Shaft to find his kidnapped daughter. Bumpy sets Shaft after a local Black Power leader named Ben Buford (Christopher St John). It’s up to Shaft to untangle all of this.

Shaft is not just any detective. Although he’s tough and takes no crap from anyone, he seems equally comfortable regardless of whether he’s talking to a white policeman, a Black gangster, a Black Power leader, or for that matter, a white gangster. He’s smart, brave, and ready for action. And by ready for action, I’m not just talking about police work. He has time for the ladies as well (yes, in its treatment of female characters this film doesn’t even come close to passing the Bechdel test).

It is very well made. It moves along from plot point to plot point smoothly. It’s well acted. Moments of humor and drama are nicely spaced. The action scenes are thrilling.

The reason why it’s a noteworthy film is because of its place and time. It was made in 1971. Although not the first, it conventionally falls under the blaxploitation genre. As such, most of the major characters are Black (there’s even a short scene featuring Antonio Fargas, soon to become famous as Huggy Bear from the original Starsky & Hutch). Shaft, although Black, is legitimately a classic detective action hero. It’s not as if Roundtree is just playing a Black version of a white character. The Blackness of Shaft is an essential part of his character. In 1971, having an unabashedly Black character as the leading, romantic, action hero protagonist was groundbreaking.

It doesn’t just stop there. A bartender is openly gay and not a big deal is made of it. One of Shaft’s affairs is with a white woman. That might not seem to be a big deal now, but remember that the Supreme Court only struck down laws banning interracial marriage in 1967 (Loving v Virginia). One of the NYC police officers is openly racist, but Shaft’s dealings with the police lieutenant are of that between two equals.

An important subplot is the friction between the Black criminal kingpin and the Black Power leader. This was (and is) an existing tension within the Black community. The fact that Black gangsters were supplying the drugs that were crippling the Black community clearly infuriated the Black Power leaders.

On its own merits, it’s interesting. I personally found the Mission Impossible complexity of the final rescue scene of the kidnapped mobster’s daughter to be somewhat hilarious. Shaft and members of a Black Power organization essentially take over a hotel, complete with donning the uniforms of the restaurant and the elevator operator. Considering the fact that they just go in with guns blazing anyway, I really didn’t see the point of all of that subterfuge. This was also from the cinematic times when all you had to do was to tap a guy on the back of the head with the butt of your gun and he’d collapse like a ton of bricks.

The film clearly struck a chord. It was seceded by four sequels as well as seven TV films. Interestingly enough, in all of these films, Shaft was portrayed by Richard Roundtree, although in the latter two films, the action hero baton had been passed onto Shaft’s descendants.

This film is worthy for its important place in cinematic / cultural history. Even better, it’s a just a fun film to watch.

Ponzi Scammers Gonna Ponzi

Title: The Key Man

Rating: 4 Stars

This is the story of Arif Naqvi, a Pakistani that became a major player in the world of impact investing.

For those that have not heard of impact investing, it’s the theory that there is profit to be made providing services to the world’s most neediest people. There is money to be made in hospitals in Nigeria or food production in India or telecommunication in Paraguay. It requires detailed knowledge of local customs and regulations, perseverance, patience, and great courage, but it’s worth it because the market is over one billion people.

This is a seductive philosophy for billionaires and other members of the global elite. Inherently suspicious of government due to their extreme reluctance of being taxed (as well as the admittedly corrupt / incompetent performance of some of these governments), thinking that private enterprise can come in and save the day while conveniently providing them with even more money, impact investing let them think that they can do well by doing good. Unfortunately, in the world of impact investing there is usually one voice that is lacking, that of the actual poor people that they are so nobly trying to serve.

Into this potentially exciting new investment opportunity stepped Naqvi. By advertising himself as someone that has experienced great success in impact investing and as the man that has the panoramic vision to bring about potentially breathtaking changes on a global scale, he was able to set up investment funds that collected hundreds of millions of dollars. Even better, he (and his company Abraaj) set himself up as a paragon of integrity. Even in the swampy mess of dealing with historically corrupt governments, his company set itself up as a lodestar of ethics and accountability.

It seemed to good to be true. Bill Gates’ charitable foundation provided him with funds. Government development programs provided him with funds. People as diverse as John Kerry to Richard Branson shared the stage with him and lauded his efforts.

As you can probably guess, it was all too good to be true. To his credit, Naqvi did buy some companies located in the Middle East, turned them around, and sold them for a profit. Some of this was due to his tolerance of risk. He made a habit of buying companies cheap that were located in turbulent countries. Once the turbulence subsided for a bit, he could then sell the company to those less risk tolerant.

