A Fair Trade Book
Title: Mama Rock’s Rules
Author:
Rose Rock
Author's web page: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1405463/bio
Author's son's web page: http://www.chrisrock.com/
Author's other son's web page: http://www.tonyrockcomedy.com/
Author's other son's web page: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3188295/
Author's daughter's web page: https://twitter.com/SuperCoolAndi
(Author has other children whose occupations don't require them to maintain web pages.)
Date:
2008
Publisher:
Harper Collins
ISBN:
978-0-06-153612-0
Length:
232 pages
Illustrations:
some black-and-white photos
Quote:
“Rule #1: I am the Parent. I make the rules.”
Everybody likes Chris Rock, right? I don’t watch enough television to know (before
looking it up online) whether he’s still active as a TV comedian, but I
remember reading his book Rock This and finding it…passable. Raunchy enough to show that
he was playing to the younger generation, but not devoid of family
values.
Well,
this is the book about his family. In this book Mrs. Rock shares a select few
pictures of her brood, including official and unofficial foster children as
well as her own children, and an equally select, although more generous,
sampling of stories about the things they did right as a family. It seems to
have worked since the children are all reasonably successful, attractive young
adults, as of the time of writing. Each chapter breaks down a rule into related
rules, “parenting” tips and tricks, and memories. Here are the primary rules
that shape the book:
1.
Parents make the rules.
2.
Children need attention.
3. Use
clean, courteous language.
4. Use
family meals as bonding time.
5. Be true
to yourself; don’t merely conform.
6. Read
real books and newspapers, and get an education.
7. Don’t
give up easily.
8. Be
mindful about sex.
9.
Preserve family memories.
10.
Practice your religion seriously.
Some of
Mama Rock’s rules seem on the surface to conflict directly with my mother’s
rules. I mention this because they seem to
be in conflict. Underneath I think the case might be made that there’s an
agreement.
By the
time you get to Rock’s chapter eight you have a clear image of her and her family’s
situation. Mine was different. In the 1970s, “casual sex” was the big fad. New
antibiotics worked on the older sexually transmitted diseases, unhygienic
social mores exposed everyone to all the airborne diseases constantly
(regardless of where you sit, everybody on a bus is breathing in that virus
that’s going around), and we didn’t know about AIDS. Pop culture had a steady
refrain of “Everybody’s doing it, doing it, doing it.” Everybody except a few
ministerial students talked to everyone at work or school the way Anita Hill
claimed to feel so hurt by Clarence Thomas talking to her. The danger we often
saw young girls facing was mistaking a Teen Romance for True Love and thus
taking any of the sexual banter seriously. My mother was in favor of love and marriage,
but she thought True Love could stand a little torture-testing and so Teen
Romance should always be debunked, denounced, even sabotaged. As a teenager I knew my parents’ “You can go out on
dates when you’re sixteen, if you bring the boy home first” basically meant
“Get a home of your own before you even think about dating.”
So why is
Mama Rock in favor of “romance”? In order to understand chapter eight of Mama Rock’s Rules, it's good to read
the other chapters and know what she’s talking about. There are young people
out there who have so little experience of love, whose families are so
fragmented, whose social lives are so confused, who may not even have had a real bonding experience with an
animal, that a physical attraction is all they know about, have to offer, or
expect. These guys aren’t offering “love”; these gals aren’t asking for “love.”
At best both of them just want to explore sensations that feel interesting to
them, together, in a mutual way. More likely the guy is demanding sexual acts
as the price for a date or some sort of personal favor. To them Mama Rock says,
“At least hold out for a little ‘romance’ before you start summoning the
stork.”
The
bottom line is the same. No parent wants to be made a grandparent before his or
her time. All parents have to find someway
to encourage teenagers to maintain control of themselves, stand against the
hormonal tide, build nests before they start broods. What they say may depend
on what else is being said and what they think their teenagers can understand.
