Word: rockwellian
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...playing with two of his seven children. In the kitchen, three women are busy over several bushels of peaches. One woman is peeling the plump yellow fruit; another toils over the kettles simmering on the stove; a third pops peach halves into bottles. The tableau seems to be a Rockwellian slice of rural Americana, a pair of friendly neighbors helping a housewife put up peaches for the winter. There is one discomforting difference, however; all three women are the wives of the man playing in the living room with his children...
Much of the Rockwellian ambience is deceptive, however. The downtown mall area contains the local headquarters of the Office of Economic Opportunity's neighborhood action program, which is pressing for low-cost housing over old-line opposition. On the 1st and 15th of every month, long sad queues of weary mothers and scraggly children stand on the street all day to collect food stamps. The young are displaced persons in El Monte. "There is nothing to do here," says good-looking Tina Chassi, 25. "If I go out on a date, we go out of town...
They are not exactly Norman Rockwell's image of Boy Scouts, but then they do not inhabit a Rockwellian America. The 60 members of Boy Scout Troop 503 live in a ghetto of South Brooklyn, and they call themselves the "Black and Puerto Rican Stoners" to indicate that they are as hard and as solid as stone. Their uniforms are Army-type fatigues, combat boots and green berets. In addition to being "trustworthy" and "loyal," the Stoners promise to "have ethnic pride," and they pledge allegiance to the flag with clenched fists over their hearts. Their oath...