I’m sure that many of you have noticed a recent slowdown in my posts over the past two weeks. I’ve been busy with other writing projects, attempting to keep my fledgling writing process going, for Boy @ The Window and writings related to it. I’ve also been catching up on my TV entertainment. Thank goodness for the power of Netflix. I’ve been catching up on Ugly Betty of late, finding it a stomach-churning show to watch in the process. I guess naivete does have its advantages.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the New York Mets winning their first World Series. They took out the powerhouse Baltimore Orioles of Palmer and McNally in five games. Even as an ex-baseball fan who didn’t actually watch the series, I know the story all too well. My mother spent my baseball-crazed teenage years telling me the story of the Miracle Mets of ’69 over and over again. Cleon Jones wasn’t an unsung hero in our chaotic corner of the world!

Those were the years I began to get to know the city immediately south of Mount Vernon. Especially Manhattan. Between hunting down my father Jimme almost every weekend between the end of ’82 and the summer of ’87 at watering holes in the Bronx and in Midtown Manhattan in order to buy clothes, buy books, wash clothes and eat. And working for Jimme in spurts in the fall of ’84 and the summer of ’85. It was an interesting time working and milling about in what I’d eventually nickname the “Third Armpit of Hell.”

It was the Koch years, of graffiti and dangerous Subway rides, with puddles of piss on the floor and people dressed for a Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam (with Full Force) video. There were plenty of weekends I looked forward to that kind of disarray. It easily beat the hum-drum of watching after four younger siblings, avoiding my idiot stepfather and a town with all of the excitement a bedroom suburb in search of an identity could muster on a Friday evening or late Saturday morning.

I didn’t come to fully understand the gnawing sensation I’d feel when walking through the diverse socioeconomic and ethnic sections of Mount Vernon until I started working for my father in September ’84. Jimme thought it’d be better for us to work for his money rather than us just coming over every week to get a few dollars. So off and on during that fall, Darren and me spent part of our weekends working for Jimme on various cleaning jobs on the Upper East Side going into Spanish Harlem, or on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center and the West 72nd Street Subway station.

Whenever anyone asked me what Jimme did, I usually said, “Oh, my dad’s a carpet cleaner.” I didn’t see him as a simple janitor, although it was true that he cleaned stuff. But Jimme didn’t clean toilets or latrines or bathroom sinks and tubs. He cleaned the floors of office buildings — carpeted, wooden, or otherwise — thoroughly treating any surface he encountered with industrial cleaning machines. He cleaned high-rise co-ops and condos where the mortgage or rent payment per month was more than our rent at 616 for a year. It was an important job in his eyes, and I wasn’t going to diminish it because other folks couldn’t understand or wouldn’t have a clue as to the amount of labor involved in Jimme’s work.

I didn’t have much of an idea until I started working for him. Spending a Friday night or a Saturday or Sunday morning working with Jimme was no easy task. We’d have to walk over to Jimme’s — or catch the 7 and get off in downtown Mount Vernon and then walk over — and get him, then get on the 2 at East 241st and get off at 72nd Street. If we were lucky Jimme might’ve had the cleaning machines at home with him and would take them on the Subway to the job. If we weren’t, we’d have to walk over to Jimme’s job at 20 East 64th to get them, all the while dealing with the mafioso-like Levi brothers Glen and Bruce (pronounced Lee-vy, not like the Levi’s Jeans). They often treated us like we had severe mental retardation.

The work was hot, hard, and boring, and with my imagination, I’d sometimes forgot that I was buffing a floor, drawing anger from Jimme. “Bo’, don’ be messin’ around with them machines,” Jimme would say. Sometimes he would mumble in anger, so much so that I thought that we were about to fight. So one thing we did to help us pass the time was to buy a standard AM/FM radio with an antenna. It kept us from getting lost in thought. This was the way I could keep up with music, with my Mets, Giants, Knicks, and Rangers, and pass the time while concentrating on the work.

