Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader 

Published by City Lights Publishers | www.citylights.com

 

 

1-Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, "Contrary Notions" is about? What is it trying to communicate? 

 

Answer:  The book's subtitle is "The Michael Parenti Reader." It is a composite selection of my various writings, focusing on the kind of systemic approach that is so grandly ignored or viciously misrepresented by many persons from across the political spectrum: left, right, and center.

 

The selections cover a wide range of subjects including media, empire, wealth, class power, politics, gender oppression, racism, ethnicity, culture, ideology, technology, environment, history, and historiography. I emphasize the extent to which things happen not out of simple chance and mishap, but because of structural forces, power, material interests, and concerted human agency---developments and events that are often perpetrated by leaders who are not as stupid as some people think they are. 

 

(2) Can you tell ZNet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is? 

 

Answer: Most of the selections in "Contrary Notions" really do offer contrary notions, that is, critical ways of thinking about socio-economic and political reality. Included are excerpts from my past books and articles ranging back over 40 years. Almost all the selections in this new book have been revised, updated, and, I like to think, improved. A few have never before been published, having been written particularly for this volume.  Three or four of the selections are drawn wholly or in part from my personal life. Most of the writing is anchored in extensive research and is concerned with ideas and analyses that go beyond the issues of the day, offering ways of putting things together that should remain useful to the reader long after many of the book's informational particulars have slipped from his or her recall.

     

 

(3) What are your hopes for "Contrary Notions"? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort? 

 

Answer: It is hard to measure a book's efficacy and impact on the minds of others. Of course there will be those sectarians who will try to cast ill repute upon an author by slapping derogatory and ideologically-charged labels on him or her.  But I find it gratifying when the more independent-minded readers write to me and tell me that my work is lucid, well substantiated, well argued, historically informed, and useful in helping them see causalities and links where before they tended to perceive only puzzlement and shallow analysis. That's what it means to be a teacher. No amount of money can buy that kind of gratification. Those who would like to get a more comprehensive overview of my work, please visit my website: www.michaelparenti.org

 

 

 

II. INTRODUCTION TO CONTRARY NOTIONS

 

Introduction

 

Contained herein are the contrary notions, the critical analysis that is so grandly ignored or viciously misrepresented by many persons from across the political spectrum—left, right, and center. To some readers my efforts might appear one-sided, but if it is true that we need to hear all sides and not just the prevailing conventional opinion, then all the more reason why the reflections and analysis presented in this book deserve reasoned attention.

 

It is not demanded of readers that they embrace my views but that they reflect upon their own. How seldom we bother to explore in some critical fashion the fundamental preconceptions that shape our understanding of social and political life. How frequently, as if by reflex rather than reflection, we respond to certain cues and incantations, resisting any incongruous notion. Our opinions shelter and support us; it is an excruciating effort to submit them to reappraisal. Yet if we are to maintain some pretense at being rational creatures we must risk the discomfiture that comes with questioning the unquestionable, and try to transcend our tendencies toward mental confinement.

 

My intent is to proffer contrary notions, that is, critical ways of thinking about socio-political reality that will remain useful to the reader long after many of the particulars herein have slipped from his or her recall. What you are about to dip into are readings from various works of mine, from across some forty years and covering a wide range of subjects, including culture, ideology, media, environment, lifestyle, gender, race, ethnicity, wealth, class power, public policy, political life, technology, empire, history, and historiography, along with a few selections drawn directly from my personal life. Almost all these entries have been revised, expanded, updated, and, I like to think, improved. A few have never before been published. A few other selections are from publications or books of mine that are out of print and not easily accessible. This volume presents a varied sampling of my work without trying to represent  every chronological phase or every subject I have ever treated.

 

Most of the writing herein is anchored in extensive research and is concerned with ideas and analyses that go beyond the issues of the day. I am of the opinion that there does not have to be an unbridgeable gap between scholars and lay readers. One can write in an accessible and pleasant style while dealing with complex concepts and constructs. To write clearly and understandably does not mean one is being simple or superficial. The converse is also true: to write in a dense, dull, or convoluted manner (as one is trained to do in academia) does not mean that one is being profound and insightful.

 

I decided not to include any of the many letters and book reviews I have published in newspapers, magazines, and journals, nor the polemical exchanges, rebuttals, and rejoinders I allowed myself to be drawn into, nor the numerous interviews I gave that have found their way into print. Letters, reviews, and interviews can provide food for thought, I think, but in a form that seems too fragmented and off-the-cuff for this volume. (For further information about me and my talks and writings, see www.michaelparenti.org.)

