Making It/Got It Made/Going to Make It
"Besides, how bad could the country be that allowed someone as bright and hard-working as he to rise? That was the theme of Making It, his 1967 account of his climb up the greasy pole of New York intellectual life. The opening sentence of the first chapter said it all: "One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan." [from a Review of Norman Podhoretz" Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer]
http://www.robertfulford.com/Podhoretz.html
--
As a kid growing up in the outer suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, I learned quickly in first grade at the Noah Wallace Elementary and Junior High School in Farmington that there were those who lived below Main St., west towards the river where the local Catholic Church was situated, and those who lived eastward above it on the high rise ground where the Congregational and Episcopal Churches dominated the Protestant world. Kids living downhill towards the river were the children of recent Irish and Italian immigrants and those uphill were the old and prosperous town WASPS, doctors, whatever.
A few Polish kids came in from farms stretched out on the flood plain to the west of town. And to my knowledge there was only one Jewish family that sent a child to Noah Wallace, the Cantors, who owned the grocery store in Oakland Gardens, a largely poor community stranded between Farmington and West Hartford. There was one African American family that had somehow escaped from the small Hartford African American ghetto to live as servants -- in a small separate house -- to one of the wealthy families just north of Farmington in Avon -- they delivered our Sunday paper as an extra source of income and probably their children prospered and moved on.
It was intriguing for us all to meet in our school -- or at least for me -- an outsider who had been born in NY and who would return to live out my life and career in NYC. We all knew that we were living in very separate worlds. Catholics and Protestants were not at that time inter-marrying and dating was a no go. We threw snow balls at each during winter. My favorite teacher, however, was Miss Loretti who became Mrs. Batista during my years with her -- she was a great teacher and I had the incredible good luck to have her from first through third grades during a brief experiment in promoting teachers with their classes.
There were a few exceptions. Peter was Italian and bright and competed with Graham, Freddy, Bobby and me for top honors in our class -- and we were friends together of a sort. The middle three lived above Main St. and Freddy was the principal town doctor's son -- his father was also a real estate developer who would show us kids his collection of two dollar bills on occasion which he kept in heaps in his office desk drawer. I had some of his bad medicine of those days, but fortunately survived.
All of this is set as background to the well known phrase incorporated as the title of his 1967 book, "Making It," by Norman Podhoretz described in a fragment of a Canadian review (above) summarizing his move from Brooklyn progressivism to establishment conservatism during the course of his 35 year career as editor of Commentary.
In a way my own journey has been a reversal of the voyage from Brooklyn to Manhattan of so many of NYC's leading intellectuals. I was myself led into philosophy by some of these -- Paul Weiss at Yale and Ernest Nagel, my dissertation supervisor at Columbia. It has been intriguing for me, however, to observe the fork in the road for some of these folks who have so flipped over from a Making It to what I would call an "I've Got It Made!" mode.
I am always a bit distressed by the flip flops that such types make from an apparently caring progressive stance to an exclusionary derisive one towards those who are trying to follow in their footsteps -- or those one might characterize as "Going to Make It." Recently deceased Robert Nozick of Harvard philosophy moved from SDS activist as student at Columbia to libertarian defender of absolutist Lockean rights of ownership at Harvard (Anarchy, State, and Utopia).
In the last category, Going to Make It, are my students at Brooklyn College. The intriguing thing about teaching a class of students there these days that one has in any one class an incredible range of recent backgrounds of families newly arrived from virtually every nation on the globe -- even an occasional stray Australian! Chadors sit next to yarmulkes with no apparent distress. One cannot encounter an event in the world -- from the Caribbean to the recent Tsunami horrors -- that will not have a student directly in touch with family 'over there'. Our most recent Rhodes Scholar survived an early bout of childhood leukemia picked up as the aftermath of Chernobyl and all our students from the Ukraine have been likely to develop (treatable) thyroid cancer. Perhaps the most brilliant student that I have ever had, who went on to NYU medical and philosophy studies while simultaneously doing public health at Columbia, was the son of a Nigerian policeman who was 'discovered' here while working as a hospital security guard.
The typical pattern of many of my students (I find as I interview them for recommendations) is of having parents who were professionals over there from which they escaped at great sacrifice to make a better life for their children here in the U.S. My job as teacher is to try to explain to them not only the subtleties of philosophy but the puzzling culture that is Amerika -- the good things as well as the all too often accepted and taken for granted horrors that abound here -- racism just below the surface that can erupt with the blast of a frightened cop's gun or the bigotries that I certainly encountered as a kid in Farmington, which still lurk to stimulate old prejudices -- against women, gays, people who look different or who practice a different religion or no religion or who speak a different language at a different decibel level or whatever other differences that some here find offensive or disconcerting.
I have found that it is good to know a bit of a number of languages. I can speak a little Russian, Spanish, more French and German (so that I can make it a little with Yiddish -- Oy veh!). I teach my beginning philosophy students Greek (or at least the alphabet) and some Latin so that they can pick up the roots of these languages that have been incorporated into English, which many of them are still mastering -- they may speak English flawlessly, but must master a much wider vocabulary in college and in the future to command the rich store of this end-of-this-end-line language (words swept up from across Europe, East to West, to become our current verbal trash heap with all its idiosyncrasies).