He did run into trouble with a couple of his purchases. He bought milk companies in Ghana and in Turkey. In both cases, he experienced more significant competition than he expected. Economic conditions deteriorated in both countries with a resultant plunge in their respective currencies. He was ruinously left buying in dollars but selling in a devalued currency. He also bought the electric company in Karachi. Some progress was made but there were such systemic, endemic issues with the company that he couldn’t get it sold for a much needed profit.

This profit was much needed because, at the same time that all of this was happening, Naqvi was diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from his investment funds for his own personal use. Funds were regularly transferred from one account to another whenever an audit was scheduled so that the account in question would appear healthy. He regularly asked for short term loans from an Arabic airline so that he could temporarily deposit cash in an account to demonstrate health. He was using investment funds that were targeted to build such things as hospitals to pay basic operational items such as employee salary.

As part of a push to collect even more investment funds, he knowingly inflated the values of some of his investment companies to make Abraaj healthier than it was. In his charismatic presentations at such events as Davos, he bragged about the nineteen percent returns of Abraaj. In reality, he was rapidly running out money.

After fifteen years or so, it all came crashing down. Wall Street Journal reporters (the authors of this book) received some tips about questionable Abraaj performance. At about the same time, an investment analyst at the Gates Foundation became suspicious and began asking pointed questions. Shortly after the reporters published their findings, many other investors began to demand answers and a return of their investments. Abraaj collapsed and several of its executives were arrested.

Naqvi was arrested in London. Now, a couple of years later, he is still fighting extradition to the United States to face charges.

Having read a biography about Bernie Madoff (here) about a month ago, it’s become apparent that Ponzi schemes interest me. I think the thing that I find most interesting about such scams is the absolutely brazen nature of them as well as the inevitability of their discovery.

I always wonder about the end game of the perpetrators. There is a finite amount of money and a finite number of suckers in the world. It is inevitable that the Ponzi scheme is going to crash. Why keep it going for so long?

Madoff apparently had no end game. He knew that he was going to get caught, and when it happened, that it would be catastrophic. He apparently just waited for the inevitable discovery and scandal.

It’s not clear with Naqvi. From e-mails and conversations, there’s no doubt that he knew that what he was doing was illegal and wrong. Perhaps he really did hope that if the profits from the sale of Karachi Electric were large enough or if he was able to fully capitalize his latest fund that perhaps he could paper over all of his chicanery. If history is any guide, if this had happened, then he probably just would have just stolen ever larger sums to enrich his lavish lifestyle even more.

Maybe there is no logical explanation. As the scorpion said to the frog as they were both drowning in the river:

“I am sorry, but I couldn’t resist the urge. It’s in my nature.”

The Savage Wars Of Academia

Title: Straight Man

Rating: 4 Stars

I should probably say straight off the bat that this rating is probably unfair. I’m a pretty big fan of Richard Russo’s early novels. I’ve read Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, and Empire Falls and think highly of all of them (Empire Falls won the Pulitzer). IMHO, Straight Man is just a shade below those three novels. Hence, if virtually anyone else had written it, I probably would have awarded it five stars. Since it’s not quite Russo’s best, I dropped it a star. Even so, I still recommend it.

The protagonist of all four novels are four different clever, verbally adroit, troublesome men. A gentle name for them would be pains in the ass. The more appropriate term is asshole, albeit charmingly so.

The other three novels features what would be called working class characters. Straight Man decidedly leaves that realm.

The setting is the fictional Western Central Pennsylvania University. If you know anything of universities, any university that contains Northern, Southern, Western, Central, or Eastern in their name is probably, in relation to some big brother university, smaller and underfunded. The fact that this is Western Central Pennsylvania University shows how small the world is in which it inhabits.

Even smaller, we’re talking about the English department at the university. Populated by eccentric, irascible professors that have known each other for twenty years, they have had substantial time to build grievances and grudges. The fact that twenty years ago, when they were just starting out, none of them thought of this university as anything other than a minor starting point on their grand careers and yet, twenty years later, all now middle-aged, this is where they all still call work, doesn’t help their collective moods any.

In all of this is our narrator. William Henry Devereaux Jr. William Henry Devereaux Sr is a widely recognized English scholar that teaches at Ivy League universities and has published significant work on literary theory. On the other hand, his son (named Hank, I’m guessing that the father was never called Hank), published one slim decently reviewed novel twenty years ago to small sales. Other than occasional witty newspaper articles, he’s published nothing since.

Hank, nearing fifty, is without doubt a pain in the ass, if not an outright asshole. He treats nothing seriously, has a witty comeback for every remark, and is snarky even to his closest friends. Even his mother calls him ‘clever’, which in her world is no compliment.

