Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to Casual Friday.
Speaker 1: I'm Holly Fry. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. One of the
Speaker 1: things we talked about this week was the history of Bondsai. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has been on your list for so long it um.
Speaker 1: I will also confess to you that um, as part
Speaker 1: of doing this episode, you know you get maybe you don't,
Speaker 1: you know how I get obsessed with some of the
Speaker 1: stuff we briess. I may have reached out to of
Speaker 1: bond psai um Nursery so I can get some of
Speaker 1: my own to start, just a couple. I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: be too foolish. I have that bad problem where I
Speaker 1: get interested in something and then I ordered twenty two
Speaker 1: of that thing because I'm overenthusiastic. And then I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is more than I can handle. I didn't this time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just too bad too. Yeah, I gotta come up with
Speaker 1: good names for him. Yeah. I will keep you posted
Speaker 1: on their uh their success. I fear I have a
Speaker 1: mixed thumb when it comes to gardening in general. Right,
Speaker 1: Like I can grow a rose like nobody's business. I
Speaker 1: don't know why. It's really just blind luck uh and
Speaker 1: I do pretty well with hardy hybiscus, but there are
Speaker 1: other plants that just are like goodbye and I can't
Speaker 1: save them, and it breaks my heart. So hopefully my
Speaker 1: bonds I will survive. Um. I discovered while doing this
Speaker 1: episode also like one of the greatest coping mechanisms I
Speaker 1: could ever ever envision, which is to go on YouTube
Speaker 1: and watch long videos of people clipping their bonds eye
Speaker 1: um or like if you see a bondsay master, who
Speaker 1: will talk through like how they're caring for that. It's
Speaker 1: so soothing. It's the best. I'm not a person that's
Speaker 1: great at met it paian Um, I'm not great at
Speaker 1: being still I'm not so for me, this is kind
Speaker 1: of like a good bridge to that kind of mental
Speaker 1: state where I'm just like, I suddenly find myself just
Speaker 1: completely enraptured quietly watching these videos for long periods of time.
Speaker 1: That's cool. I quite enjoyed it. I feel like I
Speaker 1: should also mention the other thing that comes to my
Speaker 1: mind every time the subject of Bond's eye comes up,
Speaker 1: which is not a good representation of it. There used
Speaker 1: to be an animated series called Home Movies, which was
Speaker 1: by Lauren Bouchard and UH it starred Brendan Small. Lauren Buchard,
Speaker 1: in case you don't know, is the creator of Bob's
Speaker 1: Burgers as well and now Central Park, UM, which are
Speaker 1: also shows that I love. And there was a character
Speaker 1: on Home Movies called Coach McGirk that was voiced by
Speaker 1: John Benjamin and he was like this kind of big
Speaker 1: train wreck of a soccer coach the Selementary School. But
Speaker 1: in one episode, with absolutely no context, one of the
Speaker 1: kids goes to his house and it's a very rudimentary
Speaker 1: animation style and he's just sitting there with a bunch
Speaker 1: of bonds eye trees, cultivating them and it's so out
Speaker 1: of character and so completely random for that character to
Speaker 1: be doing, and they never explained it. I just loved it. Um.
Speaker 1: There was another popular culture thing that came up in
Speaker 1: a lot of the discussions that I read both online
Speaker 1: and in books about how Bonds I became popularized in
Speaker 1: uh in American pop culture. Can you guess what it is?
Speaker 1: The Karate Kid. Yes, this is where I confess that
Speaker 1: I have never seen any of those movies. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: have definitely seen the first one, UM and I I
Speaker 1: don't know if I've seen other ones, but I can
Speaker 1: visualize a scene of taking care of bonsai, and that
Speaker 1: like Karate Kid one, I was just known as the
Speaker 1: Karate Kid when it originally came out. There was no
Speaker 1: one after it. Obviously. Yes, there were actually a lot
Speaker 1: of bonsai apparently those movies, but I having never seen them,
Speaker 1: even though I am in exactly the right age range
Speaker 1: to have watched them when they came out. I think
Speaker 1: that was probably one of those many instances where I
Speaker 1: was too um it was too cool for popular culture,
Speaker 1: its mainstream for me. I'm gonna go do you know,
Speaker 1: start trying to read in Parsterida, which I never really
Speaker 1: got very good at. I'm gonna go watch and alue,
Speaker 1: you guys watched Karate Kids. So pretentious on my part,
Speaker 1: so pretentious, rivaling me for some pretentiousness, but most of
Speaker 1: my pretentiousness was like post college. Oh no, I got
Speaker 1: that stuff out of the way early, and then I
Speaker 1: got to my just free to be stage earlier than
Speaker 1: most people. Yeah. Uh yeah, but it's interesting. I have
Speaker 1: always loved the concept of bonsai, but admittedly, uh through
Speaker 1: that very very uninformed sort of pop culture angle on it.