 

I hope the reader's experience with this book will be not only informational but conceptual and maybe even occasionally enlightening. Everything on the pages that follow is meant to cast light on larger sets of social relations. In one way or another, everything herein is meant to engage our concerns about social justice and human well-being. The struggle against plutocracy and the striving for peace and democracy are forever reborn Along with the many defeats and deceits produced in this age of reactionary resurgence, there have been some worthwhile victories.  And although we are here only for a limited time, I like to think that this is not true of the world itself.

 

 —Michael Parenti

 

III. EXCERPT FROM CONTRARY NOTIONS

 

La Famiglia: An Ethno-Class Experience

 

Decades ago in the northeast corner of Manhattan, in what is still known as East Harlem, there existed a congestion of dingy tenements and brownstones wherein resided one of the largest Italian working-class populations outside of Italy itself. The backyards were a forest of clotheslines, poles, and fences. The cellars, with their rickety wooden steps and iron banisters, opened directly onto the sidewalks. On warm days the streets were a focus of lively activity, with people coming and going or lounging on stoops and chatting. Small groups of men engaged in animated conversations, while children played ball in the streets or raced about wildly.

 

On certain days horse-drawn carts offered a lush variety of fruits and vegetables trucked in from Jersey and Long Island farms. The cries of the vendors were of a Southern Italian cadence unspoiled by a half-century in the new land. Women sat at window sills with elbows planted on pillows, occasionally calling down to acquaintances or yelling at the children. There was always something of interest going on in the streets but rarely anything of special importance except life itself.

 

It was in this East Harlem of 1933 that I made a fitful entrance into the world. My birth was a cesarean because, as my mother explained years later: "You didn't want to come out. You were stubborn even then." Since she suffered from a congenital heart disease, there was some question as to whether either of us would survive the blessed event. In those days, during a dangerous birth, a doctor might crush the baby's head in order to remove it from the womb and avoid fatal injury to the mother, a procedure the Catholic Church strenuously opposed. The Church's position was to let nature take its course and make no deliberate sacrifice of life. This sometimes meant that the baby came out alive but the mother died, or sometimes both perished. At the last minute the hospital asked my father to grant written permission to have my life sacrificed were it to prove necessary to save his wife. Obeying his heart instead of the Church, my father readily agreed. As it turned out, they decided on a cesarean section, a risky operation in 1933 for a woman with a heart condition. Happily both of us came through.

 

To talk of my family I would have to begin with my grandparents who came from the impoverished lands of Southern Italy (as did most of the Italians in America), bringing with them all the strengths and limitations of their people. They were frugal, hardworking, biologically fertile—and distrustful of anyone who lived more than a few doors away.

 

One grandmother had thirteen children of whom only seven survived, and the other had fourteen with only nine survivors. This was the traditional pattern of high fertility and high mortality carried over from the old country. Given the burdens of repeated childbirth, both my grandmothers died years before my grandfathers. Their children, however, adopted the American style of smaller families. Having discovered birth control and urban living and trying to survive the Great Depression, they rarely had more than two or three children. The image of the large Italian family is an anachronism that hardened into a stereotype.

 

My father's mother, Grandma Marietta, was a living portrait of her generation: a short squat woman who toiled endlessly in the home. She shared the common lot of Italian peasant women: endless cooking, cleaning, and tending to the family, with a fatalistic submergence of self. "Che pu fare?" ("What can you do?") was the common expression of the elderly women. Given their domestic confinement, they learned but a few words of English even after decades of living in New York. They accepted suffering as a daily experience, rather than as something extraordi­nary. They suffered while mending and washing clothes in their kitchens, or standing over hot stoves; they suffered while climbing tenement stairs, or tending to the children or sitting alone at the windows; and they suffered while praying to their saints in church and burying their dead. Most of them went through life dressed in black in an uninterrupted state of mourning for one or another kin.

 

Marietta often cast her eyes up toward the kitchen ceiling and muttered supplications to Saint Anthony of the Light Fixture. She lived in fear of u mal'occhio, the evil eye. When younger members of the family fell ill, it was because someone had given them u mal'occhio. Like a high priestess she would sit by my sickbed and drive away the evil eye, making signs of the cross on my forehead, mixing oil and water in a small dish and uttering incantations that were a combina­tion of witchcraft and Catholicism. Witchcraft was once the people's religion, having been in Southern Italy many centuries before Catholicism and having never quite left. The incantations seemed to work, for sooner or later I always recovered.