Knowing that he has no respect for institutions or authority, his department has previously elected him as their interim department chair, thinking that he will do no damage. Shockingly enough, he cares enough to make changes that leaves the department wanting to recall him. Also during this time, there are rumors floating around that the university is about to undergo significant cuts. The other professors are convinced that Devereaux is building a list of those that he’d be willing to put on the chopping block.

Given his nature, when a local television shows up to do a special interest story, Hank puts on a pair of Groucho Marx glasses and nose, picks up a goose, and tells the reporter that every day that his department doesn’t get its budget he will kill a duck. This episode goes the 90s equivalent of viral, eventually ending up being shown on a national morning show, especially when one shows up dead.

Also, Hank seems to be having a serious urinary tract issue. He’s convinced that he has a kidney stone while his doctor fears that it might be prostrate cancer. Whatever, it leaves him increasingly in pain and unable to urinate.

Does he actually have a medical condition? Or is it psychological? His writing is blocked. He really doesn’t like his job. At 50, he still lives in the shadow of the father that abandoned him.

I know that I’m not conveying how funny this novel really is. It skewers university life. There is a professor who is nearly constantly drunk. Another intentionally teaches in a boring, tedious manner and schedules his classes at inconvenient times just for the sole purpose of reducing his student workload. One very feminist enlightened male professor is nicknamed Orshee because of his habit or constantly inserting the phrase ‘or she’ whenever he hears a male pronoun. Devereaux himself spends little time in class.

Everyone is overeducated and thinks they’re the smartest person in the room. These are highly verbal and literate people fighting over minutia. Petty arguments are constantly happening. The other professors become increasingly infuriated as Devereaux continues to refuse to take seriously the minor skirmishes that the others see as some looming Armageddon.

Russo handles all of this with aplomb. It is a clever, engaging, entertaining novel. Russo did teach for a while at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. It would be interesting to learn if any of his coworkers there felt seen when they read this novel.

None Of The Emperors Have Clothes

Title: Being There

Rating: 4 Stars

This is a continuation of my exploration of the films of director Hal Ashby. Semi-forgotten today, he was one of the more significant directors of the 1970s. Films that I’ve already watched include Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, and Shampoo. In addition, he directed the Vietnam veteran film Coming Home and the Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory. All of these films were released in the 1970s. The breadth of them show that, in his prime, he was one of the great auteurs of cinema of that time.

Being There is right up there as well. It’s the story of Chance (played by Peter Sellers). Apparently raised from a child in the sequestered home of a reclusive old man, he has only been trained as a gardener. He can’t read or write. He can’t take care of himself.  Besides tending his garden, his only other interest is watching television. He’s some combination of purely innocent and simple minded.

His world comes crashing down around him when the old man dies. He is forced to leave the confines of the only life that he has ever known. Wearing the old man’s out of date but impeccably tailored suits, he wanders aimlessly around the city, experiencing various misadventures, when a limousine accidentally hits him.

Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), wife of the very powerful but seriously ill Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), jumps out of the car to lend him aid. One thing leads to another and Chance (now known to her as Chauncey Gardiner) becomes ensconced in their palatial home.

All of that is set up for the rest of the film. Chance comes into contact with a diverse set of powerful characters. To all of their questions, he answers with slightly befuddled responses or with simple facts about gardening (eg you need to suffer through the fall and winter to enjoy the bloom of spring and summer). Each person, instead of understanding that this is a simple minded man with no real experience, interprets his innocent, vacuous words with some deep meaning.

Ben Rand, representing business, tries to get him to induce him to run his investment business. The President of the United States seeks advice from him. The Soviet ambassador assumes that he speaks Russian and is completely taken with him. Major television shows has him on and breathlessly waits for / interprets his simple statements. With Ben dying and with his blessing, Eve falls in love with Chance and interprets his innocent remarks as expressions of passion. In all of these arenas, from business to politics to diplomacy to entertainment to love, his simple words are grossly misinterpreted.

By the end of the film, a powerful set of men (all white, of course), determined to select the next President and stay in power, decide that Chauncey is their best bet to win election. The film ends with Chance strolling down to a pond and then walking on the water.

With Watergate and the Vietnam War, the 1970s were a time when the American people, en masse, lost faith with those in power. Here we see all of these powerful people being fooled by someone that isn’t even trying to fool them. They are shown here to be clueless. Even with all of the evidence right in front of their faces, they are incapable of seeing the truth. They are all emperors and none of them have clothes. The physician, the one person that actually does figure out Chance’s truth, does not speak up because he does not want to upset a dying man.

The film ends with an unclear future. Will Chance become President? At what point will his simplicity be exposed?

The film ending with Chance walking on water also brings up interesting questions. Was the film implying that Chance, with his innocence and complete lack of guile, is some kind of Christ figure? If so, to what end?

