In time, some groceries, restaurants, and supermarkets started placing orders with us, causing us to expand our production. My father seemed pleased by the growth in his business. But after some months, one of his new clients, the Jerome Avenue Supermarket did the unexpected. The supermarket’s manager informed my father that one of the big companies, Wonder Bread, was going into the “specialty line” and was offering to take over the Italian bread account. As an inducement to the supermarket, Wonder Bread was promising a free introductory offer of two-hundred loaves. With that peculiar kind of generosity often found in merchants and bosses, the supermarket manager offered to reject the bid and keep our account if only we would match Wonder Bread’s offer at least in part, say a hundred loaves.
“Their bread is paper compared to mine,” my father protested. Indeed, our joke was: the reason they call it Wonder Bread is because after tasting it, you wonder if it’s bread. But his artisan’s pride proved no match for the merchant’s manipulations, and he agreed to deliver a hundred free loaves, twenty-five a day, in order to keep the supermarket account, all the while cursing the manager under his breath. In the business world, this arrangement is referred to as a “deal” or an “agreement.” To us it seemed more like extortion.
In response to “deals” of this sort, my father developed certain tricks of his own. By artfully flashing his hands across the tops of the delivery boxes he would short count loaves right under the noses of the store managers, in the case of the Jerome Avenue Supermarket, even loaves that they finally started paying for again. “Five and five across, that’s twenty-five, Pete,” he would point out, when in fact it was only twenty-three. We would load 550 loaves for the morning run and he would sell 575. Not since the Sermon on the Mount had the loaves so increased.
“Pop,” I said to him after one of his more daring performances, “You’re becoming a thief.”
“Kid,” he said, “It’s no sin to steal from them that steal from you.”[Individual competition in the pursuit of private gain brings out the best of our creative energies and thereby maximizes our productive contributions and advances the well being of the entire society. Economics 101]
I left for a few years to go to graduate school, only to return home in 1959 without a penny in my pocket. I asked my father to support me for a semester so that I could finish writing my dissertation. In return, I offered to work a few days a week on the bread truck. My father agreed to this but he wondered how he would explain to friends and neighbors that his son was twenty-six years old and still without full-time employment.
“Kid, how long can you keep going to school and what for?” he asked. “All those books,” he would warn me, “are bad for your eyes and bad for your mind.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m getting a Ph.D.” To this he made no response. So I put in a few days a week of hard labor on the truck. Nor did he complain. In fact, he needed the help and liked having me around (as he told my stepmother who told me).
When the bakers asked him how come, at the age of twenty-six, I was working only part-time, he said: “He’s getting a Ph.D.” From then on they called me “professor,” a term that was applied with playful sarcasm. It was their way of indicating that they were not as impressed with my intellectual efforts as some people might be.
On the day my dissertation was accepted and I knew I was to receive my Ph.D., I proudly informed my father. He nodded and said, “That’s good.” Then he asked me if I wanted to become a full-time partner in the bread business working with him on the truck every day. With all the education out of the way, now maybe I would be ready to do some real work.
I almost said yes.
One day the health inspectors came by and insisted we could not leave the bread naked in stores in open display boxes, exposed to passers-by who might wish to touch or fondle the loaves with their germ-ridden fingers. No telling what kind of infected predators might chance into a supermarket to fondle bread. So my father and I were required to seal each loaf in a plastic bag, thus increasing our production costs, adding hours to our labor, and causing us to handle the bread twice as much with our germ-carrying fingers. But now it looked and tasted like modern bread because the bags kept the moisture in, and the loaves would get gummy in their own humidity inside their antiseptic plastic skins instead of forming a crisp, tasty crust in the open air.
Then some of the bigger companies began in earnest to challenge our restaurant and store trade, underselling us with an inferior quality “Italian bread.” At about this time the price of flour went up. Then the son of the landlord from whom Zi Torino had first rented the bakery premises over a half century before raised our rent substantially.
“When it rains it pours,” my father said. So he tried to reduce costs by giving the dough more air and water and spending less time on the preparation. The bakers shook their heads and went on making the imitation product for the plastic bags.
“Pop,” I complained, “the bread doesn’t taste as good as it used to. It’s more like what the Americans make.”
“What’s the difference? They still eat it, don’t they?” he said with a tight face.
But no matter what he did, things became more difficult. Some of our old family customers complained about the change in the quality of the bread and began to drop their accounts. And a couple of the big stores decided it was more profitable to carry the commercial brands.
Not long after, my father disbanded the bakery and went to work driving a cab for one of the big taxi fleets in New York City. In all the years that followed, he never mentioned the bread business again.
