A MOMENT Interview with Tom Cottle
A MOMENT INTERVIEW WITH TOM COTTLE Over the years, many of Boston clinical psychologist Tom Cottle's conversations with real people have been printed in these pages. The story of Menachem Kanter is...
...You leave those homes feeling very different from the way you feel...
...I think the issue is that I'm not included, I'm a little bit different, I'm a freak...
...And 1 guess what I do in my little way is to say, "Here is this story...
...They talked...
...The business of differentness, of human boundaries, in this country is a quintessential issue...
...they told stories...
...Now, the large majority of the people I talk to are not the people I'm socializing with every day, and so there are, typically, all kinds of canyons between us...
...I don't condone it, not for a minute...
...It's not Marxist—the proletarian.vs...
...It isn't the question that men have difficulty expressing feelings...
...Welf, I've heard that and a million . other remarks that are akin to that, and I suppose that's what I'm creeping toward...
...And those momzerim in Washington think that that's where they're going to save a few billion dollars...
...That guy in Allston is in Russia and in America and in Brighton and in Weston...
...The two-minute advice on radio and television, the mechanized style of life, the lack of any feeling for what a person's biography might be, and what the words might be as shorthand—we take them as shorthand rather than as possible expressions of something more profound...
...Don't think of just this child, bui think of this child in this moment as America...
...And in Washington today, there are more limousines, more mink coats...
...People are not "examples...
...But I never conceive them that way...
...I think that there are affluent people, and poor people, and there are no ways they unite...
...I don't know what my story is...
...That's what my hope would be, in a strange way, for this country...
...Part of me says, "No, we're all the same...
...It's curious how, when you are dealing with Jews, personal biography and group history are intertwined...
...If you go as deeply as you possibly can, you reach the area where all people touch...
...Within the account is the account...
...Just listening...
...It was Milstein talking about innocuous little things, about his superstitions when he played...
...nobody comes around to ask me about my story...
...Those stories are not anecdotes, although by dint of time limitations they have to come out as anecdotes...
...What would have been more interesting to me would have been a personal history...
...They were telling poor Jew stories...
...You're not asking what his profession is...
...But it's ideological...
...I bring my forms to them, my sense of aesthetics...
...I am not a very passive listener at all...
...They were talking about this meshugenah and that scandal:—they were talking about making a hamburger, and the hamburger fell off the plate, and they picked it up and ate it...
...I was never sent to Hebrew School, no bar mitzvah...
...You remember that guy I wrote about who gives things away...
...And the boats never should have come, and Ellis Island never should have let in, and the ports in Virginia never should have accepted, and the ports in Florida never should have accepted, and it goes on every day...
...They are not only giving me their account, but they are accounting for their account...
...The other minor reason is that I don't have the writing talent...
...I'm amazed that it's only as horrendous as it is...
...And maybe that's not so bad...
...Camp David is the Petite Trianon...
...All of America is in this child...
...I am struck dumb by the number of ways we've invented to make sure that life doesn't get touched...
...They have intra-psychic struggles that hold them back...
...I hate that, and I've tried to fight it...
...If a Jew feels that, it's because he's constantly looking into one of those fun house mirrors— which are really not very funny at all...
...And I don't need to analyze it...
...My father was invited to give a course at Hadassah Hospital in 1961...
...That's why I sit in a chair that tilts backwards and forwards and swivels, and I stand up...
...I don't think I have that, and I think that's partly the reason I'm not a novelist...
...Sometimes I think that the differentness about people is their class...
...My mother was a fabulous storyteller...
...The problem has to do with a certain group of people saying, "These are the feelings that we want men to be able to express as opposed to those feelings...
...You need a refrigerator...
...Coles, there are some times when I really don't think you know what you want us to talk about...
...And that's exactly right...
...That 45 percent of the men in those studies also show fear of success is not interesting because the issue is to show that women have a fear of success...
...I found Israel too exciting and marvelous...
...My thing is an oral talent...
...You could have learned seven more verbs, and nine more nouns, and a couple of funny expressions...
...You need medical care...
...They're going to Hebrew school and they will become bar and bat mitzvah...
...In the first couple of interviews, I could do a terrific job...
...When they get there, they want it all...
...It's interesting that it's the early-on accounts, which I could have improved upon, that they come back to...
...Forty percent of the kids in this country are improperly inoculated...
...Besides, I was raised on celebrities, and they scare the hell out of me, primarily because they pass through your life...
...It's the most reading unreadingness...
...I'll never be heard of by those people...