Or is Chance walking on water an illusion (maybe there’s an old pier there)? Could it be that the fact that we, as the viewers, are fooled is the final trick Chance pulls? Does that imply that we are as susceptible to folly as those powerful figures that we were just laughing at?

Or is it something even deeper? During Ben’s eulogy, we hear “life is a state of mind”. Could it be that Chance, is his great simplicity, does not understand that he cannot walk on water? Since he does not know that he cannot, does that mean that he can?

I don’t know but these are interesting questions. One of the reasons why I enjoy older films, especially the ones from the 1970s, is that they aren’t unafraid to pose such questions.

Of all things, the film was marred by (and kept it from getting the full five stars) its end credits. For some reason, the end credits included flubbed outtakes from the film. Sure, the film is a comedy. It, however, was aspiring, through its comedy, to something greater. Showing Sellers, in his role as Chance, breaking character broke the spell that the film was casting.

Second Class Citizens Paying First Class Taxes

Title: The Whiteness of Wealth

Rating: 3 Stars

On the surface, it’s a seeming conundrum. The Civil War ended slavery way back in 1865. Brown v Board of Education of Topeka outlawed desegregation in 1954. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination by race.

Yet here we are, nearly sixty years later, in the year 2022. The average wealth of a white household (~$171,000) is ten times higher than the average Black household (~$17,100). The average household led by a Black college graduate has a lower net worth than the average white household led by a high school dropout.

What’s going on here? Why so little relative progress?

It’s not exactly a trick question. All of this is explicit evidence of systemic racism. In this fairly slim volume, chapter by chapter, Brown takes on a major category (eg taxes, housing, education) and explains how decisions, laws, and policy are all biased against Black Americans.

Being an expert on tax policy, she starts there. She focuses on the so-called marriage bonus. Tax law heavily incentivizes so-called traditional marriages, where the husband has a career and the wife manages the family and house. If the two partners in the marriage make equivalent salaries, the bonus disappears. Also, the wife that stays home produces significant unrecognized and untaxed labor (eg day care, cleaning). In all likelihood, a two wage marriage will need to pay for those services. It probably comes as no surprise that Black couples fall predominantly under the essentially equivalent two wage model.

She moves on to housing. She covers some of the same ground as the book Color of Law (which I wrote about here). There is an ugly history here. Potential Black homeowners were discriminated against at local, state, and federal levels. Everything from local covenants to the GI Bill to the Federal Housing Authority (only providing guarantees to developers that created housing developments that were built to prevent “inharmonious racial groups”) are culprits here.

Bias against Black Americans continues even today. Brokers direct potential homeowners only to certain areas. Sadly, once a certain percentage of Black Americans move into a suburb, a tipping point is reached and whites will flee, driving down home prices. The result of this is that, unless you’re one of the lucky few Black homeowners living in a development that is ten percent or less Black, the value of your home will generally stagnate, if not depreciate.

Also, under the latest tax changes, the standard deduction was substantially increased. On the one hand, that makes tax forms easier to fill out. On the other hand, it’s anticipated that only about 10% of mortgages will now actually benefit from the mortgage deduction. Would any one like to guess the racial makeup of those 10% that will be able to take advantage of that deduction? It’s not exactly a trick question.

Let’s move on to employment. Again, the history of this was covered in The Color of Law. As part of the New Deal, The Fair Labor Standards Act was passed. Passing the deal required Southern democrat support. In the 1930s and 1940s, these were some seriously racist dudes. They only agreed to pass it if two sets of job classes were excluded: farm workers and domestic workers (ie maids). Can anyone guess what two job classes were almost exclusively populated by Black Americans? Again, not a trick question.

The Stabilization Act of 1942 was another key piece of legislation. Passed during WWII, it fixed labor rates. Companies, desperate for workers but constrained from paying market rates, compensated by starting to offer perks like healthcare and pensions. Yet once more, can anyone guess the racial composition of those jobs that received perks like these?

Here we are in 2022. All of this racial disparity has led us to a state where Blacks simply cannot compete in terms of generational wealth. Generally speaking, instead of having their parents help them pay for their college, Black Americans have to get loans. Once they embark on their career, it often becomes their responsibility to provide whatever additional support they can to their parents or to other extended family members. This means that Black Americans will more likely make early withdrawals from their 401K funds, negatively affecting their wealth. An estimated 46% of white Americans will get some inheritance. 10% of Black Americans will get an inheritance. It probably goes without saying that the average Black inheritance will be smaller than the average white inheritance.

Where do we go from here? Brown has several recommendations.

