POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Larry Bird: The Making of an American Sports Legend. Daniel Levine. McGraw-Hill, $1795. Red Auerbach had this way of turning racial prejudice to his advantage. In the...
...The family was so poor that relatives would come by with food for the refrigerator...
...Would it be worth it...
...Consider Dukakis's two top Washington liaisons during the fall campaign: Richard Moe and Anne Wexler...
...The immigrants themselves had to undergo the agonies of assimilation...
...Real-estate-industry propaganda to the contrary, the American dream is not ownership of a single-family home, but something more frustrating and unattainable...
...For months, banks, securities firms, and insurance companies butted heads...
...It's not just the obvious gaffe, like the senator's aide who referred to a favored firm as her boss's "client" ("Client, constituent," she told startled consumerists, "it's the same thing in this context, right...
...The United States is extremely young compared to other industrialized countries, and it has just completed a period of rapid economic change, major internal population shifts, and heavy immigration...
...Nicholas Lemann...
...after reading this book, you'll feel as if you have just speed-read through a decade's worth of Congressional Quarterly...
...In his view, the ebb and flow of business political power is an artifact of the business cycle...
...Utilizing a no-nonsense teaching style, tempered by razoredged wit, showmanship, and seemingly Herculean classroom standards, both teachers imbued their students with a love of their respective subject, the confidence to belie the conventional wisdom that a ghetto or barrio background is a barrier to high academic achievement, and the vision to see beyond the probabilities to the possibilities of their lives...
...Some of Cheever's discontents can be traced to his own situation as a bisexual (and by late middle age, homosexual) man who had resolved to remain in the role of husband and father...
...Talk to young Democratic congressmen— even stridently progressive ones—and ask them what defines their liberalism...
...In "The Country Husband," "The village hangs, morally and economically, from a thread...
...But the sobering American experience reinforced in Escalante the unshakable determination and optimism that had made him, since childhood, always eager to take on a challenge...
...Makers of government policy could get away from the frontier-town tone that the debate over issues so often assumes...
...Bird grew up in a part of southern Indiana known simply as "The Valley," in the adjoining towns of West Baden and French Lick...
...Now the capital teems with lobbyists of every pinstripe, doling out honoraria and contributions to lawmakers and importuning government for subsidies, exemptions, and favorable treatment...
...Thomas Edsall, Brooks Jackson, Elizabeth Drew, and others have shown how business consciously heightened its efforts to influence policy...
...Bills go unpaid...
...You can do it...
...Few will answer, as their forebears would have, that their job is to stand up for the average citizen against today's economic royalists...
...the existence of the middle class still seems like a development recent enough that intellectuals are required to take an editorial position on it...
...Isiah Thomas, the Detroit Pistons star, exclaimed in a moment of pique that were Bird black, he'd be considered just another good player...
...Loren Baritz...
...During the 1960s, public attitudes shifted, spurred by the revelation that General Motors had hired a detective to spy on Ralph Nader...
...Probably the best way to get to know a place quickly is to read the fiction that is set there...
...It was no accident that Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder, in his muchpublicized comments on the physical superiority of black athletes, singled out basketball players...
...think of the long-forgotten novels of James Gould Cozzens, which were lavishly praised when they were published...
...The easiest answer is to blame the "opposition culture" of intellectuals—that is, to say that the whole picture that we have of the woes of the American middle class is simply the result of a pose that American intellectuals decided to strike at around the time of World War I and have stuck to ever since...
...Churlish as it was, Thomas did give voice to something many had mused upon but had kept to themselves...
...We now have a picture of the suburbs in the fifties, Cheever's best-known setting, as having been prosperous and optimistic, if marred by excessive conformity, racism, and sexism...
...The emergence of the underclass has undercut an important part of the American twentieth century creed, the idea that poverty is a temporary condition usually lasting one generation at most...
...There's nothing really miraculous about it...
...Anyway, the fifties were, it's now obvious, an interlude, followed by a spirited attack on middle-class values...
