POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Trump: The Art of the Deal. Donald J. 'frump, Tony Schwartz. Random House, $19.95. Here's the deal. You pay a company totally independent of me a nominal fee, I give you a...
...Money's status is plainly sinking, and Trump is scrambling for a lifeboat...
...And the future...
...Nuclear-age education" should replace "survivalist" mentality and convince teens that they can still make a difference in an age of Stealth bombers, Midgetmen missiles, and Trident submarines...
...Two decades worth of studies suggest that he spoke for more than a few scrawny kids in Brooklyn...
...Some are truly beneficial (jobs, revitalization) but in large part they result in the creation of luxury apartments on public subsidy and gaming halls that appeal to people's most pathetic motives...
...the man, woman, and child asleep in a single telephone booth in New York City...
...NBC stayed in condo-less Rockefeller Plaza...
...has pointed out that his version of what he did to tenants who blocked his plans for a glass tower on Central Park South is mild compared to the ugly reality...
...It should also be noted that Kozol's book is about only one segment of the homeless population— homeless families...
...Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry...
...He avoids risk, seldom tells the whole truth, and likes to put no money down...
...Nothing is said about the debacle of deinsti tutionalization and the abysmal failure of public psychiatric services which have produced so many clisturbed and untreated homeless individuals...
...In fact, this was a 15-by-25 foot nickel Art Deco piece that Trump ordered cut up (and presumably sold...
...While reading the 41-year-old's autobiography, I kept hearing Trump issue that wheedling proposal between the smooth, cowritten lines on the page...
...By casual feints, he gets people to sign letters of intent they will regret...
...He states categorically that, "the cause of homelessness is lack of housing!' Nobody will dispute that gentrification and urban redevelopment of inner cities have produced a dramatic decline in low-cost housing...
...For some," La Farge writes, "[the world] became no bigger than a tennis ball, lovingly cradled ." For La Farge these exercises are important avenues to "empowerment ." Most children are so numbed by the nuclear threat that they've lost faith in their ability to affect it...
...Increasing the availability of low-cost housing is essential to solving the homeless problem, but if Rachel and her children were placed in such housing today, they still would suffer...
...Thus my recommendation: no deal...
...Whatever her biases, La Farge does make it clear that our nuclear education is woefully inadequate...
...But parents and children rarely discuss even the most mundane public problems...
...Studies in many cities have established that approximal:ely one-third of all homeless individuals are mentally ill—mostly with schizophrenia—and another third are addicted to alcohol and/or drugs...
...There's no particular taboo on nuclear issues...
...Or as Kozol puts it, "It is the present we must deal with, and the future we must fear...
...Reined in, Trump might make an effective public servant: the next Democratic administration could call him on his promise to give something back and appoint him to head a Works Project Administration or build a bullet train...
...I receive an unbelievably tiny percentage, so small I'd be embarrassed to admit it here (my dad might find out...
...and while 'frump was raising the $100,000, he was urging NBC to relocate its headquarters to his Television City site in New York...
...Of course we should spend more time with our children talking about nuclear weapons— and a host of other divisive questions they'll have to face...
...Trump is showing off what he's worth and thereby advertising the saddest effect of pure capitalism on personality: the person as product...
...Such images remain with the reader long after the book is put down...
...Trump's no artist, he's artful...
...Compassionate...
...And at upscale dinner parties only AIDS challenges homelessness as the issue of discussion between the couscous and chicken cordon bleu...
...I like making deals," he writes at the start...
...This is a book you can tell by its cover...
...Trump leads a collection for $100,000, then presents the check...
...We should spend more time with them, period...
...Perhaps Kozol sensed this himself and for that reason relegated his suggestions to an appendix...
...The leader tells them to imagine something they fear, then to "embrace it, draw it in, rest [their] hands on its shoulders ." Next they pretend that they're holding the world—which proves too heavy for most of the girls, until the leader encourages them to scale things down...