Why do I
go into this? Partly, of course, for The Nephews. I think they know that they
don’t want to become parents until they’re married and settled and solvent and,
ideally, over thirty-five years old. Late marriage, a social expectation that
couples will be settled and solvent before they take any chances on having
babies, is the most effective population control measure ever invented: more of
those who are born live long, healthy lives, and fewer humans are born. Despite
some recent efforts to “preserve more nature” by depopulating small towns and
pushing more people into slums, which is much less effective (up to the point
of plague) and much less humane, the human population of Earth is out of balance and does need to decline, overall.
Some of
The Nephews have those nifty minority White genes; started out with blond hair
and will probably always have blue eyes. Those are the ones I’m most concerned
about. They are the ones likely to hear that the global minority of true White people is in a slight decline relative to the majority physical type, so those
who have White genes need to try to
“outbreed” the other types. They need to think about this line of thought in
order to reply to it, properly, with “Bosh.” Blue eyes are one of the more functional
genetic mutations known to science, unlikely ever to become a majority,
unlikely ever to die out. If you wait until you’re able to give your children
the advantages of a single home, in an uncrowded environment, to do all their
growing up in, and then have one child each,
you’re more likely to have healthy, intelligent heirs than you are by hauling a
litter of children from projects to hovels in a series of slum environments. In
any case, what makes our family special and needs to be preserved is not a
physical type but a character type. Heirs with good strong consciences, broad
but not empty minds, fortitude, generosity, and loyalty are better than heirs
who merely happen to have a certain “look.”
Others in
the group addressed as The Nephews are the majority type; some even have a few of those minority Black genes. I’m not concerned about people who might say that your
DNA is inferior, or that the Earth is flat. Sickle-cell anemia is even more
inconvenient than gluten intolerance but, so far as we know, youall have
inherited neither of these undesirable genes, and your “look” happens to be
fashionable at the moment, so count your blessings. I am concerned about your relationship with the Black American (as
distinct from recent-African-immigrant-American) subculture, which is also
fashionable at the moment. Within that subculture there are solid families with
roots and loyalty and tradition, just like ours, which is what Mama Rock
presents her family as being. They are swimming against a cultural tide of opinion
that “It’s cool to be a ‘player’ or a ‘welfare queen,’ let the government worry
about feeding and educating our babies, blame White people and a long-gone
‘legacy of slavery’ for everything that makes that lifestyle so truly inferior
and so depressing.”
Slavery
was indeed blameworthy, but when people start blathering about its
“legacy” we need to run a reality check. Are there guys in prison, gals on the
street corners, drug addicts dying “old” at twenty-five, whose
great-great-grandparents were enslaved? There are. And are there, likewise,
guys in prison, gals on the street corner, and drug addicts dying “old” at
twenty-five, whose great-great-grandparents were wealthy? There are. As explained in
the classic calypso:
Individual
choices help all of us to discard the “legacy” of bad things and fill in any
gaps in the “legacy” of good things our ancestors handed down. Even if your
great-great-grandfather had devoted his entire life to the goal of making you
rich and successful or poor and miserable, that goal was beyond his power to
achieve. You have a great deal more control over your success or failure in
life than all of your ancestors had together.
The idea
of settling for failure and whining because bad things happened to your
ancestors, let’s call it the Trend Towards Trashiness, has certainly had a lot
of influence on non-Black Americans too. It comes in a full range of ethnic
flavors. It’s compatible with the “redneck” fads for White people, it was first
noticed on this continent as the “Drunken Indian” stereotype, and let’s never
forget that the word “ghetto” comes from Europe and originally described Jewish neighborhoods—I know it’s the
last thing that comes to mind when we think of Jewish Americans nowadays, but
yes, when they let themselves be
herded into slums, Jewish people slumped into embittered, alcoholic,
disease-ridden, whining-about-the-past misery too.