...If the housing projects in Brooklyn were full of white kids instead of black, there would be more of them in the NBA...
...The idea of an American culture that actively celebrated middle-class life seems pretty dreary, but if, instead, we learned merely to accept it, the operation of the country would become easier...
...As a bright but mischievous child, Escalante had been forced to overcome an abusive, heavy-drinking father on the way to becoming a celebrated, top teacher at some of the best schools in Bolivia...
...And in telling the story Bird has never told about himself— he's an intensely private man—Levine has made him larger...
...The men have vague, unsuccessful careers...
...The Senate Banking Committee chamber was so jammed with corporate lobbyists that there literally was room for only one consumer advocate...
...Still, it is a thoughtful and valuable account of how, following World War II, Democrats who had once seen big business as "economic royalists" came to view it as not only benign but the engine of prosperity...
...But when times are bad, when the threat of unemployment or the Japanese looms, concerns about corporate accountability can seem like an unaffordable luxury...
...Miraculous...
...The excessive conformity that all the analysts of the fifties worried about has given way to an almost opposite problem, in which we have put such a premium on personal gratification that pulling together as a nation seems to have become impossible...
...By 1970, the Nixon administration and the Democratic Congress vied to be seen as more pro-environmentalist...
...By trade, I am a public interest lobbyist (for Public Citizen), and I spend my days swimming among the sharks on Capitol Hill...
...discontentedness with middle-class life will be with us for a long time...
...What struck him as unbelievable was not so much the report of cheating (later proven false) but that a school like Garfield—where the student body is 95 percent Latino, 85 percent poor, and mostly from families where their parents never graduated from high school—could produce even one student capable of passing the renownedly difficult test...
...It is no small feat, considering Bird's refusal to cooperate...
...Simply mentioning the names of the leading chroniclers of the supposedly paradisaic middle-class life of the fifties—C...
...Through no fault of his own, Bird became the Great White Hope...
...In the end, Vogel's portrayal of an even match between business lobbies and their critics simply doesn't ring true...
...Even Al Gore, an ardent environmentalist on the floor of the Senate, muffled his populism for the electorate...
...They'll tell you about the contras, about gay rights or civil rights...
...Because of this, comfortable middle-class life seems somehow pallid, compromised, and insufficient...
...When he entered the NBA in the late seventies, fan interest was declining, and many team owners thought the reason was a lack of white stars—or players, for that matter...
...Sylvester Monroe The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class...
...Baritz points out that in spite of its never-ending conceptual problems, the middle class has never had trouble attracting members...
...Yet in the end, these lapses are not fatal...
...In breaking basketball's reverse color line—a number of bona fide white stars have entered the league since— Bird was refuting these racial stereotypes rather than confirming them...
...Bird's mother worked two jobs, and Bird lived with his grandmother for long stretches...
...Because it tries to cover a vast subject in 300 pages, The Good Life has an all-over-the-place quality, but it is quite useful as what academics call "a review of the literature" on the middle class...
...He concludes, "Some day GM's management may look back with fondness to the 1960s, when its main worries were Ralph Nader and the United Automobile Workers rather than H. Ross Perot or Toyota ." What both Vogel and business miss is that GM may need both Nader and the UAW to beat Toyota...
...Insider trading, the S&Ls, global warming, Bhopal—all would seem to make for juicy targets...
...In fact, the bigger the challenge, the more it seemed to interest him...
...His father was an alcoholic who once squandered a house down-payment at a local bar...
...When the economy is flush, he says, business loses political power...
...One might wonder how such deeds would play if a black man did them...
...But not until Matthews's fascinating, but rather unlikely, book (How many books get written about real-life high-school teachers...
...It all fed the notion that black players get by on raw physical ability, while whites prevail through brains and work...
...Therefore, it's common these days to hear that the national life is going to slip into a middle-aged mode in the 1990s, with everyone sitting at home with pipe and slippers...
...There is a great irony here...
...was a favorite Escalante phrase no matter how impossible the assigned task seemed...