Jimme decided after a couple of weeks to treat us by taking us to a Mets game. Not only was this our first time at Shea. It was the first time we’d been to any sporting event, unless you count the Ice Capades with ’76 Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill at Madison Square Garden in March ’78 as one. It was a Tuesday night game near mid-September, the Mets desperately trying to catch up with the Cubs and first place in the division. It didn’t happen that cold night, as it dropped into the thirties. They lost to the St. Louis Cardinals 9-5. Keith Hernandez and George Foster hit home runs, and Darryl Strawberry got one little hit. We left after the Cardinals rallied late in the game, playing the role of spoiler and keeping a permanent underdog team like the Mets from making the postseason. As disappointed as I was, it was a wonderful experience going to see a game in person for the first time.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that today also marks the fortieth birthday of my crush #2. It’s significant only in the sense that it reminds me that my perceptions of where I’ve lived and of my times has been shaped as much by the personalities that have populated my life as it has been by geography and circumstance. Seasons do change, crushes go away, and sports that were once faves become distant memories. But the fact that I got to see more than one side of New York and Mount Vernon has helped me understand more about the inevitability of change than I otherwise would’ve if my world had been limited to 616 and my family.

I know, I know. Why do I remember things that most of us dutifully forget? How come I discuss details that so many prefer to and do commit to the memory deletion bin? These are good questions, often ones I ask of myself regularly. The answer is, I just do, I just do.

Such is the case with my applications for college some twenty-three years ago, the wonderful fall of ’86. I’ve already commented on my wonderful relations with Sylvia Fasulo, my chain-smoking guidance counselor from my MVHS years. But I neglected to discuss what it was like to get letters of recommendation from my MVHS teachers. Because I trusted almost no one in authority, I ended up with only two letters of recommendation, one out of this world, one the equivalent of used toilet paper. For those of you who either are applying to college this year or are parents whose kids are applying to college this year, here’s a lesson in critical discernment.

Of all the former teachers I decided to ask for a letter of recommendation from, I went to Andy Butler. My Pre-Calc (or Higher Math) class the year before might as well have been a study hall with function formulas. Around the end of October ’85, I began to notice what I thought was a strange everyday occurrence. Andy Butler brought a can of the new Diet Coke to class every morning without fail. We met for class during third or fourth period, around eleven o’clock. Well, he never seemed like he was awake considering he was drinking Diet Coke in front of us at a particularly high energy point of the day. The other thing I noticed was that his can seemed to have the same dents in it day after day.

I spent about a week in Butler’s class just figuring out the dents in his can. If his can had been a map, the dents would’ve been in the southeast corner, down and to the right of the red-brown Diet Coke logo (in the white area) and just above the aluminum gray bottom. When I mentioned what I’d seen to the seniors in my class, Adam, Anthony and Richard all thought that I was crazy at first. By mid-November, though, we’d figured out the dents and the truth.

On one of my after-school runs to C-Town in Pelham I stopped at the deli down the street from 616. Butler was there buying three cases of beer for home. It was about 4:30, just ninety minutes after school had ended, and it wasn’t even Friday.

“I’m going through a rough divorce,” he said, before I could say anything. As if I really wanted to know. “I’m sorry,” I said.

As far as my nose was concerned, Butler was getting refills. I’d solved the mystery, which included Butler’s long disappearances from class for no apparent reason.

This is the teacher whom I asked to write one of the most important letters in my then young life. What the inebriated Butler wrote was eighty-four words of qualified support of my pursuit of postsecondary education. I was “a good student” when I “worked hard,” but I could also become “distracted sometimes.”

Not that I felt I had other places to turn, but there were other and better possibilities. I just didn’t allow myself to realize it at the time. I knew I probably should’ve asked someone else — almost anyone else — for a letter. Cuglietto, Flanagan and Warns may well have been better choices. Even some of my senior-year teachers would’ve done better by me. I just didn’t trust anyone who practiced “tough love” like Cuglietto, put on airs like Flanagan, or compared me to Sam or any other student like Warns did. So I went with Butler’s lousy letter, figuring that Meltzer’s would at least tip the balance.