 

Some of the first-generation Italians were extreme in their preoccupation with the evil eye. I remember as late as the 1950s a few of the late-arriving postwar immigrants would put an open pair of scissors, with one blade deliberately broken, on top of the television set so that no one appearing on the screen could send u mal'occhio into their living rooms. As we now know, the contaminations of television are not warded off that easily.

 

My mother's mother, Grandma Concetta, was something of an exception to this picture of the Italian woman. Endowed with a strong personality and a vital intelligence, she turned to the only respectable profession open to rural Italian women in the late nineteenth century: she became a midwife, a skill she learned in Italy and brought with her to New York. In those days midwives did more than deliver babies. They advised families on the care of children, diagnosed and treated illnesses with herbs, dietary prescriptions, heat applications, and other natural remedies that were said to work with far less destruction and sometimes more efficacy than the expensive chemicalized drugs pushed by the medical and pharmaceutical industries of today. She died at the age of sixty, a few years before I was born. I knew her only from the testimony of others and from a few faded photographs of a woman who gazed into the camera with a friendliness and gentle strength.

 

 

 

The men of my grandfathers' generation had toiled like beasts of burden in the old country, trapped in a grinding poverty, victimized by landlords, tax collectors, and military press gangs. Having fled to the crowded tenements of New York, they found they had a little more to live on but sometimes less to live for. My mother's father, Vincenzo, came to the United States from Calabria in 1887. He spent his working days in East Harlem carrying 100-pound bags of coal up tenement stairs, a profession that left him permanently stooped over. My father's father, Giuseppe, arrived in 1909. A landless peasant who had worked for a large estate near Gravina, outside Bari, he was fleeing military conscription. Giuseppe worked as a ditchdigger and day laborer in New York, managing to raise an enormous family on subsistence wages.

 

The Italian immigrant laborers were the paragons of the humble, thrifty toilers whom some people like to point to when lecturing the poor on how to suffer in silence and survive on almost nothing. In truth, the immigrants were not all that compliant—at least not originally. In fact, they had taken the extraordinary measure of uprooting themselves from their homelands in order to escape the dreadful oppression of the Old World. Rather than suffer in silence, they voted with their feet. We may think of them as the virtuous poor (although in their day they were denounced as the "swarthy hordes"), but they saw themselves as lifelong victims who were somewhat less victimized in the new land than in the old. Now they worked only twelve hours a day instead of fourteen and were better able to feed their children.

 

Still, in their hearts, many of the first generation men nursed a sentimen­tal attachment to Italy. As the years wore on "the old country" for them became Paradise Lost, while the new land often seemed heartless, money-mad, and filled with the kind of lures and corruption that distanced children from their parents. They felt little patriotic devotion. What kept them in the United States were the loaves and fishes, not the stars and stripes.

 

The immigrant men drank wine made in their own cellars, and smoked those deliciously sweet and strong Italian stogies (to which I became temporarily addicted in my adulthood). They congregated in neighborhood clubs, barber shops, and the backrooms of stores to play cards, drink, and converse. They exercised a dominant presence in the home, yet left most domestic affairs including all the toil of child rearing to the women. Religion was also left to the women. The immigrant males might feel some sort of attachment to the saints and the church but few attended mass regularly and some openly disliked the priests. In the literal sense of the word, they were "anticlerical," suspicious of clergymen who did not work for a living but lived off other people's labor, and who did not marry but spent all their time around women and children in church.

 

The Italians who came to the United States during the great migrations at the turn of the century, like other groups before and since, were treated as unwelcome strangers. Considered incapable of becoming properly Americanized, they endured various forms of discrimination. Like other ethnic groups that have felt the sting of discrimination, many of the immigrants developed a late-blooming compensatory nationalism, becoming more nationalistic regarding Italy while in the new country than when they had lived "on the other side." Certainly that was true of Grandpa Giuseppe. For many, Mussolini appeared on the world stage in 1922 as something of a redeemer. Through his exploits in Africa and by "standing up" to other European powers, Mussolini won "respect" for Italy and for Italians everywhere—or so many of the immigrant men imagined.

 

"When Mussolini came along," an elderly Italian once told me, "they stopped calling us 'wop.'" The statement is woefully inaccurate. The admiration expressed by the U.S. conservative establishment and the mainstream press for Mussolini did not generate a new respect for immigrants in America. If anything it bespoke a low regard for them. U.S. plutocrats thought no better of ordinary Italians than they did of their own American workers. To them, the Italian was a vice-ridden ne'er-do-well, a disorderly bumpkin lacking in Calvinist virtues, just the sort of person most in need of a dictator's firm hand.

