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Who Are Clara’s Buddies? (Liberal Parenting Honorary Mentions)
Short preamble from me: I was brought up in the Midwest by liberal parents from NY State. My dad is originally from NYC and my mother from Long Island. I was always baffled about why they left NY, where everyone is cool, open-minded, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated.
I went back to “my roots” for college and until HRC won the nomination, spent a lot of time as a knee jerk liberal. So why did my Dad leave NYC? It had to do with being an iconoclast totally uninterested in image — he loves the Midwest, always hated East Coast snobbery and NYC chauvinism. And, as he once deigned to explain, in response to my repeated questioning of his decisions, because he felt that the sins of the popular kids I would meet in the Midwest might be less seductive to me, and ultimately less dangerous to my future. In other words, instead of doing coke and talking about Black Power and Foucault, he preferred that I play beer pong with people in crew cuts and polo shirts (or rather watch them play beer pong).
This calculation of his paid off. I was hopelessly unsophisticated in college, to my great disappointment. Never could overcome the uncoolness of my youthful social life. It always showed through, and I was always too stable to be cool.
This was circa 2003 so the rot wasn’t very advanced. Even the Coolest, most Jaded, East Coast kid I met in college wasn’t violent, and therefore couldn’t hold a candle to Clara Kraebber and her friends.
Preamble over. Remember my post about NYC child psychologist Markus Kraebber and architect wife Virginia Kindred and their lovely child Clara?
Well, turns out the whole group of Clara’s friends are Sarah Lawrence-educated (didn’t I predict that school would have something to do with this?) graphic designer, model, European-vacationing violent Maoists.
By the way, the NY Post has published some of Clara’s musings, about appropriating luxury apartments in NY, a “revolutionary strategy” inspired by Stalin, Trotsky, and the Spanish Civil War.
Interestingly, when the Post called Clara at home at her parents’ 1730 country estate in Litchfield, Connecticut, following her arrest, she was suddenly less inclined to expound on the details of her “revolutionary strategy.” It could have been her opportunity to martyrize herself for the cause, but she is as cowardly and craven as she is violent.
I here pay homage to my dad’s prescience (at that time he was a liberal too!). He saw the writing on the wall. I feel like I have had a close call.
Published in General
When I was growing up on the east side of Manhattan in the 1970s, it was interesting to note that the teens most enamored with the street culture of the time were the ones whose parents had the money to send them to private schools (though to be fair, teens being teens the declining quality-of-life that was NYC of the early 1970s was not simply taken for granted, with no personal history to compare it to, but was considered ‘exciting’ because teens in general think they’re 10-feet tall and bulletproof. But it was interesting that the more you were sheltered financially by mom and dad from the declining quality-of-life, the more the things that contributed to that decline were celebrated).
I was born in 1981 in Albuquerque, so the 70s in NY were when my parents had called it quits on NY. Took them a little while to arrive in the port of safety, the Midwest, passing through Chicago and San Francisco (which Dad HATED) on the way.
When I returned to NYC in the early 2000s, thanks to Guiliani the “fascist”, it was safe and clean. I met a lot of rich, white, privately educated kids who talked about the city in the 1970s with a hushed awe and I met hardened pioneers who bought in places like Park Slope in like 1975 and stuck it out so they could reminisce like battle hardened veterans.
I think today we are seeing a return to what my parents fled.
Dad laid down the law to me before I took the test to get into Stuyvesant in the early 70s that if I didn’t make it, we were moving to the suburbs, because I was not going to the district public high school down on the Lower East Side. Though ironically, by the early 70s, the influx of Asian students at Seward Park High School was improving the quality of the school (lots of them had the math scores to get into Stuyvesant, but not the English scores — now with second- and third-generation Asian students better adept at English, Stuyvesant is about three-quarters Asian, which is one of the reasons Bill de Blaiso has spent the better part of eight years trying to kill off the city’s academic high schools. They’re minority-majority, but it’s the wrong minority in the eyes of work progressive New York).
Looking at those mugshots, some of those criminals look hard-hearted as all get out.
It’s interesting that your mom and dad left somewhere that so epitomized the underpinnings of their professed liberalism @toqueville. You suggest he’s no longer liberal – is that so?
Parents do the dangdest things if they think it’s best for their children: I agreed to allow our son to go to prep school 3000 miles away from us (in part) because I thought 1. The girls in middle o’nowhere White Mountains NH would have to wear more clothes than Silicon Valley girls; 2. It would be harder to get drugs in middle o’nowhere NH. #1 was true because of dress code, not cold; #2 was mostly true but more because the kids were high achievers motivated by athletics. He rejected one of the “top” schools because he said there were too many kids from NYC. I’m still glad we are all out of CA now.
A normal parent would have at some point after her arrest asked “what were you thinking?” I submit to you that these words were never spoken by Clara’s parents.
Is it worth saying that you and your parents are still liberals. Liberals in the original meaning of the word – the belief all men were created equal before the law, there were no naturally-born aristocrats, and that equal opportunity meant equality of opportunity not equality of outcome.
