Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) by Anna Quindlen Page B
Authors: Anna Quindlen
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His mother was seventeen when he was born. When he was a child, she beat him often. As he got older, he beat her back. Once, checking himself into a detox center, he was asked, “What is your favorite leisure-time activity?” He answered, “Doing drugs.” Jay is said to have consumed two six-packs of beer a day. There’s a suicide note if I ever heard one.
It is difficult to understand how anyone could blame covert musical mumbling for what happened to these boys. On paper they had little to live for. But the truth is that their lives were notunlike the lives of many kids who live for their stereos and their beer buzz, who open the door to the corridor of the next forty years and see a future as empty and truncated as a closet. “Get a life,” they say to one another. In the responsibility department, no one is home.
They are legion. Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me. There’s a new product on the market I call Parent in a Can. You can wipe a piece of paper on something in your kid’s room and then spray the paper with this chemical. Cocaine traces, and the paper will turn turquoise. Marijuana, reddish brown. So easy to use—and no messy heart-to-heart talks, no constant parental presence. Only $44.95 plus $5 shipping and handling to do in a minute what you should have been doing for years.
In the Judas Priest lawsuit, it’s easy to see how kids get the idea that they are not responsible for their actions. They inherit it. Heavy metal music is filled with violence, but Jay and Ray got plenty of that even with the stereo unplugged. The trial judge ruled that the band was not responsible for the suicides, but the families are pressing ahead with an appeal, looking for absolution for the horrible deaths of their sons. Heavy metal made them do it—not the revolving fathers, the beatings, the alcohol, the drugs, a failure of will or of nurturing. Someone’s to blame. Someone else. Always someone else.
CRADLE TO GRAVE
December 7, 1991
He still had a trace of those delectable cheeks that dominate the face in babyhood, those round apples just below his eyes. In the photograph he is smiling. Despite it all.
Adam Mann was on television this week. For fifty-two minutes his story unraveled in a devastating
Frontline
documentary made by a producer named Carole Langer. She had followed him from cradle to grave; in Adam’s case, the journey took only five years. He was beaten to death in March 1990 for eating a piece of cake. The last frame of the film was the little boy, the cheeks still round, in his casket. The caskets for kids are smaller. They cost less.
Who Killed Adam Mann
? the film was called. His parents were charged with second-degree murder. His father pleaded guilty to manslaughter, his mother to assault. Both of them are in jail.
But Adam Mann had a guardian, too, and that guardian was supposed to be the City of New York and its Child Welfare Administration. Ms. Langer met the Mann children for the firsttime in 1983 when she was doing a documentary on caseworkers who investigate child-abuse complaints. The child in that film was Keith Mann; in one fourteen-month period he would suffer fractures of the face, ribs, arms, and skull. From the moment he was born and held in protective custody in the hospital nursery, Adam, Keith’s younger brother, would be part of the city’s vast child welfare system.
Reporters who cover the Child Welfare Administration know the drill. When you call about a case you are given a boilerplate response: Because of state laws of confidentiality, officials cannot provide any information. We go through the motions but we know that it is in vain. And we know that, no matter what the intent of the state law, the effect of it is to protect from scrutiny an agency that has historically
It is difficult to understand how anyone could blame covert musical mumbling for what happened to these boys. On paper they had little to live for. But the truth is that their lives were notunlike the lives of many kids who live for their stereos and their beer buzz, who open the door to the corridor of the next forty years and see a future as empty and truncated as a closet. “Get a life,” they say to one another. In the responsibility department, no one is home.
They are legion. Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me. There’s a new product on the market I call Parent in a Can. You can wipe a piece of paper on something in your kid’s room and then spray the paper with this chemical. Cocaine traces, and the paper will turn turquoise. Marijuana, reddish brown. So easy to use—and no messy heart-to-heart talks, no constant parental presence. Only $44.95 plus $5 shipping and handling to do in a minute what you should have been doing for years.
In the Judas Priest lawsuit, it’s easy to see how kids get the idea that they are not responsible for their actions. They inherit it. Heavy metal music is filled with violence, but Jay and Ray got plenty of that even with the stereo unplugged. The trial judge ruled that the band was not responsible for the suicides, but the families are pressing ahead with an appeal, looking for absolution for the horrible deaths of their sons. Heavy metal made them do it—not the revolving fathers, the beatings, the alcohol, the drugs, a failure of will or of nurturing. Someone’s to blame. Someone else. Always someone else.
CRADLE TO GRAVE
December 7, 1991
He still had a trace of those delectable cheeks that dominate the face in babyhood, those round apples just below his eyes. In the photograph he is smiling. Despite it all.
Adam Mann was on television this week. For fifty-two minutes his story unraveled in a devastating
Frontline
documentary made by a producer named Carole Langer. She had followed him from cradle to grave; in Adam’s case, the journey took only five years. He was beaten to death in March 1990 for eating a piece of cake. The last frame of the film was the little boy, the cheeks still round, in his casket. The caskets for kids are smaller. They cost less.
Who Killed Adam Mann
? the film was called. His parents were charged with second-degree murder. His father pleaded guilty to manslaughter, his mother to assault. Both of them are in jail.
But Adam Mann had a guardian, too, and that guardian was supposed to be the City of New York and its Child Welfare Administration. Ms. Langer met the Mann children for the firsttime in 1983 when she was doing a documentary on caseworkers who investigate child-abuse complaints. The child in that film was Keith Mann; in one fourteen-month period he would suffer fractures of the face, ribs, arms, and skull. From the moment he was born and held in protective custody in the hospital nursery, Adam, Keith’s younger brother, would be part of the city’s vast child welfare system.
Reporters who cover the Child Welfare Administration know the drill. When you call about a case you are given a boilerplate response: Because of state laws of confidentiality, officials cannot provide any information. We go through the motions but we know that it is in vain. And we know that, no matter what the intent of the state law, the effect of it is to protect from scrutiny an agency that has historically
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