06/01/19 YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN, KID

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YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN, KID

COLD NEW WORLD
Growing Up in a Harder Country
By William Finnegan
Random House 421pp $26

In the years following World War II, a huge number of Americans moved up to the middle class. This was due largely to the G.I. Bill of Rights, which paid veterans' college tuition and living allowances and gave them no-downpayment mortgages. But it was also due to an expanding economy, higher wages, and a growing foreign market for American goods.
Now, the children of that postwar generation, the baby boomers, are raising kids of their own in a much different world. Despite the booming stock market, low inflation, and low unemployment, real hourly wages for the majority of working Americans have fallen for a quarter-century. For many young people, this is a world cursed by alcohol and drugs, teen pregnancy, unstable marriages, racist gangs, and, in the words of William Finnegan, ''trendy nihilism.''
Cold New World is Finnegan's exploration of this environment and of a generation of young people seemingly bent on self-destruction. In six years spent ''knocking around the United States,'' the New Yorker magazine writer got close to these youths, their friends, and their families. Among the factors responsible for the young folks' problems, the author says, are ''the fecklessness and self-absorption'' of his own baby-boomer generation and global economics. Together, such forces have combined to leave kids culturally and economically dislocated. Finnegan's solution seems to involve a return to the days of liberal government programs. But whether you agree with his politics or not, his deft profiles can be both moving and downright frightening.
His four primary subjects come from widely disparate backgrounds, yet each one is both victim and collaborator in his or her own sad story.
-- Sixteen-year-old Terry Jackson lives in the black ghetto of New Haven. A high school dropout and a child of a drug-addicted welfare mother, he is a $1,000-a-week ''work-boy'' for the local drug dealers. It is dangerous work. Shootouts are common, and most of the victims are teenagers.
-- Juan Guerrero, 18, is a son of Mexican farmworkers and militant unionists in the Yakima Valley of Washington state. His parents say they ''only want what the whites have...normal benefits, job security, an end to discrimination, dignity.'' Not so Juan, who has opted for what Finnegan terms ''la vida loca''--the crazy life. A Tae Kwon Do black belt, Juan is expelled from school for fighting, spends 10 months in detention for assault, then takes up work in the grape fields. His steady pal is Mary Ann Ramirez, an unwed mother who has been on drugs since the eighth grade. When Finnegan first meets this pair, they are into ''wall hits''--sucking gasoline fumes out of a plastic bag until they faint.
-- Mindy Turner, 17, lives in once-flourishing Antelope Valley, Calif., a region plagued by cutbacks in aerospace and defense. The rates of teen pregnancy and juvenile crime are high. Mindy, sexually active and a drug user since the seventh grade, is now into methamphetamines, or ''speed.'' Her suppliers are a local skinhead gang, the Nazi Low Riders.
-- Lanee Mitchell is a 23-year-old black divorcee who works as a chicken plucker in a Tyson Foods Inc. plant in ''Deep East Texas.'' Even though she got off to a bad start by becoming pregnant in high school, she longs for those days and her ''good old-fashioned country upbringing.'' Everything headed downhill, she believes, when her small town, San Augustine, became a major drug center.
One of the most interesting characters in Cold New World is neither a youth nor a parent. He is Nathan Tindall, the all-powerful sheriff of San Augustine County for almost 40 years. Tindall was, moreover, an astute businessman, Finnegan says, grossing $2 million a year from diverse endeavors. These included, other authorities suspect, money-laundering and bribes from drug dealers.
A white man, Tindall enjoyed warm relations with his numerous black constituents. That paid off when he escaped the net of Operation White Tornado, a massive, multijurisdictional drug bust that jailed 54 local citizens, 50 of them black. The chief target of the raid, Tindall was never arrested or charged since none of his black friends would testify against him, Finnegan writes.
At the time of the drug probe, Tindall had recently been voted out of office. He had been a most unusual sheriff: He never carried a gun and made arrests by phoning alleged perpetrators, even murderers, and telling them to meet him at the jailhouse. Such was the power of his personality that most complied. But while his election loss seems richly deserved, it may have occurred for the wrong reason: Whites resented Tindall's rapport with blacks. Even some blacks had criticisms. ''He never did enough to stop the drugs that's hurting our people,'' Lanee Mitchell reflected.
After exposure to these cases, few will be surprised by Finnegan's despair over young people's prospects. Ultimately, he blames government, which he feels has abdicated its role as provider of last resort. ''For those of us who grew up during the long postwar boom, it is easy to forget just how large a role government programs played in the spread of mass prosperity,'' Finnegan says. That's true, but given the politics of the day, not even a book as powerful as Finnegan's is likely to revive Big Government liberalism.
BY RESA KING

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PHOTO: Cover, ``Cold New World''

BOOK EXCERPT: Chapter One of ``Cold New World''