This was before the Progressives filtched the term back in the 1920s because people began realizing that progressivism was just medieval feudalism gussied up with scientific justification, and were rejecting it. So Progs began calling themselves “liberals.” They so sullied the meaning of that honorable term that by the 1990s they began going back to describing themselves as Progressives. By then, everyone who remembered the original progressives and how regressive they were was either dead or senile, so it became an effective propaganda term again.
Modern day conservative are the inheritors of 18th century liberalism, while today’s progressives are one spiritually with the lords of 16th century Europe. The more backwards-looking ones in Eastern Europe.
Amen!
Seeing that her father is a child psychologist does not surprise me. I remember the most messed up girl in my high school also had a psychologist as a father.
My dad went to Stuyvesant, and he was second in the class, I believe. When he was there it was Jewish, like he is (ethnically, not religiously). He’s incredibly depressed and angry by what De Blasio has been trying to do. Has he succeeded? It’s my understanding that that the “diversify Stuyvesant” project stalemated. I send my kids to public school in homage to the principles behind Stuyvesant. Having been educated in private schools all my life, I know from personal experience that the brains are not necessarily among the privileged.
I second this observation. It’s also possible if the mother is a psychologist.
How interesting! So did you all move out to NH? Is he having a good experience ?
My dad has always been very ornery. He always hated the cult of NYC: the Yankees, the “I couldn’t live anywhere else”, the false authenticity people appropriate from poor living conditions (“I am so tough!”) … and once i remember him saying he felt like the vast differences between social classes were less visible outside NY, among just folks. He “turned” before Obama’s second term and voted Johnson in 2012. I remember him and my mom coming to Paris to visit after gay marriage passed all grim-faced: “you’ll see: next is TRANS!”
i think he and my mother regret their liberalism somewhat as it resulted in me becoming the sort of person who moves far away, to a big expensive European metropolis. I miss them terribly, console myself thinking at least no one in France is trying to make my kids trans or waving BLM flags at them.
of’ course given how things are going in both the US and France, my parents and I joke we might all be best off in Poland. (My great grandparents turning in their graves…) Dad thinks book burning is coming next.
Both today’s progressives and the eastern/Central European elites are into Jew-hunting!
I liked your whole post, but I just wanted to highlight these two sentences as the perfect distillation of my high school years. Thanks for saying it so well.
I too, can relate. I was uncool but never really cared a spit about it. For some reason, by the time I graduated from high school that attitude had somehow transformed me into one of the “cool kids,” despite my disdain for being cool. Maybe because I went to a Midwest high school, although Ann Arbor was a place with a lot of pretensions.
It’s only now that I realize how harmful being cool is. I don’t wish social exclusion on my kids, but I think coolness is a bad sign. I wish it had been less important to me. (PS my eldest is 7 so I don’t yet have to worry about it, but one thing I hear regularly from parents who give their kids smartphones is “if I don’t he will be excluded.” Can I just say that ensuring my kids are invited to the right parties is not part of my parenting agenda? Thinking of my parents who delayed me getting my driver’s license by 1 year causing me untold humiliation.)
I agree – and agreed back then. Which makes my achieving “coolness” even funnier. I actually resented it. (Which may have made me cooler, for all I know.)
I’m trying to figure out which one could possibly be a model
Bottom left with the axe-murderer smile.
It ended up on the back burner when all of the current COVID stuff hit. But it’s not new — the left in the late 1970s was trying to get the Carter Administration in Washington to kill Stuyvesant and the city’s other academic (entry test required) high schools because they supposedly discriminated against minorities. It didn’t succeed because Untied Federation of Teachers Union head Albert Shanker was also a grad of the school, and told Joe Calafano the union would do zilch to help Carter in the next election if he forced NYC to eliminate those schools.
Maybe because Clara learned those things from her parents, who already agree with her? So, no need to ask.
My, how the teachers unions have changed!
NH got on the list of possibilities to move because we came to like it while he was there. He went on to a couple of years of college in TN before enlisting in the Marines and he’s been largely based in NC for the last 10 years and will stay there until he retires. His unit is based there and he doesn’t have to move around to fill job specs. He loves his job but wants to return to New England in his next job – teaching history and coaching hockey. His wife loves the Seacoast and will miss it when they move northeast.
Poland, at least, still seems to think Reagan was great.
They knew and approved.
Then they and their children should pay for the damage done. They can afford to pay based on their assets.
Woody Allen in “Sleeper” mocked Shanker in part because he wasn’t woke enough for the late 1960s-early 70s — Shanker had the majority of the city’s parents on his side in 1968, when he had the teachers in New York walk out over the Lindsay Administration’s attempt to institute race-based hiring and promotion quotas for the city’s schools.
For an elementary school student of the day in NYC, it was a way to see who the furthest left parents and teachers were, since Lindsay kept the schools open, while the boycotting teachers and parents found other venues, including churches (!), where makeshift classes could be conducted. If your teacher didn’t join the boycott and went to their school, or if the parents of your friends sent them to regular school instead of the off-campus strike schools, they were part of the true hard-core left who were all-in on the same types of quotas the progressives demand in 2020.
She’d be perfect for Mugatu’s new Derelicte campaign
So, axe-murderer chic replaces heroin chic?
Lizzy Borden took an axe . . .