18 MY STRANGE VALUES
Since rather early in life I have been at odds with some of the conventional values of this society. For instance, I remember the men in my youth who used to talk about cars—and I do mean men. Women rarely even drove cars in those days, let alone held forth about them. The men would compare different auto makes and performances and tell stories about their experiences with cars much the way men in earlier times must have talked about horses. Misfit that I was, I thought such conversations were boring because I never found automobiles to be cool or enticing. I always loathed their noise and stink and pollution—and still do. And I lament the pitiless highway carnage they deliver upon us, not to mention the burden of having to get the car paid for, registered, insured, serviced, repaired, fueled, parked, and dragged through perpetual traffic jams.
To this day I detest the endless auto ads on television that portray cars as devilishly dashing and self-enhancing, whipping fearlessly around mountainous curves at irresponsible speeds. Is there something wrong with me and my values that I am so out of step with the omnipresent “car culture”? I want high-speed monorails, like they have in Japan and some other countries, that can carry millions of people all over the country without injury and in great comfort, with far less expense and minimal environmental damage. At the very least, now that I know about them, I want electric cars that do not pollute, that are simple to maintain and economical to use. Electricity, after all, is the most efficient and cleanest energy source when extracted from solar and wind energy. On this issue I am in step with growing numbers of other drivers. There are millions of us who are no longer, or never were, in love with the automobile, who treated it as nothing more than an expensive necessity and an ecological disaster (including the hybrids). But you would never know it from looking at the endless auto ads on television.
There are other weird things about my values. As I approached adulthood I had no desire to devote my life to making large sums of money. I was never interested in the extravagant material products that money can buy. Nor was I interested in the kind of job that would pay the kind of money needed to buy all those material products. Long before it became fashionable among some people in the late 1960s to drop out of the rat race, I never even wanted to toe the starting line.
In my salad days there was much talk in the country about “succeeding.” I attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bro
nx, where a career counselor told us it was important to succeed. I watched Hollywood movies about people fighting like dogs to success. What success consisted of was not always precisely put, but it was understood that it had something to do with making it to some place called “the top,” a very elevated and rewarding perch either in the business world or in a profession of some sort. My high school yearbook featured a statement by our class president. I don’t recall anything he wrote except the last exclamatory line: “We will succeed!” I do remember the feeling of distaste I experienced upon reading that declaration. Speak for yourself, student prexy. The idea that my life should be taken up with fighting my way up the greasy pole filled me with dismay. What I wanted to do was something creative, something that might help the world and make it a better place, although in 1950 I knew not what that might be.
What I really lusted after was knowledge and understanding of the world. What had happened over the centuries? What was going on in the far reaches of this and other societies? What meaning, if any, did life have? Maybe that is why I became a social science professor and researcher. As such I cannot say I found the final answer to those sorts of questions.
While not sharing the preoccupation that some people had with monetary gain, I certainly did want to have enough money to get by. Coming from a poor family I understood that without sufficient funds, an individual in this dollar-driven society is consigned to a life of constant anxiety, dreadful deprivation, and dangerous vulnerability. Indeed I spent a number of years in just such straits, having been red-baited out of my college-teaching profession and left to survive on my writing and public speaking. Given my uncompromising and unpopular political views, and my unwillingness to self-censor and say less than I believed, I was destined to make do without a stable and secure professional position. I did however pick up an occasional teaching gig here and there, which after awhile was all I wanted or needed.
I think there are a lot of people like me who do not glorify vast wealth as some kind of great accomplishment but who do want to live with some degree of comfort and security. Now in my greying years I resent the idea of having to try to sock away substantial sums because there is no completely adequate public system of human services and retirement support in this free-market society. Eventually I will have to rely, in part, on my own savings to survive. The poverty income from Social Security just is not enough. And if I get sick, I will have no health insurance other than Medicare which does not cover everything and might eventually be taken away from us by the free-marketeers. This is the way the social system is organized, forcing many of us into making “choices” that are not of our own devising.
Here is yet another “strange” thing about my values: I never liked having to exercise authority over people. There are those who are enthralled with playing the kingpin and wielding organizational power. I never felt comfortable in that role, even though I am considered a strong personality who can project ideas and feelings. When I do take the spotlight it is to speak about urgent political matters. I try to be a speaker who makes himself an instrument for projecting a message of social justice. This is different from using the message as an instrument to project and elevate the speaker, which is what too many in public life seem to do.
Whenever I have found someone kowtowing to me or deferring in some way for reasons having to do with that person’s needs or fears, I have not liked it. I taught at the college level for many years, and one of the nicest things I ever heard a student say to me was that I had a “democratic personality.” She was referring to the way I was acting as faculty advisor to the student newspaper, encouraging the students to explore issues and make their own decisions, and supporting them when the dean started breathing censorship down their necks.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, I am not trying to pass myself off as St. Francis of Assisi. I have my share of personal faults, including a hot temper on infrequent occasions. But in the socio-political realm I don’t like power for power’s sake. I dislike powermongers because they attempt to inflate themselves by diminishing others, and they have no dedication to social justice. Being hungry for power and privilege, they shine up to the top circles, ready to serve the high and mighty as a way of advancing themselves, crawling and clawing their way up the social pyramid. It might be called the Henry Kissinger Way of Life.