The first recommendation is a bit surprising. She believes that both white and Black Americans would benefit from having honest conversations regarding their relative economic circumstances. White Americans feel frustration that after all of these laws that have been passed and such obvious progress has been made that the struggle is still ongoing. Black Americans would like to understand why, despite seemingly following all of the rules, they still don’t seem to be making as much relative progress as they should. A true reckoning of each other’s economic circumstances might lift some of that confusion and create an environment of empathy.

She also does have some specific tax recommendations. Surprisingly enough, in many ways she recommends simplifying tax law. She proposes removing the mortgage deduction, the marriage bonus, and simplifying the tax structure. Understandably, this will face some serious headwinds from establishment interests and those currently benefitting (who happen to be wealthy, which gives them a powerful megaphone).

She also proposes a tax credit for those below median wealth. Knowing that a race based reparation scheme will probably be unconstitutional, her proposal is race blind. Given that 83% of all Black Americans are below median wealth, this would go a long ways towards something approaching economic justice.

My only beefs (hence the three star rating) with the book is that, first of all, it kind of read like a book that was written by an expert on tax policy.

My second beef is a tougher one to explain. I acknowledge that our country’s legacy of racism has robbed Black Americans of the opportunities for generational wealth. Unfortunately, our legacy does not end there. Native Americans live in poverty due to our country’s policies. If you read White Trash (I wrote about that here), you’ll know that there are generations of white Americans that have also been treated as second class citizens (at various times, called waste people, mudsills, clay eaters, and the now common white trash and trailer trash). Her tax law recommendation does encompass class, but only as a way to get around the race constitutional problem. I’d have liked some more acknowledgment that, although all of these issues are serious Black American problems, that these problems are not just limited to them.

Regarding an honest accounting, it has to start somewhere. I’m a white male. I went to a private, non-profit university. I received a scholarship, but my mother paid my tuition, so I graduated from the university with zero debt. After graduation, I had a friend whose father was a manager at a Fortune 50 company. Her father forwarded my resume to a manager friend in the IT department. After a perfunctory interview, I was hired. All involved in this chain were white. That started my 33 year career there.

Being either a very young Boomer or a very old Gen-X, my generational cohort was probably the last to commonly receive a pension from a public company. Many years ago, my company stopped offering new employees a pension. A couple of years ago they froze the value of the pension for us participants. By that time, I had 30 years in the pension. In addition to the pension, my company offered a 401K that matched 75% of my contributions up to 8% of my salary. Although also now discontinued, I was grandfathered in and had available to me a company provided retirement healthcare plan. With a pension, a strong 401K, and a retirement healthcare plan, I was able to retire early.

When I bought my first home, without asking, my mother gave me money that I used as part of the down payment. When my brother retired, she gave him some money to help pay off a loan. Wanting to be fair, she gave me, again unasked, the same amount of money.

I have no family, extended or otherwise, that are dependent upon me. In all likelihood, my mother will some day leave me an inheritance.

Don’t get me wrong. In my nearly 35 year career, I worked hard, made smart decisions, and made good use of every opportunity that was presented to me. Looking back, I’m proud of my life and the choices that I’ve made.

I also freely acknowledge that I am the product of systemic privileges.

Modern American Dream Ground Zero

My partner was born and raised on Long Island, New York. Since she still has family there, that’s where we spent our Memorial Day holiday. Everyone else went on a small boat to fish and to watch an airshow. Since I’m very susceptible to motion sickness, I was left to my own devices. Being a history geek, I decided to check out Levittown.  There’s not a lot to see, but in my opinion it’s the site of one of the most significant cultural shifts in American history.

For those that don’t know the story, at the end of World War II, the world was in an economic shambles. Japan and Germany were in ashes. The Soviet Union, although victorious, suffered casualties of over 25 million and much of its land was laid to waste. The UK was also victorious but its economy was destroyed. Much of continental Europe was starving in the war’s aftermath.

Alone among the developed countries, the United States emerged unimaginably stronger. It was a true economic powerhouse. Jobs were plentiful. Wages were increasing. In their exuberance, Americans were getting married and having children.

There was one problem. Where were all of these people going to live? Jobs were located in cities, but housing wasn’t keeping up. Housing needed to be made available where the jobs were.

Enter William (Bill) Levitt. His father owned a construction company called Levitt & Sons. Bill served in the Seabees during World War II. There he learned mass production techniques for military housing.

Once he returned from WWII, he figured that he could apply these same production techniques to domestic housing. Working with his brother, an architect, they designed a one story house. They figured out how to use pre-cut lumber that was shipped to the job site. All houses were built on concrete slabs. They were able to break the construction of a house down into 26 steps.

Levitt purchased large swaths of land on Long Island. In 1947, he announced a plan to construct 2,000 houses. Within two days, half of them had already been claimed. They then announced that they would build another 4,000 houses.