 

The second generation, that is, the American-born children of the immigrants, usually spoke of Mussolini with scorn and derision, especially after the United States entered World War II. I recall bitter arguments in my grandfather's house between the older and younger men. (With one or two exceptions, the women seldom voiced opinions on such matters.) As the war progressed and Mussolini showed himself to be nothing more than Hitler's acolyte, the old men tended to grow silent about him. But in their hearts, I believe, they never bore him much ill-feeling.

 

The military performance of Italy's legions in the war proved something of an embarrassment to those who had been anticipating Benito's version of the Second Coming of the Roman Empire. The ordinary recruits in the Italian army had no desire to fight il Duce's battles. Rather they manifested a decided inclination to flee or surrender the moment they realized the other side was using live ammunition. One of my uncles gleefully told the story of how the entire Italian army landed one evening in Brooklyn to invade the Navy Yard, only to be routed and driven into the sea by the nightshift maintenance crew. Grandpa was not amused by that story. When Italy switched sides and joined the Allies in the middle of the war, there was much relief and satisfaction among the American-born and probably even among many of the immigrants.

 

Contrary to what we have heard, immigrant Italians were not particularly loving toward their children. They sent their young ones to work at an early age and expropriated their earnings. For most of the adults there was little opportunity to face the world with ease and tenderness. Of course, infants and toddlers were hugged, kissed, and loved profusely, but as the children got older it would have been an embarrassment, and in any case was not the custom, to treat them with much overt affection. Besides, there were so many of them, so many to feed or to bury, each new child being either an additional burden or an early tragedy but seldom an unmitigated joy.

 

"La famiglia, la famiglia," was the incantation of the old Italians. The family, always the family: be loyal to it, obey it, stick with it. This intense attachment to the family was not peculiar to Italians but was, and still is, a common characteristic of almost any poor rural people—be it in the Philippines, Nigeria, India, or Appalachia. More than anything the family was one's defense against starvation, the padrone, the magis­trates, strangers, and rival families. As in any survival unit, its strictures were often severe and its loyalties intense. And betrayals were not easily forgiven.

 

The Italian family could also be a terrible battleground within itself. "Nobody can hate like brothers," the saying goes, especially brothers (and sisters) who had a hard childhood ruled over by immigrant parents who themselves saw life as a series of impending catastrophes. I remember the many squabbles, grudges, and hurt feelings that passed between my father, his brothers and sisters and their respective spouses. The series of shifting alliances and realignments among them resembled the Balkan politics of an earlier era. Years later, as the siblings put the deprivations and insecurities of the immigrant family behind them and mellowed with age and prosperity and the advent of children and grandchildren of their own, they tended to get along much better with each other. It was a good example of how structural relations of the larger society influence personal relations.

 

I enjoyed the nourishing embrace of the big family gatherings, the outings at the beach, the picnics, parties and holiday dinners. The Italian holiday feast was a celebration of abundance with its endless platters of tasty well-seasoned foods. I wonder if those marathon meals were a kind of ritual performed by people who had lived too long in the shadows of want and hunger, a way of telling themselves that at least on certain days the good life was theirs. Whether or not there was any larger meaning to them, the dinners were enjoyed for themselves.

 

I have an especially fond memory of my maternal grandfather, Vincenzo, a stooped, toothless, unimposing old man who was my closest ally in early life. During his last years, finding himself relegated to the edges of the adult world, he entered wholeheartedly into my world, playing cards with me, taking me for walks around the block, watching with undisguised delight as I acted out my highly dramatized cowboy and Indian games. He always took my side and despite his infirmity was sometimes able to rescue me from the discipline of my parents—which is the God-given function of grandparents.

 

Years before, when Vincenzo was still a youngster in his late seventies and a widower, he was discovered to have a girl friend, a woman of about fifty-five years. She would steal into the house when no one was home and climb into bed with him. When family members discovered this tryst, they were outraged. My relatives denounced the woman as a whore of the worse sort, whose intent was to drive Grandpa to an early grave by overexerting his heart. (He died at age eighty-seven.) The poor lonely woman dared not see Vincenzo anymore; and poor Grandpa, after being scolded like a child, was kept under a sort of house arrest. In those days the idea that elderly parents might have sexual desires caused a furious embarrassment among their children.

