CONTEMPORARY NONSENSE
141
The Bourgeois Playground
Cary Goodman's
Choosing Sides
is largely a history of the playground
movement in the United States, the people who started it, the direction it
took, and its effects on the immigrant population of New York City's Lower
East Side. He points out that when the immigrants first arrived the streets
were their playgrounds . There, he argues, they felt a sense of freedom that
allowed them to assert control over their environment, while the play–
grounds, with their fences, rules, and regulations, were the embodiment of
compartmentalization and control. He asserts that street life engendered a
feeling of camaraderie that both created and solidified social networks. . . .
The playground reformers are depicted as elitists whose condescend–
ing attitudes toward the new arrivals were characterized chiefly by an effort
to teach them bourgeois culture....
The heart of Goodman's thesis is that the playground movement was
nothing more (or less) than an attempt by greedy capitalists to dominate
and control the working classes. He uses all the catchwords employed by
Marxists-"the bosses ," "cultural imperialism," "tool of alienation,"
"false consciousness," and so on . There is a strident and biased tone
throughout the entire book . One of the most blatant examples appears on
page 49: "But in capitalism , what you see ain't what you get, pop songs or
not. "
William B. Helmreich, review of
Choosing
Sides: Playground and Street Life on the Lower
East Side
by Cary Goodman,
in
Contemporary Sociology,
July 1982
The Brezhnev-Nixon Pact
Nor could the Nixon Administration have been so arrogant with
Allende without the tacit permission of the Soviet Union. The coup took
place in the heady days of detente, when Henry the Clever and Leonid the
Shrewd agreed to stay out of each other's sphere of influence . . . . Chavkin
.. . obscures the lessons of Allende's downfall: if you ' ve got a revolution–
ary situation arm the workers despite what the Communists tell you . And
always be careful driving down the democratic road to socialism: the super–
powers are waiting at every crossroad to run you down .
Jonathan Maslin, review of
The Murder
of
Chile
by Samuel Chavkin, in
The Nation,
September 11, 1982