Speaker 1: So as I have gotten older and have done more
Speaker 1: reading on plant life and gardening in general and started
Speaker 1: to really appreciate just how much effort goes into the
Speaker 1: design and creation of these pieces. Um, I realized, one
Speaker 1: it's amazing, and two it's something I probably would never
Speaker 1: have the focus to achieve. Yeah. Yeah, how that potato
Speaker 1: bonds I come out? Yeah, like you, I have mixed
Speaker 1: results trying to grow plants of any sort. Um, So
Speaker 1: I've never tried anything with with bonds eye specifically, not
Speaker 1: even the potato thing, which even as a child, I
Speaker 1: was like, I think this misses the point. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: feel like my mom, who similarly had sort of a
Speaker 1: flighty attention span and would get obsessed with things for
Speaker 1: about twelve minutes at a time. I feel like she
Speaker 1: purchased one of those like really fakey bonsai from like
Speaker 1: a craft store at one point that had like a
Speaker 1: lot of things glued into it, and I'm not even
Speaker 1: sure if it was alive or not. I think probably
Speaker 1: a lot of kids in the US have a similar
Speaker 1: experience in terms of their exposure if they're in our
Speaker 1: age range to bonsai in like the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 1: R One of the things we talked about this week
Speaker 1: was Abraham Flexner and the Flextioner Report. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was glad when you brought this up, because when you did,
Speaker 1: I had just listened to the saw Bones episode UM
Speaker 1: that I'd like mentioned in in the podcast, which mentions
Speaker 1: that efforts to reform our medical education generally lead to
Speaker 1: schools for black students being closed. That, like I said
Speaker 1: in the episode, like that episode is really worth listening
Speaker 1: to for a different angle on the same topics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's um. As I said in the episode, it's I
Speaker 1: have such a complicated relationship with this material because I
Speaker 1: want to support the idea of educational reform. And certainly
Speaker 1: there were a lot of really really not high minded
Speaker 1: medical schools opening in the US that basically were like
Speaker 1: can you write a check, please come in uh, And
Speaker 1: those obviously needed to not be operating or not operating
Speaker 1: the way they were. But this did create such a
Speaker 1: long term ripple effect, uh for the black community that
Speaker 1: it's really really um, sort of difficult to still think
Speaker 1: like that was a great thing. Um. It's in interesting
Speaker 1: to think about how much power that one report had
Speaker 1: that like half of the medical schools in the country
Speaker 1: had closed within ten years of its publication. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: that is a lot of a lot of power for
Speaker 1: someone who was not from the medical community to have wielded. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That's one of the things that was mentioned in the
Speaker 1: episode was that because he had an outsider his perspective,
Speaker 1: he was able to look at everything without a lot
Speaker 1: of preconceptions. Um. And it's like, there's there's truth to that,
Speaker 1: but that also means that he didn't have experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he didn't have contexts. Yeah. Um, it's like it's a
Speaker 1: fair point that that medical schools needed to be reformed
Speaker 1: and that there wasn't a lot of standardization and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, but like like not really comprehending that the
Speaker 1: bar was being set that most schools wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to reach. Yeah, it was definitely a part of it,
Speaker 1: and that disproportionately the school is not able to reach
Speaker 1: that bar. We're going to be the only schools that
Speaker 1: were really open to black doctors. Yeah, And it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that, um, you know, when you think
Speaker 1: about the long term ramifications on the health of black
Speaker 1: people in the United States, like this literally was part
Speaker 1: of a problem that already existed but only got worse,
Speaker 1: where there was not trust in the medical system, and
Speaker 1: as a consequence, there have been a lot of people
Speaker 1: that do not see a doctor when they need one,
Speaker 1: Like there is a just general downgrading of health for
Speaker 1: that entire black community that happens as a consequence of
Speaker 1: this one report coming out. Um that literally today is
Speaker 1: still a problem that we're dealing with. This isn't even
Speaker 1: though it is history. It is history that is still
Speaker 1: impacting people, whether they realize it or not, um, which
Speaker 1: is what makes it so troubling and why the we
Speaker 1: need to be very mindful of looking at moments like
Speaker 1: this and recognizing like the cause and effect where we're
Speaker 1: still in the effect part of something even though we
Speaker 1: may consider it settled history. Yeah, for sure, It's still
Speaker 1: just kind of baffles me that he thought that, like
Speaker 1: any any black person that wanted a medical education could
Speaker 1: go to one of two schools, Like he didn't really
Speaker 1: think that. I mean, he we mentioned it a little bit,
Speaker 1: like he recognized that this was a limitter, but to him,
Speaker 1: the tradeoff was that it would just be better to
Speaker 1: not have black doctors from those other schools then it
Speaker 1: would be to have black doctors. You know what, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: to have poorly educated black doctors, in his opinion, was
Speaker 1: going to be a much worse problem than having no
Speaker 1: black doctors, which is a weird way to look at it. Um,
Speaker 1: just like you can't have any help because it's not
Speaker 1: excellent help. Again, Ideally, sure, you want everyone who is
Speaker 1: looking after people's health to have been excellently educated. But
Speaker 1: to say no, no resources are good enough, so you
Speaker 1: don't get any resources is a really really big problem. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Speaker 1: And yes, and he seemed to think that the bolstering
Speaker 1: of Howard and Maherry would have some sort of ripple
Speaker 1: effect where black education in the medical field would just
Speaker 1: get better everywhere, and that subsequent openings of universities would
Speaker 1: be at that level. And it's like you're presuming an
Speaker 1: awful lot on how this is going to work going forward. Um. Yeah, again,
Speaker 1: all the blind spots of Abraham Flexner are a big,
Speaker 1: big problem. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
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