One of the encouraging things that I am observing about my students is that through sharing an education with each other they seem for the most part to be caring and respectful of the rights of others with different backgrounds. They don't buy the Bush and Co. no think -- they know that Muslims here were often escaping from the terror over there and are our best defense against it here -- if allowed to serve as such in their new chosen home. They are all much aware of (and shocked by) our take-it-for-granted racism. I could go on, but I don't want to violate their privacy and take advantage of concerns they share with me personally as their teacher -- as I did with Miss Loretti/Mrs. Batista so many years ago. They give me hope for our future. They are going to make it -- and make the U.S. a better place in the process of doing so.
http://www.robertfulford.com/Podhoretz.html
--
As a kid growing up in the outer suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, I learned quickly in first grade at the Noah Wallace Elementary and Junior High School in Farmington that there were those who lived below Main St., west towards the river where the local Catholic Church was situated, and those who lived eastward above it on the high rise ground where the Congregational and Episcopal Churches dominated the Protestant world. Kids living downhill towards the river were the children of recent Irish and Italian immigrants and those uphill were the old and prosperous town WASPS, doctors, whatever.
A few Polish kids came in from farms stretched out on the flood plain to the west of town. And to my knowledge there was only one Jewish family that sent a child to Noah Wallace, the Cantors, who owned the grocery store in Oakland Gardens, a largely poor community stranded between Farmington and West Hartford. There was one African American family that had somehow escaped from the small Hartford African American ghetto to live as servants -- in a small separate house -- to one of the wealthy families just north of Farmington in Avon -- they delivered our Sunday paper as an extra source of income and probably their children prospered and moved on.
It was intriguing for us all to meet in our school -- or at least for me -- an outsider who had been born in NY and who would return to live out my life and career in NYC. We all knew that we were living in very separate worlds. Catholics and Protestants were not at that time inter-marrying and dating was a no go. We threw snow balls at each during winter. My favorite teacher, however, was Miss Loretti who became Mrs. Batista during my years with her -- she was a great teacher and I had the incredible good luck to have her from first through third grades during a brief experiment in promoting teachers with their classes.
There were a few exceptions. Peter was Italian and bright and competed with Graham, Freddy, Bobby and me for top honors in our class -- and we were friends together of a sort. The middle three lived above Main St. and Freddy was the principal town doctor's son -- his father was also a real estate developer who would show us kids his collection of two dollar bills on occasion which he kept in heaps in his office desk drawer. I had some of his bad medicine of those days, but fortunately survived.
All of this is set as background to the well known phrase incorporated as the title of his 1967 book, "Making It," by Norman Podhoretz described in a fragment of a Canadian review (above) summarizing his move from Brooklyn progressivism to establishment conservatism during the course of his 35 year career as editor of Commentary.
In a way my own journey has been a reversal of the voyage from Brooklyn to Manhattan of so many of NYC's leading intellectuals. I was myself led into philosophy by some of these -- Paul Weiss at Yale and Ernest Nagel, my dissertation supervisor at Columbia. It has been intriguing for me, however, to observe the fork in the road for some of these folks who have so flipped over from a Making It to what I would call an "I've Got It Made!" mode.
I am always a bit distressed by the flip flops that such types make from an apparently caring progressive stance to an exclusionary derisive one towards those who are trying to follow in their footsteps -- or those one might characterize as "Going to Make It." Recently deceased Robert Nozick of Harvard philosophy moved from SDS activist as student at Columbia to libertarian defender of absolutist Lockean rights of ownership at Harvard (Anarchy, State, and Utopia).
In the last category, Going to Make It, are my students at Brooklyn College. The intriguing thing about teaching a class of students there these days that one has in any one class an incredible range of recent backgrounds of families newly arrived from virtually every nation on the globe -- even an occasional stray Australian! Chadors sit next to yarmulkes with no apparent distress. One cannot encounter an event in the world -- from the Caribbean to the recent Tsunami horrors -- that will not have a student directly in touch with family 'over there'. Our most recent Rhodes Scholar survived an early bout of childhood leukemia picked up as the aftermath of Chernobyl and all our students from the Ukraine have been likely to develop (treatable) thyroid cancer. Perhaps the most brilliant student that I have ever had, who went on to NYU medical and philosophy studies while simultaneously doing public health at Columbia, was the son of a Nigerian policeman who was 'discovered' here while working as a hospital security guard.
The typical pattern of many of my students (I find as I interview them for recommendations) is of having parents who were professionals over there from which they escaped at great sacrifice to make a better life for their children here in the U.S. My job as teacher is to try to explain to them not only the subtleties of philosophy but the puzzling culture that is Amerika -- the good things as well as the all too often accepted and taken for granted horrors that abound here -- racism just below the surface that can erupt with the blast of a frightened cop's gun or the bigotries that I certainly encountered as a kid in Farmington, which still lurk to stimulate old prejudices -- against women, gays, people who look different or who practice a different religion or no religion or who speak a different language at a different decibel level or whatever other differences that some here find offensive or disconcerting.
I have found that it is good to know a bit of a number of languages. I can speak a little Russian, Spanish, more French and German (so that I can make it a little with Yiddish -- Oy veh!). I teach my beginning philosophy students Greek (or at least the alphabet) and some Latin so that they can pick up the roots of these languages that have been incorporated into English, which many of them are still mastering -- they may speak English flawlessly, but must master a much wider vocabulary in college and in the future to command the rich store of this end-of-this-end-line language (words swept up from across Europe, East to West, to become our current verbal trash heap with all its idiosyncrasies).
One of the encouraging things that I am observing about my students is that through sharing an education with each other they seem for the most part to be caring and respectful of the rights of others with different backgrounds. They don't buy the Bush and Co. no think -- they know that Muslims here were often escaping from the terror over there and are our best defense against it here -- if allowed to serve as such in their new chosen home. They are all much aware of (and shocked by) our take-it-for-granted racism. I could go on, but I don't want to violate their privacy and take advantage of concerns they share with me personally as their teacher -- as I did with Miss Loretti/Mrs. Batista so many years ago. They give me hope for our future. They are going to make it -- and make the U.S. a better place in the process of doing so.
posted by Ed Kent at 6:20 AM
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