Around the time I left Washington, if you wanted to try to
visualize what that looked like, you could just go to a neighborhood like
formerly nice Bethesda that had been infested by Eurotrash; socialist efforts
to sell the dream of nation-scale communism certainly had left a
legacy to those people, which
explained, but did not excuse, their deficiencies of manners, ethics, and
hygiene. And why was Bethesda infested? Why, because Bethesda was the neighborhood where diplomats had been leasing houses for a hundred years; because permanent residents of Bethesda were familiar with European diplomats, and adored them. Did they ever get a nasty surprise.
The Trend
Towards Trashiness is not caused by prejudice. Prejudice can also inspire
people to defy and overcome whatever has been said about them. The inspiring
story of Glenn Cunningham has grown into a cliché: every time I’ve
watched the Olympics I’ve seen a story about how one of the champions had some
sort of disease, injury, or disability, against which s/he had to work so hard
in therapy that s/he went on to become a world-class athlete. A lot of the great achievers in every
field were once told “You’ll never succeed at” whatever it was, so they proved
that they could. The Trend Towards Trashiness is caused, primarily, by weak
character. When people don’t have the fortitude to get up in the morning,
putting them in a subsidized housing project with hot running water in the
showers does not motivate them to get up and take showers; if anything it may
motivate them to wreck the shower system.
Mama Rock’s Rules is a book about
fighting that trend to indulge in a weak character. I think the cover of this
book may put some people off. If you don’t
recognize the famous comedians you might think this is a book about
bossy authoritarian mothers who stifle their children. You have to be familiar
with Chris Rock’s work, and recognize those baby pictures of his talented
relatives, to get the message that it’s about authoritative parents who have raised “a houseful of successful
children.”
As a book
of guidance for young parents, what can I say? Other parents’ memoirs can offer
moral support. No book is going to anticipate your real problems. You might open a book like Mama Rock’s Rules—there are other
witty-celebrity-parent books out there, like Everything but Money
and The Secret World of Kids—and find just the pointer you
need, during some family crisis. Or not.
and The Secret World of Kids—and find just the pointer you
need, during some family crisis. Or not.
As a
witty celebrity memoir…I think part of Chris Rock’s comedic appeal is delivery,
and that goes double for Mama Rock, who has not made a career of comedy. When
you’re not actually looking at the face of someone narrating a story like,
“They were itching for a chance to make a scene with Ally. Andre and Tony
walked over and stood next to Ally without a word. They looked at the girls
sternly. Those girls moved real fast down the block,” you’re not sure where the story may be going, whether
you’re supposed to laugh or express empathy, so you might not laugh.
Professional comedy writers
replace drawn-out words, raised eyebrows, and similar nonverbal “laugh” cues
with extraneous joke lines that may compromise the narrative point for the sake
of the laugh (“They looked down at those two little weasels, waiting for the
impact of their massive bulk to seep slowly through the Cheez Whiz in the
weasel-girls’ heads”). Whatever. If your childhood memories include any
experience of avoiding potential discomfort because the approach of an older
person suddenly reminded your childhood enemy of an urgent appointment, you’ll
laugh, either way.
“I…said to my kid when he got a 97 percent on a test, ‘Good
work, but what happened to the other three points?’” might even be “triggering”
for some of the hypersensitive souls out there. Still, if you can visualize it being
presented as comedy acts or even as lectures, Mama Rock’s Rules contains plenty of chuckles. Like Erma Bombeck
’s
later books, it also packs a full payload of inspirational “Yesss!” moments. It
is way better than Wanda Sykes. These
are serious lectures with a sense of humor more than comedy routines, but they
leave the reader feeling good.
’s
later books, it also packs a full payload of inspirational “Yesss!” moments. It
is way better than Wanda Sykes. These
are serious lectures with a sense of humor more than comedy routines, but they
leave the reader feeling good.
Another
use for this book is as a trigger for reflection, maybe journal writing,
blogging, or discussion with your family, about how Mama Rock’s Rules are like and different from your parents’ rules
and the rules you’ve chosen to follow as a parent (or parent-surrogate, e.g. a
teacher). Since most adults do eventually have to interact with children in
some sort of parent/teacher role, most adults can potentially become more
mindful and gain useful insights from this book.
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