...It would be very clear when / came to the end of a chapter, when / would end a conversation...
...I try to establish some kind of mutuality...
...bourgeoisie tension—it's in the sinews, deep in the soul...
...Some of the things you're saying about the broken narcissism of the working class Jews is a personal recapitulation of some of that history...
...They are accounting for their lives...
...Terrific anti-Stalin feelings, terrific anti-Soviet feelings, the hatred of the place, and then .'of course, a great deal of anti-German feelings, a lot of Jewish feelings...
...It's amazing how a good job can make someone feel so wonderful psychically when, for the last six months, he has felt depressed...
...That was not the arrogant, immodest Heifetz who was known to most people...
...They would tell stories...
...I can't believe that this kind of stuff goes on...
...A 16-year-old's world is not the same as a 59-year-old's world...
...Stuff is said about people that is ridiculous...
...that's when I became very much involved with Israel and its history, and I read and read...
...he's in Brookline...
...You don't have to go to Versailles anymore...
...Forty-five percent have never seen a dentist...
...But I think the major thing that bothers me, where my heart really is, is just the outright assault on utterly innocent people...
...And they come back to that...
...I didn't find the Stockman article in The Atlantic so terrific...
...People espouse values that I really despise, take positions that are so antipathetic to me I could choke them...
...At the same time, at the same moment, you are your best friend and you are absolutely not your best friend...
...Is that how you perceive what you do...
...I am very self-conscious about my profession and what we do...
...It was just as good as having someone read me a bedtime story, even better...
...Isn't it a difficult transition from people who've made it to people who are bogged down...
...I want them to know the history, too, but most of all I want them to know the language...
...I think it's worse than that...
...there's no question about that...
...We carefully make sure that we don't hear these perspectives or, when we do hear them, we hear them wrapped up in such amazing wrappings that we miss the message altogether in order to perpetuate certain feelings and attitudes that we have...
...Would you admit you into this book...
...They would reveal their struggles and their pain...
...That's part of the political thrust of what I do...
...That is one of the little, political things that I do...
...What the hell kinds of lives are these people leading...
...Don't you get frustrated by thinking, as you listen to them, that you could improve on their stories...
...We're lucky it's not a million dollars...
...I can't do that in my heart...
...And I went with him because it was a free trip and a great opportunity to go to Greece...
...Look at yourself...
...Do you know, every article about me always mentions my religion...
...How much attention is being given to this one or that one...
...It was very minimal...
...And when you hold up a mirror to people, when society holds up a mirror, it's either concave or convex, so it distorts what you see...
...How real is it...
...Forty percent of the kids in this country are on their way to heart disease, hypertension, and they're not even ten years old...
...You have to be very careful what you say...
...And my profession is very, very guilty...
...Piatigorski's stories of getting out of Russia, floating down the Volga with his cello—people would just weep—"tell that story again"—and it would get more elaborate, now there were three cellos, and he was waterskiing or whatever, but they were wonderful...
...It's the most sophisticated unsophistication...
...Are Jews different...
...Not to worry...
...I don't think so...
...I just find people...
...Census tracts where 91 percent of the high school age kids are out of school...
...I have my complaints...
...And they can't make an inroad...
...My attachment to people is through their pain...
...We do it through numbers, we do it through statistics, and now we have a wonderful new psychological way of dehumanizing people—we have all new lexicons and books that they send us from New York City about people's behavior that isn't even close to where people live...
...NEVER DID LIKE MY MOTHER...
...What prompted you to go to Israel...
...It was Horowitz talking about his sister in Russia...
...On the other hand, there is our own feeling of specialness, with the lack of fit, with the narcissism—that we are the chosen, special, superior— and sometimes with a kind of broken narcissism—that we are damaged, that we are lacking, that we are missing something or missing out on something...
...I could make up a good story for you, but I don't feel that I have these big life events...
...There is something that carries over into the Jews that I talk to, something of an intellectual cum spiritual heritage, a reading heritage, a book heritage...
...It's being at the center and at the periphery at the exact same time...
...Jews are the people for whom the waters parted and the people of the Revelation—and the people of the pogroms and the martyrs'stakes...
...It's much clearer when you're told "Slay away" in four languages...
...I would much rather have you tell me the story than read it, even though I know you would write it much more eloquently...
...They didn't talk about meeting the Queen...
...Fifty-five percent of blacks are unemployed...
...You must never worry about not getting help...
...But they weren't just telling Johnny Carson celebrity stories...
...We rarely went to temple...