...Your risk is what, $19.95, drinks at the Grand Hyatt or maybe the Trump Parc or the Trump Plaza...
...If teachers discuss only the dangers of nuclear war, but do not, for instance, give mention to deterrence, then we've hardly enhanced students' capacity for independent thought...
...I take all the risk here...
...is] what I get to keep," he says...
...NBC put Trump in touch with her...
...A perfectionist who at a time of grotesque governmental incompetence could easily take on, that's right, national responsibility...
...La Farge calls on parents and teachers to explicitly convey the "destructiveness" of nuclear weapons...
...Homelessness in America has become the issue of the 1980s...
...But then, it's hard to see Richard Gephardt reining in the megalomaniacal "frump, a guy who once gave his second-grade music teacher a black eye after deciding he knew more than the teacher about music...
...But consider: that farmwoman was Tom Brokaw's story...
...The debate over how to teach nuclear war to kids grew up right alongside the nuclear freeze movement during Reagan's first term...
...He set out to describe an underclass of children which is increasing daily and which is going to grow into an army of illiterate, unemployable, developmentally arrested adults...
...Kozol's purpose is to describe the "sad realities" of homeless families and insofar as this is his only purpose, he succeeds...
...It irritates him that architecture critics are accorded cultural esteem while casino operators and real estate developers have little...
...For example, Rachel has been a drug addict, and no one has yet devised a satisfactory strategy for preventing benefits intended for children from being taken by drug-addicted parents...
...Crown, $16.95...
...Among other things, Trump wants to be considered an artist...
...Hollywood celebrities lead sleep-ins on heating grates, bag-lady-chic is the latest in clothing, and Lily Tomlin has added an impersonation of a street person to her comedy routine...
...The problem begins at home, La Farge writes, where the nuclear subject is so "anxiety-laden" that parents won't raise it...
...The twenty-first century, "is going to punish us...
...A contributing editor of Parents magazine, she takes us to the kind of classrooms she would like to see teach kids about nuclear war, including a workshop at the 92nd Street "Y" in New York, where a circle of atom-anxious girls are "embracing the tiger...
...The American Federation of Teachers criticized the packet, as did President Reagan, who said the guide had the effect of "frightening and brainwashing American schoolchildren ." La Farge takes the left flank...
...No, all I'm hoping for is that a few of you around the nation will see me for what I am...
...Because Kozol does not address broader issues than the lack of housing, his proposed solutions are unsatisfactory...
...Alcohol and drug addiction play major roles in causing homelessness among families and these addictions gnaw at the solutions proposed to help them...
...Harper and Row, $15.95...
...Or, "skyscrapers are machines for making money...
...The policies of the Reagan administration, determined to get the federal government out of the housing business, have further exacerbated this crisis...
...and Rachel herself, a homeless mother in New York, who pleads with Kozol: "Can you get the government to know that we exist...
...And now Trump is selling to a larger market...
...Anyway, my upside isn't even the money...
...Trump says preserving the friezes would have cost him hundreds of thousands in weeks of delays on the Trump Tower—a ridiculous assertion from the man who, in the blink of an eye (and, yes, amazingly) built an iceskating rink that the city government had bungled for more than five years...
...Even when 'frump's giving it away he's trying to make it...
...Fuller Torrey...
...Kozol is unable, however, to move beyond these images...
...He protests that he doesn't do it for the moolah, but for creative fulfillment...
...It is also inextricably intertwined with a lack of job training, with an extraordinarily bureaucratized welfare system, and with national policies which have left 21 percent of our nation's children living below the poverty level...
...So much for the art of the deal...
...The whole foreclosure charade was a way of impressing NBC...
...It's a craft for the media age— using the press to panic politicians and rivals...
...Trump shows little interest in such questions of social responsibility...
...The stories that follow don't exactly bolster Trump's case...
...All we've done is frighten them...
...He wants a national image, but not the one he's got in New York as a ruthless arriviste...
