American Culture is a Thick and Sticky Substance and It Gets into Everything
Discomfort is a powerful brew, for it is almost an invariable that those moments that resist all forgetfulness are the ones in which I felt the most ill at ease. It was precisely one of those memories that woke me up this morning, and what it made me understand, not the moment or the recollection, but the act of remembering this moment, is Culture, by its very nature, is fundamentally subversive to the individual and utterly pervasive. I suspect this plays heavily in this year’s presidential election, and the power of this nation’s Culture frightens me.
Forty years ago, probably longer ago, but definitely not shorter, I was sitting at a round table at a Chinese restaurant in Washington, D.C. called the Yenching Palace. It was, like most Chinese restaurants in the 1960’s, a fairly drab menu from which they worked: sweet and sour pork, chicken, and shrimp; wanton soup; low mein, all varieties; Shirley Temples; some spicy dishes with which my father and my grandmother played taste bud roulette; and, of course, tea and fortune cookies. I don’t believe I ate anything other than the sweet and sour dishes and the fortune cookies, and the likelihood of scoring a Shirley Temple was about one in six with my father’s mood the determinant factor.
However, the Yenching Palace meal that woke me up was different than most. First off, we had a guest other than one of my grandparents. She had short brown hair, probably in her late thirties, although a six year-old’s recollection almost always throws all grown-ups into the late thirties category. I suspect it seems old enough to be an undisputed adult without that official old” tag hung around the subject’s neck. She spoke with a heavy accent, and in recalling the conversation and its content, I suspect the accent was Israeli, but it could have been French, German, Russian, or any other foreign sounding accent that didn’t make me think of the then popular Frito Lays commercials.
My father sat to my left. My brother James, seven years-old and notoriously well-behaved, sat to my right. The foreign woman, directly in front of me. Those three and I are the only four characters in the memory, although I can bet with certainty that there were others there. My mom must have been there. My father never, ever went anywhere with only James and me. He was not a “kids” person and would never have undertaken an outing with us without my mother’s child care abilities, such as they were, along for the ride.
Also, my siblings, Tony and Claudia, both older than James, were not there. This is likely for I remember thinking the meal was kind of special. And, if truth be told, any meal that did not include some form of put down from our older siblings, verbal or physical, meant the meal was special for James and me. Now, my older siblings’ presences I would have remembered, because without fail they would have interacted in the scenario that is to follow, but they have no place in the memory. I lived in a six year-old’s kid-centric head at the time, and if there had been more kids at that table, I would have known it and remembered it and more specifically, remembered Claudia and Tony’s reactions to what was to pass, because I was the youngest, and youngest always performs Kremlinologies on their older siblings. It is a pure survival mechanism and never put aside. They must have been away at camp or something like that.
Anyway, the table setting being set, I remember slurping wanton soup as quietly as a six year-old can and struggling with the cumbersome shape and calamity-inducing slipperiness of a wet wanton, when the conversation at the table ceased being grown-up talk and took the shape of absolute disaster.
As is true at most Jewish tables in the 1960’s, some discussion of the Holocaust was going to happen. It was just over twenty year’s prior that World War II had ended, and those wounds still throbbed in nearly every Jewish household.
This throbbing manifested itself in various forms. In my family’s, it came in the form of Jewish self-hatred. My mother would chastise speech, looks, mannerisms with the verbal scurge, “Too Semetic.” My father, a very Semetic looking and sounding man, was more direct in his distaste for his own Jewish-ness, and openly objected to all Jewish religious practices with the phrase “that Jewish sh-t.” Needless to add, none of us were Bar Mitzvah-ed, and it is of little coincidence that we three boys graduated from an Episcopalian private school in the shadow of the National Cathedral. However, my father still had a significant feeling of loyalty to the race, and he spoke rather animatedly with this unknown but accented woman, who agreed with him, but went even further as to the evils of Hitler. Thus, when my brother James added to the discussion the explanation that, “Hitler killed the Jews because the Jews killed Jesus,” I knew we had the making of a true event on our hands.
I wasn’t entirely clear as to who Hitler was other than he was a very bad man and hated Jews. Jesus was familiar, as Washington, D. C. was the South in the 1960’s with White and Colored water fountains and segregated counters at the local Hot Shoppes. Hence, I was sufficiently steeped in the Christian mythology to know Jesus was the guy with the long hair and beard hanging on the cross. This knowledge arrived via a Southern osmosis that felt inescapable despite my family’s other-ness, and I had no mechanism for avoiding this pervasive American Christianity. Plus, I was six. Definitions of religious and historical characters are no more complicated than “Hitler was bad,” and “Jesus wore a beard and long hair.” This was all fine as far as I was concerned. Ricky Canavan was a hippy too, and he was the nicest baby sitter we ever had, so Jesus did not seem too awful.
It was with wonder, however, that I watched James, a mere 16 months older than I, get involved in a “grown-up” conversation. And oh, what an involvement it was. The woman who sat across from me began to yell at James. My father began to yell at James. I have no recollection of what they yelled, but I remember it was bad. James began to cry. The woman yelled at my father for teaching James horrible things. James tried to defend himself, but my father shouted him down. When grilled, James admitted he had received his historical information from his friend, Tommy Tate, with whom James also smoked cigarettes in the garage, but that last tidbit was information divulged at another point in our lives.