With mass construction and interchangeable parts, houses could be constructed quickly and cheaply. They could build 30 houses a day. Each house cost $8,000 (less than $100,000 in today’s dollars). With the GI Bill and other housing subsidies, a family could get into a house with as little as $400 up front. They switched to a standard 30 year mortgage that had an equivalent cost to what people were paying for rent. This inexpensive housing has led to some cognitive dissonance among older people nowadays. Given how easy it was for them to afford a starter home, they are baffled by today’s generation that seem not to be able to acquire what they see as one of the basic trappings of an adult life.

The wild success of Levittown inspired a legion of imitators and gave birth to the modern idea of the suburbs. Not quite city and not quite country, it was close enough to commute to work but far enough to feel free from it. Home ownership skyrocketed.

And thus a new American Dream popped into existence. A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about the American Dream. It has morphed over time. Once a clarion call for justice and equality, over time it has become a capitalist vision of acquiring personal wealth. Levittown was an important part of that transition. Instead of sharing a tenement with many others, Americans could now aspire to their own house with a yard.

Levittown also exposed the dark side of the American Dream. Although Bill Levitt was not openly racist, his belief that white people would not want to share their neighborhoods with people of color led him to include restrictive covenants that restricted selling to only ‘Caucasians’. It wasn’t just Levitt. The Federal Housing Act, as well as the GI Bill, limited housing developments to white owners. Levitt somewhat unconvincingly said that he’d build houses for people for color after he’d built housing for all of the white people that wanted them. Housing was one of the great springboards into the middle class but was nearly completely unavailable to the Black community.

Not only that, but Levittown also led the way to the conformity that took hold in the US. Starting with the design for only one type of house, Levitt eventually did expand the selections a bit, but the Levittown suburb was an exercise in commonality, conformity, and homogeneous blandness. Seventy years later, you see that in nearly every new suburb. Although much larger, houses in neighborhood appear to have been made with the same cookie cutter. Such houses are where the men in the grey flannel suits come home after a hard day at the office.

Creating a dream of each family getting their own house also damaged the extended family. There was a time when multiple generations of a family would live together. With these small houses far away from where extended family members might live, the cultural emphasis migrated to the nuclear family (Leave it to Beaver anyone?).

Finally, although this was on no one’s horizon in the 1950s, the rise of the suburbs had a significant effect upon the climate. As the suburbs continued to spread, mass transit became less feasible for many. People started having to drive into work. With neighbors unlikely to be working at the same office or plant, single car commuters became standard. The grocer and other businesses were no longer in walking distance, so even if someone was staying at home, they’d have to drive their own car to do their errands. Finally, from a carbon footprint point of view, it’d be hard to come up with a more inefficient use of energy and space than a single family standalone house.

So, what does Levittown look like today? Well, it looks like any other suburb. Given that it is now 75 years old, the homogeneous nature of the original buildings have changed. Over the decades, some housing has been torn down and rebuilt. Many houses have been extensively renovated. Even so, as you drive from street to street, you can still see some of the original homes.

Since I grew up on the West Coast, I was nowhere near a Levittown. However, the neighborhood that I grew up in was certainly inspired by it. Maybe because of that, the smaller homes that I saw in Levittown just seemed somehow more homey than the McMansions that dominate today’s suburbs.

One thing that I did find amusing about my trip was Google Maps. Having no destination in mind, I just typed in Levittown and then let Maps guide me. The street address that it mapped me to had a Home Depot on one side of the street and a Wal-Mart on the other.

And if that doesn’t describe what a modern American suburb is nowadays, I don’t know how better to do it.

Fascism Isn’t A Bug, It’s A Feature

Title: Behold, America

Rating: 3 Stars

The theme of this book is the struggle in the US between two ideas. One is the American Dream. The other is America First. Although the book did a good job discussing the background of each of these two ideas, I really didn’t get a great sense of the interplay between them.

The history behind both ideas is interesting. On the one hand, when we think about the American Dream, we probably think of it as something that germinated back in the early founding father days of our country. When we think about America First, a lot of people probably think about Donald Trump. Those who have a bit more knowledge of history will think about Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee in the time immediately before the start of World War II.

What’s actually surprising is that, according to Churchwell, both ideas came to fruition in more or less about the same period of time. They both sprang up around the turn of the twentieth century. The American Dream is much younger than most people think while America First is much older.

The American Dream, as an idea, has gone through multiple variations. In the early days, the American Dream was used primarily as rhetoric. The American Dream could refer to giving everyone land to farm. It could refer to acquiring an education. It was used as the term for an aspiration.

