December 2002 Cover
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It's the American way
By
Mitzel
I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. I wasn't so sure I either recognized or particularly liked the image of the person I saw there. Slowly I lifted the razor's edge to my neck.
A desperate suicide attempt?
No. Just another morning shave, part of my diurnal toilette.
The radio was on, and I listened in that half-hearted, groggy way so natural to my morn. Some man was bloviating on the themes of corporate scandals and the unfortunate lack
of outrage among the public. He actually said: "The voters of America are its stockholders." This caught my attention. Within the context of his soundbite, I think I knew what he
intended. But what if he really meant that only those who own equities should or do vote? This is not ambiguity but plain old doubleness of meaning.
In fact, it was not long ago that you had to be male and a man of means to enjoy the franchise. Poll taxes were still around when I was young. And my friend Charley
Shively reminded me that, when he moved back to Cambridge, MA, in 1962, and went to register to vote, he was given a quiz, a little test like trying to explain Cambridge's unique PR
system and he had to score a certain number of questions correctly before he was allowed to enroll. This all seems primitive and bizarre today. Unless you live in Florida, or other
such comparable venues.
Around the same time, I heard another voice on the radio that caught my attention. It was the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis (do "crises" correctly have
"anniversaries"?), and the voice on the radio was that of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the President of the United States at the time of the crisis. Being broadcast was his address to the
nation announcing the fact of the Russian missiles in Cuba and the American blockade. He began by saying: "My fellow citizens"
This floored me. No American President since JFK has, to my knowledge, addressed his fellow citizens as "fellow citizens." It's always "my fellow Americans"; I can still hear
that awful voice of Lyndon Johnson drawling out "Uhmmuricuns." Oh well. I think there are, clearly, different degrees of civic participation designated by "citizen" and "American."
It was the summer before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I was at summer camp. I can see myself on the baseball field with the other lads as we played a game of softball. I was
pretty useless and unenthusiastic and so I got stuck out in center field, with a leather mitt on my paw. I can recall saying to myself: How the fuck can I get out of this? Well, maybe I didn't
use the word "fuck," but I was convinced there had to be something more interesting to do. And I surely knew I did not want to participate; alas, there were to be many more
softball games, I out in center field in a cloud, not a field, of dreams The camp counselor, named Jack Fay, was the hearty type, always clapping his hands and shouting: "Come on, boys,
hustle, hustle, hustle!"
A few years later, at one of my various high schools, I took up reading Jean Paul Sartre and other existentialists then on their last legs as a philosophical fad, but perfect for a
high school senior and embraced their central concept of "alienation" (alien nation?). This distance I felt from my culture, even from myself, had brainy underpinnings. And then we slid
into the later half of the 60s and you didn't feel so bad about not belonging because there was a counter-culture, and a whole lot of people started behaving differently, which no one
told me might happen. Then came the gay revolution and the porno world and I had myself whole new and much more agreeable social structures.
But I still have never reconciled this fact of alienation. I look at pictures in the newspaper of sporting events and see tens of thousands of people in the stands and I wonder:
why are they there? I used to be a man of great empathetic capacities. I simply cannot imagine myself at a sporting event. Well, maybe ballroom dancing or something that has men
and women twirling on ice. Gambling casinos are places I can't imagine setting foot in every aspect of the culture I detest all under one roof! You can't say no to everything actually
you can; back to that suicide scenario I led with in the first 'graph but there's so much to say no to.
Among the things I have said no to: I, for example, have never had a spouse. I have never owned a car. I have never been to San Francisco (or anywhere in California, for
that matter). I have never read Louis L'Amour. I have no religion (there are things I worship, but that's different and gets kind of perverse). I have often defined myself by what I am not
and don't or won't do, which has its utility, especially in this culture where the normalizers are so aggressive in their enforcement. And then I have my positive personality profile, which
gets thinner as I age, which is as it should be.
What is my policy now regarding the normal world and my interaction with it? I am tolerant and benign. I read the newspapers as tawdry fictions. I am rude only when it is
useful. Another tip: you can't build the bunker walls too high.
As for the derangos who run the institutions? I can only use the immortal Charles Pierce's line (doing his Mae West impersonation) while talking about Dale Evans: "Why don't
you put your dentures in backwards and bite your head off!"
Tennis, anyone?
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