...Or why this woman beats her children...
...But there are other parts of my life that don't radicalize me— living in a house, paying taxes, living in a community like this, a child now coming to me wanting to go to a private high school...
...Tremendous tensions between the rich relative and the notso-rich relative, which far transcend just that interpersonal business that touches upon all kinds of migration patterns and suburb-city patterns...
...It's a lot like adolescence, where people are totally, totally independent and absolutely utterly other people at the same time...
...I am particularly sensitive to the kinds of issues that keep people from getting what they want—that they're black, that they're poor, that they're Jewish, that something is going on in their lives that keeps them from getting someplace...
...And of course some of them were not Jewish...
...There's a won-.derful passage in one of Bob Coles' books where a woman pats Bob on the knee and says, "You know, Dr...
...People have a marvelous quality—you see it in therapy a lot—that the first session is headlines...
...And no one will tell you how he leads his life without telling you his feelings...
...Well, you know what I mean," they say...
...There may be a lot of gates to that city, but there's only one door to that culture, only one...
...But fundamentally, that's not what's making people beat their kids, and that's not what's keeping people from jobs...
...How does he live with what he did...
...The country has never made peace with people who have all legal rights to call themselves Americans...
...But I'll stay close to those people, and, if nothing else, they'll keep me honest so that I can have this conversation instead of saying, "Let me tell you about this wonderful interview I did with this or that famous person...
...they're not really accepted...
...POLAND UP FOR GRABS...
...They can't budge, year in, year out...
...The livery services have more and bigger limousines than ever...
...The Reagans and the Ehrlichmans and the Stockmans are people who are all practicing a very powerful form of denial...
...Or the real horrors in the culture...
...I want them, absolutely, to know Hebrew...
...I just love to hold up that Whitehead dictum, "Seek simplicity, and when you find it, doubt it...
...That, to me, is not a metaphor...
...The story of Menachem Kanter is another of these reports...
...You talk to a vast number of people—hundreds, or thousands—and a bunch of them are Jews, and while each story is unique, in your own head there's got to be some teasing out of generalizations, of categories...
...I will say to someone, "You know, that's a lot of crap...
...it's that he reflects a peculiar kind of unsettledness...
...My parents were both raised as Orthodox Jews and, from what I gather, couldn't wait to get rid of it all...
...I just talk with people...
...I'm not even a molecule to them...
...How does he live with what he did to avoid the Vietnam War, his scurrying about in divinity schools, and his Michigan upbringing...
...She grew up with a lot of them...
...They don't have any of their own teeth...
...They did not come to elaborate their recent successes of the last week...
...What I'm trying to say is that the country has never made peace with immigration...
...watching Reagan in a press conference...
...And after months and months of interviewing, the elaborations are all there...
...Are Jews different...
...We're always throwing another thing in there...
...And that's what I got from both my parents, from being'Hhe son of a doctor as well as being the son of two people both of whom came from an extraordinary amount of pain, from dire poverty...
...Yet that's clearly what I'm after...
...Another way is to put walls up...
...that is, I try, as best I can, to be linked to them...
...If you looked into that mother's eyes, you wouldn't cut her food stamps...
...There's a kind of literate illiteracy, when you find it...
...It's the business of our lack of languages, that we continue to demand that everybody speak American...
...In moment, you've written about people who are, superficially, quite unprepossessing, and yet, somehow, you manage to find exciting qualities in them...
...it was the real thing...
...I would be more content with barbed wire...
...And then I begin to think that the real difference is a steady job versus the lack of a steady job and then someone says something that knocks that one down...
...It is unconscionable, it is unlivable...
...They are part of a group that has all those Nobel laureates, but they're not part of that group because they don't follow the normal trajectory...
...I cannot believe the numbers of kids who have never seen dentists or pediatricians, who have never been properly inoculated, who are malnourished...
...And I never got to Greece...
...I'm utterly convinced that the only sacred issue is the life of one single man or woman...
...To hear the boredom in 13 and 14 year olds who relate how the only really exciting thing around here is a good car accident every once in a while...
...Or the kids who will offer me anything I want, from a woman to a drug to stolen refrigerators and stoves and cars, which I hear two or three times a month...
...There's an urbanity, an awareness, a collective sense that transcends just political awareness...
...These were celebrities, musicians, many of my mother's close friends...
...If you write about one person, obviously, aesthetically, you want to make that person memorable...
...I wasn't told that, but it was very clear that there were certain things you didn't do...
...I listen to this guy who beats his wife...