 

After passing a certain age, Italian grandfathers were frequently made captives by their sons, daughters, older nieces and nephews, who all competed to put the old man under their protective custody. If a car came too close for comfort while the grandfather was crossing the street, as might happen to any pedestrian, the family would try to keep him from taking unaccompanied strolls, convinced that he could no longer judge traffic. If he misplaced his hat or scarf, as might anyone, he would be deemed unable to care for his personal effects. At the beach, if an Italian grandfather waded into the water much above his knees, one or another of his self-appointed guardians could be seen jumping up and down on the shore, waving frantically at him and shouting: "Papa's gonna drown! Somebody get him!" I read somewhere that this phenomenon of grandfather captivity still exists in parts of Italy.

 

 I saw the protective custody game repeated with my paternal grandfather, Giuseppe, who in his later years presided in silence at the head of the table during holiday meals, a titular chieftain whose power had slipped away to his sons and sons-in-law who now earned the money and commanded their own households. While a certain deference was still paid him because of his age, more often he found himself, much to his annoyance, a victim of overprotection—which is a sure sign of powerlessness.

 

Years later in 1956, when an adult, I had occasion to have a few long talks with him and discovered that he was a most intelligent and engaging man—although he did have a number of opinions that were strange for that time, namely that country air was better for one's health than city air, canned foods were of little nutritional value, and physical exertion was better than sitting around doing nothing. Giuseppe also believed that doctors and hospitals could be dangerous to one's survival, automobiles were the ruination of cities, and too much emphasis was placed on money and material things. We treated such views as quaintly old-fashioned, having no idea that grandpa was merely ahead of his time.

 

After my birth the doctors warned my mother that with her congenital heart condition another pregnancy would be fatal. So I went through life as an only child. My mother tended to spoil me, for which she was criticized by her older sisters. More than once she mentioned how sorry she was that I had no brothers and sisters to play with, and she encouraged my playmates to come spend as much time as they wanted at our house. But I entertained no regrets about being an only child, for why would I want to share my lovely mother with some other little brat?

 

 My father played a more distant role than my mother, as was the usual way in Italian working-class families—and in just about any other family where the division of labor is drawn along gender lines. He labored long hours for meager sums, sometimes two jobs at a time. Born in Italy, he was transported to this country at the age of five. He did poorly in school because of the burdens the immigrant family imposes on its first born son. When he was only ten years old, his day went something like this: up at 6 a.m., work on his father's ice truck until 8 a.m., then to school, then back to work from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. to complete a thirteen-hour day. On Saturdays he worked from 6 a.m. to midnight, an eighteen-hour day. On Sunday he labored eight hours, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.—that was supposed to be a half-day.

 

My father understandably blamed his poor academic performance on his work burdens. As he put it: "I was too damn tired to learn to read and write." His fatigue often overcame him and he would fall asleep in class. He dropped out of school at age fourteen to work full time. Almost sixty years later, shortly before his death, I talked to him about his youthful days and recorded his thoughts. The things he remembered most were the toil, the humiliation of not being able to speak English, and the abuse he received from teachers. There was one bright spot, as he tells it:

 

The only teacher that cared about me was Miss Booth because she saw me carry ice a few times on 110th Street and she asked, "How come you're carrying ice at your age?" I said, "I got to work. My father can't afford a man. There's seven of us at home to feed." So she saw I wasn't really a bad kid. She saw I was no good in school really on account of I had to work. Miss Booth, she got me to wash the blackboard. Anything she wanted, I did because she showed she cared about me.

 

In his adult life, my father's friends were all men. Cross-gender friendships were not a common thing in those days. The women in a man's life consisted of his mother, his wife, his sisters, and other female relatives. He might know various women in the neighborhood and stop and chat with them briefly but it would have been considered inappropriate to let things develop further. To illustrate the patriarchal mentality of my father's world I might recall the time he informed me in troubled tones that Uncle Americo, while drunk one night, had started beating his wife, Aunt Fanny (my mother's sister). Americo's son, my cousin Eddy, forcibly intervened and wrestled his father to the floor. What shocked my father was not Americo's behavior but Eddy's. "I don't care what happens," he concluded, "a son should never raise a hand to his father"—a pronouncement that left me wondering what I would have done had I been in Eddy's place.

