The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (60 page)

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14. '...gather power to himself.' (p. 98)

In his dream of 'enterprise socialism', Mr Kane envisioned medical services being offered within a free enterprise system, with doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies competing for customers on the grounds of service, quality, cost, and efficacy—a far cry from the way those three constituents of the Health Mafia now batten on the misery and illness of a nation that lacks the political courage to reduce their criminal overcharges to an acceptable level. In Mr Kane's ideal world the national government would establish acceptable levels of competence and performance and would set reasonable limits on the costs of treatments, operations, fees, and medications and the profits to be made by them. The keystone to Mr Kane's system of health provision was that the doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies were paid so much a day while their client was well and healthy, and nothing when the client was ill, thus removing all incentives, even those that are denied or unrecognized, for carelessness, over-prescription, failure to concentrate on prevention rather than on cure, and intentional ignorance of alternative health systems. Mr Kane's utopian system would focus on the client's health, not on his illness.

When it came to responding to the basic human right to all the education one can fruitfully use, once again Mr Kane's oxymoronic 'enterprise socialism' took the provision of services away from politics and politicians. The central government would pay for our education, but schools would no longer be under the control of local boards of education that are so easily infiltrated by proscriptive special interest, narrow-minded bias, and racial or cultural bigotry. A federal agency would set national goals for literacy, numeracy, and general knowledge, and it would establish standards for teacher training and for facilities. He envisioned networks of privately owned and operated schools that can prove they have with no affiliations to religion or cults. These schools would compete for the 'school tickets' the government issued through parents or, in some cases, through a court acting in loco parentis. In their eagerness to attract and keep the students' valuable 'school tickets', these private schools would hire the best teachers they could find and pay them whatever was necessary to keep them, and they would develop the most attractive and efficient learning structures and ambiances possible. There would be 'higher trade schools' in medicine, law, architecture, business administration, engineering, etc., and there would be schools that specialized in training people for service work, selling, helping, repairing, etc. Other schools would offer artisan apprenticeships, and others would teach technological and industrial methods, and yet others that concentrated on a liberal education, offering that broad education in the arts, history, and culture that is necessary for an informed citizen in a democracy. It would be from stellar students in this field that the future's teachers would come.

There would be ancillary services that sought to discover and measure the strengths, aptitudes, personal tastes and aspirations of individual students. And there would be special structures for gifted children and for those to whom learning did not come easily. Both of these groups would receive 'school tickets' of higher value, because they both need more intensive, more personal teaching. Mr Kane's eyes glittered behind this steel-rimmed glasses as he described the educational utopia he had once hoped would replace American assembly-line public education in which over-worked, under-paid, often mediocre and uninspired teachers push unmotivated students from grade to grade then dump them out into the world with a level of knowledge, taste, and skill that is the laughing stock of the developed world.

He realized that there were special problems in rural areas, where students were thinly spread and opportunities for choice and competition would be limited, and for these he had a very modern solution. Short-wave buff that he was, he envisioned electronic schools that combined recorded lectures with live discussions by amateur radio. There would be additional information through the post, and personal visits by traveling specialist teachers. Three or four large radio education companies would compete for students across the nation. What educational marvels might Mr Kane have constructed had he envisioned interactive television*, email, and computer technology?

Alas, Mr Kane's quixotic brand of utopian socialism was founded on the unreliable belief that homo sapiens is, at heart, a compassionate species.

* He might have envisioned at least the television teaching aid, because as early as 1931, the year the Empire State Building was built, there were almost 30,000 television receivers in the country, 9,000 of these in New York City alone. The Second World War delayed the development of television for five years.

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15. '...approval was sought' (p. 101)

The first Negroes to appear on Pearl Street's run-down north end, were two families of a type we would now call socially mobile: men with jobs, well-spoken women, clean, neatly-dressed kids. They were representative of the natural leaders who used to live within the Black communities and serve as cultural leavening in the bad old days before the advent of civil rights. In 1948, I made my first, and embarrassingly ineffective, public speech on the Seattle docks, where I harangued a handful of off-work, stevedores who remained majestically indifferent as I passionately denounced the unjust hiring practices that excluded Blacks from working on the docks.

Like most socialists working for civil rights in the 'Fifties I assumed that after we had buried the laws and practices that had produced the inner city ghetto, many gifted Blacks would choose to remain with their people as teachers, entrepreneurs and political leaders, at least until educational and cultural equality caught up with equality under the law. We (those of us who were Black as well as those who were White) blithely expected these escapees from the ghettoes to sacrifice, or at least to limit, their personal success and that of their children for the good of their people. I cannot now imagine why we assumed that the Black American bourgeoisie would be morally superior to the White American bourgeoisie which had, generation after generation and in one ethnic group after another, abandoned the less gifted, the less motivated, the less lucky of their racial brothers and fled the slums to join in the Great Money Scramble. It is not possible to blame the modern Blacks who have escaped with their children from the violence and hopelessness of the ghetto, but it remains true that in important ways the Black slums of the 'Thirties and 'Forties were better places to bring up children than are the ghettoes of today, because they contained the merchants, the entrepreneurs, the artists, the preachers; the gifted, and the hard-working; the natural mentors, minders and models; the men and women whose departure from the ghettoes impoverished the social scene.

Hard working and well behaved though they were, those first two Black families that were the social pioneers to advance their frontier onto Pearl Street were feared and resented, even by those who would have denied being racists. (After all, they openly admired the great boxing champion, Joe Louis, hadn't they? Calling him 'a credit to his race'?) These newcomers were resented be cause they had managed to find jobs when most of our men had not, and because of their relative cultural refinement, which we denigrated as 'uppitiness'; and they were feared because it was an element of received wisdom that if one Negro family got onto your block, the first thing you know the whole street would be Negro. Like they say: 'Give 'em an inch, and they'll take an ell.'