...Wonderful...
...MID-EASTERN CRISIS...
...And the interesting thing is, that's what the kids like the most, which makes obvious psychological sense: the competence, the skills, the capacity to learn these other symbols, and that they make sense, and then you have this kind of secretive thing that you can do with only a few people and that's wonderful...
...Great idea...
...But you have to be as liberal as possible in accepting the way they are...
...The deepest emotional intensity seems to open up the vessels where all political science and sociology and anthro1 pology pour in...
...this one has never been to the state of Massachusetts or to Chicago...
...Issues like: Only women have fear of success...
...Or why the average age of beginning to drink and take drugs in this country is 12 or 13...
...C'mon...
...And I believe very strongly that the story they tell is all...
...Special ed programs for Spanish-speaking kids where not one teacher speaks Spanish...
...We just don't like the emotions they express...
...You are a total replica of your parents and absolutely will have nothing to do with your parents...
...historical battles with the past, fine...
...For Horowitz, the piano wasn't fit, and so on...
...How do you suddenly turn human life into deficits and budget cuts...
...TROUBLE WITH FATHER...
...It's not a woman's drama or a,man's drama...
...If you ever talk to people who live in New Bedford, and on the Cape—if you don't have food stamps, your kids are going to die right before your eyes...
...Another aspect of that is my own prejudices...
...They're with upper plates by the time they're 14, 15, 16...
...I don't say, "Now you've heard this little Jewish kid from Brighton, and now I'm going to tell you what he's really saying...
...this one can barely speak English...
...People have neuroses that hold them back...
...His depression, that's a big story...
...The sweet and sour cabbage would come out, it was a real oral thing...
...If it closed click-click you had to open it up again...
...That's where you find the universals...
...It was kind of a lost period of my life, and a chance to go, and it was over the summer, so why not...
...And how do you do it...
...That gets them into a whole discussion about inflation and that they've never had a good job and their mother never had a good job and their father was always unemployed...
...I got people-talk...
...They have important events that ring with some kind of political impact...
...And in the name of psychologizing, we are dehumanizing people, we're giving them a whole new lexicon...
...Some of them are horrible, terrible, frightening, frustrating, angry...
...It is very simple that in those areas where people will really talk about their hopes, or their despairs, or their fright or their terror—not their Oedipus complex or their need for dependency or their ability to cope—that kind of crap lexicon drives me up a wall—but where they talk about the most human feelings, and then go deeper and deeper and deeper, it's those areas where, simultaneously, they're talking most personally...
...Only a quarter of a million dollars on china...
...They could complain...
...Because what they are saying at the beginning is, "I don't know how much of my interior decorating I want to show you...
...I've never heard a more painful, more agonizing, lack of attachment coupled with attachment tha^I hear from poor, working class Jews...
...When I was a child, exciting people would come to our home, and I'd listen to all these, marvelous stories...
...Age continues to be one of the extraordinary differences...
...I walk different, I eat different food, I have kinky hair, speak funny words...
...Nobody ever seemed interested in my story...
...You know that line, "If you save one life, you've saved all mankind...
...It forces you to remain life-sized...
...When you talk to people about what they do every day, eventually they give you their sadness...
...There are such incredibly primitive, atavistic, unformed, totally misunderstood feelings about one's neighbors, one's literal as well as metaphoric neighbors, in this country, that it is amazing that we have as little violence as we have...
...this one has never known what affluence is...
...They come and they go...
...You'll get it...
...It's that kind of a quality that I find...
...That's hard for me, because I'm bad at generalizing...
...It became that...
...Now for a glimpse of the vision behind these stories, we share with you our conversation with Cottle himself...
...Or the Jewish parent who says, "Now, you have to dress very carefully...
...It's one of the strangest countries in the world...
...I'm also struck by what terrible misinformation we have about this culture, how we fixate on certain things by dint of who we are rather than on the lives of people who, if you ever ask them, can give you a wholly different perspective...
...We heard tales of people coming out of poverty, climbing out of poverty, out of oppressed, not-so-hot lives because God gave them a talent...
...I can't believe what goes on in jails...
...To me it's both very simple and obvious on the one hand, and, on the other, more complex than—thankfully—anyone in this generation will ever understand...
...But I don't attribute to it anything other than what should be attributed to it...
...You could tell a dirty joke in those three weeks...
...it's the in-sensitivity on the part of people who are out of touch with what's going on in these homes...
...all they are in those moments that they talk to me are the stories they tell, even if the story is about how they went to buy peanut butter and they noticed how the price has already gone up eight cents since last week...