Churchwell gives a lot of credit to a columnist named Walter Lippman. Now pretty much lost to history, he was a significant intellectual force for some sixty years. In the 1910s, he began to put out the idea that the US should stand for larger concepts and be a beacon for other countries. It was Lippmann that first began to associate the American Dream with noble concepts like liberty, justice, and equality for all.

From these high ideals, the 1920s, with its dramatic rise in stock prices, sketchy business practices, government scandals, and growth in inequality, came along and knocked the American Dream askew. Typified by Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the emphasis became more on personal consumption as opposed to abstract ideas like equality for all. With the collapse of the economy during The Great Depression, FDR’s New Deal brought back some of Lippmann’s high ideals. In the 1980s, the pendulum swung again and still hasn’t swung back. In the year 2022, we lionize Jeff Bezos while his employees are treated like machines and have to rely on government assistance for food. Free enterprise is prioritized above social justice. That is the American Dream in which we continue to live.

America First has not gone through similar gyrations. From the beginning, the movement was racist, anti-immigration, and anti-Semitic. It espoused the single drop theory, where if you weren’t of pure Anglo Saxon blood, you weren’t a real American. Thanks to Tucker Carlson and a mass shooting, replacement theory has been all over our news. In the world of racism, there really is nothing new. A hundred years ago, the replacement theory was alive and thriving.

It wasn’t always just a Republican position. At one time, both parties espoused America First. In the 1916 election, both the Democratic Woodrow Wilson and the Republican Charles Evan Hughes claimed the mantle of America First. What makes this even more jarring to me is that you think of Woodrow Wilson as this great liberal progressive thinker that wanted to create a new world order in the aftermath of World War I and Charles Evan Hughes later became a Supreme Court Justice. Unfortunately, if you scratch just a little bit at the exterior of Wilson, you’ll find a hard core unrepentant racist, so I shouldn’t have been too surprised.

Even more bizarrely, it was apparently Woodrow Wilson that first invented the term ‘Fake News’. You wouldn’t think that there’d be that many connections between the internationalist Wilson and the isolationist Donald Trump, but you’d be wrong.

One thing that’s interesting about reading, what I like to call, a near past history is that you learn odd things like Wilson inventing the term Fake News. I like to think that I know about the twentieth century, but I had no idea. This book had several other such facts that knocked me for a loop.

Dorothy Thompson was another columnist that had a pretty long run. Now largely known as the most scintillating quipster at the the ever so quippy Algonquin Table, she’s most famous for her bon mots (eg, asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, she said “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”).

Well, in her columns she was a formidable anti-fascist. She fearlessly took on Charles Lindbergh. After he visited Hitler, Lindbergh became convinced that the US could never win a war against Germany. Wanting to make sure that the ‘white’ (ie superior) people didn’t destroy themselves, he toured the country preaching racist America First principles. In her columns, Thompson repeatedly attacked him, accused him of not just being a fascist, but having designs of being an American Hitler. It was a side of her that I never knew.

This is a deeper cut, but Hugo Black was a significant force on the Warren Supreme Court. He sided with many of the important decisions of the Warren Court that greatly expanded our civil rights. This is interesting because, during his confirmation, his previous membership in the Ku Klux Klan was brought out. He admitted it but claimed to no longer be a member. First of all, his journey from Klansman to civil rights judge is pretty amazing. Secondly, say what you will about Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett, even Donald Trump wouldn’t dare to nominate a known Klansman to the Supreme Court. Although if somehow he manages to win in 2024, all bets are off.

Speaking of Trump, the America First sections are essentially a nonstop sub tweet at Donald Trump. Whenever Churchwell talks about some of the ideas and practices of America First in the past, she does everything but draw a big red line to a picture of Donald Trump.

This brings me to one of the more minor pieces of trivia that I found interesting / amusing. Most people know that Donald Trump got his start by inheriting the business from his father Fred Trump. Well, way back in the 1920s, Fred Trump was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally. He has never been identified as a member of the Klan, but there were relatively few people (less than ten) arrested at this rally, and the others were all Klan members, so maybe you can draw an inference.

Fred Trump made his fortune in apartment buildings. The Trumps (both Fred and Donald) were notorious for illegally refusing to rent to people of color. That’s obviously horrible, but one weird thing did come out of it.

Woody Guthrie actually wrote a song about Fred Trump’s housing. The song was called “Old Man Trump”. Here is the first verse:

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project

I find it amazing that one of the great legends in radical folk music wrote a diss track going after Donald Trump’s father.

This machine kills fascists indeed!