I didn’t get much help from my teachers other than Meltzer. And Meltzer did help out in numerous ways. He helped me get over some of my embarrassment as I wrote my college essays about my life as the adult teenager at 616. I needed to write this type of essay, since I had some explaining to do about my lack of extracurricular activities. Meltzer helped me interpret the multi-page green-and-white financial sheet that I picked up from the local welfare office outlining my mother’s income between ’83 and ’86, figuring out that my mother’s average income was $16,600 per year as a welfare recipient.

He also set up an interview with a Columbia University alum living in the Wykagyl section of New Rochelle, a rich neighborhood full of small mansions and near a professional-level golf course and country club. The pompous fool seemed as interested in intimidating me with his soliloquy about Columbia’s great traditions as he was in helping me get in. He never asked why someone like me would want to attend. I guess he thought that of course this Black boy would want to go to an Ivy League school like Columbia. “Why do I have to go through this to get into college?,” I thought. I tried to not hold it against Meltzer that I had to witness opulence and arrogance in my college quest.

What Meltzer did that probably helped me most was to bolster my confidence in the college application process. His letter of recommendation was six pages of unrestrained praise. He used so many superlatives to describe my academic success and college potential that I thought that I was the great Dwight Gooden by the time I finished reading it. I was “a great kid,” a “diamond in the rough,” hard-working,” a “critical thinker,” the “best student [he] ever had,” an “intellectual,” smart “beyond belief,” and, well, you get the picture. It made me laugh and blush over and over again after I first read it. I said to Meltzer the next day in the Social Studies Department’s faculty lounge, that “you know more about me than I know about myself.” He just laughed and laughed about that.

It did all work out. Meltzer’s letter — more like a six-page paper on every positive quality I had at the time — more than made up for my lackluster letter from Butler. I should’ve been wise enough to get two letters like Meltzer’s instead of the one. But then again, given where I went to school, I’m not completely sure I had a better alternative.

I admit it. I’m a closet Trekkie, and have been for about thirty-five of my forty or so years here on planet Earth. I watched the reruns of the original Star Trek on WNEW and WPIX (New York area TV stations) from the time that I was five (at least when we had a TV and when I wasn’t a Hebrew-Israelite). I watched the Star Trek cartoon series for the few years that it was on. One of the first movies I ever watched on cable was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. I’ve watched series as good at TNG, as interesting as Deep Space Nine, and as critically uneven as Voyager since then. Because I’m also an historian, I have the Star Trek time line in my head, memorized from roughly 1996 to 2380. I’m even willing to give this new-old Star Trek movie that came out earlier this year a chance, even though it’s reeking havoc with the time line once again.

But I feel that it’s time to do something different, something new, with the franchise and with its potential spin-offs (if there will ever be another one) in the future. I reached this assessment based on a experiment I decided to conduct between the end of May and last week. I decided four years after its demise to watch Star Trek: Enterprise from start to finish. I was in between semesters and consulting work in mid-May, flicked on SyFy, and saw back-to-back episodes of the series for the first time. Even though I always liked Scott Bakula, I couldn’t bring myself to watch after reading some horrible reviews, not to mention after my watching the ridiculous movie Star Trek: Nemesis in ’02. After seeing a scene of part of Florida being cut into pieces by some advanced weapon, and Bakula’s character negotiating with sentient reptilians, insectizoids, humanoids, arboreals and amphibians (all related and from the same planet), I decided to see how far down the rabbit hole would go.