The woman who sat opposite also began to cry. My father quieted everybody down and then gave a long explanation as to why James was basically an idiot and rude and why he should apologize to the woman to his right. He did so begrudgingly, and his resentment was palpable, and I think, to this day, valid. It was not that his historical pronouncement was accurate or inoffensive, but that, because he was a little kid, he should not have be accosted by two adults in so very angry a manner. Even I knew that was wrong, despite my suspicions that Tommy Tate wasn’t exactly a font of wisdom.
But why did my father and this woman react so vehemently to this seven year-old boy? The two of them did not spend much of their time debating with children. My father openly spoke of his distaste for all conversation with children and often hoped we age quicker to spare him the boredom. No, James became something far bigger than a 7 year-old boy when he spoke up that night. He came to represent the distilled American culture filtered down through misinformation, myth, hatred, religious zealotry, familial ties, neighborhood friendship, and Tommy Tate. And despite the overturned Chinese mustard and tea, the scattered silverware, and the Bartok-like discord to the language and emotions around me, I achieved an unprecedented level of clarity from that single moment. American Culture is a damn powerful thing, and if you think somehow you have escaped its grasp, you will be slapped back into reality soon enough.
I suspect I woke up having remembered this incident because last week I felt truly slapped back into reality by the American embracing of Sarah Palin. I simply will never be sufficiently prepared to accept this country’s willingness to distort fact to make the story fit the desired image. I guess that is why this has been a Republican century. The Democrats keep insisting things are not that good, and changes must be made, while their counterparts insist all is well and that cacophony of despair you hear from Wall Street is simply a bunch of whiners unwilling to take the bad with the good. Disregard the buffoon on NPR who states we are on our way to a depression, let alone a recession, and disregard those who point out Republicans have marched this country into Depression before with a weak-minded and trenchant President with no semblance of a leadership road map. That does not play well on the streets of Toledo, Ohio or Peoria, Illinois. No, the American myth is this is a good, Christian country, with good, Christian people, who are tolerant of other people, who are allowed to live here too, but they cannot run the show. No, good Christians run this good, Christian show, and the rest of the country, come on over and watch how we do this the good, Christian way.
For years I did not believe this was in fact the American in which I lived. But I lived in New York City, not America, a town where African-American men feed their children bagels and cream cheese as a default setting for breakfast. Italian men know Yiddish phrases, and most everybody agrees Ed Koch, a Jew, was the quintessential New Yorker and should have been Mayor for Life. This is not real life. This is not real America. This is New York.
Then I moved to Chicago. Slap! I met Jews. I met Gentiles. None of the Jews knew the Gentiles, and vice versa. Neither of them knew a single African-American, who, from what I can tell, were not allowed to cross north of the east-west running and aptly named Division Street. This is the real America.
This is also Sarah Palin. Take away the pregnant teenage daughter. Disregard the Downs Syndrome baby, the five kids, the Troopergate, the stolen emails. They do not matter. What matters is she represents American Culture. She, like most Americans, went to a state school or six, and finally graduated college. She’s a mom, who schleps around kids to hockey practices, although they don’t use the term “schlep”—too Jewish. She goes to church. She believes in the primacy of the Bible. She is knowledgeable enough to get by like most Americans, but she isn’t an intellectual or policy wonk. She didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. She likes guns. Hell, she is an American through and through.
More importantly, she translates into “American.” What I mean by that is the American public sees her as indelibly American, and thus she has struck a chord with the American people. That she is a bigoted, spiteful, ill-equipped and ill-prepared candidate to take the office a heartbeat away from the most powerful position on the planet does not register. Nope. She is a real American woman. She is sexy. She makes babies—lots of them. She leaves her husband alone. She deals with the kids the best she can. She works hard. She is a tough lady, and don’t you mess with her. She looks good in high heels. She is the anti-Hillary and the anti-Barack at the same time.
America loves her. She is one of them. That Obama and Biden are wiser, smarter, more prepared, more capable of leading this country to a place it must go to avoid further financial disaster and erosion of America’s standing in the world: doesn’t matter. That she is perhaps the laughing stock of world wide politics and the United States lowers itself another notch because she is in the position she is in: doesn’t matter. No, she is one of us. She is the absolute result of American, laissez-faire Democracy. What evolves is not Communism, as Marx and Engels predicted, rather a populist revolt of not ideas, but feelings, sensations, smells, desires: all of them completely American, and there is not one damn thing you or I or anyone else can do about it. The power (or tyranny) of the majority has spoken. The American culture has seeped into every pore of every institution and its thick, sticky tar-like substance will never come off. And what has emerged from this stuff? Why Sarah Palin, of course. She is exactly what America really wants.
Thus, to answer an earlier question, the one that woke me up this morning: why is American culture rousting me out of bed in so violent a fashion? I can only answer with the following: it always has, but I just wasn’t paying close enough attention.
Labels: America, Barack Obama, Chicago, culture, Jews, Joe Biden, Nazis, New York, presidential election, Sarah Palin, Yenching Palace