 

Hovering over us was the Great Depression, a mysterious force that explained why there was never enough money, why my father was away working all the time, why I couldn't have this or that new toy. I remember during one unusually difficult period my mother bought a small steak and cooked it for me as a special treat. She sat watching intently as every morsel disappeared into my mouth. When I offered her a piece she declined, saying she wasn't hungry. Only years later did I realize with a pang that she very much would have wanted some.

 

 None of my relatives talked of "careers"; I don't think the word was in vogue among us. But everyone talked about jobs—or the fear of being without one. A high school education was considered an unusual accomplishment, and the one uncle who had graduated high school was considered something of a celebrity. My mother's dream was that I would someday get a high school diploma, for then all doors would be open to me. As she said, I would be able to "dress nice every day not just Sundays" and "work in an office," a fate that sounded worse than death to a spirited street boy.

 

Toward the end of World War II the struggle for survival eased a bit. My father got steady work driving his uncle's bread truck and my mother found a job in a neighborhood dress shop, toiling at a sewing machine all day. I pledged to her that someday I would earn lots of money so that she would never have to set foot in that sweatshop again, a vow that heartened her more because of its expression of concern than because she believed she would live to see the day. As it happened, when I was seventeen she died at age forty-three, still employed by the same shop.

 

During my childhood I would wonder about the world beyond East Harlem, about the strange inhabitants of downtown Manhattan, tall, pink-faced, Anglo-Protestants who pronounced all their r's, patronized the Broadway theater, and traveled to Europe for purposes other than to locate relatives. I would think of other equally exotic peoples and unexplored worlds with anticipation. This "intoxication of experiences yet to come" left me with the feeling that East Harlem was not my final destination in life.

 

 When I was about twelve or thirteen I chanced upon a copy of Life magazine that contained an article describing East Harlem as "a slum inhabited by beggar-poor Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and Italians," words that stung me and stuck in my memory. Slum or not, most of the Italians, including all my relatives, abandoned East Harlem in the late 1950s, moving to what sociologists call "second settlement areas," leaving the old neighborhood to the growing numbers of Puerto Rican immigrants. The money the Italians had saved during the war years and post-war period became the down-payment passage to the mass-produced housing tracts of Long Island, Staten Island, and New Jersey, where as proud homeowners they could live a life that approximated the middle-class suburban one they saw in the movies.

 

But the new lifestyle had a downside to it. One uncle, who used to have huge parties for friends and relatives in his home on Third Avenue complete with mandolins, accordions, and popular and operatic songs—drawn from the amateur talents of the guests themselves—now discovered that no one came to visit him on the outer edge of Queens. An aunt of mine, who had lived all her life within shouting distance of at least three of her sisters, tearfully told my mother how lonely she was way out in Staten Island.

 

In time, I went off to graduate school and saw far less of my extended family, as they did of each other. Years later in 1968 I got a call from my cousin Anthony asking me to attend a family reunion. It took place in Anthony's home in Queens, attended by a crowd of cousins and their fourth-generation children, the latter being youngsters whom I was meeting for the first time and for whom East Harlem was nothing more than a geographical expression, if that.

 

Time had brought its changes. The women wore coiffured hairdos and stylish clothes, and the men looked heavier. There was much talk about recent vacations and a slide show of Anthony's travels to Europe, also a magnificent buffet of Italian foods that made the slide show worth sitting through. And there were a lot of invitations to "come visit us." Much to my disappointment the older surviving aunts and uncles had decided to stay away because this was an affair for the younger people, an act of age segregation that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. In all, we spent a pleasant evening joking and catching up on things. It was decided we should get together more often. But we never did have another reunion.

 

 In the late 1970s I began to have recurring dreams, one every few months or so, continuing for a period of years. Unlike the recurring dreams portrayed in movies (in which the exact same footage is run and rerun) the particulars and fixtures of each dream in real life—or real sleep—differ, but the underlying theme is the same. In each dream I found myself living in a lovely apartment; sometimes it had spiral stairwells and bare brick walls and sometimes lavish wood paneling and fireplaces, but it always turned out to be a renovation of 304 East 118th Street, the old brownstone in East Harlem where I had spent most of my early life.

 

We might think of recurring dreams as nightmarish, but these were accompanied by sensations of relief and yearning. The life past was being recaptured and renovated by the life now accomplished. The slum was being gentrified. The working-class Italian youth and the professional-class American academic were to live under the same roof. I had come home to two worlds apart. Never quite at home in either, I would now have the best of both. Once I understood the message, the dreams stopped. 

 

 

 

Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader 

 

Published by City Lights Books | www.citylights.com