Some ninety-eight episodes and 26 DVDs later — thanks to the power of Netflix — I’ve come to the realization that bad writing and limited imagination can really screw up a series, no matter the quality of the acting or the actors. It’s not like the original Star Trek, where there were lots of horrible actors, the scripts weren’t the greatest, but William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and the others from the main cast could carry you through the worst of it. No, this was worse, because the show lacked a clear sense of direction right from the start. Every time it seemed the producers had found a theme, they decided to send us back in time to either alter or maintain the Star Trek time line. Bakula’s character was hit in the head so many times that it’s possible that he could have post-concussion syndrome.

Add to that the attempt to focus Star Trek: Enterprise on a single theme for an entire 24- episode season — the warding off of the Xindi threat to Earth in season three. This was the season it came to be known that a planet had spawn six beings of high intelligence, evolving together from birds, fish/amphibians, arboreals (in this case, sloths), primates/humanoids, insects, and reptiles. I’m convinced that this was when the show jumped the shark. Watching Bakula’s character attempt to have a conversation with a half-sea-lion, half-tuna with sonar language capability was about as idiotic as the show could get.

I stayed with it, though. I couldn’t believe that the show could continue to get worse. And I had the support of the reviewers, who almost unanimously agreed that the fourth and final season was easily the best one. Yeah, it was the best all right. The best of a very, very bad bunch. It was a series of two and three-parters, some a bit interesting, a few actually good and worthy of being compared to the work done by the writers and producers for TNG. All leading to the first interplanetary alliance, a precursor of the Federation. Then, I guess, they learned that the show was canceled, so the scripts became sludgy again, leaving actors to search for emotions they never should have had in the first place, and unnecessarily killing off a main character in the final episode. A last show so cheesy that they brought back TNG veterans Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis (and the voice of Data/Brent Spiner) as their more middle-aged selves to inappropriately close out Star Trek: Enterprise on a holodeck.

Still, I watched. It was so bad at times, that I continued to watch, expecting a twist or turn, a poignant episode, a story line worthy of being followed. Their best story line was the forming of a relationship between the Vulcan science officer T’Pol (played by Jolene Blalock) and Commander Tucker (Connor Trinneer) , the ship’s chief engineer. Even this was more uneven than the eight-year-long affair of Tony Danza and Judith Light on Who’s The Boss! Star Trek: Enterprise was bad, all right, but it was so bad that I had to keep watching.

I kept watching because I liked to be entertained by quality acting with scripts that are both good and forward-thinking, one that’s about imagination and inspiration, about the future and not just about adjusting the precious time line. Star Trek: Enterprise, despite the acting, crashed and burned because it lacked the quality of a dreamer, and I’m not just talking about the late Gene Roddenberry here. It lacked the ability to make me consistency optimistic about a future for humanity beyond our everyday squabbles over money, food and water, our idiotic strife over the social constructions of race, gender, religion and nationalism. I guess it was truly a product of its times, with its first episode coming within weeks of 9/11.

Now that it’s over, I long for a series that can present a vision that raises the level of popular culture discourse the way the original Star Trek did in the ’60s or TNG did in the ’80s and ’90s. Realism is fine, but optimism and forward-thinking embedded in that realism is better. Those are the qualities that keep a series from crashing and burning, even when it does.

This post might be a bit much for many of us. It may well be too much for me. For it’s about some of why I became ambivalent about the academic enterprise. It also describes some of my cynicism — that’s right, cynicism — toward ’60s-style liberals in America, including those whom, as liberal as they may be, aren’t really progressive in any cultural or sociological sense.

You see, I took a class my first semester as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University called Comparative Working-Class History. It was mostly a study of the beaten-down, pre-industrial and Industrial Revolution-era workers who lost their control over the tools of production, and their Marxist-like struggles to regain some control over such tools. Either directly, or through the state (socialism), or through over, violent means. Not that I didn’t sympathize, but I always thought this story too simplistic, not concerned enough with the psychology of human nature or the social constructs under which people are willing to live, even at the expense of their own improvement.