...I can't believe when doctors tell me what they pull out of kids' bodies—light bulbs, coke bottles, cigarette wrappers that are shoved into people's orifices...
...But beat those people...
...this one has never owned his own home...
...There were all kinds of reasons not to do it...
...And it's not just that the David Stockpersons of the world would cut programs...
...And so I go about talking to these families, asking, essentially, how do you lead your life...
...I don't do what I do because I think I'm going to get anywhere...
...I never got celebrity-talk...
...For Milstein, there wasn't a conductor in the world...
...And we heard talk...
...I remember him telling that before he went on, the fiddle case used to have to be closed CLICK...
...To enter Jewish history is to enter this virtual schizophrenia in which the most extraordinary, wonderful things keep happening—redemption all the time—and the most terrible things keep happening...
...He has a big event, and that is: How is he going to feed those four people...
...It was not, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be that great chance...
...What you're saying is that this culture is very badly flawed, that you hear the stories of its flaws regularly, that the culture itself, whether it wants to deceive or it needs to deceive in order to preserve itself, tries to hide the flaws...
...Maybe it's this: On the one hand, when people talk about us as a race, as the Jewish race, we stand up and say, "What is that...
...And finally, there is some kind of a close— a chapter close, because, obviously, the thing never ends...
...Is your political strategy, then, to force your stories on these people...
...But instead, they hold up the mirror, and show a grotesque image...
...I don't want to romanticize these conversations...
...Who really represents my roots...
...You never see what you are...
...As you hold one group up to show their special pain you're distorting the truth not only about another group—those nasty, nasty boys and men—but you're distorting the very people you're romanticizing...
...Do you think they'll listen...
...She got to know them when they were not famous...
...We still call people Haitian Americans, Italian Americans, German Americans, Jewish Americans, Black Americans...
...I do read an enormous amount of autobiography and biography, but I would much rather have you tell it...
...In our home, over the kasha—because in our home when the Russians came we had kasha—it was the food and the talk...
...My kids are being trained...
...My mother was a concert pianist, so it happened that her friends were these people...
...I'm struggling with this...
...We have never made peace with one another...
...That's not a particularly profound statement, but there are some who would make us believe that with high school students we have all the wisdom of the ages...
...AH the media psychologists—including myself—are going to drive me out of mind making human behavior so damned simple...
...And with that, we have the most extraordinary ways of oppressing people, just making life very, very difficult for people, and ways that powerful people have of totally losing touch with their constituencies, which really causes my heart to ache the most...
...They were interested in my grades, they were interested in my performance, but not in what my story was...
...Wonderful...
...I do try to establish a couple of things in these conversations...
...Doesn't that radicalize you...
...When the goyim came, it was roast beef and those candied peaches...
...What really is going on in this culture...
...Aside from the ethnic flavor from all the visitors, what was your Jewish childhood about...
...The Kentucky Derby...
...it's angry...
...What about your own story...
...But in that moment, you're also trying to say that the universality of all of our lives is captured in that one person...
...Men express a lot of emotions...
...It's almost like being a fun house, to try to see yourself as a Jew...
...There are many ways you can barricade people, keep them out...
...It's that kind of mentality...
...I have little puny stories...
...It was complaining...
...Still, I guess I'm most attracted to the plights of the elderly and the plights of kids...
...The link between the musical and the non-musical world, for me, is the talking and listening...
...And then, as it goes on, as it goes into the first year and the second year of talking, that account becomes incredibly elaborated...
...How do you find the people you talk to...
...Give me a working class guy or a working class woman and they'll be there all the time, but the celebrity is in Chicago for two days, they play with the orchestra Friday afternoon, Saturday night, and on Monday they go to Milwaukee and you don't see them until next y ear's booking...
...I am much more a listener and a talker than I am a reader...
...I feel my stories are smaller than life-size...
...This one is a child, and black...
...It bothers some people, that I go on for page after page, but that is my way of saying that the story is all they say, that existence is nothing more than a story...
...So I'm a story collector...
...I'm utterly convinced that there's only one door to the culture...
...I think that's the leftover musical talent that I have that never got anywhere...
...I haven't really thought that much about it, but there is something...
...What kind of a race are we...
...If they moved that cabinet a little, and changed the wallpaper, I could make it so haimish, it would be charming...
...So I heard those stories, and they were told by the greatest storytellers...
...They all want into this rich thing...
...What's the quick transformation, a transformation that happened so suddenly that you don't even see it in yourself...