It was always an especially exciting thing for me to witness those occasions when people took things responsibly into their own hands in collective and communal actions, working together more or less as equals. I remember during the Vietnam antiwar movement watching young people organize to elect peace delegates to the Democratic Party state convention in Connecticut. I felt so deeply thrilled at how they planned for the tasks that needed to be done and acted in coordinated fashion with an unstudied dignity, with such intelligence and quiet dedication to carry out a successfully orchestrated electoral campaign.
On other occasions I saw antiwar protesters stand against state troopers with courage and spontaneous solidarity. What a beautiful and electrifying experience that always is for me, seeing people come into themselves, creating their own democratic impact, for one bright and shining moment taking control of their own destiny.
This gets back to another essential value. I never wanted to live a life that was dedicated only to my self-advantage. If this makes me a “do-gooder,” I can only ask, why is “do-gooder” a pejorative term in the mouths of some? There are only two alternatives to doing good: (a) doing evil, usually by serving the commands of others who do evil, and (b) doing nothing, living only for oneself in a narrowly atomized hustling way, which also makes life easier for those who do evil.
Then there is my feeling about the environment. A half century ago, I used to be considered a little weird the way I worried about what was in my food and water. Long before it became fashionable, I felt concerned about how pollution might affect my personal health and everyone else’s.
Moreover, I felt a connection to the environment. I was born and raised in East Harlem, an Italian working-class neighborhood at that time. I was a street kid with no opportunity to cultivate a sensitivity to the natural environment because there was so little of it in New York City. But I do remember journeying into the countryside or to the seashore on occasion, and how I felt something come alive in me. How beautiful the natural world seemed to me, even though I was and still am thoroughly addicted to the livelier city life and could never give up urban living for a rustic existence.
We should recall what the level of environmental consciousness was a half century ago. When I was a young man in the 1950s, I would sometimes complain about the quality of the air in the city. People would smile patronizingly and say “What are you a fresh-air fiend?” Such was the quaint and monumentally ignorant expression of that day: “fresh air fiend.”
During the Vietnam War many of us were torn up about the death and destruction being delivered upon Indochina by U.S. forces. On one occasion I saw a slide show of how U.S. planes and helicopters had sprayed tons of Agent Orange across the Vietnamese countryside, how a rich soil and fecund foliage were turned into a toxic moonscape. In this show there were no mangled bodies or burned villages, just ecocide, a bleached poison hardpan where once there had been living nature. It left me with a knot in my stomach and a weight on my heart. It was one of the most wrenching antiwar presentations I had ever seen.
Those who feel perfectly free to use Agent Orange in order to win a war are the same ones who, in times of peace, believe they have a right to what remains of the Earth’s natural resources to use as they wish, transforming living nature into commodities, and commodities into dead capital. We hear the reactionaries dilate about all the fine values for which they stand. Endlessly they go on about personal values, family values, religious values, patriotic values, old-fashioned values of honesty and clean living. Yet their ranks are plagued with illicit sexual scandals, unlawful scams, untrammeled mendacity, massive corruption, and corporate grand thefts. They plund
er the public treasure while posing as holier-than-thou patriots. Unfortunately, many beleaguered working folks—who need to believe that something in their world is right and trustworthy—give uncritical allegiance to these misleaders.
Opportunistic, hypocritical valuemongers are no more honest and virtuous than anyone else. In many instances, they are far worse than the worst of us. They perpetrate monumental deceptions and crimes that most of us would never even imagine. They tirelessly tarnish their critics for being self-indulgent liberals and libertines who lack upstanding values. But the truth is, if you are a progressive person, rather than devoting yourself to plunder and privilege, you have values for peace and justice, for fair play, and environmental sustainability, for communal caring and power sharing.
Everyone has values, but ours are much better than theirs, not only because our values stand for far, far better things, but also because we really try to live by them, as much as we can.
V.
A GUIDE TO CONCEPTS AND ISMS
19 TECHNOLOGY AND MONEY: THE MYTH OF NEUTRALITY
I recently heard a television network official assert that technology is inherently neither good nor bad; it can be used for helping or harming society. He voiced this notion with such authoritative insistence that one would think he was the first to have thought of it. In fact, many people hold to this view, and they are just as mistaken as he.
Only when one speaks hypothetically does technology achieve neutrality: “It could be used for good or it could be used for evil.” Such unspecified references to how it could be used overlook the reality of how it actually and regularly is used. The truth is, technology is “neutral” only when conceived in the abstract, divorced from the social context in which it develops. But since it actually develops only in a social context and since its application is always purposive, then we must ask, Cui bono? Who benefits? And at whose expense?
Contrary Notions Page 16