The Master Of Bad Marriage Noir

I’ve read three Patricia Highsmith novels fairly recently. Since they are her most famous, I decided to stay away from her Ripley novels. I instead focused on some of her early novels. Of the three, Strangers on a Train is probably the most famous because it was made into a Hitchcock film (which I wrote about here). Deep Water has kind of risen into the zeitgeist due to a Ben Affleck film currently streaming on Hulu (my Hulu account is not active, so I have not seen it). The Blunderer is definitely a Highsmith deep cut.

To varying degrees, I enjoyed all three novels. Having now read all three, I found an amusing theme across them. Let me give a brief synopsis of each and see if you can discover it yourself.

Strangers on a Train feature two characters, Guy and Bruno. They just happen to share a car on a train. As they talk, they both discover that they have a problem. Guy’s problem is that he’s in love with a woman named Anne. That’s unfortunate because he is already married to Miriam, an unfaithful shrew of a wife who delights in tormenting Guy and refuses to give him a divorce. Bruno, on the other hand, has serious daddy issues and wants his father dead. Bruno proposes that he will kill Guy’s wife and, in turn, Guy would then kill Bruno’s father. It’d be the perfect crime because there would be no way for the police to connect the other to the murder. Guy assumes that it’s just two men idly chatting on the train. Imagine his shock when his wife is mysteriously murdered. Bruno then pressures Guy into fulfilling his half of the bargain. By relentlessly and ruthlessly applying pressure, Guy eventually buckles and does kill Bruno’s father. Needless to say, it is not the perfect murder and their conspiracy implodes almost immediately.

Deep Water is the story of Vic and Melinda Van Allen. Sleeping in separate rooms, Vic and Melinda have a sexless marriage. Independently wealthy, Vic is seemingly a stolid, placid man interested in nothing more than his small publishing house and his snail collection. Melinda is a party girl that likes to get drunk and carry on barely concealed affairs. They have an agreement that Melinda can have lovers as long as she isn’t completely overt about it. As I’ve said, they are just barely concealed, and their friends show sympathy and concern to Vic and try to convince him that he needs to do something to get Melinda back into the normal marital fold. Vic apparently reaches his limit one night and drowns Melinda’s current lover in a pool. Melinda becomes hysterical and immediately accuses Vic of murder and even hires a detective to discover evidence. Eventually she takes another lover. Vic dispatches him as well. As expected, it does not end well for anyone.

I found The Blunderer to be the most interesting of the three novels (which I wrote about here). Walter Stackhouse is a mild mannered lawyer. He has a neurotic wife named Clara. She is rude, mean, and abusive. She’s driven off all of his friends. She accuses him of having an affair with a music teacher. Her actions do eventually lead him to having an affair with the teacher. Clara finds out and attempts suicide. Feeling trapped in this disaster of a marriage, a news article catches his eye. It’s the story of a man’s wife that mysteriously died in a fall during a rest stop on a bus trip. Clipping and saving the article, Walter even visits the murder suspect to talk to him. When Clara takes a bus trip, Walter follows her. Clara gets off the bus at a rest stop and falls to her death (having once attempted suicide, she’s now successful). When the police investigate, they discover Walter’s news clipping, his visit to the suspected murderer, and the fact that he followed the bus. They immediately begin to suspect that he’s a copycat murderer. The fact is that he’s not, but there is so much evidence against him, nearly all of it of his own doing, that there is no escape for him. Again, as with most noir, it does not end happily for him.

So, those are the major plot points of all three novels. Anyone see a connection?

Yes, shrewish wives! In all three cases, the protagonists are mild mannered professional men (an architect, a book publisher, and a lawyer) that want nothing more than to be happy and in love. In all three cases, they are foiled by wives that make Medusa look tame in comparison. We have women that are openly carrying on extramarital affairs and women that are abusive and suicidal. In two of the novels, men fall in love with meek, mild mannered, loving, caring women that want nothing more than to bring happiness to their men. If only they could get rid of their harpy wives!

All of these novels were written in the 1950s. Especially in this genre, misogyny was kind of a given. It’s amusing to me that it’s a woman that’s writing these novels featuring such horrible women.

One possible explanation for this is that Highsmith was herself an interesting woman. An alcoholic, she was known to be caustic and hostile, preferring the company of animals to people. She was bisexual who apparently preferred to spend time with men but have sex with women. She seemingly didn’t have any long term intimate relationships. In fact, one of her female lovers ended up committing suicide. Being this type of person in the 1940s and 1950s must have been especially difficult.

Could this explain her bleak perspective on heterosexual marriage? Preferring to spend time with men, could she have empathized with their simplistic notions of a successful marriage and seen the apparently more complex demands of women as poisonous to happiness? Was one of the reasons that she had difficulty with long term intimate relationships was that she found women’s behavior to be unreasonable?

Obviously, I have no idea. I just found it interesting that possibly the leading female noir writer wrote so scathingly about wives.