...And so we perpetuate a whole set of beliefs about people that, in the name of humanizing them, dehumanizes them in the most incredible way...
...it's that they leave you all the time...
...I cannot abide what happens to millions and millions of kids in this country...
...But it's not that he's the universal man...
...And the more I talk with people, the more I am convinced that what keeps people from getting things is far more sociological and political than it is psychological...
...But wrong...
...I don't have any feeling that I'm going to beat anybody...
...That bothers me...
...Who is it that I'm really attached to...
...Can you really beat them...
...And I suppose what I do there is to try and implicate myself in their lives in some way, to live with them in such a way that both of us feel we matter to each other...
...this one is 35 years older than I am...
...They themselves are not affluent or educated or whatever it is that they are not, but they are still potentially victimized as Jews...
...Still, I guess that I find the Jews a unique group, and it has to do, in my mind, with their feelings that they're not really there...
...It's not much of a shift...
...Somebody once suggested that the Jewish poor are middle class people without money...
...I can't believe the lack of attention people get in hospitals...
...That's why I am so infuriated with so many books that come out supposedly written in well-meaning ways, typically, these days, about women, and in the process, perpetuating a lot of malarkey...
...But when the Russians came, it was a very different thing...
...Three million kids in America are denied the right to go to school, kids who can't go to school because they wet their beds at night...
...These are not vignettes...
...Typically, they were stories of homelessness, of being uprooted, and remembering this one's mother and this one's father who died without a penny, who never heard them play, of relatives who were left back there, with a terrific ambivalence about Russia...
...I remember Heifetz plucking at a fiddle, and I listened closely because I wanted to hear him play, and he said, "You don't want to hear this...
...He's got an everyday story which is, somehow, really life-size...
...I read enough of the New York journalists, and I'm just about convinced, and then somebody shakes me and says, "It's a human drama...
...Or why these kids eat what they eat...
...They're talking so idiosyn-cratically that it could only be that person, it is uniquely that person's own experience, and, at the same time, they're bringing in all kinds of social and political and religious and spiritual issues that everybody deals with...
...And another way, which people do talk about, is to hold mirrors up...
...The other thing that I'm trying to do is to hunt for stories...
...That's a big event...
...They just can't make an inroad...
...Israel would be nice, but it was a great opportunity to go to Greece...
...My work is really devoted to trying to understand how people lead their lives, what they want out of life, how they go about getting it, and what keeps them from getting it...
...And what really is going on in suburban homes...
...One way is with barbed wire...
...She wasn't attracting celebrity—these were her business associates, and it just so happened that she was in a celebrity business...
...But I also feel in a way that it would be redundant...
...he's in Newton...
...He just gave me the analysis...
...it was bitching...
...And all the rest follows rather nobly, though not easily, through that one door...
...It's when they get off on making decorations for the sukkah, and that goes on for several weeks—the gourds, and the this and the that—and I'm thinking...
...It's not that they're bigger than life...
...And then there will be a series of conversations and I think it's amazing that despite those differences the human issues are almost identical...
...Well, it does...
...That's all that really matters to me, that life—individual men and women, boys and girls...
...The most recent examples, obviously, are the Cubans in Miami, or the wet-bacfebusiness in Mexico, or the Chicanos in Colorado and Arizona and California or the Jews wherever the hell they are, or the Greek Americans in this place and the German Americans in that place, or the American census which, ten years ago, had the Haitians listed among the Spanish-speaking...
...And they were essentially stories of struggle...
...I could come in, and I could also decorate their houses...
...And sometimes it's wonderful that we do, because that gives us all our uniqueness and our ethnicity, and sometimes it's because there are a lot of people who would like a lot of these other people out, and gone forever...
...it's personal journalism which, as far as I'm concerned, is just atrocious and wrong...
...And I'm not so sure I even have much of a story...
...And I fight with them sometimes...
...And that women fall apart over interpersonal relationships but men only fall apart over business...
...This doesn't happen, that doesn't happen, I could wring this one's neck, but I don't have the day-by-day story, as, for example, the guy who's been unemployed now for three and a half years...
...They have day-by-day achievements that ring with sociological truths...
...And sometimes I'm almost trapped into believing that it's sex differences that matter most...
...What the hell are they going to do...
...And the more they revealed, the more human they became...
...If—I'm thinking about The Cinderella Complex—if women struggle with the issue of dependency, so do men...
...He already gave it to me...
Vol. 7 • May 1982 • No. 5