...The least controversial line on the resume of party chairman Ron Brown was his stint as a corporate lawyer...
...Senators and congressmen chose up sides...
...A new book by Loren Baritz, a professor of history at Amherst, shows that at least as far as intellectuals were concerned, the middle class in this country has always been in a state of crisis...
...Also like many inner-city kids, Bird's early course was erratic...
...There is something to this, but it doesn't suffice as the entire reason...
...He once showed up for an awards ceremony in a bowling shirt...
...All the while, he never lost his gift for, nor his love of, teaching...
...Wright Mills, David Riesman, Erik Erikson, Paul Goodman, William H. Whyte, Arthur Miller—ought to bring to mind how bad that time seemed to the thinking classes...
...After all, reform surges aren't limited to good times...
...One of Escalante's favorite challenges was shattering negative assumptions about the abilities of people from poor, ethnic backgrounds...
...There, the evidence of business's special power is everywhere...
...students was given to me and my classmates at Wendell Phillips High in Chicago by our own Escalante—a very special man named Leroy Lovelace...
...There he discovered an Horatio Alger story of sorts in the teacher's own life...
...Vogel adds nothing new here...
...Bird's home life made the court seem especially inviting...
...but it hangs by its thread in the evening light ." To use Philip Rahv's famous partition of American literature, Cheever is a Paleface in terms of his subject matter, but he is at heart absolutely a Redskin...
...That's an astounding statistic, and it wasn't always so...
...For the past two years, Moe has lobbied on behalf of accounting firms seeking to weaken the racketeering laws—including a special "Wall Street carve-out" to benefit the securities industry...
...As Levine shows, there is much more to Bird's fan appeal than his whiteness...
...Today, the Valley has been described as a "horizontal housing project" There's a piano factory, a gypsum plant, the hotel...
...There is a tendency to interpret all of American culture as simply a function of how old the babyboom generation happens to be...
...Coincidentally or not, the Globe has ignored Levine's book, a fact the rival Herald has noted...
...But it didn't take long before business regrouped and launched a lavish, well-coordinated campaign to roll back regulation...
...The scope of business power increasingly is seen as beyond the purview of politics...
...Still, Larry Bird has a more important implication...
...The lack of a fuller response is partly the fault of consumerists and environmentalists, who have focused on narrow issues...
...Heirlooms are sold off...
...Three more championship banners now hang from the Boston Garden's already crowded rafters...
...And, as he freely acknowledges, he's afflicted with what is called in basketball circles "White Man's Disease" (i.e., he can't jump either...
...Yes, Bird is slow...
...Several of Cheever's stories have endings in which the protagonist, after having journeyed to the lower depths of despair, has a redeeming vision of the beauty and goodness of life in Westchester...
...As a former resident of a South Side Chicago housing project who attended a rough-and-tumble school with a reputation for the worst of everything—much like Garfield, though not Hispanic—I felt a great kinship with Escalante and his students...
...So he's producing his own book, with Bob Ryan, the respected basketball writer for The Boston Globe...
...The story was particularly interesting for me...
...Michael Waldman Escalante: The Best Teacher in America...
...Actually reading it for the first time was a shock—Cheever's vision is an unrelievedly dark one, in which almost all characters are profoundly alone, unable to find a rewarding connection either to the society or to other people...
...Week after week, as they wound their way through Congress, the Clean Air Act amendments were strengthened...
...Then came the Depression and World War II...
...One hundred thousand people in our nation's capital work directly or indirectly for the business lobby...
...From the populist movement in the 1890s to the New Deal, nearly every great reform movement was spurred by economic hardship...
...When my family moved to Westchester County, New York, a couple of years ago, I turned to the work of John Cheever, the "Chekhov of Westchester," for help in understanding our new home...
...Like Ted Williams, another Boston sports legend, he has a contrary streak...
...He got a much-coveted scholarship to play for Bobby Knight, the coach at Indiana University, but dropped out after less than a month...