...So what's a nucleo-neurotic kid to do...
...Chapters end with eight-digit sums of what he netted...
...Philip Weiss The Strangelove Legacy: Children, Parents and Teachers in the Nuclear Age, Phyllis La Farge...
...She argues strongly that this is apolitical, that it will allow children to decide for themselves the best way to prevent nuclear war...
...But while this sounds like a neutral approach, it's not...
...Recently, I discovered that several of my brighter students thought INF was a football league and "deterrent" a laundry cleaner...
...The relevant issue...
...As for elective office, it would be crazy to give it to Trump for the very reason (admirably again) that he won't take his companies public—he wants to make his own decisions...
...In 1983, the Massachusetts branch of the National Education Association teamed up with the Union of Concerned Scientists to produce "Choices" —a package of teaching materials that provided graphic detail of how many would be killed in a nuclear war...
...Kozol would argue that these issues are beyond the scope of his hook...
...He can employ strongarm pressure or back off laughing...
...There's no real concern with other people in this book...
...And the consequences of these deals...
...But this conversion may require more than an imaginary communion with a jungle cat...
...Manhattan, inc...
...Of exquisite taste...
...He quotes admiringly Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...Reflective bits make him squeamish...
...The serrated contour of the 'frump Tower on Fifth Avenue, Trump informs us, is not some avant-garde architectural conceit, but a means of maximizing windowed walls so he can charge even more for apartments...
...The American ideal of freedom makes it unacceptable to inculcate a particular political viewpoint in the classroom," La Farge admits...
...But the problem of homelessness is more than simply lack of housing...
...Jonathan Zimmerman Rachel and Her Children...
...Like his other monuments, it bears his name and is decorated in marble and gilt—marble-printed endpapers, a gold-faced jacket that takes longer than the book to manufacture...
...Rat came in my baby sister's crib and bit her...
...We see 'frump "hyping my plans to the press but in reality getting nowhere," or showcasing an ugly "as-of-right" model of a building in order to say, "This is all I could build the way things stand ." By such manipulations, 'frump has frequently won big tax breaks from New York's politicians...
...Remember the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen, then an adolescent, tells his family psychiatrist that the world will end in nuclear annihilation...
...The visual images evoked by Kozol include the young boy who slept in a Goodwill box from age 9 to 14 until he was no longer small enough to fit through the box's deposit slot...
...His gift is lining up the many sides of a deal by "jiggling provisional commitments...
...Then there's his apology for destroying the Bonwit building's prized friezes, which he had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art...
...Jonathan Kozol...
...You pay a company totally independent of me a nominal fee, I give you a full accounting of what I've done (so far...
...The book stands as a monument to Trump's enormous shrewdness and selfregard...
...Besides, a spokesman said at the time that saving the friezes would have cost $32,000...
...Vast majorities of children claim to share his fear of nuclear war, and increasing numbers—a third of high school seniors, according to one poll—say they'll perish in one...
...We are not going to get away with this," Moynihan says...
...Ditto, casinos...
...An effective man...
...These antics are further marred by Trump's concealments...
...Growing Up" takes 11 pages, including a glimpse of the wreckage of an older brother, dead at 43, who didn't meet his developer dad's (or developer brother's) expectations and turned to drink: "...the pressures of our particular family were not for him," Trump says, hurrying on to the deals...
...In one episode, he rescues an "adorable little lady" in Georgia from farm foreclosure after her husband commits suicide...
...A balanced nuclear curriculum would include Jonathan Schell and Richard Perle...
...a little girl reporting how "Mr...
...No dice...
...Among major industrialized nations, only Australia rivals the United States in the number of its children who live in poverty...
...frump's "regret" over the Bonwit incident ("I was too young . .") is further undercut by his three-word mention of "certain iron grillwork" he also promised the Met...
...I don't know many dads who sit junior on their lap for a father-andson talk about reducing the deficit...
Vol. 20 • March 1988 • No. 2