Anyway, the course was taught by a professor whose research looked at the role of Russian women in the economic transition between Czarist Russia and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Although I had no real personal stake in this course initially (I was too busy plotting ways to make all of my courses about multiculturalism, my dissertation topic), I eventually did because of an incident on the first day of class. The Saturday before, August 28, 1993, the great British Marxist E.P. Thompson had passed away. The writer of The Making of the English Working Class (1963) had lived to the age of 69, but apparently had been sick for nearly three years before his death. It was a sad time, for a generation of historians had been influenced by Thompson’s work. His 1963 publication was a cornerstone manual for addressing what most historians now call social history. Unlike so-called socialized medicine, it’s not when the government rewrites history. It’s about people writ large, about how groups of folks have responded to large-scale change, to oppression and exploitation, to difficult if not impossible circumstances.

Certainly Thompson wasn’t the only historian of his time to write in this manner — and hardly the first (anyone ever heard of W.E.B. Du Bois or Franz Fanon?). But for those historians whom had embraced neo-Marxism, if not scholars of color who wrote like neo-Marxists, Thompson was their Edward R. Murrow or Dwight D. Eisenhower. This was also the case of our professor, whom, in discussing E.P. Thompson’s death, her memories of him (more on that later), and his significance to the field, started sobbing in front of the twelve of us. I couldn’t believe it! I wanted to say, “There’s no crying in a graduate seminar!” She was crying as if this were a dear mentor or a close friend. This wasn’t about gender for me, it was about professionalism — she was a tenure-track professor, after all. I knew that there would be some long days in this class after her crying episode.

And they were. All semester, there was a three-way tug-of-war between me (and occasionally, my former Pitt grad school colleague who decided to hop the bridge to Carnegie Mellon to take this course), ten brown-nosing students who’d agree with her despite the evidence, and her. I didn’t expect my now fellow Carnegie Mellon grad students to take my side. But I did expect them to read Thompson and Wilentz and other folks for themselves and not just to get an A out of our professor. There may have been one or two other classes I dreaded more in three years of grad school. Yet I saw no one more unaware of their biases than our professor in this course.

It all came to a head when it was time to discuss David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness (1991) and, indirectly, Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic (1984). Both authors looked at the formation of the White American (and male) working-class in the first half of the nineteenth century. Our professor, as usual, took the stance that the only ideology of significance was one that proclaimed class inequalities the predominant issue explaining the radicalization of the American working-class. Finding this a bit laughable (a mistake on my part), I pressed my argument that at least in the case of US history, race and class distinctions have been and remain intertwined. So much so that a typical neo-Marxist analysis of the American working-class couldn’t apply.

The next two hours were me and my Pitt colleague against ten brown-nosers and our professor. Luckily in my case, I could not only quote Roediger and Wilentz, but Herbert Gutmann, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a host of other scholars to press home my counterargument. At the end, our professor said to me, in utter exasperation, “I guess we should just go back to original sin.” It meant that I was being a racial determinist, which I suppose was suppose to be an insult as well as her version of “No mas, no mas!”

I learned a lesson beyond my grades or my head-long march toward my doctorate that day. That most so-called liberals in America, whether an assistant professor or an avowed ’60s radical, are really not leftists at all, at least on issues involving race. They may not believe in promoting inequality or racism. But they don’t necessarily see groups of color as actors, activists, or as capable of taking actions independent of their ways of thinking about the world. They explain issues of inequality in ways that actually degrade the achievements of Americans of color who’ve managed to overcome such inequities. In my professor’s case, even as the wife of a prominent soon-to-be Pitt history professor, whose work has helped us as historians better understand the relationship between trade, ideas and economics on four sides of the Atlantic.

Still, the worst thing I learned is that it took Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness to confirm ideas that Du Bois had begun writing about nearly a century before. That, for me, made me apprehensive about wanting to work with scholars who may well see me and my work as well-intentioned, but inferior to theirs. I guess I could’ve cried in despair about this, but I didn’t.