...Jay Matthews...
...Three decades ago, business was sleepy, relying on oldboy ties with a few powerful lawmakers to win the day...
...In Spike Lee's movie, She's Gotta Have It, a Larry Bird put-down line is a black in-joke...
...The women are oppressed by the burden of housework that their mothers didn't have to do...
...After the Celtics won the NBA championship in 1984, he stiffed President Reagan at the White House...
...This may be changing as evidenced by the recent victory of a California ballot initiative rolling back insurance rates...
...Extraordinary...
...Consider last year's drive by Citibank and other big-city banks to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depressionera law that prevents bankers from speculating with depositors' money...
...He eventually shot himself,' while talking to Bird's mother on the telephone...
...Twentytwo years later, after racial stereotypes had come full circle, Auerbach drafted a slow white guy named Larry Bird...
...There's a good chance Isiah Thomas's kids will grow up to be lawyers or engineers...
...To some extent, landing a teacher with the professional skills and personal determination of Jaime Escalante on the doorsteps of one of the worst schools in Los Angeles might be considered something of a miracle...
...Even Larry Bird's might...
...Yet for all of basketball's therapeutic value," he writes, hitting stride, "it was less of a cathartic exercise than an imperfect act of sublimation" Such statements reduce an inspiring story of a tough country kid to the cloying prose of a guidance report from an exclusive Manhattan preschool...
...Bird had just stolen a Thomas pass for a last-second playoff win...
...In exchange for this new civility we would surely lose some of the energy generated by a mobile society...
...For Lovelace, my freshman English teacher, it was "Let's see what kind of guts you got...
...Marvelous...
...What Escalante, Lovelace, and countless unsung classroom heroes across the country know is that if you expect nothing, you get nothing...
...With little at home, and no car or diversions," Levine writes, "basketball became the sum of his existence...
...He's a total team player, yet his swagger is extraordinary...
...Before an All-Star shooting contest, he sauntered into the locker room wondering aloud who would come in second...
...And now we know, thanks to the recent publication of Cheever's letters, his biography, and a memoir by his daughter, that his life was as melancholic as his work...
...These endings are supposed to demonstrate that Cheever's outlook was not entirely bleak—that he found it possible to make one's peace after all—but I find this theory unconvincing...
...TV commentators made matters worse, constantly noting Bird's "knowledge of the game" and his spartan practice regime...
...Congress soon produced a torrent of business regulation—creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, enacting new pollution and safety standards, and strengthening the Federal Trade Commission...
...By 1981, President Reagan and House Democrats engaged in the notorious bidding war over tax cuts, taking turns poking loopholes in the tax code to woo businesses...
...But international competition need not have yielded tax cuts and regulatory freedom for megacorporations— and business political power has everything to do with why we see that as "inevitable...
...There is too much drinking...
...It's striking that this kind of feeding frenzy hasn't sparked more of a consumer backlash...
...Significantly for Bird's later endeavors, race relations in the Valley were relatively benign...
...As a little boy of eight, Jaime had bristled when his father whacked him across the face, after assuming he had stolen a pack of chewing gum that his friend had given him...
...Baritz notes in his introduction that "America has not yet found its Flaubert or Thomas Mann," meaning, I think, that our leading novelists have yet to accept the existence of the middle class as a given, so that in American fiction there lurks the idea that middle-class discontents might be healed simply by leaving the middle class...
...When GM's president apologized to Nader at a congressional hearing, politicians sensed a new and powerful consumerist impulse...
...As a new teacher at Garfield High, he was filled with the same anger when his colleagues assumed students at the academically shaky school couldn't possibly learn calculus...
...In the fifties, when another team balked at drafting a black player, the wily Boston Celtics chief got himself Bill Russell and a dynasty...
...He's got an Uncle Eephus mug, and a body with which weekend players, black as well as white, can identify...
...The question is academic...
...Knopf $19.95...
...For another, consolation usually comes from the beauty of nature, rather than from the human world...