I wonder if anyone on Pearl Street knew what the hell an ell was?

Today, my block of North Pearl Street is totally Black, and has been for more than fifty years, according to the old man (a man of my age, that is) with whom I chatted during a visit to the United States, in 1987. We sat side by side on the front stoop of his house, which had been my house many years earlier, and we talked long and lazily about the past, about crazy things we had done as kids and the hot water we had gotten into, about how little of what they call 'progress' is worth a damn, and about how everything today seems to be going to hell in a handbasket... Hell, even the food doesn't taste as good as it used to. We talked as old men do.

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16. '...a very yankee village' (p. 102)

Not long before her death from Alzheimer's disease in the 1980's, when 'Black' was enjoying its moment of political correctness before 'Afro-American', then 'African American', became the nomenclatural obligation, my mother sharply corrected a man on a bus for using the word 'Black', instead of the more respectful 'Negro'. The man who had been guilty of this gaffe was Black, and he must have had an understanding nature, because he simply nodded, showing no offense at being admonished by this nutty old honky.

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17. '...and badly-farmed' (p. 103)

They soon wore out their thin, stony soil by over-planting and not being able to run enough livestock to replenish the earth with their droppings. The popular image of Indians as ecologically-aware guardians of Nature's bounty is a myth invented by White ad-men grinding out copy for anti-pollution campaigns. The pre-Columbian Indians' destructive slash-and-burn agriculture required them to move to fresh land every few years, and they hunted into extinction the horse, the mammoth, the giant elk... indeed, with the sole exception of the bison, all the large mammals they found when they crossed the Barring land bridge from Mongolia. And many Indians are still wasteful and insouciant hunters, as anyone knows who has observed the rapid decline of game stock wherever Indians hunt and fish with modern equipment and without restriction.

With the exception of hunting all large species of animals to extinction, except the bison, my Indian ancestors did little permanent ecological damage, not because they walked the land sensitively, but because they walked it infrequently and lightly, being relatively few in number, and lacking the technology to inflict on Nature the irreparable harm that hoards of Whites subsequently did, with their buffalo guns and combine harvesters, their overgrazing of the government-owned semi-arid high plateaus, their filth-spewing factories, their insistence on growing irrigated crops where Nature doesn't want crops, on washing their cars and flushing their toilets with drinking water, and on retiring to water-guzzling golf courses in deserts, with their leaky atomic waste storage, their rapacious fishing of cod of the Grand Banks to the point of extinction, their criminal drilling for oil in fragile permafrost tundra, their mindless use of pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, genetically engineered crops, and all the rest of their greedy, lazy, short-sighted... ...oh, to hell with them!

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18. '...he'd do for me' (p. 128)

At times of danger Britt Reid became the Green Hornet and rode around in a super-fast car that sounded like a loud hornet, but at other times he went through life as an ordinary person, his unique qualities and powers unrecognized by those around him... just like me. A couple of years later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kato, the Green Hornet's faithful Japanese valet became overnight his 'faithful Filipino valet'. I had briefly considered modeling myself on that wealthy young man-about-town, Lamont Cranston who, as the Shadow, clouded criminals' minds so that they could not see him. “Who knows what evil darkness lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows! (evil laugh)” The Shadow, who was brought to radio listeners in the northeast by Blue Coal, had learned occult powers of invisibility in the mysterious Orient, and that was a pretty attractive idea: being invisible and able to stand right beside someone when he was doing something he shouldn't be doing, then suddenly laughing or speaking, and the person would just about piss himself with fright. I don't think there was a boy in America who didn't ponder the fact that if he had the Shadow's power of invisibility not only would he be able to thwart the forces of evil, but he could also sneak into the girls' dressing room at school and stand there in the corner... not touching or anything... just standing there. Wow. The closest I came to being the Shadow was to hide in the darkest corner of our hallway, and then suddenly laugh a deep scary laugh as my little sister and a playmate passed by. But they screamed and my sister went crying to my mother, so I gave up being Lamont Cranston.

The Shadow's true identity was known only to 'his friend and companion, the lovely Margo Lane'. For a woman to go about in the company of a man as his 'companion' was pretty racy stuff in the 1930s. (I wonder if The Shadow's Margo Lane and Superman's Lois Lane were related? Those Lane girls get around.)

I also considered being the star of a comic book that had recently appeared on the news stands with a character called Batman, alias Bruce Wayne, who fought criminals (and later Nazis) with a lot of Bat-gadgets he confected in the basement laboratory of his fabulous mansion. And there was also Clark Kent, who passed for a mild-mannered reporter until the need to save someone obliged him to become Superman. But my talks with Mr Kane on his side steps had made a socialist of me, so I found it difficult to identify with someone who had come to Earth from another planet, or who was fabulously rich—a condition as farfetched on Pearl Street as being from another planet. In my view, the special strength and clever devices these heroes possessed gave them so much advantage over the forces of evil that all the challenge and fun was taken out of the contest. It was like characters who have magic powers. Dull. Like Harry Potter. I dismissed Superman with particular scorn on the grounds of basic physics. It was the way he flew through the air that outraged my understanding of gravity and the law of equal and opposite forces. If he had bounded from place to place by taking huge leaps with his super-strong legs, that would have been acceptable; but to jump up, then turn in the air and fly along. No. That flouted the laws of physics. Sorry, Superman. Next!