...At the level of everyday life, people would probably save more money, uproot their families less often, and spend less time at tanning salons and EST weekends...
...Today, Bird plays with uncommon confidence and a steely, defiant swagger...
...But when he came to America, looking to broaden his professional and personal horizons, he was told that his Bolivian degree was worthless...
...Intellectuals and artists could devote the efforts now expended on rebelliousness to something else...
...What happened between Earth Day and Gucci Gulch...
...True, business lobbies often cancel each other out, but that doesn't mean that business as a whole lacks clout...
...Indeed, most middle-class Americans still have non-middle-class family memories...
...Cheever surprised me sociologically as well as temperamentally...
...The OPEC embargo set off a period in which our faith in the perpetual rise in the standard of living evaporated...
...learn, that Escalante instilled in his...
...In so doing, he reminds us that blacks dominate the NBA today for pretty much the same reason that tough white kids with names like Heinsohn and Cousy dominated it 30 years ago...
...Who was this man, Escalante, Matthews wanted to know, and how could he have accomplished so much with seemingly so little...
...Dedication, determination, and hard work, lots of hard work, are the keys, and they are reserved not just for a select few...
...What he did, taking 18 seniors from East Los Angeles's gang-ridden James A. Garfield High School through the successful completion of the Educational Testing Service's Advanced Placement Calculus Exams in 1982, has of course practically become legend...
...And of course, basketball...
...They grew up in circumstances in which sports can easily seem the only route of escape...
...The "ganas," or desire to...
...The middle class, in other words, is still in the dock...
...Basic Books, $20.95...
...Indeed, when Democrats pick party elders for service on commissions, they turn to corporate lobbyists like Lloyd Cutler and Robert Strauss, not former officeholders or policy leaders...
...Bird himself has a cousin who is half black...
...Think-tanks and PACs proliferated, Mobil ads sprouted on op-ed pages, and a new generation of congressmen grew more dependent on their private backers than the support of their party...
...With the exception of brief gasps during the primaries, no leading Democrat (with the obvious exception of Jesse Jackson) made any efforts to stoke populist fires...
...David Vogel...
...To support himself and his family, Escalante worked for 10 years as a janitor and then as a head cook at a Los Angeles restaurant while attending night school to re-earn his teaching degree...
...It has earned him welldeserved honors from the barrios of East Los Angeles to the White House and been the subject of a wellreceived motion picture called Stand and Deliver...
...Works whose aim is the glorification of the middle class nearly always seem second-rate...
...Like many sports stars today, Bird decided to cash in on his own life story, rather than let some sportswriter do it...
...For all of Bird's prowess, there has hovered over his career a cloud of racial suspicion...
...So why, to judge from the evidence of books, are we discontented with the way most of us live...
...No sooner did the middle class become securely established, which didn't happen until after the Civil War, than it began to feel culturally imperiled by the influx of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants, whose own destiny in the middle class was unimaginable at the time...
...Levine tells the story straight, without hagiography or violins...
...The securities firms wanted to keep their monopoly...
...It is not hard to see why...
...Lacking supervision, he'd be out on the basketball court until the wee hours of the morning, like the black kids at 11th and Rhode Island in Washington's Shaw neighborhood...
...But far more important has been the abdication of the Democratic party...
...Bird's stardom easily might not have been...
...have we been offered a full account of this remarkable tale of modern-day life in a Latino ghetto...
...One reason for their squeamishness is the degree to which the fabled Washington Democratic establishment is financially dependent on big business...
...Matthews tells how Escalante silenced the cynics with a compassionate and nonjudgmental voice, providing a rare, virtually unfiltered look at life in a world most non-minority Americans know very little about...
...Unfortunately, the tide isn't likely to turn anytime soon...
...It's no surprise that Dukakis didn't run hard against Republican fat cats...
...Jonathan Rowe Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America...
...Though he has more than proved his mettle, some blacks think Bird has gotten more than his share of glory...
...Matthews, the Los Angeles bureau chief of The Washington Post, first heard of Escalante seven years ago through a newspaper article about 14 Garfield students suspected of cheating on the AP calculus exam...
...Yet the great economic theme of his work is downward mobility...
...I don't believe it...
...These days almost any kind of educational success story out of an inner-city school invariably prompts an outpouring of superlatives...
...The Redskin is still at large in the culture...
...David Vogel offers too much play-byplay and not enough color commentary...
...For decades, nearly all Americans have, when asked by pollsters, identified themselves as middle class...
...But what the middle-aged Bolivian immigrant did there with a group of underprivileged, Hispanic students, while wondrously uncommon in the low-achievement world of public education, was by no means supernal...
...American life since the sixties isn't yet far enough in the past for us to have gotten a good fix on it, but a few points are becoming clear...
...Matthews's search led him all the way back to Escalante's childhood in Bolivia...
...A few peripheral characters are participating fully in the post-war boom, but most of the fully drawn, empathetic figures can't maintain the standard of living (Manhattan apartments, summer houses, private schools, servants) in which they were raised...
...For one thing, happy endings in Cheever always seem tacked-on and inconsistent with the body of the story...
...But he argues that the resurgence of business power stems more from public attitudes than PAC power...
...The middle-class literary protagonists who are happy with their lot usually lack moral and psychological awareness...
...Cheever's publicity during the last few years of his life (he died in 1982), in which he was always portrayed as a contented suburban squire, had given me the expectation that his work would be a celebration of the life of the bourgeois, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant commuter...
...What Escalante did with logarithms, Lovelace did with language...
...I doubt that I'd cooperate with someone who'd write about me that way...
...All too often government serves as an arbiter between needs of competing trade associations rather than as a champion of the common good...
...Indiana's basketball culture is every bit as rabid as that of inner-city playgrounds...
...The resort attracted black employees, and many became respected members of the community...
...Fluctuating Fortunes is a chronicle of business's political battles over the past three decades...
...But there is a more general point that his work illustrates, which is that even at this late date American literature and thought have not yet made their peace with middle-class life...
...Wexler, in turn, organized a coalition of business PACs to lobby against strong campaign finance reform...
...Joe Louis trained there, and millionaires kept their private railroad cars on a siding by the hotel...
...But an unauthorized biography of Bird by Daniel Levine, a freelance writer, reveals that Bird shares something more basic with many of his black counterparts in the NBA: a background of poverty and family disruption...
...This political vacuum is doubly distressing since, as Vogel points out, improved regulation often resulted more from politicians responding to perceived public needs than from an organized public interest movement...
...How to explain someone like Cheever or, going back a century, the first important Westchester County writer, Washington Irving, both of whom seem to have truly wanted to present a picture of a glowing, pastoral, contented America, but somehow couldn't...
...It tells the story of the early victories of consumerists and environmentalists and the Fortune 500's ferocious and well-funded response during the 1970s and 1980s...
...Also, the American middle class, more than the middle classes of other countries, is obsessed with the possibility of bigtime success—of getting to some place high above the middle where life is defined by wealth, glamour, fame, or freedom...
...Once French Lick was a thriving resort...
...Levine's one lapse is his psychologizing...
...After strict quotas put an end to the chaos of immigration, the development of a national consumer culture and the emergence of a generation of rebellious youth in the twenties caused further convulsions in the middle class's existence...
...Henry Holt, $19.95...
...He drove a garbage truck for a while, enrolled at Indiana State, and sired a child to a woman he had already divorced...
...His vision of the good is anti-order and anticivilization, and most of his heroes deep down would prefer to follow Huck Finn's lead and light out for the territories, only they've got families and mortgages and it isn't clear where the territories are any more...
...Clearly, there is some truth to Vogel's point...
...After all, the same Lee Iacocca who was derided in the 1970s for pushing Ford to produce the dangerous Pinto was lauded for whipping Chrysler into profitability in the 1980s...
Vol. 21 • May 1989 • No. 4
